Victims: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Stereotypes
Review: I'm not a regular reader of murder mysteries, so this review must be evaluated within that context. I picked up this novel because the plot appeared to be based on the Kitty Genovese case. As I was growing up, this case was often used to indicate urban lack of humanity. A fairly large group of urban dwellers ignored the pleas for help as a young woman was stabbed repeatedly and left to die.

The plot turns are skillfully managed, and the vast drug, murder, cover-up, and women-bashing (literally) conspiracies are not as fantastical as the review listed with this title in Amazon implies. We now know that cover-ups occur on a massive and international scale.

The characters are less clearly defined. The point of view changes erratically, beginning with that of the murdered woman as she is attacked, then moving between the point of view of a washed-out former Pulitzer prize winner who needs $100,000 to buy out one of his former wives on their co-owned beach house and thus needs a story, and that of a Latina policewoman who is (of course) shatteringly beautiful, brilliant, and ethical, as well as suavely sexual. We briefly enter the mind of the murdered woman's firefighter husband, but then never encounter him again, and oddly, throughout the novel, IDs of bodies occur in the most unlikely manner (he identifies her as she lies soaked in blood in the street, and he picks her up in his arms and says, "Oh Annie, what did they do to you?")

What ultimately disturbed me was the sub-text. The conspiracy plot was fine; what wasn't fine was that the Jewish characters in the book were schmucks, out to make a buck or to make themselves more than they were--and certainly lacking ethics. The Latina detective, Miranda, is appealing, and yet when her own life is being snuffed out by a skillful international kingpin of drugs and politics, she reflects on her gratitude to the nuns. Stein, the (Jewish) writer, lacks ethics. Miranda, the Catholic, rises above them all. The medical technicality on which Stein's lack of values rests seems thin, at best. Virtually everyone in the novel is unlikeable, even the one true hero, a child in the wheelchair with an (of course) genius IQ but no muscular control due to "MS and other complications."