Colin Harrison (1)Rezensionen

Nicely written dark NYC suspense thriller - perhaps not his best, but sharply astute about human nature and the dynamics of NYC society life, well-plotted, and fun.

Outstanding NY noir - a cut above most mysteries - gorgeous writing, deep human insights, intricate, flawless plotting - really outstanding.

A lot of different GR views about this new book by Colin Harrison. I really like the depth of his characters and his descriptive writing, most especially his feel for New York and its diverse residents. There is a lot of obsession for both the protagonist (an immigration lawyer, from a modest family) and the antagonist (a very successful international banker, with great wealth) and some brutal crimes surrounding the beautiful blonde wife of the Iranian antagonist and a decorated war hero. Some of the tangents that Harrison chooses are a bit much though. I sure hope we don't have to wait another eight years for his next book.

I truly enjoy Harrison's gritty writing and his characters: Christina Welles (a released convicted felon, trying to get her life back together), Rick Bocca (her ex-lover, crook, who has become a recluse fisherman), and to a lesser extent, Charlie Ravitch (a fighter pilot, POW, turned technology businessman.) Welles and Bocca's former mob boss is looking for revenge and willing to do anything to get it. Too much slaughter and sex in this novel.

I think Harrison is a terrific writer. Suspensful, but looks deep into his characters. In this novel, a newspaper columnist is seduced by a sex widow to investigate the death of her husband, a famous film director. In digging into his private film library, the columnist finds critical evidence and the owner of the newspaper seeks yet another film, which has private revelations. Gritty.

After reading the New York Times Book Review about this short novel, I was glad to have read it. I liked how Harrison captured New York City and the unravelling of a sad, but realistic story of a middle-level Wall Street executives life after he is accidentally flattened by a garbage truck. There is real drama lurking in the side plots. Highly recommended.

I like Colin Harrison. Gritty, down to earth. This book tells the story of a rising corporate executive, who lost his wife and unborn baby in a random act of street violence. Drawn into a megamedia merger, he falls for a young mother and her daughter without realizing how much baggage both she and he carry. Some good plot twists, some predictable.

The cover of this book drew me to it when it first came out, and I simply couldn't resist it. Then, it sat on my shelf all this time because the description just didn't seem quite as entrancing as the cover... until I began reading.

Harrison's depiction of a map-collecting New York immigration lawyer, along with the city itself and the all-too-real characters around him, is marvelous. At first, I wasn't even quite sure what sort of story I was reading, but within a few chapters, I couldn't put it down. The tightly wound story is so beautifully written and drawn with such care that it's impossible to call this either suspense or literary fiction--or even anything in between. There's suspense, certainly, as well as crime, romance, and such a deft hand with character that even the smallest of characters seem utterly real.

I'd recommend this to anyone who'd care to be drawn into an intelligent New York story hovering between suspense and literary fiction, and I'll be picking up the rest of Colin Harrison's work now, as well.½

Complicated, exceptionally well-written mystery starring an investigative journalist / columnist, his wife and family and nanny; a beautiful woman; an obese billionaire; an ugly enfant terrible, and dead, filmmaker. There's just a teeny bit of soul missing in the writing and/or the characters. But, well worth the ride.

Terrible novela by Baldacci
Uninspired short stories by others ...

I saw a license plate yesterday that said 'I Miss New York,' so I smashed their window and stole their radio. Sorry, couldn't resist beginning with a one-liner aimed at the city famous for one-liners.

Colin Harrison’s 2017 novel You Belong to Me captures the vibrant, pulsating, dynamic, electrifying surge of the city of New York. Sure, the story features riveting dramas of men and women from all walks of life, super rich to dirt poor, an entire rainbow of nationalities and ethnicities, but through it all, we feel the throbbing of the Big Apple aka Gotham aka Fun City aka the City that Never Sleeps.

As with the author’s previous novels, You Belong to Me is a keen study in sociology. Here's a snippet from a three page reflection on the current state of the union: "The United States, meanwhile, was steadily fracturing into two populations: those few who had enough money and those many who didn’t. Vast sections of the country were economically dead, its inhabitants hypnotized by the Internet, zombied by pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs, and Christian-identity babble, the family structure destroyed by successive decades of divorce, job loss, and domestic violence.”

