This wasn’t bad. Although I found things to dislike in Paul Levine’s second Jake Lassiter novel, Night Vision, I also found things that pleased me. So I may possibly read another.
In this outing, Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter, having (apparently) recovered from the tragic loss of the love of his life in the last book, so completely that he now never thinks of her at all, is called in by an ambitious district attorney to act as special prosecutor in the murder of a local female TV reporter, strangled while engaging in sex talk over the internet. Jake, along with Charlie Riggs, his retired pathologist friend, is soon embroiled in a serial killer investigation, and along the way Jake meets a beautiful English psychologist who becomes a romantic interest. But who can he trust? Somebody’s telling a lot of lies and laying a lot of false tracks.
The influence of Carl Hiaasen is heavy here. Jake, though generally amusing as a narrator, spends a lot of time complaining about the rape of Florida by those greedy corporations (since this is a book from the 1980s, if the things he describes had been entirely accurate, Florida would be uninhabitable today. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a development problem down there. It’s just that Floridians [I used to be one] tend to paper over their guilt at living in a fragile ecosystem by transferring it to CEOs and boards of directors). There’s also the ancient trope of American soldiers in Vietnam being so crazed by drugs and racism that civilian massacres were business as usual.
And there’s passing reference to Jake’s playing football under Coach Sandusky which will give most readers pause in 2012.
On the other hand, the book deals with transsexualism, and treats it with a fair amount of distaste (no doubt that’s an artifact of the times. The author probably wouldn’t put it that way if he wrote the book today). Also there’s a splendid passage on the end of the Playboy Age:
The sexual revolution has been repealed by the vote of the electorate. And not just because of communicable rashes and deadly viruses. There’s an old-fashioned word that makes us smart guys wince: morality.
I figured out the main murderer well before Jake did.
Not a bad read. Not stellar. The usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.