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DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 3, No. 38 |
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The SURVIVORS CLUB |
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Skip the book; wait for
the inevitable movie
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Here's the basic premise of Lisa Gardner's new thriller "The Survivors Club" (Bantam, $23.95 ): Three victims of a serial rapist are furious that the police can't catch him, so they team up to arouse the public's wrath, forcing the authorities to track him down and bring him to justice.
But here's the catch: Once the College Hill rape suspect is gunned down on the steps of the courthouse by a mysterious assassin, another girl is raped and murdered by another "College Hill rapist" who leaves behind exactly the same DNA evidence as the dead man.
Why, that's impossible, you're likely to say. DNA can't lie, right? So what happened? Did the "Survivors Club" women hound the wrong guy until the cops arrested him and a vengeful assassin blew his brains out? Was a mistake made with the original suspect's DNA? Or has some madman figured out a way to bring a dead man back to life and send him out to terrorize more women in Providence, R.I.?
It would be nice to care, but, frankly, I didn't. I found Gardner's novel too improbable, too imitative and too confusingly put together to convince me I was reading anything more than a story treatment for what could be a fairly diverting movie.
There are three key women in the story--Jillian Hayes, who was beaten nearly to death by the rapist when she surprised him after he'd just raped and murdered her young sister; Carol Rosen, who was brutally raped when her husband was late coming home from work, and Meg Pesaturo, who was raped even though her family is well-connected with the Mafia, and now suffers from amnesia.
We first meet them after rape suspect Eddie Como has been captured and is just about to go to trial in what promises to be the year's big media event. That means author Gardner has to backtrack an awfully lot in order to bring us up to date on the case and feed us all the exposition we need to figure out what's coming off. A good movie would scare us first with one of the brutal rapes, get us involved in the lives of his three victims, then pick up the story a year later as he goes to trial.
Gardner also chooses to switch points of view from chapter to chapter, so we're always in the heads of different people. Boo to that idea! If she had picked a single point of view, the story would move a lot faster and build a lot more suspense.
She also gives us a hero--state police Detective Sgt. Roan Griffin--who has his own enormous load of baggage that we have to learn about before we get to know him. Griffin was the chief investigator in the so-called "Candy Man" case, trying to track down the man who abducted 10 school children one by one. When he discovered the suspect was his next door neighbor, a "nice" young man who wound up torturing and killing the children, then burying them in his cellar, Griffin went berserk and nearly killed the suspect before his colleagues stepped in. This means still more exposition, taking us back before the "College Hill" case got started. Ho-hum.
At the heart of Gardner's story is her special villain, David Price, the brilliant, but icy-blooded child killer now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole. She attempts to turn him into her edition of Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter--a diabolical criminal genius who reaches out from prison to concoct a bewildering series of crimes just to torment his former neighbor, Roan Griffin.
Excuse me, but this is all so much nonsense--not much of it original, either--that any suspense Gardner generates is quickly dispelled by the frequent need to put the book down and guffaw at its absurdities. In fact, this is the antithesis of "the book you can't put down." This is the book you shouldn't even pick up.
But I did and I always
finish a book unless it makes me sick to my stomach, so I guess
I belong to another kind of "Survivors Club"--the one
made up of readers who actually got all the way to the end of
Gardner's latest novel.
© 2002 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is © 2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is © 2002 by Bantam Books.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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