ALL THE LITTLE PIECES: A REVIEW

On March 8, I published an essay about the crime fiction of Jilliane Hoffman, a former South Florida prosecutor who gave up the law in order to write, primarily, legal thrillers. At that time I had read three of her novels: Retribution (her 2004 debut novel), Last Witness (its 2005 sequel), and Pretty Little Things (2010, and not directly related to the other two). I thought Retribution and Pretty Little Things were both excellent thrillers. I was slightly less happy with Last Witness, primarily because of its bewildering use of governmental abbreviations and acronyms (more about that below), but I nonetheless enjoyed it. I ended my essay by writing, “I plan to seek out more of her work.” And I meant it. A few days ago, three more of Hoffman’s novels arrived in my mail: Plea of Insanity (2007), The Cutting Room (2012), and All the Little Pieces (2015). I decided to start with the most recent of the three, so I could gage her progress, if any, as a novelist. I sat up in bed until midnight last night reading to the end of All the Little Pieces, because I just couldn’t bear to put it down.

All the Little Pieces (I hate that title), is a fascinating crime novel. Though it involves a murder trial and features some courtroom drama, I wouldn’t classify it as a legal thriller. Most crime novels and legal thrillers take as their central characters a criminal, a crime victim, a detective, a prosecutor, or a defense attorney. The main character in ALP is Faith Saunders, who is none of the above. Faith is a thirtysomething wife and mother who lives in Palm Beach, Florida. Her husband is an attorney. Faith and a friend of hers own and operate a successful cupcake bakery. As the novel opens, one of Faith’s primary professional concerns is filling out an application to become a competitor on the Food Network program Cupcake Wars. She would seem to have a fairly perfect, upper-middle class life. But all of that is about to unravel (and wasn’t all that true to begin with).

In the novel’s opening pages, Faith is driving back to Palm Beach from the home of her sister, Charity (I know), who lives a few hundred miles north of Faith in Central Florida. Faith had planned on spending the night with her sister, but the two of them got in a verbal fight (about Charity’s shitty husband, Nick) and Charity ordered Faith to leave the house. Now Faith is driving south, in her Ford Explorer, through an area of Florida that she doesn’t know well. A major tropical storm has struck the area making driving difficult. Even more concerning to her are the fact that she had a few cocktails (hurricanes, ironically) before leaving her sister’s home, and the fact that her four-year-old daughter, Maggie, is sleeping in a car seat behind Faith. Faith, who has a drinking problem, also has a ten-year-old DUI arrest on her permanent record, and she doesn’t want to risk another one. At some point, late at night, she feels the car bumping into something, but in the dark and stormy night, she can’t be sure what she hit: a dog? A deer? A tree limb? She parks the SUV and looks around. She sees a dent on the front of her vehicle but she can’t find any obvious cause of it. She gets back in the Explorer and drives away, but a short time later she decides to pull over in a sparsely populated area and get some rest. She parks her vehicle in the parking lot of a shuttered hair salon. She plans to catch an hour or two of sleep before resuming her trip home, hopefully sober by then. She realizes that she has left her cell phone and her purse at her sister’s house, so she can’t call home and inform her husband, Jarrod, of the change in her plans (she was supposed to spend the whole week with Charity).

When she has been asleep for only about forty-five minutes, Faith is startled awake when a desperate young woman begins pounding on the Explorer’s passenger door and begging Faith to let her into the car. Faith is still groggy from alcohol and lack of sleep. And her primary concern is Maggie, who is now wide awake and frightened by the stranger’s sudden appearance. Soon the scene outside becomes even more frightening. While Faith is trying to decide whether or not to let the stranger into her car, she sees a man running towards the woman, obviously in pursuit of her. Before Faith can decide what to do, the man grabs hold of the woman’s wrist and pulls her away from the car. Maggie wants to know what’s happening, but Faith shushes her. The man has pulled the distraught young woman towards the rear of Faith’s car. Maggie can no longer see what is happening, but Faith can see that another man has arrived and that both men are now pulling the terrified woman towards a nearby cane field. Terrified herself, Faith fires up the Explorer and drives away. She can’t call the police because she has no phone. She tries to tell herself that what she witnessed was just a domestic matter, two men fighting over the same girlfriend. But deep down, she suspects that what she saw was something much darker and more dangerous. She promises herself that she will report what she saw to the police when she arrives home in Palm Beach.

