Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Harper Torch / HarperCollins
Release Date: January 27, 2004
ISBN: 1-89140-08-2-7
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Trade Paperback
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Genre:   Mystery – Police Procedural
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Kristin Johnson
Reviewer Notes:  Reviewer Kristin Johnson is the author of CHRISTMAS COOKIES ARE FOR GIVING, co-written with Mimi Cummins and ORDINARY MIRACLES: My Incredible Spiritual, Artistic and Scientific Journey, co-written with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D.
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Tropic of Night
By Michael Gruber

       The title of this stunning debut mystery has echoes of Henry Miller. This is appropriate, since Tropic of Night does for Cuba, Africa, anthropology, and the politics of race and religion what Miller did for Cole Porter-era Bohemian Paris.

      What’s the bad news? Michael Gruber tries to take a leaf from his sorcerer subjects and tries verbal and character slight-of-hand to see how many times he can sneak in racial commentary bordering on unintentional self-parody. Liberal whites have white guilt. Blacks raised by white adoptive parents wish for a black Hitler. Upper-class Cubans look down on Cubans who look like they might fix the transmission on the professor’s Lexus, but in reality, like Jimmy Paz, are tough Black/Cuban police officers dating white women against their Catholic immigrant mothers’ wishes. And it is unlikely that a white woman who would stick her neck out this way for an abused Cuban girl, much less adopt her and risk jail by murdering the girl’s mother.

      However, Jane Clare Doe marries a brilliant angry Black male and immerses herself in the real Africa, where her poet husband makes her out to be something out of Amos and Andy and where her problem is not race but, as in her visit to Chenka, Russia, with lover Marcel Vierchau, her inability to connect with and even have sex with the spirit world.

      Jane’s husband turns to demon summoning to get rid of Whitey.

      Jimmy Paz’s “quaint old redneck” partner Cletis Barlow, a non-racist, quotes the Bible in a way that makes the reader believe he lives the Word. But even Cletis isn’t spared the nightmare of history. Moore’s demonic possession turns him temporarily into a Grand Wizard.

     Jimmy Paz discovers his mother, Margarita Paz, is actually a practitioner of the Cuban religion Santeria (recently featured on an episode of TV’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). Margarita joins with Jimmy and Jane in the battle between good and evil.

     Like the illusions created by dark sorcery, nothing is what it seems in this mystery. Jane does wicked aikido. Jimmy and Jane don’t end up together. Finally, Jimmy, like the reader, becomes a believer.