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Rico Velasquez is a hugely talented baseball player but a lousy human being, so it's not much of a surprise when he doesn't survive until the end of GLITTER OF DIAMONDS. The murder doesn't occur until some way past page 100 but it's obvious who’s for the chop – and naturally lots of people, including Toronto Matrix team-mates, fans and hangers-on could have bumped off Rico. Lindquist has provided a large cast, and you'll thank her for the cast list at the beginning, although it’s not exhaustive. The police don't appear until the murder happens either, and one of the book's weaknesses is their lack of depth. They're very promising – the older, seen-it-all white male cop, and the keen young black woman. But he's under-drawn and she's the cliché – the independent career woman with the very tiresome family who want her married off and to know every detail of her working life. Ginny Lovejoy, the female journalist, is scarcely better – she got the job on the basis of a colleague being hungover. Of course she looks sweet and innocent, but we're expected to accept that she's good at her job despite evidence to the contrary. Any reporter who abandons her post during a match for no good reason, and then expects a colleague from another paper to bale her out with what's happened shouldn't be doing the job (and maybe Lindquist would like to research a little better how sports journalists function!) Come to think of it, none of the female characters are sympathetic (there's a slobbish radio shock-jock and a rich girl with a fixation on Marilyn Monroe), although I suspect Lindquist does want us to like Jacquie Ryan (the cop) and Ginny. The former needs to grow a backbone and the latter stop behaving like an airhead. The assumption seems to be that no woman can be happy unless she's married. Yawn. GLITTER OF DIAMONDS is a pleasant enough read with a solid central premise and some promising characters, but it would benefit from a strong edit. It's at least 75 pages too long, and much of that padding is over-explaining or rather banal dialogue. The ending drags and it's all too neatly tied up. And there's no tension at all because there are too many people and too much criss-crossing of the action. It's never clear whether the police or Ginny are supposed to be the focus. I'm not sure Lindquist knows herself. In the end it made me long for Alison Gordon to come back with her excellent Kate Henry series where the plotting is crisp and the main character tough, professional and likeable.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, June 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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