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Karma
Watching a woman plunge thirty stories to her death, New York architect Evan Scott is drawn into a terrifying conspiracy with powerful international implications. Reprint.
82 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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65 people want to read
About the author
Mitchell Smith
37 books24 followersMitchell Smith is an American author writing crime fiction and science fiction.
Also known as Roy LeBeau.
Also known as Roy LeBeau.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 12, 2011
Review of KARMA by Mitchell Smith
Not saying anything particularly revelatory here, but I’m continually astonished by how many mediocre writers hit the jackpot these days while really terrific ones are all but dismissed and forgotten. Oddly the case with most of my favorite authors. Is it just me?
The only thing maybe worse that a great writer like Mitchell Smith completely falling off the map is the idea he may still be out there somewhere cloaked under a pseudonym, and I can’t find him. I’m especially sensitive to this idea in Smith’s case having recently discovered he began his writing career under a non de plume: a series of Western paperback originals from one of the, shall we say, less reputable houses (I should know, having begun my own career with them). Is it cricket to mention a series of books an author purposely chose to remain estranged from? I don’t know; even a clearly exploitative title in the hands of a master can bear rewards.
Anyway, we’re here to discuss Smith’s mainstream era thrillers, DAYDREAMS, STONE CITY, DUE NORTH, SACRIFICE, REPRISAL and particularly KARMA, probably my personal favorite—though I hesitate to categorize them as mere thrillers, especially DUE NORTH which, like the others, has its thrills but is so much more than that. They say Richard Matheson was a mainstream writer masquerading as a horror/sci-fi writer; I’m guessing Mitchell Smith was a mainstream writer masquerading as a thriller writer. Certainly if the line can be blurred between the two, Smith did it brilliantly. His big push began with the police procedural-oriented DAYDREAMS, followed by the claustrophobically-male prison epic STONE CITY, both generally considered his best and most literary offerings. I think this is giving short shrift to his later, more overtly genre pieces like SACRIFICE and REPRISAL. Finely crafted, exceptionally well written with a style I can only describe as uniquely his own, all of Smith’s titles bear his emblematic signature prose, at times an almost musical leitmotif that, when juxtaposed with passages of violent action, border on the poetic—but somehow, amazingly (damn him!) drawing us in rather than distancing us from the narrative. No mean feat. Yet we never doubt we’re in the hand of a confident master.
KARMA’s handsome, blue-blooded architect Evan Scott witnesses the 70 story falling death of a young woman from an in-construction Madison Avenue edifice. Or was she pushed? When others around Scott meet similarly unexpected ends he soon learns his witnessing the girl’s fall has put his own life, and eventually those of his Greenwich, Connecticut family, at dire risk. This in the form of Rao Electrical, a company with a multimillion-dollar wiring contact for the building and secrets they’d just as soon keep hidden. They’re doing a good job so far; even the fallen girl’s construction foreman father hides fearfully silent behind the truth of her death. And Evan gets a particularly unnerving warning from a Hindustani NYPD Detective Prasad, who should know what he’s talking about when not too subtly suggesting the inquiring young architect keep his ivy league nose out of things. Rao Electric plays tough: “..we think they use a Pathan—a Dond savage…a mountain people; they are not minding heights at all, if you catch my drift.”
Evan might have listened, too, had one of the mysterious deaths not included his coworker/Hispanic lover Sanchia Fuentes. Ignoring the obvious warning, Evan pursues the brutal Rao brothers, a powerful Hindu crime family even the Mafia fears. He finds help in the only person who doesn’t think he’s crazy, elderly newsstand owner Ram Das Lal, whose nicely delineated appearance eventually forms what becomes essentially a buddy-picture. Deliberately paced at the beginning to reveal both Evan’s current home life and past Vietnam skirmishes (Kirkus, who is always wrong, accuses Smith unable of deciding if he’s writing a post-traumatic war pastiche or a vulnerable loner thriller—duh!—he’s writing both) the thrills and action ratchet up soon enough along with a host of wonderfully realized characters, especially Evan’s Indian pal Das, who nearly steals the show. Not to be outdone, the baddies are as repugnant as spoiled curry, especially the Rao’s imported goon, the Pathan Dond. A long-bearded, sword-wielding psychotic, the Dond thinks no more of table-leg raping and strangling Evan’s secret lover in her own bed than he does of disemboweling a group of subway toughs in broad New York City daylight.
