Rick  Boyer

THE  MAN  WHO  WHISPERED

A Doc Adams Mystery

reviewed by Patrick Killough

{WORK IN PROGRESS 07/20/1010}


(1) biblio.com  07/31/2010

recommend to readers? **** Probably.

review:

In THE MAN WHO WHISPERED (1998), author Rick Boyer says farewell to Charles Hatton Adams, M.D., D. D. S., oral surgeon of historic Concord, Massachusetts. In this ninth of the Doc Adams detective thrillers, our sometimes obtuse hero simply explodes the simple, undemanding thriller genre. There is very little fast-moving heart-in-mouth hopping from fairly easy clue to chase to armed combat to final confrontation with an evil monster.

We are now rather in an almost mythical world of Surinamese headhunters, of  blowgunners who kill with poison taken from pink frogs of the Amazon basin and of hidden treasures piled up from diamonds lying scattered for the taking in the jungles and mountains of northeastern South America.

A good-hearted dying criminal, Christos Ramos, born in Portugal but become rich on Cape Cod, whose bad teeth Doc Adams has lovingly treated in prison, wills to Doc a fortune in diamonds but also unhelpfully gives clues to several other deathbed visitors as to how to lay hands on the riches. A half dozen others race Doc Adams through the next 250 pages for Doc's inheritance. And who ends up wealthy will surprise you.

Background texture is provided by crooked Massachusetts politicians, people on Cape Cod who smuggle illegal immigrants into metro Boston, worthy-of-the-Gothic illegitimate births and secret identities, tramp steamers, killers without consciences, a Catholic priest who hopes to get the treasure for the New Bedford church patronized by Chris Ramos, and, as usual, a beautiful vamp who tempts Doc to forget his vow to be faithful to his amply endowed wife Mary. 

THE MAN WHO WHISPERED is not an undemanding read. Do not tackle if if you are tired or unwilling  to juggle a large cast of characters, learn the properties and provenance of weird poisons and accept improbable situations. Doc Adams is still good ole, amiable Doc. But he is caught up in more fantasy, intrigue and mystery than we  have come to associate with this lovable bumbler.   -OOO-

http://www.biblio.com/review.php?work=3817662
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(2) lunch.com 07/20/2010

name of review: Fare thee well, Doc Adams!

rating: ****

review:

When we read a book, we bring our entire life history to the experience. We can hardly help it.

Rick Boyer's 1998 DOC ADAMS thriller called THE MAN WHO WHISPERED has a fair amount of information about a South American country called Suriname (older English spelling: Surinam aka Dutch Guiana). I spent three years in the 1980s with the American Embassy in Paramaribo, capital of mainland South America's smallest state: slightly larger than the USA's Georgia. That was a fair chunk of my professional career.

After the funeral of Portugal-born trading magnate Christos Ramos, who is also a convicted smuggler of gems and of illegal aliens into the Boston area, his attending physician and friend, oral surgeon Doc Adams and wife Mary had noticed eight people standing or kneeling beyond an iron fence bordering the cemetery. Both men and women, all complexioned varying shades of  black, were oddly dressed, and some looked faintly Asian in addition. A couple of them even looked Mayan. Some were bare legged and barefoot. They were all grieving for Christos Ramos. As they drove off in an old Lincoln, Doc noticed a flag later identified as Surinamese on the rear window. The driver was a big man with Rasta hair ringlets. Soon these people will become associated, at least in the minds of Doc and some friends, as headhunters, poisoners with blowguns and generally awful human beings.

On his deathbead in 1995 Ramos had willed a hidden treasure to Doc, warning him to be on guard against headhunters and pink frogs. He told him that "the keys of the kingdom" are hidden in a Catholic church near New Bedford and Doc intends, more or less at leisure, to investigate, as time permits (Ch 1). A rapid start into the novel's mysteries.

Here is some of what Boyer's characters have to say about a country that my wife and I and many others have found absolutely delightful. This analysis begins in the richly appointed Boston apartment of police Lieutenant Joe Brindelli, younger brother of Mary Brindelli Adams, Doc's wife. A couple of decades earlier Joe had been, briefly, a Catholic priest in the macho mold sometimes portrayed by the likes of Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien. He proved too tough for Boston's archbishop and was laicized. Joe shares what he he has learned, partially by hear-say, of Suriname -- the only country in the Americas worse than Haiti.