Jennifer is one of the poor who has traveled to Manhattan to escape the economically dead small city of Reading, Pennsylvania where she never knew her father and her mother became a oxycontin zombie.

Alas, one of thousands of young ladies wishing to make it in the big city. Although Jennifer lacks money and connections, refinement and polish, culture and college, lacks talent of any sort (zero ability to paint, write, dance, act or model), Jennifer comes to New York City a few months shy of age twenty with one incredible advantage – she's not only stunningly beautiful but is a certain kind of perfect American girl, instantly recognizable, bringing to mind Daryl Hannah or Gwyneth Paltrow.



After a few years trading mostly on her looks - catering, girlfriend for lonely, generous Brit, hot real estate agent, Jennifer meets Ahmed, a tall, elegant, brilliant Harvard Law School educated international financial wiz from an Iranian-American family who happens to be incredibly wealthy with the prospect of amassing even greater wealth. However, with his name, his country of origin, the color of his skin and the texture of his hair, there is one thing Ahmed desperately needs to be completely assimilated – an exceptionally attractive all-American girl for a wife. Ahmed pursues Jennifer; Ahmed marries Jennifer, Ahmed has his trophy. And as far as Ahmed is concerned, Jennifer is his, completely his. Thus the novel's title.

The inclusion of Ahmed in the story lets Colin Harrison gracefully segue to observations about the increasing influence of other races and ethnic groups, especially Latinos, Asians and Middle-Easterners, and most especially by all those bright foreign students churned out by the Ivy League who decide to stay in the United States. I would even go so far as to suggest You Belong to Me could be used as supplemental reading in a college course in urban sociology.

Well, at least Jennifer is allowed to be friends with the guy who also lives on the same floor in her swank Upper West Side apartment building - Paul Reeves, a fifty-year-old twice divorced immigration lawyer. Paul’s passion is maps, his specialty, valuable maps of New York City made in the early years, as far back as the mid-1600s. Paul frequents the auctions for rich buyers at Christie’s when maps are the feature items up for sale.


1843 map of Manhattan

The opening chapter of the novel takes place at one such auction at Christie's, where Jennifer, now married to Ahmed who is off in Europe on business, joins Paul as he is about to bid on a map he has had his eye on for years.

Then the unexpected happens: a large young man, well over six feet, dressed in soldier gear appears in the room. Jennifer recognizes him and immediately leaves her seat. He wraps his arms around Jennifer and looks out defiantly for anybody in the room, especially Paul, to interfere. The next moment, the two, Jennifer and the big man, leave together.

As we learn quickly, this hawkish looking soldier, muscular, blonde, sun-beaten, is Billy Wilkerson, recently discharged from the army follow tours in Afghanistan, Somalia and Africa. Billy Wilkerson drove his red truck up from his family's ranch in Texas to New York City to find Jennifer. He and Jennifer go back. The plot quickly thickens. And how.

You Belong to Me is a sizzling. fast-paced crime thriller making more sharp turns than a taxi cab racing from Grand Central Station to Brooklyn. Much of the time we follow Paul Reeves but the focus shifts to a number of other big action players: Ahmed's Influential Uncle in Los Angeles, Ahmed's relative Amir in Hong Kong, Paul's entrepreneurial, yoga practicing girlfriend Rachel, NYC muscle men from Lebanon, Iran, Mexico, a NYC detective, map restoration experts, and, of course, Ahmed, Jennifer, and Billy.

Another neat feature is each of the 52 chapters notes the location for the ensuing action - for example: East Eighty-Second Street and Madison Avenue, Manhattan; North Vine Avenue, Palm Springs, California; Fitness Ultimatum, Queens Boulevard, Queens, New York; Plaza Hotel, Central Park South, Manhattan. In this way, it's as if we are following a map (ah, maps!) as we track the ever accelerating action chapter to chapter.