The next day, after finally arriving at her home, Faith decides not to tell anyone about what she saw. She has her reasons. She doesn’t want Jarrod to know that she had been driving after having drunk several cocktails. She doesn’t want to have to report that fact to the police either. She’s not crazy about letting either Jarrod or the police know that she drove off and abandoned a young woman in dire straits. Instead, she drives the Explorer to a body shop and has the front end repaired so that Jarrod won’t ever discover the damage that was done to it. And then she tries to go on with her life as if nothing ever happened. Alas, fate intervenes with that plan.

A few days after Faith returns to Palm Beach, the news breaks that the murdered body of a young exotic dancer named Angelina Santri has been found in a Central Florida cane field. Faith recognizes Angelina as the young woman who begged to be let into the Explorer. She realizes now that her cowardice cost the young woman her life. What’s more, she realizes that she almost certainly saw Angelina’s killers. But she doesn’t plan to come forward with this information. It is too late to be of any help to Angelina. Faith decides to let the matter die. She doesn’t want her name connected with it in any way. Alas, while her husband, Jarrod, is watching the TV news, Angelina Santri’s photo comes on screen and little Maggie shouts out, “That’s the lady who wanted Mommy to help her, but she wouldn’t open the door.” And, suddenly, the proverbial cat is out of the proverbial bag. Jarrod confronts Faith with what Maggie has told him. Eventually, Faith confesses to a somewhat prettified version of the events she witnessed. She doesn’t mention the presence of the second man involved in Angelina’s abduction. Maggie didn’t see that man, so only Faith knows of his involvement. She tells Jarrod that a young woman ran toward her vehicle and that a young man grabbed her and pulled her away. Faith claims that it looked like a lover’s spat and that she drove away in hurry to protect Maggie. She knows that it will look much worse to Jarrod if she tells him that Angelina was actually dragged away by two men. Jarrod, an attorney, insists that Faith must go to the police and tell them what she saw. Very reluctantly, she allows him to take her to the local police department, where she reports the sanitized version of what she witnessed. From the get-go, the police suspect that she is withholding information from them. But Faith is able to provide a police sketch artist with a fairly accurate description of Angelina’s first attacker. And soon the police have located their suspect and brought him in for an identity lineup. Neither Faith nor Maggie has any difficulty identifying the suspect as the man who pulled Angelina away from the Explorer. It seems as though, despite her lies and determination not to get involved, Faith has nonetheless helped solve Angelina’s murder and redeemed herself a bit. But Faith’s nightmare has really only just begun.

That summary describes only the opening act of a novel that runs to 504 pages in trade paperback. And the twists and turns in Faith’s story keep coming almost up until the final page. Faith is not a criminal, nor is she, technically, a victim of a crime, but Hoffman’s novel does a great job of illustrating the ripple effects of a violent crime. The murder of Angelina Santri ends up ruining far more lives than just Angelina’s. The novel is as much a domestic drama as it is a thriller. It explores a bunch of culturally relevant topics: parenting, alcoholism, media sensationalism, vigilantism, the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women, modern marriage, the vagaries of the justice system, and so forth.

