by James W. Hall
Page-turner of the week
The Florida crime novel, whose characters are bent on wacky schemes, their brains fried by the sun and land's-end desperation, is a genre unto itself. Think of authors Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. Think too of James W. Hall, whose zany new thriller Body Language features crime-scene photographer Alexandra Rafferty. Raped when she was 11 and still weighed down with guilt, Alex gets embroiled in a series of murders in which the bodies of women are pretzeled into weird positions. Meanwhile, without her knowing it, her lame-brained husband, Stan, is planning an armored car robbery. Matters get wildly, deliciously out of hand when Stan brings off the heist, attracting a whole caravan of crazies who end up chasing Stan and Alex to Seaside, the planned community familiar to many from The Truman Show. In his ninth novel ex-poet Hall shows himself to be an ingenious plotter and anything but a plodder with language. And in Alex he has created a character to care about. (St. Martin's, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Wild and woolly times on the Sunshine coast
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