OPINION:
THE BOMB MAKER
By Thomas Perry
Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press, $26, 384 pages
This is an explosion of a book. It isn’t just aptly titled, it is probably one of the grimmer books Thomas Perry has written and that is saying a good deal.
The bomb maker is an anonymous monster who kicks off the saga of death by killing 14 members of the Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad. The first chapters are made all the more chilling by their portrayal of the meticulous technique used by the bomb disposal experts in doing their work.
Nothing seems to be left out as the expert carefully and patiently studies the house from which a bomb threat has come. He looks in all the unlikely places and tries to insert himself into the evil mind that has done almost unbelievable planning on several levels. Tim Wilkins is very good at his job and of all men he knows how precious patience is and how what seems harmless is deadly beyond belief. He is partially successful but he hasn’t taken into account the second bomb. Its explosion turns into a massacre of the bomb experts, decimating half their number.
Mr. Perry established a reputation for heavy duty research with his series about Jane Whitmore, a Seneca Indian who can make people disappear. It is more difficult to make a case for a bomb maker because the character is inhuman. Even hitmen can be fascinating, and the author has done some of that kind of plotting, but there seems a reason for their behavior that is beyond a sadism that in the end trips up itself.
The fate of the bomb maker is not even of much interest to the reader who assumed his demise would cap the book. The only sympathy felt is for the bomb squad, which literally risks its collective life to prove a madman’s technical superiority.
Maybe not the best book for flight reading …
Meantime, the author describes the triumph of the bomb maker. “He congratulated himself on his success. He made weapons but he didn’t consider himself a warrior. He was a bomb maker, a person who killed unseen and from a safe distance. All bombs came from a small scheming self-protective part of the mind. No bomb came from bravery. At most they were cunning or imaginative, cleverly disguised as something harmless or even appealing.”
The bomb maker admits the technique he employs as being used by Russia, who used helicopters to drop small delayed bombs signed to look like toys so that Afghan children would try to pick them up. “The monumental cynicism that led to the design of these devices still excited and amazed him.”
This is the man whose goal is to completely destroy the bomb squad and he has made an remarkable start. To make matters worse, he is working for a group which also remains anonymous but used terrorist tactics backed by the large amounts of payment demanded by the man who does the dirty work and creates a lethal device.
These men also understand bombs, especially the bomb squad leader who speculates that bombs were expressions of the bomber’s thoughts about his victims. “Bombs were acts of murder but they were also jokes on you, riddles the inventor hoped were too tough for you, chances for you to pick the wrong when it was almost impossible to pick the right.”
There are interesting comparisons between the psychology of the bomb maker and the members of the bomb squad who realize quickly but not quickly enough that his goal is their obliteration. Dick Stahl, a former squad commander, is brought back on an emergency basis that is the most dangerous of his risk ridden life. His only weakness is that he becomes fond of Diane, his bomb squad partner who is equally efficient but becomes a special target of the bomb maker.
Mr. Perry writes with building tension and although the reader assumes that the bomb maker will lose, the plot is characteristically twisted to leave questions and doubts even when the blood-soaked scene is cleaned up. There is nothing relaxing about this, but it is very well done.
• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
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