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Summary
Summary
OneAlexandra began shooting at fifty yards. She worked slowly toward the four-story building, taking several wide-angle shots of the whole structure. A stucco apartment building with red tile roof and dark green stairways and landings, here and there a coral rock facade. In that part of Coconut Grove, two bedrooms started at eight hundred a month. Sporty compacts filled the parking lot, owned by the young lawyers and stockbrokers who populated these buildings, twenty-something singles with more expendable income than Alexandra had take-home pay. She got a wide-angle shot of the cars. You never knew when a perp might leave his vehicle behind. Car trouble, panic, even arrogance.A year earlier, after studying hundreds of photos of two different murder scenes, Alexandra had spotted the same car parked at both, a fact that broke the case. It took her four shots to get all the cars near the apartment.The Minolta 700 SI she was using was motor-driven, had an autofocus, auto everything.Nearly impossible to make a mistake. Alexandra Rafferty was an ID tech with the Miami PD, photographic specialist.Not being a sworn police officer meant, among other things, that she wasn't authorized to carry a gun.Which was fine by her.She'd had more than enough of guns.Her only weapon was the telescoping baton she carried on her belt.Her counterparts with Metro-Dade, the county ID techs, were sworn officers, and they were paid even more than the detectives.They carried the latest Glocks, ran the crime scene, bossed the homicide guys around.But not the City of Miami PD.Exactly the same job, only Alexandra and her colleagues were considered technicians, bottom of the totem. Night after night, she ghosted through rooms, took her shots, and when she was finished, she moved on to the next scene.Hardly noticed.Which was fine.She had no aspiration to run things.That wasn't her.She had her attitude, her opinion.Had no problem speaking up if one of the homicide guys missed something or asked for her view.But she didn't aspire to run the show or get involved with the daily dick measuring that went on all around her.She took her rolls of film, sent them to processing, got them back, arranged them, put together her files, and then moved on, and moved on again. Her B.A. was from the local state university, criminal justice, psychology minor, 3.8 average, her only Bs a couple of painting courses she'd attempted.Some of her college friends were horrified at her career choice.But she wouldn't be anywhere else.In a cheap blue shirt and matching trousers, a uniform shabbier than the ones the inmates got, working impossible hours at insultingly low pay.But none of that mattered.She liked her job.It made a difference in the world, a modest one perhaps, but essential.And the job kept her alert, focused, living close to the bone.And she liked using the camera, being a photographer who never had to tell her subjects to hold still, never got a complaint about unflattering angles. Alexandra was twenty-nine and had been doing this work for eight years.It still felt new.Every night, every scene, something different, something human and extreme.From eleven till seven, alert for eight hours.Wired.Just after dawn, she'd take her run on the beach, then go home, still pumped from the night before, and make breakfast for Stan and her father.She'd ride that high most of the morning.Just steal a few hours of sleep in the afternoon while Stan was at work and her dad was doing basket weaving at Harbor House, four or five hours at the most; then by eleven the next night, she was ready to go again. It was a little before midnight, Wednesday, October the seventh.No traffic on Tigertail Avenue.No human noises.Only the jittery fizz of the sulfurous streetlights.She lowered her camera, stepped over the yellow crime-scene tape, walked forward five paces, raised the Minolta again, and took half a dozen medium-distance flash shots of bloodstains on the asphalt parking lot.Several d
Author Notes
James W. Hall was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. After graduating from Eckerd College in Florida and earning additional degrees from John Hopkins University and the University of Utah, He began to write poetry. Among his published books of poetry are The Lady from the Dark Green Hills, The Mating Reflex, and False Statements.
