Trust Me, Richard Z Santos
Disgraced and clueless political operative Charlie O’Connell hopes for a new beginning. Santa Fe socialite Olivia Branch craves delivery from a marriage that’s become a prison. Chronic pothead and serial failure Gabriel Luna needs to scrape together a thousand bucks to send his kid to camp. Ex-cop and hammer-fisted enforcer Mallon just wants his world to make sense. Santa Fe, improbably, is building an airport—corruption is rife and wheeling-and-dealing abounds.
Richard Z. Santos’ maiden effort, Trust Me, follows these characters through two weeks of scheming, hustling, and betrayal, culminating in a denouement that, for me, felt unearned. Santos’ writing and plotting are serviceable, yet these characters rarely managed to compel me. The nefarious schemes aren’t nefarious enough, perhaps, Charlie’s ineptness too inept, Mallon’s psychology too superficial.
The exception, for me, is Gabe Lujan, whose efforts at fatherhood fall prey over and again to sloth and poor judgement, compounded by the accumulated weight of a lifetime’s worth of mistakes. Possibly I’m alone here, but that tracks pretty well with my experience as a dad. Problematically, however, Gabe’s story and that of the others never truly coalesce. Trust Me seems, in the end, less a single novel than a short novel and a novella mashed together, for whatever reason, within a single cover.
Trust Me is not a novel that pretends to the literary, so perhaps—contra Updike—I’m damning it for lacks that its author didn’t intend to fill. The book’s New Mexico setting never came alive for me, in the way it does in, say, the novels of Tony Hillerman, Willa Cather, John Nichols, or Rudolfo Anaya. I confess, though, that I made my home in the Land of Enchantment for twenty years, so it’s likely that my standards for New Mexico authenticity are too extreme.
If novels of business intrigue please you, you’ll likely find much to admire in this book. And there’s enough of quality in Trust Me to make one optimistic about Santos’ next outing.
