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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The Big
Boom by Domenic Stansberry |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Family Domenic Stansberry reprises private investigator Dante Mancuso in
a new novel, The Big
Boom, and sets it in his hometown Unlike the
living, who held their secrets within, the corpse
had no shame. It no longer spoke in the language of the tongue, with all its
limitations, but in the language of putrescence. Of stench and gastric fluids.
Of unexpected gurgles and gaseous discharges. Did you love me? The medical coroner, as well
as the detectives who had grappled the body from the bay were familiar
to some degree with the language of the dead, but their transliterations
were not precise. They had their evidence kits, their test reagents, their
sliced organs in plastic sacks, and their niass
spectrometers—but these only told the investigators so much. There was too
much noise in the field, so to speak: the rattle of their own lives, the
hollering of spouses and children, the flushing of toilets, the sound of
their own rumbling bellies. With so much interference, it was all but
impossible to filter the noise from the message. No, no. Look at me. Nonetheless,
there were things that could be determined. A Woman in her early thirties.
Four days in the water, maybe five. Traces of aspirated foam in her airways.
Lungs bloated, chest distended. The medical examiner suspected death by
drowning, though it was hard to be definitive in such instances. It was possible, too, the young woman had been dead before she
went in. There were wounds to her head and extremities, but it was hard to
tell what these meant. The corpse typically got battered as it was dragged
along the bottom by the currents. Don’t let me go. The skin
was maccrated on the finger pads, and her face and
nose looked as if they had been abraded. The soft parts of the face had been
eaten by crabs and bottom fish. The translucency was gone from the skin. The lividity was blotchy about the head and the chest—pink in
places but already gone dusky and cyanotic in others. Decomposition had been
slowed somewhat by the coldness of the bay, but the putrefaction advanced
quickly once the body was in the open air. The clothes, sodden with water,
were stripped away and placed in evidence bags. A pleated
skirt, label from Dazio’s. Black
hose. A pair of
pumps. Purple. A silk
blouse. Pearl
necklace. A scarf. No wallet,
though. No purse. No source of identification. The stripping of the clothes
revealed more maceration, bloating of the limbs. Also bruises on the thighs
and forearms—though again, whether these had occurred before death, or after,
as the corpse thudded against the pier, was hard to tell. Examination of the
vulva showed no signs of sexual penetration. Though again, this was hard to
ascertain. Fuck me. All these
details were written down, recorded in cramped forms to be followed by more
reports from the pathologist. Whisperings of the dead,
duly noted. If you read the hieroglyph correctly, it led to other documents,
to a Missing Persons report, maybe, and eventually to an address. And inside
that address were rooms, drawers filled with bills, papers, more scribblings, phone messages, all of which led to friends
and family, if there were any, hence to conversations with the living, more
hieroglyphs transliterated through memory and dreams. Don’t forget me. In the
morgue now, there was the sound of the refrigeration unit: then footsteps—and
a long metal drawer sliding open on its rusted hinge. The bag was zippered
opened and a man sighed, peering into the bag. And maybe
there was some vibration in the mass of cells there on the metal slab. Maybe
there was something that connected the nerves to the cells to the fiber to
the atrophying mass inside the plastic bag. Something that animated the
swollen brain and the optic nerve and whatever was still sentient in that
mass. The man
who peered in had a long nose and a sorrowful face and compassionate eyes.
His looks had excited the corpse once upon a time, when it was not a corpse,
when the bacteria that inhabited the animal were different bacteria and the
energy congregated in a different way. The memory of him, or its chemical
remains, lingered inside the flesh, and so his presence was recognized in
some way. Or so the man imagined. He imagined the corpse peering out from the
bag as he peered in. In another
minute he went away. His
footsteps receded, and then the corpse was slid back into the wall, into the
cold and the dark. Dante, the corpse whispered. The voice was in his
head, Dante told himself. It wasn’t real. But such distinctions didn’t
matter. Take me home. Once it got
inside of you, there it was. You had no choice but to listen. Don’t abandon me. Don’t leave me here. Dante headed
home to Steve Hopkins,
November 20, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December
2006 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Big Boom.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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