Customer Reviews

Blood of Paradise (Mortalis)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As I got into Blood of Paradise I thought this is a great story Corbett has got going here, but it's going to be tough to hold it together because he takes on so much. But he pulled it off and it's a great read. What starts with the mystery of desire and attraction quickly descends into a world of moral ambiguity and one where both personal code and the politics of El Salvador and of America are called into question. But not in a way that runs the story aground. I kept going back to this novel every night.

Corbett sets his novel in present day El Salvador. The crimes are committed by the hired guns of an oligarchy hoping to silence the brave souls who expose the rape of that nation's economic and environmental resources. There is plenty of human drama, betrayal and brutality. Corbett makes a powerful tale all the more shocking by weaving in the real-life story of the recent assassination of Jose Gilberto Soto, an American citizen and Teamster leader who returned to his native country in an effort to link up with union leaders there. Just weeks after Soto's murder, I traveled to San Salvador along with a group of religious and human rights leaders in a futile attempt to prod Salvadoran officials to find his assassins. I can attest that Corbett captures the frustration, the repression and terror that confronts those who battle for justice and oppose a brutally corrupt regime propped up by our own government.

Jude McMannus works in El Salvador as an executive protection specialist assigned to work with an American hydrologist. He moved from Chicago, haunted by his distant past. As a teenager, he watched his family fall apart after his father, who was a Chicago cop, was arrested in a huge corruption scandal. The result of the arrest was his parents' divorce and his father's death under very suspicious circumstances. Shortly after that, Jude decided to join the army and start a new life.

However, the past did not want to be forgotten that easily and one of his father's old cop friends appears in El Salvador. Bill Malvaiso had fled Chicago to avoid being arrested. He contacted Jude to ask a favor. Since he is unable to go back to the U.S. he needs Jude's help. He asks him to go back to Chicago and bring Jude's dad's and Bill's mutual friend, Strock, to El Salvador. Jude agrees to help; however he is full of uncertainty. Soon he finds himself involved in a big corruption plot where he must put his life at risk to protect values that he strongly believes in.

Blood of Paradise is a skillfully written and very detailed political thriller. It gives the reader a wide range of characters that all have a crucial role in the plot. The book has many layers. In addition to the political background, it also has a romantic thread which makes it a little bit less dark and pessimistic. The picture of El Salvador during the times of turmoil and extreme chaos, where corruption rules and citizens face starvation, prostitution and everyday death, is very realistic and extremely detailed. It's not hard to put yourself in the characters' shoes and find yourself faced with crucial decisions.

I would recommend the novel to all readers who like darker and more complicated books. Blood of Paradise is definitely not a book one reads to relax after a hard day of work.

Armchair Interviews says: Readers who like heavier reading will undoubtedly enjoy Blood of Paradise.

Having worked with refugees from the El Salvadoran conflict and frequent visits to friends, contacts and acquaintences there during decades leads me to suggest this book as a fair rendering, in the form of a novel, of the present tragic situation of violence and corruption there. Death squads operate openly and the old forces that provoked the uprising in the 1980's are back in place. The role of US interests comes under close scrutiny.

Corbett's work is a thriller-reader's dream: flawed heros, colorful troubled settings, and sociopathic villians set in paradise.

Look, he's going to drag you in and take you for the ride. The whole ride. This isn't a series of easy thrills that make every obvious plot twist in order to increase tension while all along the characters are perfectly relaxed despite their broken limbs. No. When these characters are hurt, you feel it. When they do drugs, you see the effects, good and bad.
The characters makes mistakes, anguish over them and sometimes overcome them. Sometimes they don't. Still it's got all the action you expect when you pick up a thriller. This book is wonderfully composed, brilliantly clear, believable, and prods you right in the politics.

This book offers great characterization and drama. The characters seem to be fully developed people even if we don't see all of their sides. The author does a good job of giving us glimpses that make them real. Their evil is mitigated and their quests for purity are usually tainted by the world that surrounds them.

The book is intriguing once it gets rolling and will keep you entertained. It feels like a well developed modern rendition of a Greek tragedy. This is a good thing, since that was the aim. The characters end up acting in ways that seem more ordained by fate than free will. Yet, it doesn't feel forced. It just feels like the way the world should operate in this version of El Salvador.

