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Lonesome Point

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Scribbling poetry and toking on a joint, Leo Varela has few expectations in his life other than a nowhere job as a mental health tech at Jefferson Memorial Hospital for indigents and a pregnant girlfriend who makes him happy. The past is left behind, dead and buried at Lonesome Point in Belize, where brothers Patrick and Leo grew up in the shadow of Ivan Varela's shady used car dealership. Now Patrick is Miami-Dade County Commissioner and considering a run for mayor. The two brothers couldn't be more different and both are content with the distance that defines their relationship.

Unfortunately the past arrives at Leo's job in the person of Freddy Robinson, a former acquaintance in Belize and ex-con who harbors no affection for Patrick, his attorney. Accompanied by his muscle, Freddy has a job for Leo that involves one of the patents on Leo's ward. No explanations, just demands. And threats, very painful threats. Hoping to escape in a comfortable marijuana haze with the least resistance, Leo balks, unwilling to be a pawn to the past, his brother's ambitions or Freddy's boss's demands.

Leo is the perfect protagonist in an escalating tale of violence, an easy going soul forced to reassess the direction of his life and his commitment to the future. Vasquez takes charge from the first page in a compelling thriller that is part noir and part gutsy writing, Leo tapping into an inner strength that has thus far eluded him. It's all there in the dialog, Freddy's not-so-subtle maneuvers, Leo's frustrating exchanges with Patrick, and the irrevocable actions of one dark night at Lonesome Point in Belize. Surrounded by shuffling patients on the night ward and coworkers as unhinged as their charges, Leo has few options, but refuses to submit to his fate in a mad rush to evade Freddy that ends in a shocking, satisfying denouement. Fresh and deliberate, Vasquez is a writer to watch. Luan Gaines/2009.

Leo Valera works the night shift on a psychiatric ward but his real passion is poetry. Leo's brother Patrick is commissioner for Miami-Dade County with plans to run for mayor in the upcoming election. The two brothers are polar opposites: Leo is lackadaisical and prefers to spend time smoking pot and composing poems while Patrick is aggressive and ambitious and will do anything to accomplish his goals. Leo's girlfriend is pregnant and he knows he needs to do something more with his life but isn't motivated. Patrick, married to Leo's former girlfriend, is as content as Leo to keep their relationship at a distance. Both brothers share one thing in common: escaping the vile secrets from their past which will undo them if revealed. When Freddie Robinson, a friend from their childhood, shows up where Leo works and tries to coerce Leo into releasing one of the patients, Leo reaches out to his brother for help, not realizing this is the first step for the two brothers in a sequence of events leading them back to their past and the demons they have tried to elude.

Ian Vasquez writes with an interesting style, drawing the reader in with his flowing cadence wrapped around a fast-paced plot filled with mystery and suspense. Character development is superb. Leo, the quintessential underachiever, is forced to take a serious look at his life and choose whether to remain uninvolved or become the man he should have been. Patrick's true character is revealed when he is confronted with having to decide what matters most: family or career. Dialogue stands out, especially with the secondary characters, who add an extra dimension to this engaging thriller.

Creatures from the Belize Lagoon:
Noir Mysteries from an Emerging New Belizean Talent

Reviews of Ian Vasquez' In the Heat and Lonesome Point

By LAN SLUDER

An important new talent has emerged out of the sands, swamps and condos of Florida, bringing a Belizean edge to crime novels some are calling Caribbean Noir.

Ian Vasquez, who was raised in Belize and now lives in the Tampa Bay area, where he is a copy editor at the St. Petersburg Times, has published two novels, In the Heat in 2008 and Lonesome Point in 2009. A third, Mr. Hooligan, is set for publication in summer 2010.

In the Heat is set entirely in Belize, mostly in Belize City with some of the action taking place at a jungle lodge in Cayo. Miles Young, an aging boxer coming off a loss of a bout at Bird's Isle, is hired to find the run-away 17-year-old daughter of Isabelle Gilmore, a wealthy, Caribbean Shores matron. The girl has taken a gob of mom's ill-gotten cash and is with the son of a former Belize police chief, now a well-connected owner of a Belize City security company. Soon, Miles is caught up in a tangled web of murder, corruption and money laundering. "Man, Belize was going to hell in a hand basket," says Manny, a shady boxing promoter.

