Hi:
I saw awhile back there was a thread about good recent books.
Which I didn't participate in because I hadn't read much
recent stuff in quite awhile.
Somewhat embarrassed by this I blew some gift money on four
paperbacks I picked up, more or less at random, from the
local Borders. The only real rules were that they had to be
mass market pbs and that I didn't want to know too much about
them, because I wanted to come to them reasonably
fresh.
A COLD DAY IN PARADISE -- Steve Hamilton
Apparently won the Edgar and the Shamus, but, well, it
must've been a duff year, as this is a pretty blah
book.
Struggling PI with a bullet near his heart has to face ghosts
of his past -- a psycho who seemingly is haunting him again
-- in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Novel has been ridiculously
praised for it's plot, but it's really just THE LONG GOODBYE
crossed with some recent Crazy Killer bestsellers, and anyone
hep enough to pick up a PI novel from an unknown writer will
likely be hep enough to guess the plot turns pretty quickly,
even if somehow they've avoided Chandler or ALONG CAME A
SPIDER.
Cleanly, if somewhat antiseptically written in that
over-workshopped kind of way books sometimes get. Not a bad
book, and in a craftsmanlike way certainly well put together,
but I can appreciate a solidly put together chair without
necessarily wanting it in my house, if you follow.
SMOKER -- Greg Rucka
Part of an apparently popular series about an heroic
bodyguard. Part of my problem here is purely personal, I have
a hard time buying the notion of "heroic bodyguards". Say
"bodyguard" to me and I think either of fat loads guarding
hip-hop divas or Kevin Costner in that movie.
More seriously, our hero Kodiak is one of those hb characters
that everyone says is tough but doesn't ever seem to do
anything authoritatively hardass: fundamentally he's always
reacting, not acting. That makes sense for a bodyguard, but
there's something offputting about it generally: I would
suggest the idea is misconceived from the start.
This has to do with protecting a tobacco witness. I'm a
pretty serious anti-smoker myself, but the plot's also
weighed down with tobbacco settlement blahblah, stuff that
nobody's really going to care about twenty years from now. In
other words the book's pretty dated, and will only get more
so.
Still, at least here the prose has some individuality.
RAIN DOGS -- Sean Doolittle
I'm beginning to think there's only a set number of hb plots.
This one is another variant of the "City Boy with Problem
Runs to Country and Gets Involved with Crazies in the
Sticks", basically. They did twenty six kazillion movie
versions of this in the Seventies.
This is probably the best written of the four books here,
with some really very nice, very emotional prose moments. The
protag. is not especially admirable and Doolittle doesn't shy
away from that, either. But it suffers from a certain
unfocusness (is that a word? Now it is!). It never really
gets down in a groove to tell it's story, it's kind of
floating nervously all over the place. Another way to say it
is that it's nowhere near as intense as it should be.
Still, I might try some others from Doolittle. Someone to
watch.
HARD AS NAILS -- Dan Simmons
Last of the batch is in many ways the best. I've read and
liked other stuff by Simmons -- SF and especially his
neglected THE CROOK FACTORY, to my mind the ultimate best
example of that terrible sub-genre,
"historical figure solves a mystery, unaccountably".
Simmons is sort of an ideal of a popular writer, in a lot of
ways, and in a saner, kinder world he'd be a lot better known
than he is now. This is the first of this series that I've
read, and I liked it. Kurtz is believably tough (unlike
Kodiak), the story takes place in an unusual location
(Buffalo, NY) but Simmons doesn't shy away from the fact that
it's a craphole, which I really liked. Some of the violent
moments work very well.
And some don't. My only real beef here is that it's too
beholden to the modern formulas. Simmons writes close up
action very well; larger scale action rather less so. And
there's too much of the latter -- the books probably a
quarter or so too long, and most of the climax just doesn't
work because it's too fuzzed out with the guns blazing, bombs
tossing, etc. Books aren't movies, and don't really lend
themselves to these sorts of scenes.
So I wouldn't call it great, really. But it's good, and I'll
definitely check out some others in this series. Simmons,
though, should try his hand at a HardCase original, I think
he's the kind of guy who might really do a knockout with
one.
doug
Doug Bassett
dj_bassett@yahoo.com
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