FINAL ACTS

Abella rounds out his murder-and-legal-intrigue-cum-santería-horror trilogy (The Killing of the Saints, 1991; Dead of Night, 1998) with more, much more, of the same.

When last spotted, Cuban-American lawyer Carlos Morell was bravely quaking as his vindictive half-brother Ricardo Díaz vowed revenge for Charlie’s part in bringing him and his santería cult down. Now Díaz is six feet under, but it’s not deep enough to save Charlie, who’s under indictment for a series of ritual killings he’d swear have Díaz’s signature on them. While cops in Oakland and L.A. dicker about who’s going to get the honor of locking him up, Charlie hires Mexican-Irish ex-public defender Rita Carr to conduct his defense. The West Hollywood lawyer, who loves salsa dancing and her father the judge, is such a transparent figure of fantasy that she fits right in with Charlie’s crazy alternative universe—a universe Abella can’t resist revisiting one more time by providing generous excerpts from the “novel” Charlie’s writing about his most recent woes, especially his trip to Cuba to haul back the real perp, untouchable record-company executive Max Prado. Even if Prado admitted his guilt, though, there’s no way to extradite him back to the Bay Area, where Charlie’s son Julian is waiting, only too eager to denounce his dad to the police and testify as a prosecution witness against him. Rita’s determination to tie the killings in to the suicide of a former state senator and a long-extinct sacrificial sect sets the stage for a surprisingly tense courtroom duel, followed by a climax that makes the rest of this wild, wooly tale look positively decorous.

It’s hard to imagine who the target audience for this farrago is—sensationalists who don’t have enough time to make separate trips to the supernatural horror and courtroom drama shelves?—but Abella pours on enough satanic conspiracy theories to sate them all.