“Blood” Will Tell

California private eye-turned-author David Corbett received a plenitude of critical plaudits for his first two suspense novels, The Devil’s Redhead (2002) and Done for a Dime (2003). But in our impatient era, when writers seem to disappear if they can’t produce at least one book annually, Corbett pretty much fell off the literary map over the last three years. However, I came across a mention on his Web site that he’s at work on a third novel, Blood of Paradise, and so I e-mailed him, seeking more information about the project.

As Corbett puts it, this forthcoming work, set in modern-day El Salvador, is “an extension of Done for a Dime, in that it deals with current events by using a crime story. But there’s a love story as well, which should make readers think of Redhead.” Apparently inspired by Philoctetes, “a spare and relatively obscure drama by Sophocles,” Paradise’s plot centers around Jude McManus, the son of a scandalized Chicago policeman, who escaped into the military and now works as an “executive protection specialist” in El Salvador, safeguarding the life of American engineer Axel Odelberg. Odelberg supervises water-usage issues for a soft drink company, Estrella, which operates a bottling plant in the provincial city of San Bartolo Oriente. He has also come to see Jude as a surrogate son, and Jude looks up to Axel as one of the few individuals among his clientele (“rip-roaring assholes,” for the most part) whom he’s proud to guard. But just as Jude thinks he has finally found happiness with a cultural anthropologist named Eileen Browning, his world is about to come crashing down around his ears--and Odelberg’s. Bill Malvasio, an ex-cop and criminal comrade of Jude’s father who fled to Central America a decade ago rather than face extended prison time, asks the young bodyguard for help in finding a former SWAT sniper named Phil Strock in Chicago, and bringing him to El Salvador where Malvasio claims to have secured him a job. Although Jude knows Malvasio’s a crook and undoubtedly worse, he sees this task as both an opportunity to reconnect with his late father’s past and as a challenge: “To do the job and simply walk away--thus proving once and for all he is not merely his father’s son.” What Jude doesn’t realize is that Malvasio is on the payroll of a Salvadoran gangster who wants nothing more than to see Axel Odelberg assassinated before he can expose just how quickly Estrella is exhausting the aquifers in San Bartolo Oriente--a revelation that could destroy a carefully constructed pipeline that brings “American payoffs to supporters of its geopolitical interests in El Salvador.”

Corbett insists his biggest challenge here was “to write a book that will really capture people’s attention.” He describes Blood of Paradise as “a character-driven novel that investigates Third World intrigue and corruption--and America’s complicity in it--while also exploring themes of loyalty, betrayal, self-reckoning, and the destructive as well as transformative power of love--romantic, filial, and fraternal.” Even for a guy with Corbett’s track record, that seems like an awful lot to ask of a single thriller.

The author reports that this book has been purchased by Random House and will appear in the spring of 2007 as the inaugural entry in that publisher’s “new Mortalis series, featuring crime novels of historical or foreign interest.”

(Photo by novelist Paula L. Woods.)