Mexico Set is the sequel to Len Deighton's Berlin Game, which I liked but wasn't crazy about. I wrote that Deighton spent too much time focused on office politics, and that it put me off.
Oddly enough, I enjoyed Mexico Set a great deal, even though it also focuses heavily on Bernard Samson's daily life. I think that the stakes felt higher here -- Bernie is coping with the loss of his wife, and her father is trying to take custody of Bernie's children, claiming that Bernie is not a good father. Bernie is as wonderfully dyspeptic as ever, and his jaundiced view is probably the biggest attraction of the book.
I enjoyed Carol McConnell's Bone by Bone; she gets away from some of the schtick of the Mallory books, which was starting to wear thin. I thought the climax was a bit overwrought, but other than that it was a solid book. I was also interested to see that she could write a book without a maladjusted genius as a central character. But it also didn't blow me away the way her best books do -- I'm looking forward to see what she does outside of the mallory milieu, and I'm hoping this book is just a hopeful sign along the way.
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