Don't save the cat, endanger the kids

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 25%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #6 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

Holy kevlar keyboard! Sandra Brown writes a lot of books! More than 70 since 1981, and they pretty much all spend quality time in the top-10 of The New York Times Bestsellers List.

I chose Lethal as my next book in the this little project because a couple weeks ago, when I was thinking about reading more to help me write better, it was sitting at Number One. Surely any book at the top of the charts has things to teach. And it must be true that anyone who has 70 something books published, sold more than 80 million of them, and has perfected the art of the mysterious crime author photo pose (see inset), has knowledge to impart.

What have I learned in the first 25% of Lethal?

Pick your victims carefully. You want the most sympathetic, vulnerable targets possible, and then you shove them into a nightmare.

When you are a crime fiction author, you should wear a
weathered leather jacket and jeans,
like you might soon head to a crime scene,
and you should lean a little to your right,
like you might be about to pull the gun in your back pocket.

Manipulative? Yes! What else are people paying for but to have their emotional buttons pushed and pushed hard. If I wanted deep insights into modern American life and complex characters who I have mixed feelings about, I'll read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. 

But what could he possibly know about writing fiction that reads as fast as TV watches? The guy has written three book in 30 years, picked up a Pulitzer, and had his first book turned into an okay arty flick by Sophia Coppola. Call me when he's published another 70 novels, which by my count, will be in about 700 years.

I digress. Back to Ms. Brown and Lethal...

It starts with the most adorable, heartwarming victims imaginable, a beautiful mom with her precocious four-year-old daughter making cupcakes. The daughter, Emily, wants to get the task over with as quickly as possible so she can lick the frosting bowl. Adorable! I sure hope nothing bad happens to these people I now love!

Uh-oh, there is an injured man in the front yard. And uh-oh, he's now jamming the barrel of a gun under the hot mom's chin.

Oh no! He's forcing them into the house! The four-year-old doesn't know what's going on, and she is so spunky! She tells the guy to wash his hands before eating and to not eat any more cupcakes because they are for grandpa's birthday party. Cute!

The story questions being asked are big ones, scary ones. Is the bad man going to kill the mom and daughter? Is he going to rape the mom, and maybe even the daughter? Did he really kill seven people in a warehouse a few hours ago? Why do we keep getting descriptions of his taut muscles? Is mom maybe a little bit into this mysterious but oddly handsome criminal?

The first quarter of this book is all about making you extremely worried about two people who you fell in love with within for the first 500 words of chapter one.

That is some serious commercial writing. Ms. Brown is not going to win a Pulitzer. But she is going to make you furiously turn pages (or press the "next page" button on your Kindle like you're playing Halo).

She also slips in a couple sub plots. The first is the police investigation of the warehouse shooting and their chase after the suspect. The cops come off as too casual and a little incompetent, almost goofy in fact. Now we are really worried about hot mom and cute daughter because their rescuers seem quite lost.

The second sub-plot is an odd one. The FBI agent who will take part in the manhunt is introduced with his wife and horribly handicapped 12-year-old son. The boy has been a vegetable since birth and his mere existence has been a weight on their lives and their marriage. It's sad situation and a sad house they live in. 

This sub-plot seems an odd counter-point to crime thriller it plays against, almost like it's from another novel altogether. The story question it brings up seem to go nowhere plotwise ... Will the boy be miraculously healed? (Would be unbelievable.) Will the boy die? (Would be sad.) Will he be put in a home so the parents can get some of their lives back? (A depressing and ignoble choice.)

So I'm not sure where the FBI guy's story is going to go. If Sandra has any kind of creative challenge in this book, it's to make that plotline satisfying in some way.

Otherwise, this book is a master class in writing commercial crime fiction. 

(By the way, the title of this post refers to the book Save The Cat, a well-known how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It highly recommend having your hero do something extremely likeable in the first few minutes of your story, like saving a cat.)