The Return of Ana Gray BY GARY DRETZKA
FROM THE CHICAGO SUN TIMES
The Return of Ana Gray
BY GARY DRETZKA
In a recent episode of the CBS series "Without a Trace," an investigator for the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility grilled agent Samantha Spade over a tryst he suspects her of having with senior agent Jack Malone. Perhaps if these two stalwarts of the bureau's Missing Persons Squad had read April Smith's new thriller, Good Morning, Killer, the inquisition could have been avoided.
As cautionary tales go, this one is a doozy. As the author makes abundantly clear, the primary reason cops shouldn't enter into affairs with other cops is because both parties are armed and, when angry or drunk, should be considered dangerous. Someone could even get killed.
If that little message in a bottle was all that washed ashore in Good Morning, Killer, though, it would make for a far better TV show than a long-awaited sequel to North of Montana. It has been nearly nine years since Smith first introduced readers to Ana Gray, her feisty Los Angeles-based FBI agent, then, inexplicably, put her back on the shelf.
Wisely, Gray's fiery romance with Santa Monica police detective Andrew Berringer is used to fuel only half of the drama in Good Morning, Killer. The other, equally compelling half of the story concerns their joint investigation into the abduction and heinous rape of a 15-year-old girl, Juliana Meyer-Murphy.
Unlike most real and imagined FBI agents, Gray is a bit of a loose cannon. She's an extremely competent investigator, but the rare Fed who is less interested in bureau politics and protocol than preserving her independence. Smith's rough-around-the-edges protagonist doesn't bear much resemblance to the robots that pass for agents in real life, and that's a very good thing.
"When the red hand on the workout clock brushed 6:55 a.m., I hauled out of the water and hightailed across the cold pool deck, raindrops popping off my silicone cap," Gray relates, after her constitutional swim in a Santa Monica YMCA. "Checking the pager hooked inside the swim bag, I found it was blinking: Code 3-PCH-AB
"Emergency.
"I stood alone in the freezing cinder-block locker room, dripping freely and staring at the numbers with a secret smile. It was a message in police code from 'AB' (Detective Andrew Berringer), which usually meant not a life-and-death emergency, but an emergency of the gonads, which I could feel responding as I peeled off the cold clinging bathing suit and headed for the shower."
After a brief snuggle on the beach, Gray and Berringer proceed in separate cars to the home of the child who has been kidnapped and, we soon learn, horribly abused by a serial rapist. Both of their departments will investigate the abduction, and, naturally, the star-crossed lovers are part of the joint team assigned to identify and track down the fiend. Big mistake.
The story of their love-hate relationship is neatly knitted into the fabric of the procedural that drives Good Morning, Killer. Gray is dogged in her pursuit of a former Marine who lures teenage girls into his web by offering them the hope of finding gigs as fashion models. Berringer is a good cop, but he isn't comfortable taking orders from a Fed--especially one with whom he's sleeping.
The kidnap victim blessedly manages to escape from her captor, but the damage to her psyche far outweighs the harm done to her body. Even when the case reverts to the SMPD, Gray takes such an active interest in Juliana's recovery that it quickly turns into an obsession. Berringer senses her withdrawal and uses it as an occasion for two-timing her--with another cop, naturally.
"Andrew and I had become profoundly contaminated by the materials we were working with. ... Like a chemical reagent that causes evidence to glow in the dark, the alcohol had made that contamination observable for a brief period of time, but the kind of perversity that had acted on Juliana Meyer-Murphy, and therefore on the two of us, does not go away with daylight. You carry the toxins. Maybe he was angry at being reassigned from the investigation, had to put me in my place for a lot of reasons; but there was something about the purposeful way he took us to the edge that hinted he knew all about dark places, and savage unrestraint."
To describe what happens next would require me to reveal far too many spoilers. Suffice it to say, things turn ugly in their relationship, and the ready availability of a loaded weapon pushes much of what's left of the procedural into the realm of courtroom drama. Fortunately, it doesn't overwhelm any of the actual crime fighting.
Smith is such an accomplished storyteller--with such a wonderfully precise sense of place--that, halfway through Good Morning, Killer many readers will wonder what took her so long to reprise Ana Gray. In the intervening nine years, the Los Angeles-based writer did publish another novel, Be the One--about a woman baseball scout--but, otherwise, kept busy freelancing magazine pieces and the occasional TV script.
Let's hope it doesn't take another nine years for Smith to find something else for Agent Gray to do.
ŠThe Chicago Sun Times 2003
This material is copyright by the publisher and is used here for purposes of information on the work of April Smith.