Cut and Run

Jeff Abbott

Orion £9.99 tbo

Rel Feb 2004

Reviewed by Philip Gooden

Cut and Run is the third in a US series featuring a Texas judge, Whit Mosley, and his police detective friend, Claudia Salazar. For some reason the publishers have chosen to release it over here before the first couple of thrillers (which will follow later in 2004). This means that readers are unlikely to be familiar with the background details involving Mosley and Salazar. In itself this shouldn’t matter much, but I wondered whether it contributed to the slightly taken-for-granted characterisation of the two.

The set-up in Cut and Run is promisingly complex. Whit Mosley can scarcely remember his mother Ellen. Years ago she ran away with her lover and half a million dollars. The embezzled cash turned out to belong to the Mafia and Ellen decided to return it (after killing her lover). Her reward is a job with the Family. Now thirty years later, Mosley’s father is dying and the Judge decides to track down his mother for a deathbed reunion. He traces her to Houston where she is still employed by the Bellini family. But by the time Whit Mosley arrives, things have gone badly awry in the Mafia outpost. Old man Bellini is on a life-support machine, his less-than-subtle son Paul is trying to carve out new drug empire while some of his underlings are busy taking advantage of the regime change. A drug deal with an outfit from Miami goes wrong, five million dollars disappears, murder follows murder, and Eve Mosley is caught in the middle. Naturally Whit - aided by Claudia Salazar and his sidekick Gooch - attempts to save the mother he hasn¹t seen for three decades. This will force him to take the law into his own hands and bend it more than a little.

There are some original features to Cut and Run. The Houston setting is unusual. There is plenty of action, with characters being cut down just when you think you¹ve got the plot straight in your head. The relationship between Whit and his mother is not too sentimental and makes for an interesting variation on the standard wife/girlfriend-in-peril scenario. But there is almost too much double-crossing and back-stabbing in the book, since up to half a dozen different groups are after the drugs/money/each other. True, this suggests a world in which no loyalty is fixed and no one can be sure where anybody else stands. But it also produces some tortuous bits of dialogue and explanation that make the book less streamlined than it might have been. A good read but also a faintly frustrating one.