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THE SMOKE ROOM
by Earl Emerson
Ballantine, May 2005
320 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0345462904


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

What do you do when you reckon the hero of a book is too stupid to live? That was the problem I encountered with Earl Emerson's THE SMOKE ROOM.

At the outset you should know that books featuring firefighters are my guilty pleasure -- I'd read Pat O'Keeffe's shopping list, and I snaffle new books by Suzanne Chazin, even if her heroine isn't out fighting fires every day. So I'd been looking forward to hooking up with Emerson.

We are warned constantly that Jason Gum, hero of THE SMOKE ROOM, isn't playing with a full deck. So we shouldn't be too surprised when he lands himself in trouble by bonking a glamorous older woman in the depths of the fire station when he should be out on a shout. And when he hides some stolen bonds in her garage . . . Oh purleese!

The book is a psychological thriller, complete with some dead bodies along the way, but much of the suspense is hung on the thinnish peg of whether Jason will shop his partners in crime Tronstad and Johnson. And his naivete, stupidity, call it what you will, becomes problematic as Gum gets himself deeper into the mire. Like those gangsters in Monty Python, he loves his cancer-stricken mother, but otherwise he's a pain in the proverbial.

There are some good scenes between the three as rookie firefighter Jason starts to wonder if the other two are the reliable colleagues they claim to be. And there are some entertaining, if underdeveloped, cameos of other firefighters which, I couldn't help wagering, were based on people Emerson has met in the course of his job

Aside from the 'you mistake me for someone who gives a damn' factor over the hero, I was also left looking blank at the appearance of a bizarre retired FBI agent. Erm, why? And would Tronstad really be that incompetent a firefighter? I found it hard to believe that he wouldn't have been weeded out.

The book does boast one of the best first paragraphs in crime fiction (nearly as good as Christopher Brookmyre's turd on the windowsill in the opening chapter of QUITE UGLY ONE MORNING) where a pig falls through a house roof. And Emerson can tell a tale, even if you have the lingering suspicion that the book is mostly made up of his war stories, so to speak. The ending, incidentally, is hideously sanctimonious and overall THE SMOKE ROOM is most disappointing.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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