Run the Risk

Rating:
Summary: great first book
Review: I'm always searching for new authors and this one is a winner. Kept my interest and had a different twist from the run-of-the-mill thriller. Can't wait for more!

Rating:
Summary: A Pungent New Voice for the Thriller Genre
Review: Scott Frost makes his formal novel debut with a scorchingly fascinating, roller coaster ride of a story set against the background of Pasadena, California during the time in which all eyes are on the sunny and elegant vestige of yesteryear - the New Year's Day Rose Parade. Frost understands the city and its environs and even for those of us who live here, he opens vistas with his word painting that bring into focus the 'city of perpetual New Year's Day sunlight' and makes that atmosphere add to the fine story of this first novel.

Frost has established writing credentials: he has been a scriptwriter for "Twin Peaks" and "Life Goes On". And perhaps that is why this particular novel feels so cinematic. Few writers can top his conversational tone, written in such distinctive voices that the out-of-quotes 'he said/she said' become obsolete. Every character in this book is so well defined that were they to pass us on the street we would gasp and think 'I know him'.

Frost places the narration of RUN THE RISK in his main character Alex Delillo, a divorced/widowed mother of a teenage girl Lacy who just happens to be a Homicide detective on the Pasadena Police Force. Alex and Lacy are in the expected struggle that occurs between mother/daughter in the daughter's high school years. The tone of this story is set when Lacy, a Pasadena Rose Queen princess, jolts the proper Pasadenans by spraying pesticide on the crowd as her name is called in the crowning proceedings. This 'environmentalist' gesture sets into motion a series of incidents that begin with bombs and murders in the florist environs closely associated with the incipient Rose Parade. Lacy disappears and Alex begins her investigation of what becomes an intensive and razor-sharp search for a man thought to be a terrorist bomber bent on gaining world recognition by setting off a bomb on millions of television screens observing the famous Rose Parade. But Alex in tandem with a bomb expert Harrison slowly realize that they are not dealing with a terrorist but a serial killer. Lacy is being held hostage and the one person who can bring this all to a climax is Lacy's terrified but determined mother Alex!

How all this weaves into a running series of shocking events, each surprising the reader with gory details and propelling the speed of page turning, is the structure of the novel. But in contrast to other writers of this genre, Frost has created a protagonist in Alex Delillo who holds not only our attention but our complete empathy, a character so real in her emotions that she quashes all previous perceptions of the hard woman cop.

And as this weren't sufficient to place Frost in the prominent arena of fine thriller writers, he also generously displays his sensitive observations of a city and environs like few other writers. "Driving through the garment and jewelry districts of downtown L.A. is like stepping back into a fifty-year-old Kodachrome home movie of Mexico City. Garish colors of cheap clothes and custom jewelry spill out of storefront onto the sidewalks like a street festival. The sweet smells of corn tortillas and diesel fumes drift in the air. Salsa music competes with mariachi, which competes with sirens and street crime and broken dreams carried from dirt shacks south of the border. It's a place unknown to most inhabitants of the City of Angels, as distant from the gated homes of the Hollywood Hills as a Third World shantytown."

In the end Frost sets us up for a sequel but does so in a way that avoids our frustration that we are being milked, replacing that with an intense interest in just what more can Alex Delillo accomplish. This is a well-written, exciting, tense novel that suggests that Scott Frost will be an increasingly vital force in contemporary fiction. Grady Harp, February 2005