John Lescroart’s slightly shabby white knight, defense attorney Dismas Hardy, is back. “The First Law” represents a change of direction, however. There is relatively little law practice; there is precious little law abiding, for that matter. Private police forces (yes, they exist in the city) are in the grip of powerful criminals, who have also bought the lieutenant in charge of the homicide detail. Hardy and his old nemesis/friend, tough cop Abe Glitsky, find that old-fashioned vigilante action is the only way to restore justice and save their own lives. Along the way, at least one beloved character falls. This is not my favorite Dismas Hardy novel by a long shot, but it’s still pretty good.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

What we have here is a story about a young intern who turns up missing after having an affair with a powerful San Joaquin Valley legislator. If you’re thinking this is a thinly veiled rehash of the Chandra Levy case, you’re right—and wrong.

Hill, a Fresno journalist, introduces a few factual differences to make it clear that she’s not libeling real people: The charismatic Eric Barry is a state senator, for example, not a Congressman, so the setting is Sacramento, not Washington.

There are more important differences, though. Hill’s story focuses on people close to the case—intern April Wayne’s mother, Barry’s long-suffering wife, a reporter who is driven for his own reasons to pursue the case. She’s interested in how people come to grips with and are changed by grief and publicity and guilt. Some are redeemed, and some are destroyed.

Since this is fiction, she can also solve the mystery of the missing intern. The solution has no bearing on the real Chandra Levy case, but it’s satisfying.

Hill goes pretty hard on the Valley’s farmers and politicians, who dance to the same tune of power and cash. The Valley itself, she writes, is “a three-hundred-mile strip of violence and bigotry between Sacramento and Bakersfield. We produce eighty percent of California’s wine and probably drink ninety percent.”

There are a few problems. Some young characters who gather at a local bar to casually speculate on developments in the case engage in a lot of wooden dialogue, and their ultimate significance to the plot is forced.

But, really: sex, violence, gossip, some insight, and finally justice. That’s a pretty good piece of work.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

Watching one of his famous victories unfold, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee remarked, “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it!”

That’s a famous quotation, but it doesn’t quite make sense. If war were not terrible, why shouldn’t we be fond of it; and since it is terrible, why are we tempted to be?

The fact is that Lee was fond of war—or, at least, of winning.  And his remark suggests that at times he was uncomfortable with that.

I’m reminded of Lee’s dilemma by “Under the Skin,” the seventh novel by James Carlos Blake, who is gaining a reputation as a poet of violence. This is a fine book, and a violent one. Its casual brutality makes me uncomfortable—but there are indications that Blake is uncomfortable with it, too. At the same time, like Lee, he can’t walk away.

Blake’s protagonist is James “Jimmy Boy” Youngblood, a twentyish enforcer for the Maceo Brothers, gangsters who run Galveston, Tex., in the 1930s. Maceo justice is pretty much Old Testament: You hold out on your payments and you lose a hand; twice, maybe your hands and your feet. There’s never a third time. Some offenses against the mob are punishable by death, and Jimmy is very handy with a pistol or an ice pick.  Jimmy and the Maceos are the good guys; the bad guys are—well, they’re on the other side, but there’s not much difference.

Jimmy’s life changes when he meets Daniela Zarate, a beauty who has fled to Galveston after running away from Don César Calveras, a who kidnapped her, married her, and kept her prisoner at his remote hacienda in northern Mexico.  There is a lovely scene in which Jimmy and Daniela, mutually smitten, exchange life stories over breakfast. Everything they tell each other is a lie.

Jimmy lives in a run-down Mexican neighborhood of Galveston. His neighbors, good people but poor, welcome his presence because they think it protects them. It does not.

Jimmy loves Daniela, but it’s not clear that she loves him. She knows, before he knows that she knows, that he is a killer; she may have cast her lot with him because of his violent nature, rather than in spite of it.  She’s young and full of life, but she’s also lived hard and is a masterful manipulator.

Daniela is recaptured by Don César’s thugs at the same time as the Maceos’ rivals from Dallas launch a turf war. Guys like Jimmy can’t really protect people, though, because they don’t deter violence; they attract it.

One of the things Jimmy didn’t tell Daniela is that he is the illegitimate son of Rodolfo Fierro, the infamous “butcher” of the Mexican revolution. Don César had suffered at the hands of Fierro, and when he sees the son he recognizes the face. Blake suggests that Jimmy’s murderous nature is bred in the bone, that like Oedipus, his tragedy is fated. Maybe, maybe not, but things sure don’t end well.

