cover image DIRECTOR'S CUT: A Moses Wine Novel

DIRECTOR'S CUT: A Moses Wine Novel

Roger L. Simon, . . Atria, $23 (241pp) ISBN 978-0-7434-5802-3

Simon's eighth mystery/thriller to feature his wisecracking and reckless PI, Moses Wine, unintentionally illustrates the challenges of setting a comic story in a post–9/11 world. Hired to provide security for a movie being filmed in Prague whose cast and crew have been plagued by threats, Wine stumbles across the corpse of the Grand Rabbi of Prague, who proves to be yet another aspiring screenwriter, clutching a screenplay based on a vicious anti-Semitic tract. The lurking presence of mysterious Arabs, abductions and bombings suggest that an Al Qaeda cell is targeting the film project, though some clues indicate that a personal, rather than ideological, motive, is behind the harassment campaign. Having explicitly set his character in the midst of the war on terror, Simon fails to make Wine's actions plausible. Wine, for instance, allows his pregnant wife to accompany him to possible encounters with ruthless killers. From the opening reference to John Ashcroft, Simon places the reader in the near-present day of a nation traumatized by the terrorist attacks, but the realistic trappings of increased personal anxiety, heightened security and a questioning of long-held antiestablishment beliefs come across as little more than superficial window dressing. Given the rawness of the nation's recent wounds, not to mention ongoing terror alerts and the war in Iraq, not even a Christopher Buckley could pull off a humorous suspense tale so closely tied to militant Islam, and Simon has not succeeded in doing so here. (June 24)

FYI:The MWA named Simon's first Moses Wine novel, The Big Fix (1974), as the best crime novel of the year.