For those who want to try reading what's called a "cozy mystery" there seem to be a fairly fixed set of sub-categories from which to choose. There areFor those who want to try reading what's called a "cozy mystery" there seem to be a fairly fixed set of sub-categories from which to choose. There are the classics of the Miss Marple variety, stories set in bakeries, stories involving small-town witches, and cat books. As a genre, cozy mysteries have largely been taken over by the self-publishing world much the way of romance novels. Readers of these genres consume vast quantities of books each year, know what they want, and prefer not to pay premium prices for books they know they'll finish with in a week or less. Alas, when I started glancing through the opening pages of some of the self-published cozies on Amazon, the writing turned me away pretty quickly. I'm not a literary snob by any means, but weak prose pulls me out of the story.
If all this leads you to conclude I'm not a proper cozy mystery reader and my opinions on the subject should be largely ignored, I agree completely. I can only offer my impressions with the caveat that more expert readers of the genre will likely disagree.
Lilian Jackson Braun can reasonably be seen as part of the vanguard of cat-based cozy mysteries. Her series spanned more than two dozen books and over two decades. The Cat Who Could Read Backwards is the first in the series and introduces us to experienced journalist Qwilleran and the Siamese backwards-reading cat, Koko.
It's an easy book to read, with skillful prose and a deft touch apparent in the plot about the murder of an art dealer. Characters are generally likeable and one quickly gets used to Qwilleran's semi-psychic moustache (which twitches many, many times) and Koko's superhuman intelligence.
If the genre of cozy mystery didn't exist and you had to categorize The Cat Who Could Read Backwards into something else, I'd be tempted to call it magical realism without the social commentary. There's a sense of the town being populated by interesting characters and that semi-magical stuff happens without any real questioning (Quill never wonders why his moustache twitches at strange times nor how it's possible that a cat seems to be able to read).
I doubt I'll remember much of the book a week from now. The underlying value of cozy mysteries seems to be creating a sense of safety for the reader. No gore, no sex, no swearing, experts in the genre will warn you. There's nothing wrong with that. People should be able to read books without those things if that's what they want from the experience. What troubled me a bit more though is that somehow this exhortation towards keeping the reader safe stretches into the emotional and social domain as well. None of the relationships ever go very deep or are particularly convincing. They're the sort of relationships you have with a nice local cheese shop owner. You tell each other funny things, display your quirks, but never get into anything that might feel real. That polite distance appears in all other relationships as well, making it feel a bit over-mannered and under-developed. This, in modern terms, is what we might call a feature rather than a bug, but still, it left me feeling a bit . . . unconvinced.
Hopefully others get a deeper experience out of Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who Could Read Backwards. It's a pleasant read, but for me, that insistence on staying so firmly within narrow boundaries of writer-reader politesse kept me from wanting to continue with the series....more
Have you ever watched someone perform an amazing feat only to then wonder why on earth they'd choose to do it? I'm talking about the kid on YouTubeHave you ever watched someone perform an amazing feat only to then wonder why on earth they'd choose to do it? I'm talking about the kid on YouTube who successfully juggles fifteen cereal boxes in the air, somehow managing to get a few bits from each one in his mouth, spits them up into a bowl and then shows you a perfectly-arranged mixture of fifteen different cereal brands? Or the guy who shows up on a local TV morning show and can recite the entire works of Tolstoy backwards in German while on a unicycle? It's that sense of, "Wow, this person has done something amazing! Phenomenal! Super . . . wait, why did they do that? With all that talent, why did they use it just to be weird?"
That's how I came away from reading The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem, a fabulously-written pseudo detective story that I doubt fans of detective stories will ever want to read.
Let me start by giving the simple, hooky description of the book: The Feral Detective is a noir mystery in which the protagonist is the client rather than the private investigator.
Easy, right?
Phoebe Siegler is a woman on a mission: to find the missing daughter of her best friend Rosalyn. Or maybe she's just trying to escape her suffocating and mundane New York life. Unless of course she's really just having a slow-moving nervous breakdown over the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency. All three are true, all three are fascinating in different ways. The combination feels oddly resonant – as if Lethem is showing us the otherwise inexplicable and largely indefensible inner algorithms behind our own actions. We think we're acting for noble reasons, but underneath, we're just launching ourselves into whatever bizarre experiences will simultaneously drug us out of our pain and give us the amusing anecdotes we need to construct a plausible explanation for how we got there.
Notice how I started with a pretty saleable premise: a detective story in which the client is the protagonist, and then pretty quickly got somewhere weird enough that you're not sure what's going on with this book?
What's going on is a lot of brilliant writing. Lethem gives the first-person narration a noir feel without cribbing his descriptive passages from the 1930's and 40's masters, instead giving Phoebe her own noir voice that's contemporary, credible, and vivid. The book's also compulsively readable: short chapters, fun characters, and a plot that isn't afraid to take you out into the desert to visit weird ex-hippy tribes who may or not be raiding each other, committing murders, and looking for a new king to rule them.
Where the book challenges the reader is in the way it not only subverts mystery and thriller tropes but actively revels in using them to deny you the satisfaction those tropes usually bring. You never, not for a second, get that sense of justice being restored. What's even stranger is that it's not as if Lethem's written one of those ponderously ambiguous "I'm going to deny you any real answers and leave the reader unsettled" books that only those writers who deem the genre beneath them (yet want the money it generates) choose to produce once in a while. Lethem really does give you the answers, the big action sequences, the love scenes, the punch-ups. He just does it in a way that leaves you wondering if any of it meant anything at all, or if – in an age where Donald Trump (yeah, he's mentioned more than will make you comfortable) can become president of the United States – such concepts as justice lose any real meaning.
Did that sound like it's a political book? Well it's not, because even that would make too much sense. The Feral Detective is, well, what it is: a beautifully written book that seems to accomplish exactly what it set out to do, which just happens to be to give fans of detective fiction everything they want while leaving them completely uncomfortable about why they want it.
I'm really glad I read The Feral Detective. Now I'm going to go bang my head against a wall and wait for the pain to stop....more
The problem with great mystery series –you know, the ones everybody cites when the subject of writers whose depth and skill elevates the books beyondThe problem with great mystery series – you know, the ones everybody cites when the subject of writers whose depth and skill elevates the books beyond simple commercial crime fiction – is that when you come to the first book with expectations that are too high. That was the case for me with Ian Rankin's Knots and Crosses.
It's a good first book, but that word, "first", carries with it a number of consequences that you don't consider when you know its the beginning of an incredibly successful and beloved series. D.I. Rebus isn't all that well defined here, for example. He's a collection of attributes that come up moment to moment as if the author were rolling dice. When it comes up with a 2, you get the hard-nosed determined cop. Roll a 3 and you have the hard-drinking, divorced, screwed-up-his-life middle-aged man. A six? Well now, that gets you the traumatized former SAS trainee who can't remember key details of his life. None of these sides to Rebus are bad, it's only that they feel as if they come up largely at random.
This sense of discontinuity can actually be enjoyable at times. In fact, it tends to lend a bit of a literary air to the story since those books pride themselves on the messiness of human beings. And Rebus certainly is messy. But that sense of realism falls apart when you sometimes wonder just how bad he is at his job. It's a bit like watching one of those movie cops who "breaks all the rules" only Rebus never seems to accomplish anything. When the plot needs the case to move ahead, someone else generally brings the clue or it just kind of falls into everyone's lap.
