Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome crime/noir debut. , March 16, 2009
Mixed blood is just the kind of crime thriller I've been looking for as of late. I was getting more than a little tired of mainstream novelists that feel like they need to live up to the last guy that wrote something in the same genre. Roger Smith doesn't conform to most of the traditional crime trappings. This isn't an episode of CSI or NCIS where every problem is neatly wrapped up and solved when it's all said and done. And I love that. Thank you, Roger Smith. Keep it up and you have a reader for life.
Mixed Blood's South African setting is as oppressive as a midsummer's heatstroke. You can almost feel the wind and smell the foreign sweat spilling through the pages. Also a welcomed difference in popular crime novels. The characters are pretty well drawn and the dialogue is pretty spot-on. The atmosphere is dark and hopeless and there's always a sense of suspense and dread. We're never quite sure who is going to do what. Yes, there are some predictable moments but all in all this is an extremely solid outing. I loved every page of it, honestly.
Pick this up if you want something a bit darker, a bit original and a bit more like what crime/noir should be.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brutal, Violent, Fast-Paced and Very Good, February 13, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Ex-Marine Jack Burn, in debt to some bad guys, is forced to participate in a bank robbery that leaves a man dead and Jack on the run with three million bucks. He's gotta get far away and Cape Town, South Africa is just about as far as you can get. He gets himself a nice place for himself, his pregnant wife and their four-year-old son, but as luck would have it, bad luck in this case, a couple local gang guys pick his place to rob.
Jack isn't a pansy and the robbers wind up dead and now Jack has to get rid of the bodies, however Benny Mongrel, a night watchman has seen what he shouldn't have. However, for his own reasons, he just wants to take his dog and walk away. He wants no part of this. Sadly, life seldom works out the way we want and and it doesn't work out the way anybody wants in this book.
And now Jack is on the run again and there is a very bad Afrikaner fat pig of a cop (think a 1960s big bellied Mississippi sheriff) on his trail and this monster of a man who claims to love the Lord smells some dollars, three million of `em. This guy's name is Rudi Barnard, but he's not the only cop in the story, there's a good guy Zulu cop named Disaster Zondi who has a score to settle with Barnard.
And all of this goes on in with Cape Town as the backdrop. It's been a couple decades since I was last there, but the Cape Town I remember, the European style cafés, the South American style beaches, the ritzy hotels, the nightclubs, there all still there. Cape Town is a place you could spend the rest of your live in and never miss the place you came from. Well, there's the Flats, you maybe wouldn't want to spend your life there, maybe wouldn't even want to go there. And they make up much of the story, this underbelly part of the city that will suck you right into it's squalor. You'll become a resident through these pages and you won't like it.
This is a brutal, very violent and very fast-paced book that moves unrelentingly toward a climax where nobody really wins. There are a lot of bodies here, more than your average thriller and you're going to have to look really, really hard to find your typical good guy, but for all your looking you won't find him, he ain't here, but that's okay, you won't miss him.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid debut from a talented writer., December 5, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"Mixed Blood", a crime/noir set in Cape Town, is an enjoyable read overall and despite what I consider a few points for improvement, I recommend it.
Written in short, clipped sentences with pointed dialogue and with enough description to evoke what is to this reader its exotic setting but without becoming a slave to it, author Roger Smith has created a page-turner that manages to weave South Africa's social strata within a familiar plotline through believable characters and their motivations. Athough Jack Burn (an American Desert Storm veteran who with his family is trying to escape his past) is the character around which much of the story revolves, the story is democratically distributed amongst an ex-con, a crusading dirty cop, a crusading career-driven cop, a female crystal meth user, and a host of minor characters. The pacing of the novel is one of its best features; author Smith manages to keep the action moving within subplots, but the overall arc is steady and inexorable.
On the downside, "Mixed Blood" has too many characters and the first I would have edited is the career cop Disaster Zondi. Smith may have included him to illustrate the empowered black middle class, but his presence and the number of paragraphs devoted to his accoutrements and attitudes is largely superfluous and a distraction. Like another reviewer, I found the sympathy gimmick of Bessie the dog a bit much and the perfectly-timed appearance of a puppy far too precious. Although the fateful ending of one of the characters is expected and very well done, I found the rest of the novel's end a bit terse and perfunctory. I would have preferred Smith to linger just a bit more over the contents of the final 5 or 6 pages.
But these are minor complaints. I enjoyed "Mixed Blood" and I wish Roger Smith success. He's a talented writer and I would certainly read his future efforts.
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