The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 September 2009
by Joe Gores
This is a darkly woven tale of murder, the mob, jealousy, revenge and, curiously, the history of violence in chimpanzees and orangutangs. Dante Stagnaro, a San Francisco police detective in charge of organized crime investigations (not a big business in San Francisco, for some reason), is on a murder case when the victim, promiscuous climber Moll Dalton, appears to have been killed with the M.O. of a New Jersey hit man. As he pulls out the thread of her story, the mob connections unravel and the bodies pile up. There is a mysterious message on his phone machine from a guy calling himself Raptor ("This is Raptor." echoes "This is Zodiac" from a real life spree in the 1970s.), suggesting a whole other line on the case. What does Raptor have to do with the Mafia? The victim's husband, not entirely justified in his anger and grief, heads off to Kenya for a sixteen-month study of chimps in the wild, so he is out of the picture. The book has interwoven threads of present and retrospect, so we also get to sit through Will Dalton's lecture on what he discovered from his meditations in the African forest. This aspect of the novel reveals what appears to be an enthusiasm on the part of the author, a note borne out by a two-page bibliography of books about paleoanthropology, paleontology and evolution. The author has latched on to an idea here that it seems he just wanted to get into a book, though its connection to a string of mob-related killings will appear tenuous at best. So, while thought-provoking, his meditations on chimp psychology and Death Valley geologic history seem indulgences in what might have been a taut mystery. Gores doesn't quite convincingly suggest the possibility of multiple suspects and this reader detected the perp early on in the book. If he had dwelt a little less on the anthropology, the mystery, complete with its hard-boiled characters and somewhat gratuitous sexual details, might have been more compelling. This doesn't mean that Gores doesn't have something to say. It's just a funny way of saying it.