Customer Reviews

The Other Side of Silence (Thorndike Thrillers)

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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

Here is another winner from Pronzini. I don't want to give away the plot, but a man goes camping in Death Valley and comes upon a woman lying in the sand. The man, whose son has died, revives the woman and takes her to a motel. He learns that her son has disappeared, and that she tried to kill herself because of it.

That should be enough to get you into this super novel that has a satisfying but surprising ending. I would also highly recommend "The Blue Lonesome," by Pronzini. I love the pictures on the covers of both books.

Blue Lonesome

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.

I read Bill Pronzini's The Other Side of Silence in a single sitting. The book isn't that outstanding because it's a story that's been told hundreds of times before. But the writer is simply at the top of his game and it was wonderful to see him in action. Everything Pronzini does in this novel reflects the craftsmanship he's learned throughout his long career. Above all things, Pronzini is a storyteller and his focus is on people caught up in events that alter the fabric of their lives, or reveal something within them that they barely guessed was there.

His long-running Nameless Detective series has garnered him a lot of fans and a lot of awards. I like the first-person narrative he employs in those, but this book is written in third-person and felt like one of those old Gold Medal noir novels I remember so fondly.

I immediately felt sympathy for Rick Fallon, the novel's main character. The guy had worked hard, done well, and still ended up in a loveless marriage and with a lost child. Pronzini could have written this character as a suicidal mess and I wouldn't have felt as keenly for him. In fact, one of the contexts of the novel is that Fallon sets out to help a woman he rescues from a suicide attempt.

Casey Dunbar's story is familiar as well. It's in the newspapers and media far too often. Non-custodial parent takes off with child after bad divorce and disappears. That caught my attention at once, and I loved the fact that Fallon has the tools to set the woman's world to rights.

However, Pronzini is a master at the twist game, and there are more than a few in this novel. Every time I thought I had things figured out, Pronzini changed things slightly, but just enough.

The way the author describes the desert is absolutely amazing. I've never been there, but I've seen lots of pictures. Pronzini talks about the places with an intimacy that is great, but he uses it as a device to show the hollow places that Fallon and Casey have within them.

Once Fallon takes up the pursuit of Court Spicer, things get dangerous quickly. The bad guys in the book are well done, and they're the type of guy that anyone walking the streets might bump into if they go into the places that Fallon haunts while looking for the missing child.

Readers looking for something more than a private eye tale might get disappointed in the repetition of Fallon's visits to the various players in the "case," but this is the kind of investigative work good police officers will tell you gets the job done day in and day out. I loved the feel of being there with Fallon, of watching him figure things out and step into danger.

I had most of the book figured out by the time I got to the end, but Pronzini can be a master of the endgame, and this one was one of his best. I was guessing till the last page.

"Behold, I will do a new thing,
Now it shall spring forth;
Shall you not now it?
I will even make a road in the wilderness
And rivers in the desert." -- Isaiah 43:19

This book is a delight for anyone who loves the desert's many subtle moods and shifts in colors, especially in Death Valley, California. The protagonist, Good Samaritan Rick Fallon, lives to escape from "civilization" to enjoy the relative silence experienced while being on his own in the desert. Everywhere else is, by comparison, the other side of silence.

Unexpectedly, Fallon finds a near-dead young woman who isn't happy to be saved. He gradually learns her story: She's searching for her son who has been kidnapped by her ex-husband. While trying to track down a lead, she had been brutalized . . . and gave up hope.

Fallon has experience as an MP and in security. He decides that he has an obligation to do something. Step-by-step, he probes the obvious sources to find the ex-husband. At first, he's very careful to follow all the right rules. But gradually, he finds that more is needed. What should he do?

Fallon draws on his experience and resources to speed up the search. Leads take him to all sides of the deserts in California . . . and into twists and turns that make for a very challenging mystery. The suspense nicely builds and the fun expands geometrically. It's very engrossing. If you are like me, you won't be able to put the book down.

How will the silence be re-established? And on what terms?

Enjoy a great book that reminds me favorably of the best of the early Nameless Detective novels.

Rick Fallon, whose wife has filed for divorce after 11 years of marriage, has put up his house for sale and sought solace in the place that has always provided it: Death Valley - the perfect spot for him, "the one place he truly belonged . . . a place made for loners." For three years they had been mourning the death of their young son after he'd been in a coma for three weeks following an accident, and they had been unable to overcome the guilt and strain caused by that loss.

It is October - the perfect time of year to be in the desert. Its perfection is marred, though, when Rick comes upon an abandoned vehicle and, not too far distant, the nearly-dead body of a 32-year-old woman who had attempted suicide and, but for Rick, would have been successful. Rick puts his own life on hold long enough to investigate and try to resolve the source of her desperation: Her young son has apparently been kidnapped by his father. His background serves him well - he had been an MP in the Army before going into corporate security, where.he has spent the last dozen years. His investigation takes him to the glitter and glitz of Las Vegas ["a massive, amoeba-like creature slowly inching its way across the flat desert landscape, absorbing more and more of it in little nibbling bites," whose traffic the author compares to "bunched-together platelets clogging the creature's arteries"]. The result is a wonderfully written, suspenseful novel. [What else would one expect from Mr. Pronzini?]

The desert country becomes palpable in the hands, and words, of this author. Describing the differing needs of himself and his wife: She needed "cities, constant scurrying activity. She worshipped sensation and speed, needed to hear the steady, throbbing engines of civilization in order to feel safe, secure, alive. He needed none of these things, needed not to hear the engines. Silence was what he craved. This kind of silence, nurturing, spiritual, that let him feel as he felt nowhere else, at ease with himself and his surroundings. It was the other kind he hated, the cold, hurtful, destructive kind - - the loud, long silences of a shattered marriage, the empty silence of a child's grave. They were worse than the thunder of engines."

The title says a lot about what this author has done here, which is to make the reader look at silence, and its absence, from a slightly different perspective, just a bit of an angle off from the way one is used to seeing things. [The title, by the way, derives from a line by George Eliot.]

Highly recommended.

this is an exciting mystery story, especially if you like the desert west aroung Los Vegas. While the story is fast-moving, the descriptives passages of the desert area are breathtaking. An all around good read.

Since his son's death and the consequential breakup of his marriage, corporate security specialist Rick Fallon is a loner. Thus when he goes camping in the Mohave Desert, he goes by himself. In fact he selects an isolated section of Death Valley so climatically anti-human no one will disturb him.

However to his chagrin he is not alone as he finds an abandoned car with a suicide note on it. Frantic Casey Dunbar has given up on life after spending the past few months futilely searching for her eight year old son, abducted by his father, her former husband Court Spicer. Rick finds her and saves her life to her bitterness and outrage. She explains that adding to her frustration and hopelessness is the knowledge her ex spouse couldn't give a sh*t about his offspring; instead his objective is to destroy her, which he has succeeded in doing. Rick offers to investigate; Casey accepts as their encounter in Death Valley brings both back to life.

Starring a named detective, THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE is a terrific investigative thriller with a great low-keyed final spin. The cast is fully developed especially Rick and Casey. Although mostly straightforward investigating, fans will fully appreciate the great Bill Pronzini's strong tale.

Harriet Klausner