The Perk

This book reminds me of what a writing teacher once told me, tongue in cheek. You have to write a first chapter that will grab the customer and get him to buy the book. After that, who cares about the rest of the book - you (the author, publisher) have the money! The first chapter of The Perk is strong - beautiful young Texas girl basically kidnapped, drugged and raped and left to die on side of road by sleaze ball movie star (picture Tom Cruise). So the story is going to be how the vicious crime is solved, right? Wrong. The rest of the book is a hatchet job on the white people of Fredericksburg, Texas, or at least on the descendants of the Germans who settled it, who are all racist and corrupt, and especially brutal to Mexicans. There's a subplot about a high school football hero jacked up on steroids who brutally beats a Mexican-American boy (who wants to be an astronaut or something at NASA). There's a frustrated romance between the protagonist and a hot, beautiful lesbian who moved from Austin to open a book store. The "hero" is an Atticus Finch type who grew up there but moved away and was a partner in a hotshot Chicago law firm. Moves back when his wife dies, and within six months is the district judge, although he doesn't even have a Texas law license. While judge, he personally investigates and basically prosecutes the case against the football star - nevermind that he would be disqualified from presiding over the case. There's a former judge now lawyer for the football hero that learned his negotiating skills from reading The Godfather - cheat, lie, steal and when that doesn't work, blackmail.This book meanders all over the place and the original "mystery" - will the movie star ever get caught? - falls by the wayside. In real life Hispanics and Anglos here get along just fine.And by the way - the real Gillespie County (where Fredericksburg is) has a female Mexican-American district attorney.

It's rare that I quit on a book half way in but this one just kept getting worse. Really got stupid. Conservatives hate lesbians and Mexican people. I'm not a conservative but at least I've spoken to a few. Reading this book is like speaking to a really ignorant college professor. The author is probably not stupid. Just an ignorant person that lives in a very small world. A lawyer that does not understand the significance of the rule of law. I got the Kindle version for two dollars and overpaid. Big time.

This is the third Mark Gimenez book I have read, and only one of them ("The Accused") lives up to the author's billing as the next John Grisham. I don't necessarily disagree with his politics, rather, I think his political views occupied way too much of "The Perk" and detracted from what could have been a good story. The bad guys in the story were caricatures, not real people. Putting aside the logistics of how an outsider living in the community for only a few months is able to be elected a judge, if the book had concentrated on the three subplots (the death of Beck's wife and the effects on his family, the assault by the star athlete and the mystery surrounding Heidi's death) it would have rated five stars. The author writes well, but a third of the book was extraneous political opinion that overwhelmed the story and added nothing to the plot.

A native Texan, I was lured in by the hill country location and thought Gimenez described Fredricksburg beautifully. I even called my mom in Texas (I'm in Orlando, and there are zero copies of any of his work in the libraries here), and she found a whole shelf at her local library. I am very curious about the publication being done in London when the novel was so clearly "Texan." I also found the opening scene (the murder) ghastly and felt that the lewd language was "over the top." In fact, it was hard to get past that opening scene because of the language, and then to follow the plot. I did read it in one sitting, though, and it got better. I tracked it down for a friend, though, and was ashamed to give it to her due to the language. Do people in London really like to read about Texas? The previous owner of my copy had written in "chapel" by the Alamo on the map, which I found funny since Texans usually think of the Alamo as the site of a brutal battle and are shocked to see how tiny it is upon visiting San Antonio.

Slice of Americana small town in Texas with social and race issues in the forefront. A beautiful teenager murdered, a meteoric football star plagued by steroids use amid an unscrupulous developer and an old guard German mafia fighting for town control. A newly widow, grieving lawyer estranged from his father and baffled about raising his kids is the protagonist of this drama. Reluctantly elected to town judge his decisions will affect a large undocumented Mexican population in unexpected ways as well as the lives of football fan townspeople . Another winner by Mr. Gimenez