#this happens every time. first he tried to kill matt doherty and now this.. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ayearofpike · 7 years ago

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Falling

Tom Doherty Associates, 2007 402 pages, 24 chapters ISBN 978-0-7653-5644-4 LOC: PS3566.I486 F35 2007 OCLC: 73502344 Released March 6, 2007 (per B&N)

Matt Connor has been wronged by the girl he loves. Kelly Fienman has been wronged by the suspect she’s stalking. They’re both out for vengeance, but while Matt is upfront and honest about the stunt he plans to pull, he isn’t really honest with himself about what he actually wants to get — and for her part, Kelly pretends that her need for justice is both moral and absent. When their paths inevitably cross, they’re left with several huge questions: what is right? what is good? do these things intersect? is it OK if they don’t?

(Thanksgiving and a child’s birthday were NOT conducive to A Year of Pike, gang. Let’s see if I can pick it back up here in December.)

I remembered being really happy with this book the first time I read it. Like, OK, Pike is taking it easy on the kidlit, having maybe resigned himself to the understanding that his style no longer fits with popular expectations. Plus, this came probably three years after I’d read a recent predecessor, and a solid five years after I’d BOUGHT one — I got Alosha and The Shaktra out of the library, never read The Yanti until just now, and then I saw Falling at a bookstore sometime in 2008. I read it and I loved it: so unexpected, such power, what a shift in tone and characters, what a strong and solid cliffhanger ending — literally! Surely there exists some kind of excited blog record of me finding this, so long after I’d decided Pike wasn’t for me anymore. After spending entirely too long trawling the depths of my LiveJournal, though, I can’t find one.

And the reread? Eh. As it turned out, I didn’t actually remember very much about this book. Parts of it want to be The Silence of the Lambs (and Pike even nods to that) but it doesn’t have the same power. The rest? So much speculation and estimation left up to the reader to really understand this closed-book antagonist, who is actually quite selfish but we don’t get her perspective. She doesn’t even monologue when she has our hero at literally the end of his rope. And the powerful scene at the end? More like a trickle to a halt, made even weaker by the unnecessary intercutting to the other character’s perspective as she oversees the end of her antagonist’s life. We’ll get there. I don’t know. Maybe I was so excited to get this, and to have a book where a baby’s life and future hangs in the balance right around the same time I was raising my own baby as a new at-home parent, that I overlooked another one of Pike’s letdown endings.

I forgot to talk in the last post about the ISBN shifting to 13 digits. This started in 2007: all new books would have a code that better matched up with international book listing codes. These last two have had both an ISBN-10 and an ISBN-13, I assume because he had both of them slated prior to the change, but I’ve decided to just list the newer code for simplicity’s sake. You can do more research if you feel like it, or even convert back and forth between ISBN-10 and 13. It doesn’t really affect my blog, but it’s a change and I wanted to mention it.

So Falling. It actually could have been a pretty straightforward story, with much of the bulk of the book spent exploring the mental attitudes involved in what it takes to go beyond the law, commit some kind of horrific deed that most people couldn’t imagine. The real problem with this story is that it tries to cram too much into it, and the one crime is so vile and base that it renders our antihero’s misdeed into almost seeming unimportant. But it’s not — Matt’s actions are horrible and indefensible, especially as we don’t actually get his villain’s perspective, no matter what someone else did that was totally gross. (I am so a parent: “I don’t care what Tommy did, you are not to act that way.”)

What the hell does Matt actually do? This is where Falling is good: it keeps us in suspense for the first good quarter of the book as we try to understand his plan and how it’s going to adversely affect the girl. Because of course his object of vengeance is a girl — the one who just dumped him, actually. She didn’t “just dump him,” though; she strung him along as “the only one” while she was still in contact with her rich “ex,” who she is now married to and has an unborn child with, a child that could only have been conceived while Matt was still seeing her. And it’s not his, it can’t be his, because she never let him stick it in. So Matt is going to fake his own death by crashing a personal aircraft in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, he will parachute to a waiting boat, anchored in a shallower area, and assume a new identity until he can carry out the second part of his plan: kidnap the baby, months later, after everyone has forgotten his involvement with the woman.