Following his successful 20-year career as a poet, he decided it was time to switch gears and try his hand at writing fictional crime novels. He published his first novel, Under Cover of Daylight, in 1987. Since then he has written over 15 novels including the Thorn Mysteries series, Bones of Coral, Hard Aground, Rough Draft, and Forests of the Night. Several of his novels have been optioned for film and he has written screenplays for two of those projects. He is a professor of literature and writing at Florida International University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following last year's downcast Red Sky at Night, which left beachcomber-hero Thorn in a wheelchair, Hall bounces back with a new protagonist, Alexandra Rafferty, an appealing fourth-degree blackbelt, crime-scene photographer and all-around Miami PD femme Nikita. Shadowed by 18 years of guilt from the grisly aftermath of her rape at age 11, Alex is the loving caregiver to her father, an ex-cop befuddled by senility. Caught up in a series of serial killings of young women whose bodies are left in bizarre postures, Alex is unaware that her cretinoid husband, Stan, an armored car driver, is planning the perfect robbery. All hell breaks loose when a sexy pool-cleaner/ burglar (who keeps a pet cockroach in her pocket) chances on the scene and sees Stan's airhead mistress make off with two bags worth a cool million. When Alex's pixilated dad steals back the loot, most of the major elements of this whimsical action-packed plot are in place. The ensuing 600-mile chase takes Alex and dad to Seaside, the well-known planned community on the sugary beaches of the Florida panhandle. Forgiving the distracting, superfluous plot threads, Hall fans will be more than reimbursed by his poetic imagery in the landscapes and love scenes. Alex is a heroine with enough endearing attributes to sustain yet another long-running character series. $200,000 ad/promo; audio to Brilliance; author tour. Agent, Richard Pine; editor, Jenifer Weis. (Sept.) FYI: Seaside, Fla., was the location for the new Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Key West chronicler Hall gives rugged adventurer Dick Thorn (Red Sky at Night, 1997, etc.) a well-earned rest as the author heads north to Miami to follow the fortunes of a police photographer, a lethal serial rapist, and two very large bags full of money. As the technician charged with photographing the Bloody Rapists victims, Alexandra Rafferty would have her hands full with one way or the other. Though the Rapist has obligingly left buckets of his blood and dozens of his fingerprints at each of five crime scenes so far, the cops have no leads, and it looks like the Rapist would be providing Alexandra steady work even if she didn't have troubles closer to home. But her life with armored-car driver husband Stan and with Lawton Collins, the ex-cop father who years ago covered up Alexandra's own killing of Darnel Flint, the teenaged rapist next door, is about to take a steep downward turn. Smarty-pants Stan, who thinks he's as cunning as can be, masterminds a $2 million heist from his own armored car. When Alexandra finds the money in the guest-room closet of his empty-headed, giddily amoral lover and confronts him, Stan threatens to tell the police about her own murder, casually revealed to him just a few weeks ago by Lawton, an Alzheimer's sufferer. Meantime, a couple of operators toting more guns than scruples have decided to cut themselves in on Stan's caper, and they're following the money trail right to Alexandra and Lawton. The cast of felons and wannabes provides a field day for Hall's well-known eye for grotesques (check out especially Lawton's blackly comic ramblings, presented with affection and respect but without blinkers, and the remorseless thief who keeps a pet roach named Amy), but the novelist never gets so distracted by all the murderous monkeyshines that he loses track of the Bloody Rapist, four counties back but closing fast. A double-barreled actioner set apart from the pack by Hall's virtuoso control of tone, which can shift you from giggles to gasps with a single well-trimmed phrase. ($200,00 ad/promo; author tour)
Booklist Review
When Hall's first mystery, Under Cover of Daylight, appeared in 1987, the idea of Florida as a kind of neon Armageddon was the genre's hot new theme. Now, with Hall, Carl Hiaasen, and numerous others diligently working the soil, it's threatening to become a cliche . More than any of his Floridian peers, Hall has avoided repetition; his hermit-sleuth Thorn has appeared in most of his books, but the focus has jumped from environmental issues to struggles with personal demons. Changing gears even more dramatically, Hall now introduces a new series character, Miami forensic photographer Alexandra Rafferty, whose demons are both internal and external. Attempting to avoid a dark secret in her past (for once, it isn't incest), Rafferty loses herself in the distanced objectivity of photographing crime scenes ("Eyes neutral. No personality, no throb of self"). The throbbing begins, however, when Alex realizes that the serial killer called the Bleeder is positioning his victims' bodies to spell her name. Meanwhile, Alex's disaffected husband, a Brinks armored-car driver, attempts to combine chaos theory with crime in the hopes of becoming what he calls the "first post-Einstein robber." Alex lands in the middle of the resulting chaos, and with her Alzheimer's-suffering Dad in tow, discovers she can run but she can't hide. Hall effectively combines Ridley Pearson^-like suspense and forensic detail with a near-flawless grasp of character; his Florida loonies are as loony as Hiaasen's, but they go well beyond caricature: loonies with heart. Only a too-pat romantic subplot and a slightly too happy ending keep this thriller from perfection. --Bill Ott
Library Journal Review
A forensic photographer relives a horrible event from childhood; from the author of the best-selling Buzz Cut (LJ 5/15/96). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.