-- The family in dialog with Joe correctly locates Suriname on the Northeast coast of South America: north of Brazil, sandwiched between formerly British Guyana and French Guyane (site of Devil's Island and the movie Papillon).
"Suriname is probably the nastiest of the three ... But nobody really knows for sure how nasty it is, since its lower third isn't even explored yet. It's probably inhabited.  ... it has high mountains, raging rivers, swamps, and jungles that are beyond belief."  Mary whispers: "Headhunters  .. watch out for those headhunters" (Ch. 6).

-- Later ivory expert Bill Givens, introduced in Rick Boyer's PIRATE TRADE, visits Doc, Joe and Mary at Doc's cottage on Cape Cod. Givens has been invited in his capacity as a traveler to exotic locales and as an expert on Suriname; he brings a shrunken head with him. A cousin of his and his exploration party had vanished decades ago in Suriname, likely done in by headhunters. It seems that there are diamonds and other precious stones scattered about the mountains of Suriname and the Amazon Basin. It is some of these gems, probably, that the dying smuggler Ramos had intended to bequeath to Doc. But Ramos had said the same thing to other deathbed visitors, to his daughter, his priest and a half-Dutch sea captain, Smitty, who turns out to have been the dreadlocked Rasta Lincoln limo driver at the funeral. All were curious about the treasure and were out to let Doc lead them to it. Doc, apparently, may have been the only deathbed visitor to have been told how to find the gems.

COMMENT: there is such a mingling here and elsewhere of fact and error about the real Suriname that it prevented me from concentrating on the main plot all that seriously. Every time Suriname was mentioned, I gritted my teeth.

ADVICE TO READER: don't try to sort out Boyer's fantasy of Suriname. Just take it as some frightening imaginary place in an evil parallel universe, with gems lying all around for headhunters and other South Americans to pick up and use to pay for their passage to Boston. Just don't take what you learn of the real Suriname, please, from THE MAN WHO WHISPERED.

For the rest, it is hard to keep the characters straight. I kept expecting Bill Givens's cousin who had disappeared in Suriname to reappear ravenous to steal the jewels willed to Doc. Didn't happen. By the time Doc and Lieutenant Brindelli untangle, at wearisome length, the knots of the plot, I concluded that author Rick Boyer had simply stuffed too much material into this plot to be able to hold it together convincingly.

Yes, there are blowguns with poisoned projectiles and they killed people, baddies, as it turns out.

Yes, there are pink frogs. A tubful of those weirdies aboard a ship in New Bedford harbor  illegally taken from Ramos's daughter by the evil Smitty had supplied the poison used by the blowgunner.

Yes, there is a smoking man with tuberculosis in his windpipe who whispers dangerously to Doc Adams.

Oh, my, yes, yes, yes and more yes!

The formula works.

Of course, stubborn Doc Adams bumbles as always into trouble, tries to run down too many dangerous clues without help obviously available from his brother-in-law and other police. Of course, there is much attention to good eating, as in any Doc Adams novel, especially to sea food. It is all too formulaic to be really first-rate. But there are some good flashes of suspense, detecting, fighting, dying and searching for hidden treasure.

A bit of a comedown for Doc Adam's last appearance in the nine novels that bear his name. Fare thee well, Doc Adams!

I rate THE MAN WHO WHISPERED 3.6 stars, rounding up nostalgically to 4.0.

http://www.lunch.com/reviews/rick_boyer_the_man_who_whispered
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(3) bn.com  07/31/2010

title of review: "Listen: Women are the most dangerous things on the planet. Trust me on this."

rating: * * * *

review:

In this ninth and final DOC ADAMS detective thriller, our hero, Charles Hatton Adams, M.D., D. D. S., becomes entangled with 31-year old  Claudia Kelly. She is infatuated with the good old faithful dental surgeon of Concord, Massachusetts. Claudia actually manages to be naked in bed with him, without persuading Doc to break his marriage vow of lifelong fidelity to his wife Mary. Claudia, for her part never gives up. Days later she reminds a guilt-ridden Doc: "But you didn't do anything ... except feel up my bare buns" (Ch. 30).

