Customer Reviews

Body of David Hayes

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

'The Body of David Hayes' is the latest installment in the drama that centers around Lieutenant Lou Boldt, family, and friends. Ridley Pearson's series has, in the past, focused on Lou Boldt, psychologist Daphne Matthews, and detective, now sargeant, John Lamoia as they used high tech forensic science, psychology, and a bit of good old fashioned detective work to track down kidnappers, killers, and rapers. Along the way, Pearson has gone into great depth about the home lives concerning the characters.

Daphne and John have settled into a live in relationship. This came about in the previous novel, which featured Matthews. Consequently, these two figures, while always prominent in past novels, are really no more than side characters in 'The Body of David Hayes.' John gets a fair amount of attention, but Matthews only really appears in about a dozen pages.

The attention of this novel is squarely on Lou Boldt and his wife Liz. The novel reaches back into the earlier installments of the series, and a past lover of Liz's is parolled after serving several years on his sentence for embezelling millions from the bank Liz worked out. Suddenly, Liz finds her entire world, including her career and marriage, in peril as the affair is threatened to be exposed.

While the Boldt's focus on this disruption on their lives, Lou sets out to piece together what exactly is happening. An old friend appears to have gone maverick in an attempt to close the old embezzlement case. The prosecuting attorney suddenly doesn't look so good either. David Hayes is on the loose, and what he is up to is an enigma. To top it all off, the Russian mafia enters the scene. Suddenly, who is an ally and who is an enemy is not quite so clear. Crime scenes are no longer clear, and cast suspicion on many characters.

'The Body of David Hayes' continues Pearson's string of well written novels. His writing, which was always strong, has grown and he is no longer just adept at writing a suspenseful thriller, but has captured the ability to add color to everyday scenes. The turmoil between Lou and Liz is thick and suffocating.

The only down point is that while Pearson kept the readers in suspense as to who exactly the 'bad guy' is, it almost becomes to confusing. Frequently, Liz or Lou would make some sort of discovery which would appear to be profound, but didn't seem to enlighten the reader much. This wouldn't be a problem if the story would then evolve from that point as if the reader had kept up. This doesn't happen a great deal, but enough to be distracting at points.

All in all, its a good novel. Once I started, I couldn't put it down. I recommend it to any fan of Pearson's work or the Boldt series, and any fan of police or crime fiction in general. Some knowledge of previous novels in the series would help, but it is not essential to understanding this novel. Pearson does a good job of summing up the back story so that the new reader is informed without it becoming cumbersome.

Pearson likes to take technology or science and fashion a plot around cutting edge discoveries. This time the science is old,and the ultimate solution is unexplained and leaves the reader unsatisfied. The relationship between Boldt and his wife, with all they have been through, just doesn't feel right in this one. He's done better.

Ridley Pearson does a masterful job of leading us into the lives of Liz and Lou Boldt as the bomb of David Hayes release, and Liz's long-ago infidelity, drops on their heads. Only if they work together can they hope to escape the fall out. From personal to professional crisis, both Boldts are stretched to their physical and emotional limits. This is nail-biting tension at it's best. Pearson's intricate plotting of smart moves and countermoves will keep you up all night. You don't want to miss this one!

Ridley Pearson is one of the most intellectual and cerebral detective novelists around, at least among those who are popular. He even held the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford University, a decade and a half ago. He started his career writing suspense fiction, but gradually settled into a series of police procedurals whose main characters, Seattle Police Sergeant (now Lieutenant) Lou Boldt, and his sometime partner, psychologist/detective Daphne Matthews. The current book is the ninth in that series. The series is good, and so is this book, but one warning to start things off: you shouldn't read this book first. There's too much going on here that plays off events in previous books, so start with one of the others, preferably Undercurrents, which was the first.

In this book, the focus is much more on Boldt and his wife Liz than on Daphne Matthews. Liz works at a bank, where she has a place of considerable responsibility. Some years before she had an affair with a co-worker, which almost destroyed her marriage. It turns out that the co-worker in question was later arrested for embezzlement, and went to prison for six years. He'd embezzled $17 million, but no one ever stepped forward to claim that they'd lost the money. This raised eyebrows, and authorities were further fascinated in that the money was never found, either. The embezzler (and adulterer) somehow hid the money and it hasn't ever been found.

Now the embezzler (the David Hayes of the title) is out of prison, and various people are competitively trying to watch him and recover (or perhaps steal) the money. Among them are Boldt himself, another cop who's something of a former friend, and a rogue Russian general who's come to America and become a mobster or businessman, depending on your point of view.

This is a good entry in the Boldt/Matthews series, complete with crazy antics by some of the secondary characters, and interesting plot twists and atmosphere. I enjoyed it, and would recommend the book.

