Hard Rain

Thriller about a Vietnam war vet who steals a man and a little girl and the wife has to hunt them down and find them.

"Jessie felt along the wall until she came to a switch. She flicked it. Nothing happened. She moved along the hall and tried the next switch she came to. Again nothing happened, except her fingers got wet. She tried a few more switches and gave up. Slowly she made her way past rooms once overflowing with the barn painters and their music, now full of shadows, to the kitchen. She smelled burned sugar. The kitchen lights were out too. Jessie felt through drawers until she found a box of wooden matches. She lit one and looked around the room. Except for one chair, overturned on the floor, everything seemed exactly the same as the day before. There was even a cookie sheet on the table, bearing chocolate-chip cookies in neat rows. Jessie touched one of them. Still slightly warm. The power hadn’t been out for long. She was thinking about that when she noticed something about her hand, caught for a moment in the circle of yellow match light. The tips of her fingers were red."

HARD RAIN is a novel of exquisite torments, as much for the reader as for the characters. That's a good thing. Peter Abrahams is the master of show-don't-tell, and this novel, like his others, is full of people who never answer questions as directly as the questioners would wish, instead dropping clues about themselves and what they know —carelessly and otherwise—that the questioners string together just in time, or just a little too late, to help them contain trouble or get back what they've lost. His characters use silence and non sequiturs to delightfully torturous effect, making the reader feel like a lover suffering from the world's most exquisite and extended foreplay before the heavens collapse and the seas rush in. And the frustration, suffered with nine thousand percent of one's sensory attention, knowing that every skill cell is being awakened and attended to, knowing that the payoffs will come and they'll be worth it, and what make Abrahams's novels such a great reading experience, once that demands and rewards repeated repeats.

I'm not explaining this well, possibly because explanations—the flatly expository, info-dumpy kind—are hard to come by in Peter Abrahams novels. So I'll just explain: It is one of the best of his early novels, an oeuvre-within-an-oeuvre I think of as the "For some, the war never ended" oeuvre. It is a thriller, though that feels like not quite the right term, given that the works of Abrahams, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates in a New Yorker review of another of his novels, "seem to suggest, despite their allegiance to genre, a fascination with something beyond mere form." He's more interested in character, in atmosphere, in the things said through thick silences. As Oates says: "Often the prose is coolly deployed as a camera, gliding over the surfaces of things, pausing to expose vanity, foolishness, pathos."

Some of my favorite bits of that prose:

— "She didn’t mind the rain, never had. It was probably part of the same complex that made her a sucker for Jane Eyre, guitar players, painters and all the rest."

— "The sun had set; the sodium moon had risen, but fog was rolling in, dulling its glow and spreading an orange sfumato through the night."

— "In two hundred years, Americans still hadn’t learned to feel comfortable without a titled class. That failure was responsible for their nervous energy, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the behavior of headwaiters in Manhattan. And names like Jameson Tucker Phinney."

— "The Morgan campus was the kind that came to mind when someone said 'college.' It had broad lawns, green even in November; ancient spreading trees; and impressive buildings—Georgian, Greek Revival, Federal, Colonial. Harold Lloyd could have walked out of any door."

— "His reflection flashed by in the mirror—a broad, powerful figure with a long curved scar on the right shoulder and a shorter one on the left thigh, like brackets around a qualifying clause."

— "So far, she had coped with Kate’s disappearance like a bloodhound: searching for her trail, nose to the ground. That hadn’t worked. Perhaps it was time to step back, to see from the perspective of the bloodhound’s handler. That meant putting her thoughts in order. It meant developing an explanation for Kate’s disappearance first, finding her trail second."

OK, but what of the story? HARD RAIN is the story of Jessie Shapiro, an L.A. woman whose daughter has gone missing, along with her ex-husband. It is the story of Bao Dai, an escaped prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, though at the time of this story the war appears to have been at least a decade in history's rearview mirror. It is the story of Ivan Zysmchuk, an operative of some U.S. government agency, who is treated like an ineffectual joke of sorts in his office for no other reason than the fact that he's in his ate fifties. It is the story of the Frames: a U.S. senator, his philandering wife, and their son, who apparently died in Vietnam. It is the story of drugs and free love and hippie communes and Vermont farmhouses and college rebellion, and of Soviet spies and blackmail and false identities. It is also the story of the guitar that Jimi Hendrix played at Woodstock.

It is the story of how all these people and things come together one terrible night, with complete plausibility.

HARD RAIN is not a perfect novel. Third acts are not Abrahams' strongest suit; the twists often depend on events being stage-managed to within an inch of their lives, with characters constantly appearing just in time for something, or just in time to miss something, until they pile up in the final chapters like characters in a Broadway farce by Michael Frayn or Tom Stoppard. They're always just happening to spot something that tells them about two-thirds of the things they want to know.

But, you either go with these things in the service of experiencing HARD RAIN's deeper pleasures, or you don't. I submit you'd be poorer for your reading experience if you didn't. Just because that hand on your leg might be a few degrees too cool doesn't mean you want it to stop doing that thing it's doing, or stop it from getting where it wants to go.

This book was a big disappointment. The beginning was ultra confusing, and once I figured out who was who, most of the characters were total sleazeballs. Jessie ended up performing like Wonder Woman to locate her ex-husband and her daughter, including surviving a freezing blizzard.

Hard Rain is a nail-biter of a suspense novel, part mystery and part espionage thriller, and Peter Abrahams is a writer with credentials as long as your arm, including being Stephen King’s favorite American suspense novelist. After reading this skillfully woven tale I can see why. My thanks go to Net Galley and Open Road Integrated Media for the free galley. It was one wild ride!

