Rating: 
Summary: Fast, Furious and Hard to Put Down
Review: A shipping container washes ashore in Seattle carrying a handful of scared and hungry Chinese women, three dead from the hard voyage across the Pacific. TV news anchor Stevie McNeal and her Chinese reporter friend and adopted sister Melissa chase after what seems to be a large scale scheme involving illegal aliens. Melissa decides to go undercover as an illegal but when Stevie doesn't hear from her she fears the worst.Seattle police Detective Lou Boldt is also on the case and now, all of a sudden, Stevie sees him as friend and ally, rather than foe.This was a fun read as are all Pearson's novels. It was fast, furious and impossible to put down. Reviewed by Vesta Irene
Rating: 
Summary: A Great Plot...But
Review: Although I have read all of Ridley Pearson's books, this was my first experience with one of his works on audio cassette. Once again, Mr. Pearson has created a wonderfully suspenseful plot, but one that is almost ruined by this narrator. From the very beginning Mr. Rosema's too-rapid delivery makes it almost impossible to absorb the many details which are Pearson's trademark. Rosema's chopped-up reading style results in dreadful enunciation (i.e. dijalcamra for digital camera) With the exception of Mama Lu, most of the characters are unbelieveable due to their speedy conversational styles. I was greatly disappointed. A greater disappointment would only have resulted had I purchased this audio instead of borrowing it from the library. I must now read the book.
Rating: 
Summary: "GOOD AND NOT SO GOOD"
Review: Boldt, LaMoia and company are called on to help stop the importing of illegal aliens. As it says on page 221, "it is a complex operation, involving ships, the containers, the cargo, the rendezvous, transporation, fake ID's, graveyards, brothels and sweatshops." The TV news gets in the act in the form of Stevie McNeal. Her adopted sister, Melissa, disappers. Some high ranking agent has to be on the take for it to work. Boldt and his group work their selves to death and everytime they get close some dummy from a TV news team messes it up for them. Never did know what happened to Coughlie or who he worked for. I really liked the character of Mama Lu. Hope she is used again. Pearson writes a fast paced book but I thought the several pages it took for McNeal to get on board the ship took way to long. The book is good, but some things you don't find out are not so good.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing after PIED PIPER
Review: I am relatively new to thrillers in general, and FIRST VICTIM is only my second Ridley Pearson book, the first being the excellent (five-star) PIED PIPER. This was a real comedown in comparison. Another in the Lou Boldt series, FIRST VICTIM doesn't have half the character development of its predecessor. The story of Boldt's relationship with his wife and kids is perfunctory at best. We are told that he loves his kids above all else, which I suppose makes him unique in the world. Detective Sergeant John LaMoia, so subtly flesh out in PIED PIPER, is a cartoon cutout here. Daphne Matthews is nearly invisible, appearing only in cameo, and the licentious Captain Sheila Hill is AWOL. The plot revolves around the underground industry of illegally importing aliens and making them pay for their passage by forcing them into slavery and prostitution. This is villany at its worst, but the cops never get beyond low-level goons in ferreting out the bad guys. The special guest star of FIRST VICTIM is TV anchorwoman Stevie McNeil, who in Scott Rosema's audio interpretation is given a stilted accent of no particular nationality. She spends most of her time fretting over the disappearance of her adopted Chinese "little sister," while at the same time trying to frustrate the attempts of Boldt and crew too find her. We are never really told why she is so uncooperative, except to the extent that journalists don't trust cops in general. Well, few people like lawyers in general, either, but when we need one, we don't hesitate to seek out the best. Pearson gives McNeil the obligatory sumptuous cleavage, blond hair, and shapely legs, but her sexuality never gets beyond that of a Barbie doll. This is the most chaste novel I have read in a long time. There are problems with motivation, too. When we finally find out what happened to McNeil's sister, it is never clear why she suffered this fate. Further, what happens to the bad guy, or whether or not he really was a bad guy, is never resolved. The novel just ends, abruptly and unsatisfyingly.
