RECOMMENDATION: GOOD READ

 
Reviewed by Theodore Feit

 
After various adventures in a number of other parts of the world, including having served as a Marine during Desert Storm, Mark Rohr finds himself working as a bouncer in a Thai bar when he is fired for overzealously performing his duties.  But the bar’s owner and bartender, a long-time friend, steers him onto a job assisting a woman who is looking for her brother a year after the tsunami.

The client offers him $500 a week and a $5,000 bonus if he finds the brother, who Mark believes was either lost to the giant wave or doesn’t want to be found.  The quest is complicated by a top gangster who also has a vested interest in finding the brother.  And the race is on along the pirate-infested waters of Thailand and Malaysia.  It is an exciting chase, filled with graphic descriptions of th e devastation brought on by the tsunami, as well as the poverty and corruption in the country.

This novel is the third featuring globe-trotting Rohr, ranging from Singapore and the Raffles Hotel to Casablanca and Cairo, then to India and elsewhere.  In each, he introduces a number of surprises, and Noble Lies is no exception.  This reader c ould not even begin to anticipate how he would bring the novel to such a conclusion.

Courtesy of Theodore Feit and Films & Books Magazine 

RECOMMENDATION: GOOD READ

Rachel Chavez, the protagonist in this new novel by Penny Rudolph, is unusual in at least one respect:  she runs a parking garage she has inherited from her grandfather in downtown LA, one that does not cater to the public but leases space to nearby businesses.  One night she finds a locked van in the garage , inside of which are two young Mexican boys, both unconscious.  When Rachel drives them to the emergency room of a local hospital, she is told that one of the boys is dead and the other severely dehydrated.  When she returns the next day to see how the boy is, she is told there is no record of either boy ever having been there.

Rachel is not the kind of woman to let this rest, and is determined to find out how the boys, or their records, could have simply disappeared.  She wonders if their being Mexican enters into the equation.

Her personal life is in problematical shape, with her ambivalence toward the man to whom she has recently become engaged [being engaged isn’t the problem, but getting married is], trying to get information from her less-than-forthcoming father about her Mexican heritage, and the prospect of losing a major tenant at the garage.  The latter problem is unexpectedly solved when the same local hospital signs a contract to lease over one hundred spaces for its employees as well as use of the helipad located on the roof, in what is seemingly coincidental timing.

The characters in the book are all too human – Rachel is a recovering alcoholic, her father a habitual gambler, with all the attendant problems to which that addiction gives rise.  Rachel’s friends are also very interesting creations: one is a street person, an elderly woman who for some reason has a cell phone, the other the head of a cleaning service who knows—or can find out-- much of what there is to know in the neighborhood.  The author has given us a believable, well-plotted mystery peopled with fascinating characters, including a couple of red herrings.  Suspenseful and thoroughly enjoyable, the book is recommended.

Life Blood
By Penny Rudolph
Poisoned Pen Press
September 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59058-346-3
Hardcover, $24.95, 326 pp.
Reviewed by Gloria Feit