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SHOT by Jenny Siler Henry Holt, September 2002 239 pages $24.00 ISBN: 0805072039 Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jenny Siler must have something on someone at Henry Holt. Very few writers of crime fiction today can write stand-alone after stand-alone. Series are, after all, the thing. Lisa Scottoline strikes me as an author who does it, but her characters do tend to interweave after a while. And they are all female lawyers in Philly.

Siler's third book is nothing like her second (which was nothing like her first). I wanted to read it simply because it was by Jenny Siler who impressed me very much with Easy Money

Thrillers rely on the action of the plot and leave out much of what I read mystery fiction for - character. And while thrillers rely on a fast pace to move them along - by definition, almost, they must - readers get carried away right to the end (I did, I admit it) and then, wow, phew! It's over. And then I start seeing the holes in the plot and the weaknesses. I don't see these as often in more non-thriller, traditional hard-boiled mysteries, and no, I don't know why.

This is not to say that Shot is a bad book. Far from it, it has many of the signs of talent that Siler brought to Easy Money and Iced; smart characters who tend to cope when they have to, very well-drawn and well-defined places (including my home of Seattle - there's not a lot of it here, but she got things right). But when it was over, I felt cheated.

I'm not big on reading about conspiracies, however; part of that is that I don't believe in many of them and part of that is the fear that there are evil people planning to do evil things and I don't wanna know, okay?

Lucy Greene's husband Carl is killed in Washington state in a car accident. The Greenes are wealthy; he worked for a biotech firm, and they had enough money that she didn't work. She did paint, and while it was more than a hobby, it's apparently she never came to terms with the wealth she lived with, as she grew up pretty needy in small-town Colorado.

Lucy's dealing with this death very badly and with reason. The Greenes had a baby who was born with serious birth defects and did not live. She is alone except for her brother Chick, who is ill, with a range of symptoms that developed after he returned from the Gulf War.

Those are very bare outlines of the story. There are lots of people involved; co-workers and the owners of Bioflux, where Carl worked, an ex-con named Darcy (the most intriguing character in this story) who's being blackmailed, essentially, to do illegal things for the warden where she was held and her sister is now serving time, an assassin, and many folks who aren't what they seem.

Carl's death is not what it seems either. Soon after he's buried, the house is broken into; then his coworkers come and take his computer and file (and Lucy, who is extremely depressed, doesn't seem to notice they broke in to do so and have no release forms, permissions or receipts to offer). Lucy's old boyfriend, Kevin, is on hand too; it seems Carl called him right before he died to say he had a story for him. Kevin could use a story; he was fired from his MSNBC job for faking part of a story.

So you have all these people and mysterious doings and break-ins and the complications of biotech research and how you test drugs, especially when biological warfare is illegal. None of it rang especially true to me. And when the book was over I had many questions that I didn't think had been answered well. How exactly did the bad guys constantly know where the good guys were? This was obvious a humongous conspiracy, and we never see it. Why did Krill (oh, come now, that name) seem so very evil and yet so one-dimensional? Why, in fact, could I never get to any dimensions of the characters? It's that thriller thing again; everyone had motivation for their actions, but I didn't warm to any of them, didn't really worry about any of them, felt none of them was actually thinking too clearly either.

Finally, the big ending of a thriller is usually a whammy and with this book, it was a fizzle. I felt like this was another example of "editor calls writer and says 'I need the manuscript and I need it now' syndrome. Everything ends, the evil stops, the bad guys are caught, sure, that's how most mystery and crime novels end. But it wasn't convincing, it went way too easily, way too fast and felt like a hurry-up job.