Danielle Hermans, The Tulip Virus (Minotaur, 2010)
Sometimes, a book is just plain bad. Case in point: The Tulip Virus, which manages to miss the mark on every level except possibly typesetting and cover art.
It's easy to see what author Danielle Hermans was going for: a Da Vinci Code-style historical conspiracy thriller mixed with a polemic on the evils of religious fanaticism. While that may be an admirable goal, the execution leaves practically everything to be desired: plot, characterization, dialog, and common sense.
There are two intertwined, parallel stories here. One is the murder of a tulip trader and secular activist in 17th century Holland. The other follows a modern painter and playboy whose philanthropist uncle is savagely murdered but leaves behind a cryptic clue hidden in a centuries-old book on tulips. Alec, the playboy type, channels his inner Batman and promptly begins a clumsy pursuit of his uncle Frank's murderer while doing a terrible job of lying to the police about everything. Fortunately, the police are terrible at their jobs too, so Alec and his friends Damien and Emma are free to ping-pong back and forth between London and Holland in order to sit through lengthy pieces of exposition that pass for detective work.
Most of the book is sitting and listening to people talk, or occasionally think. Nothing is demonstrated; everything is spelled out in painstaking, numbing detail. That's part of the problem -- it's all lectures. The minor characters lecture the major characters on the plot. The major characters lecture the reader on what they're feeling. And none of it matters worth a damn, because Hermans doesn't follow through on even the clichéd conflicts she sets up. The cop who's permanently scarred by the serial killer on his last case? Nothing much happens with him after his grandiose setup. Emma's shocking secret that she betrayed her husband with his best friend? Telegraphed, announced, and then dropped. It's as if Hermans can't write dialog in anything except lecture mode, so scenes of real emotional depth or conflict get skipped over lest they prove difficult.
The central mystery is another problem. The clues that Alec and company painstakingly uncover don't lead to the solution. They instead lead to the opportunity for more speechifying, and the actual resolution, if it can be called that, pretty much falls into Alec's lap. There's no tension because the stakes aren't explained until the final, grinding denouement. The fact that the math is dodgy -- the sums of money Frank had kicking around rendered his involvement in the conspiracy that got him killed largely pointless -- doesn't help. Even when the insufficiently grand master plan is revealed, it lacks the sort of scope or ambition that would spark reader interest. It's a few more millions for rich people on top of the millions they already have. One can get that just as easily reading the business pages of whatever news source one prefers.
A third problem is the villain, or lack thereof. The putative monster of the piece, the homicidal operative who takes out Uncle Frank and a few others along the way, is a cartoon, a hybrid of the albino assassin from the aforementioned Dan Brown novel and the bad guys from Lethal Weapon 2. His motivations are thin and his personality is't sketched beyond a thin veneer of "unpleasant." Plus, he's got the standard villain superpower of being able to show up anywhere, at any time, regardless of how he got there. All that is great, but this relentless hunter-killer gets taken down like a chump when push comes to shove, his menace wasted in a comically short fight scene. His mysterious, faceless backers? That's all they are, and their rationale for inspiring his murderous spree is barely mentioned.
I won't go into the "Gotcha!" ending that isn't set up by the rest of the book, or the endless earnest speechifying, or any of the other things that were so hard to read in this novel. It feels like I'm just piling on for the sake of piling on, and that's not what I'm going after at all. It's just that this is a mystery that fails to be mysterious, a thriller that does its best not to thrill, and a historical puzzler that feels like a high school history class lecture. Barely anything is set up, nothing is resolved, and in the end the reader cares about neither tulips nor the various characters who've spent so much time talking about them. Author Hermans may be described as a communications specialist in her bio, but she has failed to communicate much of anything with this book except that she seems to prefer lecturing the reader to plot, action, or characterization.
