The Smorgasbord Filled with Cliches, Tropes and Hackneyed Characters. Yummy? No.
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Author: Alex Kava Title: Whitewash Genre: mystery
The job at EchoTechnology was a girl scientists' dream, even if it did pluck Sabrina Galloway loose from a comfortable life in her native Chicago and plunk her down in that steambath called "northeast Florida." But Sabrina was a scientist, after all, meaning a person who never noticed the world around her while she kept focused on her microscopes and her high-tech computer programs. And she was doing "good," too - EchoTechnology's top-secret plant near Tallahassee could turn "organic wastes" (chicken guts, actually) into black gold, Texas tea: crude oil. So why, all of a sudden, did Sabrina find herself on the run, her boss and a co-worker already dead and a professional "removal expert" breathing down her neck?
Could Sabrina's predicament have something to do with the impending announcement that EchoTechnology would soon receive a $140-million contract to supply the military's complete hydrocarbon needs? Or did it have something to do with the strange relationship between the venture capitalist behind ET and the Democratic Senator for Florida, John Quincy Allen? But, then again, perhaps there was a connection to the super-secret plot being run out of the office of Natalie Richards, top aide to an unnamed bigwig in DC, with assistance from Colin Jernigan - a man disturbingly experienced in unsavory matters. Or maybe it was connected in some way to the high-tech terrorist plot being hatched by three young Islamic "students" posting as "cab drivers" in DC; a plot being driven in part by a shadowy person on the inside.
Sabrina was a lucky geek-girl, though: she had an 81-year-old filthy-rich ex-maid living next door to help her escape her stalker, and an older brother just down I-10 in Pensacola (though he was pretending to be Eric "Gallo" while he pulled some sort of scam on Howard Johnson - his boss, not the hotel chain). It would, naturally, fall to this motley crew to save Sabrina's hide, expose the killer and whoever hired him, and save the President of the US and the world as we know it with only the aid of a Pepsi truck driver and a Chinese fortune cookie. Yeah: like that's gonna happen.
A real smorgasbord [bigmick/wikimedia]
With her main character Maggie O'Dell (The Soul Catcher, A Perfect Evil) on break from her FBI profiler duties, Alex Kava began churning out standalone pieces such as Whitewash, her seventh novel overall. "Churning out" is, in fact, a rather mild description of Whitewash, which suffers from a broad spectrum of near-fatal ills. The tale is told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of the main character, a "scientist" - not a chemist, a molecular biologist, a low-temperature geochemist, or even a mycologist, merely a "scientist" - who toils at some high-tech plant that converts garbage into oil; and several secondary characters scattered around DC and Florida. Whether the process of turning chicken guts (and beaks and blood and other assorted yuck) into oil is possible (it probably is) pales alongside Kava's patently ridiculous assumption that what she calls "grade 2 garbage" - glass, bricks, wood, and metal - could also be turned into crude oil if EchoTechnology can just get the "flushing" process ironed out.
As the narrative flow rotates among the characters, a mishmash of plot threads unfolds; a mishmash in which several commonalities become clear: Kava intends to keep everything secret until the penultimate chapter, necessitating mass quantities of circumlocution and filler, most of the latter in the form of clichéd character descriptions and verbal smoke and mirrors to distract the reader. Ah, but from what must the reader be distracted? It's not magic, that much is crystalline: what the reader is not supposed to notice is that Kava plainly knows zip about science - her description of the workings of EchoTechnology's (and why isn't it "EcoTechnology," anyway?) plant is highly reminiscent of those inevitable references to "gravimetric distortions," "jefferies tubes," "chronometric anomalies," and "dampening fields" trekkies bemoan from lesser versions of the Star Trek canon. Unlike writers like Jeffery Deaver or T. Jefferson Parker, who excel at researching even the most minor questions for their novels, Kava simply splashed a bunch of "sciency-sounding" words about the pages and let the plot chips fall where they may.
Lacking a realistic basis for her protagonist's predicament, Kava fell back on a bagful of characters apparently picked up at a used stereotype auction and a gaggle of topical plot threads guaranteed to attract almost anyone's interest, however briefly. Consider the requisite corrupt politician subplot; or the terrorism subplot - mercifully only about fifteen pages overall – that's completely superfluous (besides featuring yet another "scientist"); several threads based in Washington that are jammed with hackneyed characters and unrealistic situations; and a long-lost brother thread that reads like an un-aired episode of "Wise Guy." In short, since Kava apparently didn't have anything to write because of her missing research on science and scientists, she just threw everything but the kitchen sink into Whitewash to give it the bulk necessary to reach 400-plus pages. The result is predictably bad: give this one a pass.