Book review: Cari Mora by Thomas Harris

Thomas Harris returns with new protagonist Cari Mora, in his fifth thriller.

Naming a book after its lead protagonist places a burden on a writer — can the character (especially a new one) live up to the billing? And that goes double for a writer with the pedigree and global success of Thomas Harris, creator of what Stephen King has called the "great fictional monster of our time": Hannibal Lecter.

Short answer — when she's written as vividly as this — yes she can; indeed a reader will remember the tough beauty of its eponymous star more than Harris' latest misogynist monster who, as a child, locked his parents alive in a freezer, returning later to chop the frozen carcasses up.

So who is Cari Mora, the star of this reclusive author's first book in 13 years?

She shares some similarities with The Silence of the Lambs' Clarice Starling: smart, resourceful, good looking and with a troubled past. Cari is a Colombian immigrant and like many Miamians, lives a hand-to-mouth existence on the under-fire Temporary Protected Status (Harris never calls out Trump but there's a strong political undertow throughout).

One of her jobs is working as a caretaker of Pablo Escobar's old home. When a new group of renters arrive in the middle of the night — ostensibly movie-makers flashing a city film permit — Cari sees them for the criminals they are.

She's warily co-operative (Harris is adept at nailing characters using dialogue and reportage-style prose) and, when she expertly pieces together a machine gun her new tenants have left in a bedroom, we know there's more to Cari's skill set than housekeeping.

Harris soon takes us into her past as a Colombian FARC child soldier. Word has it there's $25 million worth of cartel gold hidden inside a safe in the mansion and two competing enterprises have their eyes on it — (the safe detail seems to be based on the true story of one being found in 2016 at Escobar's Miami home as it was demolished).

It's a plot device almost as old as the crocodiles, manatees, parakeets and the other wildlife that populate this novel, lending it a mythical sheen in an otherwise up-to-the-minute Miami but it works well for Harris' purposes here.

Of course, Harris' new monster Hans-Peter Schneider, a brothel owner who has a liquid cremation machine in his Biscayne Bay warehouse, is one of the interested parties. When Cari first shakes his hand she catches a "whiff of brimstone off him. Like the smell of a burning village with dead inside the houses" but the horrors here are glimpsed against a real-world city. Harris celebrates this in an afterword calling Miami an "intensely American city, built and maintained by people who came from somewhere else".

The novel works best when Cari is on the page and, if Harris introduces a few too many characters in the second half of the book — a detective, a crooked lawyer, another Colombian sicario — the acuity of his prose means even these are a pleasure to read. Unlike many of his thriller and suspense contemporaries who churn out multiple novels a year, this is only the 78-year-old author's fifth.

"I can't write it until I believe it," said Harris in one of his rare interviews.

And you can sense that belief on every page of this mesmerising novel.

CARI MORA by Thomas Harris
(William Heinemann, $37)