Rating: 
Summary: MIAMI MAYHEM
Review: This is my first Hall book, and obviously the first in a new series featuring the unflappable Alexandra Rafferty, a crime scene photographer with a dark secret from her childhood. A neighborhood boy raped her; she went to threaten him with her cop father's gun, and accidentally shoots the boy dead. Dad helps cover up the crime, and no one suspects the truth, or do they?
Flash up to the present day and Alexandra finds herself involved in a serial rapist killer's horrifying carnage. Add to this a truly psychotic husband who is planning a major armored car heist, and two thieves who are like something out of a David Lynch movie, and you have the many ingredients of this strange, but mesmerizing, crime novel. If things weren't bad enough, Alex's father is now senile, suffering from Alzheimer's, and getting her in more trouble than she could ever dream possible.Hall goes out on a limb in his treatment of the father's character. The overwhelming tragedy of Alzheimer's should never be milked for comic relief, but Hall does this quite often, seguing sometimes very uncomfortably from serious repercussions of the disease to the inherent "comical" side effects. The book has a nice pace and Hall certainly demonstrates a feel for his locales. (...) It's fairly obvious who (the rapist) is, (...) so obvious, you almost want to laugh at his attempt. The characters of Norman, Emma and Jennifer are so over the top, they never achieve one moment of lucidity or credibility. Emma and her pet cockroach; Norman in his Quasimodo shroud; and dimwit Jennifer, the epitome of the dumb blonde provide some comic relief, but they are so sinister and unlikeable, you can only welcome their inimitable demises. Perhaps Hall tried to hard to give us a complex novel that he forgot his audience's suspension of belief levels.
Rating: 
Summary: Body Language
Review: Though he assembles a plot with a lot of possibilites, James Hall's downfall in Body language comes in the area of character development. Put simply, the author tries too hard in creating these characters, all of whom are indescribably complex. There is no way to get a handle on anybody. If he would have backed off a little bit, the characters would have become more believable. The finale was solid, but maybe because I was so glad to get there.
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