The Superman Project

Starred review from June 21, 2010
Roman's excellent second Chico Santana mystery (after 2009's Chinatown Angel), another hard-boiled whodunit, finds the endearing New York City PI in bad shape, reduced to living in his small Bronx office on the eve of a divorce from his wife of a decade. Then 18-year-old Pablo Sanchez, "about 250 soft pounds of fat," and Pablo's mother, Esther, who's "wearing an old ‘Obama for President' campaign button," walk in the door. Pablo needs Chico's help tracing a missing couple: Brooklyn artist Gabby Gupta and her husband, Joey Valentin, with whom she was at odds and thus the NYPD's prime person of interest. Joey happens to be a childhood crony of Chico's. Pablo, a janitor working for a spiritual self-improvement center known as the Superman Project, is convinced that forces out to destroy the project framed Joey. Despite himself, Chico begins to buy into the conspiracy theory, especially after someone murders Esther. Roman keeps the action moving all the way through a wicked sting toward the end.

July 15, 2010

In his second adventure (Chinatown Angel, 2009), Bronx peeper Chico Santana searches for an old pal and gets caught in the coils of a cult.

Over the transom come the Sanchezes, mother and son, prospective clients for Chico Santana and Company, a fledgling p.i. firm in serious need of cash flow. But there's a downside. Fee? What fee? Money? Something better than money is vaguely promised. Still, no latter-day knight errant can pass up a gig that involves an old friend gone missing. Chico had grown up with Joey Valentin, who's not merely missing but suspected of having harmed his equally missing wife. So Chico signs on and soon enough is in almost as much trouble as his vanished friend. He labors to work out the nature of "The Superman Project" and Joey's connection to it. Though Chico—and perhaps the reader—will struggle for a definition less ambiguous than a kind of upscale self-help cult, with a certain Father Ravi as chief guru, it's clear some people smell money in it. Now that Father Ravi is ailing, there's suddenly a take-no-prisoners war to determine the Project's new leadership. Rival claimants clamor, body bags fill and Chico will be hard-pressed to stay alive long enough to make sense of the fallout when a visionary idea turns into a mare's nest.

Chico's warmth and appeal are undeniable, but the plot goes beyond implausible.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
Bronx PI Chico Santana is living in his office and accepting work for food. One job is caring for Max, a precocious eight-year-old girl whose father was murdered in Detroit (the food comes with an apartment). The second is to find his now-missing boyhood friend Joey Valentin and his wife, Gabby Gupta. Gabby is one of the four daughters of Father Ravi Gupta, creator of TSP, The Superman Project, a scam posing as a human-potential program based on Nietzsche, Hinduism, and comic-book mythology. As in Chinatown Angel (2009), Chico finds himself awash in multigenerational family dysfunction, as well as double-dealing, obfuscation, willful women, and murder. Roman has fun with the moronic TSP, and the machinations of its disciples are as confused as the programs doctrines. Soulful Chico remains an engaging hero, and Chicos New York remains a fascinating ethnic gallimaufry. Perhaps its appropriate that most of the TSP schemers are as two-dimensional as . . . well, minor comic-book characters like Jimmy Olsen and Perry White.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)