From Publishers Weekly
Smooth, callow architect Maurice Valentine scores a calculated marriage to a wealthy senator's daughter, casually names names for Joe McCarthy, designs casino hotels and builds mock suburban subdivisions to be vaporized by atomic testing. But when cool, blonde femme fatale Mallory Walker appears, noir strictures demand that the moral house of cards that is this cynical operator's life be slated for demolition. They also require a thrillingly lurid plot machinery—including a troubled mob patriarch and son, a land scam involving Jimmy Hoffa, heroin, murder, revenge and periodic nuclear blasts—to embroider an elemental struggle pitting 1956 Las Vegas, aka corruption and hollowness, against insurgent beatnik romance. Rayner (
The Cloud Sketcher) mines such Nevada gothic sources as
The Godfather Part II and
Bugsy for inspiration, and he handles his classic pulp materials with style. The novel's tacit theme—why the '50s deserved to be annihilated by the '60s—is conveyed by reiteration of Nietzschean truisms ("[E]verybody wants power.... Power, not goodwill, not democracy, not love," muses Maurice, while Mallory opines, "God quit a long time ago") that combine jaded worldliness with apocalyptic anticipation. Plot twists and betrayals, bomb blasts and unrequited love all add up to a classy neo-noir.
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Rayner, an English-raised author who lives in Southern California, has written a Hollywood noir for his sixth book. Filled with money and power, lust and revenge,
Devil’s Wind resembles the dark crime fiction of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Ellroy, and Elmore Leonard. It also has a taste of Fitzgerald’s
Great Gatsby, as everyone’s reinvented themselves a few times over. Rayner’s set pieces and characters-from his casino hotels and Las Vegas parties celebrating A-bomb tests to his gangsters-turned-tycoons, African-American jazz musicians, and cameos by Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Hoffa-evoke the glossy sheen covering the era’s massive social corruption. Only the novel’s plotting, while ingenious, generated some confusion. Still,
Devil’s Wind is a fine addition to its genre.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
