Dive

South Florida construction worker Ray Rose killed the rapist of a friend. He also inherited Port St. Lucie property from a throat cancer victim who used his fingers to select Ray randomly from the phone book. Growing up with two older sisters, female neighbors his age, and no young male nearby, Ray believes in romantic love forever though his third wife left him just a few months ago. He plans to perform Florida's most famous profession, reinventing himself but in Alaska. In Los Angeles, children's carton show animator Ruby Falls loves her lifestyle especially living on the Laurel Canyon estate of her best friend, a former porn star Jeannie. Having dumped her last boyfriend not to long ago, Ruby's good times abruptly end when she finds the corpses of Jeannie's beloved dogs and their Walker. Needing to reinvent herself she chooses Alaska. In Alaska, Ruby and Ray meet having in common fleeing the forty-eight. They begin to fall in love, but both have lingering demons haunting them. As they work through their respective problems, Ruby is injured and ends in a coma with Ray never leaving her side while her family arrives to bicker and divide the spoils. This is a terrific contemporary romantic suspense with strong characters especially in Alaska. However, many readers will feel the story line dives short of the gold as the key suspense elements, his committing homicide and her finding a homicide are not fully explored. Still, the solid story line grips the reader from the start as Lisa Teasley writes a fine tale that fans will enjoy because the lead couple with the strong support of the secondary cast provides an interesting tale of love. Harriet Klausner

My wife teaches with Lisa Teasley down in Antioch LA and she was telling me what a fine writer Teasley is and how popular with her students. I picked up DIVE and, well, kind of dove in. It was lying around the coffee table here for quite awhile. Dive is quite an arresting novel. In its own way it reminds me of the farflung expansivenss of something like the late Ken Kesey's SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION. Its two main characters see the worst in each other, and the best, and opt out for somewhere in between. I liked the way the city of Los Angeles turned into one of the main characters as well. Ray is sort of difficult because you spend the whole book from the very first page knowing he's a killer on the run. Teasley performs the difficult task of making us feel empathy for a killer, kind of like a Jim Thompson novel, except Lisa Teasley's got such a feel for action sequences, she makes Jim Thompson feel like Ivy Compton Burnett. Here's one tense part where Ray is trying to save Ruby (his love interest) from drowning. "Superhuman reflex catapults Ray into the water less than a moment after Ruby dives in. He couldn't be sure that her head would strike the piling at two feet under, but she is unconscious, dead weight. Though his own heart throbs up the back of his throat, seamlessly he lays out her small, baked cinnamon body, slick and wet as a seal, the thin clothes sticking to her as if melted." That's just a sample of action from a book whose suspense and nerve-wracking tension never let up all the way to the end. And, there's some interesting family stuff too. I hope they make a movie out of this book.

I feel compelled to weigh in on the discussion of Lisa Teasley's DIVE because my girlfriend insisted I read it, and I thought it was because she was trying to teach me another lesson in chick values. Was I ever wrong. I knew a guy a lot like Ray, the main character. I'm blown away at the ease in which Teasley gets the male voice and the male drive. I grew up on a midwestern farm myself, so I very much related to Ray, so much so it was freaky. Because I could trust this author to really get that experience, I found myself letting go and really loving the letters between the women-- both of them far from typical in their desires, individuality and strength. I highly recommend this book to guys who don't ordinarily read women writers, because they'll be surprised at the relief they will feel at how someone really gets the misdirected anger, the violence, the hot sex, the wanting, and the need to just lose yourself in someone else, just because.

The reviews call this thing uneven, but maybe they were holding their heads crooked at the time. Lisa's characters *feel* warm to the touch, and their lives, while swimming in extraordinary events, ring as true and as ordinary as any of us. These are not people living fantastically unconcerned lives in an fantasy setting, these are you and me trying to cope with the billions of forces that weigh on us daily. We can't filter them all. Ray and Ruby try to turn towards each other and make "it" work, but those jagged jarring events are always just around the corner.