Book Review: Body of Truth

May is No Place for Gringos Month !

Book Review: 'Body of Truth' by David Lindsey

4 / 5 Stars

'Body of Truth' (465 pp.) first was published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1993. This Bantam Books paperback edition was issued in April, 1993, with cover art by Jim Lebadd.

David Lindsey (b. 1944) began publishing the first of his 14 novels in 1983, most of these, like 'Body of Truth', are entries in the series featuring the Houston Police Department detective Stuart Haydon. Two of Lindsey's novels, 'Mercy' and 'The Color of Night', were made into films.

'Body of Truth' is set in Guatemala in the early 1990s. As it opens, Haydon is assigned to investigate a missing person, one Lena Muller, a co-ed and the daughter of a wealthy, and politically influential, Houston couple. It seems Lena Muller had been working as a Peace Corps member in rural Guatemala, and in so doing, had become involved in some kind of 'trouble'. 

Being fluent in Spanish, and having worked South of the Border on previous cases, Haydon flies down to Guatemala City and begins his inquiries both among the dissipated American expatriate community, and the American embassy staff. As his investigation proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that Lena Muller had taken notice of some clandestine activities involving people in positions of power in the Guatemalan government. And those people are not kindly disposed to foreigners intruding into their business. 

As Stuart Haydon is about to find out, Guatemala in the midst of a brutal war against Marxist insurgents definitely is No Place for Gringos........

It's not easy to compose a crime novel that holds one's interest through all of its 465 pages, but to his credit, author Lindsey keeps the narrative from getting too static by leavening 'Body of Truth' with red herrings, some sharply rendered episodes of mayhem, and more than a few double-crosses (and double-double-crosses). Through the experiences of the cynical but dogged detective Haydon, the reader is brought to awareness of how duplicity and mendacity are part and parcel of the fabric of life in Guatemala.

However, 'Body' suffers from being overwritten. Too many descriptive passages take attention away from the plot; for example, at one point early in the novel, the author devotes half a page to documenting the ravages a January freeze has inflicted on the vegetation in Haydon's backyard. Then there are the soulful soliloquies (such as a parable about cicadas and starving children), uttered in a kind of poetic Spanish-translated-into-English, that one of the Guatemalan characters periodically launches into. These are intended to impart a depth to the storyline that presumably elevates 'Body of Truth' above the conventions of most crime or thriller novels. But I found these soliloquies to be stilted and unconvincing.

Then there are constant pontifications from the author that are intended to remind the reader of the immorality both of the Guatemalan regime, and the U.S. (for maintaining said government): 

One of the reasons why the Guatemalan army and the right-wing death squads had gotten away with their massacres and assassinations as long as they had was because Guatemala itself had always avoided major international attention.  

***

His was the story of Guatemala.........But sufrimiento was everywhere. Ugliness survived where beauty perished. The fact was that the land of eternal spring had vanished, and the land of eternal suffering had taken its place. 

***

On the other side of the plaza, to their left, the Palacio Nacional glowered biliously, a three story farrago of classic and colonial architectural motifs of light green stone........The sight of it angered and frustrated and frightened hundreds of thousands, even millions of the people it was supposedly there to serve.

These expressions of righteous indignation quickly become tedious.

The closing chapters of 'Body of Lies' maintain a leisurely pacing, obliging the reader to endure intricate descriptions of motoring on the Guatemalan highway system, and traversing the narrow roads of villages and rural locales. However, the novel's denouement avoids contrivance, while delivering some additional plot twists.

The verdict ? 'Body of Lies' succeeds as a 'No Place for Gringos' novel. Its length requires rather more investment from the reader than other entries in the genre, such as Ron Faust's 'In the Forest of the Night' (which also I'm reviewing), but provides an convincing picture of a country at a particularly fraught time and place in its history. As such, it deserves four stars.