The Perk

A very interesting thriller, plotted from so many angles, but with one central theme—the meaning of justice. The hero Beck Hardin left his small town of Fredericksburg near Austin, Texas a teenager angry with his father J.B. Hardin after his mother died, angry with the discriminatory justice meted out by the town judge Stutz. Twenty-four years later he is forced to return to the small town because his own wife has died from cancer and he is unable to raise his two children by himself; they go back to his father who is still very much alive.

Four years before Beck’s return, Heidi, the beautiful daughter of Beck’s high school best friend Aubrey, was killed by a cocaine overdose and found dumped in a ditch. Because of a debt Beck owed Aubrey, Aubrey now wants him to find the killer of this daughter before the time runs out, so that justice could be done. As the story unfolds, Beck is elected the new judge, by a curious stroke of fate, and he quickly finds out why the favored candidate had to drop out at the last hour. As Beck investigates Heidi’s case, he discovers that Heidi’s mother Randi, who divorced Aubrey shortly after Heidi’s death, had in fact contacted the man responsible for her death, movie star Chase Connelly, who settled her with a mansion in Austin and $25 million to be paid over several years but provided she would keep her mouth shut. So now, would it be justice to expose Chase and deprive Randi of her settlement wealth? Beck thinks so.

However by the time he manages to get Chase’s DNA matched with that of the semen found inside Heidi’s vagina, the time for conviction of the culprit has run out. The positive DNA result comes in 57 minutes late. But while the law fails to catch up with Chase, something else does: Heidi had been HIV-positive before Chase had his way with her in his limo. And so had transmitted the virus to him, or so it seemed. When Chase turns up in his courthouse the night he is supposed to be convicted, it is Beck that has to give him both the good news—that he won’t be tried for lack of time—and also the bad—that his blood had tested HIV-positive and that he’d been infected by Heidi.

Some of the other interesting angles to the story include the issue of racism. The whole county had just one black person and so the racism portrayed wasn’t the usual white against black, but white against brown: Between the Anglo residents of Fredericksburg and the mostly illegal Mexicans, living in a barrio (slum) part of town and doing menial jobs for very low wages. There is the issue of sports as big business and how kids were taught by society via the TV and movies to cheat to win at all cost, if they could get away with it. Another is the issue of how the town was run by German descendants who would go to any extent to keep outsiders out. There is segregation in the kids’ schools, with Anglo and Mexicans being taught separately. Then there were two female friends that moved into town years before. They lived together and did nothing to dispel the false rumor they were lesbians, but only for selfish reasons—not wanting the lonely farmers to bother them for wives. Running through most of the book was the discovery by Beck that he had failed in his duty as husband to his wife and father to his children while the wife lived, as he now has to read how the wife told his father via email the story of their lives, her sickness and her evaluation of him.

August 10, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel last published in 2008; ISBN 928-1-84744-070-9.