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Murder by the Numbers
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# : |
19955 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,284 Words |
| Author
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Robert F. Geary
Robert F. Geary is head of the English Department at James
Madison University. His academic interests include the gothic
novel and its literary descendants. |
SANTA FE RULES
Stuart Woods
New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
300 pp., $20.00
Wolf Willette's day goes fairly well for a while, as he flies his private plane from his Santa Fe home to Los Angeles to conduct movie business. Forced to land due to mechanical failure, he reads in the local newspaper that he, his wife, and his partner have been found murdered by shotgun blasts in his Santa Fe home. From this point on, the successful producer of small films finds his stylish, affluent life turning into a steadily worsening nightmare.
Wolf's first problem is that he has lost a day out of his life--the day, unfortunately, on which he was supposedly slain. What he thought was a night's rest has been, in fact, a blackout lasting a day and a half. Moreover, he had a similar blackout once before, immediately after he walked away from the auto accident that killed his first wife, who was pregnant with a child he did not want. Whatever happiness he might feel at not being one of the three badly disfigured corpses found in his bedroom is overborne by the realization that upon "returning to life" he will be the prime, indeed the only, suspect in the grisly deaths of his wife, his best friend and film director, and the unknown man whose face the shotgun fire destroyed along with his life. To make matters worse, Wolf cannot be at all sure of his innocence. Finding out from her obituary that Julia, his murdered wife, had a criminal past and recalling her recent hints of her desire for unorthodox sexual explorations, he wonders whether, finding her in bed with his closest friends and another man, he had used his shotgun to vent his rage. All this, moreover, is only the beginning of Wolf Willette's troubles.
From this intriguing opening, Stuart Woods deftly unfolds his ninth novel, the mystery-thriller Santa Fe Rules. The rapidly developing plot keeps readers in suspense and puzzlement, wondering who killed the three people and anxious over the fate of Willette, who, as one of the book's two centers of narrative focus, engages our sympathy even though we cannot dismiss him as the murderer. Moreover, just as we may be tempted to set aside our suspicions of Wolf, more people connected with him turn up murdered, increasing our anxiety for his safety even as the added killings seem to lessen the likelihood of his guilt.
Other suspects are not lacking. Julia's sordid past could have tempted any number of her
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