Review: Deadly Quicksilver Lies (Garrett Files #7) by Glen Cook

Deadly Quicksilver Lies (Garrett Files #7) by Glen Cook

Even though I am rereading the Garrett Files series, I was not anxious to pick up this volume. Memory told me that it was of significantly lower quality than the first six books and it’s just hard to get excited about rereading a book like that. Unfortunately, my memory was correct. I started and stopped the novel roughly ten times before biting the bullet and reading it through to the end. The problem is one of pacing. This book with “quicksilver” in the title reads like frozen molasses trying to find enough heat to drip off a table. It’s not that any particular part of the plot, or any particular onion layer of the mystery isn’t good, it’s that it happens so incredibly slowly.

 

It's a shame, because there are actually a lot of really good elements to this story. Garrett gets slammed into an insane asylum. The Deadman is asleep for the whole novel leaving Garrett to figure things out totally on his own. The primary villain is a fascinating figure with big surprises. There’s actually some very good action scenes as well. But these elements are stretched so far out that it just doesn’t save the story. Maybe if Cook had cut one hundred pages it would have been all right, but this one, I sadly report, just didn’t work for me.