This ran on February 17, 2008 • Portland Oregonian
      In April Smith’s third Ana Grey novel, “Judas Horse,” the troubled, Los Angeles-based FBI agent is recovering for a shooting incident but ready to return to the Bureau and get on with her life and job.
      Ana is offered the chance to go undercover and investigate a fanatical animal rights organization located in the Portland area. The group is believed to be responsible for the recent murder of the previous undercover FBI agent, a man who Ana was close to in the past. Initially, Smith captivates us with a briskly paced first person narrative by Ana describing her training in “undercover school.”
      “…a deep-cover identity is carefully constructed, like a computer- generated creature in a special-effects studio, with input from FBI psychologists and experts in terrorist organizations. You’re trying to create a three-dimensional character that will credibly blend with the target; whose believability will withstand whatever they throw at you.” Once Ana’s sometimes harrowing training is complete, she begins her infiltration at a Portland dive bar called “Omar’s Roadhouse.”
      Sometimes reading and enjoying crime fiction is a truly frustrating experience. Do you completely surrender to the author’s construct, and suspend disbelief, or does it become impossible, with all good intentions, to swallow significant aspects of plot and characterization? In “Judas Horse,” here is where our suspension of disbelief falters, badly: the scene at Omar’s, supposedly a breeding ground for disaffected radicals and misfits, is so preposterously staged, it’s a wonder anything else in the story comes close to plausibility.
      After a laundry list of extremist causes, Smith describes the patrons of the bar: “two fat truckers and two even fatter hookers are squeezed rump-to-rump, pitcher-to-pitcher at a table littered with pizza and chips, openly popping pills. Mexican gangbangers hover near a TV showing the fights, palming nickel bags of coke, muttering and complaining, flicking butts, grinding the worn heels of their western boots to jukebox Santana. The female neo-Nazis are big into black eyeliner and leather halters that show off their breasts…”
      That these disparate individuals would hang out together (along with an ashtray-chomping biker and a bartender who uses a French expression in casual conversation) begs the belief of even the most forgiving reader. (Smith also inaccurately places Portland in Washington County and refers to the newspaper Willamette “Weekly”)
      After Ana makes contact with one of the animal rights people and eventually ingratiates her way into the group, we learn they are led and dominated by Dick Stone, a rogue former FBI agent who has his own agenda at heart.
      There’s no question Smith is capable of writing wonderfully tense and vivid action scenes and she piles on the twists as the novel concludes. Ana is an affecting, complex woman we invariably root for, despite our reservations about some of her choices in work and personal life. The final pages race by, as Ana finds herself in deeper jeopardy than she or her “handlers” could have fathomed. If only Smith had been more discerning and less slapdash in her eagerness to paint all fringe extremists with the same brush, “Judas Horse” might have been a rock solid thriller from the social realism school of crime fiction, instead of an entertaining but superficial screed. Copyright © 1998-2008 Peter Handel, All Rights Reserved.