There are moments when the book seems to abandon the police procedural genre altogether, such as when Rebus goes under hypnosis to relive the trauma that's taken away some of his key memories. I actually loved those moments. Ian Rankin does a fantastic job of exposing wounds, of complicating characters' lives, of bringing us those messy and very real moments in relationships, such as Rebus's first sexual encounter with the love interest in the novel (I'm not saying her name just to avoid spoiling anything, but she's an excellent character and not just "the love interest").
The problems I had with Knots and Crosses were only that the actual genre aspects felt disjointed and uncommitted – as if the author wasn't quite sure he wanted to be a crime novelist. This is in many ways the inverse of the problems I have reading most big-name conventional mysteries and thrillers, which is that everything is so slick and by-the-numbers that an hour after putting the book down it'll have melted into the mass of all the dozens or hundreds of others that felt like the exact same experience.
I imagine John Rebus, often cited as one of the great detective characters of the age, long ago found his footing and enabled Rankin to combine his fascination with intriguing characters alongside those elements of police procedurals that lend steadying rails to a novel. I also suspect, had I read the book fresh in 1987 when it was first published, I'd have found it to be a mesmerizing and daring detective story that broke the mold of the time. Alas, I came to the series a little late, which filled me with too many expectations, which is quite possibly the worst way to read a book that deserves an unjaundiced eye....more
I was curious about this book after finding out that it was both an Amazon #1 bestseller in the UK and that its author, L.J. Ross, had become one ofI was curious about this book after finding out that it was both an Amazon #1 bestseller in the UK and that its author, L.J. Ross, had become one of the very top selling crime writers in the UK – no small achievement for a self-published author. What I found reading Holy Island was a somewhat by-the-numbers mystery novel that I suspect the author has long surpassed in quality with the subsequent thirteen books in the series.
Holy Island hits all the conventional police detective beats of yesteryear. There's an exceptionally handsome, skilled, and hard-nosed chief inspector, an exceptionally beautiful, intelligent, and caring love interest, along with a cast of secondary characters who seem like they could be lifted from any number of other detective novels or television shows. This isn't a criticism, really – I'm getting the sense more and more lately that the larger readership for mystery novels wants this same cast to appear over and over. Different names, the occasional character quirks, but the same basic formulation.
The middle act of mystery novels is often where I get a bit lost. It makes perfect sense that the detective needs to interrogate witnesses, search for clues, and run down false leads. But in no other genre is one so forcefully reminded that nothing you encounter is going to really change things until the end. That guy they're chasing halfway through? He's not the killer. You know this because the book is screaming at you that the real killer will only be revealed at the end. For this reason, drama and intrigue have to come from other places – from troubling personal relationships, unexpected plot twists, and the unveiling of themes that make one question the underlying meaning of what's going on. Maybe some of that was present in Holy Island for other readers, but I didn't get much of it, and found myself often skimming.
It's not a bad book, though. The story delivers on all the promises of the genre, and I particularly liked the epilogue that gives the reader reason to want to continue with the series. As I said at the start, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I'd've liked, but it did make me suspect the later books in the series get better and that those readers who stick with LJ Ross's Northumberland mysteries will be rewarded for doing so....more
I rarely find a book that fits my sense of three stars: solid, readable, unremarkable. Usually a book like that ends up losing my interest too quicklyI rarely find a book that fits my sense of three stars: solid, readable, unremarkable. Usually a book like that ends up losing my interest too quickly to get to the end. Peter May's Extraordinary People, however, managed to keep my interest up on the strength of his fluid writing style and the generally fun characters.
Enzo is one of those nice-guy detectives found in so many crime novels. He's messed up his family life, his career isn't really going anywhere, but despite this, those around him (and the reader) generally find him likeable and trustworthy. He's not an athlete, but big enough to intimidate when he needs to. He's pushing fifty, but younger women see to throw themselves at him. That last part is rendered unbelievable only by the fact that he has a pony tail.
May's a skilled writer, his sense of character and pacing no doubt honed through his television writing. This, in addition to Enzo's personal family problems, kept me reading even after I'd largely lost interest in the overall murder mystery, which itself felt at times contrived and almost out of date – fitting better with that much earlier style of mystery in which killers come up with impossibly convoluted sets of clues to leave for reasons only vaguely believable.
All of this left me happy enough to have finished the book, but not reaching for the next one in the series. However it did make me want to try more of Peter May's books, so I'll be grabbing one of those forthwith....more
I really have no business criticizing James Patterson books. Having read three or four of them already and complained about every one, I should knowI really have no business criticizing James Patterson books. Having read three or four of them already and complained about every one, I should know better by now and recognize that his style and that of his collaborators just isn't for me. So take this review with a grain of salt.
What drew me to this book was the lure of a new Nancy Drew-esque character and the fact that I'd never read a YA mystery before. Most of the YA I've read in the past has been fantasy, so I wanted to explore a bit outside that genre. As is often the case with James Patterson books, the premise and quick-paced opening chapters seemed compelling enough to give it a read. The problem was that it soon devolved into a contrived mess.
Mystery thrillers aren't meant to be hyper-realistic. You expect the protagonist to extravagantly skilled and heroic, the events to be more bombastic than plausible, and the way other characters to behave to be perhaps a little convenient to the plot. With Confessions of a Murder Suspect, though, things just continuously go off the rails. The police are ridiculously menacing and incompetent in equal measure. Tandy and her siblings are preposterously super-powered (due to an odd deviation into unexplained pseudo science fiction late in the second act). The deceased parents read as mildly psychotic except when the book wants us to momentarily sympathize with them and then suddenly expects a kind word here or there, remembered from the past, to excuse everything else. I'd be fine with this if it worked, but it doesn't. Suffice it to say, no one reads as engaging or believable.
The pace itself, though careening as it moves along, also plods in a strange way. Patterson in interviews prides himself on fast-moving plots with short chapters. But here it's not that the scenes are actually short, only that they're cut into multiple chapters. So a single conversation ends up spanning two or three chapters broken up with Tandy saying something like, "And then he said something that blew my mind." It read to me as a cheap tactic, and worse, it didn't actually feel effective in moving things along.
None of this makes the book unreadable. There's a story there, though not a particularly satisfying ending. Those expecting a mystery in which clues are laid out and you can try along with the detective to figure out the solution will be disappointed by the contrived way in which the deaths took place and the answer was found. Those looking for fast-paced thrills will probably find the rapid "Oh no, we're in danger" followed two pages later by, "No, looks like we're fine" to be a little dull after a while.
But for all that, maybe those reading it just for Tandy's emotional reactions to events, to her feelings of being alternately powerless and powerful, will enjoy the experience. Not every book suits every reader and as I made clear at the outset, I've really got no business reading books from an author whose work I've not enjoyed in the past. Loads of people love James Patterson, and maybe the things they enjoy in his books are here by the bucketload. I just couldn't quite find them.
Maybe it says something about Patterson's talent for premise and concept that despite all my complaints, I still find myself now and then picking up one of his books and thinking, "Hmm . . . maybe this time . . ."...more
Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a beautifully written gothic tale that I found myself struggling to enjoy for reasons I could only really understandMarina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a beautifully written gothic tale that I found myself struggling to enjoy for reasons I could only really understand once I reached the conclusion. Set in 1980 Barcelona, the novel transports the reader to a series of semi-hidden locations within the city as fifteen year old Oscar and the enigmatic and lovely Marina unravel a mystery that is by turns fantastical and horrific. If all that sounds great, well, it is, and yet something just didn't work for me about the book.
