Customer Reviews

"They say there's sometimes more truth in fiction than in fact" - By: Michael Leonard, 10 Dec 2008
Spider Season, John Morgan Wilson's latest Benjamin Justice thriller, proves that you can never fully escape your past. History that you carryin your blood even when it'sin danger of reaching into darker recesses of the human heart. In this tense & engaging novel, the broken down & washed-out Benjamin Justice once again finds his past infusing with his presence, & shaping everything he does. As the poisonous spiders weave their delicate tendrils of evil around Benjamin's life, for the first time he finds himself tackling the strange voices that emanate from his past. Amid the stifling August heat of Los Angeles, Benjamin is celebrating the publication of his first book, a memoir that finally lays outin shameful detail his spectacular fall from grace, the murder of his father & the stripping away of his Pulitzer prize all those years ago. Finally Ben has reached a stagein his life where he has a chance to do some public atonement, make a little money & possibly get back into the writing game, & also finally put to rest some of the issues surrounding his beloved Jacques who died of AIDS eighteen years ago.

But then something is amiss outside the West Hollywood home that he shares with his best-friends, the octogenarians Fred & Maurice. Here is a menacing intruder, a young tattooed man who trashes Ben's prized mustang. The end result is fierce fight & a bloodied young boy is laying face down on the pavement, his battered face the results of Benjamin's seething testosterone-fuelled anger. The publication has certainly stirred up a whole pack of snarling dogs. When hate mail suddenly appears, Ben realizes that his past is littered with all kinds of bad choices & trouble & with all of the people he had abandoned & the challenges he had run away from. Benjamin isn't prepared for the fawning attentions of Jason Holt, now propped up with plastic surgery & his fascination with spiders. Jason's evil seems to encapsulate Ben, & like the spiders that he so loves he's capable of building webs, trapping & killing his prey with venom: "You can finally admit Ben that you were enchanted with me." Determined to unpick this knotted network of dark intentions, Ben is somewhat diverted by another investigation, the long term surveillance of Cathryn Conroy - a tough-minded female reporter.

Then there's the machinations of prestigious artist Charles Wu & his strange & troubling portrait of Jason Holt, a painting that he considers undoubtedly inferior. As Ben traverses the suburbs of a smoggy & suffocating Los Angeles, he becomes desperate to tie together these all of these disparate elementsin a mystery that involves murder & cover-ups, poisonings, & a surprising betrayal from someone whom Ben had long considered his best friend. Even his new lover Ismael Aragon, a compassionate Catholic priest, can do little emolliate Ben's feeling that he's made such a mess of things, with time blowing through his life "like a storm wind" breaking & scattering nearly everything & everyone he cared about.

Essentially about Ben's "old debts finally coming due," this installment is also about how Ben must put many of his past mistakes to rest. In a dark & crazy way, Ben's lust & his anger has mixedin with his confusion about who he really is & what his real intentions are. Time & guilt have a way of warping Ben's memory & of blurring his reality. Now nearing fifty, Ben may have lived a troubled life, but he's lost none of his irascibility & remarkable capacities for tenderness. A unique, compelling, & beautifully plotted mystery that is full of noir elements, John Morgan Wilson once again proves that he is on top of his game here, with his beloved protagonist as gutsy & as desire-driven asin any of his previous adventures, yet also riddled with a type of melancholy mixedin with doses of heartache & sorrow. Ironically, it is left up to the kindly Maurice, whoin the midst of heartbreak, finally tells Ben what he's always wanted to hear, that he's always looked for the dark sidein life even as he tries emotionally to blunt the pain of his failed relationships. Mike Leonard December 08.