Topic of Night

Michael Gruber

The number of superlative adjectives that have been thrown around in relation to this book is nothing short of amazing. I should have realized, however, when Martin Cruz Smith's blurb on the front compared it to Smilla's Sense of Snow that I was in for a long, somewhat boring read. To be fair, it does pick up towards the end.

We open with Jane Doe, a woman who ironically, in order to hide herself, had to take another name (her real name is, in fact, Jane Doe). She's hiding from her husband, for reasons we are not made privy to until much later. Meanwhile, detectives Jimmy Paz and Cletis Barlow are working on a particularly gruesome murder in Overtown, a lower-class Miami neighborhood. Of course, these two things tie together somewhere down the line.

The main problem with the book is that it takes everything way, way too long to tie together. Gruber is in desperate need of a few classes on how to pace a thriller; the first three hundred pages of this just-over-four-hundred-page novel are setup. Which, when done right (cf. Palliser's *The Quincunx*, with over twice the amount of setup), can be just as gripping as the actual action, but here it's not done right in the least. We switch back and forth between Jane in the present, Jane in the past as revealed through her journals, and Paz/Barlow's investigation. Of the three, the last is the only one that really works. These chapters speed by, leaving the reader wanting more. The stuff that comes between, well, that can end at any time. But it never seems to, it just keeps going on and on.

Once the storylines mesh, the pace picks up. The problem here is that at this point the book becomes predictable. Gruber has set everything up in such a way that you're no longer faced with a mystery, but he still has pieces of that mystery to unveil. Unfortunately, as is the case in most mysteries that fail, the reader's figured out the final pieces long before the characters do. (The addition of a completely unrelated red herring at the end is almost painful in its amateurism, and it screams "red herring" from the get-go, even though Gruber tries to keep us believing it's the real deal until the book's final page.)

About the only thing to like about the book is the characterization, and in at least one case, we find out that Gruber has characterized one of his characters the way he has for the sole purpose of filling in a plot twist; given that, the astute reviewer is suddenly faced with a dilemma. Is good characterization that only serves to throw in a plot twist still good characterization? I have no idea. But I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since most of the main characters are well-drawn enough. The minor characters, however, are little more than stereotypes (and stereotype also rears its ugly head in Paz' character, though that, too, seems to be there in order to provide dramatic tension at a certain point).

All in all, I can't recommend it. There are many, many better thrillers to be found out there. Those who considered this book too slow, I'd point you in the directions of Douglas E. Winter's Run and Jack Priest's Ragged Man.