The Ginger Star, Altered Carbon, the Ragman's Memory, Chasing Darkness, Grave Peril

It feels like a long time since I last wrote anything, so I guess I've got a fair amount to catch up on...

Two audiobooks and three real books... probably just as well I don't have so much to say about each one.

In The Ginger Star, Leigh Brackett revisits and updates Eric John Stark, himself an updating of the Tarzan story. It's good, pulpy fun, but also very vivid. It's interesting to compare to, say, The Lensman books, where a lot goes on, but I don't have such a good picture in my head of what the various planets and places looked like. I find that Brackett conjures up a very conrete sense of what Skaith looks like.

I also read Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon, sort of the other end of the science fiction scale from The Ginger Star. Morgan is very interested in grim, gritty realism. The gimmick that drives the whole story, that people can have their minds moved from body to body, is thoroughly explored, and given a reasonably scientific basis. In the end, I feel like it was a bit too grim and gritty for me -- I found the book interesting, but have absolutely no desire to read anything else by Morgan.

I have had The Ragman's Memory on my shelf for a while, but hadn't gotten around to it. I have to be in the right frame of mind to start an Archer Mayor book; they're all so slow at first. This one stayed slow pretty much the whole way through, and I thought it was his most successful book yet. The problem with the others has been that the fireworks at the end don't really suit the methodical nature of the police investigation leading up to them. Here, Mayor delivers a solid, deliberate novel that seems to be as much about the people as about the mystery.

Chasing Darkness is Robert Crais's latest Elvis Cole novel, and I really enjoyed it. He had Elvis shot up very badly in the last book, and I think he was signalling a change of direction in his writing. With Elvis so wounded, the novels can't really end with the huge firefights that have been his signature, and I think this is a good thing. At first, they were exciting, but they got ridiculous, as each book had to top the one before. Here, Crais is writing at a slower tempo, and leaving us with some open questions at the end. It's still a popcorn novel, but it's his best novel in quite a while.

Lastly, I read Grave Peril, in which Butcher has opened up a number of plot threads. I'm interested to see where he'll take them, but it feels almost pointless to talk about the book now, until I see where it goes.