"Fugitive" is a book that brings to mind the phrase "what a shame" for a number of reasons.

In the entirety of its 352 pages, this "thriller" offers no thrills. Its logic is either so shoddy or so obvious that the reader cannot help but stop every five pages to massage temples or reach for a drink of something stiff.

Descriptions of people and places are perfunctory and flaccid. Phillip Margolin's characters are often nothing more than mouthpieces for heaping piles of exposition. They should be pitied, for they are all crippled by their creator. He continually denies them authentic humanity, content to make them types, not people.

In this novel, a slimy literary agent is nothing more than that, the same for a whip-smart, do-gooder attorney -- Margolin's standby heroine, Amanda Jaffe -- and a cannibalistic, Idi Amin-like dictator.

The characters are all brought into one another's orbits by one man, Charlie Marsh, a former con man/New Age guru who fled the U.S. after being charged with the murder of a politician he was cuckolding. However, it is in the African country of Batanga where he meets Jean-Claude Baptiste, the aforementioned dictator, sleeps with his wife and then must escape back home to avoid torture, death and possibly being made into a meal.

This, of course, comes long after he was awarded an early release from a prison sentence for saving the warden's life during a hostage situation.

Oh, forget it.

There are plenty of writers who could take a plot as ludicrous as this and, if not make it seem plausible, at least invest it with vigor and interest and make it an enjoyable, trashy read, but Margolin is not one of them.

This is a novel completely lacking in bravery or passion. There are constant hints throughout of what puerile fun "Fugitive" could have been -- with sex, murder, corruption, cannibalism -- but nearly all opportunities have been ignored. Instead, and what a shame. Margolin has written a novel that is about as interesting as a ficus plant in a doctor's office.

Raphael Peterson is a freelance writer living in Roanoke.