If I had to place the genre I'd say it's a literary YA gothic horror adventure that never quite fulfills any of those things. While it features a teenaged protagonist, it felt less like a young adult story and more like a recounting of an older man's recollections of their youth. Though gothic in style – which is to say filled with lengthy, detailed, and lyrical descriptions of settings – that sensibility never really reached inside Oscar himself who is a sort of everyman defined only by his attraction for Marina. And while there were horror and adventure elements aplenty in the book, none of them ever felt entirely fulfilled because ultimately none of them felt particularly connected to Oscar and Marina. They were just two characters who happened to get caught up in someone else's dark tale of love, loss, genius and madness to Oscar and Marina. There is a connection, of course, but its so tenuous that it never really got off the ground for me.
Others may find that a deeper reading of the book yields far greater satisfaction. The writing is lovely and while entirely accessible to a general audience is vastly richer than most commercial fiction. There's a willingness to choose nuance over flash without sacrificing the sense that we're deep inside a dark and intriguing adventure story. Finally, Zafón both foreshadows and delivers tragedy where the novel demands it.
In the end, Marina was one of those books where I found myself at the end wondering if perhaps I should have gone back to re-read it from the beginning and gave all those beautiful sentences the time and attention they deserved. That's my advice, I suppose: if the synopsis appeals to you, pick up the book and appreciate it at a slower pace than you might otherwise do with a YA novel. That might be the key to finding the magic of Marina.
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn was my favourite novel of last year, so I've been waiting expectantly for The Huntress to arrive, and while there's noThe Alice Network by Kate Quinn was my favourite novel of last year, so I've been waiting expectantly for The Huntress to arrive, and while there's no question it's a longer book and a slower read, by the end it proved just as impressive a novel.
Quinn sets both The Alice Network and The Huntress in and around World War II, while skirting most of the terrain found in other books set in that era. The focus is less on the battles, the armies, the political figures, and more on those whose war takes place at the edges: spies, spy hunters, escaped prisoners, and above all, the repercussions to individual lives once the war is over.
The plot moves very gradually with this one, and more than once I found myself wishing it were shorter. It's not that the pace is off, but rather it's clearly moving the way Quinn wants it to, with the reader aware that a confrontation is coming, but building suspense over the long haul rather than paying anything off too early. With most novels, I probably wouldn't choose to wait that long, but in the case of the Huntress, the writing itself kept me going.
I'm not quite sure what it is I like so much about Kate Quinn's writing, other than to say it feels perfectly and thoughtfully balanced. Her prose is neither florid nor sparse, neither avoids the lingo of the era in which it sets nor hits us over the head with it. You have the clear sense of being in that place and time, yet there's never a sense of distance from the characters.
The Huntress follows three main viewpoint characters: Ian, the war-weary, almost-but-not-quite dashing journalist who has given up writing in favour of finding war criminals. Nina, the blunt, reckless, and daring Russian pilot who's quite happy to die – or murder – to ensure the eponymous Huntress from the title gets her due. Finally, there's Jordan, the all-American young woman who longs to be a photographer while still determined to do right by her family.
Into their lives – at three very different points in time – comes the Huntress, a ruthless killer who has taken someone from each of them and who could now get away with it, disappearing into the American post-war landscape into a respectable life.
I won't go into more details of the plot, but suffice it to say that the final confrontation is well worth the wait. More importantly, the relationships between the characters keeps the story moving as we come to root for them to find purpose and happiness into the uncertain world left behind by the war.
The Huntress is an expertly-told tale of the tensions between justice and revenge, between forgiving others and forgiving oneself, and most of all, of making peace with the past....more
I don't often read police procedurals, I suspect because I'm always a bit nervous they'll just plod on forever in technical detail and lengthyI don't often read police procedurals, I suspect because I'm always a bit nervous they'll just plod on forever in technical detail and lengthy diatribes on how crimes are only ever solved by dull, methodical inches. Contrast this with private detective novels which tend to focus on instinct, charm, and a healthy dose of daring. Lucky for me, the Puppet Show blended both those worlds into a fast-paced and twisty thriller.
While there are loads of plot twists in the story, fans of realism in their crime fiction will no doubt enjoy the details and specificity about the structure and functioning of various law enforcement divisions within the book's setting of Cumbria in England. M.W. Craven populates that world with characters both familiar and strange. His duo of Washington Poe, the unusually named but steadfastly heroic former D.I. (that's Detective Inspector for non-Brits) and now temporary D.S. (Detective Sargent is a demotion in this case) and the brilliant-but-eccentric Tilly Bradshaw (I.Q. 200, social skills -10) exemplifies the book's bombastic nature and appeal.
The prose emphasizes clarity and concision over stylistic trickery. Sometimes I found myself being inducted into more of Poe's moral philosophy on people and issues than I wanted, but I imagine many readers will likely enjoy this a great deal and share in Poe's perspectives. There were a couple of scenes I found myself questioning, specifically dealing with Poe's response to bullying. While lots of people would likely cheer them, I wondered about the agency of the character being protected. Again, though, I suspect more readers will appreciate these scenes than will find cause for complaint.
Fast-paced and cleverly twisty, The Puppet Show will no doubt bring loads of new crime thriller fans back for more of Washington Poe's stoic heroism and Tilly Bradshaw's brilliant quirkiness....more
Here's the worst way possible to experience Robert Galbraith's Cormorant Strike series: first, read the novel of the Cuckoo's Calling (which isHere's the worst way possible to experience Robert Galbraith's Cormorant Strike series: first, read the novel of the Cuckoo's Calling (which is excellent), then watch the BBC TV series of the first three books (which is also excellent), but don't read the second and third novels themselves (very dumb thing to do), and then, finally, read the fourth novel, Lethal White.
Doing all this results in conflating the books with the TV shows, the characters on the page with the excellent actors on the screen, and ending up where you can't tell whether Lethal White is just not a very good book, or whether I kept trying to force the wrong set of expectations on it. All this to say: don't trust my review. I could be horribly wrong.
Lethal White is one part mystery novel, one part relationship story. Those two come together often enough, but here they really felt very separate – and very much affected my enjoyment of the book.
For some reason I've managed to go through this series without ever taking seriously the notion of a romance between Strike and Ellacott. It seemed too obvious, which is why I assumed it was intentionally being swept aside both in the first book and the TV series. Lethal White showed that I was both clearly wrong and . . . possibly right?
There's a constant stream of romantic tension between Robin and Cormoran, including the usually cringe-worthy scenes of him thinking she's thinking the opposite of what she's really thinking, and her thinking he must be thinking the opposite of . . . you get the idea. If you love wondering aloud, "But if only they'd just talk about their feelings, they'd realize they're in love!" then this is the book for you. If all that sounded dismissive, I should add that I really enjoyed those scenes, so I may actually be one of those people.
The main mystery narrative struck me as long, meandering, and convoluted. At no point did I really care about those characters or who did what and why. There's such a stark contrast between the depth given to the two main characters versus the largely one-note treatment the rest get that the mystery itself never stuck with me.
So, with all that complaining aside, why not just say this is a terrible book and leave it at that? Mostly I'd have to say it's because Galbraith (J.K. Rowling) is just such a good writer that she could probably just jot down her shopping list and somehow it would keep my interest. She's always pointing the camera in an interesting direction even if the scene itself isn't all that interesting. Also, both Strike and Ellacott are such fundamentally charming leads that any time they're dealing with their personal lives you find yourself rooting for something as small as whether Strike gets up the stairs without injuring his leg. That said, we really do hear about that leg a lot, which brings up what was most troublesome about this fourth book in the series: it's just so damned long.
At the end of the day Lethal White has a straight (if incredibly long) mystery storyline and a relationship storyline and neither seems explored in enough depth to make scene after scene after scene of the same sort of action and dialogue hold together. By the end, the book felt ponderous, and I was finding it hard not to skim.
