My one-word review is “meh.” Bruce DeSilva’s A Scourge of Vipers is not a bad mystery. (There’s litotes for you. You can look it up, as I think I said in my last post in a different context, though still a Greek word for an English figure of speech.) The real mystery is how it averaged four stars among Amazon readers. While reading the book, I was shocked, shocked to see gambling and political corruption in Rhode Island. No, there was no Buddy Cianci in the story, but it still felt all too familiar. Except for the governor: an ex-nun nicknamed Attila the Nun. She was certainly not familiar.

Oh, there’s also a second theme intertwined with the political corruption: the slow death of local journalism as small papers are bought by much larger out-of-town corporations. Again, all too familiar. All too true. There are some other works of fiction that can be so unrealistic that we don’t suspend disbelief; this case, in contrast, is so realistic that it doesn’t feel like fiction.

In that connection I found the journalism subplot the most interesting aspect of the book, but maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s because the author is a long-time journalist. Here is an excerpt:

“Journalists try to convince themselves that their jobs are noble and exciting, but mostly the work is pointless and boring.”

“If that’s how you feel, why’d you get into it in the first place?”

”Because it wasn’t always this way,” I said. “In the good old days, which weren’t all that long ago, the job was a license to dig out the truth behind the façade, to expose incompetence and corruption, to explain how the world really works. Now, outside of a few big-city metros like The Washington Post and The New York Times, news organizations don’t have the staff — or the balls — to do much of that anymore. Hell, even the big boys don’t do as much of it as they used to.”

Categories: Books