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Summary
Summary
Blinded in an accident, Dane Rudd regains his sight after a cornea transplant and sets out to investigate the suicide death of his benefactor, Taylor Greene, heir to a vast fortune.
Author Notes
Boston Teran , Edgar Award finalist and critically acclaimed winner of numerous international awards including the Creasey Dagger Award and the Fiction Lovers Book of the Year Award, is the author of God is a Bullet and Never Count Out The Dead . Born and raised in the South Bronx, he lives in California.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
After soaring high with his first two thrillers, God Is a Bullet and Never Count Out the Dead, Teran crashes and burns with his third, an archly overwritten and confusing book, which also wastes a promising, relatively fresh locale California's Sacramento Delta. The first problem is the writing: although there are a few early flashes of the originality that made Teran's first two novels so exciting, these very quickly degrade into sloppy poetry: "Nathan was hungry for some ultimate legacy, something that would carry past the wakes of his life. But he also knew there is, in each of us, a place where resides an eternal antagonist who remains untouched by any virtue." Then there are the characters, a grotesque gallery of genre clichs with few humanizing touches. For reasons never made entirely clear, the hero a young man who calls himself Dane Rudd is claimed as a lost son by several people, including an ex-con pilot who decorates the walls of the bar he runs with sketches from the Greek myth of the Minotaur in the labyrinth (perhaps a plug for the publisher?). But most damaging is the plot, a serpentine and finally unconvincing exercise, which has Rudd supposedly blinded early on in a subway attack, but even this is left in doubt at the end investigating the death of the man whose corneas he inherited by infiltrating a gang of smugglers and killers whose nastiness is exceeded only by their ineptitude. All this adds up to a misfire from which the reclusive, supposedly pseudonymous author will hopefully recover. Agent, David Hale Smith, DHS Literary. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A third violent vengeance-thriller from Teran (Never Count Out the Dead, 2001, etc.), larded with one-dimensional characters and written in pretentious, occasionally incomprehensible pseudo-lit prose. While waiting on a New York City subway platform at two in the morning-"That's when you get to experience the other side of the other side"-young Dane Rudd has the course of his life drastically altered by an act of mindless cruelty. Someone riding between two cars of an express train hurls a glass at his face and hits him with a blend of chemicals potent enough to rob him of most of his eyesight. Flash to young Taylor Green in Rio Vista, California. In a manner of speaking he too is soon to have a life-altering experience: he's about to be murdered. Quite by accident, Taylor has become privy to a desperate secret concerning the covert activities of some of his friends and neighbors, rich movers and shakers as reputable as they are unscrupulous. He knows that they know he knows about the money-laundering and drug-pushing, and all know their response will be swift and remorseless. Taylor's abrupt demise is brazenly camouflaged as suicide, but brave, bereaved Essie Law, the young woman who loved him, refuses to be hornswoggled. Reenter Dane, freshly kitted out with cornea transplants from Taylor, to aid and abet Essie. Though beaten frequently and tortured inhumanly, he eventually proves that Taylor was victimized, gets revenge on his killers, heals Essie's fractured heart, and gains redemption for himself, having become a changed and better person through such Zenlike insights as: "The con man and the honest man suffer in the end the same, for they are forever in jeopardy from themselves as well as others." Knowledge is power. Pulpy, purple, and essentially plotless.
Booklist Review
Promoted as "edgy" and "explosive," this thriller combines a feverish New Journalism writing style with the kind of philosophical ruminations popular in freshman dorms after all the pot has been smoked. Employing the standard plotline of a stranger arriving to shake up a corrupt community, the novel's nonetheless lofty ambitions too often exceed the writer's grasp. For all that, Teran's third book heralds a bright literary talent--one that just needs a bit more polishing if he's to live up to the promise he showed in God Is a Bullet (1999), which won the John Creasy Award for Best First Novel. For every over-amped paragraph in his latest tale, which follows a man without choices forced to infiltrate a den of money-laundering killers in California, Teran uncorks a passage of startling power and beauty. With a bit more restraint, he might have delivered one of the year's most powerful noir novels. This is a writer to watch. --Frank Sennett
