4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mystery that, while acknowledging the darkness, never succumbs to it, November 17, 2008
In May 2008, the Mystery Writers of America gave their Grand Master Award to Bill Pronzini. And while he might not be as well known to the general public as such mystery writers as Robert B. Parker and Michael Connelly, fans of the genre know that Pronzini richly deserves the recognition. Since 1971, he has written over 70 novels, including 33 detective stories featuring the "Nameless" San Francisco investigator modeled after Dashiell Hammett's "Continental Op." THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE is his latest stand-alone mystery. And, as true mystery lovers know, any book by Pronzini is well worth the read.
Rick Fallon is going through a mid-life crisis when the novel opens. His wife has left him a few years after their only child, a boy, died in an accident. So he retreats to the desert for a few weeks of camping and hiking so that he can "narrow it down." Pronzini writes, "The Valley was a place made for loners. You could share it only with someone who viewed it with the same perspective --- not as the countless miles of coarse dead landscape but as a starkly beautiful wilderness teeming with life. To him, it seemed almost sentient, as if deep within its ancient rock was something that approximated a soul."
And indeed, in this novel the desert is a character, the opposite of what Pronzini describes as "traffic clogged freeways, urban blight, random violence...and all the other by products of what was laughingly called modern civilization: global warming, Nine-Eleven and the looming threat of terrorism, the stupid Iraq War."
On the second day of his trip he finds an abandoned Toyota Camry containing a woman's purse and a note that reads "I can't go on anymore. There's no hope left..." Fallon soon finds 32-year-old Casey Dunbar at the bottom of a nearby wash, dehydrated, blistered by the merciless sun and close to death. He saves her and soon learns she was beaten, robbed and raped as she sought to get back her eight-year-old son who was kidnapped four months earlier by her ex-husband.
So begins our descent into this sun-bleached noir world. Stirred by the picture of Casey's son, Fallon is reminded of his own lost child. He agrees to help Casey find the boy. And, just as with all noir stories, few things are what they seem here and perception is turned upside down and distorted, much as the great Orson Welles did in the famous funhouse mirror scene in the classic film noir The Lady from Shanghai. So Fallon travels from the safety and silence of the desert wilderness to the truly dangerous human wilderness of urban civilization. Pronzini writes:
"Fallon had always thought of Vegas as a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert plane, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites. No head or tail, no intelligence, its only purpose to grow larger, fatter, like the others of its kind that had covered the Los Angeles basin and the Phoenix area and were now swallowing parts of the Mojave desert...Worse of all was the noise it generated. Growls, snarls, howls, roars, siren shrieks and all the other sounds that came from its writhing bowels in a throbbing, never-ending din." What we call civilization is simply the other side of silence.
Pronzini won't be getting a job writing for the Chamber of Commerce anytime soon, but he doesn't need one. He is a truly great mystery writer, an artist at building suspense.
Fallon is a former military MP and now works in security for a pharmaceuticals firm. He is a standup guy. But soon he is breaking laws and withholding information from the police to help Casey. From Glitter Gulch to casino piano lounges, he wanders through a noisy, congested nightmare underworld. About one western-styled casino, Pronzini writes, "The soft pile carpeting and leather chairs spoiled the effect, but that was Vegas for you: all illusion, but none of it quite what it was intended to be. Elaborate, ornate, and phony as hell."
Pronzini is a master stylist. Not only does he present here a great plot with plenty of twists to keep you off balance and guessing, but his true brilliance as a writer is in developing character. Fallon is the ultimate Good Samaritan, simply looking "to rebuild another future." We can't help but root for him to get back to the healing silence of the desert.
THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE is a mystery that, while acknowledging the darkness, never succumbs to it. If you haven't read Pronzini before, you are in for a treat. Start with this one and then go back and find as many of his books that you can get your hands on. You will not be disappointed.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Only good for the first few pages, October 15, 2009
It seems that I will be the first one give a negative review on this book. After reading all the positive reviews of this book, I decided to borrow it from library. I am glad I didn't buy it.
One thing these positive reviews did was forcing me to finish this book instead of returning it back to library, because I wanted to see what was the fuss about at the end of this book to get such good reviews.
The story started in deserts, and this is pretty much all that can be related to deserts. To me the rest story is Rick put another 3,000 miles on his jeep, asked 500 questions, and made 100 phone calls. It is boring, and you pretty much know who did what.
One advise to readers, if you want to give up at the half of the book and thought there would be some exciting things going to happen, let me tell you the rest half is as boring as the first half.
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