Not everyone will have the same issues I did, and I worry that maybe having watched the TV series in-between coloured my experience of reading this fourth novel – making me expect a pace that's not justified for the type of book Galbraith chose to write. Bottom line: give the first couple of chapters a read. If you like them, expect to enjoy many, many more....more
I keep looking for private eye thrillers that I can enjoy, but the usual suspects leave me cold. I’ll pick up a Patterson or a Child or any of theI keep looking for private eye thrillers that I can enjoy, but the usual suspects leave me cold. I’ll pick up a Patterson or a Child or any of the other big names and within a page I’m regretting the decision. The characters feel kind of dated, the dialogue flat and forced, and the plot overly contrived. It’s not like I’m a literary snob by any stretch nor do I expect or desire overly lyrical prose. I just want something where fast-paced is matched with well-written. I’d never read anything by T. Jefferson Parker before, but The Room of White Fire hit the spot for me.
Roland Ford is a former-cop, former-soldier, current P.I. with the requisite dead wife and troubled past. Normally that alone would feel kind of stale to me, but Parker pulls it off by imbuing his protagonist with a believable malaise and yet without the sort of “life sucks, love sucks, everything sucks” retreat from the world I’ve seen elsewhere. Blessedly, he doesn’t spend every night drowning at the bottom of a bottle.
The story itself is dark and deals with difficult subjects, but this is balanced by a cast of sidekicks and villains that’s varied and who bring a certain optimism to the book. I won’t say more, suffice it to say that I read the book in a single day on holiday and enjoyed it a lot. The Room of White Fire isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for me it provided a well-written and somewhat more believable take on the Jack Reacher tough-guy character. I’m likely to pick up the sequel, Swift Vengeance, too....more
Reading Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood felt to me like being six years old, having someone hand me War & Peace andReading Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood felt to me like being six years old, having someone hand me War & Peace and then asking me to review it. “Umm . . . boring and, like, I didn’t get it,” would be my six-year-old self’s reply – not because the book itself isn’t great, but because I lacked the skill and experience to understand it. In other words, So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood might be a brilliant, inciteful novel about the unreliability of memory, but if so it’s one I might be too dumb to appreciate properly.
The novel begins as a kind of faux noir, which is to say, it lies to you by pretending to be a kind of dark mystery tale filled with strange characters who may be trying to either blackmail or otherwise deceive the main character. It goes on like that for a while before you realize the book isn’t a noir at all, nor really a mystery, or at least, not the mystery you signed up for. This kind of playing with the reader can be wonderful, though I confess I get kind of weary of people abusing noir as a sub genre where they want to abscond with the style while then ignoring any kind of obligation to the form itself.
There’s no real resolution to be found here. Characters come on the page, seemingly important, only to disappear a few chapters later never to return. Other characters only briefly mentioned earlier, who leave no real impression on the reader or the narrator, turn out to be of vital consequence to the mystery – not, you understand, the mystery you thought you were following, but rather the one the narrator has utterly forgotten.
So is it a bad book? No. There’s flair and cunning to the writing, to the way the story plays self-consciously with time and with memory. Underneath it all there’s a sense of something real that we struggle to fully appreciate by the time the story reaches its end. This is a short book, a novella, really, but because I never found myself invested in the characters it ended up feeling like it went on and on.
There were moments, of course, glimmers of something compelling, but they were all too fleeting for me. In the end, I felt much like the narrator: as though there had once been a very important story there, but by the time I reached the final page of So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood, I’d long forgotten it....more
I feel bad reviewing James Patterson books. At least, I feel like I'm bad at reviewing them. I'm always looking for what it is that works about hisI feel bad reviewing James Patterson books. At least, I feel like I'm bad at reviewing them. I'm always looking for what it is that works about his novels, so there's definitely something there, but the parts I dislike always feel so much more pronounced. Here's what I've finally come up with: the plots are fast-paced and twisty and they work. The characters and writing don't.
It's remarkable to find 126 chapters (and an epilogue) in a book this short. That's because Patterson goes from scene setup to conflict to cliff-hanger in just a couple of pages. Sometimes it's contrived (" . . . and then I got a phone call. Oh, god." sort of thing), other times it's an actual plot twist that makes you want to see what comes next. Most of all, it's kind of effortless. I found my attention wandering through a lot of scenes and it really didn't matter. The story itself could almost entirely be told by just reading the first and last sentences of each chapter. It's the in-between that's the problem.
When I say the plot works, I mean, in a work of heightened fiction, you can suspend your disbelief and go along with it – much like you can a plot in a fantasy novel that turns on finding a magic sword. No doubt there's plenty of realism in the details of 1st To Die, but those quickly get overshadowed by how contrived the characters are. It's not just a matter of being one-dimensional (I mean, Frodo is a pretty amazing character but are there really a lot of sides to him?), but that they make decisions, have emotional crashes, and fall in love without any real character development bringing them to those moments. The word that keeps coming to mind is "earned". None of the emotional drama or big decisions feel earned.
That brings us to the writing, which can easily be confused with "sentences" and how elaborate or clever they are, but it's really not: it's the means by which the story gets conveyed. In 1st To Die, it's not the overly-simplicity of the prose that irritates, but the over-simplification of how the characters seem to think and talk to each other. It's a bit like watching a soap opera, but those often had loads of time to get characters from one state to another. Here it always feels contrived.
Anyway, no more complaining about someone who is, in fact, one of the most successful authors in the world. His readers aren't dumb – they know what they like and Patterson does it well. For someone who doesn't enjoy his writing, however, it's very hard to figure out what you're supposed to like about his books. Then again, I think I've read two of his novellas and two of his full-length novels now, so it's past time I stop criticizing the guy and read something else....more
There are lots of ways to hook a reader into picking up a novel: intriguing characters, the promise of a particular genre or sub-genre, or specificThere are lots of ways to hook a reader into picking up a novel: intriguing characters, the promise of a particular genre or sub-genre, or specific details of the plot itself. In the case of The 7 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (the title gets an extra half death in the U.S. edition), it's the premise: imagine trying to solve an Agatha Christy-style mystery while stuck in a Groundhog Day time loop, repeating the same day over and over, only each time you're inside the body of a different person. It's a tricky structure to pull off, but Stuart Turton, in his debut novel, does so with precision and an unrelenting set of twists and turns.
This is one of those books where it's dangerous to talk in too much detail because that risks spoiling the experience of the story itself. My advice to those about to approach The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is actually quite simple: learn the names of every character as you go and make a note of each location. Treat the book a bit like a game - a kind of Groundhog Day version of Clue. Independent of the mystery itself ("who killed Evelyn Hardcastle") there are loads of puzzles along the way, and these are a lot more fun if you're not trying to remember who the characters are. Turton doesn't make it easy on you, given they all have very similar, very English names, and they seem to pretty much all be white, which gives you one less point of distinction with which to separate them. When reading a novel with lots of characters, it's not uncommon to ignore the ones who seem secondary, but in The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, almost no one is secondary. You need to keep track of all of them to get full enjoyment from the story.
Turton succeeds in making a mystery in which the central conceit of body switching is both necessary for solving it and an intriguing device for the reader to experience the story. By the time I reached the end, I was tempted to start again at the beginning just to follow the plot more closely – and it's a truly convoluted plot. Fans of cozy mysteries will probably be more skilled at deciphering the novel than I was, which reminded me that reading is itself a talent – one I need to work on myself.
