PanThe Irish Times (IRELAND)It is a frustrating, inconsequential confection, one in which...fragments of its creator’s earlier brilliance occasionally gleam, rendering the rest more disappointing by comparison ... [The novel\'s villain Hans-Peter] Schneider...is a caricature, and nothing more ... Cari Mora herself, meanwhile, appears to continue Harris’s laudable tradition of placing strong female protagonists...at the core of his narratives, but she is given a backstory, albeit the strongest section of the book, in place of an inner life. The rest of the characters, if that’s the correct word for them, are mostly stock Latinos and Latinas, destined to be reduced to severed, disfigured, or exploded heads ... Cari Mora can only really be read as a black comedy; its strokes are too broad for any other interpretation ... The grotesqueness of the novel’s imagery—a half-consumed torso here, a burning skull there—owes much to Victorian stage melodrama and the gothic, but Cari Mora lacks what Flannery O’Connor termed the \'inner coherence\' necessary for the successful appropriation of the latter ... Cari Mora is rarely dull, because the sensibility of its creator is too atypical for that, but it is careless and underwritten. The shallowness of its characterization means that its violence comes across as simple sadism ... if Cari Mora is a comedy, it is one in which the joke is on the reader.
