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Jaz Parks #2, Another One Bites the Dust, took place in Texas. Biting the Bullet finds Jaz and her crew in Iran, which in more ways than one is about as far away as you can get from the Lone Star State.
Jaz's estranged twin brother, David, is the leader of a paranormal special ops unit within the CIA. They've got a mole problem, and Jaz's team has been called in to smoke him out while both teams bivouac in Tehran and prepare to assassinate the Jazverse version of Osama bin Laden, "The Wizard," who has a duel degree in religious terrorism and necromancy from Evil University.
As soon as the two teams convene they're collectively attacked by a gang of reavers, the three-eyed soul-eating yuckies who first appeared in #2. I didn't like the reavers last time and I don't like them now. |
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Maybe it's because, like any true fan of Firefly, I think reavers are space-ship driving cannibals. Maybe it's because the reavers in these books are hard to picture, insipidly easy for Jaz to dispose of, and so circumscribed by the Laws of the Universe that they can't even kill anyone unless they have a sponsor. I like my monsters self-sufficient and intimidating, and these guys are bowling pins.
Jaz's death has been purchased by the reaver Ulbin Beit and sponsored by Edward Samos, the "Big Bad" of the series so far; when the reavers prove inept at dispatching Jaz, "The Magistrate," a naked, whip-wielding demon who Jaz alleges to be even better looking than Keanu Reeves, eventually takes on the job himself.
But I'm jumping ahead.
Sometimes Jaz travels outside of her body in her sleep, and she was able to take a quick naptime trip to Hell and watch as Beit ordered the hit. Beit's boyfriend, the reaver Desmond Yale, died on Jaz's orders, though it was her sidekick Cole who pulled the trigger. Personally I think the story would have been more interesting if the reavers had come after Cole instead, but no matter.
My question here is not how I am supposed to believe that Jaz visited Hell, but why Desmond Yale isn't already there. What happened when he died? In a universe where there is a Hell, and there are evil demons, logic dictates that the evil demons be sent to eternal torment when they "Bite the Bullet" (sorry, couldn't resist). But is Hell where reavers and their kind go to hang out when they're not on Earth, and then, when they die, they just die? That hardly seems fair. Maybe they simply wake up in an alternate dimension full of plot holes.
Biting the Bullet has one main plot and at least seven subplots. The main plot concerns the plan to kill the Wizard; Rardin throws in a twist when Jaz discovers that the Wizard has set them up to murder an innocent man, Iran's adorably fairy-tale analogue to Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, and Mother Theresa. The CIA bosses want her to go ahead with the hit so that the organization will look good.
Jaz is having none of the hero-murdering, so she has to formulate an elaborate scheme to save the good guy, kill the bad guy, and cross a few other things off her list, all without getting fired. I find it ironic (and appropriate, given the current state of the U.S. economy) that our educated twenty-something heroine's biggest fear is not death, but unemployment.
I won't tell you all seven subplots because your head will spin, my head will spin, and in the time it would take for me to explain everything you could just read the book yourself. But I will say that I had the same difficulty with this book that I did with its predecessor: half of the subplots are engaging, but half are unnecessary and in some cases poorly drawn. When Rardin tries to tie together every loose end in the last thirty or forty pages, the effect is dizzying because there are just too many loose ends to begin with.
Fortunately several of these subplots are engaging, much more so than the main plot, which is not terribly nuanced (killing bad guy: good; killing good guy: bad). The most engaging and heartbreaking is the glimpse of Jaz's backstory. In each installment Rardin reveals a little more about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of everyone in Jaz's original crew, save for she and David. It turns out that Jaz named her gun Grief after using it to kill her brother's newly vampiric wife right in front of his eyes, a move that has understandably created a strain in their relationship.
The tone is snappy. Sassy. You might think Diablo Cody had written Jaz's inner monologue. She says things like, "Raoul fixed me with a drop-and-give-me-twenty look" (Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Jaz has a mysterious spirit guide named Raoul who lives in an adjacent dimension. That's eight subplots).
I don't think the series would work with an omniscient point of view, because Jaz's narration is a serious contributing factor to the delightfulness of the series.
And the series is delightful, my frustration with the excess storylines aside, mostly because Jaz is one of those unattainable heroines we can still sympathize with because she has experienced loss of love and family connection, she feels romantic anxiety and frustration with her job, and sometimes she would like nothing more than to run home and curl up on the couch with a burrito. The storyline is all incidental, really. If Jennifer Rardin wrote a book in which Jaz Parks went shopping for a dinner party, I'd read it.
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