Not all is satisfying in the book, however. By the end, I was impressed with the narrative feat that Turton had executed and yet found myself wondering if there was any greater purpose to it than the game itself. No great or grand thematic questions were addressed, no particular reason why it was set in the time and place it was. There's a vague attempt at the end to allude to the question of redemption and measuring a person by what they would do if they knew the clock would be reset at the end of the day. However this wasn't so much a thread through the novel as a kind of afterthought. That said, the same argument could be made against The Martian - another high concept premise that hooked me in. Maybe these books work better without being suffused with theme.
In the end, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a remarkably crafted debut novel that brings the promise of a fresh new mystery for fans of the genre to immerse themselves in. My recommendation is to keep a notepad handy for characters, times, and places, settle in for a wild ride, and don't forget your deerstalker hat: the game is afoot....more
I have a huge fondness for books about friendship, underdogs, and groups of misfits coming together. Slow Horses has that in spades, with its team ofI have a huge fondness for books about friendship, underdogs, and groups of misfits coming together. Slow Horses has that in spades, with its team of MI5 rejects, consigned to the forgotten heap that is Slough House – the building where agents who’ve royally screwed up find themselves. With that in mind, I would’ve expected to love Slow Horses, but in the end, I didn’t quite get there.
Mick Herron’s cast of characters are truly pitiable folks, but each has their own redeeming quality, and it’s satisfying to see how those qualities survive the barrage of disrespect they receive from the rest of MI5. There’s a strong streak of humour that runs through the novel – a thoroughly British mixture of banal and peculiar flaws contrasted with that equally British sense of ‘keep calm and carry on.’ At first it’s an amiable trait, but after a while I found myself never quite sure whether to take the story seriously or not. I think that stylistic choice – which might work wonderfully for other readers – was a big reason why I didn’t fall in love with the story or the characters.
Slow Horses takes a while to get moving, focusing too long for my taste on showing us just how unhappy every character is and how dull their lives. There’s a point to this, of course, but I think I’d have enjoyed the story more if it were made a little quicker, and that we’d had a bit more time with the characters once they’d come together. That, too, however, created some problems for me. Given how little affinity or affection they had for each other, I didn’t quite see any reason why they suddenly came to admire one another by the climax of the book. Yes, the external circumstances made it necessary, but there wasn’t much internally that prompted the change of heart.
There’s lots to like about Slow Horses, including qualities I haven’t noted here simply because they don’t happen to be ones of particular importance to me. I suggest reading the first few chapters, and if those grab you, then you’ll likely find Slow Horses by Mick Herron a worthy world of misfit spies and unlikely heroes. ...more
This was my first time reading The Da Vinci Code, and my first Dan Brown novel. Despite having been a blockbuster in its day, the book's received moreThis was my first time reading The Da Vinci Code, and my first Dan Brown novel. Despite having been a blockbuster in its day, the book's received more than its fair share of criticism. So I was curious to see how much of that was true, and how much might reasonably be characterized as the usual sour grapes that hits any creative work that ends up begin vastly more successful than anticipated.
Initially I found the book much better written than I'd expected, which tells me I'd absorbed too many of the aforementioned criticisms. The prose is spare but very much in service to its subject matter, which often consists of providing historical context and various conspiracy theories around secret societies. The story moves briskly, and there are more than enough twists and turns to satisfy thriller readers looking for something that's more focused on the mystery rather than ghoulish violence. It's easy to see why so many people fell in love with the book, and likely enjoyed reading – and later telling their friends – about semi-exotic locations given added dashes of spicy religious or mystical details. In short, the Da Vinci code delivers on its promises.
None of this makes it a perfect book, or even a great one if you're not keen on religious conspiracy thrillers. The various theories expounded become ponderous after a while, seemingly never letting up, which means the characters never really get to shine. The writing, too, became less appealing for me once I realized no one other than perhaps the albino Silas or the oh-so-British Leigh had any voice to speak of. This lack of personality was most notable with the protagonist, Robert Langdon. I'd challenge anyone to describe his voice to me as anything other than bland and didactic.
My personal criticisms of the book may be largely irrelevant, however, for those seeking to be entranced by the myriad conspiracies and religious historical theories – all of which are intriguing regardless of their relative credibility. The book is meant as entertainment, not history. Despite this, Brown makes a clear and concerted effort not to wholesale manufacture any historical evidence, and I imaging that, too, endears him to his millions of fans. The Da Vinci Code isn't my cup of tea, but I can understand why so many people adored it....more
A solid suspense thriller whose twists are somewhat undercut by a lack of depth in the characters. I'm glad I read Find Her, Gardner's eighth book inA solid suspense thriller whose twists are somewhat undercut by a lack of depth in the characters. I'm glad I read Find Her, Gardner's eighth book in the D.D. Warren series first as the characters in that book were considerably more nuanced while also being more engaging.
Alone reads as modestly ahead of its time in that it has all the qualities of the more recent crop of domestic thrillers that dominate the charts. Like those, we have a story centred around a woman whose troubled past has given her strength and resiliency at the cost of any chance for real happiness. This pessimistic outlook on the world lends domestic thrillers a kind of realism, though for me they sometimes read so cynically as to become less believable than even the more heroic thrillers out there. Maybe people are just generally that depressed and self-destructive, finding agency only through hurting themselves and everyone around them. I hope not, though.
Bobby Dodge, the honourable-but-miserable police sniper is a reasonable protagonist, but I found myself wondering why he was so doggedly determined to find the worst possible approach to every problem he tries to solve. In the book, characters continuously warn him against trusting Catherine – who alternates from determined heroine to old-school femme fatale with alarming speed. The reader knows, of course, that Bobby's going to take her side anyway, which is fine. You just find yourself wishing he'd take five minutes now and then to, you know, make sure he's got proof of his own innocence or maybe carry a tape recorder once in a while for all the people who reveal their evil plans to him.
It's worth noting that my problems with the book won't necessarily reflect anyone else's reading experience. Gardner is a good writer who knows how to balance both fast-paced thrills and the necessary pauses for the characters and the reader to process what's going on. I read the book in just a few days – something I find impossible with many books that don't suit my taste.
Where to leave off? I'm glad I found Lisa Gardner's work through Find Her first, because it's given me the impetus to keep reading her books that I might not have felt with Alone. Now the only question is which of her novels should I read next?...more
I've never read any of Lisa Gardner's books before, nor could I tell you where she fits in the pantheon of thriller writers. I picked up Find Her on aI've never read any of Lisa Gardner's books before, nor could I tell you where she fits in the pantheon of thriller writers. I picked up Find Her on a whim, not even aware that it was the eighth book in the series. Fortunately, none of that mattered. From the first page I was pulled into a tale of kidnapping and revenge that compelled me to read on through its potent mix of intense characters and surprising twists. Find Her is a mystery novel filled with suspense and tension and is, in fact, what I always assumed thrillers were supposed to be.
I'm not an aficionado of the thriller genre. Despite the ever-present promises of "thrills, chills, and unforgettable shocks", most of what I've read recently falls into two camps: surprisingly literate psychological character studies that stall in the middle through constant repetition of the same internal monologues without the story actually moving forward, and seemingly fast-paced plots so devoid of genuine character, originality, or believability that I find myself completely unengaged. So I was taken aback at how Lisa Gardner's Find Her so quickly got me wrapped up in the story, each chapter delivering unexpected twists and even correctly predicting those developments the reader anticipates only to subvert them pages later. The prose is economical without feeling stilted, with just enough nuance to give key characters their own voice, and the pacing shows Gardner knows exactly how and when to let the reader breathe and when to pull you along to the next chapter.