With a prose style rife with frags, disruptive ellipses and occasional not-quite-purple passages, Smith’s mesmeric, deceivingly languid style closes the circle of terror around both Evan and reader with unnerving skill and bravado. It’s on full display during Evan’s witness of the iron worker’s fatal fall near the novel’s opening:
(Evan) looked out over the wall, looked up—expecting some workman waving across the way—looked up and saw through soft, richly golden light, a girl come falling.
She fell from far higher, out from the red steel skeleton of the building in progress—not more than yards away across empty air.
Evan heard her call again…something. Only a startled exclamation—certainly not a scream, not a shriek as she fell. And he saw her, and she saw him watching as she fell so seemingly slowly, lying spread-eagled in the air, wearing a tool belt, work clothes—jeans, shirt—all softly beaten by the air, and her long black hair bannering out, ruffling in the wind of descent so Evan heard it through the silence.
The book predicts our current phobia of foreign terrorists more than half a decade before 9/11, though when written it was probably more a metaphor for ‘70’s big business developers ravaging NY. Some may read bias bordering jingoism in Smith’s subtest. Evan is an unapologetic WASP war hero haunted by Vietnam dreams, his Aryan wife Catherine a privileged snob who, in the book’s explosive finale, wielding a shotgun to defend hearth and home against foreign invaders, is found “standing high at the end of the deck as faint gunsmoke drifted, her blond hair frosted white in moonlight, standing with the full moon behind her—a northern goddess, and grim.”
Still, Smith smooths any outright bigotry with the appearance of the Hispanic Fuentes and, more pointedly, in the wonderful Hindustani Ram Das whom Evan regards at novel’s end as his dearest friend. Walking New York streets together, Das, worried that the invasion of so many foreigners is taking its crowding toll on the Yale, Groton’s native soil, is reminded by a worldly-minded Evan: “The city was made by foreigners.” True enough. But Smith makes it sound just short of a warning.
Hidden agendas or not, there’s no denying the power of Smith’s story-telling during scenes both thoughtfully introspective and savagely, almost uncomfortably real. It’s not even the outward threat of foreign gangsters that provides Evan’s biggest nightmares, but the doubting indifference of associates and family around him. Where’s the real enemy here--self-assured American complacency and arrogance? Is the most obvious metaphor Evan Scott himself, the disillusioned lonely big city dweller hiding in plain sight? Clearly the war has left its scars and scares enfolded deep--going off to one thankless war only to return home to another kind of battlefield in its own way just as bafflingly isolated.
War in all its deceiving faces, though only shown in brief flashbacks, permeates the book as a constant, lurking menace. Early on, we’re shown Evan coveting dead Marine buddy Beckwith’s bowie knife, kept ever sharp and oiled in loving memory back in Evan’s civilian life. And in dark contrast, we see the demonic Dond’s lethal sword, dispatching the subway toughs with near psychotic detachment. We just know, as events unfold, these gleaming weapons are destined to meet in an analogous war from which only one can emerge. When it finally comes, Smith’s vertiginous stage is the unfinished lattice of narrow I-beams wrapping Evan’s own workplace, high amid the darkened canyons of NY. It’s one of the book’s defining and perhaps most memorable moments: a clash of cultures and mindsets that in its fury morphs the flailing combatants into a near balletic death dance that turns all soldiers into borderless brothers. Evan’s first glimpse of the Pathan is like an explosively evil apparition of Chernabog himself:
Something was running toward him over the steel. Huge, oddly shaped, and galloping with a long cloth coat swept back by its speed—looking barely human in moonlight, its head thrown back in a great grin of pleasure, long moon-silvered beard, long hair fallen loose and streaming behind it…this man came running barefoot over the steel as if there were no spaces, no emptiness, as if sparse structures were solid flooring all across. There was no sound but the eager padding of his feet, their swift rhythm humming through the steel.
