Kent Harrington (1) (1952–)

Oh my … I think Harrington is a talented writer who can craft a hard-boiled crime novel. This book focuses on Vincent Calhoun, a DEA agent working in Tijuana, Mexico, who has given in to gambling and corruption. The entire story takes place in about 30 hours, beginning on Nov 1 at 2:00 pm, and ending just short of midnight on the night of Nov 2. In that time frame Harrington manages to cram in several shootings, car chases through the desert, ambushes, drug trafficking, animal doping, loan sharking, kinky sex and even a grossly obese billionaire who is wheeled on a refrigerator dolly through back streets full of drunken revelers. Really? The characters might have been interesting, but as written they were about as flat as the desert landscape. With the exception of a young Guatemalan couple who make just a cameo appearance, I just didn’t care what happened to any of them. What really turned me off, though, was extensive gratuitous sex and violence. It seemed that every time Harrington wrote his character into a jam the way out was either through f**king or killing. He may have the talent to write crime novels, but he wasted it on this drivel.… (más)

"…Harrington's best by far, a story about the internal place where the currents of fear and desire lap against the shores of danger." --Michael Connelly, author of The Lincoln Lawyer

From Publishers Weekly
Set in Guatemala, Harrington's entertaining noir political thriller boasts a hero, Russell Cruz-Price, whose biography bears some not-so-coincidental parallels to the author's. While working in Central America as a financial journalist, Cruz-Price finds himself passionately involved with two women, an American working for a U.N. housing affiliate and the beautiful wife of Carlos Selva, the head of Guatemalan intelligence. He's also mixed up with a ruthless and ambitious Guatemalan strongman aiming to take over the country and a venal German archeologist, improbably named Gustav Mahler, who seeks a legendary immense jade jaguar. Flashbacks to 1988 and the dreadful final end of Cruz-Price's mother, a member of Guatemala's social elite, nicely serve to heighten suspense by interrupting and prolonging the present-day narrative. The author's occasional use of an omniscient point of view to leap forward in time to describe a character's ultimate fate helps to distinguish this tale from the typical Latin American coup saga. Despite his slightly enigmatic central figure and an underdeveloped supporting cast, the author (Dark Ride, etc.)does a nice job of painting a grim picture of the Third World and the corruption of the powerful.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* "He'd wanted to give up his self, the great monolith of his personality; he'd wanted to smash it, to pulverize it and walk away somehow different, or dead." Russell Cruz-Price achieves his goal and more in this utterly compelling blend of noir thriller and adventure novel. Shorn of that Indiana Jones can-do spirit, Harrington's story sends a dissolute journalist--think Fowler in The Quiet American--straight into the heart of darkness. Cruz-Price is marking time as a foreign correspondent in Guatemala--his mother, daughter of one of the country's coffee barons, was murdered there 30 years earlier--when two events change his life. He agrees to buy a coffee plantation, having been convinced by a fortune-hunting archaeologist that the mythical Red Jaguar, a giant Mayan sculpture made of jade, is buried on the grounds, and he falls hard for the wife of the head of Guatemala's secret service. Imagine if Fred C. Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre had had a femme fatale to deal with in addition to his greedy partners, and you'll have some idea how Cruz-Price gets "pulverized." But there is much more happening here than a hapless hero caught in a vice. Harrington draws us into Cruz-Price's passion completely--making us feel the irresistibility of both the woman and the jaguar--and he drenches us in the corruption of South American politics (the author's mother was a member of one of Guatemala's ruling families). The result is a thriller that twists its knife far deeper than most. An instant cult classic that just might vault into the mainstream. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved… (más)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. All the moral incongruities and conundrums that complicate the war on terror are on almost palpable display in this searing thriller from Harrington (Red Jungle), set largely in Mexico City. In this backwater in the war on terror, Dr. Collin Reeves has found a semicomfortable niche performing occasional chores for the CIA, acting as a go to doctor for the U.S. embassy when American tourists need medical attention, and pursuing his avocation of painting. When CIA veterans Alex Law and Butch Nickels get wind of a possible terrorist bombing plot, they use any means to extract information that might prevent it. Reeves, pressed to keep alive suspects who are being tortured, faces both a moral dilemma and personal danger. This taut, thought-provoking novel offers no easy answers, no good versus evil dichotomy, as Reeves discovers that there was no morally safe place anywhere. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* “Everyone runs out of luck some place. . . . It was just a question of where.” In the course of not quite 300 pages, that question is answered for most of the cast in Harrington’s superb thriller. Collin Reeves is a doctor at the American embassy in Mexico City; he’s also a CIA agent, but he’s largely ignored by the Company, left to spend his days playing at becoming a painter. Then the Muslim owner of a hotel across the street from Collin’s apartment asks the doctor to treat an American guest. So begins Collin’s transformation from dilettante to reluctant antiterrorist to disgusted man of action. It starts when he falls in love with the sick “American,” who turns out to be a beautiful Iraqi woman who may be involved with terrorists who have brought a bomb into Mexico City. Every character in this gripping story—from the good doctor to his CIA superiors to the terrorists—is portrayed with remarkable subtlety, moments of heartbreaking vulnerability and humanity set against multiple forms of hatred. Curiously, this is not an overtly political novel, except in the sense that Harrington heaps plagues upon all the ideological houses whose bombs spray their shrapnel across our landscape. Duck if you can, the good doctor learns, but recognize when you’ve reached that place where your luck runs out, and try to act with as much grace as you can muster. This will remind many of John le Carré’s Absolute Friends (2004), but it is less ideological and more unflinching in its willingness to examine the humanity of the terrorist and the inhumanity of terrorism. --Bill Ott… (más)

Vincent Calhoun is sick with dengue fever. He is sick to his very soul, betraying his country, his oath as a DEA agent, and his "clients." Calhoun is an American drug agent working in Tijuana, indulging in the excesses and corruption of that Mexican border town. He supplements his income - and tries to to cover his losses at the dog track - by smuggling illegal aliens across the border into California. His partner of choice is a Mexican federal cop. His partner of necessity is a well-bred, young, violent British fixer. The pressure on Calhoun mounts as he's "hired" to mule a group of Chinese girls across the border; unknown to him the girls have ingested balloons of heroin. He reunites with an American girl who started his downward spiral in California, pledging to get her back across the border along with a Chilean family and a 500 lb. Mexican crime lord. Everything comes to a head on Mexico's Dia de los Muertes - the Day of the Dead.

In some all too obvious ways, this classic novel noir reminded me of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil." A central character has no idea of the forces that are leading him. There is ambition, money, lust, and violence. But, unlike Charlton Heston's film character of Mike Vargas, there is no character with a moral center. Calhoun is more like a younger, handsome version of Welles' character, Hank Quinlan. Calhoun has opportunities to get his life straight, but his physical and moral sickness keep him spiraling down to a violent climax.

La Dia de los Muertes is a fast-moving book that rises above the level of pulp, full of fleshed-out colorful characters who populate a continuum of amorality. I enjoyed this book a lot, but felt like taking a shower after I finished it to wash away the sights, smells, and sounds of Tijuana and the denizens of this novel.… (más)