Customer Reviews

Body Language

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

When I heard that James Hall had written another book, I was all set to read another adventure of the Key Largo Beach Bum, Thorn. I must admit I was a little disappointed when I learned that Thorn would not be appearring in Body Language, but nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed the book!

Think you got problems? Consider Alexandra Rafferty, Crime Photographer for the Miami Police Department.

She was sexually assaulted at age 11.

Her husband is not only having an affair, but he's also planning an armoured car heist.

Her best friend is on the hit list of every anti-Castro Cuban organization in Miami.

Her live-in Dad is sufferring from severe memory lapses due to Alzheimers Disease.

She's on the run from a pair of gun-toting Whack-O's, one who's built like a Rhino and the other keeps a cochroach as a pet.

With all that on her mind how can she possibly help the police to capture a serial rapist? James Hall spins a suspense filled tale that takes the readers from the seedy back streets of Miami to the white sandy shores of the Florida Panhandle.

This book will keep you on the edge of your seat up to the final paragraph! If you've never read anything by James W. Hall, Body Language is a great place to start!

Last night, I finished James W. Hall's latest novel, _Body Language_, which is something of a departure for him. Hall has an ongoing series featuring the character Thorn, a generally easygoing type, who spends his days tying sought-after flies for fishermen and is often dragged into all manner of violent and complicated situations involving an assortment of his old friends and lovers. The Thorn books are great and highly recommended.

In _Body Language_, Hall introduces a new character, Alexandra Collins, who is a photo technician with the Miami police department, spending her nightly shifts photographing murder scenes and apparently paying penance for a violent incident in her own past (which opens the book, by the way, so it's not much of a spoiler). This same incident appears to be coming back to haunt her, in the form of a series of rape- murders being committed by the "Bloody Rapist."

Most writers would be happy with this as the complete plot for a novel, but Hall only uses this as a starting point, adding a whole variety of other criminal activity into the mix. The whole is at times gruesome, but then the mood will quickly change to black comedy or to a very moving, emotional moment. Sure, there are some rough edges, particularly noticeable during the book's conclusion, but the whole is so well-written and comes off as a sort of mixture of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard's Florida-based crime stories.

Without my really realizing it, Hall has snuck in and become one of the few authors whose work I will snap up without reservation. The last Thorn novel, _Red Sky at Night_, made my ten-best list for 1998, and I would place _Body Language_ in my early forecast for best books of this year. For anyone who enjoys Carl Hiaasen or the work of Randy Wayne White, James W. Hall is another name in the pantheon of Florida-based crime writers to be added to your list.

Forensic photographer Alexandra Rafferty buries herself in her gruesome work for the Miami police department as a means of forgetting the time she was raped as an eleven-year old. Recently, her father, a retired cop and the only person besides his daughter and the culprit who knows about that rape, is becoming forgetful due to Alzheimer's. Her spouse, a Brinks driver, is an idiot who robs an armored car.

As her personal life spins out of orbit, her professional life becomes more intense when a serial rapist-murderer takes front and center stage in Southern Florida. Before Alexandra realizes what is happening, she is on the lam with her father and the loot he stole from her spouse. Her husband, other crooks, and a vicious killer give chase as Alexandra heads to Seaside. Anyone of them is willing to eliminate Alexandra as a threat.

BODY LANGUAGE is as crazy as a tale gets without losing its sense of direction (from Miami north to the Panhandle). James W. Hall shows why he is one of the leading lights of the zany Southern Florida mysteries with a frenzied, yet exciting and detailed tale. The characters clearly make the show as all are fully motivated and a bit off-centered. Especially of note is three of the prime men in Alexandra's life: her father (his comments are dark comic relief), her spouse (using chaos theory to pull off his heist), and the killer (as bloody a rapist as one will read about). Mr. Hall continues to be one of the best mystery writers of non-stop thrillers.

Harriet Klausner

I really did want to like this book. I have a fondness for the gruesome, and this book's blurbs all bill it as a serial killer procedural introducing Alexandra Rafferty, a scene of the crime photographer. I was more than a little surprised to find it was mostly melodrama even including the short trips into the mind of 'The Bloody Rapist.' The crimes consist of a series of women who are raped, their throats slashed, and then are left in contorted positions with trails of blood leading to their bodies. Unfortunately, procedure is almost completely lacking, and what passes for detection is mostly serendipitous luck.

Alexandra is an unfortunate heroine. A rape when very young has left her with permanent scars, not the least from killing the boy who violated her. She is married to an egotistical football player who is several cells short of a brain. And her father is falling victim to Alzheimer's. This would be a tragic life in most circumstances, but when her husband decides to mastermind the robbery of the contents of the armored card he drives, the whole thing falls apart. Alexandra discovers her husband's girlfriend, her father discovers the money and soon a pair of psychotics are chasing after her. In addition to Mr. Bloody Rapist, who is, for some not so mysterious reason, fascinated with Alexandra.

The key problem is that the plot keeps advancing by accident and coincidence. The characters betray very little sense including Alexandra who uses her rape at the age of 11 as the reason for becoming an accessory after the fact and causing several deaths as a result. I also find that turning Alzheimer's into comic relief (and the plot primary mechanism) is inappropriate. One gets quickly tired of this sadly damaged man wandering in to a scene and mostly due to silliness, finding clues everyone else has missed.

Hall is a good writer, and I've long been a fan of his Thorn series, but this story is one of those books that simply shouldn't have been written. And having been written, it should have been heavily edited. My advice is to skip this book and look into Hall's others, in particular the Thorn books.

