The Chaco Canyon Tapes Book

James Grippando, Under Cover of Darkness (Avon, 2000)

Boy, does this novel start out wonderfully. A workaholic lawyer discovers his wife has gone missing. A local FBI agent with an eye towards the serial killers' profiling unit is given the job of liaison between the branch office and the rep from Washington, her idol, after dumping her groom at the altar for sleeping with her sister. The missing wife might be dead...or she might be an accomplice to a string of serial killings. People keep turning up dead. And somehow, a fitness guru factors into it all. Everything's set up perfectly.

Then it all goes down the tubes. The last fifty pages or so of this novel have "Hollywood ending" written all over them, as if just before he started writing them, Grippando got word that this book had been optioned, and he had to come up with an ending that would work in Hollywood. The whole tone changes; what would have taken two hundred pages earlier in the novel is rushed into far less than half that. Aside from the lack of wires and big masks, a lot of the ending has "deus ex machina" stamped on it.

That's not to say it's not worth reading for the first three quarters of the book. Just beware the last quarter and the disappointment that comes with it. ** ½