Vasquez' second novel, Lonesome Point, takes place in Miami and Tampa, with flashbacks to Belize. Two Belizean brothers, Leo and Patrick Varela, though still bound together by a deadly family secret of their youth in Belize City, have drifted apart since they moved to South Florida. Patrick is a successful attorney and Miami-Dade County commissioner, with a beautiful home and trophy family in Biscayne Bay, while Leo is a would-be poet and night shift worker on a dead-end job in a hospital psych ward. One night, a figure out of Leo's Belizean past shows up and demands a favor of him: Get a patient, an old man with apparent schizophrenia, out of isolation to take a middle-of-the-night meeting. If Leo doesn't cooperate, things that happened at Lonesome Point in Belize may be brought to light. Soon, Leo is in the middle of a nightmare, on the run from his Belizean past, desperately trying to save the life of his pregnant girlfriend, the patient, and himself. Leo is hunted by his one-time Belizean pal, Freddy, along with Bernard, a hulking, 290-pound black weightlifter, and perhaps even by his brother Patrick.

I came to the two novels with the wrong expectations. Misled by blurbs comparing Vasquez to John D. McDonald, I was expecting Travis McGee transplanted to Belize. But Vasquez is his own man. Unlike the stories featuring McGee, Spenser, Marlowe, Millhone and some of the other classic heroes of mystery and crime fiction, Vasquez' tales are told in the third person, with omniscient narrators. His main characters are accidental detectives, rather than professionals. Instead of boldly forging ahead, like skiffs on the Caribbean, they are often buffeted by the winds of chance.

Lonesome Point, to be sure, is the more powerful of the two books. From the first to the second, you can see Vasquez' growth as a writer in the more complex plotting, easier handling of narrative and the harder, steel-cut dialog. Vasquez, now only in his early 40s, has the time to flower like a flamboyant tree in Belizean summer.

The weakness of both novels is in the main characters. In the Heat's protagonist, the washed-up boxer, Miles, is sketchily drawn and appears in surprisingly few scenes. Leo Varela, the knock-about in Lonesome Point who smokes weed to get through his night shift, is better, but in the end Leo doesn't have a lot of appeal, more victim than victor.

Several of the secondary characters, by contrast, are vividly painted. Isabelle, the bitchy, sexy Caribbean Shores matron of In the Heat, deserves a book of her own. Also in the first novel, Harry Rolles, an expat American deeply involved in Belize's dark underbelly of crime, cries out for a bigger, uh, roll. Marlon Tablada, In the Heat's corrupt ex-police chief, could have made a fascinating if amoral protagonist. The hulking Bernard in Lonesome Point easily could have carried the novel. Several of the other minor characters in both novels are sharply if quickly presented.

I also liked the measured way Vasquez uses the Belize setting. Exotic, colorful locations like New Orleans, or Belize, can overwhelm character and story line. Vasquez matter-of-factly names streets and landmarks in Belize, only once in a while getting things wrong (he suggests that the Macal flows west) but doesn't get lost in the Belizeness of it all. He recreates some of the patterns of Creole, and plants a word here or there, along with some Spanish and Spanglish but wisely doesn't make the Anglophone reader struggle to understand the language. Some of Vasquez' scenes, such as when Isabelle and the boxing promoter, Manny, are caught in bed by Isabelle's husband, who suffers from Alzheimer's, are dark but laugh-aloud funny.

But I digress. What's important here is that we have a new thriller writer on the scene, a Belizean published by a name New York publishing house, who very likely is going to become a major international crime writer. I'm eagerly awaiting his third novel.

Ian Vasquez, Lonesome Point (St. Martin's, 2009)

It's been a couple of weeks since I finished Ian Vasquez' second novel, Lonesome Point, and I haven't been able to figure out quite what to say about it. I have no idea why this is, because I quite liked the book. Sometimes the words just won't come. That's more frustrating because this is a solicited review. When someone messages me through myspace offering me a book, ninety-nine percent of the time it's a vanity-press publication. (Not to disparage such, as I've read some real humdingers.) But I get this one in the mail and it's St. Martin's Minotaur? My expectations were already jacked, and for the most part, Lonesome Point met them. It's got just about everything you could want in a crime novel, though I do think the prologue comes dangerously close to giving the game away.

