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Dan Abatangelo, a freelance photographer with other interests which are not so artistic, spends a wild few days in Las Vegas where he meets the woman of his dreams - beautiful, red-headed Shel Beaudry, a dealer in Caesar's Palace. The lives they have led should mean that they're both too cynical to believe in love at first sight, yet that's what happens. After a few perfect days, Shel discovers that it IS too good to be true after all. Abatangelo is a drug smuggler. His soul may be that of a poet, but his head belongs to a businessman. Like a romantic swashbuckling pirate he smuggles Thai marijuana across the high seas. No gangsters, no guns, no one gets hurt. Shel might be romantic, but she's also a realist, and Dan's good points far outweigh the bad. The drug business means they can exist, having each other means they can feel alive. However, the drug scene is changing, becoming less about peace and love, and more about power and hate. Dan and Shel have decided on one last big score to act as a nest egg for their future, before they ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately, they're betrayed by an underling and arrested. To protect Shel and his friends, Dan takes the fall and serves ten long years in jail. Only thoughts of Shel keep him optimistic during those years, but ten years is a long time, things change. The drugs business has become an ugly, violent war. The gangsters and guns have taken over. Shel is in her own personal prison with a man called Frank Maas. When Abatangelo gets out of jail, his one aim is to find Shel, even though it soon becomes clear that she doesn't want to be found and that his search will lead him down a road that he really doesn't want to tread. I loved this book. It's dark, bleak, violent and hopeless. But it's also the opposite of all those things. There's an overriding sense of the power of hope and the ability of love to turn petty, weak, fallible people into something better. David Corbett has written a book which incorporates great themes of revenge, retribution, despair, hope, love, futility, desparation in the lives of ordinary people in a way that is both grand and down to earth. The writing is lush and resonant, but it's also realistic and often shocking. It's not a book for the faint-hearted, with its matter of fact descriptions of the results of senseless violence. The destruction and waste is sometimes overwhelming, but the impression of something better waiting for Shel and Abatangelo is always there. A gorgeous book which filled me with several emotions at once, and whose characters stayed with me long after I'd moved on to another book.
Reviewed by Donna Moore, December 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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