Running away like a terrified child against such indomitable fierceness, Evan finds soon enough that the Dond savage is far swifter, and his shrieking saber a good deal longer than the Bowie war memento the young architect brought along for comfort. When the Pathan’s blade finally descends:
--Evan was saved by Beckwith’s knife and what was left of college fencing, and by twenty years of polo. Born and built for this, the Bowie hooked the Pathan’s blade as it came, turned it just enough, and carried it clanging away. And Evan’s right hand and arm and shoulder—packed with muscle from years of swinging a mallet whipping left and right from a galloping pony—his hand and arm and shoulder parried, and took the shock.
The Dond stood back and relaxed, a bird of prey at ease, and stared at Evan considering, while they both breathed. The two of them were alone in the world; there was no world beside the narrow beam they fought on, nothing beyond the striking circle of their knives. They had become as close as friends, and knew each other.
Do yourself a solid and know this book.
And the poetic prowess of very cutting edge action/suspense Mitchell Smith-style.
Not saying anything particularly revelatory here, but I’m continually astonished by how many mediocre writers hit the jackpot these days while really terrific ones are all but dismissed and forgotten. Oddly the case with most of my favorite authors. Is it just me?
The only thing maybe worse that a great writer like Mitchell Smith completely falling off the map is the idea he may still be out there somewhere cloaked under a pseudonym, and I can’t find him. I’m especially sensitive to this idea in Smith’s case having recently discovered he began his writing career under a non de plume: a series of Western paperback originals from one of the, shall we say, less reputable houses (I should know, having begun my own career with them). Is it cricket to mention a series of books an author purposely chose to remain estranged from? I don’t know; even a clearly exploitative title in the hands of a master can bear rewards.
Anyway, we’re here to discuss Smith’s mainstream era thrillers, DAYDREAMS, STONE CITY, DUE NORTH, SACRIFICE, REPRISAL and particularly KARMA, probably my personal favorite—though I hesitate to categorize them as mere thrillers, especially DUE NORTH which, like the others, has its thrills but is so much more than that. They say Richard Matheson was a mainstream writer masquerading as a horror/sci-fi writer; I’m guessing Mitchell Smith was a mainstream writer masquerading as a thriller writer. Certainly if the line can be blurred between the two, Smith did it brilliantly. His big push began with the police procedural-oriented DAYDREAMS, followed by the claustrophobically-male prison epic STONE CITY, both generally considered his best and most literary offerings. I think this is giving short shrift to his later, more overtly genre pieces like SACRIFICE and REPRISAL. Finely crafted, exceptionally well written with a style I can only describe as uniquely his own, all of Smith’s titles bear his emblematic signature prose, at times an almost musical leitmotif that, when juxtaposed with passages of violent action, border on the poetic—but somehow, amazingly (damn him!) drawing us in rather than distancing us from the narrative. No mean feat. Yet we never doubt we’re in the hand of a confident master.
KARMA’s handsome, blue-blooded architect Evan Scott witnesses the 70 story falling death of a young woman from an in-construction Madison Avenue edifice. Or was she pushed? When others around Scott meet similarly unexpected ends he soon learns his witnessing the girl’s fall has put his own life, and eventually those of his Greenwich, Connecticut family, at dire risk. This in the form of Rao Electrical, a company with a multimillion-dollar wiring contact for the building and secrets they’d just as soon keep hidden. They’re doing a good job so far; even the fallen girl’s construction foreman father hides fearfully silent behind the truth of her death. And Evan gets a particularly unnerving warning from a Hindustani NYPD Detective Prasad, who should know what he’s talking about when not too subtly suggesting the inquiring young architect keep his ivy league nose out of things. Rao Electric plays tough: “..we think they use a Pathan—a Dond savage…a mountain people; they are not minding heights at all, if you catch my drift.”
