Book Review: Zig Zag

Jose Carlos Somoza, winner of the Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger award in 2002 for The Athenian Murders, has followed up The Art of Murder with Zig Zag, a novel of science and suspense. This review is of the Advanced Reader Edition from Harper Collins, available in April, 2007.

The basic premise of the novel was intriguing. String theory, satellites, and a particle collider are used to create a method for recording images from the distant (and not-so-distant) past. The physicists are taken to a secluded lab and retrieve images of dinosaurs and of a woman in Jerusalem near the time of Christ's crucifixion. Something goes very wrong and people start dying.

The island is evacuated shortly thereafter, when an explosion during a storm kills some of the men guarding the crew. Everyone is sworn to secrecy and life goes on, though hardly back to normal, for 10 years. Then more scientists from the island die in horrible ways. Everyone is called back to the island to fix what went wrong.

The execution of this plot, however, left quite a bit to be desired. In Zig Zag, Mr. Somoza displays a tendency to belabor a point until you want to shout at him, "Yes, I get it!" Apparently Mr. Somoza believes that his readers need to be told that horror is coming and that the characters will be terrified in nearly every paragraph of the first chapter. And once the horror has terrified everyone, the reader is reminded of that on almost every page. A thesaurus and a vicious editor would have done wonders for this novel.

There were good points to Zig Zag. Mr. Samoza obviously knew and enjoyed his subject. The portions of the novel dealing with physics and string theory were much better-written than the dialogue, both internal and external. The exploration of how the physical world behaves during a frozen moment in time was particularly well done.

The plot was creative and the solution cleverly foreshadowed. The climax is interesting, and the amount of research done and imagination invested clearly show. The ending is left wide open. Had the writing been cleaner, this would have been a very good book. As published, unfortunately, it reads like a second draft.

You can't help but suspect that Mr. Somoza was having an off book with Zig Zag. His previous works, both in Spanish and in English, reviewed well. A quick glance through their synopses shows the breadth of his creativity and his commitment to researching little-known settings and subjects. Here's hoping he can get back to his more readable style in the future.