Corruption, oil and lives at stake in literate thriller

-- FICTION

Many thrillers come filled with bodies (a serial killer at work), a flawed hero, less-than-helpful cops, a relationship-based subplot and page-turning suspense.

Richard North Patterson's novels often have the same ingredients -- and qualities that raise his work above the genre's bar: intellectual depth, political viewpoints and provocative ideas.

"Eclipse," much of which is set in the fictional West African country of Luandia (based on Nigeria), is Patterson's latest effort to combine a compelling and credible plot while raising questions about serious public-policy issues.

Previous Patterson novels have taken on the death penalty, late-term abortion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; now, the author focuses on Big Oil and the struggle for human rights in Africa.

Future lawyer Damon Pierce met Marissa Brand at a creative-writing class when both were undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley. When Damon tried to take the relationship further, Marissa told him she was committed to Bobby Okari, a Luandian determined to improve conditions in his country.

Twelve years later, Damon is a high-powered specialist in international law, and Marissa and Bobby -- now married -- have returned to Luandia, where Bobby is a nonviolent freedom fighter devoted to bettering the lives of his people. But Luandia's savage dictator, Gen. Savior Karama, detests Bobby -- the two knew each other as young men and once shared a woman.

On the day of a solar eclipse, Bobby stages a mass demonstration. But three employees of PetroGlobal Luandia, a subsidiary of an American oil giant, are found hanged, Bobby is arrested, the people of his village are massacred, and Marissa contacts Damon for help.

Damon -- still half in love with Bobby's wife -- flies to Africa, where he is confronted with a web of brutality and deception, an unholy alliance between PGL and Karama, a people with little hope -- and Bobby facing trial for his life. As Damon works the case, he is forced to face a sham of a tribunal, his fears for his life (and both Okaris'), his reawakened feelings for Marissa and the hellish links between petroleum and politics.

"Eclipse" brims with memorable characters -- Damon, Marissa and Bobby are fully drawn, simultaneously sympathetic and ambiguous, and even the novel's lesser figures come across as credible rather than as cartoonish. And Patterson's prose, as usual, rises above standard thriller fodder. Consider this:

"Caught in his own conflicted feelings, Pierce could not respond. The shadow of a memory surfaced in his mind: that on meeting Bobby Okari, he had sensed that this man's life might not be long. But then martyrs, like believers, envision an afterlife. Damon Pierce was neither."

Patterson draws some not-so-subtle comparisons between Luandia's violations of civil liberties and what he sees as similar breaches committed by the United States in the war on terror, and his take on the world's lust for oil is forceful. Whether you agree with him is not the point; Patterson's raising of the issue is guaranteed to rouse you to thought, and "Eclipse" cannot fail to do that.

A disquieting read that confronts moral as well as geopolitical concerns, "Eclipse" will make you uneasy in your easy chair. And drivers of gas guzzlers should find themselves squirming.
Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .