Book Review: 'Cari Mora' By Thomas Harris

No one can create a fictional creepy serial killer as well as Thomas Harris. Witness his Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs,” who eats his victims. And he’s the good guy.

Then there’s Mason Verger of the novel “Hannibal,” who was Lecter’s archenemy, He had been persuaded by Lecter to cut off his own nose and eat it. Verger collects the tears of his victims, the way an oenophile would collect fine vintages.

In Harris’s latest book, “Cari Mora,” (Grand Central Publishing. $29. 308 pp) the exotic villain is Hans-Peter Schneider. His particular sexual fixation is to dissolve the bodies of attractive young women in a lye-based solution while he watches. He makes his living supplying young women to clients with similar tastes. He makes Hannibal seem like a pantywaist.

Though he is the mover and shaker behind much of the action, this bizarre character doesn’t make too many actual appearances in the narrative, except to move things along. Hans-Peter is looking for gold, particularly a safe containing over $25 million which he knows is on the Miami estate of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The estate house is strange, filled with film props, including an old electric chair. But Escobar never lived in it. He bought it for his family in the event that he was going to be extradited to the United States. Hans-Peter was not alone in his quest.

Members of the cartel were also looking for this fabled treasure. Caught between these two forces is the house’s caretaker, Caridad Mora, known as Cari. As a very young girl she had been abducted by FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionas Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary army, and trained in the use of arms as a child soldier.

She escaped when she was a teenager and was living in Miami on a shaky temporary status, subject to ICE and the whims of an unsteady president. Not only is she the house’s caretaker, but she is also a caterer for tour boats and she volunteers at the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, which rehabilitates birds and other injured animals and releases them to resume life in the wild. She exemplifies what is best in an immigrant population. Incidentally, the Pelican Harbor facility is a project close to Harris’s heart.

Though the body count is high and arrived at by grisly means, like Schneider’s “liquid cremation machine,” and though sometimes the stomach turns, the book has all the lineaments of a skillfully written thriller. It is another chapter in the chronicle of the ageless battle of good versus evil, a morality play in which evil is personified by the grotesque Hans-Peter Schneider. Good is in the person of the seemingly vulnerable but fearless and resourceful Cari Mora.

Harris pays tribute to the backdrop against which all the action takes place, “Miami — savory and beautiful, an intensely American city built and maintained by people who came from somewhere else, often on foot.”