Simple Simon - Ryne Douglas Pearson

   1996; 250 pages.  Book 4 (out of 5) in the “Art Jefferson Thriller” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Technothriller; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    How do you test a new encryption system?  Well, you could give a coded message to all your geeky IT guys who weren’t part of its development team and challenge them to try to bust it.

 

    But the head of Comsec-Z, the folks that spent the last five years and ten billion dollars of Uncle Sam’s money creating the new system (called KIWI), wants a more robust round of testing.  After all, KIWI is slated to be used throughout the United States federal government for all sensitive communications.

 

    Hey, why not try it out in a puzzle magazine?  Insert an encrypted message into one of the editions, with a secret message.  Have it say something like: “You’ve solved Puzzle 99!  Call this number (insert a private Comsec-Z telephone number here) to claim your prize!”  Then just have someone monitor that phone in case it rings.  It won’t, of course.  But still.

 

    That phone number has been routed to the desk of Leo Pedanski, a cryptographer for Comsec-Z.  As expected, it’s never rang.  So far.

 

    Leo Pedanski is about to have the worst day ever in his long career at Comsec-Z.

 

What’s To Like...

    Simple Simon was my introduction to Ryne Douglas Pearson’s 5-book thriller series featuring a black FBI agent, Art Jefferson, and a 16-year-old autistic boy, Simon Lynch.  It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Simon solves the encrypted message in the puzzle magazine and that Art becomes his de facto bodyguard when Comsec-Z reacts unkindly when Simon calls to claim his prize.

 

    I liked the focus on autism.  We get to hear what Simon hears, see the world as it appears to him, and struggle with his jumbled up thought processes.  Simon’s personal quirks were fascinating.  When writing, he meticulously avoids using the letter “e”, but can’t give you a reason why he does that.  He likes jigsaw puzzles, but only if they have exactly 500 pieces.  Any more or any less, and he ignores them., and he builds those 500-piece ones with all the pieces face down.

 

    To be honest, I know very little about autism, so I can’t say how accurately it is portrayed, but it gives the storyline a unique tone.  The baddies have formidable resources at their disposal when they come looking for whoever “solved Puzzle 99”, including a psycho assassin from overseas, and Art Jefferson’s task of protecting Simon is made even harder because of the boy’s disorder.

 

    The ending is okay.  It’s suitably exciting and has a nice twist that allows Simon to finally shake off his pursuers, but the actual showdown between Jefferson and the baddies seemed a bit predictable to me.  The epilogue felt a bit too convenient, although it does reinforce the maxim that karma is a b*tch.

 

    Simple Simon is a fast, easy read.  Things unfold at a brisk pace, and never bogged down.  The chapters are short, with 26 of them covering 250 pages.  ANAICT, Simon doesn’t appear in the first three books in this series, but Book 5, Simon Sees, is a continuation of Simon's and Art’s relationship.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 187 ratings and 106 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.67*/5, based on 352 ratings and 44 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    He set the cup back on the coaster on the lamp table and cast his eyes to The Tinkery.  They danced over the cover, unwilling to remain still.  There were too many colors, and they bled together so that one color was not itself anymore, and then it was another color.  In his mind’s eye, Simon saw pictures as unbalanced, imprecise, and unsettling.  A picture of a chair was not like looking at a real chair.  The world reduced to two dimensions disturbed him.  (loc. 389)

 

    It was difficult to think of the man that way with his tongue torn out and one knee bent forward at an impossible angle.  That this…woman had done that frightened Heiji more than a bit.  If only she were tame his thoughts might be of pleasure.

    “Mitsuo, don’t imagine yourself with me,” Keiko said without looking at him.  “Imagination is the second most dangerous thing a man has.”

    Heiji snickered a bit, nervously.  He had been too obvious in his musings.  “The second, is it?”

    “Yes.”

    “What is the first?”

    “A heartbeat.”  (loc. 932)

 

Kindle Details…

    Currently, Simple Simon sells for $4.99 at Amazon, as do the other four books in the series.  Ryne Douglas Pearson offers more than a dozen other e-books, ranging in price from $1.99 to $4.99, plus two short stories, each costing $0.99.

 

“Under a tree by a house, by a field washed with rain, lies a boy all alone with his thoughts and his dreams.”  (loc. 132)

    There are a couple of things to quibble about, but nothing major.  I counted only 16 cusswords in the first 20% of the book, which is commendably sparse for a Thriller novel, Four of those were f-bombs.  There’s a racial epithet later on, plus a mention of an erection, and a couple of bouts of torture, but, as shown in the second excerpt above, at least these weren’t lurid.  Still, Wikipedia’s labeling of this as a “Young Adult Novel” seems a bit misguided.

 

    There were a fair amount of typos.  Hyphen issues, such as “thirty year old”, “mid bite”, “well armed”, and “two handed” were distracting, but maybe this occurs during the document-to-digital conversion.  Others, such as breech/breach, shirt tails/shirttails, and/an, and Arm/arm (twice!), just mean another round of editing ought to be done.

 

    Overall, Simple Simon was an enjoyable read, although for me, it wasn’t a page-turner.  The plotline seemed predictable, at least up until the aforementioned twist in the ending.  I still recommend it though, particularly for the insight into the challenges of coping with autism.

 

    7 Stars.  Simple Simon was the basis for a 1998 movie, Mercury Rising, which featured Bruce Willis as the protagonist FBI agent.  Several changes were made in converting from book to movie.  The most obvious was the racial switch of Art from black white, but his last name also went from Jefferson to Jeffries (why??), and Simon’s age dropped from 16 years old to 9 years.  More alterations are listed in its Wikipedia article.

 

    Mercury Rising grossed $93 million at the box office, but garnered mostly bad reviews, and Bruce Willis “won” the 1999 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor for his performance that year in this and two other films.  I rarely watch movies, but I did watch this one many years ago, and I thought it was quite good, no matter what the critics say.