Blue Widows Bites

The Blue Widows is Jon Land's sixth novel featuring the off-again/on-again investigating couple Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea, who find themselves up against shadowy plotters working out of Saudi Arabia. The fanatics they face have a sinister plan to humble the U.S. that's code-named "the end of all things," and the Palestinian-American Kamal and Israeli Barnea reunite after an estrangement to try to stop the plot.

Both of them will find their own families and family histories deeply intertwined with those of their opponents, and the only way to defeat their enemies requires them both to face family issues from their respective pasts.

Land writes a serviceable enough thriller and knows how to keep his action scenes brisk and to the point. He displays little of the same discipline when it comes to his actual plotting, throwing in more coincidences than a Victorian melodrama and tossing in characters who are either too important for the brief stage time they get or not nearly important enough to rate the work spent defining them. In a couple of cases, they are both. Land also has a few too many important things happen "offscreen," so to speak, as we learn about some major events only through the secondhand testimony of others, rather than any of our lead characters. The flashback sequences that explain both the title and the roots that led to the current crisis are clumsily inserted, lurching backwards to pick up some vital details before jackrabbiting forward again with the storyline we'd been following. They make the book the equivalent of a teenager learning how to drive before he or she understands gradual pressure on the brake and accelerator pedals.

Reader enjoyment of The Blue Widows is likely to depend on a willingness to overlook those kinds of problems. I picked up my copy off the clearance shelves at a used book store, which generally helps my overlooking, so although Widows has some serious dead spots, I suppose I liked it well enough. Just not well enough to tackle any more cases with Ben and Danielle.