Cari Mora
By Thomas Harris
ISBN # 9781538750148
Author’s Website: thomasharris.com
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
From the creator of Hannibal Lecter and The Silence of the Lambs comes a story of evil, greed, and the consequences of dark obsession.
Twenty-five million dollars in cartel gold lies hidden beneath a mansion on the Miami Beach waterfront. Ruthless men have tracked it for years. Leading the pack is Hans-Peter Schneider. Driven by unspeakable appetites, he makes a living fleshing out the violent fantasies of other, richer men.
Cari Mora, caretaker of the house, has escaped from the violence in her native country. She stays in Miami on a wobbly Temporary Protected Status, subject to the iron whim of ICE. She works at many jobs to survive. Beautiful, marked by war, Cari catches the eye of Hans-Peter as he closes in on the treasure. But Cari Mora has surprising skills, and her will to survive has been tested before.
Monsters lurk in the crevices between male desire and female survival. No other writer in the last century has conjured those monsters with more terrifying brilliance than Thomas Harris. Cari Mora, his sixth novel, is the long-awaited return of an American master.
Review
Cari Mora is the compelling story of resilience, inner strength, death, and the secrets of old drug lords. The book tells the story of Caridad “Cari” Mora, an immigrant from Colombia who was kidnapped at a young age to serve in the FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) and was able to escape and now has made a life in Miami, Florida, US. While juggling many jobs, such as, food vendor, Veterinarian assistant at the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, and many others to make ends meet. She is also the caretaker of a mansion that used to be owned by the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, which needs to have a live in caretaker for insurance issues and is rented constantly to movie studios and rich people.
Great name for the story with an interesting topic and characters that had so many backgrounds. At first when reading the summary of the book I didn’t imagine the personal story that Cari was going to have, and her survival skills amazed me to no end. There were many characters that worked so hard in the story to steal the gold, and many of them died, but they were interesting characters.
While most characters were interesting, Hans-Peter was a creep. Some authors like to throw around the word sadistic psychopath when describing their characters, but in this case the word does describe Han, and the author used it correctly. What else can you expect from the creator of Hannibal Lecter series, than a monster just as Hans-Peter and the people he works with, my skin crawled every time he thought about women and what he wanted to do to them.
This story had a lot of history about Colombia that was very interesting and even though it mostly centers around Cari, it still gave flavor to the story for the reader to know what made Cari who she is, and the characters that wanted the gold so bad. It is always nice having some history lessons in the books I read.
This story is dark and shows the darkest part of humans, who can be monsters, but it shows the fire that people have to survive adversities.
If you are a fan of Thomas Harris, the author of the Hannibal Lecter series, then I recommend you Cari Mora. Cari Mora is a woman that has fought all her life to survive and when she thinks her life is settling and getting good outside forces come at her again and she needs to fight once more.
