Suspenseful Equality: Carolyn Crane's OFF THE EDGE

I've read romantic suspense novels with police officers, detectives, and FBI agents as heroes. With army officers, Navy SEALS, and members of various military special ops groups. Even with spies, thieves, and the occasional assassin. But until last week, when I picked up the second book in Carolyn Crane's Undercover Associates series, I'd never come across a work of romantic suspense featuring an academic in the leading male role.

Or at least, a former academic. American Dr. Peter Maxwell was once happy to spend his days analyzing language, breaking words into smaller sound components, spending "entire months studying the way different people pronounced a dipthong like the ow in low, and draw all kinds of conclusions about what that meant" (20). But after his family and his fiancee are killed during an attack on a Mexican train, Peter turns his academic skills to tracking the terrorists responsible. So successful does his investigation via linguistics prove that he's recruited by a secret cabal, The Associates, a private group devoted to "keeping the balance of power intact," "keeping World War Three from happening," and "stopping the most despicable crimes" (124). After years of training, Peter Maxwell has transformed himself in Macmillan, one of the smartest, as well as the most dangerous, members of the Associates team.

If Henry Higgins had turned to spying...

For his latest mission, Macmillan has come to Bangkok in the guise of a visiting professor, but really to keep a disturbingly advanced remote control drone, a weapon powerful enough to take out an entire airport, and precise enough to target a single man on a crowded street, from falling into criminal hands. If he could only get close enough to hear the conversations of arms dealers who have gathered in a famous Bangkok hotel, he'd be able to use his linguistic analysis skills to hone in on the man who stole the weapon, and shut him down before he can auction off the weapon to the highest bidder. When he realizes that the hotel's lounge singer, a woman whose sentimentally irritating songs have been pissing him off all night, has been recording her set, her equipment right next to the arms dealers, Macmillan knows that seduction and larceny are next on his agenda.

Laney Lancaster, like Macmillan, has come to Bangkok for motives other than what appear on the surface. Having played a vital role in sending her gangster husband to jail, Laney fled the States to avoid being captured by men loyal to her ex. Hiding in plain sight in Thailand, Laney seems a damsel custom-fitted for being rescued from distress.

But Laney, like Macmillan, is far from the typical romantic suspense heroine. Though the opening scene shows her fleeing and hiding after spotting a man she believes worked for her husband, Laney is determined to protect herself, determined never to allow the abusive Rolly to harm or control her ever again. To never allow another man to tell her want she wants, to make her feel small, to turn her into a victim. Her skills with language, as well as her newfound skills with a gun, will make sure of it.

Macmillan may think he's the one in control during their seduction, but Laney's way with language proves just as disarming as his own. For Laney, poetic language is "about connecting with people, not hurting them or isolating them [as her husband uses it]. The dusty old poets Laney so loved—Keats, Byron—they helped her feel less alone, as though she was linking with another soul across time. That was poetry" (9). Macmillan uses language against others, to hide and deceive, to hunt and track, to entice and seduce. But Laney uses language to forge connection, to delve beyond the commonplaces, to flush out the truth. To pull pieces of the old Peter out of Macmillan, pieces he'd long imagined dead: "Peter hadn't lost parts of himself in the train bombing. He'd gained parts of himself. He was all of these things. Lover. Fighter. Scholar. Hunter. Killer."

Peter, like most romantic suspense heroes, feels protective towards Laney, and takes his fair share of punches, insults, and bullets on her behalf (and on behalf of the mission). But it's her courage that he most admires, not her frailty: the courage to forge meaningful connections with others, even after the abuse she suffered from her former husband; the courage to fight with him, to tell him what he doesn't want to hear; the courage to keep hope alive. "That was Laney. A warrior for the people she cared about" (215).

Unlike in much romantic suspense, the emotional thrill of this book doesn't stem primarily from watching its heroine be placed in danger. Instead it's from the danger that both Peter and Laney face together. And from the emotional vulnerability each must risk for the other, if their mission is to succeed. For it will be their ability to work together, rather than Peter's ability to swoop in and rescue, that will bring these two "word nerds" to a fittingly happy, and feminist, ending.


Photo credits:
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins: Wikimedia
Word Nerd: Melville House

Carolyn Crane

Off the Edge

(Associates #2)

self-published by Carolyn Crane

2013