Diamonds and Danger By Lynn Gardner Covenant Communications, 1997. Paperback: 248 pages. ISBN: 1-57734-108-2 Suggested retail price: $11.95 (US) Audience: Mormon women who love thrillers and romance novels
Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark

Bad Guys, Bullets, Bombs and Baubles; Or The Pearls of Pauline

 :    "I don't know how you manage to have so many people intent on doing away with that beautiful body. You know, if someone wrote that, even as fiction, it would be too far out for any editor to accept."
 :    "I know. That's me. Totally unbelievable," I shrugged. --page 224

Courtship. Marriage. Knowing. The fall into daily life. Every marriage replays Eden, as two become one in the delight of each other's bodies. Every marriage replays the Fall as one becomes two again and they set out on the path back to the tree whose fruit is desirable above all. Sexual passion eventually burns itself out. (Like that lovely split-screen scene in Woody Allen's Annie Hall where Alvy and Annie are talking to their respective psychiatrists. "How often do you have sex?" "Hardly ever," Alvy says. "Two, three times a week." "All the time," Annie says. "Two, three times a week." Annie Hall is a completely different movie, BTW, after you've been married than it is just out of high school.)

When sexual passion subsides a couple has to decide whether to stay together. Note that word, decide; when two people are passionate to know each other's bodies they can decide as one, but very soon they have to make separate decisions.

But decisions that used to affect only one now affect two. Emeralds and Espionage was about courtship, a whirlwind courtship with all the chaos explicit in a whirlwind, all the destruction. Pearls and Peril is about a whirlwind honeymoon, again with much destruction. Diamonds and Danger opens with Allison and Bart still trying to finish their honeymoon. But something is afoot in San Francisco, a series of murders -- each victim being decorated with a diamond. So it's off to SF.

Allison's father is head of the super-secret anti-terrorist agency Anastasia (someone has recently almost succeeded in saying, "Tass bedanya, [don't hold me to that spelling] Anya") Bart is an agent, and Allison wants to be one. Bart doesn't want her to be, telling her repeatedly that she has a way of attracting trouble. There's the conflict. The lovers are starting to be two again, starting to make unilateral desicisons that should be shared. And Lynn Gardner has found the perfect setting to emphasize the differences between Bart and Allison.

Given the significance of fog in Mormon scripture and culture, it was brilliant to set this novel in San Francisco, where the fog can symbolize Bart and Allison's contrasting reactions to danger. Bart holds to the iron rod of safety and reason, assuming that if he tells Allison of the danger in San Francisco she will be a good obedient little girl and stay put in their hotel room. But Allison is a grown woman who speaks 12 languages and has a career translating for the UN. She has her own Liahona, and her semiotic analysis of the murders is superb, as she shows why a terrorist organization would want to dump bodies at the locations where these bodies have been found, what message they are delivering along with the bodies.

But she doesn't think about how following her own Liahona affects Bart, until he finally tells her -- after much peril -- that by going off around the city on her own, attracting trouble to herself, she is putting other people in danger who have to rescue her. She hasn't thought how much her decisions decide for others.

Nor has Bart. In trying to protect her, keep her from being an Anastasia agent, he has risked taking away her agency. (Note the polyptoton.) Allison finally has to decide whether she wants to stay with Bart, whether constant danger and Bart's paternalism will allow her to have a normal marriage. Bart does not share Allison's ambivalence, and frames the decision differently, telling her that they have a contract, not a covenant. He wants a covenant.

I complained in Part 1 that the action moves too fast to make Bart's religious conversion seem like more that a gimmick, that the action has to slow down to give Allison time and place for contemplation. Bart realizes that and tries to slow down the action, tries to get Allison into a place and state of mind where she can contemplate the Book of Mormon and begin to understand the difference between the contractual marriage they have and the covenantal marriage he wants.

He doesn't succeed. Allison is not hostile to Bart's new faith, but she's too caught up in her need to thwart the terrorists to examine the resistance she feels to the idea of an angel giving a boy a book. This deepens Allison's characterization. I wish it had come in one of the first two books.

The action in this book is somewhat more believable than in the first two, but the villain's death is unbelievable. Without giving anything away (there are several villains) I like that he kills himself. It's easy to create a story where the hero has to kill the villain. This creates some interesting tensions with LDS scripture. In the Book of Mormon when Alma is trying to impress upon his son Corianton the gravity of his sins he tells him that wickedness is misery. Very few thrillers pay much attention to the suffering wicked people bring upon themselves, to the sense that sin carries a punishment within itself. (Crime and Punishment is one of the few I can think of.)

Thrillers tend to use the knight battling the dragon archetype, with the author clearly on the knight's side. In a strange way, though, much fiction ends up glorifying the evil it is condemning by making the villains so evil that the only way to deal with them is to have the hero violently do away with them. Such villains have no conscience or humanity to appeal to. Killing them is the only option.

So it's nice to have a villain who self-destructs, but for the same reason that most thrillers have the hero kill the villain off, his self-destruction is not believable. He's so relentless in pursuing Allison that it's hard to believe he would do what he does. And because we never enter into his mind, only see him from Allison's point of view, we have no idea of his motivations. (The ones he gives are unconvincing, given his sheer relentless dedication to evil. They suggest a certain mental deterioration, but the scene is too short, too undetailed to let us believe it.)

I'll say more about how Gardner treats villains in the next review. I want to end this review by talking about her delightful sex scenes. I particularly like a scene early in this novel where Bart and Allison have gotten wet in the drizzly fog and come back to their hotel. Bart starts to undress Allison, to get her dry. I enjoy the contrast between their words, which are addressing a central conflict in many marriages, and what they are doing with their bodies.

 :    "You continually surprise me, Bartholomew James Allen. First you insult and demean me, then you undress me. Is there a message there?"
 :    "Probably that I'm a typical thoughtless, unobservant male," he said as he gently shoved me back on the bed to remove my shoes. "When did I insult and demean you and how?"
 :    "When you implied my job wasn't important."
 :    "Did I imply that?" he asked absently, his mind and fingers concentrating on the tiny fabric buttons on my blouse.
 :    "You did. You dismissed my work, brushed it aside as you would brush a fly away. I can do this myself, you know. I learned how to undress years ago."
 :    "I know, but I'm rather enjoying it. Ho do I get you out of your dripping skirt? You're getting the bed all wet" (52).

The whole scene is too long to quote, but Allison reverses roles and starts undressing Bart. I love that we have to imagine everything. The scene is full of sexual energy, but doesn't tell us what part of the body is suddenly naked or what that part is doing. It would make a nice phrase to say that Lynn Gardner has some of the sexiest dialogue since "You know how to whistle, don't you?" but I've never seen that movie, and I don't read a lot of romance scenes, so I'll just say I like Gardner's telling me something is happening and letting me imagine it, rather than showing me.

Harlow S. Clark