Author: Brian Freeman Title: Immoral Genre: Mystery
Lots of us have memories of "leftover night" from our childhood - one night each week (perhaps just before payday) when Mom served up a supper assembled from the leftovers of the previous nights. Maybe it was a soup or stew; perhaps it took the form of tuna casserole; it might have been a strange concoction like those dishes my Mom called "Johnny Marzetti" and "wiggles." Whatever the case, even if it did stick to your ribs it didn't always measure up to her roast or her fried chicken.
The literary equivalent of leftover night would thus be something assembled from the scraps of a thousand predecessors. Its plot would be trite; hackneyed. Its characters would seem old hat, cardboard stereotypes with back stories we've read a hundred times before, engaged in a conflict that's already played out in the pages of myriad novels. In short, there would be nothing new - and Brian Freeman's Immoral is about as good an example of that failing as any novel I've read in a long time. Look here...
Is there a serial killer plucking teenage girls from the streets of Duluth? That's homicide lieutenant Jon Stride's biggest fear when Rachel Deese disappears, just as Kerry McGrath disappeared a year and a half ago. Without a body, however, suspects are few and far between - until a week later, when the DPD discovers a strip of bloody cloth from the shirt Rachel was wearing when she disappeared. And then they find more blood in the back of her stepfather's minivan, and still more blood on his knife: all of it Rachel's. Arrest. Trial. But with the sharpest defense lawyer in Minnesota on her banker stepdad's defense team, the cops' collection of circumstantial evidence just may not cut it.
Consider reasonable doubt: hey, Rachel's not the only pretty teenager to disappear 'round these parts lately, right? You say there's no known link between the disappearance of the first girl and the suspect in this case? And there's no body? And that Rachel was well-known for being troubled? Sure lookslike someone else could've done it... maybe she's not even dead...
And suddenly the trial concludes in an explosion of courtroom drama, and just as suddenly it's three years later. Erstwhile widower Stride is on the brink of divorcing the woman he met while investigating Rachel's disappearance, the new divorcée he married in a horrible confluence of emotional rebound. And lo, just outside Las Vegas a body arises in the Nevada desert. It's one of Stride's missing teens - but this is a nice fresh corpse, only days dead.
Oops...
Wouldn't you know, the investigating officer looks more like a showgirl than a cop. And wouldn't you know, she's destined to be the missing piece in Stride's life. And wouldn't you know, the key to the entire sordid affair has been lying in a young stripper's dresser drawer. But you'll never guess who actually did the deed... or what deed who did... and by this time you may not care.
The Duluth skyline
Immoral is business writer... business writer?! Brian Freeman's first foray into the world of crime fiction, and frankly, it shows. Though the young author managed to cobble together a marginally interesting story - not particularly original, but marginally interesting - the book's plot is crushed under the weight of all those stereotypes Freeman trots out:
a sensitive cop mourning his one true love, living amid the ruins of his marital bliss
a teenager molested by her step-father (he used that one twice)
a man-hating lesbian high-school counselor
a district attorney with his eyes on statewide politics instead of justice
a pillar of the community bank officer with his closet full of dirty little secrets
a soulless reporter who will do anything for a scoop
a beautiful Las Vegas female cop with a semi-sordid past (Catherine Willows, anyone?)
a minister with feet of clay
a beautiful divorcée with a hunger for cop meat
a selfish teenage girl who would rather see justice denied than lose her boyfriend.
Oh, sure, that looks real - if you change the name of Duluth to "Stereotype City."
The cops look like complete idiots: no one checked the family car for blood for a week after she disappeared? The sex scenes are so forced you expect the male partner to open his wallet and drop a couple of fifties on the nightstand. Add in Freeman's inability to write believable dialog, especially for anyone younger than twenty (one six-year-old talks like a second-year law student) and his penchant for dragging in bizarre plot twists, and it all adds up to a novel that reads like "Johnny Marzetti" tasted.
Immoral begins with clumsy misdirection and ends in a climax that's not only unexpected but completely unsupported by the preceding plot. In the middle, there's little to relieve the monotony of a seemingly endless succession of shopworn plot twists. The characters are straight out of formulaic television shows and B movies, and have about as much complexity as a Hostess Twinkie. My advice? Give this one a wide berth.