Having read all of Ridley Pearson's books and thoroughly enjoyed every one, I'm wondering if he really wrote The Body of David Hayes. It just does not measure up to his previous novels. Other reviewers have pointed out the timeline discrepancy, and I could not get "connected" with the characters as I have in the past. And to think, this is the first Pearson novel I've purchased in hardback!

Ridley Pearson is an author that I've come to eagerly await each new release with great anticipation. The Body of David Hayes was such a let down. The past several books have led up to a very interesting relationship between LaMoia and Daphne. They were hardly referred to in this book at all and it was as tho they were cardboard characters when reference was made to their relationship. The book could have been an opportunity for Lou and Liz Boldt to strengthen and grow within their relationship while letting the reader gain a greater understanding and appreciation of their characters. Instead, Lou and Liz are just about the last two folks I'd invite to lunch. They were boring, whiney, and for two people that have been thru as much as they have--they showed a marked non-understanding of each other and their characters as well as being unable to get past the past. If you are reading the Lou Boldt series for the first time--this is not representative of Pearson's ability or writing skill. Go back and read the previous books and then hope that he finds his muse again for the next book!

I'd like to start off by saying this is my first book on CD that I have ever listened to. So I don't know if all novels have just one reader for all the voices or if generally they have both female and male readers for the parts. But for me, the story was diminished because the man who narrated did the female parts as well as the male, and I had a hard time connecting with Liz, who was one of the main characters because of it. He sounded like a man pretending to be a woman, which reminded me a little of comedy skits on TV, so it was hard to take Liz's character seriously because of the "mental image" I had developed of a cross dressing man with a bad wig in Liz's part. Perhaps this is only my own problem and would not be a problem for others more used to the book on CD format.

The story was action packed, it kept me interested and the plot had a lot of twists and turns to it. As for the rest of the male voices in the story he did a fabulous job. They were each distinct and I could tell who was who just by how he read it. My only critizism of the story itself is that Liz and Bolt's kids were tossed in the story, and they weren't well developed and I felt that things would have been fine without them since they had no major roles in the plot line at all.

I took this on a 10 hour road trip and it did pass the time nicely. It definitely was not boring to listen to.

David Hayes' body - dead or alive - takes the spotlight in the personal as well as the professional stages of Pearson's latest Lou Boldt novel.

Hayes' body first turns up missing - amid a welter of blood - when Seattle Police lieutenant Boldt responds to an assault on old friend and colleague, Danny Foreman, who had staked out Hayes on no one's orders but his own. Hayes, a former computer whiz at Liz Boldt's bank, has just completed his stint for a wire fraud of 17 million dollars - which was never recovered, or traced to its owner.

But Hayes turns up again the next day - phoning Liz to beg her to get him into the bank so he can access the computer and give the money back to its ruthless owners, the ones who have already taken two of his finger nails for incentive.

Anguished and terrified, Liz does what she has to - tells Boldt Hayes was the man she had an affair with five years before, reopening that old wound and rocking their marriage once again.

Pearson intertwines the marital upheavals with the suspense of police work, and the suspense part is a lot more successful. The criminals are smart and vicious, the police work dangerous and the various intrigues keep the pages turning and the questions coming. When pitting cops against criminals Pearson knows how to ratchet up the tension, but the writing strains against the byplay of painful emotions and the struggle to make a marriage work. The nail-biter climax is satisfyingly long and complex and meticulously choreographed and almost redeems the Boldts from their tawdry past.

Ridley Pearson shoots for the moon here. He tries for a nice literary prose style, a plot that unfolds like a map of Manhattan, and character studies worthy of the greatest actors.

However... for the scope of this novel, the huge story it tries to tell, it is in the end a couple hundred pages too short. By this I mean Pearson is too stacato and hurried. Components of the story rush by in a blur and after one development piles ontop of another you will find yourself wondering what the hell just happened. This isn't a state you will find yourself in at the end of the book, you will find yourself here several times. The story jumps around from one line of thought to another and in the end you will feel like your mind has been in a high speed bumper car chase.

Not the best Pearson book you will come across.

In one sense, this book is an easy read. In another, it doesn't make much sense. I kept looking back to see if I missed something on the previous page(s). When an author withholds information that would allow the reader to understand what's going on, and never explains suppositions that guide central characters' judgments and actions relative to each other, the reader is faced with wading through writing tricks masquerading as suspense and character development. That's what we have here. Pretty thin stuff. In the end, the main character Lou Boldt is described as lieing in the post incident police investigation. The author doesn't even offer us that writer's gimmick to tie together the story (as well as exposing true police procedure).

The consensus of reviewers is that other Pearson novels in this series are better. I'll have to check one more.