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Lonesome Point (Summary)
Leo Varela is an unfocused sometime-poet who works a job with no perspective at Miami’s psychiatric hospital and knows his life must change: his fiancée is pregnant, and it s time to get responsible. But when change comes to him, it doesn’t come in the shape he would have wished for because pretty much the last person from his past he wants to encounter again is his old Belizean pal Freddy. Freddy knows more than one Varela family secret and so is in a good position to encourage Leo to arrange the release of an old Cuban man who’s a patient on his ward. Freddy’s mysterious client is rather keen to interview said Cuban. Leo seeks the advice of his brother, Patrick, a Miami-Dade County commissioner and mayoral candidate. Patrick is everything Leo is not: wealthy, hardworking, ambitious and corrupt. So he knows, of course, that he is the real target of whoever is behind Freddy. Patrick instructs Leo to sit tight and not surrender the patient while frantically trying to figure out who is coming after him. Leo becomes a pawn in Patrick’s game and Patrick, he soon learns, won’t hesitate to sacrifice a pawn in order to win. Even if that pawn happens to be his brother.
Ian Vasquez’s second novel, LONESOME POINT is another
atmospheric neo-noir that confirms his reputation as a rising star in
the genre.
Lonesome Point Reviews
Review from the South Florida Sun Sentinel - click here to read or scroll down.
Review from the St. Petersburg Times - click here to read
South Florida Sun Sentinel Review - July 5, 2009
Ian Vasquez takes the common themes of sibling rivalry and family secrets to deliver a thoughtful look at unbridled ambition and failed dreams.
While Vasquez's debut last year used the tenets of the private detective novel, Lonesome Point firmly proves his affinity for a gripping noir tale. In the Heat was a good debut but Lonesome Point succeeds on an even higher level.
Leo Varela had ambition when he left his native Belize for college. But now, the 50-year-old Leo is realizing that his "go-slow attitude in most things" has left him a failed poet stuck in a dead-end job in a Miami hospital's psych ward. With a pregnant girlfriend, his life needs to change, but that's not likely to happen.
Patrick Varela, Leo's brother, allowed his ambition to control his every move as he became a Miami-Dade County commissioner. With a smart wife and an in with Miami's movers and shakers, Patrick will do anything to keep his position.
The brothers' lives are about to be upended when an acquaintance from Belize asks Leo to kidnap a patient from the mental health ward. If Leo doesn't help, the old friend will expose the brothers' violent background that erupted at Lonesome Point, a remote area of Belize.
Vasquez quickly gets to the heart of each brother, showing the emotional resolve and moral center that each man has, or lacks. It would be easy to turn Lonesome Point into an updated Cain and Abel story. Instead, Vasquez's storytelling skills will remind readers of early Elmore Leonard, especially with its surprise denouement.
Vasquez, who lives in St. Petersburg, showcases his native Belize in flashback scenes, while also providing a view of Miami's dark alleys.
Oline H. Cogdill can be reached at olinecog@aol.com.
BOOKLIST
Moving beyond the conventions of the hard-boiled detective story, which he put to such good use in his debut, In the Heat (2008), Vasquez delivers a noir-style story line in which a regular guy, albeit one with a secret, finds his past rearing up to grasp him in a stranglehold. An immigrant from Belize (where In the Heat was set), Leo Varela is a wannabe-poet, working nights in a Miami psychiatric ward, when Freddy Robinson, a small-time grifter from back home, strolls into his life with a proposition: help him kidnap one of the patients in the ward or face up to what happened at Lonesome Point, where the lives of Leo and his brother, Patrick, now a rising Miami politician, were forever altered. Leo and his girlfriend, Tessa, have a plan to free themselves from Patrick, Freddy, and the memory of Lonesome Point, but inevitably it all goes bad, as such plans must. Vasquez builds our sympathy for Leo and Tessa skillfully, adds a Quentin Tarantino–like supporting cast, and tightens the noose exquisitely, finishing with a nicely ambiguous ending. Expect much more from Vasquez, whose star continues to rise. --Bill Ott
Kirkus
Blackmail and buried secrets pit two brothers against each other.
In crime-ridden Belize City, Leo Varela and his brother Patrick watch police examine the body of their father’s right-hand man, the Rev, shot at close range while only half-dressed. Cut to Miami more than a decade later, where aspiring poet Leo lives with pregnant girlfriend Tessa and works as an attendant at a mental-health facility while county commissioner Patrick campaigns for mayor with trophy wife Celina. Potential disaster arrives in the rumpled person of Freddy Robinson, a shady character from the brothers’ years in Belize. Freddy firmly requests that Leo arrange a meeting between himself and elderly schizophrenic patient Herman Massini. After consulting Patrick, who presents a facade of nonchalance that he immediately sees through, Leo suggests a wait-and-see attitude. As both brothers take independent action, periodic flashbacks fill in the dark details surrounding the murder of the Rev, so called because of his status as a defrocked priest. Leo and Patrick’s father Ivan shared a small criminal empire and an affinity for young boys, a secret that Patrick discovered but never shared with his brother. Patrick also knows more about the Rev’s murder than he’s telling. While Patrick hires muscle to deal with either Freddy or Massini, Leo devises a tricky plot to sneak the old man out of the hospital. Game on.
The plot stalls at times, but Vasquez (In the Heat, 2008, etc.) writes with a winning combination of grit and heart.
Launching Lonesome Point
