Director's Cut : A Moses Wine Novel [Hardcover]

Roger L. Simon (Author)

Book Description

Series: Moses Wine Mysteries | Publication Date: June 24, 2003

From Roger L. Simon, author of The Big Fix, comes his best Moses Wine novel yet -- a hilarious, dark thriller set in the movie world.

DIRECTOR'S CUT

A quarter of a century after he first appeared in the now-classic The Big Fix, Moses Wine remains a private investigator par excellence. Still a Berkeley radical at heart, Moses is now thoroughly chastened by the events that have led to the war on terrorism -- so much so that he's started to find himself agreeing with John Ashcroft, which for Moses is like saying that the Grateful Dead were overrated. Then the call comes -- a film crew in Prague keeps finding hate messages on the set and in their hotel rooms, and it's Moses's job to find out who's trying to shut the movie down. In a twist of fate that might only happen to a man like Wine, the director of the film gets knocked off a bridge by a runaway truck, and Moses agrees to take over -- Moses Wine is an auteur!

But there are obstacles: The costars, the sexy Donna Gold and the brooding Goran, can't decide whether to kill each other or have an affair; Moses's wife has a surprise for him; Moses keeps finding himself in places he really shouldn't be; the CIA seems interested in the film, and that's a first; and a guy who resembles the Michelin Man keeps turning up with threats of violent destruction. Clearly something more is at stake than an art-house film, and things turn deadly serious when the threat of terrorism appears at the screening of the film -- Moses has to race to save not only the movie, but the whole of the Sundance festival, too.

Roger L. Simon has been delighting fans of smart thrillers for a quarter century. This time it's the movie world's turn to get the Roger L. Simon treatment, and Director's Cut shows him at the height of his powers -- skewering our mores and making us laugh out loud.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Simon's eighth mystery/thriller to feature his wisecracking and reckless PI, Moses Wine, unintentionally illustrates the challenges of setting a comic story in a post-9/11 world. Hired to provide security for a movie being filmed in Prague whose cast and crew have been plagued by threats, Wine stumbles across the corpse of the Grand Rabbi of Prague, who proves to be yet another aspiring screenwriter, clutching a screenplay based on a vicious anti-Semitic tract. The lurking presence of mysterious Arabs, abductions and bombings suggest that an Al Qaeda cell is targeting the film project, though some clues indicate that a personal, rather than ideological, motive, is behind the harassment campaign. Having explicitly set his character in the midst of the war on terror, Simon fails to make Wine's actions plausible. Wine, for instance, allows his pregnant wife to accompany him to possible encounters with ruthless killers. From the opening reference to John Ashcroft, Simon places the reader in the near-present day of a nation traumatized by the terrorist attacks, but the realistic trappings of increased personal anxiety, heightened security and a questioning of long-held antiestablishment beliefs come across as little more than superficial window dressing. Given the rawness of the nation's recent wounds, not to mention ongoing terror alerts and the war in Iraq, not even a Christopher Buckley could pull off a humorous suspense tale so closely tied to militant Islam, and Simon has not succeeded in doing so here.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

What could make lifelong liberal Moses Wine cozy up to Attorney General John Ashcroft? Only the September 11 attacks, which prompt the PI to offer the FBI a hand in battling terrorism. Wine soon gets his chance, as his eighth adventure takes him from L.A. to the Czech Republic, where he must protect a Holocaust film shoot from Islamic fundamentalists and a mysterious antagonist who plants snakes in the rooms of cast and crew members. The situation grows so dire that Wine himself must take the helm of the movie while keeping an eye out for mad bombers. Even so, he manages to land several lefty licks as he details a CIA operative who puts the film crew at risk to break up a terror cell and an FBI computer system so out of whack it flags the Jewish detective as a possible acquaintance of Mohammed Atta. Wine manages to save the day--if not his director's credit--and Simon's savvy Hollywood satire raises troubling questions about our B-grade domestic preparedness efforts. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Atria; 1ST edition (June 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743458028
• ISBN-13: 978-0743458023
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,117,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cutting Up, June 18, 2003

By 

David Freeman (L.A.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Director's Cut : A Moses Wine Novel (Hardcover)

