Book Review : Ingredients Fine; Cook’s Wanting

Heat Lightning by John Lantigua (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $17.95, 264 pages)

“Mr. Lantigua,” accompanying publicity on this book tells us, “a respected, experienced journalist, has covered Central America for such publications as the Washington Post and Newsweek. His considerable knowledge about the complex causes of the unceasing violence convulsing that area gives a unique resonance to this novel.” Well, maybe.

“Heat Lightning” is a lot like an elaborately prepared meal that doesn’t turn out because the person making it is a pretty bad cook. All the ingredients seem to be fine, but it just doesn’t taste very good; it doesn’t read very well.

The story here is: David Cruz, hard-boiled homicide inspector, lives and works in San Francisco, and it’s a jungle out there. It’s always a jungle, but it seems so particularly to the new crop of Central American refugees who have invaded the city: “You were careful with these people because it seemed at any minute they might go off. They had brought a fear with them that always sat in their eyes and became part of everything they saw around them.”

Permanently Soured

All this fits in exactly with Inspector Cruz’s own world view. He’s seen so many murders and so many murderers that his disposition has permanently soured. His ex-wife, Alice, who still believes that people have the capacity for goodness, has taunted him unceasingly about how cold he is, how cruel he is, how hopeless he is, etc.

So. In San Francisco, where the Central American War is now being played out by extremists from both the right and the left wings, Gloria Soto, a beautiful young Latino girl, has been murdered. It looks “like they scared her to death,” Cruz thinks, but more than that, “Carved into the dirt next to the body was . . . a drawing: a rough outline of an animal that looked like a bull. It had four legs, a thick body and two long horns that curved in the dirt right toward the girl’s head. It was a signature.”

Was this poor girl--from Central America, of course--killed by an irate lover, an unknown enemy, right-wing terrorists, or left-wing terrorists, or what? Over time we are introduced to characters from that other life, down south.

One of them is Eric Hernandez, Gloria’s old novio and a left-wing fugitive; tall, handsome, pure of heart and soul--and for some reason that only the author knows for sure, Inspector Cruz’s chief suspect.

This is especially hard to take because there is another suspect whom Cruz dismisses almost at once--a 300-pound disgusting rapist, who dresses in very bad taste and is a moron and also a coyote who smuggles refugees into this country for exorbitant fees and often leaves them to die in the desert, but still sweet Gloria Soto appeared to have preferred him to the pure-hearted Eric. Certainly there must have been a reason for this behavior.

Despite Cruz’s non-investigation, the story creeps along. We realize soon that the lovely dead girl and Eric were part of an ongoing, separate war over who “really” owned a single Central American plantation--the peasants who did the work, or the landlords who exploited them. We learn that the right-wing people here in San Francisco are not pleasant people at all.

A Latino priest tries to talk some sense to the pig-headed inspector, as he chases futilely all over this fictional landscape looking for handsome pure-hearted Eric to pin him for the murder. Maybe the hombres on the right had something to do with Gloria’s murder: “Every once in a while,” says the priest, “I get one that comes in to talk about his past sins. They were in the Army or the National Guard or maybe death squads. . . . I hear some incredible things and I hear them in great detail, David.” Who cares? David Cruz has heard all that before. He still thinks Eric the pure-hearted killed that girl, because San Francisco is a “jungle” (see pages 75, 77, 85, 151 and 263), and because he’s a loner, and so on.

This is what’s wrong with “Heat Lightning,” and I’m sorry to have to say it. John Lantigua knows a lot about Central America and very little about writing a detective novel. He respects events, but scorns his own characters. This makes “Heat Lightning” very slow going.