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Days and nights of heavy spring rain threaten to cripple New
York City. Neighbourhoods are experiencing periodic blackouts.
People have been reported electrocuted by fallen power lines.
Flooding of some subway lines has stopped trains in their
tracks. And in the midst of the deluge, the CSI team has three
cases to solve: a series of grisly murders in which the victims
all seem to have an unusual connection; the puzzling death
of a teacher on the upper west side and the suspicious collapse
of an entire building - which puts one of the team in deadly
danger...
Deluge
is the latest CSI:
NY
novel written by Suart M. Kaminsky. Although, fans of the
TV show will be forgiven for not actually recognising this
as a CSI tale at all - the forensic element is kept
to a bare minimum. There's also no attempt to have the characters
interact together as a team in the lab - in fact there are
no lab scenes at all in this book.
Kaminsky
splits up the characters into three different units and sets
them off investigating their own crimes:
Mac
Taylor and Don Flack are on the trail of the perpetrator of
a string of grisly murders with one thing in common: initials
carved into the victims' bodies. When an unusual connection
is found between the victims' lives, Mac realises the killer
is trying to send a message... quite literally.
Lindsay
Monroe and Danny Messer investigate the death of a teacher
in an exclusive Manhattan private school. The victim seems
like everyone's favourite teacher on the surface - but they
soon uncover a darker secret lurking beneath.
Stella
Bonsaera and Sheldon Hawkes are on-site at a suspicious building
collapse when shifting rubble traps Hawkes in a deep pit with
a mysterious stranger. Tensions rise as their oxygen starts
to run out.
The
back drop to Deluge is a New York that has seen an
usually high amount of rainfall in a short period of time
- six straight days of heavy spring rain threaten to cripple
New York. But, while this is mentioned in passing every now
and then, it's never really focussed on as a problem for the
investigators. Any one who has watched the show will realise
that the worst thing for a forensics examiner is a crime committed
outside in the rain. Sadly the writer fails to use this in
his crimes at all - either as a hindrance to the investigators,
or as a convenient help to the killer's crimes. As almost
every crime is committed out of the rain, I was a little unsure
why we kept getting reminders that the weather was bad.
I
had only managed to get a dozen or so pages into the book
when I started to get disoriented. The narrative flips backwards
and forwards between locations and events way to quickly.
And there are too many new people being introduced that don't
really add that much to the narrative. A perfect example of
this is The Hat - a homeless man who is introduced in the
closing chapters of the book. His addition seemed forced -
as though someone was trying to fill space. Nowhere is this
space filling more obvious thank in the closing chapter, which
flicks between several of the characters and tries to give
each one a bit of closure
Another
thing that confused me was why the blurb on the back cover
of this book used American spellings. This is UK edition of
the American book, and while I appreciate that the cost of
reprinting all the pages for a UK audience was probably not
cost effective, I couldn't understand why the back cover hadn't
been altered. After all this cover was designed for a UK market
only - the ISBN and fact that the price is in sterling reflect
this.
For
those with the attention span of a goldfish, this will be
a welcome addition to your library. For everyone else, the
chopping and changing may be too much to stand. It's almost
as though the writer is trying to cover up a crime of his
own - that he's not particularly comfortable with the characters
and is trying his hardest to distract fans of the show from
his unfamiliarity with it all.
Pete
Boomer
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