Blake has been compared as a writer with Cormac McCarthy, and there are obvious similarities between “Under the Skin” and McCarthy’s acclaimed “All the Pretty Horses”: They share a region, a powerful sense of place, a quest, and the incompleteness of victory. McCarthy muses on things that Blake never bothers with, while Blake has his own issues. He’s the more terse of the two, more the pure thriller writer.

There’s a lot to think about here. When Jimmy sets out to rescue Daniela, his gangland mentor cautions him: “A woman’s never the reason. It’s always something else. Always. The important thing is to know what it really is.” When you start thinking about that is when this book begins getting under your skin.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

If you’ve lived in the South, “The March” can be only one thing: Gen. William T. Sherman’s trail of destruction in 1864 from Atlanta to the sea 275 miles away, then north through the Carolinas.

Sherman led 62,000 men on his infamous march, cutting a 50-mile-wide swath through the Confederacy. His self-styled “bummers” laid waste to rail lines, supply depots and war industries, and lived off the land by taking what they needed from farmers and townspeople. They left a fiery trail, but were more respectful of people than property: There were few reported rapes or murders.  Nonetheless, the South has not forgotten or forgiven.

The numbers above aren’t in E.L. Doctorow’s novel, “The March.”  Doctorow’s tale is accurate enough, but he’s not simply trying to dress up history.  He’s an artist, and his truths are the deep truths of art.

We know we are in a new country in the first few pages, with Doctorow’s description of the coming of the federal hosts to Milledgeville, Ga.  It’s worth quoting in full:

And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then widening like the furrow from the plow. It was moving across the sky to the south of them. When the sound of this cloud reached them, it was like nothing they had ever heard in their lives. It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming. Then, carried on a gust of wind, the sound became for moments a rhythmic tromp that relieved them as the human reason for the great cloud of dust. And then, at the edges of this sound of a trompled-upon earth, they heard the voices of living men shouting, finally. And the lowing of cattle. And the creaking of wheels. But they saw nothing. The symphonious clamor was everywhere, filling the sky like the cloud of red dust that arrowed past them to the south and left the sky dim, it was the great processional of the Union armies, but of no more substance than an army of ghosts.

And ghosts they are. The real characters in this novel—Sherman, Grant, Lincoln—have been dead for more than a century. The slaves, soldiers, spinsters, shysters and lovers who are Doctorow’s creations never lived. But as Doctorow’s tale is spun, all come slowly into clarity. First we see them as they are picked from the mass of humanity, and then we hear them in soliloquies that punctuate the book and provide its most eloquent moments.

There is Lt. Clarke, whose stay with us is short but important; he carries off Pearl, a young half-white slave whose growth into a sustainable self is a central theme. She will eventually confront her former owners with confidence and compassion acquired in the maelstrom of war.

Her former mistress, Mattie Jameson, is shattered by the loss of her plantation-owner husband to madness and death, and the mortal danger of her sons serving in the overmatched Confederate army.

Will Kirkland and Arly Wilcox are Confederate shirkers imprisoned by their own side; they are released to fight against Sherman, but embark on a series of ultimately tragic misadventures propelled by Arly’s conviction that God has saved them to do great things. Arly is a great comic figure whose florid speeches are equal parts slyness, bombast and unwitting pathos.

Emily Thompson is the daughter of a Georgia Supreme Court justice who dies the day the war comes to Milledgeville. She becomes a nurse for brilliant Union surgeon Wrede Sartorius, but there is no future with that icy genius.

There are other characters who come and go, sometimes with no apparent reason. Emily Thompson, for example, simply vanishes for the last 100 pages, and other stories are begun and then abandoned. Coalhouse Walker comes into the story long enough for us to note that he’s the father of a main character in Doctorow’s earlier masterpiece, “Ragtime,” and to get a sense of how the younger Walker came to be the man he was; then Coalhouse Sr.  disappears from view.

These are observations more than complaints. As with “Ragtime” and the best of Doctorow’s other fiction, “The March” is full of sights and sound and smells and a colorful array of human acts and feelings. Scenes of terrible sadness are chockablock with bits of inspired comedy. This feels like a much bigger book than it is because it is so full of life. It is very quick reading, but loses nothing in depth for that.

Gen. Sherman himself is absent for the first 75 pages, then becomes a central character. He is proud and plain, brilliant and insecure, a cold, calculating soldier who is nonetheless paralyzed by grief at the deaths of two of his children. Above all, he is obsessed with driving his army like a stake through the heart of Dixie and ending the terrible war—which he has made more terrible, of course.

