Plot Lines Nearly as Twisted as the Villains

Over the course of nine novels, James Hall has proven himself a writer whose strengths lie in his ability to create intricately conceived plots as well as multilayered depictions of Florida locales and locals. “Rough Draft” relies on his strong sense of the Florida landscape, his ability to set up a dizzying sequence of events and his portraits of some diabolical, truly frightening villains to save a convoluted story of murder, revenge and mayhem.

Hannah Keller is a former Miami Police Department public information officer who gives up policing after the simultaneous sale of her first mystery novel and the murder of her parents. The suspected murderer is J.J. Fielding, a man Hannah’s father, a U.S. attorney, was tracking in a $463-million embezzlement case.

In a heart-wrenching prologue that brings home the lingering horror of murder in the lives of victims’ families, Hall quickly establishes that Hannah’s young son, Randall, witnessed the murder and that the case was never solved, in spite of her badgering of FBI agent Frank Sheffield, its hapless investigator.

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Five years later, Fielding is still on the lam while mother and son have become veritable hermits, Hannah lost in her books and Randall withdrawn into Internet chat rooms and Web sites. The scenes between mother and son are masterfully charged not only with familiar parent-adolescent miscommunication but with the pain of shared, unexpressed grief: “Hannah put her hand on his shoulder. She could feel the vibrations radiating from his body like the hum of a tuning fork buried deep in the bone, a low throb that had begun to pulse years ago . . . when he found his grandparents dead. . . . Any little noise, a bird exploding into flight, an avocado falling from the tree would send him reeling. . . . He had manic outbursts, long hours lost in his programming language, deaf to the world.”

Although Hannah and Randall try to forget Fielding, the man who destroyed their lives, the FBI has not forgotten him, and is certain that the Cali cartel, whose money Fielding embezzled, hasn’t either. In fact, the bureau is pursuing Hal, the assassin hired by the Calis to find and eliminate Fielding, for the murder of a senator’s daughter and, in order to grab him, uses an unsuspecting Hannah as bait.

The sting involves more than a dozen FBI agents, among them the now-smitten Sheffield, who tails the mystery writer in everything from a UPS truck to helicopters. If all of this sounds convoluted and contrived, it is. The reader is supposed to believe that the FBI is comprised of a bunch of careerist barracudas, who lead Hannah on a rather improbable chase that stretches the limits of credibility.

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Hall’s characters are what hold “Rough Draft” together, keeping interest high when all else fails. And while the good guys and a series of well-drawn minor characters have their moments, it’s Hall’s villains who mesmerize us. In Hal, an emotionally crippled young man with a peculiarly gruesome method of dispatching his victims, Hall has hit homicidal pay dirt, creating a character as chillingly complex and as grimly comical as anything concocted by Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard. By the time Hal meets up with Misty, a twisted young woman with her own reasons for wanting Hannah to suffer, the reader intuitively knows that when good finally does triumph over evil, it will do so in a most grotesque, eccentrically Floridian fashion.