{"id":8046,"date":"2019-06-25T06:40:25","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T10:40:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8046"},"modified":"2019-06-25T06:40:25","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T10:40:25","slug":"the-divinities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8046","title":{"rendered":"***The Divinities"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Parker Bilal – With The Divinities, Parker Bilal starts a\nnew police procedural series, involving the potentially interesting duo, Met\ndetective Calil Drake and Iranian-born forensic psychologist Dr. Rayhana Crane.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a ton of rocks crushes a man and woman at the bottom of a swimming pool under construction in Battersea, Drake is called in, though it\u2019s Crane who wonders whether the avalanche of stone is merely a mechanized form of the ancient punishment of stoning. The link between the two victims is a mystery, and in Drake\u2019s interviews with the victims’ families, he doesn\u2019t ask obvious questions that would have revealed that connection early on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although there are a few subtle hints about his mixed-race\nidentity, Calil Drake is called Cal, and the author doesn\u2019t clarify until well\nalong that he had a British mother and Sudanese father or that as a teenager he\nhad embraced Islam. This sheds a very different light on his rocky\nrelationships with other police detectives. His chief makes it clear he has\nonly forty-eight hours before the case will go to the Homicide and Major Crimes\nCommand, where DCI Pryce is itching to put Drake in a bad light. Much is made\nabout this forty-eight hours, yet that time passes without any increase in\nnarrative urgency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Cal and the pair of younger officers who work under\nhim banter amusingly, they have no other style of communication. When every\ninteraction prompts a wisecrack, the device loses something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A police procedural needs to develop a clear logic chain, and this novel fails to do that at both the larger plot level and within individual conversations. Drake\u2019s reasons for interviewing whom he does, when he does, and the questions he asks all feel very ad hoc. Perhaps that\u2019s due to Drake\u2019s drinking on the job\u2014a crime fiction clich\u00e9 overdue for retirement. The author says Drake understands the killer\u2019s motivation instinctively, but really, some evidence would help. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parker Bilal is the pseudonym for literary fiction writer Jamal Mahjoub, himself a mixed-race son of Sudanese and British parents. He\u2019s won prizes for his literary novels and short stories and since 2012, as Parker Bilal, he\u2019s written seven crime novels. Yet, mysteriously, the literary flourishes that frequently crop up in crime fiction do not appear here. You may want to like these interesting lead characters. Now if only future stories do them justice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo: Fredrik Alpstedt, creative commons license<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Parker Bilal – With The Divinities, Parker Bilal starts a new police procedural series, involving the potentially interesting duo, Met detective Calil Drake and Iranian-born forensic psychologist Dr. Rayhana Crane. When a ton of rocks crushes a man and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":"***The Divinities - disappointing thriller by a literary fiction writer. Intriguing characters, but plot doesn't hold up.","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}},"categories":[52,54,632,126],"tags":[1588,1589],"class_list":["post-8046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-police","category-reading-2","tag-parker-bilal","tag-the-divinities"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/gravel.jpg?fit=683%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-25M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8046","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=8046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8047,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8046\/revisions\/8047"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}