Hostage: A Todd Mills Mystery Book

Hostage ranks with Morris West's Proteus and Vince Flynn's Term Limits as an excellent example of how an author's innate devotion to social order can spoil the best and most revolutionary ideas.

The premise is brilliant: three people dying of AIDS will infect a congressman who has been busy demonizing them and blocking funding for medical research into HIV, so that he will come to understand their suffering, and so that the world will grasp the scope and horror of the disease. Their anger is certainly justified, and the actions they take are in the best traditions of the classic fable, where the central character is removed from a position of power and thrust into poverty and despair as a learning experience. The Arab legend surrounding the loss of Solomon's ring leaps to mind as a similar, albeit much older, tale, as does the story of Griselda, though the parallel in that case is less exact.

But Zimmermann fails to deliver on all of this promise. At the last second, after nearly three hundred pages with only occasional gleams of insight, the man with the syringe turns into a coward. He can't press the plunger home. He steps away in failure to waste away and die, his point unmade - because his social conditioning overtakes him and he can't bear to pour the poison into his enemy's blood.

Of course, this outcome was predictable from the spoiler alone. Zimmermann is willing to let the reader sympathize with the despair of his characters. However, as a good, upstanding citizen on the side of law and order, he, like his creations, cannot ultimately shatter the stability of the world in which he lives and writes. The plot of Hostage is a farce that parallels the way in which it was written. Its actors merely pretend to be transgressive, and at the end behave as society expects them to behave. Its author pretends to write a biting, revealing commentary on the terrors of AIDS and the indifference of the state, and at the end lets his target go free, because the conventions of the genre and his own inherent deference demand it. The abuser survives and prospers, his pursuers have suffered for nothing, and in that resolution, a story about the basic justice of revenge becomes one about how the only plausible, possible, conceivably just outcome is the upholding of the status quo.

It would have been so easy for the author and the character to drive the needle home. Neither one could do it. And that is a grave error which does a disservice to a reader who expects daring and unconventionality in the mold of the brave men and women who rioted at Stonewall.