Snakes by William Maltese

[reviews_and_ramblings]

The book starts with Ian who is screwing Leith. But Ian and Leith are not the romance couple of the book, instead Ian is trying to forget the night he spent with Gerald, a wealthy man who is always cornering Ian and wooing him. But Ian thinks himself not relationship material and Gerald is not the man he can consider one more notch in his belt. Gerald is a long term relationship type of man, and Ian, even if play the role of the man-eater, is a romantic at heart, and he can loose his heart with Gerald.

And so Ian is screwing Leith; after Leith leaves the story in a very sudden way, dying for an heart attack (but not while he is with Ian...), Ian turns his interest on Shem, and since Shem is a very generous man, he convinces Ian to give a chance also to Philip... Three chapter and three different men after, Ian has to admit that his interest on Gerald is not something that he can deny, and so at the fourth chapter finally Gerald enters the scene and... and nothing since Gerald and Ian find themself trapped in a facility in the middle of the Australian desert, with other three men and a woman, and one of them is a murderer, since the bodies piled up at every corner.

From a funny romp, the story turns on a Agatha Christie mystery, and Ian and Gerald try to understand who is the killer, but everytime they believe to have found a clue, the tables turns up down and they need to begin again to disentangle the clues.

If you don't take in account the first three chapters (10 pages), in the story there is less sex than in the usual William Maltese's stories. Most of the 90 pages of the book (but in usual standard the pages would be a lot more, since the pages are filled to the capacity with very small words) are spent in the claustrophobic setting of the facility, with very few characters and a mystery to solve. It's quite difficult to maintain the suspense high, and believable the story, but I believe that it's fully achieved.

William Maltese's style is a rush of words, some of them probably coined by the same author just for the book, and you can't analyze a single phrase; if you extrapolate a part of the whole, it loses its strenght and impact. A William Maltese's book should be read in a continuum, not stopping to think, but letting you drag by the flow.

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