|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
What a clean, organized, poignant first novel! Mitchell memorably sets the scene in the desert and along the border without giving us a travelogue, and he lets us know Brink from the inside as life happens to him. One night east of Nogales, Border Patrol Agent Brinker was shot in the shoulder and nearly died, maybe with the complicity of a fellow agent. At the urging of his best friend since childhood, Tucson policeman Al Avila, and the love of his life, TV reporter Dolores Gonzalez, Brink left the coyotes, tunnels, and human misery of the border for a quieter life as a licensed private investigator in Tucson. Brink was content with insurance work, following those who supposedly can't walk to make sure they aren't developing a powerful golf game, and then car dealer king Mo Crain begged him to find out who shot his wife in the face in broad daylight in a shopping mall parking lot. Sandra Crain was a nurse who married rich but continued as the best kind of nurse, an angel of mercy who put her time as well as her money into caring for abused children, aged mallwalkers, and every other category of the needy. The police were unable to turn up any secret vice or old enemy that could lead to murder, and neither could Brink. Yet something he stirred up in Vancouver or Mexico or Manhattan is getting him followed, threatened, and beaten up. Links to his old life in la migra start showing. The child he illicitly rescued from a filthy border tunnel is at risk, his girlfriend is menaced, and Brink himself, well-meaning and sometimes heroic but no comic book superhero, finds himself vulnerable to both the law and the lawless. The conclusion is satisfying to the reader if not to the protagonist, and this polished first effort is, I'm glad to report, the first in a series.
Reviewed by Joy Matkowski, July 2003
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
|
