Reviews
James Hall's series about beach bum Thorne (Mean High Tide, Buzz Cut, Hard Aground) placed him firmly in a Holy Trinity of Floridian crime novelists. Like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen, Hall brought to life Florida's alluring, addictive mix of sand and ocean, hibiscus and alligator, tanned skin and pastel stucco. Rough Draft, however, is less concerned with place than with plot: Miami is a cipher, a generic background for the convoluted whodunit (or perhaps more precisely, who's doing it to whom) Hall weaves around former policewoman and successful crime writer Hannah Keller.

Fiercely protective of her brilliant but haunted 11-year-old son, who five years ago witnessed the murders of his grandparents (presumably by the embezzler his grandfather was pursuing), Hannah becomes an unwitting pawn in an FBI operation to catch Hal Bonner. Bonner is a Cali assassin with a particularly brutal "signature." Since J.J. Fielding escaped with $463 million in drug money, Hal is hot on his trail; if--the FBI assumes--he can be persuaded that Hannah has found Fielding and the cash, he'll emerge from hiding to exact revenge. They lay a series of clues for Hannah to follow, beginning with a gruesomely annotated copy of her first book that seems to be a direct message from her parents' killer. But as the 72 hours allotted to the plan unfold, it becomes increasingly clear that Hannah will not be led by breadcrumbs; she prefers making her own path.

For sheer presence and emotional depth, Hannah may not be on a par with Alexandra Rafferty, the Miami police photographer of Body Language, and the machinations of the FBI agents--mostly an unpleasant bunch who are wound tighter than the proverbial top--may seem so labyrinthine as to verge on the ridiculous. But Hall serves up a delicious pair of villains in Hal and Misty (who is stalking Hannah for her own purposes). The slow-thinking killer and the quick-talking Hooters girl are chillingly vicious and oddly funny; picture a Capra-esque screwball courtship conducted at the Bates Motel. --Kelly Flynn


From Publishers Weekly
Veteran thriller master Hall (Body Language) exhibits a new dimension in this latest suspense novel. His intrepid protagonist Thorne conspicuously absent, he again features a female protagonist. Five years ago, beleaguered Miami police detective and single mom Hannah Keller was closing in on J.J. Fielding, a banker/money launderer for the Cali drug cartel. But when agents got close to nabbing Fielding, he disappeared with $463 million in embezzled cash. Meanwhile, Keller and her loving parents were about to celebrate her big break; she'd just sold her first mystery novel for a sizable sum. Her happiness turned to horror when she discovered her mother and her father, a former U.S. Attorney, dead--assassinated gang-style by killers leaving Fielding's "calling card" and a sole witness, Keller's then six-year-old son, Randall. The case has remained unsolved since. Now, Miami FBI agents Frank Sheffield and Helen Shane are out to capture the man who murdered a U.S. senator's daughter. They're sure that the killer is Hal Bonner, hired gun for the Cali cartel, and they decide to use Keller and her son as decoys to capture Bonner. Meanwhile, looking for revenge is Fielding's disturbed daughter, Hooters' employee, Misty. Filled with rage at her father's disappearance, she's determined to kill young Randall. In a creepy plot twist, Keller finds a copy of her first novel marked with scribblings that contain a code, possibly from Fielding himself. Solid suspense builds as the FBI, Misty and Hal chase Keller in choppers, cars and UPS vans. An expert creator of grotesque villains and fast action, former poet Hall raises the crossbar with his sensitive insights into the human condition. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Hall's latest clever thriller will grab new fans and please old ones. Ex-cop Hannah Keller has a successful career writing crime novels. Her teenage son, Randall, witnessed the killing of his grandparents five years ago and still hasn't fully recovered. While waiting in her son's psychiatrist's office, she discovers a copy of her first novel with strange notes and numbers in the margins. Deciphering it reveals what appears to be a direct message to her from the killers of her parents. With the help of a reluctant FBI agent, Hannah decides to play along, but by her own rules. Hall (Body Language) is a master at duping the reader into believing something that inevitably proves to be jaw-droppingly false. A surprising book that should be on all public library shelves.---Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Using a variety of carefully selected and clearly differentiated voices, Sandra Burr delivers a fully realized performance of this excellent mystery. Burr uses a flat, nearly emotionless voice for the narrative, then brings out all the nuances of character and motivation in the dialogue. Her performance of the terrorized 10-year-old, for example, is heartbreaking in its combination of fear and pre-adolescent bravado. She takes a wide variety of accents, from Norwegian to Colombian, in stride without drawing attention to her artistry. The only music on the tape denotes the chapter changes, but with Burr's performance, no further ornamentation is needed. G.M.N. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
A freewheeling FBI unit uses a sorrowing crime writer to get at a brutal hired killerin an intricate thriller that never quite hits the Michael Connelly mark. Five years ago, Hannah Keller's parents were murdered, presumably by the embezzler her father had just seen slip through his fingers. But her Miami PD colleagues never bought Hannah's theory that J.J. Fielding was the killer. Now that she's retired to become a successful crime writer, the Feebees figure she'll be the perfect bait to flush out Hal Bonner, the Cali assassin who likes to kill his victims by squeezing the life out of their hearts. If Hal can be persuaded that Hannah's found Fielding and his boodle, he'll come out of hiding to follow her as she follows the trail of false clues the FBI has laid down, beginning with a mysteriously annotated copy of her first novel that seems to point to Fielding's whereabouts. Though the plot is diabolically clever, the Bureau types are all ciphers, and Hannah, struggling alone to raise her young son Randall, who was traumatized by seeing his grandparents' killers, doesn't leave much more of an impression. But the bad guys, as ever with Hall (Body Language, 1998, etc.), are delightfully hissable. Hal, an idiot savant of homicide with the self-awareness of a cinder block (``He could do math. He could read. He wasn't learning disabled'') meets his match in Misty, a sad-eyed stripper who's stalking Hannah for reasons of her own. It's a shame that it's so obvious for so long what's going to happen when they finally come face to face with her, her son, and her son's house pet. More twists than thrills, but connoisseurs of villainy will appreciate the latest additions to the most memorable gallery of criminal grotesques since the glory days of Dick Tracy. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"James Hall is a master of suspense."--The New York Times

"James Hall's writing is astringent, penetrating, and unfailingly gripping long after you read the last page." -Dean Koontz

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
James W. Hall is one of a number of writers -- others include Carl Hiaasen, John Katzenbach, Edna Buchanan, and Randy Wayne White -- who have transformed the south Florida crime novel into a thriving subgenre. Hall, who is a poet as well as a novelist and short story writer, has published ten increasingly popular thrillers, most of which recount the exploits of a charismatic loner named Thorn. In the past few years, Hall has produced a couple of equally successful nonseries novels. The latest of these, Rough Draft, is now available, and it is a certified page-turner.

According to the publicity material, Rough Draft had its origins in an actual event. While browsing in a secondhand bookstore, Hall came across a used copy of one of his own novels. This particular copy was heavily annotated, filled with underlinings, marginal notations, and cryptic scrawls. The image of that bizarrely marked volume stayed in Hall's mind. Eventually, it found its way into his fiction and now serves as the McGuffin that stands at the center of his striking, ambitious new book.

The heroine of Rough Draft is Hannah Keller, a former Miami homicide cop who is now the author of a popular series of police procedurals. Five years prior to the main events of this book, Hannah's parents were murdered, shot down by a trio of killers who still remain at large. Randall Keller, Hannah's six-year-old son, was the only witness to the murders, which left him deeply -- perhaps permanently -- traumatized. As the novel begins, Hannah finds a copy of her own first novel in the waiting room of Randall's psychiatrist. The book is filled with cryptic scribblings and with columns of numbers that represent a childishly simple code. The encoded message is directed at Hannah and appears to have been written by the man responsible for her parents' deaths.

Faced with the prospect of catching the killer, Hannah's police instincts, now long dormant, begin to resurface. By this point, however, the reader knows something that Hannah does not: The "message" is a fake, the central element in a calculating, overly elaborate sting operation designed and implemented, for complex reasons of their own, by an ambitious FBI agent and a grief-maddened U.S. senator. The ultimate object of the sting is to flush from hiding a brutal contract killer who has successfully eluded capture for more than a decade. Unaware that she is being callously used, Hannah takes the bait and runs with it.

The manipulation of Hannah Keller forms the centerpiece of a cleverly devised plot that moves, swiftly and with great assurance, in some unexpected directions. As Hannah stalks a nonexistent killer, a real killer begins to stalk her. As the real killer slowly emerges from hiding, the FBI team clumsily prepares to spring its trap. Nothing, of course, goes exactly as planned. As the narrative progresses, new players, with agendas of their own, intrude on the action; enmities and alliances begin to form among the various participants; and the FBI master plan proves fundamentally flawed. In the end, both Hannah Keller and her deeply vulnerable son find themselves in mortal jeopardy, victimized by forces on both sides of the law.

