BOOKS: ‘Sweet Mary’

SWEET MARY
By Liz Balmaseda
Atria Books, $24.95, 242 pages
REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

Liz Balmaseda has not one but two Pulitzers. You’d think she’d be satisfied. But no, she’s got to go and write a novel! And it’s pretty darn good. How annoying is that?

Born in Cuba during the revolution (1959), she was raised and schooled in Florida, wrote for El Herald, the Spanish language sister paper of the Miami Herald in the early 1980s, leaving to become Newsweek’s Central America bureau chief, and then a Honduras-based producer for NBC News. In 1987, she came back to “The Herald” as a feature writer. Six years later she won her first Pulitzer Prize for her writings about the plight of Haitian refugees and the Cuban-American population, and in 2001, she received the second for her coverage of the government’s seizing of Elian Gonzalez. Today she writes for The Palm Beach Post.

I bother to mention all of that because it indicates Ms. Balmeseda has walked the walk. But, as so many journalists have learned the hard way when they venture into creative writing (more on that later), that doesn’t necessarily mean she can talk the talk. Well, take it from me, she can. Here’s the story: 33-year-old Mary Guevara is a fairly successful Miami real estate agent on her way to bigger and better accomplishments. She’s hot (of course) but in a subdued way, divorced from a banker with whom she had a son, 7-year-old Max, the love of her life. She had an adult love of her life some years ago, Joe Pratts, and they were engaged, but sensible Mary broke it off in fear that his involvement with the demimonde of drug sales and distribution would doom them both to an unsalvageable life. She owns her house, has a BFF named Gina (also hot, of course), not only loves but also sees her parents regularly, and even helps out with PTA. In other words, Mary is a solid citizen with a solid life and a predictably better future.

And then it all starts to go, as the kids would say, way wrong. One morning as she is about to get Max off to school and herself to the office, she answers her front door, and three masked gunmen burst in. Armed robbery? No, armed DEA agents. They mistakenly think Mary is “La Reina,” a fugitive drug queen with a similar name and a bodacious rap sheet. Max is taken, screaming, by a woman from Child Services, and Mary is taken into custody.

Interrogated by Dan Green, the same handsome (what did you expect, Woody Allen?) DEA agent who led the posse through her door, she reacts with anger, indignation and sarcasm, all of which are lost on the stock character agent because he just knows in his little law-abiding heart, that she is La Reina (which we, the readers, just know she isn’t).

It takes the fast legal footwork of Miami’s top criminal defense lawyer, to whom fellow realtor Gina sold a house, to spring Mary, but the local yellow sheet calls it a “dubious” dismissal, and Mary’s former husband (color him a jerk) tries to use this set of circumstances to get full, instead of joint, custody of their son. Lest you think he really cares for the kid, I should mention that he doesn’t. His new wife, who is running for local office on a family-values platform, thinks having an instant family will improve her chances with her potential constituency.

Up to this point, thanks to the author’s ability to create a very believable South Florida landscape and people it with generally believable characters — especially Mary — all within a very strong plot, I thought “Sweet Mary” was going to be a real novel, as opposed to escapist fare. But at just this point the author took it in a different direction, and it became an airplane book you could read at the beach (or vice versa). Sigh.

However, I should in fairness add that the book is a good example of this kind of book — not great, mind you, but pretty darn good, or, if you will, pretty fair fare.

No Dummy Mary sees that the only way out of this dilemma, the only way to get Max back and clear her name, is for her to find La Reina herself and “bring her to justice.” That is, with some help from two significant others, one being her road dog buddy, the redoubtable Gina, Thelma to Mary’s Louise, and the other is her ex-fiancee Joe Pratts. And away we go.

I’ve often wondered if authors of semi-serious crime fiction consciously or unconsciously have themselves in mind when they make their heroes perform barely credible feats of derring-do, feats that the average Joe or Jane would definitely consider derring-don’t. Whether or not first-time novelist Balmaseda fell into that trap isn’t important; what is important is that her protagonist, who thus far has been the best-drawn and most believable, i.e., real, character in the book, quickly morphs into Wonder Woman.

Here’s part of a sample paragraph: “In a bold, sudden move I didn’t expect, Bad Mary thrust an arm upward and knocked the knife out of my hands. She dove to the floor to grab the knife, but I kicked it out of her way. She grabbed my leg and brought me tumbling to the floor, yanking my hair and twisting it in her fists. … She yanked me down once again and clobbered me with her shoe. But in one jolting move, I poked her hard in the breast and dove for my purse. I grabbed the Glock at the same time as she grabbed the knife from the floor. Her hands were trembling as if she had never brandished a knife before, something I found hard to believe. Then again, I was aiming the gun at her, right between the eyes.” I think “something I found hard to believe” is the operative phrase here.

Interestingly, the first third of this book suggested the author, who has great powers of observation and description, might be able to write a very good conventional novel, while the rest suggests, even more strongly, that she can write fast-paced, seemingly realistic commercial fiction. Want to bet which way she goes next time?

Journalist Liz Balmaseda deserves praise for doing so well with her first shot at fiction. As I suggested above, that’s not often the case. I remember, for example, that my late great friend Dick Stout, then a political correspondent for Newsweek, annoyed that a fellow journalist had written a successful novel, decided to see if he could do the same thing by breaking ground over a weekend. “I took my portable Olivetti typewriter, bought a ream of paper and a bottle of bourbon, and went to a motel on New York Avenue. By nine o’clock Friday night, the bourbon was gone, and I hadn’t written a word. I went home the next morning.”

• John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.