We know where Sherman is headed—but where is Doctorow going with all this? The unlikely key is Albion Simms, whose role is small but vital. In an explosion, a metal spike has been driven into Simms’ brain. When he is brought to surgeon Sartorius, he can speak and has all his senses; but he remembers nothing from one moment to the next. Ever.

”Who did you say I was?”

“Albion Simms.”

“No, I can’t remember. There is no remembering. It’s always now.”

“Are you crying?”

“Yes. Because it’s always now. What did I just say?”

“It’s always now.”

“Yes.”

Sartorius remarks, “My poor fellow, it’s always now for all of us. But, for you, a bit more so.”

This is a very unusual passage. If ever there was an author whose characters do not live only “now,” it is Doctorow. His people always carry the burden and the solace of the centuries—not only the past, but sometimes even the future. At one point, Sartorius, in an offhand comment to Emily about the state of medicine, says: “Someday we will have other means. We will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones. And so on.” Emily is startled, and so are we.

But “it’s always now” is at the heart of everything Doctorow is doing. At war’s end, Sherman reflects on his famous march in a passage that illuminates the journey of each character:

Though this march is done, and well accomplished, I think of it now, God help me, with longing—not for its blood and death but for the bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river and road into something of moral consequence, whereas now, as the march dissolves so does the meaning…

In these few months of 1864 and 1865, each of Doctorow’s characters has been transformed, for better or for worse, by an intensity of experience that he or she would never again know. For a brief time they were truly alive, and it was, as never before or since, “always now.”

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

“The Revenant” is my sleeper novel of the summer, a simple, powerful tale based on a true story.

In 1823, Hugh Glass joins a fur-company expedition up the wild Missouri River. Severely wounded by a bear, Hugh is abandoned to die by his two companions—one of them a very young Jim Bridger, later to become a legendary figure of the West.

Hugh survives, though, and treks across thousands of miles of wilderness in a quest for revenge. He is the revenant—an interesting word that means literally “one who returns” but that carries implications of mission, of fulfilling a destiny, in this case of exacting retribution.

Hugh ultimately succeeds in tracking down his men, but his revenge takes an unexpected course.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

Professional killers are all the fashion these days. I must have received a dozen new novels in the past few months in which the heroes were murderers—bright, successful, charismatic and working for the right side, but still murderers.

The funny thing is, this works. I’m won over and entertained, and only later do I ask myself what on earth I was thinking.

In “The Devil’s Redhead,” first-time novelist David Corbett of Vallejo works against the grain. His protagonist, Dan Abatangelo, is only a career marijuana smuggler. What’s more, he’s of the old-school hippie variety: no guns, no mobsters, just grass and money.  Even his name is a tip-off, “fallen angel” in Italian.

He falls into the love of a lifetime, with blackjack-dealing drifter Shel Beaudry. When he’s finally busted, he takes the fall—10 years—in return for a reduced sentence for her. By the[MJ1] time he’s released, she’s gone, descended to being the live-in girlfriend of a crazed crankhead loser, a lackey of the most violent gang in all of Contra Costa County.

This is a different world from that of Dan’s youth.  There are no more hippies, and the drug trade is fought over by bands of murderous criminals. In attempting to rescue Shel, Dan is caught between two of them. The cops aren’t exactly helpful, either.

There’s tremendous energy in Corbett’s work, and an air of dusty, violent, Old Testament depression that reminds me of Boston Teran (“God is a Bullet,” “Never Count Out the Dead”), one of my favorite crime novelists.

But in the end, it doesn’t quite work. Corbett isn’t the prose stylist that Teran is, and is sometimes careless in just the wrong places. One major plot thread involves an investigative reporter, and Corbett clearly has no idea whatever of how real reporters work (which may not matter to many readers). Dan and Shel are appealing until about page 22, after which they are so utterly down and adrift that it’s hard to muster much emotional attachment to them. They both blunder unnecessarily into the hands of their ruthless enemies again and again, and so many villains appear and disappear that it’s hard to keep track of them. I believe that the biggest villain of all is still at large at the end. I’m not sure—he could be at the bottom of one of the body piles.

There are things to like here, though, and it’s refreshing to have a crime-novel hero who doesn’t solve his problems with a gun in each hand, even if no one else in the book is so encumbered with conscience. I feel that I should like Dan and Shel more than I do, but I have to be honest: It’s easier to like those smooth, professional killer types.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

Talk about baggage; John Rain has a load.

