The Fall: A Thriller

By Michael Allen Dymmoch

Book Overview

The judge will order you to talk and offer to put you in the witness protection program. You said you won't consider that. Why on earth?I have a life, Mr. Norman.Well, if this man they want to wiretap really is connected, you won't for long.It's not fair But it's the law.What if I just refused to talk?The judge will jail you for contempt until you testify. And I doubt the mob would trust you to accept an indefinite stay in County. Even in solitary you wouldn't be safe.Then I have no choice? Most of us are lucky that some simple action---one that we've performed a hundred times---doesn't suddenly plunge our entire life into a private hell. But undeserved or not, unheralded or not, that's what happens to Joanne Lessing, a freelance photographer and the divorced mother of a teenage son. On a fine fall morning, sent to record the aftermath of Halloween in a town park, Joanne turns from the geese she is photographing to see a luxurious foreign car come speeding down the road at the park's edge. The driver, noticing Joanne aiming her camera and seeming to panic, veers and smacks into a Volkswagen parked at the curb. His car scrapes the curb and leaves. Good citizen Joanne reports the accident and turns over her photos of the offending car to the police. Not until she sees a story in that evening's local paper does she have an answer to what has puzzled her all day: Why did the police immediately send a man to interview her and pick up her photos for a relatively minor accident in which no one was injured? The news story tells her that one of her neighbors had been murdered, a man who had once been the head of the local mob and has been living quietly in the FBI's witness protection program. A flock of FBI agents arrive to work with the local police. The agents know who did the killing; they've been living with the effort to catch and convict the gang members. Among the single-minded Feebies is Agent Paul Minorini. He is the only one who seems to give some thought to the danger Joanne is in if the gangsters learn it was she who caught their car with her camera---and possibly caught some or all of its occupants as well. Minorini's worry about Joanne's safety puts him at odds with his partner, and his attraction to the besieged woman makes it almost impossible for him to perform his job. Meanwhile, spunky Joanne, trapped between the mob and the tunnel-vision agents, has some ideas of her own about how to handle her endangered life...if only she can make those ideas work.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312321937
• ISBN13: 9780312321932
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.7" x 0.9" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

A GREAT FALL

THE FALL is a cynical, tough-minded thriller that may unsettle some readers. I found it refreshing reading in this political season where all nuance is lost and only simplistic black or white is the order of the day. Joanne Lessing is a professional photographer on assignment in a Chicago suburb who snaps a picture of a hit-and-run driver who sideswipes a parked car. Though no one is injured, Joanne reports the incident to the Northbrook Police. Only later, when detectives and a gaggle of FBI agents descend on her, does Joanne learn that the driver was probably a Mafia hit man leaving the scene of his latest crime. She identifies the driver and is subpoenaed to testify at a hearing to get a wiretap on the suspect's telephone. A hit-and-run driver kills another supposed witness and a bomb is discovered in Joanne's car. The FBI insists that she and her son go into the Federal Witness Protection program. The Chicago FBI office is struggling to identify who is leaking information about its witnesses to the Mafia at the same time they are trying to nail the hit man known as "Mr. Million". To complicate matters further, Joanne and one of the FBI agents, Paul Minorini, fall for each other. One wonders what "fall" Dymmoch has in mind with her title. The story begins in the fall of the year, but I think she has a more Miltonian fall in mind. There are plenty of candidates: prideful, straight-arrow Minorini; Dossi, the untouchable hit man; or one of the several other characters who fall in one sense or another. PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY says THE FALL "...ends in a moral quagmire some readers may find unsatisfying". Many fine novels, from DON QUIXOTE to A S Byatt's POSSESSION, end in moral ambiguity. Most murder mystery plots do indeed end tidily with the scales of justice neatly balanced. Perhaps that's why they are so popular. Bravo to Ms Dymmoch for giving the reader something messier and closer to real life.