Jaws 2 by Hank Searls, 244 pages
"Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."
The small town of Amity, New York, is still recovering years after a series of deadly shark attacks gave it an unfortunate reputation with the summer tourists it depends upon to survive. The town's hopes are now pinned on legalized gambling, with a real estate developer already beginning construction on a new casino in anticipation of Albany's consent. Police Chief Martin Brody, the man who killed the killer shark, is also recovering after his traumatic experiences, as is his older son, Mike, who saw a man eaten alive mere feet away from him. At least there isn't much police work in the quiet town, until an ornery vacationing cop shoots a seal on the beach, and Brody ends up with a wounded baby seal convalescing in his garage and an angry cop cooling off in his jail. Brody's stubborn unwillingness to drop the case leads to trouble with the state authorities, endangering the casino deal, and this concerns some shady characters who provided some of the developer's financial backing, the kind of men who are willing to take drastic measures to protect their investment.
And, also, a shark is eating people.
The film Jaws 2, sometimes derisively referred to as "Jaws the 13th" for its aping of slasher movie tropes, is a very different beast from its novelization. The movie largely rehashes the first film's plot, with Brody recognizing the danger and fighting to take the necessary precautions against the resistance of the mayor and town council, who fear the financial disaster that will result, all while the shark picks off victims a couple at a time. In the novelization, Brody doesn't even know another shark is out there until three-quarters of the way through, just in time for the climax. The involvement of organized crime in the Amity real estate market, which is the real focus of the novelization, was alluded to in the original novel Jaws, and was apparently part of an early script for Jaws 2 before being dropped, leaving behind the vestigial character of Len Peterson, the real estate developer who is Ellen Brody's boss in the film (but not the book). Although Searls deserves credit for not merely repeating what was done before, he negates that goodwill by reducing the killer shark to a mere subplot, especially when his main plot is not particularly interesting.
A correction: I assumed the character of Len Peterson was a vestige of the Mafia subplot, but John LeMay, in his book Jaws Unmade, states that the character is actually left over from another abandoned subplot in which he would have had an affair with Ellen Brody.
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