All the Little Pieces also demonstrates that Hoffman has continued to evolve as a writer. It is easily the most polished and culturally astute of the four Hoffman novels I have read to date. What’s more, she seems to have learned just how put off readers are by crime novels that contain a bewildering array of alphabetic agency references. Here is what I wrote about Last Witness a few weeks ago:

If you scroll through the reader reviews of Hoffman’s thrillers on Goodreads.com or Amazon.com, you’ll find quite a few people complaining about Hoffman’s excessive use of acronyms and alphabet agencies. This wasn’t a big problem for me in Retribution or Pretty Little Things, but in Last Witness it is a fairly major annoyance. Some of this may be unavoidable. South Florida has a lot of different law enforcement agencies: Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD), Miami Police Department (MPD), Miami Beach Police Department (MBPD), Broward’s Sheriff’s Office (BSO), FHP (Florida Highway Patrol), and so forth. But nearly every page of the book contains multiple law-enforcement abbreviations: FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which I couldn’t help thinking of as “fiddle,” though no one in the book refers to it as such), MROC (the Miami Regional Operations Center of FDLE), SAO (State’s Attorney’s Office), ASA (Assistant State’s Attorney), DCJ (Dade County Jail), QSL (a police code for “I receive”), CJN (Criminal Justice Network), ECU (Economic Crimes Unit), DVU (Domestic Violence Unit), MCU (Major Crimes Unit), CCS (Criminal Conspiracy Section), SAC (Special Agent in Charge), CO (Correctional Officer), AUSA (Assistant United States Attorney) IA (Internal Affairs). These are in addition to the many fairly common abbreviations found in a lot of other crime fiction: FBI, BOLO, ME, DB, DEA, ABT, DUI, etc. And there are other non-law enforcement abbreviations – for instance SoBe for South Beach – that can be confusing if you are not a Floridian. Here’s a typical sentence from Last Witness: “MDPD, MBPD, FDLE, FHP – and practically every other police department in Miami, including the twenty-four-man department of Surfside P.D. – assuaged the fears of the citizens in their jurisdictions with reports of the investigation and the precautions their officers were taking.”

Reading All the Little Pieces, it seemed clear to me that Hoffman (or perhaps her editor or her publisher) took all of these reader criticisms to heart. All the Little Pieces contains far fewer abbreviations and acronyms than any of the other Hoffman novels I have read. What’s more, whenever Hoffman does employ an abbreviation, she almost instantly follows up with an explanation. Here are a couple of examples:

“According to her BAC she had enough alcohol in her to keep her drunk for days,” remarked Dunleavy. BAC stood for blood alcohol content.

“[S]he’ll probably plead NGI and let the jury walk her because we all know that any of us would’ve done the same if we were her and had a gun in our purse.” NGI stood for Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.

I admire authors who are responsive to reader’s complaints about their work. I’m not saying that readers are always right, or that an author should dumb down her work in order to make it more palatable. But if hundreds of readers are making the same reasonable complaint about an author’s work, she probably ought to at least consider the possibility that they may be right. I like the fact that Hoffman didn’t try to come up with clever ways of explaining her abbreviations. She simply follows them up with the same flat wording: “XYZ stands for…”

The book contains one oddity that contemporary readers might find amusing. The book was published in 2015, before President Donald Trump’s political career had officially begun. On page 332, one character tells another that Palm Beach is rarely the scene of a sensational crime, not like L.A. or New York, where those things happen all the time. “It’s Palm Beach, Arnie,” he says. “Crimes like that don’t happen around here. Ask a Kennedy. Or a Trump.” Then, on page 333, we find a reference to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the prosecutor in a notorious real-life San Francisco case involving a deadly dog attack. At that time, Guilfoyle was best known as a commentator on various Fox News programs. But in 2018, Donald Trump, Jr. would leave his wife of thirteen years and become engaged to Kimberly Guilfoyle. That relationship didn’t last, but Guilfoyle remains close to President Trump and has been nominated by him to be America’s Ambassador to Greece. What’s more Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has become Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. But well before Trump and Guilfoyle and Kennedy were linked politically, they were linked, accidentally, in adjacent pages of Hoffman’s novel.

Pretty Little Things remains my favorite of the Hoffman books that I have read to date. I love a good thriller, and PLT is about as thrilling as pop fiction gets. But I think that All the Little Pieces is probably a better book, smarter and more realistic. In either case, just remember that, as long as you pick a Hoffman novel with the word “little” in the title, you cannot go wrong.