Suspicion of an Unsatisfying Read
I’m reading, actually just finished reading, a novel by Barbara Parker called Suspicion of Vengeance. Now I have to admit that I skimmed a lot of the last third of the book. Sometimes I do that. I skip ahead. Not because the book isn’t good (or at least not always) but because I start to get the feeling that the ending might annoy me and I don’t want to waste my time. It’s a bad habit and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’ve learned to live with it.
Anyway, among the high points of Suspicion of Vengeance--a man is on death row convicted of killing a young mother whose baby then also died--an accidental, but related death. The convicted man says he was somewhere else at the time and now, eleven years after the conviction, a woman has come forward. She says that she was with him, was evicting him from her trailer, in fact, at the time an eyewitness who testified in the original trial says that he was lurking outside the murdered woman’s house. She tried, she says, to come forward at the time, eleven years ago, but, she says, the police threatened her with planted drugs and she didn’t want to go to jail.
It turns out she wasn’t just making it up, she was actually threatened by the police eleven years earlier, all in the name of we-know-we-have-our-guy-and-you’re-just-complicating-things.
But, of course, he’s not the guy. Which is, actually, why there’s a novel at all.
So, at this point, in comes the main character, a woman who knows the convicted man’s grandmother, roped into working on his appeal. She’s accompanied by her boyfriend, a pretty-danged-rich, high-priced defense lawyer.
In the course of their quest to prove the convicted man’s innocence before he’s executed, they (well, mostly the boyfriend) threaten to beat the living stuffing out of one guy in order to convince him to change his original testimony and they plant a shotgun in such a way as to point a finger at a man they have reason to believe commited four particularly hideous murders without any direct evidence against him.
In other words, they did just exactly what the police did eleven years ago.
Now this just bothers the heck out of me because what it says is: cheating is bad if you’re wrong, but it’s perfectly all right if you’re right.
Jeez, louise!
Cheating is bad because for one thing you have no way of knowing if this is the time you’re right or if this is the time you’re wrong. It’s also bad because it is unfair, unjust, and in this story it’s particularly bad because we’ve already got a bright and shining example of the evils of cheating as a means to an end. I mean an innocent man got killed for pete's sake!
I like my mystery stories to be about good triumphing over evil. Call me naïve and foolish, but hey, that’s why I read ‘em. Now I also like complications and dealing with shades of gray and the flaws and weaknesses of character. And I might not mind cheating in a good cause if it was set up and presented in a way that worked. But setting up the ‘good’ solution so that it’s the same as the ‘bad’ is not an example of a story where it works.