Lee Allen's Blog - Posts Tagged "thomas-harris"

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Thomas Harris is back! The creator of Hannibal Lecter returns with his first novel since ‘Hannibal Rising’ in 2006, his first standalone novel since his debut ‘Black Sunday’ in 1975.

The novel revolves around eponymous character Caridad “Cari” Mora, a young immigrant living in Miami on Temporary Protected Status, currently working multiple jobs, one as caretaker to a mansion previously owned by Pablo Escobar. It has been long-rumoured that millions of dollars in gold has been hidden beneath the mansion. A ruthless gang, led by Hans-Peter Schneider, is determined to uncover it. Schneider’s sadistic appetites draw him to Cari, placing her in peril beyond her proximity to the gold. Meanwhile, mob boss Don Ernesto is determined to reach the gold before Schneider, dispatching his own gang to recover Escobar’s millions.

The novels layers are carefully applied like the construction of a piece of fine art. Schneider is a twisted villain - the pleasures he and his associates enjoy send shivers down your spine. He does not have the finesse of Hannibal Lecter, more a truly diabolical character like Mason Verger (who featured in ‘Hannibal’). Cari is a kind young woman, scarred by the horrors of war, having escaped her country and not succumbed to the pain inflicted on her – she is kind and gentle, with ambitions to become a veterinarian. She is drawn into the stand-off between both criminal gangs, reluctantly agreeing to help Don Ernesto’s team when one of their number is killed.

The gold is heavily protected. As they close in, dangers lurk out of sight and the stakes get higher, while Schneider is determined to close in on his ultimate prize once the gold has been recovered. It will take all Cari’s strength and determination to survive.

‘Cari Mora’ is a delicious indulgence of a novel – incredibly fast-paced, multi-layered, with a large cast of characters. It’s difficult not to race through to the finish, but to do so would risk you losing track of the character threads. Cari herself is an endearing creation, a strong-willed, damaged young woman, fighting back against the men who seek to use and abuse her.

Harris is a master of the crime genre. Rumours of two new books circulated prior to the publication of ‘Hannibal Rising’, so it has been a long wait of thirteen years for the second of those. I hope it won’t be quite so long to wait for another and would welcome further standalone crime stories in the vein of ‘Cari Mora’.



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Black Sunday by Thomas Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Thomas Harris' debut novel centres around a terrorist plot on American soil and the international effort to hunt down the terrorists.

Members of Black September, a terrorist group, are making the final arrangements for an attack within the United States. Ambushed in Beirut as part of an Israeli-led mission, their numbers are severely depleted. But, underestimated by those who brought down the cell, Dahlia Iyad escapes with her life and returns to America to continue facilitating the planned attack.

Michael Lander, an ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, feeling betrayed by the American government after his years of service and what he was subjected to as a prisoner of war, is determined to seek revenge in a demonstration that will also claim maximum casualties. Together, he and Dahlia plot to construct and detonate a bomb that will claim millions of lives.

David Kabakov, an agent with Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, travels to America, determined to hunt down the surviving members of the terror group and foil their plot when it becomes clear that the mission in Beirut has not neutralised the threat.

Character-driven rather than action-driven, the novel's shining moments are the detailed explorations of the characters' psychology, backstories and personal relationships, reminiscent of Harris' later psychological thrillers. With a backdrop of the global political climate of the 1970's - this is the midst of the Cold War and in the aftermath of the Vietnam War (a conflict that drew in both the US and USSR) - you are also immediately struck by how little the world has changed; conflict in the Middle East continues to this day - significantly the conflict between Israel and Palestine; and between extremist Islamist terror groups and the West, significantly the US. Terror attacks over the last twenty years, notably 9/11, lend a chilling plausibility to events and the novel does not suffer for reading it over four decades later.

In a race against time, Kabakov hunts the terrorists to the eleventh hour, building to a dramatic action-packed climax as the terror plot unfolds. A gripping political thriller that hooks until the very end, 'Black Sunday' is an early demonstration of Harris' skill at exploring the horrors human beings are capable of inflicting on each other.



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