Evan might have listened, too, had one of the mysterious deaths not included his coworker/Hispanic lover Sanchia Fuentes. Ignoring the obvious warning, Evan pursues the brutal Rao brothers, a powerful Hindu crime family even the Mafia fears. He finds help in the only person who doesn’t think he’s crazy, elderly newsstand owner Ram Das Lal, whose nicely delineated appearance eventually forms what becomes essentially a buddy-picture. Deliberately paced at the beginning to reveal both Evan’s current home life and past Vietnam skirmishes (Kirkus, who is always wrong, accuses Smith unable of deciding if he’s writing a post-traumatic war pastiche or a vulnerable loner thriller—duh!—he’s writing both) the thrills and action ratchet up soon enough along with a host of wonderfully realized characters, especially Evan’s Indian pal Das, who nearly steals the show. Not to be outdone, the baddies are as repugnant as spoiled curry, especially the Rao’s imported goon, the Pathan Dond. A long-bearded, sword-wielding psychotic, the Dond thinks no more of table-leg raping and strangling Evan’s secret lover in her own bed than he does of disemboweling a group of subway toughs in broad New York City daylight.
With a prose style rife with frags, disruptive ellipses and occasional not-quite-purple passages, Smith’s mesmeric, deceivingly languid style closes the circle of terror around both Evan and reader with unnerving skill and bravado. It’s on full display during Evan’s witness of the iron worker’s fatal fall near the novel’s opening:
(Evan) looked out over the wall, looked up—expecting some workman waving across the way—looked up and saw through soft, richly golden light, a girl come falling.
She fell from far higher, out from the red steel skeleton of the building in progress—not more than yards away across empty air.
Evan heard her call again…something. Only a startled exclamation—certainly not a scream, not a shriek as she fell. And he saw her, and she saw him watching as she fell so seemingly slowly, lying spread-eagled in the air, wearing a tool belt, work clothes—jeans, shirt—all softly beaten by the air, and her long black hair bannering out, ruffling in the wind of descent so Evan heard it through the silence.
The book predicts our current phobia of foreign terrorists more than half a decade before 9/11, though when written it was probably more a metaphor for ‘70’s big business developers ravaging NY. Some may read bias bordering jingoism in Smith’s subtest. Evan is an unapologetic WASP war hero haunted by Vietnam dreams, his Aryan wife Catherine a privileged snob who, in the book’s explosive finale, wielding a shotgun to defend hearth and home against foreign invaders, is found “standing high at the end of the deck as faint gunsmoke drifted, her blond hair frosted white in moonlight, standing with the full moon behind her—a northern goddess, and grim.”
Still, Smith smooths any outright bigotry with the appearance of the Hispanic Fuentes and, more pointedly, in the wonderful Hindustani Ram Das whom Evan regards at novel’s end as his dearest friend. Walking New York streets together, Das, worried that the invasion of so many foreigners is taking its crowding toll on the Yale, Groton’s native soil, is reminded by a worldly-minded Evan: “The city was made by foreigners.” True enough. But Smith makes it sound just short of a warning.
Hidden agendas or not, there’s no denying the power of Smith’s story-telling during scenes both thoughtfully introspective and savagely, almost uncomfortably real. It’s not even the outward threat of foreign gangsters that provides Evan’s biggest nightmares, but the doubting indifference of associates and family around him. Where’s the real enemy here--self-assured American complacency and arrogance? Is the most obvious metaphor Evan Scott himself, the disillusioned lonely big city dweller hiding in plain sight? Clearly the war has left its scars and scares enfolded deep--going off to one thankless war only to return home to another kind of battlefield in its own way just as bafflingly isolated.