A major theme to keep in mind: wisdom versus emotions and impulse. Are the younger men and women listening and learning from the older men? (Sorry, the only older woman in the novel is Jennifer's mother, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from wisdom), Can such hard won wisdom be passed on or must people make their own mistakes and learn the hard way?

How much knowledge and insight and richness of perspective is gained with an appreciation of history and geography through maps? What are we to make of Paul's obsession with maps? Curiously, Colin Harrison, also a man obsessed with his map collection, could put much of his own first-hand experience with maps to use in this novel. My sense is Colin and Paul share a good bit in common beyond maps since Colin wrote his novel when in his 50s, the same age range as Paul.

A first-rate read. Highly recommended!


New York City novelist Colin Harrison, born 1960

Paul Reeves in the same room with a much loved map: "Magnificent, the Ratzer. A map used by George Washington to defend the new republic in a time when American was more an idea than anything else and the island of Manhattan a town of a mere twelve thousand souls living in shingled and clapboard wood houses, with the occasional old farmhouse." - Colin Harrison, You Belong to Me

“Colin Harrison is trying to do for New York what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy have done for Los Angeles: map the sinister underbelly of the city, the nexus of greed and lust and ambition that metastasizes there and its dark spawn of larceny and murder.” So wrote Michiko Kakutani in her New York Times review back in 2004 when The Havana Room was first published. Ms. Kakutani went on to write about the book in glowing terms, not something she’s usually known for.

As a big Colin Harrison fan myself, so happens I’m in complete agreement. The Havana Room is one hell of a literary crime thriller, capturing the energy of New York City in startling ways. Here are a batch of Off-Off-Broadway headliners a reader will encounter in its sizzling pages:

The Old Bill Wyeth: Our perceptive, highly intelligent, keenly analytic, articulate narrator is a 39-year old rich, successful lawyer living with his wife and son on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His prospects are bountiful, although he probably will live a conventional, predictable, even what some would consider a boring life, Bill is poised to become even more accomplished in his chosen field of law and incredibly over-the-top wealthy.

The New Bill Wyeth: Then a random spinning of Fortuna's wheel casts this stellar barrister down with a crash: Bill inadvertently causes the death of one of his six-year old son's friends. The son's rich father sues and gets Bill fired; he's forced out of his apartment; his wife Judith can't take it and leaves with son Timothy for San Francisco. Soon thereafter the divorce papers come through. All of a sudden Bill's life is anything but boring - he's a divorced man on the down-and-out skids.

Femme Fatale: Lonely, despondent, unemployed, there's one high spot in Bill's life: he dines at an old New York steakhouse (Ulysses S. Grant and Charles Dickens paid visits) where he meets and gets to know the manager of the establishment: alluring, available, sexy Allison Sparks, a gal who turns out to be a magnet for trouble. Like a ferromagnetic metal, Bill is drawn to Allison, big time. Oh, Bill, if you only knew.



Dastardly Deed: One evening at the restaurant, Allison asks Bill to stand in as real estate lawyer, his specialty, for her friend Jay Rainey. Bill knows he shouldn’t be bullied into agreeing to review contracts and offer advice under a makeshift arrangement with the clock ticking on an unreasonable deadline, but he would be given a chance to impress Allison and also prove to his wounded lawyer ego that he still has what it takes to untangle knotty legal documents. After all, he muses, how far can he fall now that he’s fallen this far? Whoa, Billy! What a blunder! You can spiral much, much further down – and you do.

Rugged Rainey: Big, burly Jay comes off as your typical NYC tough-guy but the more we learn about this well-built athlete raised on a Long Island farm, the more our hearts soften. Likewise, Bill Wyeth begins to appreciate the depth of Jay’s suffering as he goes about unraveling clues to the big man’s blood ties and past tragedies.

Down on the Farm: After all the papers are signed, Jay and Bill take a ride out to the farm that was part of the deal Bill just approved. The men encounter the unexpected: long-time farm hand Herschel is frozen in the driver's seat of a tractor. And what in the world was he trying to bury? The thick plottens.