Doc  counters with a little sermon on the reasons for marital chastity. In the midst of so much sublimated he-ing and she-ing, Doc shares with readers a long learned lesson:
  "Listen: Women are the most dangerous things on the planet. Trust me on this" (Ch. 21).

But for the rest of his days Doc Adams will keep asking "what if" he had taken Claudia at her word and gone off with her to some tropical island paradise.    

Once upon a time there were two partners in marine freighting in and around Boston: Portugal-born Christos Ramos and South Boston Irish Lawrence Kelly. When business turned bad, each partner went illegal in different ways to make ends meet. Ramos smuggled immigrants from South America who paid for their trip and for their false identity papers with diamonds scooped off the ground from the mountains of Surinam.

Christos seduced Kelly's wife Ida and beauteous Claudia was the offspring. The cuckolded Kelly framed Christos Ramos and with the help of a politician named Ivan Ipassis got Ramos stuck in the worst, unhealthiest prison in Massachusetts. There his bad teeth were taken care of by none other than Doc Adams. On his deathbed, a grateful Ramos wills all his well hidden diamonds to Doc. But he also gives hints to his daughter Claudia and a Dutch half-breed sea Captain called Smitty on how to find the treasure trove. 

Two sets of bad guys now emerge (though this is not clear till novel's end) pro-Ramos and pro-Kelly gangs. "The man who whispered" leads the pro-Kelly faction. One by one his group is wiped out, in three cases by a Surinamese blowgun poisoned with ingredients from Amazonian pink frogs. Doc Adams and his police lieutenant brother-in-law Joe Brindelli do the best job among all the gem hunters of unraveling the clues leading to two buckets full of diamonds and other jewels. Along the way, beautiful Claudia, who has links to those loyal to both her legal father and to her real father, both deceased, is saved from violent death. She and Smitty also deal themselves into dividing the spoils that Doc has found.  

And so we close the cover on the final volume of the DOC ADAMS detective adventure series. It has been quite a ride.

As volume succeeded volume, the plots grew increasingly bizarre. Who would have thought that people would be blowgunned to death all around Cape Cod? The earlier novels are more purely American in their gourmet meals, passions and crimes.

We last see Doc Adams bestowing on beloved wife Mary a stone given him by grateful Claudia for his troubles. Still 50-something Doc sighs as he recalls the last words he heard from Claudia as she fled the country:
 "'Oh, God ... I wish you were going with me. ... I'll never forget you'" (Ch. 34).
  -000-


recommended reading:  Rick Boyer - THE DAISY DUCKS, A SHERLOCKIAN QUARTET.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Man-Who-Whispered/
Rick-Boyer/e/9780804110440/?itm=1&USRI=rick+boyer+-+the+man
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(4) amazon.com one review 08/01/10

title of review: Aha! "Chris Ramos was your father, not Larry Kelly!"

rating: * * * *

review:

In all of his works of fiction, from A SHERLOCKIAN QUARTET through the nine DOC ADAMS detective thrillers and culminating in BUCK GENTRY, author Rick Boyer is a noticer. His is a camera of surfaces small and large. He is, especially, a kind of microbe hunter or cancer detector, finding for us readers exotic, terrifying little creatures moving almost invisibly beneath the skin of cities like Boston and Asheville or the bays and waters up and down the coast of the eastern United States.

Boyer's ability to sniff out the outre, the bizarre, killings by darts dipped in the venom of tiny red frogs and propelled in silence by blowgun: all this and more is scattered across the pages of THE MAN WHO WHISPERED (1998), the novel that pulls down the curtain on the adventures of Charles Hatton Adams, M.D., D. D. S. We have come to know and like 50-something, often bumbling "Doc" Adams, his voluptuous Calabrian American Catholic wife Mary, her ex-priest brother, Massachusetts Lieutenant of Police, Joe Brindelli, Doc's otherworldly psychiatrist friend Moe Abramson, Doc's dark angel, retired soldier of fortune Laitis Roantis, who has taught Adams what he knows of martial arts, the two sons of "Charlie" and Mary -- Jack and Tony -- and a supporting cast of a dozen more regulars.

A dying criminal named Christos Ramos on his deathbed gives his beloved benefactor and dentist, Doc Adams, a clue as to where to find "the keys of the kingdom." These turn out to be real keys and each has a role to play leading Doc (and two rival gangs who are on Doc's trail) to two bucketfuls of raw gems from South America, mainly diamonds. The gems were in payment for the dying criminal's years of smuggling illegals from the Caribbean Basin into greater Boston, especially Cape Cod.

