The Bricklayer

by Noah Boyd

 

Boyd’s first novel has good promotional blurbs (Lee Child, James Patterson, Patricia Cornwell), an interesting cover, and an engaging first fifty pages.  Savor those fifty pages – you won’t see the likes of them again.

 

Steve Vail (a most square-jawed, Aryan name) is a former FBI agent caught on videotape single-handedly quelling a bank robbery with a water cooler.  Vail mysteriously disappears before he can be congratulated but not before he is brought to the attention of the FBI director.  Vail is just the kind of crazy maverick the FBI needs to solve a series of ongoing murders, the director decides, and sends Assistant Deputy Director Kate Bannon to recruit him for the job. 

 

Having been fired five years ago from the FBI for being a crazy maverick, Vail is now a Chicago bricklayer.  When Bannon asks him why he isn’t doing something “indoors,” Vail replies that “there are too many bosses indoors.”  With that exchange, they’re off.  Way off.  And so it goes throughout the rest of the book.

 

Keep in mind that Kate Bannon is the Assistant Deputy Director of the FBI, a position, one would think, that requires a good deal of intelligence, initiative, and authority.  Within pages of meeting Steve Vail, the reader wonders how Bannon has managed to brush her teeth without his innate wisdom and direction. 

 

Vail has to point out to her that an unclosed gate means someone left in a hurry; she leaves the combination to her desk safe, containing three million dollars, in her desk drawer – so Vail promptly snatches it for a secret mission; and, incredibly, he has to remind her more than once not to disturb a crime scene.  And the dialogue between them is supposed to be snappy, but in most cases, is just stupid:

               

Vail:  “How’d you sleep?”

                                Bannon:  “On my stomach.”

 

The best suspense books are those in which the protagonists are somewhat flawed, not stereotyped.  And, Mr. Boyd, it really isn’t necessary for Vail to protect Kate Bannon from knowing they are being followed – which, you’d think, she’d pick up on herself; she’s been an FBI agent for 15 years. 

 

Noah Boyd had it going for a short, sweet while.  Then fantasy and ego got the better of him.  

On page 57, to be precise, when Kate announces: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation needs the particular skills of Steven Noah Vail.”  When the author cannot resist pasting his own name onto the muscular, wise, handsomely-chiseled main character, he’s laying it on rather thick, even for brick.