I carefully collected and pasted all your kind
recommendations and then, for reasons way beyond my control,
utterly lacked the time to read through them, make decisions,
and shop.
Instead, I tore through all the TBRs
I could reach in search of a book that fit the January genre.
I had Angry Moon available because Terrill Lankford is a
listmate here or somewhere else, and I was pretty sure
somebody here had mentioned the title. Besides, the cover has
a giant Jules Verne-type pitted moon looming over a cityscape
dripping molten lava; it looks like HB science fiction.
Actually, having read it, I'd put it
in the horror section, based on my minimal knowledge of
either genre.
In some ways, it's a hitman book,
setting our protagonist hitman against his former trainee
turned informant and then against his mentor hitman, turned
worse. Our hitman is morally superior to other hitmen because
he has standards: He won't kill or risk killing innocent
bystanders as he assassinates his assigned targets. Then,
having been smitten by a wooden female plot device, he
develops even higher standards and decides to forgo his
hitman career altogether, after he knits up a few loose
ends.
This book has lots of
beyond-gratuitous violence, beyond slaughters of entire drug
cartel armies, heads on stakes, and shop equipment grinding
off the surface of our hero's forehead. In addition, our
protag has pneumonia, described in ways that do not belong in
books read for pleasure. All in all, though, it's a readable
book, if you can get by the above, plus the overall plot
that
SPOILER
the mentor hitman cannot be killed, even by a bomb that
utterly destroys the car he's driving in, even by a direct
headshot, even by--well, I forget what he tried next--because
his severed spinal column, his crushed skull, and his
dangling eyeball regenerate. He is a wolfman.
I'll go back to the reading list at
my leisure one of these days and find HBSF set in the near
future in which our hero teleports or something. Next up for
me in crime fiction is Stroby's The Barbed-Wire Kiss, which I
acquired for a discussion on another list that has already
finished discussing it and didn't much like it. But I love
the title and have to try it.
Joy, suddenly having too much life and not enough time to
read
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