Does it really count as a book review when you explain why you tossed the book aside less than half way through? Because that’s what I did with Jeffery Deaver’s The Vanished Man.

I was not disappointed with the author’s skill. He writes a good story, creates a tight plot. His characters are well realized.

No, I just didn’t like the points he was trying to make, and I didn’t want to waste any more time on them.

The Vanished Man is a well-crafted thriller with a clever premise. What if a master magician became a serial killer? What if he felt compelled to re-create the feats of famous escape artists like Houdini, except that he stages them with innocent victims, leaving them no avenue of escape? And what if he were skilled in quick changes, illusion and lock-picking, so that even when the police have him surrounded, he can slip away from them?

That’s the promising scenario of The Vanished Man.



But Deaver lost me as a reader. I doubt if he cares. He clearly despises people like me, and wouldn’t want us for readers.

For instance, I’m a sexist pig. I don’t believe women (in general) make as good policemen as men. I believe men have both an obligation and a psychological need to protect women, and that putting women in harm’s way debases both them and the men.

In Deaver’s world, about half the cops are women, and any suggestion that a guy thinks even for a moment that women don’t make equally effective cops proves that he’s a Neanderthal.

There’s a conservative Protestant pastor in the novel, and at the beginning he seems to be portrayed pretty sympathetically. This immediately made me suspicious, and I was right to be. A little further in, we learn that the pastor is a child molester, and that he’s in New York City to perform a political assassination on behalf of a right-wing militia group.

That was when I lost interest.

Nobody pays me to read these books, and I don’t have unlimited time left in my life. I’m not going to spend that time reading fiction that insults me.

No doubt some people feel the same about my books.

Fair enough.

Today I gave my classic Orientation-time PowerPoint on library procedures to the students at the Bible school. As usual it was a hit, and it ought to earn me some tolerance from the students, right up until they actually have to deal with me in person.

I learned yesterday morning, as I lay in bed luxuriating in the Labor Day holiday, that I was supposed to be at school, delivering the thing. The implication was that I’d been informed about this. I have no memory of that (as unindicted co-conspirators like to say). So it was arranged for me to do it today, but I went in and put in a few hours work yesterday anyway. Had to update the PowerPoint, for one thing. New rules on fines, in general more forgiving ones. Naturally, as a Christian conservative, I hate that. All the money we spent on the new pillory and refurbishing the ducking stool, down the drain. There’s just no standards anymore.

I am strongly conflicted about Randy Wayne White’s Shark River. I liked it and disliked it, in about equal proportions. No, I guess I liked it a little more than I disliked it. I shall elucidate.

White’s Doc Ford character is widely considered an heir to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, and I have to say I haven’t read anything in the field that meets the qualifications better. Like McGee, Ford lives a laid-back life on the water in Florida (though Ford lives on the other coast, and works pretty hard as a marine biologist, while McGee purposely lived as a beach bum between cases). They are both actively involved in the social scenes in their marinas, though Ford’s neighbors are more important to the plot than McGee’s usually were.

But Ford has a dark past. He was formerly a member of an ultra-secret government assassination squad. He came to Sanibel Island, his present home, with the intention of killing a man named Tomlinson, who had been involved in a fatal anti-war bombing plot back in the Vietnam years. For reasons of his own, Ford decided to let Tomlinson live, became his best friend, and hung up his spurs, so to speak.

Shark River begins with the attempt of a Colombian drug lord to kidnap the daughter of an influential American bureaucrat. Ford, in the right place at the right time, prevents it. In the fight he paralyzes a man who turns out to be the drug lord’s son, making himself a target. At the same time he meets Ransom Ebanks, a Bahamian woman who claims to be his long-lost half-sister, but is in fact the daughter of his reprobate uncle, whom Ford never liked much. She has a letter from her father and a sort of treasure map promising to lead to her “inheritance,” and she is relentless in trying to get Ford to help her. But of course the Colombians are waiting over the horizon, planning to strike back at the man who crippled one of their own.

In his casual courage and human tolerance, Doc Ford pleases me in the same way Travis McGee used to. But there are elements in the story that please me less. I can’t help it, but I’m just intolerant of drug use. Ford doesn’t use marijuana, but his friend Tomlinson and his “sister” Ransom are both users.

Tomlinson is presented as a burnt-out case, a little flaky (he is a Buddhist and a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, which also doesn’t win any points with me), but I have trouble with his history as an anti-war radical, as well as his religion. I think his friendship with Doc Ford is meant to be a metaphor for American reconciliation, and that’s nice, but I’m still pretty bitter about the whole thing, so I found Tomlinson kind of hard to take. Especially when he was smoking pot.

The attitude toward sexual morality all around in the book was pretty heedless too, in my opinion. (Yes, even more heedless than Travis McGee’s.)

But I liked Shark River enough that I expect I’ll give White another read.