Rough Draft is a tense, tight, cleanly written thriller that moves at approximately the speed of light. Hall captures the dilemmas and anxieties of his haunted central characters with precision and sympathy, and he populates his story with a varied, equally credible cast of supporting characters. Included among them are a disaffected FBI agent no longer able -- or willing -- to play his assigned role, a psychopathic killer who has no access at all to the normal range of human feelings, an embittered young woman with a grotesque penchant for mutilating Barbie dolls in the name of art, and a 12-year-old computer prodigy who is slowly dying of an AIDS-related illness and whose technical expertise helps set the stage for the violent denouement.

Readers impatient for the next installment of the Thorn saga may grumble a bit at this latest departure, but they shouldn't, really. Hall, I'm sure, will return to Thorn in his own good time. In the meanwhile, we are fortunate to have this humane, imaginative thriller to fall back on. Rough Draft is a suspense novel with heart, brains, and impressive narrative muscle and comes highly recommended to anyone on the lookout for intelligent, high-adrenaline entertainment.

--Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

After the brutal murders of her parents, mystery novelist Hannah Keller quit the Miami P.D. to devote more time to writing, and to her eleven-year-old son Randall—still haunted by the discovery of his grandparents' bodies five years ago. But just when life seems to be calming down for Hannah, she finds a copy of one of her books, with cryptic notes scribbled in its margins. Hannah, immediately sensing the connection to her parents' deaths, is soon plunged into a harrowing search for answers—one that will draw her and her son closer to danger...to a reclusive millionaire who may hold all the answers...to two villains—one out for revenge and the other for blood...and to a real-life mystery more shocking than anything she could have penned.

FROM THE CRITICS

Carolyn Banks - Washington Post Book World

This is a thoroughly satisfying thriller, and even though I read it smack on the heels of two others, it stood out. Even the big action scenes are well-considered, pushed to the max. It isn't that they leave the realm of reality. No. Instead, Hall has taken what could be old hat and given it just enough of a twist to make it new.

New York Times

James Hall is a master of suspense.

Publishers Weekly

Veteran thriller master Hall (Body Language) exhibits a new dimension in this latest suspense novel. His intrepid protagonist Thorne conspicuously absent, he again features a female protagonist. Five years ago, beleaguered Miami police detective and single mom Hannah Keller was closing in on J.J. Fielding, a banker/money launderer for the Cali drug cartel. But when agents got close to nabbing Fielding, he disappeared with $463 million in embezzled cash. Meanwhile, Keller and her loving parents were about to celebrate her big break; she'd just sold her first mystery novel for a sizable sum. Her happiness turned to horror when she discovered her mother and her father, a former U.S. Attorney, dead--assassinated gang-style by killers leaving Fielding's "calling card" and a sole witness, Keller's then six-year-old son, Randall. The case has remained unsolved since. Now, Miami FBI agents Frank Sheffield and Helen Shane are out to capture the man who murdered a U.S. senator's daughter. They're sure that the killer is Hal Bonner, hired gun for the Cali cartel, and they decide to use Keller and her son as decoys to capture Bonner. Meanwhile, looking for revenge is Fielding's disturbed daughter, Hooters' employee, Misty. Filled with rage at her father's disappearance, she's determined to kill young Randall. In a creepy plot twist, Keller finds a copy of her first novel marked with scribblings that contain a code, possibly from Fielding himself. Solid suspense builds as the FBI, Misty and Hal chase Keller in choppers, cars and UPS vans. An expert creator of grotesque villains and fast action, former poet Hall raises the crossbar with his sensitive insights into the human condition. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Hall's latest clever thriller will grab new fans and please old ones. Ex-cop Hannah Keller has a successful career writing crime novels. Her teenage son, Randall, witnessed the killing of his grandparents five years ago and still hasn't fully recovered. While waiting in her son's psychiatrist's office, she discovers a copy of her first novel with strange notes and numbers in the margins. Deciphering it reveals what appears to be a direct message to her from the killers of her parents. With the help of a reluctant FBI agent, Hannah decides to play along, but by her own rules. Hall (Body Language) is a master at duping the reader into believing something that inevitably proves to be jaw-droppingly false. A surprising book that should be on all public library shelves. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/99.]--Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING