Ritual by William Heffernan

Title: Ritual

Author: William Heffernan

Year: 1988

Publishing Details: Signet, New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., First Signet Printing, February, 1990

Genre: Murder Mystery

Topical Category: Murder Mystery, Horror

Synopsis and Background:

Do you recall Lincoln Child’s quote about the genesis of Relic? 

“Doug pitched me a murder mystery set in the museum that was literally called ‘Zero at the Bone’ and it wasn’t all that good, but that wasn’t his fault. It was because murder mysteries were a dime a dozen and I told him that and I suggested that we write a thriller– a techno-thriller à la Jurassic Park, set in a museum which is the ideal place for it.”

Well, while Preston and Child decided to go the techno-thriller route someone else (years previously) decided to go the murder mystery route. I present to you Ritual the book that Relic almost was. Right down to the museum setting and the decapitations. A dime a dozen is right.

When I picked it up I did not know that that was what I was getting. On the back, this book proclaims

“The woman’s body was found behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum, strangely and savagely mutilated–the first in a series of bizarre murders that share an eerie similarity to the Toltec Indian ritual of human sacrifice.” 

This reminded me strongly of a 1975 episode of the TV series Kolchak: the Night Stalker called “Legacy of Terror” about an Aztec cult that must sustain their mummified god by periodically sacrificing five people to it, each one laid out on a staircase and with their heart removed. Between that similarity and the promise of a museum setting, I decided to read it.

The main character, Stanislaus Rolk, is a New York homicide detective known as the ‘Scholar of Murder’. He attends a museum presentation for the hoi polloi intended to kick off The Smiling Gods of Human Sacrifice, a joint Metropolitan and Museum of Natural History exhibit on Toltec religion. During the cocktail party afterwards he meets Kate Silverman, one of the curators. Unfortunately, a woman is murdered in the nearby section of Central Park. A murder exactly resembling the Toltec ritual murders that the presentation described.

The plot thickens as we learn that Rolk is a department maverick who takes some heat from the top brass when he decides that the killer had to be affiliated with the museum. It seems the murder was committed with Toltec weapons over 700 years old. Just as in Relic, there is a deputy police commissioner more concerned about the museum’s negative publicity than he is about people’s safety. The Smiling Gods exhibit is big news for the museum, financially speaking.

As Rolk investigates the museum, we are introduced to a series of suspects. There’s Kate Silverman, the attractive curator of anthropology who has been pushing the sensational exhibit, and is an expert on Toltec rituals. 

There’s also her boss, Dr. Grace Mallory, who has been objecting to the excesses of the exhibit on professional grounds. Could she want it shut down…permanently?

There’s Dr. Malcolm  Sousi, who chafes at working underneath Grace Mallory. He feels he should be in charge. In fact he seems to harbor a deep hatred and disdain for women. Enough to murder one? More than one?

There’s Father Joseph LoPato, contributor to the exhibit, collector of Toltec artifacts, and part of an illegal refugee movement that is relocating Mayan villagers to New York City. Fr. LoPato recently spent some time in the Yucatán and there were rumors of similar murders occurring there…

Regardless of who is suspected, one thing is certain. The murderer intends to kill. Again and again. Until the ritual is complete.

SPOILERS BELOW

My Thoughts:

So, at first, I figured this book would be a pretty straight-forward whodunnit, albeit with a gruesome sacrificial twist and more focus on police procedural. We are introduced to a variety of plausible suspects, some of whom have to be red herrings. We also get to know Rolk, our lead detective, as well as his partner Devlin. They both have tragic backstories, Devlin having lost his wife and Rolk having mysteriously lost his wife and young daughter fifteen years ago.

He came home to a note saying that his wife had fallen in love with someone else and was running away. He never saw them again. This was so long ago that Rolk has started looking for his missing daughter in college admissions, as she would be about that age. He keeps her room as a sort of memorial, having redorated it over the years from a girl’s room to a young woman’s. Which…is weird, but adds some depth to his character’s backstory.