One gang, made up of former followers of Chris Ramos is, at bottom, kindly disposed to Doc (but not so kindly that its leader is inclined to let Doc keep any jewels he finds). Obligingly, the friendly gang, led by a Dutch-Surinamese giant named Smits, uses a blowgun to kill three members of a second Irish gang of kidnappers once led by Lawrence Kelly, Ramos's partner in the New England shipping business, that would as soon see Doc dead as not.

In this "farewell to Doc Adams," readers will relish the sometimes hard to dig out clues that lead Doc to a final confrontation with "The Man Who Whispered," a  shadowy and very hard to identify onetime Massachusetts politician and current leader of the Irish gang.

Readers will also see Doc's marriage threatened by Claudia Kelly, the gorgeous 31-year old illegitimate daughter of the man who had willed Doc the treasure trove of diamonds. Doc's genealogical "aha moment": "Chris Ramos was your father, not Larry Kelly!" (Ch. 10).

Doc thinks his virtue safe from Claudia because she is a lesbian. But appearances can deceive. A sorely tempted Doc tells us:

"Listen: Women are the most dangerous things on the planet. Trust me on this" (Ch. 21).

THE MAN WHO WHISPERED exposes us to bizarre, sometimes evil, doings of men and women from the Caribbean Basin, especially from the Georgia-sized, onetime Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. From that source sail up to Cape Cod Bay diamonds and other gems, a runaway monkey, a bathtub full of diminutive venomous red frogs and the blowgun to deliver their venom.

If any one sentence sums up the complexity and bizarreness of THE MAN WHO WHISPERED, it is this:

"Gee, I didn't know all this exotic stuff was so close to home" (Ch. 15).

-OOO--

tags: rick boyer, doc adams, suriname, red frogs, poisoned darts, blowguns, smuggling of illegal immigrants


http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Whispered-Adams-Mysteries/
dp/0804110441/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279482176&sr=8
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(5) epinions.com 08/01/2010

Review Title:  "Gee, I didn't know all this exotic stuff was so close to home"

Product Rating: * * * *

PROS: Smuggling: diamonds, people, monkeys, red frogs. Fair clues structure. Fleshly temptation sublimated. Cape Cod atmospherics.

CONS: Farewell, Doc Adams! Suriname is defamed. Too much unraveling of mystery for a meant-to-be fast thriller.

BOTTOM LINE: THE MAN WHO WHISPERED worthily lowers the curtain on the nine volume DOC ADAMS series. Our globe is full of weird, frightening people. Surprisingly many visit or live on Cape Cod.

aohcapablanca's Full Review: 

In his ninth DOC ADAMS detective thriller, THE MAN WHO WHISPERED, author Rick Boyer bids farewell to Charles Hatton Adams, M.D., D. D. S.

Doc slides ever deeper into his 50s. His inner juices are ready to say yes to the greatest temptation ever --  to break his vow of marital fidelity to luscious wife Mary. Doc's last appearance in and near The Breakers, his beloved cottage on the west side of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, makes it clear that Metro Boston is a hotbed of illegal immigration, diamond smuggling, ethnic rivalries (especially Irish v. Portuguese) crooked politicians and people who slay their enemies with blowguns.

Cape Cod is also home to devout churchmen and well-attended ethnic churches.

And, oh, by the way there is more about Suriname and exotic humans and other creatures of the Amazon Basin than you might expect, including monkeys and poisonous red frogs. As a voice from New Bedford sums up all this background lushness:

     "Gee, I didn't know all this exotic stuff was so close to  home" (Ch. 15).

In my view, even as they now stand -- perhaps too lightly edited -- the nine DOC ADAMS detective adventure yarns make notably better than average reading. Yet they are no longer best sellers. You can buy on-line some second hand copies for a penny. My guess is that his editors allowed Edgar Award winning author Rick Boyer to pack twice too much material into every volume. The same material in 15 or 20 volumes -- instead of nine -- would sell far better today, I suspect.

