{"id":2251,"date":"2018-01-06T09:45:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-06T16:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2251"},"modified":"2018-01-06T09:45:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T16:45:54","slug":"waiting-for-the-gun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/?p=2251","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for the gun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bob Moyer\u2019s New Year\u2019s resolution is to review more books even when he\u2019s on the road, as he often is. He just doesn\u2019t know about this resolution yet, but one hopes he will after reading this post.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer<\/p>\n

THE CUBAN AFFAIR. By Nelson DeMille. Simon and Schuster. 429 pages. $28.99.<\/p>\n

\"cuban\"<\/a>Looking for a book where you can dive into the action with the leathered hero, following him through adrenaline-soaked, body-filled pages until you both emerge, exhausted but fulfilled, with the partner of your choice and righteousness by your side?<\/p>\n

Sorry, this is not that book.<\/p>\n

Author Nelson DeMille takes so much time to bring The Cuban Affair<\/em> to a climax that his narrative may qualify as the longest literary foreplay of 2017. It begins when three Cuban Americans come on to Mac to help them with a multi-million dollar project. They want to get millions of dollars and documents in 11 trunks out of Cuba. They need him for his boat and his body \u2014 he\u2019s a veteran field officer who served in \u201cAllfuckedupestan\u201d and can handle himself and others in hostile situations. The plan is simple \u2014 the boat enters a fishing competition\u00a0in Cuba with Mac\u2019s first mate as captain. Mac, in the meantime, pretends to become a couple with the woman in the trio on an educational\u00a0tour sponsored by Yale. Mac can\u2019t turn down the offer, because it looked like \u201cSex, money, and adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

When they get to Havana, the mock affair intimated in the double entendre title runs amok, while the clandestine affair turns into a tame tour of\u00a0present landmarks and past crimes of the Castro regime. The only sparks in the narrative are the frequent witticisms offered by Mac.<\/p>\n

Then, his first mate meets him on shore and gives him a gun. Now, there\u2019s a rule in both mystery fiction and the theater that if you bring a gun onstage, you have to use it \u2014 because everyone is waiting for just that. Sure enough, this gun is hidden in the room, stowed in a waistpack, stuck in a waistband, dropped over a wall, while we are waiting for it to be fired. For hundreds of pages. Meanwhile, \u00a0\u201c \u2018The best laid schemes o\u2019 mice and men gang aft a-gley,\u2019 \u201c meaning, according to Mac, \u201c \u2019This shit\u2019s not working.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0As they make their way off the island, the gun is finally fired on page 374, relieving all that built-up tension.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there\u2019s not much pop to the conclusion; there\u2019s more powder in the pistol and AK-47\u2019s than there is in the plot, and we are left relatively unsatisfied by The Cuban Affair.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bob Moyer\u2019s New Year\u2019s resolution is to review more books even when he\u2019s on the road, as he often is. He just doesn\u2019t know about this resolution yet, but one hopes he will after reading this post. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer THE CUBAN AFFAIR. By Nelson DeMille. Simon and Schuster. 429 pages. $28.99. Looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[426,14],"tags":[1019,1020,410],"class_list":["post-2251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-fiction","category-thriller-suspense","tag-nelson-demille","tag-robert-p-moyer","tag-thrillers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2253,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2251\/revisions\/2253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}