Moondogs (2011) by Alexander Yates
Good Reads meta-data is 339 pages, rated 3.68 by 424 litizens.
Genre: krimi; Species: Magic unrealism.
DNA: Filipino.
Verdict: I warmed to it, slowly.
Tagline: Can’t tell the players without a scorecard!
Estranged son flies to Manila at the invitation of his father, who is absent when he arrives. He falls in with some of his father’s drinking buddies. That is one thread.
We already know that father has been kidnapped by a pair of incompetent and spontaneous lowlifes with the aim of selling him to some mad and bad Muslims who specialise in decapitations. Meanwhile, father is locked in a room. The Imam they approach tries to stop their crazy plot and reports them to the police. That is thread two.
Thread three is a Philippine Army solider with uncanny, preternatural marksmanship who is recruited by the Dirtiest Harry of them all for a special police coven consisting of bruhos, that is, witches, of which this soldier is one whether he knows it or not; hence his ability. This is the magic part of the realism.
Thread four is Monique at the American embassy who deals with Americans who get into trouble in the Philippines, and there are a lot of them: drunks, pederasts, and kidnapees. Her ‘trailing spouse’ (official Foreign Service terminology) hates Manila. Her adopted children are rebellious. She has somehow started an affair with Dirtiest Harry. To say the least, they are a mismatched couple even when they couple.
It adds up to a lot characters to keep straight without a scorecard.
Cockfights, earth tremors, terrorist explosions, gold lined hotels with golden toilets, all add to the local colour. The combination of opulence and corruption would make The Felon in Chief feel right at home.
All these threads, and perhaps some I have forgotten or missed among all the superfluous detail, come together with a boom and a high body count. It did so with very little investment from me.
Set out in that chopped up, asynchronous, billiard ball style favoured by thriller writers who prefer to leave connecting the plot dots to readers. With all the cutting back and forth through time and space, I lost track of, and for a time interest in, the characters who tumble out of the pages. I stuck with it because of the exotic locale – The Philippines. It is richly textured of that place, sometimes too much for my taste, e.g., the details of slaughtering a pig…in a hotel room!
Pedants note: On the front cover the title has a hyphen as ‘Moon-Dogs,’ while on the spine (and in the text) it is ‘Moondogs.’
Moondogs are those brights spots around the moon or a blurred halo behind it, also called paraselenae for those who must know and are too lazy to consult Wikipedia. The term is used only once in the book, that I noticed, and then is in no way significant.