A Fistful of Rain
Greg Rucka
(Guest Reviewer - Ian Schwartz)
2003 Bantam Books
ISBN: 055380135X

Tortured rocker Mim Bracca is kicked out of her band & heads for home, only to find her brother murdered & her father out of prison.

Guest Reviewer Ian Schwartz writes:

Successful thriller writers traditionally have left the risk-taking to their characters. Some of the most prolific greats -- Robert Ludlum & David Morrell leap to mind -- have written dozens of books with only one or two minor plot variations.

Greg Rucka appeared to be following the same path after Critical Space, his fifth & best Atticus Kodiak novel, which elevated him among the pantheon of modern action authors in 2001. But with his latest protagonist, the talented but tortured rocker Miriam (Mim) Bracca, Rucka instead has established himself as perhaps the boldest of all his talented contemporaries.

The tattooed, 26-year-old Bracca is not your grandfather's hero. & she sure isn't the girl you'd take home to mother. Unable to escape her horrific past -- she witnessed her drunk, junkie father murder her boozing mother -- she finds herself following in their self-destructive footsteps. A burgeoning alcoholic, she is unceremoniously dumped from one of the world's hottest rock bands. Even a stud guitarist has to go if she keeps blacking out & taking headers off of the stage ... at least in fiction.

Jobless & badly hung over, Bracca slinks into her hometown, where things get worse with a vengeance. A masked gunman accosts her at her front door, orders her to strip naked & climb into the covered bed of his pickup truck. They drive for an hour before she is inexplicably returned to her house unharmed & untouched. While recovering from that ordeal, she learns from her older brother -- an unapologetic drug dealer -- that her father has been released from prison after 15 years & wants to see her. What's a girl to do?

Drink about a liter of Jack Daniels apparently, then wake up to learn that pornographic pictures of herself have mysteriously surfaced on the Internet. This is just the beginning of her nightmare. Numerous threats, home invasions, the murder of her brother & the kidnapping of her father for $1 million ransom ensue in rapid-fire order.

A suspect in her brother's killing, the resilient Mim must do her best to stay alive & free of an alternately suspicious & amorous police detective, & her sharp-eyed partner in order to free her father.

Along the way Mim must ask herself some difficult questions. In addition to finding out who is trying to ruin her with the obscene photos as well as who abducted her father, she searches for reasons to justify her fall from the top.

But most puzzling is why she desperately is trying to save her father's life after 15 years of hoping he burns in hell. Just what happened on the day her father killed her mother by running her over in their driveway? To find that answer, & her brother's killer, she must journey back to her childhood, to a time before she discovered salvation in a guitar's taut strings.

The strength of Rucka's latest effort lies in his well-written main character, whose soft core is eating away at the carapace of toughness she presents to the world. Her struggles with a worsening addiction & growing fame are ironic, touching & tinged with hopelessness. Mim uses her addiction as an excuse to continue her downward spiral. She prefaces one drinking bout with the words, “I was a liar. I was an alcoholic, just like my father, just like my mother.”

While Rucka's Mim is dead on, the authenticity appears to come at the expense of the slam-bang action sequences that have been the author's bread & butter. They're neither as believable nor as breath stealing as in his Kodiak thrillers.

Also, aside from Bracca, the supporting characters are rather thinly fleshed. Especially her felonious father who is someone the reader should have gotten to know better.

How do you measure the quality of a writer's work? Do you line it up against his best effort, or put it side by side with the novels of his contemporaries? While it does not possess the literary power of Dennis Lehane's Mystic River -- that author's first book after a successful detective series -- it certainly matches up with the efforts of savvy Los Angeles thriller writer Robert Crais. Unfortunately, it is a bit of a letdown coming off Rucka's Critical Space. But he does deserve credit for taking a chance & crafting a fun read.

Ultimately -- & sadly -- these days the acid test of a book is whether it is worth paying $25 to buy. In this case I would probably wait for the paperback. But if I happened to see it lying on the library shelf, I would snatch it up faster than Mim could down a glass of Jack-on-the-rocks.

More from Greg Rucka:
Shooting at Midnight
The Atticus Kodiak Series: Keeper
Finder
Whiteout
Queen and Country: Operation: Blackwall
Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia, & many more.
(01/18/04)

Guest Reviewer - Ian Schwartz
2004©Ian Schwartz