Author: Bonnie Ramthun Title: Earthquake Games Genre: mystery
I get the impression sometimes that everybody out there is convinced that s/he holds the Great American Novel within. Indeed, I've labored under that particular misconception a time or two myself. I thought I had the plot, the characters, and the setting; I had done the research. Perhaps what I lacked was the drive; more's the pity. But for the run-of-the-mill citizen (as distinguished from, say, William Shatner or Tabitha King), getting a first novel published requires a great many things. Writing skill is not always foremost among them (one need look no further than the NYT Bestseller lists to confirm that fact). It also takes luck - especially if you're unable to woo a literary agent. For those unsolicited manuscripts sent to a publisher without an insider paving the way, there is a special place in author's hell: the "slush pile."
Junior editors and summer interns, I've been told, are given the task of culling the dross from the slush pile; reading through great heaps of manuscripts in search of the rare work that's fit to print. Some famous first novels have made it only because an overworked editor was astute enough to recognize the writer's talent. But just as there are good and bad writers, there are also good and bad editors. One particularly idiotic editor picked Bonnie Ramthun's first novel (Ground Zero) off the pile at Putnam's and published it. Now I admit I've not read that tome, but if Ramthun's second novel, Earthquake Games, is indicative of her level of "talent," I surely hope that editor is on the street in search of a job at the local Starbuck's - and that Ramthun is next in line. Here's why:
The Great Sand Dunes [Peter Fitzgerald / wikimedia commons]
A Shaky Plot
Bonnie's little tale begins with an earthquake in - of all places - Colorado Springs. In the aftermath of the quake - which did an inordinate amount of damage over a very large area for a piddling 3.7 magnitude - a pair of corpses magically appear. In the Springs, civilian employee Jim Leetsdale is found dead on the lawn at Fort Carson Army Base, an apparent suicide. At Great Sand Dunes National Monument (a hundred miles from the Springs as the crow flies) a young woman's mutilated body is found near the center of the dune field. When Springs detective Eileen Reed sees through the suicide ruse and initiates a homicide investigation, she finds a concealed Post-It amidst the clutter in the Leetsdale's office that bears the name Krista Lewis. You guessed it, the corpse in the dunes.
The dead woman's internet correspondent, Alan Baxter - a retired professor from Cheyenne - just happens to have pulled into the San Luis Valley to fish the Rio Grande that very morning. Although he's never met Krista Lewis, he decides that the unidentified victim is his cyber-friend and persuades the local sheriff to let him identify her body (from photos she'd sent him). Somehow divining that his late friend was associated with the dead man in the Springs, Baxter takes it upon himself to drive back out of the Valley to discuss the case with the CSPD investigating officer. At their first meeting, Eileen screams "Daddy?!" and Baxter faints. Seems fate has brought together the woman abandoned by her mother as a four-year-old and her biological father, whom she instantly recognizes (even after thirty-plus years). Of course, this means that Eileen's now in the uncomfortable position of having her own father as suspect in a homicide. For some reason, though, she declines to recuse herself. Such professionalism!
Ladled on top of this stew are UFOs and a slew of cattle mutilations around the Dunes - which naturally leads locals and UFO aficionados to claim that Lewis was an alien abductee; that is, until the coroner reports she was raped. But the piece de resistance is the discovery from Leetsdale's encrypted computer files - get this, he wrote his PGP key on one of his diskettes - that the earthquake wasn't a natural phenomenon. Never mind that Eileen took his computer and the files to her boyfriend Joe Tanner instead of the police crime lab. Tanner learns (by building a massively-parallel processing supercomputer out of four old Mac laptops) that some shadowy black-budget project has built a working replica of the fabled Nicola Tesla Earthquake Machine and has been using it to set off earthquakes all over the world. Their next scheduled quake is set to happen in three days; a release of energy on the New Madrid Fault (near the southern tip of Illinois) that is designed to generate a magnitude 8 quake! The old meanies have set up shop in the exact center of the Dunes.
Eileen and Alan take it set off into the Dunes to halt this heinous plot, without any help from the "proper authorities" (because, of course, they don't trust the "proper authorities"). They're followed in by Joe, Eileen's partner Rosen, and a motley crew of MUFON members, SLV ranchers, and assorted hangers-on. They know where the Tesla machine will be set up and when, all the two teams need do is stop the bad men from pulling the switch and they'll all be heroes.
Wanna bet whether they'll succeed?
What's to Like
*
Nikola Tesla
What's Not to Like
It's a shame that Ramthun has published not one book but two - there are tens of thousands of deserving manuscripts on slush piles all over the publishing world that are undoubtedly better than this. I'll try to distill my antipathy toward this book into a few examples, though I could go on for pages and pages, to be sure:
Ramthun writes bad prose: One need read only a few lines to tumble to her lack of writing ability, but it's made especially evident by passages such as this:
Bandimere giggled jaggedly and then bit the sound off with a hand to the back of her lips.