This is my first Hall book, and obviously the first in a new series featuring the unflappable Alexandra Rafferty, a crime scene photographer with a dark secret from her childhood. A neighborhood boy raped her; she went to threaten him with her cop father's gun, and accidentally shoots the boy dead. Dad helps cover up the crime, and no one suspects the truth, or do they?
Flash up to the present day and Alexandra finds herself involved in a serial rapist killer's horrifying carnage. Add to this a truly psychotic husband who is planning a major armored car heist, and two thieves who are like something out of a David Lynch movie, and you have the many ingredients of this strange, but mesmerizing, crime novel. If things weren't bad enough, Alex's father is now senile, suffering from Alzheimer's, and getting her in more trouble than she could ever dream possible.

Hall goes out on a limb in his treatment of the father's character. The overwhelming tragedy of Alzheimer's should never be milked for comic relief, but Hall does this quite often, seguing sometimes very uncomfortably from serious repercussions of the disease to the inherent "comical" side effects.

The book has a nice pace and Hall certainly demonstrates a feel for his locales. (...) It's fairly obvious who (the rapist) is, (...) so obvious, you almost want to laugh at his attempt.

The characters of Norman, Emma and Jennifer are so over the top, they never achieve one moment of lucidity or credibility. Emma and her pet cockroach; Norman in his Quasimodo shroud; and dimwit Jennifer, the epitome of the dumb blonde provide some comic relief, but they are so sinister and unlikeable, you can only welcome their inimitable demises.

Perhaps Hall tried to hard to give us a complex novel that he forgot his audience's suspension of belief levels.

Miami-based Alexandra Rafferty's been on the run for eighteen years because she killed the neighbor boy who raped her and her father helped cover up the crime. These horrific events when she was eleven have overshadowed her entire childhood.

A police crime scene photographer, she's kept the world at bay with karate, "the art of deflecting human touch," but feelings can't stay submerged forever. Her marriage to a thuggish ex- jock is dying and her father's Alzheimer's is dragging her down. Everything blows up when her husband, a Brinks truck driver and true crime buff, plans a heist.

Readers will be intrigued to see the sparkling town in "The Truman Show"--Seaside, Florida--play a major role in the novel, but Hall's attempt at an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiassen mix of crime and comedy doesn't always work. Still, Body Language is a well-written thriller, and Alexandra and her father make a surprisingly appealing pair. ...

Ever since I picked up a dog-eared copy of Squall Line from my local library I have been hooked on James Hall's sometimes poetic, always inspired novels. But Body Language just can't cut it. A damaged lead character - as per for Hall - who finds a kind of redemption at the end is all well and good. However, the need for love and it's final release is neither wonderfully climactic nor - despite the purple prose - all that smouldering. Instead the love interest is a not particularly interesting nor well-drawn character, and his presence allows for an end that is a little too pat, a little too easy. Plotwise it really is straight out murder mystery via Hollywood - only two characters unaccounted for to suspect, and one she falls for. Not seen that one before... And four characters who are built up over the novel are dispensed with in such a cursory manner as to even make the excuse that Hall is showing us the random brutality of violence a too easy a way out. It just comes across as lazy writing. And that is the crux of my problems with this book. Once Hall wrote like the poet he is - a little Lee Burke with a left of centre Florida outlook. Here the language is throwaway and forced and the characters, on the whole, simplistic. And for someone who writes a crazy plot about strange people - well, why the vicious dig at Hiaasen? (At least that is how it appears. One character is reading a column in the Miami Herald from a hotshot star columnist who 'discovered sarcasm in grade 5' and is having a go at Florida real estate developers. Sounds like Carl to me, and Hall has a sustained go at him.) Too many novelists can't sustain their invention, but I can only hope I see Hall back on form by his next work.

James W. Hall is a master wordsmith. His descriptions and colorful language are some of the finest I've read in any genre. His plotting and misdirection are like an advanced course in how it should be done. This is the first novel I've read by Hall; it definitely won't be the last.

I have read other novels by Hall but found this particular one extremely satisifying. The humor alone caused me to laugh out loud several times. The characters very down-to-earth believeable. I've always been a big fan of Ed McBain's series of the "87th" due to the humor injected along with the suspense plot. I also have a soft spot for police dramas. BODY LANGUAGE reminded me of McBains writing style. I would highly recommend this novel. DO IT AGAIN, JAMES. e

Alexandra Rafferty overcomes a shocking childhood incident before growing up to become a forensic photographer. Although appearing to have put her past behind her, she still lives with it, affecting her marriage to Stan, an armoured truck driver who thinks he has devised the perfect crime, a plan in which he would rob his own truck, after which he and his girlfriend would leave Miami to live on the proceeds.

Inevitably, Stan's perfect crime isn't so perfect after all, having attracted the attention of some other life-long and low-life criminals who can see an easy profit for the taking. Somehow, the money falls into Alexandra's hands and she suddenly finds herself on the run from her husband, the opportunistic criminals and, just to add a nifty twist, a serial killer. With all of these people chasing the same person, their paths are bound to cross at some point with unpredictable results.

There are all sorts of interesting and strange characters making up the book: with Emma, the young pool cleaner who keeps a pet cockroach on a string leash in her pocket; and Lawton, Alexandra's father, an ex-policeman who is slowly losing his memory. He is a tragic figure who still has a very important part to play in the story's outcome.

This is a brisk thriller joining together a desperate chase across Florida with the tension and terror of not knowing when or where the serial killer will strike next.