I don't want to give the impression that every aspect of the book is perfect, only that it reads as intentional and carefully conceived and executed. While Flora is a dark and compelling heroine for the story, the ostensible series lead, D.D. Warren, felt more like a passenger following along in her wake. I honestly couldn't tell you much about the detective other than that she reminds us repeatedly that she's not happy about being on restricted duty as a result of a recent injury. I didn't mind that so much, though, and I assume other books in the series give her more depth and attention. This book was very much about a young woman who'd suffered an absolutely horrifying long-term kidnapping only to come out the other end as someone she never expected or wanted to be. Find Her is the story of how she reconciles that past without apology, which feels exactly as it should be.
Find Her comes to a satisfying conclusion as a true mystery-suspence-thriller that neither talks down to the audience nor shies away from delivering the emotional tropes of the genres. I'm looking forward to reading more of Lisa Gardner's work....more
The Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief is a delightful pairing of Sherlockian mystery and Victorian occult tale that stays true to both withoutThe Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief is a delightful pairing of Sherlockian mystery and Victorian occult tale that stays true to both without falling prey to the clichés of either genre.
Tuttle's heroine, Di Lane (don't dare call her 'Aphrodite' Lane – she hates that), is daring and clever while still having to face challenges that emerge both from her times and within herself. Unlike the generic 'badass in a bodice' who lives in a deeply patriarchal society but somehow is completely free of its influence and found time to become the world's sleuth and greatest martial artist, Lane actively struggles to prove herself as a detective – especially when partnered with the positively Sherlock-like Mr Jesperson.
Jasper Jesperson makes an enjoyable partner for Lane, partly because he excels at so many things she doesn't, and does so with an ease and grace that makes you want to punch him every time he makes a brilliant deduction or plots an ingenious escape. Again, though, it's this very same unfairness that makes us root for Lane all the more.
In fact, Lane's weaknesses are precisely what make her interesting to follow. She's not starting out as a brilliant detective who can easily beat up her foes or outwit any conspiracy. Instead, she has to work at it – sometimes even against her own instincts. For the reader, this means getting both the joy of watching her succeed and the pain of watching her fail. Sometimes it's almost as if Tuttle intentionally wants us to think her heroine is just a frail girl – fitting uncomfortably into the attitudes of the time about a woman's role and the limits of her capabilities. But these moments are clearly meant to frustrate us and bring us into Lane's life and situation. Watching her uncover the truth of those events and overcome them becomes all the more satisfying.
What's more to say? Lisa Tuttle is a fantastic writer whose nuanced characters and flawless prose combine with a mastery of genre conventions that allow her to subvert them brilliantly. If this isn't your usual sub-genre of fantasy or mystery, think of The Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief as a wonderful, relaxing venture into unexplored territory....more
Mystery Man is a fun, light-hearted novel featuring the owner of a bookstore specializing in mysteries who gets roped into several of his own when aMystery Man is a fun, light-hearted novel featuring the owner of a bookstore specializing in mysteries who gets roped into several of his own when a private detective's office next door gets shuttered and his clients start coming to the bookstore looking for help.
I've always been a fan of what's called the "amateur detective" sub-genre of mystery novels. There's something appealing about watching a regular person try to use their much more limited means of investigation to solve a case rather than the professionals who simply follow their tried-and-true procedures. The trick, of course, is making this at least somewhat believable. Despite the humorous tone of the novel, Colin Bateman does an excellent job of making his unnamed protagonist's unusual situation viable. This makes it much easier to go along for the ride.
And what a ride it is.
Mystery Man both embraces and subverts traditional mystery plots. The first few cases are brief, almost short stories within the novel itself. The overarching case that spans the book unfolds more gradually, at first in between these other little mysteries, before taking centre stage. It was the fun way the plot unfolded that carried me along to the end of the book. This, however, points to the aspect of the novel that kept me from loving it.
We've all seen more than enough of the hard-boiled, wise-cracking alcoholic P.I. characters to last . . . well, until the next one someone finds a way to make fresh again. Bateman goes the opposite direction with his hero. First of all, the protagonist is never once named in the novel. It's hard to pin down his age or appearance, other than his own frequent references to being either unattractive or feeble or both. This anonymity felt a bit forced to me – like a device or writing experiment. Certainly there was no particular way in which it enriched the story. But the real problem is that our hero, in an effort to be un-heroic, becomes difficult to enjoy. It's not just that he's constantly reminding us that he's not strong or daring – he's incessantly telling us what callow thing he plans to do (mostly involving letting the woman he's in love with and who, for no reason evident in the novel, decides to love him, take a bullet for him. Over and over again.) His various neuroses are fine, except that they're so hyperbolized that you're not sure any of them are real. Mostly, though, it's the fact that these very broadly-painted character flaws just keep coming and going without any discernible arc to them.
I've probably over-emphasized my dislike of the main character. There are moments of charm in there, too. My hope would be that in the second novel in the series some kind of progression would appear to the character. However I'm not yet sure if I want to jump into that second book yet.
Despite my issues, there's a lot to love about Mystery Man, and if you're hankering for a crime novel that's a little different from the rest, that sparkles with excellent prose and interesting twists, then give the book a try.
The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay sits in the sweet-spot of my interest in crime fiction: the noir detective-with-a-problem (that isn't alcoholism).The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay sits in the sweet-spot of my interest in crime fiction: the noir detective-with-a-problem (that isn't alcoholism). It's not that I mind stories about alcoholics, it's just the trope of the hard-drinking detective wears on me after a while. In The Little Sleep, Mark Genevich is a private detective suffering from multiple narcoleptic symptoms stemming from a car accident that has left him sometimes falling asleep at the worst possible times, occasionally hallucinating clients and enemies, and sometimes even finding himself awake but paralyzed. With all this on his plate, Mark finds himself caught up in a case of blackmail that isn't at all what it seems.
Tremblay does a lot of things both well and boldly in The Little Sleep. He makes Mark Genevich's life exactly the kind of hell it would be given his circumstances. The car accident left him with severe facial deformity, his detective work is in no way sufficient to support himself – leaving him dependent on his mother, and his narcolepsy is no super-power-in-hiding. It sucks. Big time.
The author also knows his noir stylings. Descriptions are emotionally vivid, full of cynical malaise about the world and the people in it, characters live inside the grey rather than black and white – and those that seem reliably evil have a very good reason for it.
What held me back from enjoying the Little Sleep is that it does exactly what Tremblay intends: delivers a tale of a relentlessly depressive main character undergoing events largely beyond his control in a tale both horrifying and banal with an ending that leaves you with the same sense of dissatisfaction as that experienced by its hero. In that sense it almost feels more like a literary novel intentionally problematizing the genre precisely by leveraging its style and tropes and then forcing the reader to see them through the lens of what would more likely be true than what we're used to. In some ways it reminds me of Martin Amis's pseudo-noir, Night Train. However Night Train has the virtue that it's never blinding you to its intent and in that sense isn't trying to have it both ways. You read Night Train, you're going on a dark and troubling ride. The Little Sleep felt like it wanted to both subvert the genre while still asking you to read the next novel in the series. In this way it becomes kind of a slog in the second half. There's no real increase in the pace and the narrator continues to give excessively long descriptions of relatively simple things. There's an honesty to this in that, for the main character, time isn't really passing the way it does for us. However I still felt myself wishing he'd get on with it and stop telling me how a dirty couch represented all that was sad and humdrum about the world.