Kelly is one of the FBI agents assigned to the kidnapping case. She’s actually just back on the job after a tragic and devastating incident with a previous suspect that has taken out a good chunk of her GI system. And this is where Falling has problems: this second story, totally unrelated to and unnecessary for understanding Matt’s motivations, is clung to and pushed on us constantly through the whole book, even as it threatens to be a more engaging tale of horrific glee. Like, I get why Pike didn’t just write this one (out of concerns of being accused of ripping off Thomas Harris) but this is really TWO suspense stories, and he hasn’t properly fleshed out the tale of Kelly and the Sex Murderin’ English Teacher.

Because that’s what’s happened: three-four months before the kidnapping, she gets pulled into an investigation on a dude who has made videos of himself having extremely consensual sex with rich women, tying them to the beds, confronting them about their obvious infidelity to their rich husbands, and then killing them by pouring corrosive acid on (and then INTO) their chests. She has a Ph.D in mythology and literature, which they need because the dude is throwin’ out all sorts of esoteric references and they think that knowing them will help them track him down. Of course, Kelly has gone into FBI work because she wants to be a hero, and so she breaks like EVERY protocol in investigating the trail of these obscure Asian myths back to either Ohio State or Ohio University, depending on which page you look at. (Does Pike know there’s a difference?) All the evidence points to a doctoral student, but it’s been manipulated that way by his faculty advisor, who is doing the sex murders because he caught his wife cheating with the dude. And now he’s going to kill Kelly the same way, only he hasn’t counted on her being a totally buff FBI agent who actually MOVES THE ENTIRE BED SHE’S TIED TO and makes the acid splash on the ropes, which she can now break to get at her gun and cap the fucker in the back of the neck. Of course, the acid has also splashed on her stomach and eaten into her organs, hence the GI problems. And also her husband is pissed that she went to such crazy lengths and endangered herself, to the point where if she goes back to the FBI he’s not willing to hang around and watch her kill herself. So he moves out and takes their young daughter with him.

I KNOW. This is a WAY more fuckin’ interesting story than oh, boo hoo, she was stringing me along so I’m gonna kidnap her baby. It’s too bad that he drags this shit out and doesn’t give it more consideration. But as with so much literature, we gotta accept the tragic male antihero versus the strong female agent who is still trying to figure out the boundaries of her moral code.

Yeah, there’s still more story. Matt hires a nanny under the table to help take care of the baby, and she thinks they look alike. You hear this all the time as a parent, even if your kid looks NOTHING like you — but Matt’s curious, so he does a mail-away DNA test and it comes back unquestionably that he’s actually the father. So now he knows he can’t just bail on the kid like he was planning, but he needs money to raise him. So he sets up an intricate ransom for his ex and her husband, who has money (of course he has money; why do you think she married him?). Matt makes the dude put $3 million in cash and jewels into a bag, then chase all over metro LA until he finally ends up taking a boat out to Catalina Island. But halfway there, he instructs the husband to load the dough into a weighted box and throw it overboard. Because of course Matt is a scuba diver — this is a Pike book, after all. He retrieves the money and then uses a personal propeller to zip off underwater. And the FBI, which was so prepared for an island drop or a boat handoff, is caught with their pants all the way down.

Of course Kelly is furious, but also curious. She remembers seeing a picture of Matt in the woman’s desk, and asks about the circumstances of his death. It seems that the day Matt’s plane crashed, he had been on Catalina — finishing up his scuba certification. So now Kelly has connected the dots, in a way only a Pike heroine can, but she can’t imagine where to find the dude. But she knows someone who can: a certain Sex Murderin’ English Teacher, who is still alive but paralyzed from the neck down, who knows better than anyone Kelly knows how a twisted male mind works. He grasps the intricacies of the situation immediately and advises Kelly to follow the woman, because there’s no way she’s unaware.

Kelly doesn’t believe it, but sure enough the chick leads her directly to Matt and the baby, set up in a fancy apartment not even that far from the rich husband’s house. It seems that Matt felt like he had all the leverage he needed to get the girl back, now that he had the baby and some money. But it’s not enough — she knows that the dude isn’t ever going to let her just go, and that the only way to be totally free to be back with Matt is if they kill her husband. So Matt, against his better judgment, starts coming up with a plan to murder a dude: drive his boat to Catalina, get him super drunk, and then push him overboard on the way back. The girl, weirdly, insists that Matt has to be on board and actually do the pushing. Which makes Kelly, listening in on her bugs planted in the apartment, start to think that maybe she’s the actual monster, even though Matt has faked his own death and then kidnapped her son. So she affects her own secret identity and moves into the complex to get closer to the situation but also to try to keep Matt from doing something he’ll regret.

