The Talented Mr. Ridley
Written: Feb 06 '04 (Updated Feb 06 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: More thrills than the Coney Island Cyclone.
Cons: Possibility of whiplash.
The Bottom Line: This is a title that will please long-time Pearson fans and new readers alike.
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| cornelia's Full Review: The Body Of David Hayes |
Ridley Pearson’s writing always reminds me of Hillaire Belloc’s observation that, “If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English tongue.” I have no doubt that Pearson, blindfolded and typing with only one hand, could have us all performing Will Rogers lasso tricks in under a hundred words.
Pick a topic… any topic… Tidal currents in Puget Sound? Secrets of ATM software? The human genome as exegesis of the criminal impulse? The man not only renders these doctoral-thesis-worthy intellectual briar patches with clarity and elan, he does so in suspense novels, for God’s sake.
With each new book, Pearson makes me want to give a little literary genuflection. I mean, he drops these complex mind-bombs on you and STILL keeps his plot ripping along at breakneck speed. I’m talking the kind of velocity where you end up feeling like a pilot stop-action photographed in that centrifuge experiment, the one where you get strapped to the tip of a spinning steel arm and whipped around so fast your lips peel back and your cheeks go all Dizzy Gillespie.
Can you imagine what a miracle it would be if all the world’s technical writers absorbed, by some virtual osmosis, Pearson’s breathtaking dexterity with complex, jargon-heavy information? We would never again be confounded by an owner’s manual. The glowing digits of every VCR clock would reflect its exact zonal variation from Greenwich Mean Time. Each slice of toast around the globe would be of an ideal and even crispness, heat, and golden-brown tone. Technical support operators would shortly be as lonely as the proverbial Maytag repairman.
With the ninth book in his Boldt/Matthews series, he’s done it again. Due out in April of 2004, The Body of David Hayes will further burnish Pearson’s reputation as a master of both plot twist and technical detail.
Centered on Seattle PD’s Lieutenant Lou Boldt and his banker wife Liz, Hayes is an artful page-turner careering from high-tech embezzlement to cancer survival guilt, the Russian mob, child musical prodigies, “counterfeit” caviar, the nefarious uses to which traffic cams can be put, and the heart-rending repercussions of infidelity.
Marriage is at the heart of this story. The Boldts have been unfaithful to one another, and have since tried to rebuild their relationship without ever coming completely clean about their indiscretions. It’s not that they’re trying to hide anything. Each has withheld information to spare the other pain, to preserve the now-fragile union so valued by both. These are deeply honorable people: the husband a gifted and ethics-driven police officer, the wife a responsible financier and ardent believer that it is her rediscovered religious faith which allowed her to survive cancer, to remain here on earth with her beloved family.
They screwed up. They forgave each other and moved on. They thought they were past it.
But when Liz Boldt's former lover David Hayes resurfaces, this carefully mended marriage fractures along all the old faultlines. That Hayes was in jail for embezzlement from Liz’s bank and that the $17 million he
“disappeared” is still unaccounted for makes the marital friction (and just about everything else) worse, of course. Ridley-Pearson-plot-roller-coaster worse. In a big huge way.
And despite the technical razzle-dazzle—the quick costume changes, the layered nuance of the computer hacking, the wheels within wheels within wheels—what has stayed with me from this novel is the delicacy of Pearson’s “portrait of a marriage.” Down to the last scene, he nails this perfectly. Not in any oh-man-this-has- to-be-autobiographical way, but just in his ability to point up that all lasting relationships are, of necessity, patch jobs. Pearson quietly affirms that the only real structural integrity of any marriage is our will toward kindness, toward courtesy, toward offering one another sanctuary as often and to as great an extent as possible.
It’s not about absolutes, he lets the Boldts gently show us. It’s not even about total confession or perfect virtue or utterly renouncing temptation, most of the time. It’s about remembering that all married people are jammed into a sputtering rattletrap Grapes-of-Wrath truck together for the duration, with parents and kids and second-cousins and ex-lovers and a coop of chickens along for the ride. The tires will blow. The radiator will steam over. They won’t ever have your exact fanbelt anywhere between here and Barstow. In fact, there are gonna be days when you think you’ve been bumping down this hot narrow road forever, but the cool Pacific is always just over that next set of hills, and if you try really, really hard, this time it can all turn out okay.
Especially, of course, if you can avoid having that Russian mob dude shoot you up with Rohypnol, duct-tape you to a kitchen chair, and yank out two of your fingernails.
I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that any novel containing all that, my friends, is one helluva story.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
cornelia
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 - Top 1000 |
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Member: Cornelia Read
Location: Berkeley, California
Reviews written: 100
Trusted by: 330 members
About Me:
Disorganized mother of twins by day, crime fiction writer by... um... day.
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