No Man's Land [Hardcover]

G. M. Ford's new thriller, "No Man's Land," gets off to a rip-roaring start. In Arizona's maximum security Meza Azul penitentiary, a cunning prisoner named Timothy Driver manages to bypass the facility's state-of-the-art security features. He takes over the prison, releases the inmates, and nabs 163 hostages. Driver threatens to shoot one hostage every six hours until Frank Corso arrives at the scene.

Corso is a journalist and a recluse who previously had written a book about Driver. Members of the Coast Guard persuade an extremely reluctant Corso to leaves his boat in Seattle and fly to Mesa Azul. When he arrives at the prison, Corso quickly becomes a pawn in Driver's violent master plan. This psychopathic killer, whose partner is an equally frightening felon named Kehoe, engineers an ingenious escape and Corso is forcibly taken along for the ride.

Meanwhile, an ambitious television journalist named Melanie Harris risks her already shaky marriage when she goes to Arizona to cover the story. The slimy warden who runs Mesa Azul is more worried about his job than he is about the many lives that are lost during the uprising. After Driver and Kehoe make their escape, they meet up with a variety of individuals, both on the right and wrong side of the law. Most of these people are the worse for wear after their encounter with these two cold-blooded killers.

Ford has a no-nonsense writing style that I like very much. His black humor, crisp dialogue, and descriptive passages are all first rate. However, the plot meanders too much once the convicts leave Arizona. The book quickly degenrates into a lengthy spree of mindless violence.

Ford does effectively explore such themes as the predatory nature of the media, the randomness of fate, and the unspeakable conditions in America's prisons. However, the fatal flaw in this thriller is that Frank Corso, who has always been a savvy and tough man when the chips are down, plays too limited a role in capturing the criminals. Although he shows great courage when he confronts the volatile Driver, throughout most of the novel, Frank is little more than a horrified spectator. He also engages in a brief fling with Melanie that feels forced and artificial. There are too many scenes of excessive violence, and the conclusion is chaotic and unfocused. Although Ford is a talented writer whose books I have enjoyed in the past, "No Man's Land" is one of the weaker entries in the Frank Corso series.

Timothy Driver was once a Navy SEAL and the Captain of a Trident missile submarine. He came home unexpectedly and found his wife in bed with another man. Capt. Driver dispatched both wife and her lover to the great beyond. As a result (and somewhat unbelievably as the result of a crime of passion), Driver is sentenced to life in prison without parole. Anything but a model prisoner, Driver causes a major optical problem (blindness by puncture wounds) for another prisoner to whom he had been "sold" as a sex slave.

Driver becomes a a guest of the Meza Azul prison in Arizona, which is run by a private corporation. Within short order, Driver compromises the high-tech facility and takes over the prison. He promise to execute one guard every six hours unless Frank Corso, who wrote a book about Driver, is delivered to the prison.

Uh huh, Ford's plot and character development would, under normal circumstances, leave a lot to be desired. But happily Ford's idea of plot is a hyper-kinetic, utterly unpredictable series of events that would serve as a model for chaos theory. One by one, seemingly unrelated events come together to produce unintended and unexpected consequences, much to the delight of the reader.

Corso is actually a near-minor player in the novel, which is a plus. He's just sort of there, sometimes the victim of events, sometimes the beneficiary. Driver is a man on a mission who, incidentally, is a cunning operator. Corso is important to him for reasons that are not clear until well into the book.

Overall, a delightful read and a fine thriller. Thin plot, thin characters, but in Ford's hands, neither is a consideration. The man simply knows how to tell a hold-on-to-your-seat story.