War in all its deceiving faces, though only shown in brief flashbacks, permeates the book as a constant, lurking menace. Early on, we’re shown Evan coveting dead Marine buddy Beckwith’s bowie knife, kept ever sharp and oiled in loving memory back in Evan’s civilian life. And in dark contrast, we see the demonic Dond’s lethal sword, dispatching the subway toughs with near psychotic detachment. We just know, as events unfold, these gleaming weapons are destined to meet in an analogous war from which only one can emerge. When it finally comes, Smith’s vertiginous stage is the unfinished lattice of narrow I-beams wrapping Evan’s own workplace, high amid the darkened canyons of NY. It’s one of the book’s defining and perhaps most memorable moments: a clash of cultures and mindsets that in its fury morphs the flailing combatants into a near balletic death dance that turns all soldiers into borderless brothers. Evan’s first glimpse of the Pathan is like an explosively evil apparition of Chernabog himself:
Something was running toward him over the steel. Huge, oddly shaped, and galloping with a long cloth coat swept back by its speed—looking barely human in moonlight, its head thrown back in a great grin of pleasure, long moon-silvered beard, long hair fallen loose and streaming behind it…this man came running barefoot over the steel as if there were no spaces, no emptiness, as if sparse structures were solid flooring all across. There was no sound but the eager padding of his feet, their swift rhythm humming through the steel.
Running away like a terrified child against such indomitable fierceness, Evan finds soon enough that the Dond savage is far swifter, and his shrieking saber a good deal longer than the Bowie war memento the young architect brought along for comfort. When the Pathan’s blade finally descends:
--Evan was saved by Beckwith’s knife and what was left of college fencing, and by twenty years of polo. Born and built for this, the Bowie hooked the Pathan’s blade as it came, turned it just enough, and carried it clanging away. And Evan’s right hand and arm and shoulder—packed with muscle from years of swinging a mallet whipping left and right from a galloping pony—his hand and arm and shoulder parried, and took the shock.
The Dond stood back and relaxed, a bird of prey at ease, and stared at Evan considering, while they both breathed. The two of them were alone in the world; there was no world beside the narrow beam they fought on, nothing beyond the striking circle of their knives. They had become as close as friends, and knew each other.
Do yourself a solid and know this book.
And the poetic prowess of very cutting edge action/suspense Mitchell Smith-style.
Read
April 26, 2025there's a funny disconnect b/w this plush, sensory prose (stg smith has better olfactory details than just about anybody) & the deep silliness of the plot. like... this starts w/ somebody murdered via bamboo spears hidden in a dessert dumpling (??); couple hundo pp later our connecticut architect protag knife fights a dacoit atop an unfinished NYC skyscraper; and it is, uh, not a lot less zany in between. it's like if you got somebody on the order of a robert stone to novelize one of those doofy '90s thrillers they used to run on TNT or USA 3pm of a saturday afternoon. an orientalist streak (not fully offset by a wonderful portrayal of the brave ram dass lal) & one rly gnarly act of sexual violence against a woman keep this from the rarefied heights of stone city (read it read it read it); but if you dug that one, you'll dig much of what's here. not quite le corbussin', but enjoyed it frank lloyd wright to the end.
July 25, 2022
Started out strong, faded about half way through and the rest of it was prolonged to the point I don't recall the ending. Ah well.
October 20, 2013
An old-money New York architect witnesses a murder. An unusual group of Indian death-cult mobsters comes after him and his family to silence him, but no one--not his bosses, not the cops, not even his wife--believes him that the accumulating deaths are anything but unrelated accidents and random crimes. Like the star of an 80s action movie, he takes the fight to the Kali-worshipping gangsters.
Karma is one of Smith's early works, and he got a LOT better with Sacrifice and the Snowfall trilogy. The first half of the book simply bored me, it was hard to relate to a depressed, blue-blooded country club New Englander. I didn't really engage until the hero's extramarital affair was uncovered; he found himself in the interesting position of having to convince his wife that their daughter's life was in mortal danger from implausible bad guys immediately after having destroyed his credibility with her. THAT was juicy.