Many readers might prefer their clues less difficult to disentangle from learned probings of the mating calls of whales, or from excursuses to the long ago fall of Dien Bien Phu or into several dozen recipes of meals prepared by gourmet cook Doc Adams, wife Mary and Mary's brother, Massachusetts police lieutenant Joe Brindelli.

Other readers, like me, thoroughly enjoy the didactic immersions in ivory, its three sources, the replacement in billiard balls of ivory by plastic, in walking tours of Boston, in  sailing jaunts around Cape Cod Bay and on and on. But why, we ask, is there so much fleshing out of the normally less demanding genre of  detective thriller?

We read and re-read, by contrast, Graham Greene's "thrillers" such as BRIGHTON ROCK or THIS GUN FOR HIRE to some extent precisely because they are lean, spare. Spareness, sparcity of subplots, promotes quick movement toward a thrilling ending. Greene is a far more profound analyst of the human psyche than Rick Boyer. I suspect that Boyer knows this. Lacking depth, therefore, Boyer perhaps compensates by spreading before us a broad, lush mosaic across which the recurring characters of the DOC ADAMS series stroll and pace.

THE MAN WHO WHISPERED is complicated enough without its didactic components. And, oh, by the way, 90% of Boyer's negative assessment of Suriname in northeastern South America is demonstrably false. For example:
(Mary Adams to her brother): "...' there's no place on earth worse than Haiti,   Joey'."
(Lieutenant Brindelli replies): "'Oh, yes, there is, Suriname.'"

(FYI: I lived and worked for three happy years in Suriname, the old Dutch Guiana, a country about the size of Georgia. It has as gentle, easy-going and peaceful a mixed population of Amerindians, East Indians, formerly freed or escaped black slaves, Indonesians and Europeans as you could hope to enjoy anywhere. Boyer defames a charming little country and its larger five-country geographic context of "the Guianas"  --  the varied lands between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers.

But without falsified geographic "Guianas" as the source of the illegal immigrants, the diamonds, blowguns, escapee monkey and red frogs found on and around Cape Cod, THE MAN WHO WHISPERED would lose much of its terror. Oh, well!)
The plot:

A dying, born-in-Portugal criminal with a big heart gives Doc Adams, his dentist, all the clues that Doc will need to become owner of any diamonds he can find, diamonds used by illegal immigrants from South America to finance their travel to Boston and pay for U.S. green cards made in Panama.

But that Portuguese rogue had a South Boston Irish partner, an even worse criminal. The Portuguese seduced the Irishman's wife and begat Claudia Kelly Ramos. She is 31, gorgeous, and wants to borrow Doc from Mary for a few nights of rapture. She almost succeeds and Doc will remember her forever.

Meanwhile two rival gangs -- one Irish, one Surinamese -- have succeeded Claudia's Daddy and her Dad (I leave it you to figure out which is which) and each wants for itself alone the diamonds that have been willed to Doc Adams.

The Irish gang, led by the very hard to uncover Man Who Whispered, kidnaps from New Bedford the fiancee of the Dutch/Surinamese dreadlock-wearing leader of the other gang.

Big mistake. For Surinamers have access to blowguns and the venom of smuggled Amazonian red frogs. Will Doc find his diamonds before the Irish gang or the Surinamese gang does? And if Doc does so first, will he get to keep the treasure trove?

At novel's end, Doc presents Mary a diamond ring. A grateful Claudia had given Doc the polished diamond to make the ring. And more than once naughty Claudia invited smitten Doc to run away with her to some island paradise. Doc loves and remains faithful to Mary but will sigh forever for Claudia!

Fare thee well, Doc Adams!
COMMENT:

I finished a first reading of THE MAN WHO WHISPERED angry at the distortions of facts about Suriname, a country I know well and love, overwhelmed by the plot's complexity, having missed one or more important clues and rather glad to have seen the last of Doc Adams.

But then I re-read before reviewing. I still fault Rick Boyer for careless research on Suriname. Yet I can only blame myself for missing the clues amid the complexity. I hope that you will get more out of a first reading of THE MAN WHO WHISPERED than I did. But if you don't, I encourage you to "read, read again." The novel is worth it.

-OOO-
Thank you Befus/Beth for making this reviewable by me as by epinionators one and all.

Recommended: Yes!

http://www99.epinions.com/review/Rick_Boyer_The_Man_Who_Whispered
_epi/content_519878315652
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