Max R. Tomlinson

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Who can you trust in a country haunted by its past?

On the hunt for an abducted Indian beggar girl, Peruvian National Police officer Nina Flores is determined to track down the suspected kidnapper, a man who resembles what the locals call pishtacos: tall, pale ghosts who steal children. In spite of being jumped by a mysterious attacker, and the murder of a woman who gets too close to the truth, Nina is blocked at every turn by her superiors. Then she show more discovers links to a second case reaching back twenty years to the country’s dirty war. Defying the powers that be, Nina forms a shaky alliance with a member of a brutal drug cartel and heads deep into the Amazon jungle. She will bring the lost one home, or die trying.

My Review: My goodness. This is another case of a thriller that thrills, but leaves some nagging questions in the reader's mind. None are fatal to the story. All are significant enough that I feel I must mention them.

I very very much enjoy the Peruvian setting. I love Ninasisa's complete and understated conviction that she can handle any-goddam-thing that Peru, the USA, the narcotraficantes, can dream up to throw at her. The view of the politics of The New Peru is, I am convinced, accurate: Good people trying to make amends and start anew, bad people trying to make a buck and get a piece of the pie, and world leaders silently tolerating what would, in their own countries, cause revolution and outrage.

Weltanschauung = Weltschmerz, I suppose. Frantz Fanon needs to reincarnate in Peru.

Nina, as she is referred to most of the time, is a poor girl from a poor family, who made it into a darn good job because her narco uncle feels bad about her orphanhood and subsidized a US university education for her. He would have preferred that she stay there. She came home and became a Tourist Police officer...an interface between Peru's lawlessness and tourists' expectations of a civilized experience.

Now she's embroiled in a chase, thinking that one of the street kids she looks out for as a form of paying it forward is being pedophilically used after being snatched off the street during Easter Week chaos by an American tourist.

The chase is remarkably slow. Many days go by, a week or more before Nina can get close to the perp. Any police department will tell you that this is a *terrible* sign, no search, no discovery, no demand for ransom within 48 hours maximum usually means it's a recovery mission and not a rescue. Tomlinson makes sure we experience Nina's frustration, which becomes problematic because it's all we experience. There is nothing that impels us to invest in the lost child, since her older sister is the character we see more of and we don't see all that much of her. Common thriller techniques, like dates and times as chapter headings, or short fast chapters, aren't employed here. It leaves out a kind of urgency that can only help readers see how much Nina cares, that she's investing so much time.

Nina's new crush object, after the first book soured her relationship with an earlier paramour, is terribly convenient and quite promising. He is drawn with care to show what about him attracts and then interests a wary, heartsick woman of early middle age. Because he is so sketchily filled in, I can only be morally certain that he's younger than she is. That's certainly not unheard of, and it's clear that Nina possesses the attributes that interest straight men, but it does raise a question I wondered about in the first book: She's in early middle age, at 36, and no one...not one soul...says anything about her being an old maid or a lesbian or boo-turkey about it. In Peru. A Catholic patriarchy.

That ain't bloody likely, more especially since she takes such an interest in the sex workers and children of Cuzco. SOMEone would make a jibe about her getting the kids she never had, looking for a girlfriend among the whores, etc etc etc. Men are like that, and so are some of the cattier women that Nina runs up against.

And the American villains of the piece? Well, sketched in adequately to show why they're villains and what damage they've caused and endured. The ending, however, doesn't hang together where they are concerned, and the final chase scenes lack a sense of more than theatrical stakes because of it.

And finally, a niggle. Something that gets under my saddle and rubs a blister on my hide. PICK A CONVENTION. Italicize Spanish and Quechua, Spanish or Quechua, but not sometimes and then not. Also, choose a single spelling convention, either American (Cuzco) or Peruvian (Cusco). Different between books. That isn't good. Italicize Spanish AND Quechua, or just Quechua (which I'd recommend, since in Peru it's still a second language and that reinforces the Peruvianness of the books). And spellcheck is NOT your friend in Spanish. Barracho doesn't mean anything that I know of.

These are issues that affect fussbudgets like me, though, and only because I'm engrossed in the story and don't want to notice extraneous stuff like that. I like Nina, I like Cuzco, I like where it seems we're headed, and for the price I can't imagine a better deal.


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Colleen Hayes is an ex-con. She spent ten years in prison for killing her ex-husband when she learned he was abusing their eight-year-old daughter. Now, she's out of prison and looking to rebuild her life. She's currently working as a security guard in an abandoned paint factory and trying to get her license as a private investigator.

A retired police officer steers her to Edward Copeland. The retired industrialist wants someone to look into the cold case death of his daughter Margaret before show more he dies of lung cancer. She sympathizes with him because she has lost contact with her daughter who has joined a religious cult and wants no contact with her.

