TRAIN

Racial fear and hatred, and a divided culture’s predisposition toward violence, irreparably alter several lives in this unsparing melodrama, the fourth novel from NBA–winning Dexter (Paris Trout, 1988, etc.).

The setting is 1953 southern California, where Miller Packard, survivor of a wartime disaster at sea, has reinvented himself as a Los Angeles police detective. Investigating a boat-jacking during which two grisly murders were committed, Packard encounters and quickly falls for that incident’s lone survivor, gorgeous Beverly Hills matron Norah Still (who had also lived through a notorious incident when Howard Hughes’s private airplane crashed into her wealthy husband Alec Rose’s palatial home). In a parallel plot gradually connected to this one, 18-year-old black golf caddy Lionel “Train” Walk is unjustly linked to the two blacks who had committed the boat-jacking (also raping and mutilating Norah), loses his job, succumbs to the violence he has hitherto avoided—and is seemingly offered a way out when Packard, an emotionless manipulator with a sadistic grudge against his new home turf’s idle rich, enlists Train to fleece gamblers in a series of illegal interstate golf matches. Sound overplotted? There’s more. In a savage dénouement, Train’s not-quite-helpless boon companion Plural, an amateur boxer blinded and deranged in a sparring accident, pushes Norah (a former liberal activist involved in integrating all-white neighborhoods) beyond her limits (“She wanted them all gone. . . . All the Negroes in her life, past and present”), and nobody escapes unhurt. Train pulses with energy and meanness, and its nihilistic vision of a “hungry” world where “whatever kind of thing you is, there’s something out there that likes to eat it” has a noir-inflected authority. But its characters are puppets, and its plot whiplashes about like an enraged pit bull shaking its prey to death.

Prototypical Dexter, not nearly at his best.