When the Wind Blows

Rating:
Summary: A clever and well-written tale of mangled identity
Review: As a writer myself, I'm acutely aware of the difficulty of weaving a complex story in such a fashion that all the disparate elements hang together logically while the reader's interest is continually engaged. Many writers detour around this obstacle by churning out simplistic plots and dressing them up in irrelevant fluff so as to disguise the paucity of substantive ideas. To make matters worse, many present-day editors applaud the trend, assuming that the greatest revenue accrues from sales to readers whose attention span is limited to time spent hanging from a subway strap.

Fortunately, neither Zachary Alan Fox nor his editor seem to have made any such compromises in bringing us When the Wind Blows, and they don't assume that their potential readership is composed of bored clerical workers looking to kill time. So if you like your thrillers intricate and dense, and appreciate the virtues of patient exposition prior to the fireworks, you'll probably like this book as much as I did.

The story opens with an incident whose theme is universal in its evocation of disorientation: widower Mark Ritter discovers that he was adopted and the identity and lineage he has taken for granted all his life is a sham. Together with his young daughter, he sets out on an odyssey of personal discovery but almost immediately runs into an obstacle course of skepticism, suspicion and deliberate deception. At times it seems the relentless pursuit of his past is almost as much an angry rebellion against the stonewalling he encounters as it is a primal drive to definitively determine the circumstances surrounding his origins.

To say more than that would ruin the fun. Fox deftly throws red herrings at us with the skill of a stage magician but never strains credulity or gratuitously leads us down wrong paths. At every turn, there's a likelihood our interim guesses will turn out to be wrong, but in every case, the information that led us astray is relevant in another context. So we never feel cheated as we do in works of lesser craft. And all the while, we're in complete sympathy with Ritter's escalating anxiety and frustration, especially since the presence of his young daughter seems to be engendering more disquiet among his potential sources of information than his own interminable questions. Speaking of disquiet, pedophilia is a central thread running through the tale, but thankfully this subject is exploited only as a literary vehicle and there is nothing graphically prurient in its presentation.

As he did in his previous novel, All Fall Down (an interesting title in that it's the same as a novel of my own), Fox showed us an enviable knack for sustaining breath-catching suspense over an amazingly large number of concluding pages, a skill he shares only with the likes of Nelson DeMille. That ability is in dazzling view in When the Wind Blows, as events come to a deadly head on a deserted ski slope in the off-season. But rather than degrade into a standard chase bearing little relevance to what went on before, this ending serves not only as a visceral tour-de-force but a satisfying conclusion that crisply ties up all the plot elements.

In reading other comments here about When the Wind Blows, I wonder if some of these reviewers read the same book I did, or perhaps got it mixed up with a different book because, as with his previous novel, Fox once again finds himself sharing a title with another author. That unfortunate coincidence would be a shame if it kept readers from experiencing this adroitly presented story.

Rating:
Summary: Faulty, but ...
Review: I agree with many of the previous reviews of WHEN THE WIND BLOWS--the book has flaws. For one thing, most of the members of the police force in the little town of Harmony were really stereotyped, like the typical southern cops in a TV melodrama. Why a town that totally relies on its tourist trade for survival would have a bunch of thugs as its law enforcers stretches the credibility factor. The cops were a lot of fun to dislike, but would have been more believable had at least a couple of the members of the force been more sincere in carrying out their duties as public servants.

Events fall into place too fast and too easily. Mark Ritter goes from being a man bereaving his mother's death to finding out secrets buried and hidden from his past within the time span of a few days. It's like the town of Harmony had been in limbo for 30 years until he showed up to set them in motion.

One of the really annoying factors in this novel was the author's problem in trying to decide what to do with Ritter's 10-year-old daughter while the man was hunting down clues to his past. In most scenes, the child was in the way of the story. The common device the author used to remind us of the girl's presence was to have her complaining for ice cream, whining to go horseback riding, etc. This, in reality, is what most children would do to get some attention after being subjected to hours of listening to adults talk about topics often too mature for a 10-year-old's ears. But her presence became annoying when I wanted to see the plot advance and then have to stop for an ice cream break for the child. To solve this technical problem, the author should have found a logical way to keep the girl from appearing in just about every scene, i.e., creating a nice motherly character to baby-sit her (there HAD to be someone without an evil thought even in Harmony). Instead, her father left her with virtual strangers or let her wander off by herself, even after he discovered the child's life had been threatened.

And yes, the ending was too long and cumbersome, finally all tied up in ribbon like a Christmas package.

Despite its weaknesses and inconsistencies, I had a great time reading this novel.. Mr. Fox has a knack with suspense that, at two o'clock in the morning, kept me saying, "One more chapter and then I'll go to sleep." Needless to say, I read the book in two days. And that's what a suspense novel should be. Right?

Rating:
Summary: I wish I'd read these reviews before reading the book....
Review: I found the actions of the characters in this book totally unbelievable to the point of being annoying. This really got in the way of what could have been an enjoyable book. The corker for me was when Mark and his daughter visited one of the shops in town and he let her wander around the store on her own... after noticing that the town pedophile was also there. Come on, what parent would do that? Just the fact that this man kept ignoring his child through the entire story turned me off.