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SHOOTING ELVIS
by Robert M. Eversz
Grove Press, August 1996
217 pages
$12.00
ISBN: 0802135013


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This is an important book to read if for no other good reason than that it gives the background of Nina Zero, whose popularity with book reviewers and readers has soared with Robert Eversz's newer novel, KILLING PAPARAZZI (which I confess I haven't read yet). However, there other good reasons for reading the book, including for its own sake. SHOOTING ELVIS is a fascinating, fast-moving story that has none of the dross between action scenes that seems to be necessary for continuity in even the best of books; in fact, the entire book is composed of action scenes. You would be surprised how quickly you'll find yourself reading it.

It's the story of a young woman without guile, without malice in her heart, without even being naïve who finds herself making all the wrong decisions. Mary Alice Baker gets so much over her head in trouble that she changes her name to Nina Zero, an indication of how she thinks of herself. Among the many encomiums heaped upon this book by the popular review columns, one in the London Daily Telegraph states that it "reads like CATCHER IN THE RYE with high explosives." As I went from chapter to chapter, I got the impression that here we were dealing with an updated Holden Caulfield, only feminine and from a working class family. Nina, too, finds many things "phoney," but unlike Holden she doesn't resist her phoney world, rather she accepts it as the world she was born in: it's just there and she has to do the best she can in it.

She bounces around in a heartless Los Angeles putting her trust in the wrong people, stumbling from the fire to the frying pan, and not getting her share of the breaks. Considering her upbringing, she's surprisingly quick to learn, resourceful, and gutsy. She understands what's happening around her, but she doesn't know how she can stop her missteps from multiplying. In some respects she's amoral, as if she doesn't know the difference between good and bad. Actually she does, but she reasons that anything goes in her struggle for survival.

Coaxed by a boyfriend to exchange items with a stranger at the airport, she gives in to curiosity and sets in motion the death of one man, the weaving of a gigantic web of confusion, and a deadly chase that doesn't seem to end. She finds friendship and help from a variety of L.A. denizens, some weird and some merely comic, but she also finds gross betrayal. The police are after her as a terrorist, but as she evades them she gets in deeper and deeper. She undergoes brutal beatings and deadly accidents. Gradually the reader sees that her end is inescapable, and yet continues pulling for her to the last page.

Nina is a loser, a likeable one, but a loser, yet the reader comes out a winner. Ordinarily I don't care for sequels, but in this case it's a good thing that there is one. For mystery lovers who, like me, want to be knowledgeable of all the sub-genres, I would call SHOOTING ELVIS indispensable reading.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, December 2001

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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