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Title: Tourists by Richard B. Wright ISBN: 0-8027-0810-2 Publisher: Walker & Co Pub. Date: October, 1984 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $13.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Tourists
Comment: A superb mix of suspense and humour, Tourists is the tale of Canadian English instructor Philip Bannister's confession of multiple murder as a solution to a bad vacation. His trip to Mexico with his wife, Joan, becomes a nightmare of the absurd once the not-so-loving couple link up with two live wires from Lincoln, Nebraska--Ted and Corky Hacker. The Americans seem to bring out the worst in Joan Bannister, much to poor Philip's chagrin, and Ted's behaviour towards Philip is dangerously unpredictable, swinging from bullying to friendly to violent, long before Ted's wife is coming on to our confused Canadian and he is reciprocating.

The book is fraught with sexual tension, as the Hackers make various shocking overtures to the Bannisters, either as a sort of tag-team, or individually, when the other isn't looking. Ted Hacker in particular seems to delight in childish mindgames. Philip finds himself in a terrible position when he wishes the Hackers would disappear--their aggravating, disruptive presence becomes more and more intolerable--only to see his wife joining their camp, so to speak, and accusing him of being a wet blanket.

Incidents erupting between the two couples are at times amusing, and at times riotous, but there is always a touch of the unsettling. Ted Hacker is creepily persistent in his psycho-torture of Philip, and Philip, in turn, slowly develops into a narrator on the edge, who becomes like a firecracker waiting to explode. When things between these tourists do come to a head--when Philip can take no more of his vacation from hell--the final chapters seem a bit hasty. Philip makes a leap that perhaps is not fully explained. Sure, we've seen him endure degradation, but we are not provided with the internal workings of his mind, as this narrator is pushed to a wicked deed of, what, revenge?--insanity?--closure and return to peace? Hard to say why our narrator does what he does in the final pages. Nevertheless, the book mostly succeeds as some kind of comic-crime novel with a disturbing edge to it.