Green Girls [Mass Market Paperback]

In New England, writer Jacob Winter goes berserk when he learns his wife is having an affair. Unable to control his rage, he assaults his wife's lover, ending in jail. Surprisingly, an old college crony Alix Callahan who he has not seen in well over a decade bails Jacob out of jail.

Alix asks Jacob and her exotic gardening business partner and lover July to meet her at a nearby large bridge. At the site, Jacob see Alix apparently fall to her death though her corpse is not found. The police consider Jacob with his record for violence as a prime murder suspect, but subsequent events make him wonder if Alix lives. July's estranged husband is coming to collect two live hides and the drug money that his wife and her lover stole from him when they set him up to take the fall. Most important of all, Jacob wants to return to his family, but July has her hooks into him making extraction nearly impossible.

This regional noir is at its best when Jacob stays on center stage though his behavior is self-destructive. When the exciting story line turns to paranormal elements it loses its gritty edge of a secular world in chaos. Jacob is an intriguing character who Fraud would have loved to analyze while the rest of the cast adds depth to his seemingly fall into the abyss of hell. Readers who love adrenaline rush of non stop suspense that grows chillier by the paragraph will want to read GREEN GIRLS because Michael Kimball attains the pinnacle of suspense and keeps the thrill at that height until the climax.

Harriet Klausner

Anyone who has taken the coastal route in or out of Maine is familiar with the unusual setting of the crucial elements in Kimball's latest noir thriller - the big I-95 bridge. The Maine author's steamy, riveting page-turner takes place in Kittery, ME, and Portsmouth, NH, and the primary action takes place on, or in the shadow of, that dominating bridge.

The book opens with a brief prologue: the protagonist, Jacob Winter, plummets from the top of the bridge, experiencing an untimely burst of insight, "seeing how things came to be." Part One drops back to find Jacob in jail for assaulting his former psychiatrist, Price Ashworth, after returning home early with his young son from a Red Sox game, to find his wife and the good doctor enjoying the aftermath of a romantic dinner. Though Jacob has only a blurred memory of the assault, there's no doubt he not only delivered the concussing blow, but destroyed much of the beautiful furniture he had made for the house over his 12-year marriage.

His wife has sent some significant belongings to the jail - a sleeping bag and his laptop computer among them - but has not bailed him out. That favor has fallen mysteriously to Alix Callahan, a woman Jacob has never spoken to, though he remembers her as a committed lesbian and powerful personality from his undergraduate days at the University of New Hampshire.

A struggling non-fiction writer with an "overactive" imagination, Jacob habitually organizes his life with scheduled lists and makes precision straight-lined, square-cornered furniture to keep himself anchored. His wife's infidelity - totally unexpected - (it's actually somewhat difficult to square Jacob's idyllic memories with the calculating harpy the reader sees)leaves him shaky and bewildered and terrified of losing 9-year-old Max. Despite the restraining order barring him from his home, he touches base with Max, downplaying the upheaval in their lives and delivering the advice Jacob himself struggles to live by, "Your head, not your heart."

Then he takes out the card Alix has left him: "GREEN GIRLS, the business card read. EXOTIC GROWERS." The address is on the Portsmouth side of the Piscataqua, on the banks of the river, under the span of the bridge. A huge greenhouse is attached to the back of the house. The greenhouse nurtures a pungent, humid jungle of South American rainforest plants and small poisonous frogs. As Alix leads Jacob in, a dark, beautiful woman, radiating intense sexuality, appears from the greenhouse. Alix introduces July and explains that she helped Jacob because she admires his writing.

" `I do have to admit,' Alix went on, `even though there are never any people in his books, something about his writing is extremely sensual. The fire in Baltimore? The commotion in the next berth? I'm not sure if he treats violence sexually or sex violently.' She gave July a pointed look. `Either way, I know you'd appreciate it.' " Jacob's books, we learn, are about things, like the train berth he occupied on the way home from his mother's funeral. Or the I-95 bridge he now chooses as the center of his first novel.

The friction between Alix and July (hiding from an abusive, murderous husband) is palpable, and Jacob wants nothing to do with them. But after another visit with his son, he finds July waiting for him, agitated over a fight with Alix. Moments later his cell phone summons him to the big bridge from which Alix, after a short, cryptic exchange, jumps. Jake keeps saying he can't get involved, but it's too late. Alix's body is not recovered and July's Columbian shaman husband - the one who tried to kill her - has broken out of prison and is on his way.

The erotic tension runs high as the action heats up from all sides, entangling Jacob deeper in a web of deceit, suspicion, mysticism and murder. There's a strong James M. Cain feel to the edgy mix of steamy eroticism and dark double dealing in which Jacob's judgment is fatefully faulty and erratic and absolutely no one can be trusted - except Max.

Kimball ("Undone," "Mouth to Mouth") puts the bridge at the center of the story as an object of grace and beauty, magnificence and deadly danger, and invests it with a powerful character that is not in the least anthropomorphic. Though plot and atmosphere drive the book as much as character, Jacob draws the reader with his earnest grit and hapless inability to live by his mantra: "head not heart."

A friend who is a reviewer recommended "Green Girls" as a book that I might find interesting. I didn't think I would like it from reading the blurb, but I was wrong. This is a compelling read that held my attention throughout. The obsessive and quite mad July is a pretty unnerving character. I got a little tired of the protagonist making stupid mistakes, but he eventually tries to redeem himself. The Colombian shaman is a great character and Kimball did a great job with him. If you like books that are a little out there and not so "in the box" this is a good book for you.