Hard Rain is set in the period after Vietnam, but prior to the time when satellites revolutionized our means of communication. Our opening scenes involve a mysterious, sinister fellow named Bao Dai. His murder of a stranger for no apparent reason sets the reader on edge, and the surreal tone the writer lends is better than anything I have ever seen. In fact, the writing style and pacing are so brilliant that until I stumbled across some unexpected but fairly glaring problems in the last quarter of the book, it was headed for a five star review and a home on my favorites list. But more about that later.

Our chief problem, once the initial set up flashes past us, is that Jessie’s daughter is missing. Her ex-husband, Pat Rodney, took her for the weekend. They were going to go fishing, and then she was going to be returned to Jessie in time for a birthday party. But they never made it to the fishing boat, and there are some ominous messages on Pat’s answering machine. Kate never came home, and Jessie has no clue where she is.The cops aren’t all that concerned, seeing it as a routine custody violation that will surely be resolved on its own, but Pat has never been responsible, and has never ever wanted full custody; Jessie just doesn’t think he would snatch her. Her best friend, Barbara, is a no-holds-barred lawyer, and she’s ready to get down to business, but she is killed by a hit and run driver as she goes to cross Jessie’s street, wearing Jessie’s yellow rain slicker. That one person was the entire cavalry; now Jessie is on her own.

It just doesn’t look good.

The trail takes Jessie to Bennington College in Vermont. Pat was originally from Vermont, and she thinks he may have gone home, or at least contacted his family. And once there, all hell breaks loose. A particularly harrowing scene involves a chase scene in a subterranean tunnel beneath the dormitories.

A parallel storyline that blinks in and out has to do with an aging spy named Zyzmchuk, who is about to be sent out to pasture. Keith and Dahlin, a snappy, younger pair of more business-like spooks, plan one further adventure for “Zyz” in the hope that when it’s over, he’ll either be dead or leave quietly. These two, for some reason, made me think of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the two sinister advisers that did President Nixon’s bidding at times, and at other times kept him on a leash to keep him from acting crazier than he already was. Maybe it’s because I am also reading Tim Weiner’s galley about the Nixon presidency. I have to say that of all the myriad characters that wink in and out of this complex, deliberately disorienting story, Keith and Dahlin are my favorites.

The imagery, with water and falling being constant themes throughout this spooky story, is among the best I have read, together with a deceptively simple sentence pattern that creates suspense in something of a house-that-Jack-built fashion. I still can’t figure out how he does it. It’s uncanny, and really absorbing.

So, even with the problems toward the end, is this creepy novel worth your time and money? Assuming you enjoy this sort of story, I have to say yes, it is. In fact, this writer won the Edgar earlier in his career, and that early title is now on my to-read list. I probably won’t find it as a galley, which means I have to hunt it down at the library, or fish around for it on my annual pilgrimage to Powell’s City of Books. So what follows was not enough to cross this writer off my A list, by any means. And now if you read further, there are going to be spoilers, so if you want to read this yourself and not know how the ending shakes out—or at least bits of it—this is the place to quit reading. And for those skimming, I will make it more obvious:

*****SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT!!!*****

We are 75% of the way into the story. Jessie has been beaten by bad guys, and has been rescued, medical attention sought by our very own spook, Zyzmchuk. He is keeping an eye on her partly for her own good (awww), but also so that she doesn’t get in his way, because her mission interferes with part of his. He sets a guard to watch her when he has to go out, but otherwise, he sits in a chair in her hotel room there in New England, keeping watch over her. She is a sweet young thing still; he is retirement age.

And so there she is, with a nasty concussion and a number of other bad injuries, worried about her missing child, and so what would be more natural than inviting this duffer, a man as ancient as I am now, to come climb in bed with her so they can have great sex?

What the hell?

“’Shit,’ said Dahlin.
“’Fuck’, said Keith.’”

Okay, that quote belongs much earlier in the book (and more than once), but I like it here just as well, so I have taken the liberty of inserting it. Because really…what is that about? Did someone in marketing decide the book needed some gratuitous sex in order to sell properly? Go figure.

At the 85% we have to wonder whether some bad editor also cut out a chunk of story that should have been more judiciously and lightly pruned, because when Jessie sneaks out of her hotel room to try to find her daughter, she returns to find that Zyz, the guard Zyz posted while he stepped out, and all other apparent spooks and body guards have decamped. We, the readers, know that the guard in her hotel room was killed after she snuck out, but we don’t know where the hell Zyz went. And the next time we run across him, he is strolling into his office in Washington as if nothing untoward ever occurred. There is never any real explanation for this bizarre leap in the plot.

All that said, once again, I would happily read more of this author’s work. His capacity to create a frisson of chilly suspense far outweighs the Hollywood-like choice to dump the hot chick in bed with the old guy, as well as what may have been an editor’s error toward the conclusion.


*****END OF SPOILER ALERT!*****

This book will be released digitally July 28. What better way to spend a summer vacation? Just stay out of the water, and definitely keep an eye on your kids. You won’t want them out of your sight while you read this story!

I enjoyed it, though not as much as I usually enjoy Abrahams' books. Some nice twists and turns, and I could definitely feel the angst of Jessie's character.

I liked this. Unexpected grit from my favorite feel-good mystery writer!

About half way through the book, I figured out the mystery, but I didn't have any idea how it was all going to play out. Very good book, I definitely want to read more by this author.

More twists than a pretzel

Very enjoyable read. The plot twists were unexpected and I thought the characters were well developed. Looking forward to reading more by this author.