I suppose could've skipped most of my review by simply telling you that The Little Sleep is a well-written book that's no fun. However I think for plenty of readers it's skilful subversion of noir tropes will be appealing and worth a try. I found myself by the end wondering whether perhaps the next books in the series must be a little more enthusiastic, but didn't feel a sufficient urge to find out....more
I really enjoyed Josh Bazell's debut novel, Beat The Reaper, and after finishing it and going on to something else, found myself almost immediatelyI really enjoyed Josh Bazell's debut novel, Beat The Reaper, and after finishing it and going on to something else, found myself almost immediately missing the bold voice and skillful prose he brings to the action/mystery genre. I devoured this one in just a couple of days and now I wish Bazell had written more.
It's hard to describe Wild Thing because it contains a ton of contradictions. The plot, right from the get-go, is kind of preposterous: former hitman in witness protection who's working as a doctor on a cruise ship gets asked to be part of a trip to find a rumoured monster lurking beneath the surface of a small backwoods lake. So right there, you'd think this would either be farce or that brand of poorly-written "men's adventure" story that still shows up in bookstores only with better covers. The thing is, everything – and I mean everything – in Bazell's book is meticulously researched. The back of the book contains a huge chapter detailing the research behind every fact (and half the jokes) in the book. So there's something wonderful about knowing that someone went to that amount of work to construct a credible story that on the surface seems ludicrous.
Though there's plenty of humour and brazen tough-guy material in Bazell's books, there's also a somewhat self-conscious deconstruction of those tropes. It's an odd and precarious balance, and yet the book keeps it together, simultaneously unbelievable and yet credible. It's like watching an especially skilled writer decide to cut loose – almost daring the reader to see the flaws – while still retaining all of their talent and savvy. I suppose in the end that's what makes Wild Thing so strange to read: given what Bazell's chosen to write, you wonder why he goes to all the trouble of writing it so well. It's like suddenly finding an episode of Scooby Doo written by Aaron Sorkin.
If you love James Patterson, you'll probably dislike Josh Bazell for seeming as though he's mocking the very genre he's writing in. If, on the other hand, you keep wishing you could find a really good, really brazen adventure thriller that's both entertaining and treats the reader as if they might actually care about the details? Josh Bazell's your guy. I sure hope he writes another novel soon.
Beat The Reaper is pure modern noir. The dialogue is bold and stylish (with hints of Raymond Chandler), the characters are simultaneously over-the-topBeat The Reaper is pure modern noir. The dialogue is bold and stylish (with hints of Raymond Chandler), the characters are simultaneously over-the-top while still having those nuanced touches of humanity that makes you believe in them anyway, and the pace is relentless. It's an incredibly well-written book that I devoured in just a few days.
The story centres around an ex-hitman who winds up in witness protection, goes to med school, and becomes a resident at a hospital so vile you start to wonder who's worse: the mob or the medical system? Bazell himself is a doctor and brings all the visceral reality of a first-year resident to the story, bringing along some rather frightening facts about health care and the quirks of the human body. I enjoyed the way Bazell used the factual layer of the novel to hold up the more extreme and unlikely events that take place.
Some of those unlikely events felt like they pushed against the level of believability established in the novel. This particularly comes through in the climax, which, while I'm certain is technically possible, nonetheless pulled me out of the story for a bit as my head tried to wrap around what the main character, Peter Brown, was doing. I won't say more. Suffice to say, some will love the inventiveness of this scene and some will not.
If you're a fan of noir stories with a streak of humour and a brazen attitude, you'll love Beat The Reaper. I'm not surprised it's been optioned as a film with Leonardo Di Caprio attached. I'll be first in line for a ticket to see it....more
In 1948, the first eight African-American men joined the Atlanta police force. They weren't allowed squad cars, arresting white citizens, or evenIn 1948, the first eight African-American men joined the Atlanta police force. They weren't allowed squad cars, arresting white citizens, or even setting foot inside police headquarters. This makes life particularly challenging for two recent recruits, Boggs and Smith, as they investigate the murder of a young woman killed just hours after they'd seen her fleeing a white ex-cop's car. Any attempt to investigate the murder is met with resistance from their superiors – at most they're expected to be beat cops: patrolling the very confined neighbourhoods of "Darktown" and under no circumstances are they allowed to investigate crimes. This is the Jim Crow south, after all, and while the Ku Klux Klan might no be as visible as they'd been in the past, they were still incredible influential – including among the city's white police officers.
Darktown is the most vivid and disturbing crime novel I've read this year. The characters are nuanced, imperfect, and each wrestling in their own way with a social order that makes no sense – sometimes even to those who reinforce it. The struggles faced by Boggs and Smith, along with Rake, a sympathetic (though hardly revolutionary) white cop desperate to get out from under the influence of his very corrupt partner, feel so much darker and more difficult than in a conventional detective novel. The act of investigating the murder constitutes a breach not only of police regulations but of the social order itself.
Like the Nordic Noir novels that have become so popular over the past few years, Darktown is filled with a bleakness that lends weight to the tension and suspense. There are few moments of levity in the book, and these only counterpoints to the relentless sense of injustice that permeates the novel. But for all this, Thomas Mullen's book is infused with hope – hope that a crime no one wants investigated can be solved; hope that these first few African-America police officers can survive their first year on the job; and hope that somehow, life will get better for the citizens of Darktown.
The first in a series and, if reports are accurate, an upcoming television series, Darktown is the best crime novel I've read all year....more
I should confess up front that I'm not a fan of James Patterson's book (and should equally admit that this is only the second of his books that I'veI should confess up front that I'm not a fan of James Patterson's book (and should equally admit that this is only the second of his books that I've read.) I was curious about the "Bookshots" format, with its promise of being a roughly two-hour read with action packed pacing.
Bookshots is the imprint for Patterson's line of 150 page books (about 25k words), geared at being read on a single flight. In essence, these are novellas, which have been around forever. To be fair, though, where conventional novellas have tended to be a deep exploration of a relatively small set of plot events, Patterson's model is to take the plot for an entire novel and cut out everything that isn't the action – remove what isn't immediately gripping so that the reader never has the chance to get bored. In this I think French Kiss succeeds: it's exceedingly fast-paced, with events happening so fast you never really get a chance to wonder if any of those events was particularly believable or meaningful.
This is where the book begins to fall apart. Sure, lots of stuff happens, but none of it was particularly credible. A French detective on loan to the NYPD finds himself at the centre of a series of murders that are . . . dubiously constructed. Certainly none of them are explained in any remotely believable way. That part is, I think, forgivable because Patterson and co-author Richard DiLallo aren't aiming for a police procedural here but more of a light thriller.
I've always heard James Patterson talk about his love of characters, but the ones in French Kiss are entirely one-dimensional. What's worse is that they needn't be: Patterson and Dilallo spend a remarkable about of time repeating the same observations about each one: The partner is "by the book", the girlfriend is "incredibly beautiful", the boss is "grouchy but caring". This repetition of telling us what they're like grows a bit wearisome.
Still, French Kiss does do what Bookshots promises: gives you a fast-paced read that you won't have any trouble finishing. My hope is that Patterson and his co-authors can add something more to that model: a sense that there's some meaning behind the words....more
Many years ago I read the John Grisham novel The Client and found it to be a compelling legal thriller with engaging characters fighting their wayMany years ago I read the John Grisham novel The Client and found it to be a compelling legal thriller with engaging characters fighting their way through a tangle of threats both from criminals and from the law. I suppose I expected something similar from The Whistler, which is never fair to the author – there's no guarantee that one novel will have a similar style or approach to another. However it's hard for me to make sense of what Grisham was going for with this book, and even harder for me to appreciate it.
The Whistler is ostensibly the story of a lawyer working with a state Judicial Review Board tasked with investigating potentially crooked judges. She comes upon the largest case of her career – a twisted, decades long conspiracy involving corruption, casinos, bribes, and murder. As the case grows in scale and complexity, Lacy finds it harder and harder to know who to trust and to see how she can unwind the conspiracy.
