The Fugitives Book Club

Rating:
Summary: An infantile waste of a tree
Review: About one of the dumbest, most pitiful attempts at a book i've ever had the misfortune to laugh my way through. If you enjoy cringing a lot, having your intelligence insulted and seeing good trees go pointlessly to waste on dreck, then this book is the one for you. Unless you prefer the previous review written, doubtless, by the author himself.

Rating:
Summary: Bibliophiles on the Run
Review: Keith Clark is a paralegal for a Santa Barbara, California, law firm, and he's in love with a pretty blond coffee shop clerk named Erika "Johnson." Keith knows that Erika has strong feelings for him, also, but she's told him that her private life is a mess, and she refuses to meet him outside the coffee shop.

But on the day after the Labor Day weekend, Keith learns all about Erika's private life, when it blows up in her face, and he inadvertently becomes involved in a nightmare of violence and murder. Erika is being pursued by a homicidal drug lord named Joseph Gordon, who pursues Erika right to the door of Keith's condominium. Gordon's men start shooting, but Keith's got a gun, too--a .44 Magnum that he'd bought many years before, after watching a Dirty Harry movie, because he'd wanted to own "the most powerful handgun in the world." Keith shoots one of Gordon's "soldiers," and Keith and Erika flee Santa Barbara in Keith's 19-year old Toyota Corolla.

Unfortunately for Keith and Erika, Gordon frames them by planting cocaine in Keith's condominium, along with the decapitated head of Erika's cousin, Ralph Carlson. Now Keith and Erika are on the run from both Gordon and the police.

Meanwhile, back in Santa Barbara, there's another pretty blond going through some hard times of her own with Gordon. Her name is Jenny Ellwood, and she's also Erika's cousin. She made the big mistake of helping Ralph Carlson blackmail Gordon, and now she's a hair's breadth away from losing her own head. Gordon is keeping her alive for the time being, but he's making her life a living hell.

Keith and Erika make their way through California, driving north toward San Francisco, to collect some running-away money from Keith's ex-wife (who ain't exactly thrilled to hear from him, either). When Keith and Erika stop to eat lunch at a restaurant in a mountain town, the police discover the car and Keith and Erika are forced to resume their journey on foot, through the rugged Sierra Nevada backcountry, and then in a series of cars they steal along the way.

Keith and Erika make it up north, only to tangle with Gordon's soldiers in a wild gun battle at the house of Keith's ex-wife. They team up with Jenny in the aftermath of the gun battle, and escape from the police in a wild, high-speed chase on a busy California freeway.

And then the action really begins.

This is a chase story and a love story, about a pair of booklovers on the run. It's got gunfights, it's got humor and it's got sex, but Keith and Erika aren't just action heroes and sex objects--they're thinkers, too. And they've got some interesting and frank things to say about sex, race, and society during their travels through California. And although you may not agree with with everything they say, you'll find yourself thinking about it for a long time after you've reached the book's HAPPY ENDING, and put this book back on the shelf.