The big thing that holds this book back is the concentration on El Salvador. There are times when the characters spend too much time making political speeches. At times it hinders the flow of the narrative. To an extent it also damages the believability of the relationship between the protagonist and his romantic interest. It makes their relationship seem more like a plot device than an honest extension of their circumstances or personalities.

I would recommend the book to people than want a more cerebral action story. I wouldn't recommend it to people that are apathetic towards politics. The book could turn in to a slog instead of an interesting read for the less politically inclined.

For some reason, a lot of critics seem to favor books written for stupid people, and for those critics, this book falls short. For those who like fascinating background, crisp insightful writing, and deep characterization, this book is a the best entertainment you can find. I was hooked from beginning to end.

This is above all a character-driven book, and Corbett's eye for the corruption of the human soul is profound and flawless. The sociopath at the center of the book is one of the best renditions of that character type I've seen anywhere. By turns likeable, believable and intensely frightening.
I've spent time in El Salvador, and Corbett's depiction of the underside of a country in the backwash of a civil war is accurate and fascinating.

Corbett's post-script essay was highly interesting. I don't know what the Booklist and Library Journal people are griping about. Maybe they should stick with simple, shallow thrillers, which are a dime a dozen. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes intelligent, gripping novels, regardless of their genre.

The trajectory of writer David Corbett's novel writing career is pretty breathtaking. If he'd been content to write pulpish crime novels like his first effort, "The Devil's Redhead," (which is very good) he would have carved a niche, probably not unlike James Elroy's. Violent, edgy, contemporary, great dialogue, "Redhead" had it all. But his second novel, "Done on a Dime," you saw the writer stretching himself. It's an uneven read, due to plotting more than anything else. But what stands out in Corbett's sophomore effort is great character development (I'm still intrigued by the Jazz waif, Nadya, who seems like she stepped right out of a Beat novel), and an underlying moral concern for the way things happen to be. It is also the novel that introduces the force-of-evil character, Bill Malvasio (Malevolent?), who features so prominently in "Blood of Paradise."

"Blood of Paradise," will be viewed as Corbett's first major novel. It's noir, it's a thriller, but it's also literature, since it steps beyond the narrower confines of genre. You can easily liken the novel to Robert Stone's work (in particular, "Flag for Sunrise"), or Graham Greene's novels. The location of the novel surprised me - El Salvador. I was also surprised to find that things are as bad as ever down there, enough so to make a rereading of Joan Dideon's "Salvador," as something more than a look at old history.

The story itself centers on bodyguard Jude McManus, who is generally a good, but psychologically damaged young man, trying to dig himself out from under the sins of his crooked cop father by just doing his job and keeping things light. Unfortunately for him, his principal job is to protect a hydrologist who is investigating the viability of a soft drink factory and its impact of the area's water table. What spirals out from those seemingly mundane facts is a portrait of El Salvador that is rotten through and through, and a people and culture living on the edge while those in power feast away. But those in power can never have enough, and they see threats everywhere to their profit margin, and the hydrologist just might be a future project. Their main fixer is bad guy Bill Malvasio, who in a past life was a crooked cop along with Jude's father. Bill is basically a kind of devil, offering Jude hazy deals that will in some way wipe the slate clean. But also coming into the mix is Eileen Browning, a politically active anthropoligist (who is also, sexually, quite acrobatic). Browning serves as something of an angel of light, pulling Jude outside of his shell, helping him to see the suffering and corruption that are all around him. Corbett does a fine job pouring out a lot of recent history, without the speeches flattening out the characters. To integrate such strong political statements into a novel, and not sound like a preacher, is a very hard thing to do, but Corbett pulls it off seamlessly. And when action does occur, it's intense, and nasty. That said however, Browning's intriguing character, seemed to fade as the novel moved on, which is a shame, since Corbett seemed to invest a lot in her. But who knows? Maybe Eileen (and Nadya) will show up in future novels. And besides, the main card here is Malvasio and Jude. To tell more, would be to cheat the reader. Check it out.

this man can write,,,in some ways its evokes Mystic River,,,albeit in El Salvador,,,the themes (redemption, revenge) are intense, and the writing is fluid,,,