In Which Robert K. Tanenbaum Jumps the Shark
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Author: Robert K. Tanenbaum
Title: Counterplay Genre: thriller In eighteen novels over a period of almost two decades, Robert Tanenbaum has spun out the tale of the Karp-Ciampi clan. The New York lawyer's work is one of the few action-thriller series in which time moves at a normal pace: originally a pair of single attorneys in their twenties, the main characters are now in their forties, married and the parents of three - including a grown daughter, Lucy. That's the good part. In the debit column, the novels have always been a carnival of improbable action and farfetched coincidence; mostly when Marlene Ciampi's latest caper ended up dovetailing into her husband's latest court case. Fans of the family (and the series) have long since learned to not only suspend their disbelief when reading Tanenbaum, but to lock it in the basement for the duration. In Counterplay, however, he's done it: he's gone and jumped the shark. To "jump the shark" is a television concept, specifically a reference to a 1977 episode in the sitcom Happy Days in which Fonzie jumped over a caged shark while water skiing. The phrase has since become a metaphor for the point of no return in the evolution of a television series, the point at which script writing has bottomed out and the audience is disappearing faster than David Copperfield's assistants. It's the beginning of the end. In television dramas, jump-the-shark episodes often involve a main character's mental breakdown ("Northern Exposure," for instance). The hallmark of shark-jumping is the use of a preposterous stunt in a desperate attempt to regain viewership, which instead alienates what remains of the audience. That's what's happened to me while reading Counterplay: my disbelief became so strong that it stomped up the stairs, shattered the basement door with a single mighty kick, and roared into the library bellowing "Enough!" at the top of its leathery lungs. Here's why... Andrew Kane is a very, very bad man. We learned that in his last appearance (in 2004's Hoax), wherein the lawyer / politician / sociopath attempted to parlay myriad acts of evil into a winning campaign for mayor of NYC. The Karp-Ciampi clan unmasked him, however, to the collective relief of the seven boroughs. Unfortunately, Kane still has a few tricks up his sleeve: in the opening pages of Counterplay, a band of Chechen terrorists spring Kane from custody, leaving behind a school bus load of dead children and a slew of murdered agents. Seems that Kane has allied himself with Al Qaeda - in the person of the drop-dead gorgeous Palestinian lesbian Samira - to commit an act of terror that will make 9/11 seem like a Sunday-school picnic invaded by fire ants. Meanwhile, ADA Karp - who by this time is on the campaign trail himself, with his run for New York County District Attorney hanging fire - has leapt on the cold-case bandwagon. Fourteen years ago, the wife of a prominent banker disappeared; now the couple's troubled nineteen-year-old son has "recovered" memories of the night his father choked and then shot his mother. As players in the drama that has surrounded Andrew Kane for decades succumb to his untender mercies one by one, the Karp-Ciampis' environs become a beehive of activity - beehives, actually, since Lucy is living in a cheap Taos motel to be near her beloved cowboy, Ned. Though there are multiple layers of security around the family, there's apparently a mole - of course - so the good guys (and a few bad guys) are dropping like flies. Unfortunately, that includes Taos Pueblo sheriff John Jojola, though the philosopher-gangster-war criminal Tranh escapes unharmed, as does David Grale, the psychotic lord of the underworld and its Morlockian Mole People. Rest assured, though, that Kane has every intention of bringing the fight to the Karp-Ciampi loft and collecting his booty. Actually, it's the lovely Lucy's booty he intends to collect... As hackneyed clichés from across the breadth of half a dozen fiction genres join together in a literary blitzkrieg, Kane's plan comes to fruition. At that very moment, the entire cast of characters links arms and merrily leaps across the back of a rather small and harmless nurse shark. The Fonz would be proud. As someone said to me not long ago, "How can I turn my back on the people I've followed for fifteen years?" If Tanenbaum has a gift as a writer, it's in his ability to create likable protagonists. Butch and Marlene seem to be the kind of people we might meet at a block party or a cookout thrown by a mutual friend. They're personable, witty, intelligent, and committed. Eldest child Lucy is lovely though a tad strange: the young language savant might have a screw or two loose, since she seems to frequently converse with a vision of Saint Theresa. The twin boys Zik and Zak are mere set pieces, rarely more than plot devices and reasons for other family members to be shocked, frightened, or anguished. The supporting cast that surrounds the K-C family is less well-crafted than even the twins. Most of them evince but a single personality trait - usually an almost puppy-like loyalty, but there's also a libidinous wench and your typical organizational genius. Villains range from your ordinary crooked cops (from NYPD beat-walkers to the upper echelons of the FBI) to homicidal priests to your stereotypical Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. At the top of the bad-guy food chain, villain-in-chief Andrew Kane is your average master planner with a whole lot of screws loose somewhere in that genius brain. He's so predictably bad that it's almost campy. There's an odd middle ground in Tanenbaum's characterizations; gray characters in an otherwise black-and-white world. These include a father-and-son pair of Russian Mafiyeh gangsters who love their American family (Papa is Butch's great-uncle) and a religious psycho who lives underground and controls a network of homeless street-dwellers, most of whom are wackos. It's in plotting that Tanenbaum falls flat; worsened, I fear, by the loss of his long-unacknowledged co-author Michael Gruber (author of Tropic of Night). Whereas in most of his previous novels the seemingly disparate cases of Butch and Marlene invariable mesh in the final reel (the inevitable visit from the Coincidence Fairy), this time there's a single case: find Andrew Kane before he kills everyone they know and love. Oh, yeah, and before he pulls off his great act of terror. Therein lies the problem: every single character in the book believes that Kane's planned "great act of terror" is A, while even the most casual reader will realize that it's B. No matter how many ridiculous red herrings Tanenbaum throws into the plot - a multiple personality subplot, hordes of subverted cops and priests, religious visions, double-blind double-crosses, and the rest - he can't hide the fact that nobody with a brain would overlook Kane's real target. In that respect, Counterplay reminds me of an old cooking trick: take a substandard piece of meat and marinate the bejeepers out of it with every herb and spice you can find (a recipe also known as "fajitas"). With luck, the diners won't be able to taste the meat. Tanenbaum has thrown every cliché in his arsenal at the plot, and it didn't work: the plot still tastes like a hunk of beef jerky. A couple of asides: Tanenbaum and his editor need to learn the difference between "imply" and "infer"; and they need to take a gander at a map of New Mexico: Gallup is pretty darned far from the Mexican border. all content copyright © 2001-present by scmrak
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