As for the other characters, Kate begins to develop an attraction to Rolk, and receives several death threats from the killer; she seems an unlikely suspect. It also turns out that Grace Mallory was only acting suspicious because she was a closet lesbian and had a crush on Kate that she felt was inappropriate as Kate was a woman and her subordinate. And then just as she comes to terms with her sexuality and asks Kate to dinner she gets murdered. That seems to happen a lot in these types of horror books as well. I am gonna start another count ‘The number of times a lesbian character deserved better’ So Grace is out.

As the book continued and the red herrings were excluded one after another…I started to get suspicious. Usually novelists spend time fleshing out their police detectives in case they could become recurring characters, like what happened to Agent Pendergast. I figured the novelist spent so much time having us sympathize with Rolk and Devlin because he intended to bring them back in a second installment once this one was wrapped up. But we were running out of plausible suspects. And then someone was murdered who could only have trusted a fellow cop in order for the killer to get so close. So I started to consider them. 

Devlin seemed suspiciously nice and unassuming. And he had ‘gone home’ with no alibi when one of the murders was committed. As for Rolk, I was on the phone with a friend discussing the book before I finished it and I said, “It’s gotta be Devlin. I mean, Rolk is weird, but this can’t possibly be a The Murder of Roger Akroyd situation right? They’ve spent too much time trying to get us to sympathize with him. I mean, he’s set up like Dirty Harry.” I had in fact been imagining him in my head as alternatively Charles Bronson or Cameron Mitchell. It couldn’t be Rolk, right?

Well, the next day I proceeded to eat those words. Rolk’s frequent headaches, his knowledge of Toltec ritual, his romantic interest in Kate…  I really should have seen it coming. Kate had psycho-thriller protagonist written all over her, blonde, dressed like she stepped out from the pages of Vogue, right in line with ‘Hitchcock blondes’ like Nicole Kidman, Glenn Close, and Michelle Pfiffer (see the films Before I Go to Sleep, Jagged Edge, What Lies Beneath, etc.). And Rolk’s ‘missing wife and daughter’. Of course. Of course that’s what happened to them. I forgot to my detriment the words of the immortal Miss Marple:

“One thinks, of course, of the husband.”

In hindsight there were so many, many clues. But I was still surprised. So my hat off to William Heffernan. He got me.

The number of times during my reading marathon a pointless sex scene does nothing to advance the plot: 3 (The sex scenes here are awkward but they definitely advance the plot.)

The number of times a lesbian character deserved better: 1

Rating:

3/3 Entertainment Value: This one was good. Not quite pulse pounding, but it had an atmosphere, the whodunit aspect was interesting, and I finished it in two sittings.

2/3 Quality: Decently put together book. There wasn’t much in the way of wild flights of fancy. But pretty solid and well paced overall. 

1/3 Originality: Whodunits have been done to death. And I will cop to not having a great understanding of the differences between the various Mesoamerican civilizations. But I don’t think Mayans and Toltecs are the same thing. Lumping mesoamerican cultures together and emphasizing human sacrifice is not very original. Also the police procedural components. Seriously. Rolk is a ‘loose cannon’ who is in complete violation of ‘department policy’, the deputy commissioner has ‘City Hall on his ass’, ‘you’re off the case as of now!’ Blah blah. I mean, why not just have him ‘hand in his badge’ and ‘go on suspension’?

0/1 Exceeds Expectations: Eh. The final twist was good and played with some police procedural conventions. But, again, Agatha Christie did it first. Language and attitudes were pretty normal for the time. The asshat deputy police commissioner has some unnecessary use of both ‘polack’ and ‘spic’, which is designed to make us hate him but really could have been left out. And Kate is constantly being described as attractive. She has great legs, soft blonde hair, flawless bone structure, yada yada yada. She’s your basic DID and she never breaks the mold. Though I did appreciate the scene where she very briefly considered throwing her high heeled shoe at the killer.

Total Score: 6/10

Best Quote(s):

“If the gods are to be satisfied, the ritual must be completed. But it will be. Who would suspect you as the substitute of the great god Quetzalcoatl? Who would think you capable of such a thing? No. They might look. They might even question. But, in the end, who would believe them? And you can lead them in any direction you want now. A finger pointing subtly in another direction. And they’ll never find the weapons or the heads. Not for years and years and years.”