I don't know, but is that physically possible? Or she invents strange words, such as:
The sand was still and moveless, so Eileen knew morning was still a few hours away.
"Moveless"? Does she mean "motionless"? She must think it's a word, because she used it at least twice. And then there's her fixation with body odor: at least a half-dozen times she prattles on about getting a whiff of "Eileen-sweat" or "old-man sweat" or "Joe-sweat." When I say this book stinks, I mean it literally!
Ramthun doesn't do her research: She's trampling on science that I know far better than she - witness these strange geological observations:
The Great Sand Dunes are made of ground quartz, did you know that?
Ahem: MSc in sedimentology here: virtually all dune fields in the world are largely quartz grains, with the exception of a few places where there is no local supply of quartz . e.g., White Sands, New Mexico (gypsum), and Hawaii (volcanic rock fragments). And what's this "ground" business? Is she trying to say that aliens put big hunks of quartz though a mechanical grinder? Hmmmph! How 'bout this rot:
"Kansas City is built on what used to be mud flats from the Mississippi," Joe said, watching Doreen's earthquake again. "When an earthquake of magnitude six hits - and remember, New Madrid is supposed to be an eight - the vibration turns the ground into thick soup. Essentially it liquefies. Down go houses, people, cars, skyscrapers. Then when the shaking stops, the ground hardens. A really awful way to die, I think. Like being buried in Portland cement...
[google maps]
Hey, Bonnie: Kansas City's on the Missouri River - It's St. Louis that's on the Mississippi! Scientifically speaking, much of the Mission District in San Francisco is built on thixotropic clays of the sort Ramthun's attempting to describe. Remember the World Series Earthquake? Did any of the buildings, cars, people sink into "thick soup" and then end up encased in "Portland cement"? I don't think so! Or:
So I'm learning all about earthquakes," Joe continued. "You know about how all the continents are really just big plates floating on the liquid core of the earth...
Bonnie, it's only a few miles to the University of Colorado from where you live. Next time you want to discuss plate tectonics and continental drift, drop in and find an undergrad geology major to explain it to you.
Ramthun is inconsistent: The earthquake happened at dawn in the Sand Dunes, and Alan Baxter was at nearby La Veta pass when it hit. Here's his story:
The sight of Blanca Peak nearly took [his] breath away... The top was a pure and blinding white in the early morning sun... [he] had gotten out to stretch his legs. He stopped every two hours... He'd been driving since early morning and the cold air was delicious...
We later learn that Baxter spent the night in Laramie, Wyoming (about five hours away from La Veta Pass, according to AAA). So how long does dawn take, anyway?
Ramthun never passes up a chance to espouse her politics: Flat characters are especially prone to spouting political views, though the major characters are also rather chatty on the subject:
Eileen tried to arm women at every opportunity, and she found it odd and puzzling that most women, who got the best use out of guns and who rarely put them to bad use, were so adamantly for gun control.
"Operation Relief gives groceries to lower income families," Susan explained to Alan in a murmur. "Private, no governmental strings, just the way we like it."
"And we'd all be speaking Japanese pretty soon, or Chinese, or German," Daniel said. "As soon as they could figure out how to take over. But how 'bout a revolution? A newly minted America with no taxes, no government, no bloated bureaucracy? Just a Constitution and a new Congress and no more of the old crap."
'Scuse me, but doesn't the U. S. Constitution lay out a government with Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches, all in the name of balance? Balance, by the way, being something Ramthun lacks.
We also learn at different times that Ramthun believes "abortion is the only answer in very rare situations," that she believes Donald DeFreeze (of the 60s-era SLA) would have "happily slaughtered hundreds to spread his message of peace and love," that she believes the government is in collusion with the alien "Grays" who crash-landed at Roswell in 1947, and that she believes in a conspiracy to cover up the identity of John Doe number two in the Oklahoma City bombing. Too bad the book was published in 2000, or I assume we'd learn that Osama bin Laden was in the employ of the DEA.
Overall
This is one lousy book - so lousy that I did two things with it I never do: I marked it up and after I'd read it I threw it away. Ramthun has limited skill as an author: her plot is so riddled with inconsistencies, coincidences, and conspiracy-theory hokum as to be laughable. Her characters are flat and lifeless; her settings are blank pages. Her technical skills are at best mediocre: the text is larded with redundancy, misinformation is rampant, and the organization is so choppy that it's easy to see why she can't tell a consistent story.
My advice? If someone gives you this book, you might be able to make some use of it to prop up a short table leg (the hardcopy is about an inch thick). If none of your furniture wobbles, take it over to your local used-paperback store and swap it for something useful, like half a bodice-ripper from, Harlequin. Remember, if you open it you can't return it (and you WILL want to return it)!