Moses Wine, that wistful, ironic and always thoughtful P.I. has been with us through eight books and some thirty years, rambling from his beginnings in Berkeley to the capitals of the world. We've been along with him through marriage and family, divorce and acrimony, to what he hopes will be his final wife. Has Moses done everything? Well, not quite because now, in this new book, Moses Wine wants to direct.
In "Director's Cut," Roger L. Simon has rediscovered his satiric impulse. In "The Big Fix," the first in the series, Simon had fun with the Los Angeles-Chandler style. ("I turned left on La Cienega and drove right on Santa Monica...") This time around, Moses gets mixed up with the twin scourges of the present age: movie making and terrorism. He's game, if not quite ready, on both counts.
Book for book, I've always been caught up in the various capers and scrapes, and that, appropriately, is the case here. But this time, I saw something else. Moses Wine has become part of the American cultural landscape. Simon has created an American archetype, a fictional detective who has entered our collective mind and now stands for more than his adventures. Like Lew Archer or Sam Spade, Moses Wine -- who is just trying to get through the day -- finds people are shooting at him. Just like the country he reflects. What Simon has done to keep this series fresh is to let Moses grow and change. That's unusual for literary detectives who are usually frozen along one mean street or another. The joke is that as Moses ages, it seems that he's only going to make new mistakes, and he does, but then damned if he doesn't also manage to achieve a certain wisdom.
In "Director's Cut" he's in Prague with a pregnant wife, chasing down a completion bond problem (it's a kind of insurance)on a movie set. Moses winds up in the director's chair. He's not bad at it, at least he's no worse than the people who direct movies all the time, and after all Moses Wine can also collar miscreants, crack cases and crack wise.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wild and wacky thriller, June 16, 2003

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Director's Cut : A Moses Wine Novel (Hardcover)

Immediately following September 11th, Moses Wine's detective agency became seriously strapped for clients. They only had one case and his partner (who is also his wife) was handling it. Moses was puzzled when he was called into the local FBI office and questioned about the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Czech Republic and Radio Free Europe headquarters in Prague. Of course he knows nothing about the subjects the FBI asked him about but matters become a little clearer when he receives a call from a friend who is in Prague.

Arthur Sugarman, a completion bondsman for movies, wants him to come over there and act as private security for a film being shot in Prague. Almost as soon as he arrives, Islamic fundamentalists kidnap Moses and the film's leading lady. When government officials rescue them, the kidnap leader escapes. Moses becomes the film director because his predecessor was badly injured during the abduction. Moses works with CIA officials to try to stop a terrorist cell who infiltrated the movie set from carrying out their diabolic agenda.

DIRECTOR'S CUT is a wild and wacky thriller that satirizes the games one has to play to make it in the motion picture industry. It is also a somber reflection about the effect September 11th has had on the protagonist and how he needs to contribute to the cause. The mystery revolves around the leader who is manipulating events to further his personal agenda and how the hero finally figures it out and tries to stop him. Robert L. Simon is a talented writer who can always be counted to deliver a chilling thriller.

Harriet Klausner

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First post-9/11 mystery novel?, August 20, 2003

By 

Hovig J. Heghinian (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Director's Cut : A Moses Wine Novel (Hardcover)

"Director's Cut" is the latest mystery novel starring the wise-cracking LA-detective Moses Wine, a private hack who cut his cultural teeth during the 1960s ... if you know what I mean ... but this book contains more than a few surprises, and I don't mean the "mystery novel" kind.

It starts off with a bang in Chapter One, speaking favorably of John Ashcroft, and unfavorably of Louis Freeh. Uh oh. The countercultural cred is being blown already. At one point mid-novel, in an excellent little scene, it boldly compares the Holocaust to the Rwandan massacres. Gee, what kind of disrespectful guy is this Moses character anyway? Actually, the whole book is a gutsy cultural statement for a mainstream mystery novel, especially for one with this character's past, and this author's history. The book is written with a sense of personal freedom and confidence, which clearly shows through.

And oh yeah ... during all this cultural commentary, there's apparently a mystery novel going on. (Smile.) Seriously, I loved the feeling of being on a movie set. It's such a mysterious industry to begin with, it was so interesting to read about it from an insider's point of view, seeing it treated like any other real job. Moses even shows his hand at directing at one point, which was a lot of fun to read.

I also loved the wonderful descriptions of Prague, which made me jealous of the author's experiences there; as well as all the contemporary references to the Internet sprinkled throughout the book, which were really fun to see in a novel. It certainly had its share of the "mystery novel" kind of surprises too, with enough twists and turns to keep the plot going from Los Angeles, to Prague, to New Mexico, to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah.

The only question is, if the novel begins with a bang, does it end with a bang? I'll never tell. But I will say this book can be recommended as the nation's first post-9/11 mystery novel.