Turquoise and Terrorists By Lynn Gardner Covenant Communications, 1998. Paperback. ISBN: 1-57734-245-3 Suggested retail price: $12.95 (US) Audience: Feminists, and other women and men
Sapphires and Smugglers By Lynn Gardner Covenant Communications, 1999. Paperback. Suggested retail price: $13.95 (US)
Reviewed by: Harlow S. Clark

A year or so back, NPR honored Barbie's anniversary of some sort with a story. Barbie is considered the stereotype of everything no self-respecting feminist would want her daughter to be, but the story quoted a spokeswoman for Barbie who noted that she has been a doctor, lawyer, astronaut, airline pilot and just about anything else any self-respecting feminist would encourage her daughter to follow her dream of becoming.

I thought of this somewhere in the middle of these two novels. While this series (these two are the 4th and 5th) doesn't seem overtly feminist the sources of power and major characters are all women. It's unfortunate that feminism has a rather negative connotation for many LDS. I keep remembering the student presentation on feminism in Charles Johnson's Aesthetics class at the UW. I was fascinated at how much of the presentation paralleled Joseph Smith's analysis of power in his letter from Liberty Jail.

Feminists are particularly interested in where power comes from, who exercises it and how and why, who power benefits and who are its victims, themes that come up repeatedly in various forms in the last third of the Doctrine and Covenants, especially when it warns us that almost everyone who thinks they have power (whether they actually do or not) will abuse it.

So it was with great interest that I noted that all the power structures (except the villains, but there is even a female villain) in these novels are female. The heroine/narrator (if you haven't read the previous reviews -- 8/10 and 9/14) is Allison. Her father is head of the supersecret anti-terrorist group Anastasia, but in Turquoise and Terrorists he and Bart (Allison's husband) get themselves kidnapped and Allison's mother has to run things. (She's also had to be mother and father to Allison because her husband has had to pretend to be dead.)

The people who most help Allison and Margaret find their husbands are also women: no damsels in distress here except the men. The same is true of Sapphires and Smugglers, which begins, "My husband of only six months was missing." Soon Allison is off to Sri Lanka to find Bart, rescue him if need be.

Amnesia intervenes. (You know that if you've read the back cover, which I usually don't with thrillers, as the back cover often tells me more than I want to know.) Gardner uses amnesia somewhat like Chris Heimerdinger does in Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites, where it symbolizes the idea that perhaps all stories come from the pre-mortal existence, that all storytelling is an attempt to recover stories we have lost. Gardner uses amnesia to suggest that we don't so much gain a testimony as regain one, remembering what has been dismembered -- parted from us by the veil of forgetfulness we step through into this vale of tears.<g>:)

There are many other charming things about this series, much to like. So I wish I liked it better. How I yearn for a Mormon serial detective who obeys the law of chastity and doesn't kill people -- a Sister Marple, say, or Bishop Poirot, or Elders Brown, Dowling, Small and Wimsey. There's too much killing in these novels.

Eric Samuelsen (Re: New Yorker Profile of Neil LaBute, 13 Jul 1999) said that Neil LaBute, being Mormon, "tends to think of evil in our day in primarily sexual terms, the sexual arena being the one where evil (we believe, don't we?) plays itself out." Lynn Gardner apparently feels the same way, and there is a fine, satisfying subplot where Allison frees a child, now grown, from sexual slavery. But Gardner doesn't see evil as being played out in the arena of violence.

What an odd thing to say about novels that define the villains by their villainous violence. I'll explore this at length in the longer review, and just note here that there's a lot of casual violence in these novels, even by the good guys.

     I checked the man I'd bashed in the head with my radio, then shot when he wouldn't stay down. What a horrible thing to do to another human being.
     What unspeakable things they had planned to do to us! And to the Three Tenors. And had already done to my father and husband. My misplaced sympathy dissipated instantly. The man got what he deserved. Maybe much less. (Turquoise and Terrorists, 122)

I contrast this with the scene in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon where Will Graham takes his wife out onto the FBI firing range to teach her how to shoot, to defend herself from the serial killer/necrophiliac he is hunting, who is also hunting Will and his family. Will mourns at teaching his wife how to kill, mourns as if for a family member who has died. There is nothing of that moral or emotional depth, complexity and nuance in any of Lynn Gardner's novels. (Am I overstating this? For all Harris's moral complexity there is plenty of casual killing in Red Dragon, and its sequel, The Silence of the Lambs, but that's another review.)

Thrillers unavoidably raise ethical, political and moral questions. Lynn Gardner has treated the sexual questions with wit, style, charm, but left many of the others to go begging. I keep remembering King Benjamin's admonition, "ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition unto you in vain" (Mosiah 4:16), and hoping for more.

Harlow Soderborg Clark