What the Hell has He Been Smoking?
Amazon says:
Banes & Noble thinks:
|
Author: Patrick Quinlan
Title: Smoked Genre: thriller James Dugan is on his second life. After more than thirty years as a bomb-maker and arsonist for the New York mob, Dugan kicked the traces when he found out that his last product had been used to blow up a plane filled with innocents. For a letter of resignation, he left his boss's house in flames (with that boss inside), and then disappeared with a cool 2.5 million. No longer answering to Walter O'Malley of the Big Apple, James "Smoke" Dugan now lives a quiet life in Portland, Maine, where the "retired engineer" puts his finely-honed motor skills to work making toys for the special ed kids at school. Lucky kids. Lucky Smoke, too, 'cause that school's where he met the luscious Lola Bell, thirty-odd years his junior and one heckuva good time in the sack. Ain't love wonderful? A little mixup at a photographer's modeling session - I told you she was luscious - has left Lola the target of a couple of unscrupulous trailer-trash wannabe pornographers. Ever since she kicked their rear ends around the room for a while and then busted up all their equipment for trying to rape her on-camera, the two fellows have a bit of revenge in mind. Problem is, the New Boss in New York set Smoke's replacement as button man on Smoke's case. So, at pretty much the same time, a team of three seasoned pros is after Smoke, and a team of two rank amateurs is after Lola. Pity poor Pamela, Lola's roomie, caught in the middle of all this... Lead enforcer Denny Cruz, a scar-faced dude who's seen a few decades as a hitter for the mob himself, has been tasked with picking up Smoke and persuading him to turn over all that missing money. If he tries the strong silent approach, they can always find luscious Lola for a little leverage. Remember, it's a lot of money. Ol' Denny does have a bit of a personal problem, though - it seems he's lost his will to kill. That's not exactly the best job qualifications for one's resume when you're in Cruz's line of work... So let's see: we have two prey, five hunters, and an extra innocent caught in the maelstrom. A few people are gonna get beat up, somebody's gonna get kidnapped, a few people are gonna get dead, and a few people are gonna live. And you'll never guess who... Something strange has happened to our society in the past few years. It concerns the way we choose our heroes. It used to be that a hero was someone who exemplified everything good: the soldier, the fireman who rushes into a burning building to save a child, the elementary school teacher. They were people we and our children could look up to, people played by John Wayne or Katharine Hepburn in the movies; characters in books by Horatio Alger or Ellery Queen; television characters like Wonder Woman or Walker, Texas Ranger. Whoever they were, they were forces for good. Something's changed, though: now many of our "heroes" have feet of clay, character flaws, warts, and wrinkles. In a world where there were once only black hats and white, there are now as many gray as anything else. You know who I mean: Tony Soprano. Vampires. Jack Bauer. Lifers planning a prison break. Some of those heroes don't merely have feet of clay, they're down in the mud wallowing with the hogs. This isn't new in literature - Lawrence Block's done it for years with his Scudder mysteries (see Everybody Dies for a classic example); and the hard-boiled detectives like Spenser have always strayed over the line when they "had to." Hawk, Spenser's infamous sidekick, probably hasn't been on the legal side of the line in years. Even established writers with white-hat protagonists stray into gray-hat land from time to time; writers such as Michael Connelly in Void Moon- though Harry Bosch's white hat is pretty soiled at times. All that to say that the trend is chugging ahead full steam - and one of the latest entries in the black-hat-hero race has been getting a lot of good press. I'm here to tell you, though, that Smoked isn't worth giving up hope for. You definitely have to give first-time author Patrick Quinlan a style point or two for Smoked. After all, with that many people trying to kill, kiss, or kidnap each other all at the same time, things could've quickly disintegrated into a bloodbath; a regular shootout at the Portland Corral. But, for the most part, he carries it off: Quinlan manages to come up with an ending that's admittedly surprising, though how he gets everyone to that last page tends to be hackneyed at times. Consider, for instance, that you have not one but two fifty-plus guys, neither one the typical chiseled-featured blow-dried tennis-tanned CEO. Now see that both of them end up making whoopee with a smart, gorgeous twenty-something. Kinda makes one suspect that Quinlan has an active, if not particularly original, fantasy life involving a woman half his age. Oddly, neither one drives a red sports car (though they are boat guys). No big deal. However, Quinlan apparently also has less harmless fantasies. His pair of would-be pornographers has a tidy scam going on: they've raped dozens or perhaps hundreds of women on-camera, and sold the videos to internet porn sites. Yet Quinlan portrays the two not as the bottom-dwelling scum they actually are, but as a pair of happy-go-lucky, if somewhat bumbling, Down-East rednecks. Apparently the author has other, darker fantasies as well. Even if it this is the menopausal male's equivalent of a bodice-ripper- would that be a loincloth-ripper, I wonder? - Smoked could probably ascend to something worth reading except for the obvious. Maybe, just maybe, Smoke Dugan might be considered redeemable for having "only killed bad guys" his whole career and for his new life as a toymaker. The other protagonist of the piece has but one redeeming feature: he finds it hard to kill people any more. Those are pretty thin justification for being a hero, which leads back to our previous question: what has befallen heroism in this day and age? Smoked will entertain some readers, though certainly not all. Sure, it's fast-paced and breezy; a light read that'll keep you flipping pages. It's far from great literature, though - Quinlan didn't do much basic research (no, Pat, one doesn't breathe through the esophagus), including his single foray into simple bomb-making in Smoke's workshop. His action scenes are contrived, and many of his characters hackneyed - especially the trailer-trash porno boys. And hovering over it all is a scruff of needless, overly graphic violence and rape. Give this one a pass. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
|