That is, I think, a fair description of the promise of the novel. However what follows is a tale told almost entirely in long tracts of exposition with pages upon pages of the omniscient narrator telling us what's happened. This was odd enough in itself for a modern novel, but it was compounded for me by frequent repetition of the save retellings. The narrator would tell us what happened, then one character would tell another the same thing, then a little later that character would recount the same sequence of events for someone else. I don't want to overstate the case on this, but it was genuinely jarring for me after a while.
Lacy's a serviceable main character – she's committed, cautious, determined to live her life as she chooses. But I'd have trouble telling you more than that about her. In many ways she drifts in and out of the plot itself, suddenly becoming irrelevant and therefore disappearing while the narrator summarizes over chapters what others have done that's actually moved the case forward. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to describe in what way Lacy was actually important to the story. She generally gets handed things by other characters who just sort of decide to trust her, then she kind of hands that information off to someone else. Other than a fairly bolted-on bit of action near the end, Lacy is almost absent from the third act of the novel.
So if it's such a mess, why not give it one star? Because while the story felt stale and awkward to me as a reader, there was a sense of realism about it. I found myself thinking, "well, this is slow and boring, but then, probably a real investigation would feel this way." Lacking any real knowledge of such matters, I'm choosing to assume that Grisham – with a wealth of expertise and experience in these kinds of legal cases – is giving it to us somewhat in the way a lawyer working in judicial review would actually experience it. Also, for all my dislike of the book, I did finish reading it, which says something in and of itself. Most books that feel trite or dull to me, I simply don't finish, and therefore don't review them. So I guess what I'm saying is this: I didn't "get" John Grisham's The Whistler in a way that I could enjoy the book, but perhaps other readers who are more attuned to his style will see it differently....more
This is a difficult novel for me to review because a lot of my criticisms may be completely irrelevant to people who enjoy this kind of book. This wasThis is a difficult novel for me to review because a lot of my criticisms may be completely irrelevant to people who enjoy this kind of book. This was the first James Patterson novel I've read, and I'm mindful of the fact that my own opinions on the book are kind of irrelevant – he's got a legion of fans and they've already made up their minds on what they love and what they don't. So I'm going to point out what worked and didn't work for me, but if you're reaction to it is, "you're focusing on the wrong things! It's [insert story element here] that really matters!" then just know that you're probably right, but I just come at it from a different place.
Just a quick note here: I'm referring to James Patterson most of the time in terms of the general characteristics of his books, but of course this book was co-written with Maxine Paetro, so when I'm referring to Paterson it's about his general approach and the rest of the time I'm referring to the two of them.
Probably the most iconic aspect of Patterson's work is the lightning-fast pacing, and that's certainly true of Private. Things happen fast. Chapters are just a few pages long and there's not a lot of introspection. In fact, I found the scenes where there was some attempt at introspection felt a bit stiff and awkward – as if it's the illusion of emotional reflection without any genuine effort at it. But there's something incredibly powerful about that speed of pacing. I'd decided within a few chapters that I had fifteen things I didn't like about the book and yet it wasn't difficult to keep reading.
Another strength of the novel is that it holds nothing back: Patterson And Paetro deliver whatever would be the most exciting development next rather than bowing to either faux realism or saving stuff for subsequent books. To me that's a brave way to write: leaving it all out on the field and having to count on your creativity to come up with material for the next books.
So given all that, what was it I didn't like about the book? Everything else. The main character, Jack Morgan, is an ex-military pilot whose incredibly handsome, incredibly physically capable, every woman in the book loves him (and he's slept with a rather unnerving number of co-workers and wives of friends), while still being given the sheen of nobility. Oh, and he owns the worlds most prestigious private investigations firm with offices in every cool place you can think of. Also, the police – far from being antagonistic – actually hire Morgan's firm to help on the most exciting and dangerous cases.
One thing I found truly odd about the book was the number of storylines running through it. Morgan's dealing with four different cases, none of which are really narratively or thematically related, and so it's all kind of rushed (the book just shy of 80,000 words).
Finally, for me as a reader the prose felt stilted. Economical prose – writing that avoids the ten-dollar words or infinitely long sentences – is great, but I didn't actually find the prose transparent so much as simplistic. Things get described that don't seem to need it and other things get so glossed over as to feel meaningless to me.
Despite all that, I finished the book. I enjoyed the loose ends being tied up and some hints of future events are given that imply lots of conflict ahead. I can imagine a lot of readers really enjoying Patterson and Paetro's book for its readability and pacing. But for me, it felt like everything took the cheap and easy route, delivering trope after trope in an almost random order. I've no doubt Patterson and Paetro are talented writers who could deliver whatever style they wanted to, but this particular approach doesn't grab me as a reader....more
Sam Wiebe's an exceptional writer and it shows from the first page of Invisible Dead. For those who enjoyed his debut detective novel, Last of theSam Wiebe's an exceptional writer and it shows from the first page of Invisible Dead. For those who enjoyed his debut detective novel, Last of the Independents, his new Wakeland series feels very much like the next level of that storytelling. The prose is crisp, maintaining the economy and directness of the early noir writers but without following so closely as to dip into self-parody. The characters and relationships feel real and compelling, and his compassion for the subject matter – that of missing and murdered women too long ignored because of their status as sex workers – shows throughout. It's rare to find a private eye novel that feels as realistic as a police procedural, but that's what Wiebe does here. In fact, if there was one thing that kept the novel from being as enjoyable as I might like, it's simply that his commitment to realism outweights his commitment to entertainment. Where nordic noir tends to be bleak while maintaining a streak of undeniable idealism, Invisible Dead tends towards an honest – and therefore depressing – view of its subject matter. I suspect that this will make Wiebe's novels even more compelling for fans of realistic crime fiction....more
I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary. First, because I'm not much of a Christie fan, and second,I found myself surprised by how much I enjoyed Agatha Christie's The Secret Adversary. First, because I'm not much of a Christie fan, and second, because I doubt those who are would ever say this was one of her better books.
The Secret Adversary smacks of all those qualities modern writers are told to avoid at all costs: messy viewpoint that often dips into the omniscient, one-dimensional characters who can be described with a single adjective such as "perky" or "stolid", prose that often involves a great deal of exclamation points and the sort of dialogue that's hard to imagine real people ever uttering (even in the period of the 1920's in which the novel is set), a certain bigotry when those not of British descent are being described . . . the list goes on. So, it would be easy to dismiss the book, but here's the problem in doing so: the story carried me forward from the first page to the last. Tommy and Tuppence are fun characters – not necessarily the kind of people you often meet, but certainly ones you wish you could. The plot, though it twists and turns largely for the benefit of the characters rather than through an inherent logic, nonetheless keeps you guessing. In fact, even at the very end I wasn't sure who the villain – the Secret Adversary of the title – really was.
There's a kind of brilliance in being able to tell a somewhat unbelievable spy adventure in such a way that the reader doesn't care whether its credible or not, and the Secret Adversary does it well. It also reminded me of one other aspect of writing that's easy to forget: sometimes it's okay to write about characters we like rather than those who come with the requisite list of personal problems and distasteful characteristics that constitute the current notion of realism.
I guess what I'm saying is, I should probably have hated The Secret Adversary, but I didn't. In fact, I may even go so far as to pick up the sequel.
Note: the version I read came from the wonderful Standard Ebooks – a community-driven site that takes works in the public domain and gives them excellent typesetting and design, making them at least as pleasurable to read as currently published works....more
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