Simons’ book is all about incredibly stupid people doing incredibly unbelievable things to no point whatsoever. It may not take you eleven hours to read it but, however many it takes, you’ll want them back. With interest — because this book has none.
It starts with a very pregnant woman, Didi, in a Texan shopping mall. Apart from the fact that she’s pregnant — a condition which, probably in general and certainly in Texas, ought to require a licence — there is absolutely nothing to recommend her. She’s a classic middle-class American christist who likes nothing more than purchasing and praying. And she is utterly, utterly, stupid.
Somehow a nasty man, Lyle, manages to get her out of the mall and into his car. He offers to carry her bags (full of useless crap), but she refuses, suspecting him of male-volence. But still, having refused, and still suspecting, she goes with him under the weakest of verbal entreatments. Turns out later that he’s carrying a gun and a knife (which, of course, he has to use later) but these do not come into play in her abduction. The whole thing should have fallen into a heap at this point on sheer grounds of believability; not to mention æsthetics. She could have coshed him with the sheer weight of her purchases, for example. But that would have prevented the litany of farces to come.
The scene shifts to her distraught and equally stupid husband, Rick. To cut an unduly long (300 pages) story short, he ends up with the stupidest FBI agent in the world, Scott, who — and this is likely to happen, isn’t it? — takes him on the recovery mission, allowing him to ride in the FBI helicopter, to wear combat gear, usw — stopping just short of issuing him with a firearm. Only their combined stupidity allows the search to go on for quite so many bits of wasted tree.
A single example: not much after 7:00pm, way more than an hour before sunset in Texas in summer, the cops find that, and from where, Lyle has stolen a police car and is now using it as the kidnap vee-hickle. The police car has a unique identification number and they have a helicopter. Wield would have had Lyle in the cuffs within a few minutes.
Didi and Lyle aren’t rich, just average Americans (i.e., fairly rich). They don’t have enemies, unless they are rival christist publishers (Rick’s job) — now that would have made a great plot! And Lyle doesn’t know them. So why on earth else would a nutcase abduct a specifically pregnant woman? You don’t have to be Shamrock Wombs, or even Tara Moss, to work this one out. But it’s not revealed as such, in actual printed words, until page 263! Simons must think her readers are as stupid as her characters and, most likely, as stupid as she is on this showing.
From a practical point of view, the shopping and the faith in god-and-fairies remain more or less in tact by the end of the story. Now, in Texas, that’s called getting your priorities right.