Karma is one of Smith's early works, and he got a LOT better with Sacrifice and the Snowfall trilogy. The first half of the book simply bored me, it was hard to relate to a depressed, blue-blooded country club New Englander. I didn't really engage until the hero's extramarital affair was uncovered; he found himself in the interesting position of having to convince his wife that their daughter's life was in mortal danger from implausible bad guys immediately after having destroyed his credibility with her. THAT was juicy.
November 13, 2023
I moved recently and one of the first things I love doing is to check out the new-to-me local libraries.
I go to the library nearest my new home, and imagine my surprise when I see an entire section devoted to local authors. If you follow my reviews, you probably know that I read a lot of indies, and small pubs, etc... So here I am staring at this section of local authors (not sure if they're indie or not, but they're local, which I find KEWL) and I see this book 'Karma' by Mitchell Smith.
The pages are yellowed. The spine is worn. A piece is torn from the back cover somehow.
I'm aware that many book snobs would call those atrocities as being criminal activity...
BUT not me. I saw it as a well-read book. One that I couldn't resist.
So I checked it out.
It's classified as thriller, and it is that, but also so much more.
The characters made this book delightful. The world building and cast of characters help my interest.
An architect witnesses a woman plunging to death from a building that is being constructed, and finds himself involved in something sinister. A classic story of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I go to the library nearest my new home, and imagine my surprise when I see an entire section devoted to local authors. If you follow my reviews, you probably know that I read a lot of indies, and small pubs, etc... So here I am staring at this section of local authors (not sure if they're indie or not, but they're local, which I find KEWL) and I see this book 'Karma' by Mitchell Smith.
The pages are yellowed. The spine is worn. A piece is torn from the back cover somehow.
I'm aware that many book snobs would call those atrocities as being criminal activity...
BUT not me. I saw it as a well-read book. One that I couldn't resist.
So I checked it out.
It's classified as thriller, and it is that, but also so much more.
The characters made this book delightful. The world building and cast of characters help my interest.
An architect witnesses a woman plunging to death from a building that is being constructed, and finds himself involved in something sinister. A classic story of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
February 9, 2020
I was bored by most of this book. The author describes everything in so much detail, too much detail. I found it difficult to stay interested. The last 30 pages were the best part of the whole thing.
December 11, 2019
I won't be reading another by this author. First, I can't believe he actually got published. Second, the book is full of racial slurs. Not my cup of tea.
August 5, 2021
One of the best and most beautifully written books I ever read!
January 3, 2026
Bigly!
*** 3 Stars.
*** 3 Stars.
October 22, 2013
An unreadable mess. Chapter after chapter of the main character doing absolutely nothing to progress the story, twisted/confusing prose with almost no significant detail...I gave up less than 70 pages in. Which I hate to do, but when the guy who's supposed to be driving the narrative simply repeats the story of his one supposedly extraordinary experience - witnessing a woman's death - to several different characters, over and over again, telling us readers what we already know because we read it as it happened to him...what's the point in continuing? I only have so much patience, waiting for him to actually do something and maybe discover something more about what he's involved in. Not worth the effort.
June 14, 2013
This book features an ancient crime syndicate from India which I had never heard of before and which may or may not exist. I thought it was an interesting read, although there do seem to be a few holes in the plot. The book did hold my attention, though, and I raced through it. It's just the sort of book to have with you when you are traveling to address the waiting on boredom that confront you on all sides as you wait for trains to arrive at airports, to board airplanes, to wait for the airplanes to take off, etc.
May 1, 2013
The rating I gave this book isn't really fair because I couldn't get past the third chapter. WAY too many details. My brain is too clouded to concentrate at that level right now. I even left it in my hotel room because I didn't have any hope that I would pick it up again. Probably should have given it another chance but there are so many other books on my list that I had to simply move on.
September 5, 2009
Very Good; man stumbles on to conspiracy by Indian contractors to use bad equipment in building construction - and they are willing to kill everyone and their families who get in their way.
Read
April 9, 2008this is a great book and i recommend it to everyone
Want to read
September 19, 2018Synopsis: everything's perfect for Evan Scott until he sees a woman plunge thirty stories to her death.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews