Despite the recent success of Mary Willis Walker's Under the
Beetle's Cellar (p. 818) and Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave (p.
965), this interminable inquest into a similar crime - a crazed
gunman's assault on a busful of schoolchildren - suggests that no
suspense formula is foolproof. "This is not, repeat not, a criminal
investigation," forensic psychiatrist Dr. Leander Heartwood tells
his unwilling partner, Special Agent Gabriel Chin, of the
California Department of Justice. But their assignment - to compile
a "psychological autopsy" that will explain why Duane Boggs opened
fire on a field trip to Sutter's Mill, killing 14 of 26 mostly
Asian-American students - sounds just like that, especially after
evidence indicates that Boggs, who seemed incapable of planning
this kind of crime anyway, had help killing himself at the scene.
After a survey of Boggs's few friends, a dalliance with the KKK and
the White Aryan Resistance, and a brief look at Boggs's kinky kid
brother Duane Tipton, Heartwood and Chin settle on Boggs's coworker
Mace Weathers as his most likely accomplice. Though Weathers, a
Mormon weight-lifter who lost an eye in defending his own Asian
girlfriend against a bunch of skinheads, doesn't seem to fit the
profile of the coolheaded bigot they're after, Heartwood and Chin
battle the cliches - their squabbles over tuff and procedure, the
frequent switches to Weathers's point of view, the reverential tone
toward psychological profiling, which you'd swear had never been
used by any actual or fictional detectives before - to spring a
trap on Weathers, who's planning an encore with another cat's-paw.
But without the uncertainty that's lost in all those closeups of
Weathers, there's not much suspense, and even less originality, to
their game of cat and mouse. All the size and sweep you'd expect
from Caputo (Means of Escape, 1991, etc.), but hurt by his lack of
familiarity with the conventions of a genre he seems to think he's
invented himself. (Kirkus Reviews)
On a quiet morning in California, a lone gunman opens fire on a
busload of children headed for a field trip, then turns the gun on
himself. Forensic psychiatrist Leander Heartwood and special agent
Gabriel Chin team up to investigate the case, seeking at first only
to solve this single disturbing crime but in time delving into
issues of race, morality, and the complex forces at work in all
horrifying acts of violence.
Part mystery, part psychological thriller, part piercing social
commentary, Equation for Evil is a riveting and incisive meditation
on violence and the nature of evil.
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