Review of Die With Me

Die With Me (Macadam Cage, 2007), by first time novelist Elena Forbes, is a competent, but hardly compelling, thriller. It focuses on London detective Mark Tartaglia’s search for a killer who seduces young girls over the Internet and then tosses them from high places. If this were all Tartaglia had to deal with it would be enough, but his boss and best friend is in a coma after a motorcycle accident and the woman brought in to replace him rubs him the wrong way and she might have a stalker and his partner’s love life is unfulfilling and his sister wants him to come to Sunday dinner and he’s been sleeping with the coroner who neglected to tell him she had a boyfriend. One might be tempted to say that Tartaglia’s real problem is not the killer but the sheer number of needy women in his life. It’s a wonder he’s not the one chucking female members of the species off bridges.

Even if you just chalk up Tartaglia’s patience with what goes on around him to a preternatural tolerance for annoying, selfish women, it’s still too much. Forbes juggles too many subplots and too many points-of-view. She never does it poorly. It’s always easy to tell what’s going on and whose perspective is being presented, but it all takes away from the central plot. Despite repeated chapters presented from the killer’s point-of-view, the murder mystery almost feels like an afterthought. The result is that the killer, when he surfaces in the investigation, is easy to spot, unless the reader is just not paying attention. Forbes would have been well served to have spent more time cultivating suspects and leading her characters down convincing blind alleys than dwelling on their personal lives.

Forbes could have also crafted a more compelling villain. His motivations are textbook (he had a less than ideal childhood, don’t you know) and his choice of victims and method of killing are not exactly terrifying. Tossing Emo kids to their deaths might, in some circles, be considered a public service. The fact that Forbes ends her book with a setup for a sequel featuring the same killer, does not bode well for the next installment in the series.

Internet Promotions

MacAdam Cage author Marshall Karp is holding a "Pimp this Rabbit," contest at his Web site. No, it does not actually involve selling someone a rabbit for sex, so you animal rights types can stop reaching for your placards. It's a Youtube contest for the best internet promotion for his first novel, The Rabbit Factory. The winner will get $500 bucks and his or her name in the third Lomax and Biggs mystery.
Over at Bleak House Books, they want your questions. If you're lucky they'll get answered on a daily podcast. You can listen to Benjamin LeRoy, Bleak House publisher, talk about his job here.

Review of The Rabbit Factory

The Rabbit Factory (MacAdam Cage: 2006) by Marshall Karp, is a mystery that starts out with a bang, but ends up being dragged down by its own weight.
The 600-plus page novel introduces LAPD homicide cops Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs. Lomax, the narrator, is grieving over is dead wife and trying to move on with his life, while Biggs, who wants to be a stand-up comic, serves to lighten the mood. They're both likable, but not too original characters, who go on a roller coaster ride after a man in a rabbit costume gets garroted at Familyland, a gigantic amusement park where people from all over the world come to be surrounded by the cartoon creations of Dean Lamaar.
Karp does an admirable job with the main plot, which has Lomax and Biggs trying to find out who wants to destroy the Lamaar Corporation. Bodies pile up, corporate types try to protect the company while making life difficult for Lomax and Biggs, and the duo stumbles down plenty of blind alleys in their search for the villain.
The two subplots are a different story. The first, which is romantic, has Lomax reading letters his dead wife wrote to him before she died, while dealing with his feelings for another woman. The second one involves Lomax's brother Frankie, who has a gambling problem. The romantic interludes help round out Lomax, and prevent the character from becoming a caricature, but they tend to be too long., especially the three full letters from Lomax's dead wife that made it into the final draft. The Frankie subplot is uneventful. No doubt Karp introduced Frankie because he will be a recurring character in other Lomax and Biggs novels, but the plot complications he caused in this book get solved with minimal fuss and minimal suspense. The book would have moved along faster without it, and there is no hard and fast rule that the first novel in a series has to introduce every character.
In the end, it is Karp's light prose and dark sense of humor that make the overall experience worthwhile. As previously mentioned, the book opens with a man in a large rabbit costume getting garroted. It's a funny image, if you like that sort of humor, and while the book is long, the prose isn't turgid. It isn't Les Miserables. Now there was a detective story that really needed an editor.