Carelessly Making a Case

Special to The Washington Post 
Saturday, August 22, 2009

TOTAL IMMUNITY

By Robert Ward

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 358 pp. $26

Robert Ward’s turbulent new thriller is set in a world that will feel familiar to fans of television impresarios Michael Mann and Steven Bochco. This is hardly surprising, since Ward is a former writer and producer of “Miami Vice” and “Hill Street Blues,” in addition to being the author of eight previous novels. Set in a contemporary Los Angeles where everyone seems to be involved in either the criminal justice system or the film business (or both), “Total Immunity” opens with the violent FBI bust of a South African diamond smuggler named Karl Steinbach. Leading the raid is Agent Jack Harper, whose college nickname was “Scary” and who proves “as cool as a pitcher of sangria” in the moments leading up to the bust. The smuggler, however, shows an equal degree of sang-froid, vowing before the cuffs are even slapped on his wrists to kill all four FBI agents involved in his arrest.

Jack is initially unfazed by the threat, though he changes his tune when one of his partners is killed after someone severs his car’s brakes. What’s more, Jack suspects that one of his superiors in the Bureau might have helped Steinbach arrange his colleague’s murder. And then another FBI agent is pushed in front of a train. What makes these murders even more ominous is that both are secretly filmed by a shadowy man with a scarred face. Matters become further complicated when Steinbach is released from jail after being granted immunity by a dodgy Homeland Security officer.

As Jack’s investigations continue to produce more questions than answers, the stress and long hours begin to take their toll on his personal life. His girlfriend leaves him, and his neglected 14-year-old son begins to slip into the netherworld of delinquency and drugs. Meanwhile, Jack finds himself in growing jeopardy, most notably when a gangster looses a Gila monster and a coral snake upon him after Jack breaks into the gangster’s sleazy club in search of evidence. Finally, Jack comes to understand fully the exact nature of the powerfully murderous forces set in motion by his seemingly straightforward arrest of a diamond smuggler, though not before they threaten to consume him and those close to him.

Although there is plenty of promise in Ward’s macho ambiance and Los Angeles locales, his writing consistently fails to deliver. His attempts at authorial flourish are often so awkward that they distract the reader. When Steinbach tumbles into a lake during a chase, he flails around “like a beached walrus” — though surely the author had another sea mammal in mind, since walruses perform perfectly well on dry land. Later, when a hulking thug finds himself alone with a sexy lounge singer, “his lizard heart fluttered like a butterfly’s wings inside his massive chest,” a mixture of images that seems more appropriate to an album cover for a psychedelic rock band than a hard-boiled contemporary thriller. At times, Ward’s characters share their author’s verbal awkwardness: Moments after a man gets shot, when he presumably has other things on his mind than parsing figures of speech, he decides that it “was as though someone had drilled a hole in him with a power drill, and for the first time he understood the term ‘drilling someone with a bullet.’ “

These stylistic shortcomings would be less noticeable if they served a more elegant and exciting plot, but after a bold start Ward quickly loses his way. There is really no sense of the inner workings of the FBI, and an inter-bureau squabble with Homeland Security is dealt with in a cursory manner. Despite the car chases, shootouts, imperiled children and venomous reptiles, the book lacks the sort of headlong momentum its pulsating urban setting requires. There are simply too many false leads, too many dead ends. When the big revelation comes, it is so wholly unexpected that it feels like something of a cheat, leaving the reader flailing on a beach a long way from where he started.

Amidon’s most recent novel is “Security.”