Leo and Patrick Varela are brothers who, we learn in the prologue, grew up in Belize. As we open, they, along with many of their secondary school contemporaries, are gathered after their senior prom by the river, where a body has been discovered. Turns out the guy is a close friend and business associate of their father's. There's also another guy in the car named Freddy. Pay attention, he gets very important later. Fast-forward a bunch of years, and the two of them are now living in Miami. Patrick has become a county commissioner, a pillar of the community, and is considering a mayoral run. Leo, on the other hand, is a pot-smoking, poetry-writing mental health worker barely scraping by. Things get sticky when Freddy (remember him?) approaches Leo with a business proposition: someone on his ward needs to be released for a conference with some shadowy figures for whom Freddy works. Freddy, of course, has old dirt from Belize to hang over Leo's head. Leo, not being happy with this setup, goes to his brother to find out what's going on. From there, the two of them uncover a web of intrigue that just gets more tangled the deeper they dig, until ultimately no one is sure who to trust anymore.

While I love it when crime novels conform to the standards of great literature, I'm not going to hold a crime novel to the same standards I hold, say, Hemingway (unless it's someone like Dennis Lehane). To satisfy my taste for the stuff, a crime novel needs to be fast-paced, well-plotted, and stocked with solid, three-dimensional characters. I think I'm easy to please. (There are even some authors I'll give a pass on the third one, like Mickey Spillane.) Still, there's a great deal of crime fiction that doesn't do it, far more than that which does; why do you think only a handful of guys who were writing hardboiled detective stories back in the thirties are still household names in the new century? I do think the ratio of signal to noise has improved markedly in the past twenty years, though (not coincidentally, it started improving when Vintage introduced their Black Lizard crime line, reprinting stuff by lesser-known but great authors like Jim Thompson), and Vasquez is one of a line of crime writers who take the usual formula and inject a bit of exotic flavor into it with facets of cultures that haven't been done to death in American fiction. You can't really call it a new spin on the genre, but it's at least a quarter turn, and it's welcome. Doesn't matter how much you gussy it up if it doesn't have good bones, though, and Lonesome Point has great bones. It does veer a bit close to overexposure now and again (veteran readers of crimefic will probably have a bunch of hypotheses worked out by the end of the prologue, and one of them is probably right), but it's still a solid, well-written thriller with all the plot twists a reader could possibly want, great characters, and a fine sense of pace. This is good stuff. Check it out. *** ½

Although LONESOME POINT is only Ian Vasquez' second novel, it is certainly a really good one. Had I not known better, I would have sworn that the author is a veteran writer of crime stories. This novel has everything I look for in this sort of book: characters-- or at least one whom I really want to get what he is after and whom I root for, in this instance Leo-- a plot that moves quickly that keeps me turning the pages, and an exotic location-- here we have two, Belize and Miami.

LONESOME POINT is essentially about the Varela brothers, Patrick and Leo, formerly of Belize but now residents of Miami. The older brother Patrick has made it. He is an attorney running for public office, has a beautiful home, a beautiful wife with two tanned beautiful children, all of whom inhabit a beautiful, expensive home. And Patrick is also a sociopath. His younger brother Leo is freeways away from his brother. He at 32 still works the night shift of a psych ward, really hates his job but cannot seem to get out of the rut he is in. Of course getting high on a daily basis may get in the way of looking for better employment. (There is a quite delicious scene where Leo, to hide his habit from his live-in pregnant girlfriend Tessie, tokes up in the bathroom of their less-than-elegant apartment while standing on the toilet and blows the smoke into the air vent to prevent discovery.) Leo writes poetry from time to time, quotes Neruda, and is just extremely likeable.

While these two brothers are so different, what they have in common is a deep dark secret that goes all the way back to their youth spent in Belize. And-- without revealing the plot-- their past threatens to destroy them.

Mr. Vasquez lays out the puzzle, piece by piece. (Notice, for example, that we find out early on that Leo is extremely claustrophobic. The author isn't just telling the reader that to fill up space.) And the plot has enough suspense to satisfy the most critical of readers. Valquez pays attention to detail and can say a lot with few words. There is a scene, for example, when Celine, Patrick's wife and Leo's former girlfriend-- can you say sibling rivalry-- feigns an interest in Leo's current girlfriend, and he knows it. He gives "her smile his back." A great phrase.

I was fascinated also with Patrick and Leo's mother, the matriarch of this family. She has the steely determination that would make Lady Macbeth envious as she reminds Patrick that "you've enjoyed the benefits of being in this family, now it's time to accept the burdens." You will have to read the novel to find out if Patrick accepts the challenge.

I obviously liked LONESOME POINT a lot. I would read anything Mr. Vasquez writes.

I loved this book. Vasquez does an amazing job describing the characters and the situations they are in. Can't wait for his next book to come out!

