

I needn't have worried.
Slaughter is about only one of a handful of authors of whom I would even consider buying in hardback. However, her latest novel, Triptych, was long ago relegated to "It can wait until paperback" status. That's when I found myself in the local book store, and I'd just polished off both of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter Morgan novels, and my reading pile was dangerously low, and it was 20% off and -- ah, what the hell:
When a series of brutal rape/murders rock the Atlanta area -- that are gruesomely linked by the fact that the victim's tongues are being bitten off -- Detectives Michael Ormwood and Angie Polaski, and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, Will Trent, are charged to hunt down and bring the killer to justice. Also along for the ride is recent parolee John Shelley, whose incarceration 20 years ago resulted from a grisly crime very similar to the ones occurring now.
As with her previous novels, the author unfolds events from several different character's perspectives. And one of Slaughter's greatest strengths is her ability to define her characters -- and all of them tend to be fundamentally flawed in some way. Triptych is no different. As the novel's title suggests, your views will change on these characters, drastically, depending on whose perspective we're viewing them from. And appearances prove to be very deceiving; no one seems to be as they first appear. And as you get deeper and deeper into the book, we don't know who to sympathize or empathize with.
We open with Ormwood and his marital problems -- and his resulting adultery (-- including a sour encounter with Polaski.) There's also history between Polaski and Trent, both damaged goods, and both bring a lot of baggage to the romance pile. And then there's Shelley, whose lawless teen drug-fueled days came to a screeching halt with him raping and killing a cheerleader, waking up out of his cocaine haze beside the corpse in a pool of her blood. He's convicted, and though spared the death penalty, retribution is soon coming from his fellow cons once he's in prison. (And I don't think I need to draw a picture here.) Shelley always claimed he was innocent and couldn't remember what happened that fateful night. Finally paroled, Shelley will do anything to stay out of prison. And things really start to get interesting when he finds out that while in prison he was the victim of identity theft.
Truthfully, all of these characters seem to have something to hide; and will these closeted skeletons torpedo the investigation and allow the killer to kill again? Who am I to spoil it. Anyways, as far as mysteries go, it isn't really all that hard to figure out whodunit, but I honestly don't think that's the point. The true strength of the novel is the Hitchcockian "Wrong-Man" set-up, where, as a reader, you know what's going on and read helplessly while clues are missed, a frame-up slowly clicks into place, and the truth is tantalizing dangled in front of characters who just need to ask one more question to unravel things. But what fun is that?
As Hitchcock himself once proposed ... What is more suspenseful to an audience? A scene were someone is searching a room for a suitcase with bomb in it; or a scene where someone is in a room oblivious to the fact that there is a bomb in the suitcase over in the corner?
Your answer to that question will gauge how well you'll enjoy Triptych as it barrels toward it's fairly predictable conclusion. Me ... I fall in the second category and enjoyed the heck out of it, and I can honestly say to all Slaughter fans that Triptych will definitely tied you over until her new Grant novel, Beyond Reach, debuts sometime in '07.
Airport opens with the titular locale being pummeled by a snowstorm. Burt Lancaster runs the show and from a stuck plane blocking a runway, to noise complaints from the neighboring subdivisions, to the fact that Van Heflin has smuggled a bomb on board a flight to Italy to cash in on a Life Insurance policy for his destitute family everything seems to be going wrong.
And while swinging pilot Dean Martin takes time out from knocking up stewardesses to try and land the crippled plane, on the ground, George Kennedy -- the patron saint of disaster movies, hell yeah, Patroni will save us all! -- red-lines things to get the much needed runway clear for an emergency landing or the the tarmac will be littered with the corpses of every Hollywood actor and actress over the age of 65.
Next up comes my all time favorite -- The Towering Inferno, where we find out what happens when you cram 135 floors of steel and glass with polyester, tafata and every flammable accelerant known to man. Paul Newman designed it, William Holden built it, and then Richard Chamberlain screwed it all up, so now it's up to Steve McQueen to save all their sorry asses. And I try not to laugh while Newman and McQueen set the charges to blow the water tanks, when they pause to look each other in the eye, and I burst into a lively rendition of "We May Never Love this Way Again..." (And for those of you playing at home, this is the Love Theme from The Towering Inferno , used ad nauseum whenever two love leads express their affections for each other before one or both of them is turned into a charcoal briquette.)
Hee-hee, burn, baby, burn.
And you wanna know something? I think Los Angeles was lucky that the Richter went off the scale in Earthquake, leveling most of the city. Why? It left little or no furniture or scenery lying around for Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and Marjoe Gortner to rip apart with the bare teeth.
To me, Earthquake is easily the weakest entry but it was also the apex of the genre -- it truly is an awful and laughable film-watching experience; it distilled the disaster movie back to its basic elements and the results is a very sour mash. The disaster movie was never the same again, and things quickly went downhill in a helluva hurry. But I still giggle, though, whenever I ponder how in the hell we were supposed buy Lorne Greene as Ava Gardner's father. (She appears to be at least thirty years his senior.) Who knew she was the lost Cartwright brother?