“You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.” — George Carlin

“I’m from Texas, and one of the reasons I like Texas is because there’s no one in control.” — Willie Nelson

This novel by Rick Mofina is a story set in Texas, a bad place for stories, written by a writer whom I think is Canadian. Like most Canadian authors, he abandons his homeland for an American setting, thinking he’s going to tap the rich American market thereby.

“If Two Are Dead” has the tagline Three can keep a secret… IF TWO ARE DEAD. It’s based on the Benjamin Franklin quote Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Franklin plays a minor starring role in the story, so he would be pleased if he were still alive.

The two main characters are Carrie and Luke, a graphics designer and a former LAPD cop respectively. The two move back to Clear River, Texas, from LA, to be close to Carrie’s father, who is dying of an incurable ailment. Not coincidentally, Clear River is the site of a “horrific” crime which saw Carrie as the only survivor of a 2-girl massacre in the woods. She stumbled in the river and lost her memory. Part of the reason she’s moving back to Clear River is to attempt to gain her memory back. Her therapist thinks it’s a good idea, and who’s to question the almighty therapist?

If Two Are Dead is a dull book where nothing happens. I don’t recommend buying it. The ending is okay — it’s got a zinger of an ending — but unlike the blurb at the cover of the book, there are no twists along the way, just a plodding, overly emotional narrative that misses most of the right notes.

What holds it together is the author’s reporterial skill at piecing words together. Man, that man can put glue on a narrative and make it adhere. Here we see the value of having written millions of words in your life, where you can pull nothing out of thin air and make it more than just bullshit.

One interesting technique that the author uses over and over again is what I call the “prefix -ing.” It goes something like this: Seeing that the story was going nowhere, Greg Nikolic grew frustrated. Or: Writing his blog post for the first time, Nikolic resolved not to do a rewrite because the topic wasn’t worth it. You see?

One of the good things about sampling many different authors’ styles is their Voice tends to find all the ways to use the techniques they prefer. By reading widely, you get to sample all the writing techniques that are out there.

Carrie is a big crybaby. The baby Emily is referenced far too often. Luke is a little bitch who is traumatized by a necessary killing in LA. The three make a family that you want to shoot and burn in a funeral pyre. They remind one of the importance of deviancy in writing a novel. You want your characters to zing, to act outside the norm sometimes so as to grab your attention as a reader.

The ending relies on Author’s Fiat, by which I mean the author says so, so logic is irrelevant and goes out the window, and we just have action based on words. This is common in movies. A great example is Terminator 2. The terminator has Sarah Connor cornered and is waving a sharp metal-sword in her eye. Then the next moment Sarah is magically freed and the terminator hasn’t killed her, with no word of an explanation for how she emerged from her situation. If Two Are Dead ends like that, with a series of tenuous connections resulting in a SWAT team being summoned and all the cops acting super-efficient in a common cause that would never happen in real life.

Again, this is a book and an author to be avoided. I will never read Rick Mofina again. I had similar feelings about David Baldacci, but unlike Mofina, Baldacci actually has some skill as a novelist. So I bought more than one Baldacci book. Mofina is a reporter first and foremost — expert with words, but alien to the playground that is the novel’s setting.

This book gets a 5.5 stars out of 10.