Rosarito Beach by
M.A. Lawson (Penguin: Blue Rider Press, 2013, 352 pages, $26.95) is
an interesting and problematic novel. M.A. Lawson is a pseudonym for
Mike Lawson, author of the well regarded nine volume Joe Demarco
series, and is the first in a projected Kay Hamilton series. Although
written from a third person perspective, this book purports to
present Kay Hamilton from her own point of view, with a male writer
interpreting it. The selection of the pseudonym M.A. seems to be a
thinly veiled effort to suggst a woman writer, perhaps named Mary
Ann, as the author, in order to give it added legitimacy. In this,
despite some other very good plot elements, Lawson fails to convince.
Kay Hamilton, the beautiful, sexy, smart, ambitious supervisor in
the San Diego DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) office is an
action oriented, take no prisoners person who does not suffer fools
gladly, who would often rather act than think, and who seems to go
out of her way to alienate her co-workers and subordinates. She
struck me as a male agent with the wrong plumbing. Until the daughter
she had given up for adoption at birth fifteen years before shows up
in need of a place to stay....
Kay Hamilton has
risen to her current status in the DEA because of a successful
under-cover (double entendre intended) operation whose ending
required a change of venue as well as a promotion for her. Now in San
Diego, she is dedicated to bringing down the American branch of the
Olivera drug cartel located in Mexico. Early in the narrative, she
engineers the arrest of Tito Olivera, the younger brother of drug
lord Cesar Olivero, whose power and influence have helped corrupt
almost the entire Mexican political, judicial, and enforcement
branches of government. The elder Olivera has become a worldly and
skilled political figure, overlaying his essentially brutal self.
There follows an exciting and disastrous set-piece as Tito is
transported to a safe confinement at Camp Pendleton, necessitating a
plot to break him out before his sure conviction in federal court.
Just as all this is being set up, Kay's long lost daughter,Jessica,
whom she has hardly ever given a thought to before, appears, prepared to
stay. Kay has no idea how to be a mother, nor any interest in being
one. The story moves on from there with Jessica being kidnapped and
held for ransom in Mexico, as Kay discovers her maternal instinct,
long dormant, now awakened.
Most characters in this sometimes
exciting thriller conform to common stereotypes for gender,
ethnicity, role, and so-on. There's nothing much surprising in their
responses to situations or their approaches to life. I was
interested that Lawson has Kay Hamilton thinking about her casual
sexual encounters with a married lawyer friend as “playing”
together, something like kids in a sandbox, with always satisfactory
orgasms. This struck me as the way a man might want a desirable
woman to think about sexual activity, but maybe not in congruence
with the way many women actually think. This led me to ask why a
previously published male writer, whose previous successful series
features the male investigator for the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to write in the guise of a woman using a female
central character for, perhaps, woman readers. The web site Marketing
Charts.com posted some results of a poll of readers recently. The
results indicated that female readers in the 18 – 33 demographic as
well as among older women read more than men do, and by a margin of
57% to 39% enjoy mystery/thriller/crime books. Men prefer science
fiction, literature, and graphic novels (comics). Older readers
prefer the mystery/thriller/crime genre to an even greater extent
than do younger ones. While there have long been successful woman
writers writing about both men and woman detectives (Agatha
Christie, P.D. James, Sue Grafton), I've become increasingly aware
that many of the first novels I'm reading lately are by women, and many of
them are about women solving crimes. I'm not particularly aware of
successful efforts of male writers to feature women detectives as
protagonists. So two questions arise: is Lawson making a cynical play
to capture woman readers, and is this a successful effort to do so?
M.A. Lawson
Mike
Lawson says he “was raised in Pueblo, Colorado with a passel of
brothers and one sister, then attended college at Seattle University
and got a degree in engineering. After college, I went to work for
the U.S. Navy as a nuclear engineer and spent about thirty years
working for the Navy’s nuclear power program. I spent some time in
Washington D.C., but most of my career was at a large naval shipyard
in Bremerton, Washington. At the shipyard I managed a number of
different organizations related to overhauling nuclear powered
submarines, cruisers, and aircraft carriers. I ended my career as a
member of the government’s Senior Executive Service and as the top
civilian at the shipyard responsible for navy reactor plant work on
the West Coast. The influence of my former career on my writing is
discussed briefly in the “Behind
the Books” section of [his] website. Regarding my personal
life, let’s just leave at: I’m married, live in the Pacific
Northwest, and when I’m not writing I mostly play golf and just
goof around.”
Rosarito Beach (An Agent KayHamilton Novel) by M.A. Lawson
(Penguin: Blue Rider Press, December 2013, 352 pages, $26.95) is the
first in a projected series with DEA agent Kay Hamilton as the
protagonist. Written by M.A. Lawson, a pseudonym for successful crime
novelist Mike Lawson, it's a somewhat predictable drug cartel tale
set in the environs of San Diego and nearby northern Mexico. There
are plenty of plot twists to help the reader maintain interest, and
Agent Hamilton shows some growth through her experiences, but there's
no telling where Lawson will take the story of a career mother whose new-found domestic responsibilities may jeopardize both her sex life
and her career. Rosarito Beach
was provided to me as an electronic galley by the publisher through
Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle.
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