Don't Take the Time to Track This One
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Author: Leslie Glass
Title: Tracking Time Genre: mystery Once while roaming the wilds of eastern Arizona, I happened upon an eclectic little bistro that went by the name of Rosa Wong's Chinese-Mexican Restaurant. Okay, it was more of a greasy spoon diner than a bistro, but the menu was pretty eclectic. No, they didn't serve a blended cuisine -- no chicken-fried frijoles, no General Tso's menudo, nary a taco dim sum in sight. In fact, it was pretty plain fare, if I can remember that far back -- Chinese, American, and Mexican all on the same page. What was interesting about the place was the somewhat jarring juxtaposition, in those pre-multiculturalism days, of an Hispanic first name and an Asian surname, which might have been exactly what some savvy marketer intended (though more likely it was just Rosa's real name) Leslie Glass must have seen such a restaurant herself once upon a time. She's certainly headed in the same direction: Asian and Hispanic lovers, huevos revueltos for breakfast and kung-pao chicken for dinner, clashing cultures played out in a New York police precinct. Too bad she can't carry it off in Tracking Time. A Plot, A Plot - the Middle Kingdom for a Plot! When a young psychiatrist disappears, a worried colleague calls his inside contact in New York's Finest. Never mind some old forty-eight hours missing-persons policy: if your daughter's godmother is a detective sergeant, you can call the next morning! Missing is one Maslow Atkins, MD -- at least to Sgt. April Woo, he's missing (even if she is working outside her jurisdiction). We know where he is, and we know who put him there: David Owen (seventeen) and Brandy Fabman (fifteen), the bored offspring of filthy-rich Manhattanites. Drug abuse, cutting school, alcohol use, pornography, fumbly sex, and charging Prada bags to Mom's credit card help occupy the full lives of these two fine American youth. The K9 squad shows up to look for the missing man with a distracted tracking dog. A homeless Vietnam veteran may have seen something, so he's taken downtown to answer a few questions. Atkins' last patient the day he disappeared turns out to be "not who she says she is," and promptly disappears herself. Those wicked little teenagers find new people to terrorize, this time succeeding in finishing the job. Another tracking dog - this one a Doberman - shows up; and she's a lot better than the first. Plot after plot rolls off the printing page: infidelity, bastard siblings, ethnic discord, office politics, evil adolescents, incompetence in the NYPD, male chauvinism, arrogant rich folks, trophy wives... Assembled in one volume, it reads more like a week's summary of a low-budget soap opera than a mystery novel. April Who? The nominal central character -- April Woo, second-generation Chinese-American, first-generation cop -- mostly dithers as she watches watches the action unfold around her. She's pushed one direction by the dog trainers; pulled a second by her boss; buffeted a third by her boyfriend, Lt. Mike Sanchez. She's on the outs with her mother, Skinny Dragon, for having a "Spanish ghost" boyfriend, and on the outs with her boss simply for being female (and worse yet, Asian). But more than anything else, she's boring. Given a character with the potential of this bright, attractive Asian-American female detective, Glass has certainly dropped the ball. It's not that we automatically expect Sgt. Woo to have the chutzpah of a V. I. Warshawski or the understated class of a Kay Scarpetta, but at the very least we expect her to have sufficient skill and sense to justify having risen to Detective Sergeant. She's bumbling and indecisive, and when she does make a move it's invariably beyond the pale. Is Everyone Here Made Out of Cardboard? It's not merely Woo: the parents of the two teenagers are drawn as venal, shallow caricatures straight out of a Grace Metalious plot. Brandy's beauteous mother's just suffered through full-body liposuction plus collagen injections, all because her ex-husband's dating someone twenty years her junior. Her self-talk is incessantly concerned with having only gotten a six-room apartment on Central Park West in the divorce settlement. David's haughty mother and vacant father -- both banking executives, though Mom only makes $180K per year -- are forever sniping at each other, leaving the kid to hunker down in his stinky bedroom while they argue about whose turn it is to treat him nicely today. Nor do the police fare much better, they're all like rainbows: visible only from one side. April's boss, Irriarte, exists only as a flashy wardrobe, her "partner" Baum has his own defining trait: he's a lousy driver, which is mentioned almost every time he appears. Sanchez is a serial womanizer who does stupid favors for girls barely out of their teens while drunk. Skinny Dragon (April's mother) speaks Pidgin English on the street to impress her neighbors -- but when she shifts to "Chinese" (Mandarin? Cantonese? what?) in the house, Glass still "translates" her dialog into something straight out of a Mr. Moto movie. Sanchez apparently knows only about four words in Spanish (querida, te amo, bunuelito). The two tracking dogs - Freda and Peachy - have more personality than most of the humans. Why Write It? Whenever an issue grips the American public, whether because of tabloid TV or thoughtful analysis, it's almost certain to eventually rear its head in other areas of popular culture. The turnaround time varies: television dramas (e.g., "Law and Order") usually get the issue out front in a few months; magazines, a few weeks; and books, usually a year or so. One such issue is the oft-cited "rising tide of violence" among American teens -- wilding in Central Park, schoolhouse murders, the Menedez brothers, drive-by shootings -- all fodder for commentary and TV "docudramas." Leslie Glass's 2000 novel is apparently her attempt to capitalize on the public's interest in teen violence. Overall Tracking Time suffers most from a plot deeply flawed by the passivity of its central character, April Woo. Close on this weakness's heels, however, is Glass's apparent disinterest in investigating the ethnicity of Woo and Sanchez enough to move beyond stereotypes. Poorly-developed, type-cast characters fill out the pages, each entirely predictable (except perhaps the dogs). The book is of the subgenre in which police race against time to rescue the victim of the "wily" criminals (a pair of hormonal teenagers?). The narrative shifts focus from character to character, including the missing man in his "prison." Some of the stopping points are pretty unpleasant, including Glass's take on the mental workings of a mentally-disturbed homeless man and the internalizations of the self-absorbed parents of the two teens. Recommendation? Skip it. capsule: busty teenager, inscrutable Asians, rats, hot-blooded Latins, skinny jogger, granola bars, shopping, internet porn, horny teenagers, stupid cops, smart dogs all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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