David Rosenfelt puts his popular, often canine-centric Andy Carpenter series on hold again for DOWN TO THE WIRE, his second standalone thriller. He uses the opportunity to take chances and try different approaches to his narrative — all admirable, but sadly, this venture falls short of its intended mark.
Chris Turley has long ago resigned to the fact that he will never be the kind of journalist his father, Edward Turley, was: a prize-winning investigative reporter whose relentless probes uncovered corruption in the world of politics and general commercial business. By contrast, Chris covers mainly conferences and town hall meetings for his New Jersey paper, THE BERGEN NEWS.
One day, he gets a phone call that sounds like an anonymous story tip, and agrees to meet the caller the following afternoon at a park near a huge office building. Shortly after Chris arrives, a giant explosion collapses half the building. He rushes into action and pulls out five people before the fire trucks and ambulance arrive. Then, of course, he submits his story to the paper, and his firsthand account of the tragedy suddenly makes him a hero and a celebrity.
Similar tips follow, seemingly from the same source. And as the stories continue to break, Chris soon becomes every ounce the star reporter his father was.
In alternating scenes, we learn that the source of these story tips is a shadowy, highly skilled madman who calls himself P.T. It is soon clear he is using Chris to exact a deeply-rooted revenge scheme that goes all the back to one of the stories Edward wrote, and one of the lives it destroyed. But the more time it takes for Chris to uncover P.T.’s identity and motive, the more lives are randomly lost.
Rosenfelt chose a somewhat quiet, deadpan style to tell his story, and tries to build suspense with various soft-spoken cliffhangers at the end of sections and chapters. But the method backfires on him and results in a disturbing distance from his characters. It’s as though he were dispassionately observing the characters’ thoughts and actions after the fact. This arm’s-length observation — especially evident as he wraps up events in the concluding chapters — leaves no room for empathy.
Adding to this distance are the various backstories that Rosenfelt included on most of P.T.’s murder victims. They are introduced, explained and then immediately eliminated. It’s effective at first. But the repeated use of this technique ends up confusing us as to which characters our sympathies should follow.
It’s exciting to watch an author try different approaches to storytelling. And while the media-manipulation theme is intriguing and relevant, Rosenfelt went a bit too far a field with his stylistic experiments in DOWN TO THE WIRE. His fans will no doubt welcome his return to the world of Andy Carpenter and his various hounds. —Alan Cranis
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