The Barnes & Noble Review
James W. Hall is one of a number of writers -- others include Carl Hiaasen, John Katzenbach, Edna Buchanan, and Randy Wayne White -- who have transformed the south Florida crime novel into a thriving subgenre. Hall, who is a poet as well as a novelist and short story writer, has published ten increasingly popular thrillers, most of which recount the exploits of a charismatic loner named Thorn. In the past few years, Hall has produced a couple of equally successful nonseries novels. The latest of these, Rough Draft, is now available, and it is a certified page-turner.
According to the publicity material, Rough Draft had its origins in an actual event. While browsing in a secondhand bookstore, Hall came across a used copy of one of his own novels. This particular copy was heavily annotated, filled with underlinings, marginal notations, and cryptic scrawls. The image of that bizarrely marked volume stayed in Hall's mind. Eventually, it found its way into his fiction and now serves as the McGuffin that stands at the center of his striking, ambitious new book.
The heroine of Rough Draft is Hannah Keller, a former Miami homicide cop who is now the author of a popular series of police procedurals. Five years prior to the main events of this book, Hannah's parents were murdered, shot down by a trio of killers who still remain at large. Randall Keller, Hannah's six-year-old son, was the only witness to the murders, which left him deeply -- perhaps permanently -- traumatized. As the novel begins, Hannah finds a copy of her own first novel in the waiting room of Randall's psychiatrist. The book is filled with cryptic scribblings and with columns of numbers that represent a childishly simple code. The encoded message is directed at Hannah and appears to have been written by the man responsible for her parents' deaths.
Faced with the prospect of catching the killer, Hannah's police instincts, now long dormant, begin to resurface. By this point, however, the reader knows something that Hannah does not: The "message" is a fake, the central element in a calculating, overly elaborate sting operation designed and implemented, for complex reasons of their own, by an ambitious FBI agent and a grief-maddened U.S. senator. The ultimate object of the sting is to flush from hiding a brutal contract killer who has successfully eluded capture for more than a decade. Unaware that she is being callously used, Hannah takes the bait and runs with it.
The manipulation of Hannah Keller forms the centerpiece of a cleverly devised plot that moves, swiftly and with great assurance, in some unexpected directions. As Hannah stalks a nonexistent killer, a real killer begins to stalk her. As the real killer slowly emerges from hiding, the FBI team clumsily prepares to spring its trap. Nothing, of course, goes exactly as planned. As the narrative progresses, new players, with agendas of their own, intrude on the action; enmities and alliances begin to form among the various participants; and the FBI master plan proves fundamentally flawed. In the end, both Hannah Keller and her deeply vulnerable son find themselves in mortal jeopardy, victimized by forces on both sides of the law.
Rough Draft is a tense, tight, cleanly written thriller that moves at approximately the speed of light. Hall captures the dilemmas and anxieties of his haunted central characters with precision and sympathy, and he populates his story with a varied, equally credible cast of supporting characters. Included among them are a disaffected FBI agent no longer able -- or willing -- to play his assigned role, a psychopathic killer who has no access at all to the normal range of human feelings, an embittered young woman with a grotesque penchant for mutilating Barbie dolls in the name of art, and a 12-year-old computer prodigy who is slowly dying of an AIDS-related illness and whose technical expertise helps set the stage for the violent denouement.
Readers impatient for the next installment of the Thorn saga may grumble a bit at this latest departure, but they shouldn't, really. Hall, I'm sure, will return to Thorn in his own good time. In the meanwhile, we are fortunate to have this humane, imaginative thriller to fall back on. Rough Draft is a suspense novel with heart, brains, and impressive narrative muscle and comes highly recommended to anyone on the lookout for intelligent, high-adrenaline entertainment.
--Bill Sheehan
