Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield mystery/thrillers have a solid fan base and publishers will probably offer them gladly as long as Perry wants to write them, but they've never become the mega-sellers that some other thriller series have become.
Curious. They are dark but so are Dennis Lehane's books among many others. They are violent but so are Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" books.
The "problem" -- if it is a problem -- might be the character of Jane, who's complex and troubled, emotionally strong but still undergoing her own learning process.
That's what I love about the books, but when Jane meditates on the life she's chosen, her parents and the ways they influenced her, what she wants her life to be, maybe some readers get too impatient.
If anybody wants to try this series, I strongly recommend reading the second book. Either read the first but keep on for one more, before you judge the series. Or skip right to Book Two. It was the game changer for Perry.
The first book, Vanishing Act, introduces Jane and it's one smashing good, tense read. Jane lives alone in her childhood home in an old and quiet town in upstate New York. But her underground life is one of helping innocent people who have run out of options.
She calls herself a Guide. She helps them disappear and start new lives under new identities. She provides first quality identity documents and often-frustrating lessons for the victims in how to stay safe in their new lives, resettles each one, and sometimes has to escape or kill the bad guys who are after them.
The novels give a lot of detail about the process of disappearing. Jane herself has to use multiple identities as she crosses the country to prepare her client's new home, teach him how vital it is to avoid old haunts, old contacts, and old habits. She's a martial arts expert. She also, in this first novel, has to win a battle to the death in the forest using strength and cunning.
I loved it. Another friend didn't. She said Jane was too unbelievable and perfect.
The author seemed to agree because he developed Jane's character in an unusual new direction in Book Two, Dance for the Dead. The Jane of Book One was a Lone Ranger. She had a rather unrealistic willingness to live a solitary life with few close relationships.
In Book Two, she's in love. And Perry decided to let her have a personal life and a marriage.
It was risky idea if he wanted to keep a series going, since life as a surgeon's wife, mother, and Hospital Ladies Auxiliary member is highly incompatible with vanishing under assumed identities at unpredictable intervals, to remain away for weeks as she preps someone for a new life. Not to mention having to sometimes kill or be killed, an eternal risk.
Perry developed the relationship between Jane and love-interest/husband Carey slowly through a couple more thrillers. She had to tell Carey about her secret life. She had to discuss with him the risks of what she did, and she had to come to a willingness to leave that dangerous life, if she wanted a family and community life. Carey had to understand that winding down her Guide business will take time and that it could intrude on their life together while that process occurs.
This still left Perry with a few missions he could take Jane through, even after her marriage. He came up with a couple good ones, notably one in which Carey's elderly mentor is the one who needs to vanish, and Carey reluctantly requests Jane's help, and plays a role in the mission.
After Book Five, Perry wisely had Jane -- and himself -- take a break. Extricating herself from the life of helping desperate people escape had to be a slow process, since they hear about and seek her out only through a grapevine that's impossible to shut down quickly, but there was plausibly a stretch during which she was untroubled by runners looking for her.
Runner returns to Jane and Carey several years after the previous book. She has settled into a serenely ordinary life, but the underground network through which runners hear about her hasn't gone totally silent, and a young pregnant woman comes to her for help.
The mystery and the difficulty of helping this girl make for a white-knuckle read. Perry has never been satisfied with preserving Jane in amber, though. She's on her own life's journey, and we have to hear her thoughts about the personal dilemma she's in.
I noticed some reviewers criticizing the way Perry handled the aspect of the plot that involved Jane's personal life, and they have a point. Here's Jane, in great health and married to a physician, for crying out loud, so why is she bemoaning her inability to get pregnant? If fertility treatment with a high likelihood of success is available to anybody on earth, it oughta be available to this couple.
I understand that criticism, but I saw it differently. Jane herself wonders if her constant honing of her body to stay in fighting shape isn't reducing her fertility as it does some female athletes.
And she wonders if she's kept herself in such athletic shape because she unconsciously couldn't give up being a guide.
Perry doesn't settle for easily answering that question because Jane has a deeper dilemma, and a pretty dark one.
She began acting as a guide when she was pretty young, still in college. Now she realizes that it might have been a lifetime commitment, and that she made it without knowing that once she got into the Guide business, she might never be able to get out.
Is she unconsciously staying childless because she really doesn't want a family...or is it because of a cold knowledge that this door might be closed?
Here's this frightened and endangered girl, who has followed a word-of-mouth trail to Jane that's years old. Will the grapevine ever go silent? Does what Jane wants even matter? Did she close off the family-life option as a young and naive woman, without even knowing she was doing so?
A new Jane Whitefield is on its way! It came out 3 days ago and my copy is in the mail, but I wanted to post this entry about the previous titles, before I read it. Pre-pub reviewers are already calling it somewhat disturbing.
It was clear in the last book that Perry has decided to escalate the conflict between Jane's two worlds. It'll make readers uncomfortable. It'll probably make me uncomfortable. But for Jane Whitefield to serenely maintain her mental/emotional equilibrium while her outer worlds come into more conflict would make her that paragon that good writers really need to avoid, so I'll see where he takes it.
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