Rating:
Summary: The First Victim is First Rate
Review: I first met Lou Boldt in The Pied Piper and then backtracked in our relationship by reading No Witnesses and Beyond Recognition. When I like a book series I usually read in groups of three and then take a year off. I'm glad I didn't follow my rule with this Ridley Peason novel. It was a great read and I find myself looking forward to Middle of Nowhere. This is a first for me--five series books in a row without a significant break. And, you should know, that as a former English teacher I am very picky. Here are the top three things about The First Victim: 1. Lou Boldt continues to be incredibly believable. I have a good friend who is a homicide detective in Washington State. Lou Boldt is so much like him that it's uncanny. His strained yet loving relationship with his wife adds deeper truth to the police procedural genre. I can personally vouch for Lou Boldt's feelings about his wife's recovery from cancer. They are real. Anything but cliche. 2. There is plenty of action in this novel, but the book never falls prey to the kind of trite, police stereotypes that litter most novels of this type. Boldt's friend and subordinate LaMoia comes the closest to a two dimensonal character, but the fact that he is the only one makes him unique. 3. The addition of the Stevie McNeal, the headstrong TV anchor, gives the novel a new direction. I am glad that Pearson gave the Daphne Matthew's/Boldt attraction a bit of rest.
Rating:
Summary: An "A" for Effort--Keep Them Coming
Review: I get real tired with people who expect a 5 star novel every time up to bat. Personally I'll settle for a 5 star effort. The only thing that I really got bogged down with was the bureacracy. The rest of it was well paced. one of my fellow Ridley fans aptly described this as a mind thriller. definitely an apt description.
Rating: 
Summary: Not up to the previous books in the series...
Review: If you're a Lou Boldt fan you'll read this book anyway because you care about the characters, and you'll want to keep up to date with them. I can't recommend reading this book for any other reason. It doesn't measure up to anything Pearson has done in the past. Certainly the subject matter, mistreatment of illegal Asian aliens, is important, but the story plods along with very little suspense or real urgency. I love Ridley Pearson's writing, but this book seems rushed, and forced in all the wrong ways.
Rating:
Summary: Not up to snuff
Review: Lou Boldt is struggling with his new position as Lieutenant in the Seattle Police Department's Homicide division and with his wife's "miraculous" cure of cancer. The death of three Chinese women in a container destined for Seattle's underground sweat shops drags him away from his wife and two small children. Then when a prominent newscaster's "Little Sister" becomes involved in trying to uncover the story of illegal immigrants goes missing a new urgency drives the investigation forward.
This book is not up to Pearson's usual high standards. The character of the newscaster, Stevie McNeal, is well developed but the others except for Lou Boldt, who we know from other novels, are poorly developed and their interactions and story line limp at times.
Rating:
Summary: America--The Final Victim?
Review: Screams are coming from a shipping container being fished out of Puget Sound, a container filled with illegal immigrants, Asian women bound for sweatshops and prostitution. The container had slipped off its transfer cable and plunged into a stormy sea, but even before that some had died.
This is the attention-grabbing scene early in another of Pearson's Lou Boldt hardboiled detective series. A good read, and since written by a "New York Times best-selling author," it provides an excellent example of how today's novelist handles the issue of US mass immigration, legal and illegal.
As is true of almost all fictional attempts to deal with this topic, the book condemns the exploitation of illegals without condemning illegal immigration itself--that which makes such exploitation inevitable.
Commenting to his wife on the ship-container deaths, Boldt reflects on immigration: "We all crossed the ocean at some point. Your people came in the early 1800s. Mine during the Great War. You think our people would make it now? All the qualifications and requirements?"
How odd. Since we are now living in the longest sustained period of mass immigration in US history, how is it that "All the qualifications and requirements" are making things so much more restrictive? Or maybe Boldt is making an oblique reference to the anti-European stacked deck of US immigration policy, largely due to so much "chain migration" chaining back to Third World people who first came here illegally. Yes, maybe that's it--and maybe my cat Molly will develop a stand-up routine and start touring dog kennel charity shows.