Dangerous White Collars: The buyer of the farm, Mr. Marceno, a Chilean wine-baron, demands a meeting with Bill Wyeth - he wants to know what is under the land he now owns. He points a threatening finger in Bill's face and says if anything is less than perfect, Mr. Bill, the attorney of record, will be on the receiving end of a mammoth lawsuit.

Dangerous Gold Chains: The relatives of Herschel are upset and demand money for all the hard work over the years poor Herschel put in for the owners of that farm. And that's relatives as in big, strong, mean, dangerous men who will exert all sorts of pressure to get what they want. Are you listenin' to me, Mr. Bill Wyeth! Similar to New York City author Richard Price with novels such as Clockers, Colin Harrison has an excellent ear for the way New Yorkers from all socioeconomic strata talk. With the likes of H.J., Gabriel, Denny, and Lemont, there's the undeniable sense real people are doing real talking.



Dangerous City: New York's mighty heart pulses and pounds, making its urban presence felt on every page. In many ways, this is a tale of the multicultural, multiracial, multi-everything else metropolis, from posh private restaurants, offices and apartments to public dangers lurking, thieves on the streets, plunderers in law firms, all set to pounce on unsuspecting victims who let their guards down.

The Havana Room: The exclusive, very private room in Allison's steakhouse. Among its many secrets contained therein is Mr. Ha serving the rare Shao-tzou fish from China. Eaten the proper way, this fish can produce certain varieties of ecstasy; eaten the wrong way, it can kill you. Who would have guessed? As it transpires, this Chinese fish is a major player in the novel.

Michiko Encore: Here’s the last sentence from Ms. Kakutani’s first-rate review: "Though there's plenty of suspense in this novel, we don't keep reading because of plot pyrotechnics, but because we've come to care about what happens to poor Bill Wyeth, and because Mr. Harrison is a master of mood and atmosphere, and he gives us in these pages a noirish New York that's at once recognizable as the day-lighted city we all work in, and as frightening as the nightmare place we all dread."


New York City author Colin Harrison, Born 1960

"Squatting within the shadows of this rusting, rushing superstructure are businesses that depend upon such a marginal location, where rents are lower, squalor ignored, parking ample and unpoliced: porn shops, taxi garages, car service offices, and so on. It's a bad zone; it was here, for example that a New York City policeman, drinking for twelve hours after his shift ended, some of that time in a strip joint, ran over a pregnant Latina woman and her two children with his van going seventy miles an hour, an event which, for those who believe in such places, sent four souls to heaven and one to the front page of the tabloids." - Colin Harrison, The Havana Room

"My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her."
- Colin Harrison, Bodies Electric

Colin Harrison's novel is not only a thriller but a study in sociology, psychology and cross cultural collisions, a novel of hard-boiled language and fast-paced action. As way of example, here are several quotes from the opening pages:

Thriller - "My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her - not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I'm as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex - of course that was part of it." Jack Whitman is the first-person narrator and this is how the novel opens, an opening Raymond Chandler and his fictional private-eye Phillip Marlow would appreciate.

Sociology - "And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filed with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence's gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to love life faster and harder than was ever meant." The author has Jack Whitman make pointed, telling and sometimes scathing observations about society on nearly every page.

Psychology - "Morrison, second in command in the Corporation, the man everyone feared . . . . Morrison had lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, having survived, he had the confidence of five men. Combat had shown him that we are all merely walking bags of meat, and once a man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes possible." Indeed, Harrison's novel is a study in corporate psychology. One could argue Bodies Electric should be required reading for anybody contemplating a career in the business world, particularly the American business world.

Cross-Cultural Collisions - "What is certain is that as Liz waited for the light, a silver BMW with tinted windows . . . pulled over and someone poked the short metal barrel of a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol over the electric window and started shooting. . . . Liz was right in the way of it." Liz was Jack Whitman's beautiful young pregnant wife and both Liz and her seven month old daughter in the womb were killed by a Harlem gang's bullets. New York City aka the Big Apple as the American melting pot on speed. Harrison loves the city (and he said so directly in an interview) and captures NYC's hyper-energizing hum.

The characters play for high stakes, as well they should, since they are each caught in an emotionally-charged net of circumstances and faced with life and death choices. Regarding our main character, Jack Whitman - he sees the twenty-something cinnamon-skinned beauty with her little four-year-old girl on the subway in two ways: as Madonna and Child and as an exotic sexually-charged object of desire.

In the aftermath of his tragic loss, the magnetic pull is too powerful to resist (one way to think of Whitman's attraction is in terms of Carl Jung's archetype, the "anima"). Whitman hands her his business card and offers help, which turns out to be the first step in a series of events swirling himself and others in unexpected and sometimes dark, violent directions. For my money, Bodies Electric is a modern classic.


American author Colin Harrison, born 1960, has had a lifelong fascination with New York City - the energy with which he writes about the Big Apple shines through on every page.

Here are 10 reasons to put Colin Harrison’s literary thriller on your reading list:

1. The Voice – A cross between Dashiell Hammett hardboiled and Upton Sinclair social commentary. Mr. Harrison has the literary virtuosity to pull it off. You’d have to go a long way to find a writer with a greater command of language. Here’s a quick sample from the first-person narrator and main character, newspaper reporter Porter Wren: “When the column was done my thoughts returned to the previous afternoon, and I suppose that if my marital guilt were a cave, then I meant now to feel along the dark, damp walls for the sharp places and for the size of the cavity I had opened within myself.”

2. The City – As in Manhattan; all the fast-paced action takes place in the Big Apple – it’s as if the streets, subways and all those multistory buildings inject the characters with super-charged vim.

3. The Beautiful Babe – Porter Wren first encounters her at a publishing party. “Her face was no less beautiful as it approached, but I could see a certain determination in her features. Dark brows, blonde hair lifted off her neck. The rope of pearls. Her breasts moved heavily against the silky materials of her gown, which, I now saw, was not white but, more alluringly, the color of the flesh of a peach.” Meet Caroline Crowley, a femme fatale if there ever was one.

4. The Artist – Filmmaker Simon Crowley, Caroline’s dead husband who died a tragic death but left tons of video footage, including a number of very hot clips people in high places would love to get their hands on. In a series of Carolyn’s flashbacks along with Wren’s commentary on Simon appearing in his own videos, we are given a riveting picture of the filmmaker’s character.

5. The Tycoon – Owner of a series of multinational publishing and media companies, a big, fat Australian by the name of Hobbs who visits NYC to establish his presence and oversee the deals. At one point in the story Hobbs anticipates a deal-making phone-call from Rupert Murdoch. Surely it is more than coincidence the tycoon shares his name with 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbs, author of his famous book, ‘The Leviathan’, wherein he wrote how, prior to political community, the natural state of man is nasty, brutish and short. Ironically, as Porter Wren narrates, modern urban life can still be, if not so short, than quite nasty and brutish.

6. The Cop – Hal Fitzgerald is a hard-talking, high-level NYC policeman who deals with Porter Wren and stands for truth and justice, particularly when it comes to a police officer killed in the line of duty. Video footage Wren comes across is high-stakes; even Mayor Giuliani makes a cameo appearance in the novel.

7. The Family – Porter Wren lives in NYC with his brilliant surgeon wife and their young children, all of whom play an important role as the story unfolds and winds around Manhattan’s sharp corners.

8. The Mood – As in nocturne; a pensive, dreamy mood pervades the novel, especially Porter Wren’s nighttime relationship with Caroline Crowley.

9. The Pleasure – This novel is a page-turner. Once you get several pages in you’ll want to keep reading and reading. If you like your literary fiction with a bite, you’ve found your book of the month.

10. The Movie – A novel screaming to be made into a movie - set up the projector and use your own mind and imagination as the screen.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster Canada and NetGalley for providing me with an e-copy of You Belong to Me by Colin Harrison in exchange for any honest review. Paul Reeves, an immigration lawyer and antique New York maps collector, finds himself caught in the middle of the marriage of two of his neighbors. Though he is not involved, he witnesses what can happen when a wife is reunited with a former lover and how her jealous and wealthy husband copes with the situation. The story line winds around many turns and introduces several characters who get involved in this crumbling marriage, one way or another. Few will be standing at the end and the reader will get hooked into following who will do what to whom. A great read that does not disappoint.

An immigration lawyer who collects rare NYC maps; a beautiful blond neighbor cheating on her rich Iranian husband; a pesky, annoying girlfriend; a former Army Ranger from Texas in love with the beautiful blond - how could anything possibly go wrong with any of that? On the gritty streets of New York, it certainly does. Paul Reeves, the hero map collector, seems affable, diffident, cool, calm and collected but very clever, intelligent and resourceful, so much so that it seems he could have had a former life that we learn nothing about in this book. Everything is tied up neatly at the end. Moderately entertaining.

Fun. A very tightly told story. Much better than most novels of this genre.

'Risk' is a short novel by Colin Harrison about a New York insurance lawyer who's taken outside his comfort zone to investigate the last moments of a person involved in a fatal accident outside a bar. George Young, our hero, is drawn into the action at the request of the victim's mother, the widow of the law firm's founder, who also happens to have hired Mr. Young long ago. He feels he has a debt to re-pay, so he takes it on. For a while it seemed like it was a poor decision to take the case, but it turned into a fine one at the end.

Risk was originally published as a series of articles in a magazine, but it doesn't seem disjointed as a result. There's not much character development involved, but Harrison's writing is top notch and the dialogue and interactions between characters are realistic. The plot, though, is pretty narrow so the whole thing seems like a very long short story. That's not a criticism, just an observation. It moves quickly, which is usually a good thing.

What I liked the best about Risk was the roster of 'odd' characters (a Czech hand model, for example) that quickly entered and left the story. Unfortunately, probably because of the way the novel was originally published, there wasn't much development done so their contribution to the story was episodic at best.

Risk is worth a read, if for nothing else than to appreciate Harrison's writing.

I think maybe this book looms larger in my mind than it deserves because of overlapping memories from Crowley's Little, Big.

The author can write, I will say that, sadly the author writes too much! Too much description, too much detail, way too much senseless rambling, that has nothing to do with the story. Cut this book in half, and Maybe it is worth reading. The "mystery is not that interesting and certainly doesn't warrant this many pages to get it resolved.½

Here are 10 reasons to put Colin Harrison’s literary thriller on your reading list:

1. The Voice – A cross between Dashiell Hammett hardboiled and Upton Sinclair social commentary. Mr. Harrison has the literary virtuosity to pull it off. You’d have to go a long way to find a writer with a greater command of language. Here’s a quick sample from the first-person narrator and main character, newspaper reporter Porter Wren: “When the column was done my thoughts returned to the previous afternoon, and I suppose that if my marital guilt were a cave, then I meant now to feel along the dark, damp walls for the sharp places and for the size of the cavity I had opened within myself.”

2. The City – As in Manhattan; all the fast-paced action takes place in the Big Apple – it’s as if the streets, subways and all those multistory buildings inject the characters with super-charged vim.

3. The Beautiful Babe – Porter Wren first encounters her at a publishing party. “Her face was no less beautiful as it approached, but I could see a certain determination in her features. Dark brows, blonde hair lifted off her neck. The rope of pearls. Her breasts moved heavily against the silky materials of her gown, which, I now saw, was not white but, more alluringly, the color of the flesh of a peach.” Meet Caroline Crowley, a femme fatale if there ever was one.

4. The Artist – Filmmaker Simon Crowley, Caroline’s dead husband who died a tragic death but left tons of video footage, including a number of very hot clips people in high places would love to get their hands on. In a series of Carolyn’s flashbacks along with Wren’s commentary on Simon appearing in his own videos, we are given a riveting picture of the filmmaker’s character.

5. The Tycoon – Owner of a series of multinational publishing and media companies, a big, fat Australian by the name of Hobbs who visits NYC to establish his presence and oversee the deals. At one point in the story Hobbs anticipates a deal-making phone-call from Rupert Murdoch. Surely it is more than coincidence the tycoon shares his name with 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbs, author of his famous book, ‘The Leviathan’, wherein he wrote how, prior to political community, the natural state of man is nasty, brutish and short. Ironically, as Porter Wren narrates, modern urban life can still be, if not so short, than quite nasty and brutish.

