Recently I saw the movie The Bourne Identity, starring Matt Damon and a very good German actress named Franka Potente. As often happens in action movies, Potente was wasted in what I call a “girlfriend role”: she had no real purpose other than to be protected by, and to love, the dominant hero. Dina McCall’s The Perfect Lie reminded me a bit of that movie, mostly because the author has placed her heroine squarely in a girlfriend role – odd in a genre written primarily for women.

Felicity Blaine told her lover, Jonah Slade, that she aborted their child. He left her, not knowing she’d lied. She bore his son, Evan, and raised him as heir to the Blaine business empire. Sixteen years later, Undercover CIA agent Jonah Slade mistakenly believes that he has no family, and is therefore invulnerable to his many enemies. During a mission, he kills the son of a brutal Colombian drug lord named Miguel Calderone. In retaliation, Calderone’s minions kill Felicity and kidnap fifteen-year-old Evan. Calderone doesn’t realize that Jonah doesn’t know of Evan’s existence.

Mercedes Blaine, Felicity’s younger sister, always adored Jonah and missed him when he left. She told Evan about his father, and as a result was exiled and disowned from the Blaine family. When Evan is kidnapped, Macie hunts down Jonah and tells him everything. Together, the two of them seek the son he never knew he had.

There’s no careful balancing of romance and suspense in this book: the suspense plot takes over. We spend at least as much time with the villains as we do with our protagonists. There are sections from the point of view of Miguel Calderone, Calderone’s girlfriend, a drug dealer, the drug dealer’s bodyguard, an American assassin, guards, thugs, etc. If there’s a bad guy in this book, you can be sure that you will get a look inside his or her head at some point. Most of these chapters were extremely boring. Calderone’s thoughts are exactly the same every time we hear them, and it’s dull to spend long pages listening to his vainglorious dreams of vengeance. The sections from his henchmen’s points of view serve only to repeatedly hammer home the point that, yes, Calderone is a bad guy.

Since the suspense plot is so important to the book, it’s a pity that it doesn’t hang together very well. I’m particularly dissatisfied with the revelation about the person who told Calderone about Jonah’s son Evan. Why didn’t this person also tell Calderone that Jonah doesn’t know about Evan’s existence? And the way Jonah deals with this person is almost ridiculous. Instead of simply making an arrest, there’s a contrived sequence of events that ends in a big explosion. Again, I’m reminded of action movies in which explosions are a big payoff. They really don’t have the same impact in print – characters behaving like real people would have been more satisfactory.

What with all the time we spend inside the heads of the various bad guys, and the chapters detailing Evan’s experiences in captivity, we spend very little time with Macie and Jonah. The romance is barely there. It’s as though that the author decided that, since we all know that Macie and Jonah are going to get together, there’s no point in wasting time with the details. On page 129, Macie asks Jonah if she wants to come to the kitchen to have a sandwich with her, and he thinks, “If things had been different, he would have followed her to the ends of the earth.” I thought, “Whoa, where did that come from?”

I really have no idea who these characters are or why they fall in love. Jonah is the more well-drawn of the two – he feels guilty about Evan and grieves over the time he lost with his son. He’s also a well-trained, emotionless killer. This is a rather violent book, much of the violence at Jonah’s hands. Macie is not fazed by this for an instant. Macie has no real personality. Apparently she’s a successful businesswoman, but we don’t know how she became one, nor do we see any part of that life. She is attractive, grief-stricken, frightened, and loves Jonah. That’s it.

All of this is conveyed in some very choppy writing – I found that surprising, considering how experienced this author is. She tells us what happens without making much of an effort to put us on the scene or to make it seem real for us. Also, for some reason she has a bad guy named The Snowman and a good guy named Sugarman – that’s just confusing.

I enjoyed The Bourne Identity (the movie, not the Robert Ludlum book, which I haven’t read). It was action-packed and had a tiny romance thrown in. The Perfect Lie is also action-packed and has a bit of romance, but it’s not nearly as good. There is so much emphasis on the violent, repetitive musings and actions of a large number of villains, and sections from so many different points of view, that we never get to know the protagonists at all. As a result I found them one-dimensional, and the book uninteresting.

This is the first book I’ve read by McCall (also known as Sharon Sala), and while it’s readable, it’s very disappointing. From all accounts McCall knows how to write good books, and she certainly should know that, whether she’s writing suspense or romance, characters with emotional depth are a must. The Perfect Lie doesn’t have them, and I can’t recommend it.