Lord Vishnu's Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort Of)
Will Clarke, .. Simon & Schuster, $23 (292pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-7147-9
Travis Anderson, the protagonist of Clark's intentionally kitschy debut, knows when someone will call on the telephone and he knows that his wife is cheating on him. A dream told him to get into the Web-site building business, and he's now quite comfortable. Following this early-pages setup (in another of the seemingly endless computer-oriented conceits by young male novelists), a bored Travis stumbles on a government Web site that stealthily head hunts psychics. Soon, he begins to help locate missing persons, but a crazed, power-mad co-worker kidnaps his wife and son, setting things in hectic motion. Travis's first-person narration is vivid and witty, and gives the dopey plot, which involves a man who claims to be an incarnation of the god Vishnu, nice nuance. But a tricked-out denouement, with Disney World wired to blow Atlanta Olympics-style, is overblown and finally pushes the book from campy and fun to silly and showy.
Reviewed on: 05/16/2005
Genre: Fiction
Compact Disc - 979-8-200-14914-8
MP3 CD - 979-8-200-14915-5
Other - 304 pages - 978-0-7432-7444-9
Paperback - 304 pages - 978-0-7432-7148-6
Paperback - 248 pages - 978-0-9726588-0-5