6. The Cop – Hal Fitzgerald is a hard-talking, high-level NYC policeman who deals with Porter Wren and stands for truth and justice, particularly when it comes to a police officer killed in the line of duty. Video footage Wren comes across is high-stakes; even Major Giuliani makes a cameo appearance in the novel.

7. The Family – Porter Wren lives in NYC with his brilliant surgeon wife and their young children, all of whom play an important role as the story unfolds and winds around Manhattan’s sharp corners.

8. The Mood – As in nocturne; a pensive, dreamy mood pervades the novel, especially Porter Wren’s nighttime relationship with Caroline Crowley.

9. The Pleasure – This novel is a page-turner. Once you get several pages in you’ll want to keep reading and reading. If you like your literary fiction with a bite, you’ve found your book of the month.

10. The Movie – IMDb’s internet site provides an update on the film being made from Harrison’s novel. Usually I don’t go to films, but this is one I will make a point of seeing.

Colin Harrison's novel is not only a thriller but a study in sociology, psychology and cross cultural collisions, a novel of hard-boiled language and fast-paced action. As way of example, here are several quotes from the opening pages:

Thriller - "My name is Jack Whitman and I should never have had the first thing to do with her - not with what was happening at the Corporation at the time. But I'm as weak hearted for love and greedy for power as the next guy, maybe more so. And I was crazy for the sex - of course that was part of it." Jack Whitman is the first-person narrator and this is how the novel opens, an opening Raymond Chandler and his fictional private-eye Phillip Marlow would appreciate.

Sociology - "And it was equally clear that if the woman had been dressed in a pair of tight jeans and cheap red pumps, she might be a New York-born Puerto Rican whore addicted to self-destruction, carrying a purse filed with rubbers and wrinkled bills and selling herself to all comers at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, a woman who, despite providence's gift of fine bones and large, deep eyes, was forced to love life faster and harder than was ever meant." The author has Jack Whitman make pointed, telling and sometimes scathing observations about society on nearly every page.

Psychology - "Morrison, second in command in the Corporation, the man everyone feared . . . . Morrison had lost half a leg and most of a hand as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam, having survived, he had the confidence of five men. Combat had shown him that we are all merely walking bags of meat, and once a man has decided that, all manner of brilliant scheming becomes possible." Indeed, Harrison's novel is a study in corporate psychology. One could argue Bodies Electric should be required reading for anybody contemplating a career in the business world, particularly the American business world.

Cross-Cultural Collisions - "What is certain is that as Liz waited for the light, a silver BMW with tinted windows . . . pulled over and someone poked the short metal barrel of a nine-millimeter semi-automatic pistol over the electric window and started shooting. . . . Liz was right in the way of it." Liz was Jack Whitman's beautiful young pregnant wife and both Liz and her seven month old daughter in the womb were killed by a Harlem gang's bullets. New York City aka the Big Apple as the American melting pot on speed. Harrison loves the city (and he said so directly in an interview) and captures NYC's hyper-energizing hum.

The characters play for high stakes, as well they should, since they are each caught in an emotionally-charged net of circumstances and faced with life and death choices. Regarding our main character, Jack Whitman - he sees the twenty-something cinnamon-skinned beauty with her 4 year old girl on the subway in two ways: as Madonna and Child and as an exotic sexually-charged object of desire. In the aftermath of his tragic loss, the magnetic pull is too powerful to resist (one way to think of Whitman's attraction is in terms of Carl Jung's archetype, the `anima'). Whitman hands her his business card and offers help, which turns out to be the first step in a series of events swirling himself and others in unexpected and sometimes dark, violent directions. For my money, Bodies Electric is a modern classic.

This started out well, but then fizzled and became predictable.

This started out well, but then fizzled and became predictable.

This book contains one Novella and two short stories that are mysteries with a sports theme. The title story by David Baldacci was the one I enjoyed the most but the other two stories, one by Brad Meltzer and one by Ann Perry were also entertaining.