LONESOME POINT is a tale of two brothers from Belize who now live in Miami. One is a city commissioner with an eye on the mayor's office; the other is an $11/hour doper who works in the psych ward of a facility for indigents. This is a crime novel; which one is going to obtain redemption and which one's true nature is going to be revealed?

OK, that's an easy one, but writing a lean and taut thriller is not. This is a clean, straightforward narrative whose arcs assure us that we are headed toward no place good. The title refers to a setting in Belize where something evil happened, something implicating the two brothers. And now, in Miami, there is someone who was there, someone with loose lips, and if he is incapable of wreaking havoc, his bald, hulking sidekick, `Big B' is. From these ingredients Ian Vasquez fashions a wiry story in which the key characters will find themselves in another place but in contemporary time, a place in which more evil will be perpetrated, a place from which some will walk away and some will not.

We're in Hiaasen, Willeford and Leonard country, as some have noted, but I thought as well of Marcel Montecino, who is particularly adept at doing the Cain/Abel number. It's a story that always works, because it's a story that's been there from the beginning for a reason.

This is Ian Vasquez's second crime novel. He knows the territory. Willeford once said that he went to Miami to write because that's where the crime was. Ian Vasquez reinforces that comment with this strong, second outing. Highly recommended.

If you like thrillers - especially those touching on hitmen and politics - Lonesome Point will be quite a good read. Ian Vasquez is quite a good writer, writing very crisp and realistic dialogue and never overdoing his prose (as many thriller writers tend to do).

The plot of Lonesome point manages two things seldom seen together in a thriller: it is interesting but also believable. Leo, a struggling poet working at a mental institution, and Patrick, a successful Miami Comissioner, are brothers with a tense past. Not entirely out of coincidence, one of Patrick's ex "business partners" (wink) winds up in the mental institution Leo works in, in order to prevent him from exposing a secret that could threaten Patrick's career. Patrick's opposition is pressuring Leo to hand the man to them. Patrick wants the man handed to him. Leo doesn't want to do either. What emerges is an intriguing power struggle that takes us into the underbelly of local politics and shady dealings.

As mentioned, what I loved about this book was Vasquez's smart use of dialogue, both realistic and fast-moving. I've read too many thrillers of this sort where the dialogue and events tend to be quite cliche: Lonesome Point does not suffer this problem. While Lonesome Point doesn't contain all the twists and turns of many suspense novels, it makes up for this by being quite realistic and keeping things just the other side of predictable.

Overall, a very good second novel from a new voice in thrillers.

Why isn't this highly readable thriller a bestseller? Why isn't it up in the top 20 in the New York Times and at Amazon? It has all of the right ingredients. There's an attention-grabbing opening scene with a dead body an an action-packed climax with the hero at the mercy of the bad guys; there's a nice pregnant girl who wants to settle down and a nasty one who likes kinky sex: and it's set (mostly) in Miami.
Maybe the book's absence from the lists is a matter of shear dumb luck. Stuff happens. But I also think it contains perhaps too many of the right ingredients and lacks a gimmick to separate it from the pack
The opening scene, with its dead body and wisecracking policeman contains so many clichés of the genre that it is very closely a rerun of Steve Hely's parody at the opening of chapter 15 of "How I Became a Famous Novelist." Two distinctive ingredients are the settings in a public psychiatric hospital and in Belize, but these fade out in the first quarter of the book and we're left in territory that, well as Vasquez describes it, Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard and Willeford have been to already. There are some intriguing elements in the Belize background where car-driving teenagers take unchaperoned dates to a "prom" but these are not explained. The religious denomination of the Reverend is unmentioned. There's a whisky-drinking tennis-playing matriarch who eggs her men on to crime. An English writer called William Shakespeare did great things with a character like that in a Scottish setting, but Vasquez drops her too soon, and gives her lines like "He's a problem that needs to be eliminated once and for all" instead of "Infirm of purpose. Give me the dagger." '

Leo has been running most of his life. The story starts with a death in Belize on a prom night. That will grab the reader's attention. Then it skips forward to present day Miami. The characters have grown into adults, and gone their separate ways, but one of the people from the past has shown up in Leo's life, wanting a favor that will cause Leo trouble.

It is story of politicians, wheelers and dealers, low-lifes, and Leo who just wants to forget the past and get by in his low paying job. Leo has always been a survivor, but now he is confronted by a threatening situation.

It is a well written story that draws on the author's background. It leaves a few things hanging a bit at the end, but maybe not. There are always fixers to fix things.