I’d give this zero stars if I could - what an unbearably tedious load of twaddle Thomas Harris’ new novel, Cari Mora, was!
Cari Mora is the caretaker of a house on the Miami waterfront that used to belong to Pablo Escobar. Unbeknownst to her, there’s millions of dollars of gold buried somewhere on the property and bad guys, including psychopathic Hans-Peter Schneider, are after it - which means she’s in the way and has to go. But, of course, Cari is no pushover - let battle commence!
I don’t know how a writer as experienced and talented as Harris could’ve made such a dog’s dinner of a seemingly straightforward story, but he completely bungles the execution. It’s an unfocused and unnecessarily complicated narrative with awkward scene transitions (random flashbacks to the past) and too many pointless details that slow an already sedate narrative down to an interminably glacial pace.
A lot of the time it’s confusing and unclear what’s happening and why, and it’s always, always uninteresting! It amounts to one set of dull wafer-thin characters vs another set with a predictable conclusion - duuuh, d’you think the obviously “good” character prevails against the obviously “evil” character? Yuh huh!
And that’s the other thing: the cast are a bunch of vaguely-written nobodies. Cari and Hans-Peter are bargain basement Clarice and Hannibal stand-ins while the rest - of which there are way too many, particularly as none of them are important anyway - may as well be called Stock Detective Character and Stock FBI Agent Character; that’s how memorable they are!
Cari Mora fails across the board. Badly written, boring beyond belief, and a total waste of time, I can’t believe this is the same writer that gave us The Silence of the Lambs - what a difference 30 years makes, eh?
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