Customer Reviews

Mr. Clarinet (Max Mingus Thriller)

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

 

 

It is 1996. Max Mingus, ex-cop and PI, has just been released from prison for killing a pair of junkie child murderers. In an emotional vacuum since his wife's death in a freak accident, Max has no desire to follow through with their plans for world travel, returning home to Miami. Unable after all to endure the home he shared with his wife, a woman who wrought profound changes in a downward-spiraling life, Max checks into a hotel. There he is contacted by Allain Carver, a rich white Haitian, who has been actively pursuing Max to search for his kidnapped son, Charlie, now five-years-old. Inclined toward a change of scene, Mingus accepts the assignment with much trepidation, the three former PIs on the case either dead, physically mutilated or missing. Maintaining his jailhouse persona, Mingus arrives in chaotic Haiti with few expectations.

Posters of Charlie Carver are everywhere, each marked with the symbol of Ton Ton Clarinet, the child-stealer to whom native superstition assigns the blame for a country of disappeared children. While ascertaining the wealthy Carver family's reputation, it becomes obvious that their enemies are legion, the family patriarch cruel and uncompromising, the boy's mother desperate to leave Haiti and her marriage, but not without her son. Max plunges himself into the local scene, assaulted by the poverty and violence around him. Papa Doc, Baby Doc Duvalier and Aristide have set the stage for the unparalleled greed and larceny of bloody reigns, the country now occupied by the Americans and the CIA, dictatorships replaced by special interests and the politics of expedience, mass poverty and superstition devastating the population.

Mingus plunges into a bizarre culture where a few reputations are larger than life: Vincent Paul, the King of Cite Soleil, a "cocaine Castro" with a secret El Dorado; Max's nemesis, Solomon Boukman, their fates on a collision course since Max put him in prison in the States. Boukman returned to Haiti, this is an old feud that requires resolution but Max is in no hurry, the missing boy his priority. Surrounded by hougans, vodou, bokors and black magic, Max resists the seductive pull of blackness that taunts him, teetering on an emotional cusp. Surrounded by the evil bred of greed and exploitation, Haiti offers a hellish landscape. In such a place, one man's soul is a useless commodity, yet Max ignores the siren call of corruption, sorting through villains and innocents with a grim resolve. Submerged in an exotic culture, Max muddles through a maze of half-truths, the moral morass a great challenge for the emotionally impaired PI, perhaps the perfect prescription for the reawakening of his soul: "He'd never known a place so dark."

With a cast of characters straight out of Dante's Inferno, this taut thriller features an unsettling plot and an impressive protagonist who perseveres in spite of hardships, with the aid of an unexpected ally. Stone's edgy and provocative Max Mingus raises the bar in the genre. Luan Gaines/2007.

MR CLARINET is a highly acclaimed thriller, that won both the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award (for best adventure/thriller novel) and an International Thriller Award (for best debut novel of 2007). I think it's largely deserving of those awards.

The plot of MR CLARINET is straightforward. Max Mingus is a police detective who served seven years in prison for a vigilante killing. After being released, Mingus is offered a job by a rich man named Allain Carver. He is asked to find Carver's son Charlie, who disappeared three years ago on the island of Haiti. If he succeeds, he will get paid $10 million. Mingus then travels to Haiti, and learns the case is much more complicated than it seems.

Overall I thought MR CLARINET was well written. Nick Stone's writing style reminds me a lot of another UK author, John Connolly. Stone's the type of writer who takes a lot of time to set up the story, the main character's background, and the surrounding atmosphere. This is not what I would describe as a leanly written, fast-paced novel.

In MR CLARINET, Stone does a great job detailing the realities of Haitian society in the mid-1990s. Needless to say, it's not a great place to live. If you have a pre-existing interest in this region, this novel provides some fascinating insights into what daily life is like in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. If you couldn't care less about Haiti, you might find all the detail to be tedious.

Personally, I though Stone paid a bit too much attention to the setting, and not enough time on developing the characters. Other than the anti-hero Max Mingus, I didn't feel most of the characters in this book had much depth. I also felt that the plotline was a bit too convoluted for my tastes, with one clever twist too many.

MR CLARINET is gritty to the extreme. This book has a ton of graphic violence and sexual content (of the non-erotic variety), and readers sensitive to such material should definitely stay away.

But in the end, I very much enjoyed MR CLARINET. The story was well told, and the writing of very impressive quality. This is the first book in a series, and I look forward to future installments.

I'll start with the bad things. 1) The prose is descriptive but artless, but there is a good point to it (see below).

2) There is an awful black guy-white guy buddy element that screams to Hollywood from the very HP LaserJet home printer the first draft was pounded out on. And the "twist" on the "black guy's" character is he is a Bruce Springsteen fan. Daaawwwwwgggg, where you cum up wid dis sheeah? Yep, it is that obvious a "Novel writing 101: Developing Interesting Characters" in vomitous transparency. 3) the evil guy is over-the-top evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever and completely unsympathetic...purposefully so, which makes it kinda adolescent and Manichean. 4) the rich creepy guy is rich and creepy and evil too. Has it ever occurred to an author that someone who is rich might be kind, intelligent, holy, benevolent, and filled with gemutlichkeit? No. All rich people in pop novels are evil. Evil evil evil. Class warfare comrade! Novelists of the work unit! You have nothing to loose but your stupidity in perpetuating stereotypes! 4) the "tender" moments are about as brief as a ten-second "touching moment/double head-shot" in a movie script, and about as deep.

Happily, the good points overcome these weaknesses. There are funny metaphors throughout: horses pissing on wind chimes for a sound was my favourite.

