Middle of Nowhere

May 29, 2000
"Blue Flu" is running through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department, and life's not easy for the few cops who've chosen to buck the union and remain on the job. Among them is Lt. Lou Boldt, the relentless crime fighter and star of Pearson's outstanding series, whose loyalty to law and order tends to suck him into more than his share of life's complications. With 90% of the force calling in sick, Boldt has to shoulder an enormous caseload, yet a strange series of burglaries worries him the most. During one of the hits, a strikebreaking police officer was savagely attacked, her neck broken. When two other officers are mauled in similar fashion, and Boldt himself is badly beaten, a sickening prospect emerges: the cops who are on strike are retaliating against the cops still on the job. Yet it may not be that simple. Some of the crimes could be the handiwork of Bryce Abbot Flek, a crafty career criminal who has devised an ingenious method of coaxing people out of the homes he wants to burglarize. Along the way, Flek has also developed a searing hatred for Boldt, whom he holds responsible for the death of his brother, who was killed in prison shortly after a visit from the lieutenant. Pearson (The Pied Piper) never quite masters the intersection of these two disparate story lines, yet they eventually converge in a well-devised finale. This seventh Boldt thriller packs all of Pearson's usual wallop: it boasts simmering suspense, a plot with a level of detail that comes only from painstaking research, and dynamic chemistry between Boldt and his colleagues and family. Somewhat less effective is Pearson's latest stab at working current events into his books. His detailed explanation of how cell phones can be effective police tools fails to captivate and slows the story's otherwise torrid pace. 125,000 first printing; $300,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Mystery Guild selections; audio rights to Brilliance; 11-city author tour.

May 15, 2000
In his new Detective Lou Boldt thriller, Pearson (The First Victim) whisks the reader on a lightning-paced chase through the grisly sights and sounds of Seattle's seedy underbelly. With cops out on strike, burglaries are rampant; Boldt is among the loyal blues showing up to investigate the burglaries and a brutal attack on a female officer. When he and other cops are assaulted, he suspects that the strikers are warning them for not observing the walkout. Boldt's detective work leads him to a telemarketing prisoner in Denver and his volatile burglar brother, who is tied to criminal cop activity in Seattle. On a personal front, Boldt is drifting away from his noble wife, so it's no surprise when his love interest, police psychologist Daphne Matthews, has a kiss for him too tempting to resist. Readers will be riveted as Boldt's invigorating pursuit leads to a truly electrifying denouement. Highly recommended for all collections.--Molly Gorman, San Marino, CA

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2000
Just what is it about Ridley Pearson that makes him the best damn thriller writer on the planet? We've celebrated the forensic detail, the taut plotting, the multidimensional characters, and the screw-tightening suspense, but lots of fiction writers do all that. Here's a theory: Pearson is a master at manipulating opposites. His stories are forever jumping from high concept to small scale, from positive to negative charges, manipulating our emotions and minds with their polar hip-hopping. Take this latest example, in which Seattle police lieutenant Boldt and forensic psychologist Matthews must contend not only with a string of robbery assaults--one victim of which is a fellow officer--but also with the effects of a "blue flu" that has left the department seriously understaffed and riddled with internal conflict. We jump from marvelously detailed micromoments of forensic discovery--using triangulation to track the location of a cell-phone--to the high drama of a climactic shoot-out worthy of Peckinpah; from Boldt's ongoing, multileveled marital crisis, in which a raised eyebrow or a ringing telephone carry Jamesian levels of meaning, to a spectacularly choreographed chase scene in which a suspect is tracked across Seattle, on and off buses, in and out of shopping malls. This bipolar narration works not only between scenes but almost simultaneously within the same scene. Take the interchanges between Boldt and Matthews--utterly professional one moment, erotically charged the next, and with every moment holding the potential to become its opposite. That's the key, really: in a Pearson novel, there is no terra firma. He moves the ground from under his readers' feet more skillfully and more believably than any of his fellow writers. One of the reasons we like to read thrillers, after all, is that the terra in our own lives is altogether too firma. Pearson takes us to a very different place, but it is still a recognizably real place in which flesh-and-blood characters live lives that, at one pole at least, are quite like ours. But not for long. ((Reviewed April 1, 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)