Once she begins looking into the case, she finds what looks like a coverup by the San Francisco police force. Reports go missing or she has to jump through time-consuming hoops for a chance to see them. She also finds that the people who were investigating the case when it occurred eleven years earlier are strangely unavailable to talk to her. The detective who was the lead investigator retired soon after the case. The coroner has retired and moved away. The newspaperman who wrote a number of articles about the case won't return her calls.

Colleen tracks down the lead detective but he's found dead before he can share any information with her. She also finds that she is being followed by someone who isn't reluctant to trying to burn her out at the paint factory.

I liked Colleen who wasn't going to drop the case even if her client wants her to stop. I liked all the period details that show that this story is set in 1978. I remember the bell bottoms and jumpsuits. I remember when everyone smoked cool cigarettes like Virginia Slims or macho cigarettes like Marlboros. Colleen even drives a cool car and teases her retired police consultant for his Pinto.

This is the first book in a new mystery series. I look forward to reading more of Colleen's adventures. show less

Soldiers kill Nina’s father in cold blood, and as a result her brother Miguel joins up with the re-emerging Shining Path and their pastor is thrown in jail for trying to hold the soldiers accountable. Years later, the pastor—out of jail—comes to see Nina, informing her he’s learned that Miguel is still alive. When the pastor shortly goes missing, she drops everything to find him and Miguel in the deep wilds of Peru. Action-packed, well-written, we learn a lot about the country, its show more corrupt soldiers and the equally corrupt Shining Path—relying on Americans’ addiction to cocaine to fund their revolution. Nina is a tough cookie and she will be tested accordingly. This is the first of two books and when I get time I’d like to read it, too. This one was lengthy though so I’ll have to plan ahead if book 2 is about the same length. The books appear to be self-published, often a pejorative. At least with this book he is an excellent author with a complex plot that is well-told. show less

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1987, the dirty war that will last twelve years and kill thirty thousand Peruvians finally reaches up through the Andean cloud forest for Nina and her family. Nina’s father is shot by soldiers, her mother raped, and her brother lost to the shadowy ranks of Shining Path guerrillas. And when Agustín Malqui, the village pastor, files a legal complaint against the military, it’s no surprise when he disappears in the middle of the night—just show more another casualty of the military regime.

Twenty-odd years later, Nina, now an officer in Cuzco’s tourist police, comes across a familiar name on the police printer that she scans daily for any trace of her long-lost brother. Agustín Malqui is alive. After spending years in a political prison, the broken pastor has been wandering the country, saving souls and drowning his demons in pisco. Nina tracks him down, only to lose him yet again in a police sweep of political malcontents. But before Malqui disappears, he tells her a drunken tale she can scarcely believe: that her brother Miguel is still alive.

Despite warnings and threats from her chief and the pleadings of her lover, an officer in Peru’s anti-terrorist branch, Nina presses on to find Malqui. Her search takes her through Peru’s underworld, from remote villages high in the Andes to the steaming jungle haunts of the narcotraficantes, and ultimately to a secret political prison in the altiplano, where she learns the truth about Malqui and her own vanished brother.

My Review: I've been to Cuzco twice, and Peru three times, in my life. I very much like it there, and I am a big fan of the Andean people's surviving culture. I came to the book ready to love it.

I liked it a whole lot.

There are the accustomed ebook-original glitches, typos and oddly placed punctuation marks and continuity errors. I don't want to dwell on them, but one big one is the last-name change of a major character between books one and two. I sigh, and remove one star.

Ninasisa is a really sympathetic character to build a series of thrillers on, and full marks to Mr. Tomlinson for making her believably damaged by her and her country's fraught past. Nina, as she is known in most of the book, has sustained losses that would wreck a lesser person's entire life. Nina isn't rising above her beginnings, she's building her future on making the beginnings part of it. She never hides or is shamed by her mountain-Indian origins, despite the fact that she's dating a Spaniard (a white Peruvian) from Cuzco's upper classes.

She never forgets that her roots are down low, despite a US university education and a job with the Tourist Police. She could credibly downplay the past, but chooses not to, and that provides a lot of conflict between herself and the class- and race-conscious Peruvian culture. Reading her interactions with the gigantic lower-class majority of Cuzco, the ancient Inca and modern Andean capital, rang very true to me. (My contact with same having been an Andean tour guide who was at pains to inform his American guests of the true nature of poverty.)

I removed one more half-star for the first-time novelist errors of characterization, such as the all-villain-all-the-time bad guys, and the overwhelming goodness of all the womenfolk. It's not tragic, but it informs the ending of the book, which...well...it was certainly dramatic and very well set-up by the rest of the book, but was...pat. Expected. Predictable, if excitingly written.

Make no mistake, this first novel of a series is a very worthwhile way to wile the hours away. If you've never been to Peru, you'll feel like you have after reading this. If you have been to Peru, you'll feel that little pleased jolt when Tomlinson mentions a place you've visited. It's a good read.

Not quite excellent. Not perfect. A good, solid read, delivers on its promise of action, and manages a vivid sense of place. At $2.99 for the Kindle version, it's worth that and more.


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