InSuspects, Thomas Berger invites us into the most American of towns: a manicured hamlet thats not quite as safe as it once was but that is still inhabited by good, hard workers, friendly neighbors, and, of course, dysfunctional families.
Amazon.com Review
Anyone familiar with Thomas Berger knows he has turned out some strange work. Suspects, centered around the gruesome slaying of a mother and daughter, is no exception. The main suspect in their murders has a feeble-minded half brother who is caught trying to steal a rubber duck from a convenience store, an incident that leads to the shooting death of a policeman and the arrest of an 11-year-old boy whose cousin was involved. Meanwhile, the half brother is hauled away by the cops from his sister-in-law's funeral because he is in possession of a handgun given to him by the female truck driver who hired him. The press is having a ball with the whole affair and the cops lose more evidence than the LAPD ever had. Suspects is a riotous, rollicking novel of insane proportions that leaves you believing it may have really happened.
From Publishers Weekly
Berger's 20th novel suffers from a surfeit of pages and a lack of story. There is probably enough material in this fairly straightforward murder mystery to satisfy the demands of a novella; but for a standard 256-page novel, the mystery, the characters and their histories are not nearly complex enough to sustain the narrative. To fill out the page count, far too many diluting diversions, descriptions and side stories have been introduced. The resulting concoction?described as a meditation on "friendship, family loyalty, and the American dream"?is little more than a collection of run-of-the-mill human interest stories pasted onto what could have been a fine, workmanlike whodunit set in a typical American town. In the first two-thirds of the narrative, Berger calls the motives and actions of a large portion of his dramatis personae into question; but, because of his narrative perambulations, there is very little suspense or sense of urgency. In a novel more about police than about suspects, Berger (Robert Crews, 1994, etc.) gets caught up in the inner lives of a rather large cast of cameo characters and in arguments about the good old days before notions of individual rights and accountability came along and made life difficult for cops. Too caught up, as it happens, to be able to divert his readers from the fact that his red herring is far too red to escape notice.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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