Heartwood, A Pinch of Stuff, Skin and Bones, Six Bad Things

I was in CA this weekend for a wonderful bar mitzvah. Travelling's great, because you get to see new places, meet great people, and, of course, the plane is a great time to read :-).

On the way down, I read A Pinch of Snuff by Reginald Hill and Skin and Bones by Paul Levine. Well, I say I read them, but I could only get through about 80 pages of the latter (I confess, I left the book in the airport). It was just very underwhelming -- not funny (though it tried), not suspenseful (though it tried), and not engaging.

Pinch of Snuff, though, was a different story. Hill writes mysteries the way that only the British authors seem to pull off -- that dry satirical inflection to everything, shining a spotlight on everyone's foibles, in a very aloof way (reminds me of P.D. James). It also seems that Hill decided that he made Dalziel, the older, more conservative policeman, too sympathetic in the previous book in the series (this one is the fourth), and pushed him back into being boorish and as often wrong as right. He makes a great foil for Pascoe, which is why he's there, of course, but in this novel they're more evenly matched than before. All in all, very enjoyable, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

On the way back, I finished Heartwood, the second book about Billy Bob Holland by James Lee Burke. The polar opposite of the aloof Reginald Hill, Burke wants to get you up close to each of his characters. Even though this is marketed as a mystery novel, it isn't really -- Burke is more interested in showing how the divides of wealth and poverty can drive the people in a town to desperation. In the end, the novel unfolds with all the seeming inevitability (and body count) of an Elizabethan tragedy.

Lastly, I read Six Bad Things, Charlie Huston's follow-up to Caught Stealing, which I wrote about here. I loved Six Bad Things, but for pretty much all the reasons that I loved Caught Stealing. Huston doesn't break any new ground with this novel, but he does the same-old-same-old so well that I know I'll be reading the final book in the trilogy.