Body Language

Michael Connell

Body Language is James Hall showing all his best stuff. Complex and edgy, engrossing and masterful.
— USA Today

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hall's first novel is reissued as a trade paperback in conjunction with the mass market release of his latest, a thriller that PW said "will slice readers' sleep into slivers." (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Following last year's downcast Red Sky at Night, which left beachcomber-hero Thorn in a wheelchair, Hall bounces back with a new protagonist, Alexandra Rafferty, an appealing fourth-degree blackbelt, crime-scene photographer and all-around Miami PD femme Nikita. Shadowed by 18 years of guilt from the grisly aftermath of her rape at age 11, Alex is the loving caregiver to her father, an ex-cop befuddled by senility. Caught up in a series of serial killings of young women whose bodies are left in bizarre postures, Alex is unaware that her cretinoid husband, Stan, an armored car driver, is planning the perfect robbery. All hell breaks loose when a sexy pool-cleaner/ burglar (who keeps a pet cockroach in her pocket) chances on the scene and sees Stan's airhead mistress make off with two bags worth a cool million. When Alex's pixilated dad steals back the loot, most of the major elements of this whimsical action-packed plot are in place. The ensuing 600-mile chase takes Alex and dad to Seaside, the well-known planned community on the sugary beaches of the Florida panhandle. Forgiving the distracting, superfluous plot threads, Hall fans will be more than reimbursed by his poetic imagery in the landscapes and love scenes. Alex is a heroine with enough endearing attributes to sustain yet another long-running character series. $200,000 ad/promo; audio to Brilliance; author tour. Agent, Richard Pine; editor, Jenifer Weis. (Sept.) FYI: Seaside, Fla., was the location for the new Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show.

Library Journal

Nineteen years after the death of his parents, a troubled teenager avenges them by causing the death of the drunk driver responsible. Now thirty-nine and emotionally scarred, Thorn still lives in Key Largo, selling hand-tied fish flies. His adoptive mother, Kate Truman, a sturdy, outspoken fisherwoman, leads local battles against land developmentthe most recent of which results in her rape/murder. Thorn's hunt for the culprit(s) increasingly involves new lady friend Sarah Ryan, Kate's lawyer buddy, sometime dope-smuggling partner, and (secretly) daughter of the dead drunk driver come to spy on his ``killer.'' Hard-hitting, nuts-and-bolts prose, effectively picturesque characterization, periodic sex and violence, and a wonderful, cinematic climax embellish a largely realistic plot. A great first novel and necessary purchase. Rex E. Klett, Anson Cty. Lib., Wadesboro, N . C.

Library Journal

Miami police photographer Alexandra Collins Rafferty has a few problems. Her marriage is falling apart, her father has Alzheimer's, she is attracted to one of her fellow karate students but is unsure about her feelings for him, and a rapist-murderer is terrorizing the city. Then Stan, her crime-obsessed husband, an armored-car driver, thinks he has pulled off the perfect robbery and plans to run off with his young mistress. But the theft is witnessed by a ruthless woman who, with her hulking partner, is determined to find the loot. A deadly chase to a Gulf Coast resort ensues. The serial killer plot seems peripheral until a shocking revelation near the end. Hall (Buzz Cut, Audio Reviews, LJ 8/96) tries to embellish the plot by having the characters engage in colorful dialog about all manner of subjects, but he is not in the same league as Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, despite reader Laural(OK) Merlington's best efforts to convey the humor. Recommended for public libraries.--Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr., New York

William Plummer

The Florida crime novel, whose characters are bent on wacky schemes, their brains fried by the sun and land's-end desperation, is a genre unto itself....Hall shows himself to be an ingenious plotter and anything but a plodder with language. --People Weekly

BookList

More than any of his Floridian peers, Hall had avoided repetition.... Hall effectively combines Ridley Person-like suspense and forensic detail with a near-flawless grasp of character; his Floridian loonies are as loony as Hiaasen's, but they go well beyond caricature: loonies with heart.

New York Times Book Review

James Hall's prose runs as clean and fast as Gulf Stream waters.

Kirkus Reviews

Key West chronicler Hall gives rugged adventurer Dick Thorn (Red Sky at Night, 1997, etc.) a well-earned rest as the author heads north to Miami to follow the fortunes of a police photographer, a lethal serial rapist, and two very large bags full of money. As the technician charged with photographing the 'Bloody Rapist's' victims, Alexandra Rafferty would have her hands full with one way or the other. Though the rapist has obligingly left buckets of his blood and dozens of his fingerprints at each of five crime scenes so far, the cops have no leads, and it looks like the rapist would be providing Alexandra steady work even if she didn't have troubles closer to home. But her life with armored-car driver husband Stan and with Lawton Collins, the ex-cop father who years ago covered up Alexandra's own killing of Darnel Flint, the teenaged rapist next door, is about to take a steep downward turn. Smarty-pants Stan, who thinks he's as cunning as can be, masterminds a $2 million heist from his own armored car. When Alexandra finds the money in the guest-room closet of his empty-headed, giddily amoral lover and confronts him, Stan threatens to tell the police about her own murder, casually revealed to him just a few weeks ago by Lawton, an Alzheimer's sufferer. Meantime, a couple of operators toting more guns than scruples have decided to cut themselves in on Stan's caper, and they're following the money trail right to Alexandra and Lawton.

The cast of felons and wannabes provides a field day for Hall's well-known eye for grotesques (check out especially Lawton's blackly comic ramblings, presented with affection and respect but without blinkers, and the remorseless thief who keeps a pet roach named Amy), but the novelist never gets so distracted by all the murderous monkeyshines that he loses track of the 'Bloody Rapist', four counties back but closing fast. A double-barreled actioner set apart from the pack by Hall's virtuoso control of tone, which can shift you from giggles to gasps with a single well-trimmed phrase.

From the Publisher

"A first rate thriller by a masterful writer."—James Patterson

"Hall shows himself to be an ingenious plotter...In Alex he has created a character to care about."—People

"Body Language is James Hall showing off all his best stuff. Complex and edgy, engrossing and masterful. This book's a cut above the rest. It's his very best."—Michael Connelly