A Perfect Crime, Peter Abrahams, 1998, Ballantine Books. Genre: Crime. 322 pages. Finished 4/19/2012.
LesOpinion: Remember back when we had big hair and hated the Russians? Peter Abrahams manages to make one of his early novels, Hard Rain, contain every 80's icon he could get his hands on: big hair, burned out hippies, coke-snorting rockers, Russian spies, CIA agents, and snobbish college students. The whole thing is a ridiculous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mystery that I figured out on about page 2. Which meant that reading all the way to page 374 for the big reveal was a bit of a slog. I kept wanting to shout to the heroine, "No! He's the other guy!" But that just goes to show that shouting at books is no more useful than shouting at the TV.
Fast forward ten years for A Perfect Crime, and we find that Abrahams has joined the rest of us in giving up on hating Russians. Instead, he has settled down to pen a thriller about a cuckolded man who wants to kill his wife.
Abrahams wants to write about strong women who overcome difficulties. Note to Mr. Abrahams: If the men your heroines marry or carry on with weren't such one-dimensional, pathetic plot-devices it wouldn't reduce the ladies to self-flagellating idiots.
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