The son of a Japanese father and an American mother, he was bullied as a boy in both countries. In Vietnam he learned he was a natural fighter, but he did things—we don’t know what for many pages—that he will carry with him the rest of his life. He longed for a place to call home, but in ‘Nam his best friend would whisper in his ear, “There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.”

His wartime service ended in tragedy and betrayal, but Rain’s private war never ended. After working for the CIA in Japan, he found his true calling. When we meet him, the protagonist of Menlo Park writer Barry Eisler’s first, remarkable novel, he is a killer.

He has his pride. He won’t kill women or children; he will only target principals, not family members or employees; he must be an exclusive hire, because he doesn’t want to run into someone else with the same assignment.

He has never met his employers, but they are officials of Japan’s ruling, and highly corrupt, Liberal Democratic Party. He doesn’t know his victims, but corruption in high places is so pervasive in Japan that he could say, like Arnold Schwarzenegger justifying his killings to wife Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” “They were all bad.”

When we meet Rain, his life is stable. Happiness is not an issue.

Then he kills on assignment a high official in the public works ministry who was apparently on his way to a secret meeting. Both the police and organized criminals are inordinately interested in the victim. Rain, a jazz aficionado, has a chance encounter with the victim’s daughter, Midori, a young jazz pianist. He falls in love with her, which is uncharacteristic and dangerous. He’s then stunned to find that she is his next assignment; he must make her death appear to be from natural causes.

He decides instead to protect her, but he has enemies of his own. Despite his years of cultivated anonymity, they know where he lives and what he has done. He has unwittingly worked for them.

Worse yet, as he and Midori are drawn together he is increasingly aware of his own darkness. He has not only murdered her father, but also has other deeds etched in his soul for which he can never forgive himself.  Perhaps his only choice will be how to lose her. And the current situation is taking an ominously familiar shape: “It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago…something I want to make sure never happens again.” This is not coincidence.

Author Eisler has lived and worked in Tokyo, and “Rain Fall” is rich in real places and sounds, tastes and experiences. If you are a devotee of offbeat restaurants, jazz clubs and fine single-malt whiskies, you could use this novel as a travel guide.  You’ll enjoy your trip most if your baggage is lighter than John Rain’s.

The final copy of this review appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

Is it my twisted imagination, or is there at least a minor backlash going on against the gore of the horror genre?  “Superstition,” by David Ambrose is the latest and among the best of the more cerebral, character-driven and sophisticated supernatural thrillers that have been showing up this year.

Sam Towne is a research psychologist at Manhattan University whose team is probing what he calls “anomalous phenomena” – in short, the paranormal. Joanna Cross is a magazine journalist who has made a name for herself unmasking fraudulent psychics.

Joanna finds herself attracted by Sam’s work, which is serious science (I won’t get into the real-life debate over that). She’s also attracted to Sam, and he to her. To give her a taste of the paranormal, and ensure a favorable piece in her magazine, he sets up an experiment. He will recruit a group of seven – including himself and Joanna – and they will create a ghost.

The idea, Sam explains, is that ghosts are not real beings:

Why are ghosts always so repetitive and unoriginal? They’re always doing the same thing and dressed the same way, no matter how often they’re seen and how many people see them. They’re more like a snapshot or a memory than an actual event. And a memory is something that’s stored in the brain. And that’s where I think ghosts come from: from the brains of the people who see them.

The idea, taken from an actual experiment in Toronto in the 1970s, is for the group to talk and think together, to design and imagine up a ghost – who will not be a real historical person, but simply a product of their collective brainpower.

They give their ghost a name and a past – Adam Wyatt, an aide who accompanies Lafayette from America to Paris in the 1780s and is guillotined during the subsequent French Revolution. And they succeed – they bring forth a ghost who makes noises, moves tables, and talks to them via Ouija board.

But things go quickly and seriously wrong.  Adam begins to assert himself in unforeseen ways and places, and the group members find that their creature is gradually creating a real past for himself – a past with which their existence is incompatible.

These events appear to be related to some “baggage” that Joanna brought with her into the experiment. Just after she first met Sam, she was confronted by a psychic whom she has unmasked and who blamed Joanna for the subsequent death of her husband.

“You think I’m a fake, do you? A phony. You’ll find out.” Her face took on the rapturous look of a fanatic entering hallowed presence of the supreme power.

