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Blind Fury lags to boring
Book review: La Plante, Lynda (2010). Blind Fury
by Derryll White
It doesn’t take very long for the reader to realize that La Plante stories are located off the North American continent. Her main character, Detective Inspector Anne Travis, opens the boot of her car to remove a pair of Wellingtons and I am thinking Great Britain. That is soon confirmed – London. The references to lorry drivers and petrol-station attendants assure me that the story setting will continue to be foreign, and hopefully interesting.
What happens, however, is that the author allows the story to lapse into a tedious police procedural with few social insights and little intellectual excitement. She spends interminable pages documenting how an investigation develops, what the assigned jobs are and how the evidence is sifted. Things move slowly. The reader is left with a story that features everyday life inside a London special police squad room, with a romance theme laid on top of that.
Detective Inspector Anna Travis comes across as a real person, well-developed and with normal shortcomings. But the story lags and has many predictible crisis points. In the end, as a reader, I am left bored. I have dropped Linda La Plante from my ‘want to read’ list.
Excerpts from the novel:
JAIL: They’ve got computer courses, exercise classes, gymnasiums, and it was at Barfield that one of the feckin’ prisoners almost caused a riot because he said that being forced to wear the coloured shoulder-band that shows who’s a prisoner and who’s a visitor was an invasion of his privacy. The world’s gone bloody mad.
PRIVATIZATION: Barfield was one of the few privately-owned prisons. A modern build, it was a massive, sprawling place.
ABUSE: The poor woman had lost her children and Anna felt, was so worn out by abuse that even though she had been warned over and over again of the dangers, she continued risking the only real possession she had. Her own life.
IMMIGRATION: Barolli was at it again, suggesting she read up on just how many Polish immigrants had been shipped back out of England. “We’re bloody inundated with Poles,” he said rudely.
