{"id":10170,"date":"2023-01-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10170"},"modified":"2023-01-08T21:26:57","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T02:26:57","slug":"the-pain-tourist-by-paul-cleave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10170","title":{"rendered":"The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave"},"content":{"rendered":"
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What I like about the two Paul Cleave thrillers I\u2019ve read is how he ties social behavior into the story of a crime and investigation. In his work, Internet frenzies make bad situations worse, leaving me thinking, \u201cOh, yeah. I can see that happening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first book of his I read, The Quiet People<\/a><\/em>, a couple suspected of harming their child is besieged by angry would-be vigilantes camping out in front of their home. Suspicions inflamed by social media are enough to produce a crowd edging toward violence. The Pain Tourist<\/a><\/em> touches on people\u2019s fascination with true-crime stories and their willingness to believe they are competent and informed enough to become investigators themselves. You\u2019ve seen this in action if you watched the discovery+ channel\u2019s 2021 series Citizen P.I<\/em>. In the official confusion and near-vacuum of information after the recent killings at the University of Idaho, the amateurs stepped in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amateurs have provided helpful information in a number of instances. They\u2019re good at code-cracking, occasionally find missing persons, and willing to delve into cold cases. But more ambitious self-assigned tasks, such as identifying pedophiles and targeting presumed perpetrators can get dangerous for both the citizen and the accused, who may, in fact, be innocent. This is particularly so when accusers decide to take action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Authorities worry they can jam up an investigation, overwhelming police with \u201ctips\u201d<\/a> that need to be checked out (more than 6,000 in the Idaho case in the first three weeks after the crimes). In Cleave\u2019s writing, these true crime devotees are pain tourists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taut. Twisty. Propulsive. You can trot out all the cliches regularly used to describe thriller fiction and use them with abandon for The Pain Tourist<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A home invasion leaves Frank and Avah Garrett dead. Nine years later, their 19-year-old son, James, remains in a coma with a bullet wound to the brain, and their 14-year-old daughter, Hazel, is trying to piece a life together. The three men seen running from the Garrett home have never been identified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Christchurch Detective Rebecca Kent investigates a serial murderer case, alternating chapters provide insight into what\u2019s going on inside James\u2019s head. A lot, and it\u2019s fascinating. His mind is constructing an alternative reality \u2013 one in which his parents don\u2019t die and he and Hazel carry on their lives as they would have been. Eight years and 10 months after the attack, in the now of the novel, James wakes up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he describes his memories during those years, Hazel and his doctor see correlations with real-life events. James calls what\u2019s in his head Coma World. In Coma World, he had adventures that drew from the books Hazel read to him. The dates he believes certain events occurred match reality. Naturally, the police want to talk to him to find out whether this amazing memory contains clues from that fatal night. He agrees to try. It\u2019s an intriguing possibility, with loads of implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent is assigned to James\u2019s case, and because her old friend, retired Detective Inspector Theodore Tate, worked the original case, she gets in touch. He\u2019s now working as a technical advisor for true crime television shows, and Cleave nicely portrays the rise in true crime \u2018entertainments\u2019, the dark side of the audience obsession and the shamelessness of the media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cleave has a special talent for misdirection, which you don\u2019t fully appreciate until near the book\u2019s end, when several investigations start to come together most satisfactorily. Kent and Tate share one serious concern, that the men who killed James\u2019s parents will come back to finish the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rebecca Kent and Theodore Tate are solidly written characters. Hazel and James\u2019s relationship is especially close, a cup of kindness in a vat of cruelty. James and his prodigious abilities form a completely believable, highly sympathetic character. And, along the way, numerous minor characters are given enough detail for plausibility. Maybe the bad guys are a bit too irredeemable, though that merely raises the stakes. This is a fast-moving, engaging story that has something to say and is hard to put down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America\u2019s Coldest Cases<\/a><\/em>, by Deborah Halber \u2013 \u201cPart whodunit, part sociological study . . . The result is eminently entertaining.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What I like about the two Paul Cleave thrillers I\u2019ve read is how he ties social behavior into the story of a crime and investigation. In his work, Internet frenzies make bad situations worse, leaving me thinking, \u201cOh, yeah. I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"What can a young man who's spent ten years in a coma reveal about the shooting that changed his life? The answer could be deadly.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,1288,40,632,126,256],"tags":[1938,2041],"class_list":["post-10170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-culture","category-fiction","category-police","category-reading-2","category-social-media-2","tag-paul-cleave","tag-the-pain-tourist"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2E2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10172,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10170\/revisions\/10172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}