“It’s done,” she whispered. “There’s only the nightmare now.”

Tragedy befalls the seven experiments. The lucky ones die. For Sam and Joanna, another fate awaits – not only the result of an active malevolence, but also of changes in the world around them which they never could have imagined.

You won’t have imagined it, either. You will not guess where this novel is taking you. Nor should you be comforted by the assurance that the ending will necessarily be happy. I’ll reveal only one secret: Sam and Joanna end up together, but not as they might have expected.

Ambrose is clearly impressed with the current state of paranormal research, but you needn’t be. A simple suspension of disbelief is all you need to enjoy “Superstition.”

In “When the Wind Blows” veterinarian Frannie O’Neill’s husband is mysteriously murdered. After another murder occurs, Frannie and FBI Agent Kit Harrison discover Max, a very unusual 11-year-old who is the key to “one of the most diabolical and inhuman plots of modern science.” This is a non-Alex Cross thriller by master James Patterson. Kensington Books published a novel of the same name by the less famous but capable Zachary Alan Fox last month. Fox’s novel is “a gripping psychological thriller of revenge, redemption, and deadly secrets,” Kensington says.

Bisexual biker babe Tomato Rodriguez, star of San Francisco Bay Times writer Erika Lopez’s minor phenomenon “Flaming Iguanas,” returns in “They Call Me Mad Dog.” Tomato’s in the slammer, where she’s trying to solve the disappearance of a faithless ex-girlfriend. Simon & Schuster called “the greatest women-behind-bars epic since ‘Caged Heat.’”

“Trick of Light” is David Hunt’s follow up to “The Magician’s Tale,” a successful and very good story set in San Francisco’s underbelly. Achromatic photographer Kaye Farrow (she sees the world only in shades of gray) is back, this time investigating the murder of her mentor.

A final copy of this column was published in the San Jose Mercury Times.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

When Trisha, Kate, Lang and Molly graduate in ’79 from exclusive Briarcliffe College,

Trisha’s rich dad “gifts” them (I hate that word) with matching telephone answering machines so they can always stay in touch.

That’s the overarching conceit of “Gossip” by Los Angeles television anchorwoman Kelly Lange, whose previous novel was the equally trendy-titled “Trophy Wife.”

The women are carefully typed, as is the custom in pop fiction. Trisha’s the tall, golden rich one. Lane is the adventuresome, determined rich one. Kate is the soft, fatally lovely, dreamy rich one. And Molly is the scrappy, red-headed, pretty-but-not-gorgeous, middle class one.

Nineteen years later, they are still in touch, via newer, sleeker answering machines. Trisha is in New York, married to rich businessman Peter, who buys Trisha her own call-in radio show doing – what else? – gossip. Lane runs a bakery and antique store in Carmel, where is married to the gorgeous chief of police. Kate is the wife of the sleazy, abusive Austin Feruzzi, owner of first-rank art galleries in Beverly Hills, New York and London; she’s stoic, regal and totally crocked on pills and wine. Molly, unmarried, is the director of Austin’s New York gallery.

The novel’s title isn’t quite accurate. While each chapter begins with a list of answering-machine messages, they’re more practical than gossipy as the characters arrange to get together. It is somewhat amusing that when three of the women need to confront the fourth (she’s been sleeping with one of their husbands) they do it via conference call.

There is plenty of face-to-face, though. At book’s end, one of the women recalls all they’ve been through in little more than 300 pages: “betrayal, battering, adultery, the loss of a child, treachery, divorce, threat to their lives, suicide, murder, all of it.”

Despite Lange’s credentials as a TV journalist, “Gossip” is stunningly shallow, presenting a world in which the only motivations appear to be wealth and appearance. There is a subplot about spousal abuse, although the book provides no information you wouldn’t have seen in 150 movies of the week. In one telling moment, Lane sees the terribly battered Kate after a confrontation with Austin: “Amazing,” Lane thought, “how truly beautiful Katie was, even with a black eye, a badly bruised cheekbone, and a split lip.” Amazing, indeed.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.

Thrillers and adventure novels are filled with natural disasters. We love our hurricanes and tornadoes, our floods and tsunamis, our forest fires and volcanoes, our occasional asteroid on a collision course with Manhattan.

