From the creator of Hannibal Lecter and The Silence of the Lambs comes a story of evil, greed, and the consequences of dark obsession as a young immigrant woman with a tortured past, now working as a caretaker of a house in Miami Beach, finds herself caught between a psychopath and a drug kingpin.
This is steak trimmed of all fat. A tight little story wrapped with a bow. The perfect length for what it is: pure, unapologetic entertainment. With Cari Mora, Harris does what he does best—takes us on a spine-tingling, edge-of-your-seat ride steeped in intrigue and nail-biting suspense. You will not sleep. You will not eat. This book screams to be devoured in one sitting. Is this Harris’ most ambitious work? Naw, but it’s good. It’s different. It’s one of our best authors checking in after a long time on the bench, and I’m thrilled to report he hasn’t lost that edge with time. He’s been busy sharpening the blade.
...the heist story that makes up the bulk of Cari Mora is inventive and crisp, with a prose style that owes less to the floridness of the last two Hannibal novels than it does to the late and much-lamented Elmore Leonard ... Whether or not Harris ever consciously endorsed the anxieties expressed by the genre he created (he hasn’t granted an interview since the ’70s), Cari Mora represents a bid for a more liberal worldview. The novel makes multiple digs at the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and all of the good characters are people of color. (Hans-Peter is technically a Paraguayan national, suggesting that he’s descended from Nazis who fled to Latin America after World War II.) Sexuality still represents a monstrous threat and a potential source of corruption and danger, however; Harris’ fiction offers few depictions of nondestructive physical love.
The story is mostly a snooze: not so much The Silence of the Lambs as The Counting of the Sheep ... the novel plods along with a hodgepodge of macabre silliness ... Which is the central problem with Cari Mora. Despite all its ghastly goings-on, this creaky thriller constantly slips on banana peels of its own unintentional comedy ... Even Anthony Hopkins would strain to make this gory goofiness frightening ... A couple of sentimental side stories eventually lead off to nowhere ... Toward the end of the novel, a man-eating crocodile in Biscayne Bay suffers a small bout of indigestion while passing one of the gangsters he ate. Readers of Cari Mora are likely to suffer similar but wholly temporary discomfort.
