Florida thriller has the right resume
By JEAN HELLER
Published October 24, 2005
Shock Wave, By James O. Born
James O. Born comes to novel writing with all the right expertise to create a thriller: He is an agent of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and has been a U.S. marshal and an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. And he is good enough at writing and plotting - with a couple of missteps at characterization - to keep readers interested in Shock Wave, his second outing.
FDLE Agent Bill Tasker finds himself squared off against the FBI again, the same FBI that framed him and nearly got him killed in Born's debut, Walking Money. This time Tasker is tipped to the pending sale of a stolen Stinger missile, something you really don't want falling into the hands of terrorists.
He drafts the help of his longtime buddy, Miami cop Derrick Sutter. They also bring in Camy Parks, an agent with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and inevitably the FBI, to help grab the bad guys and the missile before they can do any damage. In the process, an ambitious and off-the-wall FBI agent looking for advancement implicates a handyman named Daniel Wells in the Stinger deal, and the FBI arrests Wells.
When Tasker determines that Wells had nothing to do with the deal, he moves heaven and earth to get the charges dropped, incurring the wrath of both the FBI and ATF. The relationships sour further when Tasker begins to think that though Wells might be innocent where the Stinger deal is concerned, he is guilty of something much bigger, and might even have deadlier plans.
But the FBI and ATF have written off Tasker as a screw-up, so he and Sutter are in the mess alone, at least for a while.
Sutter, a black man with no end of self-assurance when it comes to police work and women, is an especially appealing character. Tasker is your basic can-do hero, a divorced but loving ex-husband and a good father. He is well-drawn and interesting. Camy Parks has an altogether too-weird taste in men and could use some depth.
But it is with his drawing of the FBI agents that Born leaves something to be desired. Jimmy Lail, a rural Texas white boy, can't keep himself from pretending to be a black street dude, and he is completely annoying. Perhaps he is supposed to be, but I cringed every time he showed up in the story until he got a well-earned payback at the end.
The rest of the FBI entourage falls into the fiction mold we see all too often when police agencies try to assert their individual interests on the same case. They clash. That's real.
But Born paints the FBI agents as arrogant, lazy and occasionally corrupt. All of them. It is a thriller cliche that the FBI forever tries to thwart and subvert the work of other law enforcement agencies. Inevitably, cliches have some inkling of truth, and Born might have encountered some FBI obstructionist behavior in his real-life work. But I'm personally tired of seeing it used as a device to build tension in novels.
But that's just me.
Even with that quibble, I can nonetheless recommend Shock Wave as a readable novel with fresh plot angles and a most intriguing and unexpected conclusion.
"Shock Wave," by James O. Born, Putnam, $24.95, 287 pages.
Reviewer Jean Heller is the author of the mystery-thrillers "Handyman" and "Maximum Impact."
MEET THE AUTHORJames O. Born will appear at the Times Festival of Reading from 2 to 2:45 p.m. Saturday at USF St. Petersburg, Davis Hall 105.