Peril
by Thomas H. Cook
Bantam Dell, 320 pages, hardback, 2004
Sara Labriola is, in a rather small way, married to the Mob: her husband Tony runs a legitimate enough business, but her father-in-law Leo is a vicious operator in the lower Mob echelons. Although Tony hasn't inherited Dad's vileness, he has been indoctrinated into believing some of Dad's rather more reprehensible attitudes concerning the roles of husbands and wives. Constrained from pursuing any activity that might interest her, condemned to spend her time picking up dirty underwear after Tony, realizing that she's hit middle-age and the future is going to be only endlessly more of the same, she yearns even for the somewhat grim days before she met Tony. Then she was a torch singer of occasionally purchasable morals, but at least she wasn't stifled.
Being fortunately childless – for shame! – one day she ups and flees her comfortable Long Island home for the anonymity of New York, taking neither car nor credit cards. She's untraceable. Or is she? Tony, slowly realizing the error of his ways, is eager to find her, not necessarily to bring her back but at least to talk to her so that he may have some sense of closure. Leo wants to track her too, ostensibly to bring back his son's wife but in fact to destroy her.
A small-time semi-crook called Mortimer is in serious hock to Leo. Mortimer has just been told he has only three months to live, so were all other things equal he'd be unmoved by Leo's death threats. However, he understands these would extend to his widow. He therefore complies when told to bring into the game the services of Stark, an enigmatic figure whose expertise is finding lost people – whether or not they wish to stay lost. (Stark? Donald E. Westlake fans, see below.)
Other involved characters include the barman Abe, the sole person whom Mortimer entrusts with the secret of his impending demise and also – by very stretched coincidence – the guy whom Sara approaches in Manhattan seeking a job as a singer; and Caruso, a hood forever seeking to turn hitman. Caruso has a fanatical loyalty to Leo, to whom he believes he owes everything.
Peril is made up the interlocking tales of these various people, constructed rather in the way of a typical Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, although there the resemblance ends. (The style is more reminiscent of Donald E. Westlake in his "Richard Stark" mode.) As we are given the pieces of the plot to jigsaw together, a sort of inexorable momentum builds up; the tension is very real. Everyone wants to locate Sara except Sara herself, who wants to lose Sara and rediscover the woman she once was. Who will find her first? Her life depends on it.
A couple of the main characters are quite brilliantly depicted: Mortimer and especially Tony, who goes through a gradual attitudinal sea-change that's masterfully handled. But Leo's vileness seems sketched rather than painted in, and Sara's vapidity, although wonderfully captured in a lovely, lovely piece of characterization, makes it hard to care as much about her fate as you perhaps should.
You'll certainly enjoy Peril, and almost certainly you'll become snared in the working out of its various converging strands, but even just a few days after you've finished it you may find you have difficulty remembering its resolution. This is a top-quality piece of journeyman craftsmanship – nothing at all wrong with that, but it's not Cook at his best. Cook at his best, though, is equalled by few, so who's complaining?
—Crescent Blues