This weekend was one for mindless crime novels, and it taught me yet again that there are vast differences between good mindless and lousy mindless novels.
Florida Roadkill is a crazy romp of a novel, a caper story on meth. There are something like a dozen characters chasing after a bag containing $5 million, and only the people who actually have the money have no idea that they're carrying $5 million in the trunk of their car. Most of the dozen villains die in one ironic way or another, sometimes at each others hands, and it's general hilarity all the way through, partly because there are sympathetic characters as such.
Rainfall wants to be a high-octane thriller about an assassin who learns the error of his ways, but is embroiled too deeply into evil plots to walk away. But the stock characters (the assassin with a heart of gold, the brilliant hacker, the evil government functionary) render the whole thing ultra predictable instead.
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