Ratings: 3.5 (Amazon 3.5) Book Club: FL - Mystery - October, 2007 Summary: From Library Journal: Like Parker's first two novels (Suspicion of Innocence, LJ 12/93; Suspicion of Guilt, LJ 2/1/95), this thriller thrusts Miami lawyer Gail Connor into perils from which she emerges owing mostly to luck. Gail, now engaged to Cuban exile Anthony Quintera, also a Miami lawyer, provides legal counsel for the Miami Opera. A promising young singer, Thomas Nolan, is to star in Don Giovanni, but his connections with Castro's Cuba may cause trouble for the opera should they become known. From this rather interesting beginning, the plot wanders further and further afield, until the reader yearns for the inevitable murder. Politics, nostalgia of the Miami exile community, and conflicting memories or reports of Gail's fiance and friends bulk out the story, which hovers uneasily between episodes of Gail and Tony's lovemaking and Gail's getting herself into cliched predicaments (donning a wig to stake out her suspect's movements, breaking into the home of the chief suspect). Sadly, this series demeans both women lawyers and Miami Hispanics. Buy only if you live in Florida and have a lavish book budget. From Kirkus Reviews: Messy, overplotted third volume in Parker's Suspicion series (Suspicion of Guilt, 1995, etc.) continues the travails of Miami lawyer Gail Connor. Now on her own in a one-woman practice, Connor isn't getting many clients but is enjoying the low-key joys of taking her daughter to soccer games and doing pro bono work for the Miami Opera while spending every night in the arms of her fiance‚, Cuban-born super successful defense lawyer Anthony Quintana. At a swank Opera soiree, Connor learns that tenor Tom Nolan, who's booked to open the season, did a series of recitals two years before in Cuba. Though most of the ever-so-sleazy rich folks on the Opera's board couldn't care less about their star's employment history, the city's large population of anti-Castro Cuban refugees might well take offense. Quintana, hoping to be nothing more than Connor's escort, finds himself questioned by board members who are afraid that Quintana's brother-in-law, rabble-rousing anti-Castro radio talk-show host Octavio Reyes, might rally his listeners against them, possibly with the backing of Quintana's vehemently anti-Communist grandfather. While Quintana mutters about not being his brother-in-law's keeper, Connor discovers that her fiance‚ not only harbored Marxist sympathies 20 years previously, but accompanied some of the very same board members on an ill-fated pilgrimage to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas, a trip resulting in the murder of Quintana's old American girlfriend by a Somozan thug. But was Quintana in any way responsible for her death? Parker plays on Connor's fears about her fiance's past while an assassin picks off members of the Opera board, all of whom have some connection to the Nicaraguan misadventure. The climax, in which Connor stalls for time by persuading the killer to play an opera recording, is too silly for words. All this, and piles of politically correct palaver about Miami's misunderstood Cuban exiles. Even Parker's fans might put this one down. Recommendation: Although the reviews do not recommend the book, I enjoyed the story. It gives the reader a view of the Miami Cuban community beyond the radical element. I enjoyed how Parker used "different" versions of Anthony and his friends experiences in Nicaragua to move the plot along, ending with Gail's own version of the story. I also enjoyed the part the stories from the operas "Don Giovanni" and "Aida" played in the novel. Not a thought provoking story, but an enjoyable summer read.
Favorite Passages: The following passage was thought provoking, especially in light of the many versions of the Nicaraguan trip......After the dress rehearsal of Don Giovanni, Gail is talking with the opera star, Thomas Nolan, asking him about his piano teacher, Miss Wells...
page 381......The makeup gave him such odd eyes, pale blue outlined in dark brown. One black eyebrow was painted higher than the other in permanent ironic jest....."All the world's a stage, Gail, and reality is what you think it is."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
He saluted with his champagne. "Whatever you want it to mean...."
No comments:
Post a Comment