Cons: overly familiar characters, weak motivation of villain
The Bottom Line: The bottom line was last seen plotting the next in a series of heinous attacks on the family of one of the FBI's approximately 4,000,000 profilers...
scmrak's Full Review: Lisa Gardner - The Next Accident
Mystery novels, of which I read (or, more accurately, devour) an inordinate number, are routinely assigned to a plethora of subgenre. There is, of course, the dichotomy between police procedural and private detective; there are a slew of protagonist-driven series; there are psychological thrillers; and there is - one of my personal favorites - the female protagonist subgenre. Of course, some of these are great reads and some are pure schlock. Nonetheless, I'm continually on the lookout for new authors. That's how I stumbled over Lisa Gardner's The Next Accident while recently browsing the shelves at my tiny local library. It's the only Gardner book they have - and the jury is out on whether that's good or bad...
Profile of a Plot
Lorraine "Rainie" Connor, the ink still wet on the new PI license in her purse, has been presented her first case. The ex-cop (drummed out of a small-town police force for reasons unspecified here) receives a visit from FBI profiler extraordinaire Pierce Quincy, with whom she had worked on the defining case of her short career as a cop.
Quincy's elder daughter, 23-year-old Amanda, was buried last month after languishing in a coma for fourteen months; having killed herself while driving drunk. Quincy, however, is convinced that there was foul play (we readers, of course, know that his instincts are correct...) Ergo, he schleps cross-country from Virginia to Portland, Oregon, to hire a woman with whom he has a strange, tortured emotional relationship to investigate Mandy's death. What the heck, east-coast money spends the same as west-coast cash - Rainie takes the case.
It's increasingly obvious to Rainie and Quincy that there is a conspiracy to destroy him, but the perpetrator has hidden his tracks in veritable blizzard of clues. When Quincy's ex-wife Bethie turns up brutally murdered, the plot against him shifts into high gear. With only a matter of days left before the conspirator's clever noose tightens around his neck, Quincy and Rainie flee to Portland with his sole surviving daughter, Kimberly. That's when Gardner shifts into high gear, injecting a series of plot twists and turns into a plot that is already moving forward at a near-dizzying speed.
Emotionally crippled by the deaths in his family and the impending collapse of his carefully-ordered life, Quincy is forced to trust Rainie - herself a mass of self-doubt - to protect him and Kimberly and ferret out the killer. Fortunately, she's up to the task, although she's more distracted than she should be by her physical and emotional attraction to the handsome FBI agent.
Haven't I Seen You Somewhere...
Profilers and serial killers are staples of murder mysteries - far out of proportion to their presence in the general population. But then clever, manipulative killers are also far rarer in real life than in mystery novels - after all, who'd want to read a thirty-page novel about a redneck with a monumental hangover who offs his next-door neighbor for mowing the lawn at 7:00 AM on Sunday? Not me - or you, either, so murder mysteries are invariably about the tiny fraction of killers who are ingenious, manipulative psychological masterminds even while incontrovertibly psychotic.
That's not to say that those literary murderers and profilers are necessarily well done or that the psychology of the killings is always carefully researched. And I'll never deny that more than a few of the plots are as leaky as the proverbial sieve - they are.
This time around, Gardner is covering ground that's already well trodden. A profiler and his loved ones under psychological and physical attack from (presumably) one of his former "clients"? What - you never watched "Profiler" on television? A lean, handsome, salt-and-pepper tressed, startlingly intelligent and tasteful FBI profiler whose home life has been destroyed... read any Kay Scarpetta novels lately? At the least, Gardner could have disguised Pierce Quincy a little better - giving him two last names is just a little too close an homage to Cornwell's Benton Wesley.
Does it Work?
Gardner steps on one of my pet peeves in The Next Accident, that of failing to introduce her characters to new readers. There are a wealth of hints at Rainie and Quincy's tortured relationship and the case tht first drew them together, but Gardner (and her publisher) seem to have taken special care not to say enough to educate the reader. They're all just oblique references to sturrn und drang, but the references are so common that she's doing her readers a disservice (in my book, anyway).
Oddly enough, the fast-paced novel still works even though the characters are so mysterious and the themes are so familiar. The plot twists aren't so outlandish as to defy analysis, though Gardner does telegraph what's intended to be one of the most surprising. Where the plot falls flattest is in Gardner's research into the psychology of her villain, developing a motive that borders on ludicrous for a multiple-murder plot. Even though she's written a fast and furious plot peopled with accessible characters, the book still leaves you wanting something... more.
New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner is at the top of her form as she takes us on a desperate manhunt for a killer who preys upon his victim...More at Barnes & Noble.com
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