Jerry

(Warning: a plot detail from the previous book, Red Tide, is revealed in the first paragraph)

In No Man's Land, by G.M. Ford, Frank Corso is finally on his own. In Red Tide, his companion, Meg Dougherty, finally left him for good. I found Red Tide to be a great book with one of its only faults being the way that Meg leaves. While her presence is definitely missed in No Man's Land, Ford manages to make the book gripping despite it. This book also continues where Red Tide left off in how we get into the minds of other characters as well as Corso, which enriches this book enormously. While it is still not perfect, Ford has written another gripping thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

There has been a riot at a privately-run maximum security prison in Arizona. The leader of the inmates, Timothy Driver, has a special request. He wants Frank Corso to come to the prison, or he will have a guard killed every six hours. It seems that Corso wrote a book about the murders Driver committed, and Driver wants him to come along for the rest of his story and write the truth. This riot also attracts the attention of Melanie Harris, of American Manhunt, who races down to Arizona after being informed of this big news story, as ratings have been going down for a while. When Corso finally shows up, he finds a situation much more fluid then he imagined. Driver, a fellow inmate named Kehoe, and Corso escape from the prison and a massive manhunt begins. What is Driver's ultimate purpose in involving Corso in all this? Does he want to go out in a blaze of glory documented by the only writer Driver trusts? Or is there another motive involved? And will Corso survive to tell the tale?

No Man's Land claims to be a "cross-country journey" for Corso, but it turns out to just be a few western states. Still, Ford has once again branched beyond his native Seattle, and this time it doesn't feel as forced as it did in A Blind Eye, when the Midwest didn't really feel like the Midwest. This time, it feels more natural, as they travel from the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Nevada and beyond. However, that could be because I'm not as familiar with that environment as I am the Midwest. Still, Ford seems to do a great job with the setting.

The best things about Ford's books are usually the characters, and he doesn't disappoint here, with a few odd exceptions. Corso is, of course, wonderfully done. It's unclear how long it's been since Meg left, but he clearly still misses her at the beginning of the book, and she even pops up in his mind occasionally during everything else. He's still the same man, though, always looking out for the underdog and not taking any grief from the higher authorities. His relationship with the FBI in this one is typically rough, and it predictably causes some dangerous situations as he is not believed when he finally does try and call them in. His relationship with Melanie is a little more unusual, as we're not used to seeing him in a casual fling (Meg has been around since the beginning for the reader of the series), but it does seem to develop in a natural fashion (at least as far as Corso is concerned).

Melanie is a bit more of a mixed bag. She's set up to be a mirror image of John Walsh (American Manhunt is basically America's Most Wanted), though she is given a few different characteristics (besides the obvious fact that she's a woman). When her daughter was killed, she began a crusade in a similar fashion as Walsh, ending up with the show. Unfortunately, she dragged her husband along with all this as she became a media star, but he's withdrawn into himself and doesn't want any part of this. Her time in Los Angeles has seen a chasm form between the two of them, and he moves back to Wisconsin while she's on assignment in Arizona. I kept wondering how much of her character was based on Walsh (just the history of a murdered child, or some of the subsequent events too?). On a side note, I was also a little uncomfortable with Ford stating that Samantha's death and Melanie's crusading resulted in the Amber Alert system. In a fictionalized world like this, I believe he should have called it something else, as the Amber Alert was named for a real Amber, and not changing the name seems to trivialize Amber's death a little bit (besides making it very odd that it's still called "Amber" instead of "Samantha").

Ford gets into the mind of the villain, Driver, very well, but he spends a little too much time there. Fans of Corso may find that he's not in the book enough, as we see things from Driver's point of view, Melanie's, and a few other bit characters. It's kind of fun to see the FBI agents and their internal reactions to Corso (rather than just what Corso himself sees), but I did miss Corso at times, wishing he'd come back onto the scene. Driver's motivation isn't firmly established either. The reason that seems to be given at the end of the book (which, of course, I won't tell you) doesn't indicate why Corso is so important to him, especially as he keeps insisting to Koher that Corso can't be killed because he has to tell Driver's story. It just didn't seem complete, especially given the way the book does finally end.

Even with that, though, No Man's Land will keep you turning the page, especially if you're already a fan of Corso's. Ford's dialogue is always wonderful, and he avoids the political statements that Red Tide was filled with. The plot is intriguing (even if Driver's motivation doesn't really work) and the characterization is great. No Man's Land is another winner.

David Roy