Although the earthquake is the quintessential lurking fear of Californians, it has been a disappointment in popular fiction. It’s simply a bad fit: A big quake is infrequent, its occurrence and location is relatively unpredictable, and it’s over in a matter of seconds. California quakes also have been insufficiently undeadly by fictional or Hollywood standards; far fewer people died in the Loma Prieta quake of ’89, for example, than in a single jetliner crash. There was massive infrastructure damage, of course, but thrillers aren’t about infrastructure.

Quakes are, if anything, too natural—they can’t believably be wielded by a villain, deciding when and where the next one will strike, holding hostage a terrified, massive public.

Here, however, science on the march has come to our rescue, and veteran novelist Ken Follett (“The Eye of the Needle,” “The Key to Rebecca,” “On Wings of Eagles”) seizes the opportunity in “The Hammer of Eden.”

In a lovely Sierra County valley, aging hippies Priest and Star and a handful of others have maintained a peaceful commune and have kept faith with the spiritual, non-materialistic ways that brought them here in the first place.

Now, the commune’s future is threatened by a proposed nuclear power plant in the valley; the state will not renew the lease on the land. Hurt and angry, feeling too old to start over again, Priest and Star vow that they will do anything – anything – to defend their land.

There are a couple of extraordinary circumstances here. First, Priest (real name Ricky Granger) is not entirely the otherworldly sort that he seems. His life before the commune was one of crime and violence, and he rules the commune through steely manipulation disguised as spiritual insight.

Secondly, although Star has been Priest’s woman, he’s also sleeping with the commune’s newest member, mini-skirted Melanie, who happens to have a master’s degree in seismology and whose estranged husband is a renowned doctor of same.

The commune leaders huddle, trying to come up with a bargaining chip valuable enough to get the state to call off the plant construction. Melanie comes up with the idea:

My husband—soon to be my ex-husband—developed the stress-trigger theory of earthquakes. At certain points along the fault line, shear pressure builds up, over the decades, to a very high level. Then it takes only a very weak vibration in the earth’s crust to dislodge the plates, release all that accumulated energy, and cause an earthquake.

Priest was captivated. He caught Star’s eye. She nodded somberly.

To make it work, they have to locate and steal a seismic vibrator (a truck-mounted device used in petroleum exploration that causes – you guessed it – seismic vibrations), and they have to steal Melanie’s husband’s data.  Although none of the communards save Melanie have been in contact with the outside world since the early ‘70s, and Priest, for one, is totally illiterate, they don’t seem to have any problem picking up advanced seismology – in other words, they can understand anything Follett’s plot needs them to.

Priest steals the vibrator, committing a brutal murder along the way, and the plan is launched. Little do the conspirators reckon, however, on Judy Maddox, the FBI agent who is handed the communards’ earthquake threat—regarded by the bureau as harebrained—as punishment for being an uppity woman. Maddox thinks it’s harebrained, too, until she meets hunky seismologist Michael Quercus, who thinks such a quake could be deliberately caused. Michael, who happens to be Melanie’s husband, has no idea that his own data is being used in the plot.

Judy and Michael have to identify the conspirators and track them down before seismic disaster strikes. They are opposed not only by the conspirators, but by Judy’s miserably incompetent and egotistical superiors (doesn’t anybody in fiction have a decent boss?).

This being a Ken Follett book, there are some very nice things interspersed with some clumsy ones. Priest is a good character, because he is genuinely both a serious villain and a loving, caring father and neighbor.  The science is interesting, too.

On the debit side, the earthquakes (there are a couple of tune-ups before the Big One) are definitely the Hollywood kind: Things fall down, cars crash, buildings explode, and then we move on to the next scene. Public panic is not exploited as it might be, because Follett keeps the masses at arm’s length; we never meet anyone who’s scared. There is no mention of the days and weeks after the quake, the cleanup, the cost, the heart-clutching fear that accompanies every aftershock.

Follett’s prose has never been a very sharp tool, but it’s adequate. I wish he had never discovered the word “frisson,” with which he appears to have fallen half in love. Judy experiences one after another, like temblors: a frisson of fear, a sexual frisson, a frisson of pleasure.

All told, “The Hammer of Eden” is a workmanlike thriller with a decent California hook. The Big One is yet to be written.

A final copy of this review was published in the San Jose Mercury News.

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Leslie Pratch, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University with an M.B.A. in Strategy and Finance from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a B.A. in Religion from Williams College. She works with boards of directors and private equity investors to select and develop executives. She can be reached at (312) 464-7919, leslie@pratchco.com, or visit her at pratchco.com.

Mark Johnson is a retired book reviewer for the San Jose Mercury Times.