Matt actually has no intention of killing the husband. His plan was pretty much always to tag along on the boat and then get the girl to fake her OWN death, and then they can be free and alone and untraceable. But but but, the girl objects, if she is dead and not the husband, then she won’t be heir to all his money! But Matt flatly refuses to push the dude. So she goes ahead and does it. Unlucky for her, they’re being tailed by — who else? — Kelly the Hero, who now has enough circumstantial evidence to arrest the woman for murder. Her father-in-law bails her out of jail, raising more weird questions, and then she manages to convince Matt to help her jump bail and escape with all her worldly possessions. They make it to Utah the first night, but the ten minutes Matt runs out to buy diapers and formula is long enough for a dude to bust in and tie his girl to the bed and be looming over her with a beaker full of acid when he gets back.

Holy shit, right? By now Matt knows who Kelly is and has gotten her backstory, and he knows that she’s willing to let him slide on the whole kidnap kerfuffle, so he calls her with this weird coincidence. But there’s no way it could be SMET, who is totally paralyzed! But Kelly now fears for HIS ex-wife’s life, and flies back to Ohio to do another check on this whole twisted clan. The best thing she can think of is to do a home stakeout with the lady and her new man, the grad student she was cheating with. Only — uh-oh — turns out the dude is in cahoots with SMET the whole time! His whole life, in fact: Cheatin’ Grad Student is SMET’s little brother! Their mother was also a cheater, and died of complications from their dad pushing her down the stairs after he found out. But wait! It seems that SMET actually did the killing, replacing her cardiac epinephrine shot with vinegar, so when she seized in her hospital bed it was the attempt to save her that killed her. Please note: SMET did this as a motherfucking TEN YEAR OLD. From there, he realized the thrill of destroying loose women and employed his little brother in helping to deface and dispose of the bodies.

So it only follows that he’d employ the dude to lure his wife, and was devastated when she bit, and that has turned into more killin’. In fact, it was CGS who was in Utah the night before, on his brother’s orders, ready to take down another terrible, cheating, murdering, bail-jumping lady. But this kid is even more debased than his brother, and is just going to rape and dismember Kelly while his new bae is knocked out from drugs in her dinner. Luckily she has her own syringe of cardiac vinegar, uncovered in her prior search of the dad’s house, and she manages to stab it into CGS’s heart just in the nick of time.

What’s up with Matt and the On-the-Lam Family? No big, they’re just doing some leisurely rock climbing now that they’re free from dead rich husbands or acid murderers. This, it turns out, is Matt’s one final big test to his girl’s fidelity — and she fails big time, cutting his rope and leaving him stranded on the edge of a cliff while he’s rappelling. But Matt’s been here before, because he’s an experienced and expert rock climber (because what the FUCK ELSE can this asshole be good at), and he manages to free-climb up the side of the cliff and catch his girl as she’s packing up the car. So now it’s her turn to be stuck on a cliff ledge, until he can get to a pay phone and call the cops on her for jumping bail. And we’re all like, good god, dude, it took you fuckin’ well long enough.

Of course we can’t just be done, right? Kelly has a sex murderin’ English teacher to revenge. She makes it look like a suicide, unscrewing part of his wheelchair and scraping his wrist veins against it so he bleeds out. But before he goes, he wants to talk to Matt, because they’re not so different, and he’d like to congratulate a fellow charismatic criminal for getting away with his misdeeds. And then he dies, and Kelly swears off FBI work so that maybe she can go back to her family and actually appreciate it and be appreciated by them.

Um ... what? But yeah, that’s the end of Falling. Either one of these stories would have been better served by itself, unless he could have given us Kelly’s necessary backstory in the beginning rather than trying to make everything happen at the same time. It comes across as excessive and unnecessary, and makes the ending fall flat. And when you have a blah ending, it doesn’t matter how vibrant the characters have been, or how real and horrific their struggles, or how much you sympathized with them throughout the narrative. All you remember is the “um ... what?”

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