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Kunma

by Frank Corsaro

Forge, 336 pages, hardback, 2003

Unorthodox psychotherapist David Sussman has a new client, Laurel Hunt. From the descriptions, you might be forgiven if you occasionally leafed back to check that David is indeed a psychotherapist, not a Black Mask-style P.I., because this babe has the legs, the curves and the wherewithal. She also has a problem: her semi-estranged husband's in hospital with an undiagnosed condition; his business partner (and her recent amorous partner) has been discovered murdered in London with his tongue ripped out; and she thinks everything's the fault of a malevolent supernatural entity.

David thinks she's disturbed.

He also thinks she's hot.

She thinks he's hot, too.

It doesn't take long before P.I. (sorry, psychotherapist) and client are clapping more than lustful eyes on each other. However, as David soon has to admit, Laurel has a point, because David's charlatan-psychic pal Ara, to whom David sent her for a consultation, turns up with his tongue ripped out. Guided by his other pal Peter – all three of David, Ara and Peter went off a while back to study at an Indian ashram – David soon discovers that the root of Laurel's problems is himself.

In a previous incarnation he was a Tibetan abbot who schemed to instal a protege in place of the Dalai Lama. The scheme was exposed and the abbot horribly executed. The protege was sexually abused and had his tongue ripped out. He promised to avenge the abbot's death, but was unsuccessful during that lifetime. Taunted as "Kunma" – soul-stealer – the protege has come back in this new reincarnatory cycle as a supernatural monster, capable of possessing people (Laurel's husband) and still intent on exacting vengeance against the reincarnated versions of the punishers.

Oh, and Laurel's young son Chris is the new Dalai Lama but nobody knows it yet.

There's quite a lot more like this, all culminating in an incredibly confusing face-off with a pack (it says here) of vultures at the top of a mesa in New Mexico. I say it's incredibly confusing, because at least one of the characters, if I was following things aright, is in two places at once. The vultures certainly find it all zoologically confusing; we're told that "the abbot watched dazedly as they rushed like lemurs toward destruction."

Frank Corsaro is Artistic Director of the Juilliard Opera Center, and is in general a pretty prestigious sort of a fellow – possibly famous, although, er, I'm not the best judge of that. The writing is atrocious, which makes for occasional giggles but is more often just outright tedious – I would have given up had I not been reading this book for review. The editorial standards emulate those of iUniverse or xLibris. The research manages to be both superficial and heavy-handed. The plotting is risible.

This is shoddy publishing. Of course, plenty of bad books are published for commercial reasons. But, when they hand over their $24.95, readers have a certain right to expect the publisher has made at least some effort with the "product" they're paying for. Otherwise the $24.95 is being taken under false pretenses.

—Crescent Blues

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