No, more likely it is the familiar practice of lumping all immigrants, legal, illegal, past, present, into the same moral category. And part of the standard defense that illegals as coming here [cue inspirational music] "seeking a better life"--apparently impossible outside of the United States, and a rationale that would excuse almost any invasion in history. Open-border apologists also frequently argue that illegals are "unstoppable," so it is futile to even try--and, besides, it's unsavory to even bring it up, because it shows, you know, "intolerance" and stuff.
Back to the Boldts. Lou's wife: "If your grandfather had never made the crossing, we would not be here." Wow, this woman is deep.
Lou: "That's what's bugging me, I think. If those women had lived ... at least for awhile they would have a legitimate chance at freedom." "Legitimate" illegals?
Ironically, elsewhere in the book, when it comes to things like police lawbreaking, Boldt is said to be "sentry at the gate." But aren't our nation's borders the ultimate "gate"? Protecting us from terrorists, murderers, rapists, robbers, and the like? Some sentry.
After Boldt, the book's featured character is television news anchor Stevie McNeal, whose half-Asian, half-sister reporter, Mi Chow/Melissa, is captured by the illegal smuggling gang while she is covering the container-death story.
The anchorwoman conducts an interview with INS official Adam Talmadge, during which she keeps referring to all Seattle illegals as "political refugees," apparently because many are from a repressive China. Well, let's see, following that criterion, how many hundreds of millions of the world's billions could move here tomorrow?
The official disputes her, saying in the agency's defense, "Congress has enacted one of the most far-reaching, sweeping overhauls to the Immigration Act this century, making our borders more welcoming that they have been in our seventy years." Welcoming borders? The more you repeat this phrase, the more hilariously Orwellian it becomes--and so very true!
Later in the book, the admired anchorwoman darkly refers to the real image of the INS as being "gatekeepers" and "border guards." Apparently US law enforcement officers risking their lives daily at our borders belong to one of the ickiest occupations imaginable. Since this is obviously presented as the common view of enlightened people, it is, once again, predictably Orwellian, since the real public image of the INS, if public opinion polls mean anything, is that of an agency did not provide ENOUGH support to the Border Patrol.
Although the book's lead characters are obviously meant to be open-minded and intelligent, they seem oblivious or confused on the connection between never-ending mass immigration and its inescapable consequences--such as growing crime. Although Boldt believes that his job now "implicitly requires fundamental knowledge of and contact with elements of organized crime, whether the Chinese Triad, the Russian Mafia ...," he still thinks immigration is just too darn restrictive. So what's the next requirement for Seattle's overworked police detectives, intimate knowledge of the crime lords of Katmandu?
Another familiar aspect of immigration's fictional treatment is that everything is personal. Bolt thinks of illegal immigration in terms of his (legal!) immigrant grandfather. The anchorwoman is motivated by memories of her father's valiant "efforts to smuggle [her half-sister] out of China alive." Sheer numbers of immigrants, and descendants, never enters into it--the effects on the environment, crime, you name it. However, the equally personal stories of those who are victims of crimes committed BY illegal immigrants--keeping in mind that about one in five of all those in American jails and prisons are illegals, for crimes other than their immigration status--never get mentioned. Apparently fictional characters who can think rationally about cumulative immigration NUMBERS would be just too embarrassingly uncool.
In the meantime, the dedicated lieutenant will go on solving his intriguingly gruesome murders, while the stunning anchorwoman will continue enjoying her "contract that includes a Town Car and driver to shuttle her to and from her all-expense-paid five-bedroom co-op apartment." Neither, we can be sure, will ever experience fifteen illegals encamped next door, nor lose their job to one.
On the other side of the issue, we have average un-PC Americans who are burdened by their ability to perform basic math, and are increasingly viewing never-ending mass legal and illegal immigration as leading to a non-nation nation, a teeming collapsed anthill of alien and warring cultures. Good luck Lou.
Not that this book isn't skillfully written. More's the pity.
Rating:
Summary: Hanging On
Review: This is my first read of Pearson. I found it thoughtful and intriuging. The story is creative yet real and gives the reader a new set of world issues to consider. A good read.
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