Blood of Paradise

Corbett's work is a thriller-reader's dream: flawed heros, colorful troubled settings, and sociopathic villians set in paradise.

Corbett's third portrait of evil plays out in the real world, real time setting of El Salvador, a tiny country where truth is, alas, stranger than his fictional riffs. The descriptions of place are wonderful. The plot, built on an ugly mix of American and Salvadoran motives, stirred up by unchecked greed, and fueled by mercenaries and thugs makes for a dark story. To me, it reads most like a cold war spy thriller, even though it's a story of a psychopath, some bad cops, and a lot of crooked businessmen and politicians. But there are rays of goodness, albeit vaporous at times, that kept me engaged and hopeful. I liked Corbett's end papers, his obvious desire to be a witness for truth in a country that has too many modern martyrs. This is fiction that's hard to pigeonhole as mystery or crime. As with Done for a Dime, Corbett refuses to write formula fiction - good for him!

As I got into Blood of Paradise I thought this is a great story Corbett has got going here, but it's going to be tough to hold it together because he takes on so much. But he pulled it off and it's a great read. What starts with the mystery of desire and attraction quickly descends into a world of moral ambiguity and one where both personal code and the politics of El Salvador and of America are called into question. But not in a way that runs the story aground. I kept going back to this novel every night.

David Corbett has written a page turner that once begun is hard to put down. He says its plot is based on an obscure Greek drama, but as Francis Ford Coppella made Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into the classic film "Appocolypse Now", Corbett has placed this story in the contempoary world, the underworld of Chicago and the hell of post war El Salvador today. I was a journalist in El Salvador during the revolution of the mid eighties and I can vouch for his research. He got it right. Its a netherworld of political and economic foul play that you won't read about in the New York Times. Corbett is apparently torn between being a fiction writer or a journalist.He has some strong and realistic notions about how El Salvador became the satanic backdrop for his fascinating cast to act out their fate, but it doesn't slow down the action. In a unique bonus he has included an epilogue "From Troy to Baghdad via El Salvador". It contains some inconvenient truths on the failure of US policy in El Salvdor and how the "salvador option" is creating yet another morass in Iraq, where an imposed democracy means you get to vote with your feet and flee. At the surprising end of "Blood of Paradise", I started looking for other books this guy may have written.

Corbett sets his novel in present day El Salvador. The crimes are committed by the hired guns of an oligarchy hoping to silence the brave souls who expose the rape of that nation's economic and environmental resources. There is plenty of human drama, betrayal and brutality. Corbett makes a powerful tale all the more shocking by weaving in the real-life story of the recent assassination of Jose Gilberto Soto, an American citizen and Teamster leader who returned to his native country in an effort to link up with union leaders there. Just weeks after Soto's murder, I traveled to San Salvador along with a group of religious and human rights leaders in a futile attempt to prod Salvadoran officials to find his assassins. I can attest that Corbett captures the frustration, the repression and terror that confronts those who battle for justice and oppose a brutally corrupt regime propped up by our own government.