Mass Market Paperback - 336 pages (April 2, 2002)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca The gist
of Montrealer Michael Blair's quirky debut novel, If Looks Could
Kill, is that "value systems are curious things"--a polite
understatement considering the harshness and pace of this tongue-in-cheek
mystery. Thomas "Tommy" McCall, a dullard freelance photographer, is a
poster boy for the dysfunctional and the lead stooge in a parade of
double-crosses and love losses. He's a poser with a Land Rover, a Porsche,
and a sinking houseboat on Vancouver's Granville Island. His life is a
superficial shambles, offering--amongst much pretence--"twinges of Oedipal
guilt" while he leers at his former runway-model mom, "dressed as if she
still weighed a hundred and ten pounds, in close fitting garments that
emphasized her plumpness and severely strained the containment limits of
Lycra."
His biggest problem, though, is one Carla Bergman, a cold-hearted,
scurrilous vixen who brought him to his knees two years ago and now--after
a chance meeting at the airport--is likely his utter ruination this time
around. He knows now that she can't ever be trusted, but the Jezebel still
owns him, and she knows it: "Tommy, if I put my mind to it, I could make
you believe that the sky was falling." So it's no surprise that he's
suckered again when she turns up at his door, desperate for a hideout
after finally jacking up the wrong guy, a menacing thug who rightly
reckons Tommy is chump enough to try bailing Carla out. Tommy feels that
ominous heat, and it's fun to watch him whine, wiggle, and squirm. Looks, which was a nominee for the inaugural Chapters/Robertson
Davies Prize for unpublished Canadian novelists, isn't a classic
mind-bender that causes deep shivers or loathing, but it will amuse and
confound, holding your interest with each turn of the page.