The plot is excellent and the back story for the hero well thought out. Perhaps this is a strength and flaw, for the hero is so compellingly constructed that the other characters, other than his dead wife, are less interesting in comparison.

The excellent dual locations of Miami, and Haiti are fun, and there are unblinking passages about Haiti that recall overwhelming memories for anyone who has visited there.

Needless to say, the complex backdrop and intersection of the random and the supernatural and the rational world and voodoo make for arresting points and twists, although the supernatural is simultaneously a great motivating force for the characters, explicit supernatural events that could *ONLY* be supernatural are left intentionally and artfully ambiguous.

Detailed torture scenes are not for the squeamish. Please consider this a warning, as this does not happen "offstage" in the prose.

This is excellent pop literature that overcomes its flaws with tremendous and compelling thought. Certainly not the depth of erudition of Thomas Harris or Donna Tartt, but a compelling novel that touches on crime, procedural, and outsider cultures that shows tremendous promise. Highly recommended.

I really enjoyed this debut novel. It's a little drawn out but I enjoyed the journey and I thought it had a very good ending. You learn a lot about the main character, Max Mingus, and yet are left wanting to know even more and I think that's a perfect way in which to end the first book of a new series. I will definitely be watching for the second book to come out. I would recommend it.

I would have liked more passages about genuine ritual and trance, and suggestion/magic.

As it is, the book was surprisingly civilised and mundane. In my view, it didn't exploit to the full the exotic atmosphere, if there continues to be one (I was last there in the 80's!). Maybe it's the writing style that puts a gloss that shouldn't be there -like, say, a Hollywood musical about slum life- over everything Haitian: you don't FEEL the grittines and destitution.

It's predictable and clichéed, also, that nothing is as it seems; and the main danger to Mingus never materialises, although on the other hand if the series continues, there's the possibility of a future romance (by the way, Mingus' Haitian chaperone, if properly exploited, could have bloomed into an interesting major character; but didn't).

The Miami parts were awful. Max and Liston, Mingus' ex-partner, strike me as unattractive characters. Take the booze away, and what's left of them and their friendship? Also Max's dead wife, Sandra!: did you ever hear of a real love like that? Some characters seem taken staight out of "Advise and Consent".

Nonetheless, I'll be buying the prequel when published in a sensibly small format. Most of my gripes are really about failed expectations created by the ads.

What John Sandford does with Lucas Davenport in Minneapolis, Nick Stone does with his anti-hero in Haiti. I kept comparing the two, Max and Lucas. Max has more baggage than Lucas, but they share the same world-view. If a good book has an impact on its readers, then, this is a brilliant book. I immediately wanted to look up Haitian past and current history. Storytelling at its best...but not for the easily offended!

Stone's debut introduces Max Mingus, an ex-police officer/P.I. recently released from prison after serving 7 years for manslaughter. Unable to return to work as a P.I. in Miami, Max is persuaded to take a missing persons case in Haiti involving the disappearance of the son of one of the country's wealthiest families. The child, rumored by locals to have been taken by a bogeyman known as Mr. Clarinet, has been missing for 3 years and the trail long since gone cold, but the family wants resolution even if it means confirmation that the boy is dead.

Max's search once he arrives in Haiti starts slowly, but the story has a subtle, almost insidious way of taking hold of the reader. Haiti itself is really the main character. Stone's descriptions of the country circa the mid 90s, its contrasting beauty and squalor, the hopelessness of the 80% of the population that lives in poverty, are beyond vivid... they are relentless, and the story that unfolds is grim. But Stone never uses the (sometimes graphic) descriptions of violence merely for the sake of sensationalism; the brutality inherent in the daily lives of the people Max encounters is presented in very matter-of-fact fashion. Stone also presents the Vodou religion in a very respectful fashion, neither romanticizing nor demonizing it or its practitioners.

Woven in throughout the course of the story is a significant amount of Haiti's history, particularly its political turmoil, yet Stone manages to do so in a way that not only doesn't disrupt the flow of events, but is absolutely essential to understanding several of the characters' motivation.

By the time Max comes to the end of his journey in Haiti Stone has managed to work in several major plot twists, including completely flipping one character's role halfway through the book, and you'll be glad you took the trip with Max to find out exactly who Mr. Clarinet is and what happened to the missing child.

I actually read Nick Stone's second novel "The King of Swords" first. I was barely 100 pages into it, when I jumped online and ordered Mr. Clarinet. His books are so suspensful, the characters are interesting that it is hard to put them down once you begin reading. In Mr. Clarinet, Max Mingus goes to Haiti to help a very wealthy man find his kidnapped son. The plot line and ending are unlike any I've ever read, and I read a LOT!! If you are a suspense, mystery, fan, Nick Stone's books are not to be missed.

I didn't finish this book. It started off slow and didn't accelerate as it moved forward. It seems the author tried too hard to make Max Mingus into a tough private eye, but his effort only seemed to be a parody of other P.I.'s in the genre. I guess what really bothered me is that the author didn't write with authority. As other reviewers have noted, the book seems too formulaic. It didn't flow. It didn't have "the touch." I hope Stone can develop his skills in future books. This just didn't cut it for me.

I have no idea why this book has almost a four-star rating. It's filled with useless adjectives and repetitive passages to the brim. The 70 pages I managed to get through might as well have been 30 pages. Oh, I forgot about the cliched phrases that had me saying 'Give me a break' every other paragraph. Do yourself a favor and if you don't find Mr. Clarinet: A Novel (Max Mingus Thriller) capturing your attention within the first 30-40 pages, give up and move on to something worth your time.