Customer Reviews

White Rabbit: A Mystery

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

John Sparrow has a terrible problem--a serial killer attacking young, defenseless hippies during San Francisco's drug crazy "Summer of Love." He is a tough cop whose career has stalled into neutral becauss his supervisors just don't cotton to his ways, nor does his own defensive attitude help. The City is built on armed camps: in one, a hapless police department bulwarks itself into a policy of aggressive refusal to understand, like a castle under siege pulling back its moat bridges. On the other, residents of the Haight try to foster violent revolution (some of them wielding the gasoline-topped bottles known as "Molotiv cocktails" while the other non-violent "freaks" oppose the police chuckleheads every which way they can. The bodies are dropping like flies, and the rank and file are feeling the heat. In the middle of this confusion Sparrow must find a way to let the sun shine in on the truth, even if it means a shakeup inside the department.

When he runs into Amy Cole, he becomes guilty of consorting with the enemy. David Daniel draws this bittersweet reomance with tenderness and subtlety. We see how Amy, a young reporter from back East, has been radicalized by a series of rapid events, the assassination of JFK, the war in Viet Nam that claimed a boyfriend and now threatens the life of her youthful teen brother, and drugs of course. What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? She works for an alternative free newspaper and thus she has connections the cops badly envy, for as a hippie herself she has some understanding of the LSD trade and it becomes pretty apparent that "White Rabbit" acid may be one of the keys to the bizarre and superviolent crimes, which resemble sex crimes except there's been no apparent sexual assault. At the same time a group of Maoist revolutionaries are planning their own counterplot. The tension is so thick you could cut it with an ax. David Daniel has written other novels of crime, but the themes and characters of WHITE RABBIT seem to have touched a nerve in him, for he writes with more verve and invention than ever before.

I came late to this book, which must have been out a few years by now, and I have to confess I only read it because Peter Abrahams wrote the blurb--Peter Abrahams, America's best thriller writer. And also Ray Manzarek from The Doors--how cool is that?

Daniel provides a good mystery, a thrilling story, and a walk back through the "Summer of Love," in White Rabbit, a page-turner that is also of the highest literary quality. Not to be missed...not only for those former flower children who lived through Haight-Ashbury, not only for Boomers who wished they had, but for all readers who enjoy a good scare, a good mystery, and a wonderfully-written book--something rarely seen in this genre. The 60s setting is amazing. You can almost smell the pot...you can certainly smell the flowers...and the blood.

White Rabbit is first and foremost a good story well told. Set against the backdrop of San Fransico and the Summer of Love, Daniel captures a slice of Americana, without sentimentalizing it, and portrays the charcters through defly drawn scenes as the characters respond to the times and to each other carrying the story along.
The story glides as the main characters find and keep their humanity through the maze of powerful music, new ideals truly and twistedly expressed, social institutions that both grind down and allow for freedom, and the crazy, dog-legged trail of one person whose childhood and Vietnam experiences can't be left behind.
It's a good read. Daniel trusts both the story and his chararcters enough to let them speak for themselves; this is a great gift and let's the story pull the reader into it.
If you like a book you can't put down, pick White Rabbit up (I even took it to work and read it on breaks!) Kudos to Daniel for a story well told.

1967 has been called rock and roll's greatest year and music is always playing somewhere in WHITE RABBIT. Fragments of songs sprinkled in the text prompt frequent nostalgia trips. The Viet Nam war's effect on many characters' lives also resonates with the effect the Iraq war has on lives today. This was a terrific book, successful on every side! The characters and language of the time are right on and the story is compelling. As all the forces come together, WHITE RABBIT becomes impossible to put down.

In a wonderfully written book, David Daniel has taken the reader back to 1967 Haight-Ashbury and the Summer of Love. In a wild trip you will experience music,love, drugs, murder and mayhem.

There is a killer loose and the victims are as nameless and lost as he/she is. Partner a down on his luck San Francisco inspector with a young, attractive writer for an underground newspaper and you have an odd couple hoping to catch an elusive prey before The Summer of Love becomes The Summer of Blood.

I recommend this book for all of you who were there in the 60s' and all of you who wish that you were.

In 1967 everybody coming to San Francisco seems to wear flowers in their hair as the city gears up to what seems as a half million strong during the summer of love. However, someone does not want somebody to love, killing three hippies and mutilating their smiling faces in the Haight district. Well-respected SFPD detective John Sparrow works the investigation that has made the usually cool city streets hotter than a matchstick.

At a news conference, underground newspaper The Rag reporter Amy Cole introduces herself to John, but neither trusts the other. She sees him as a kind of a drag pig unable to accept an alternate lifestyle. He believes she is just another associate of the drugged crazies. Though unhappy together, they need to make up their mind and come together to insure a murderer pays the pied piper. Demanding his respect, she guides him through doors closed by those residents, who all they need is love, a joint, and no interaction with oinkers claiming to have built this city. Soon both become believers that teaming up may enable them to stop, stop, stop a killer.

If this novel were just a nostalgic piece the Woodstock Generation would still want to read it. However, instead David Daniel scribes a pleasant police procedural that provides the audience with a reflective look back at the love summer in the City on the Bay. The investigation is cleverly designed so that cross-generation readers will gain plenty of pleasure from this treasure that lets the sun shine on the Age of Aquarius.

Harriet Klausner

Everyone else has already explained what the book is about, so I will just give my opinion of it.

This strikes me as an idea the author had that was so good he started writing immediately, but then as time passed and the story got longer and longer he had less and less interest in it until finally he decided to end it as quickly as possible without regard to tying up loose ends in the plot.

The book starts out strong and then gets weaker and weaker until finally it stops abruptly with only the killings resolved in an "easy-way-out" style ending.

The author failed to develop a lot of the characters and relationships as well as he could. He barely gets into some of them and his explanation of the relationship between Amy and her cousin, Glenn, in Vietnam was so poor that one reviewer on here actually thought he was her boyfriend. The author doesn't bother himself too much with side plots. He starts them and then abandons them at will and the ones he does resolve are handled in an off-handed, careless manner. People are just thrown together in this book with only a paragraph or two of backstory and then they drift away from each other and the author never bothers to explain why. Plus I think a lot of the stuff that happens in this book is just thrown in to fill up space between the front cover and the back.

The band, The New Riders of the Apocalypse, are mentioned on just about every page and are constantly hinted at as though they are tied into the killings somehow; the singer even is given some spooky powers at one point, but then the author seemingly abandons that avenue and the band ends up serving no purpose at all in the book, except just to be everywhere at all times.

These faults could be ignored if the murderer was at least original and edgy, but the killings are anti-climatic and all the same and the killer isn't dynamic or interesting in the least. He is just a kid who is killing because of something that has to do with his dead friends in Vietnam. I don't know, the author got bored and ended the story before he got around to explaining the murderer's motives fully.

The story is bad, but I gave it three stars because the author has talent and potential and his writing style is actually decent, just this book (and maybe the mystery genre altogether) was not something he should have bothered with.

This book is a well written mystery about a San Francisco police officer tracking down a serial killer while simultaneously keeping a crazed colleague from head bashing hippies, because, yes, it is set during the *summer of love,* 1967. It is almost painful for me to read -- all those ideals that seemed so real at the time, and so many of them didn't work out the way we thought they would. But, hey! It is still a great story! Enjoy!