Mirror Maze by William Bayer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

" Remember: Somewhere in here lies the answer to a riddle. I'm not sure what the riddle is, except that it had to do with the way the mirrors catch the light and make something out of it, something you can't touch, but that's real - and that never existed before."

I have reviewed two novels by William Bayer here on Goodreads: very, very good Switch (solid four stars) and almost as good The Magician's Tale (also four stars), which the author published under the pen name of David Hunt. For me, these are extremely high scores for crime novels/thrillers, which means I must like the author's prose. On the other hand it also allows me to state major disappointment with Mirror Maze (1994). I am unable to rate the novel anywhere near the four-star territory.

Captivating first chapter: an attractive woman prepares herself for another episode of her game: finding a suitable mark in a Manhattan bar and allowing herself to be picked up. Naturally, a dupe is instantaneously found, happy to invite her to his apartment and finalize the easy catch. But it is not to be: the woman drugs him, he falls asleep, she steals some valuables from him and "inscribes" the guy - with indelible black marker she writes a phrase on his chest, in mirror-reverse. Wow!

Meanwhile, Detective Janek, whom we know from Switch, is meeting with an informant, who might have new details on a notorious unsolved case from the past - the Mendoza case. These two threads - the exploits of and search for the mirror-reverse writer and revisiting of the Mendoza case - form the two parallel axes of the novel.

I much prefer the "Mendoza" thread, which exposes the enormous complexity of the case in all kinds of dimensions: legal, psychological, human, and - most of all - the inextricable entanglement with the power games of office and city politics. Janek is sent to Havana to interrogate a potential witness in the case. I find the Havana episode the best part of the novel - well written, plausible, and devoid of affectation.

While Mr. Bayer's prose is, as usual, accomplished, what bothers me is how pretentious the main theme - fascination with mirrors - is. The following passage epitomizes it:

"The world of mirrors. Mirror-madness time. Reflections that don't show who you are [...] Mirrorworld. The mockery of mirrors. Their cruelty. Infinite corridors. Galleries of images. [...]"

This is just one of the many, many, many fragments exploiting the world of mirrors. Actually what bothers me even more is that the author does not explore the reflection metaphor, instead focusing on titillating the reader with continual repetition of the word 'mirror.'

Sexual abuse of children by their parents is a horrible thing. Yet it happens not as often as the "asexual" abuse, which routinely occurs in a frighteningly high percentage of families, where parents wreck their children's lives as a result of their own inadequacies, complexes, and plain stupidity. I would like to read more books with this in the background rather than cliché sexual abuse.

At least the ending is quite good. The mandatory "final twist of plot" is unexpected in a completely unexpected way.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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