I finished a couple of books that weren't really bad, were even pretty good, but didn't really do anything for me.
Craig Johnson's Death Without Company is a mystery set in a small town in Wyoming. The problem with small-town mystery series is that it's pretty hard to justify more than one case in a row. In the first book, there was a spree of 3 murders, more, we're told, than happened in the last decade. Now, just a month later, there's another spree... That aside, the folksy jokey tone just doesn't work for me. It felt a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Wyoming, where everyone's a smart-aleck.
Having said all that, Johnson is a perceptive writer. His nature descriptions are beautiful. Although the interpersonal relationships he describes don't interest me, they're definitely well-written. I can see why the amazon reviews are in general so positive.
Heartsick pulls off the neat trick of starting out like a Red Dragon-wannabe, but ending up in a completely different place. If nothing else, Chelsea McCain deserves kudos for not treading down the well-worn Hannibal Lector path of a brilliant psycho in jail teaching our detective how to find the bad guy. Sadly, in every other respect I found it pretty unmemorable. Again, I can see how it's good for the right audience, but not my thing.
Lastly, I wrote about Master of the Delta in my previous post. It ended up as good as I'd hoped, a totally gut-wrenching conclusion. As you approach the ending, it starts to take on more and more of an air of tragedy, where the narrator's willful obstinacy leads to an inevitable conclusion. And the final couple of paragraphs were just perfect. Wrenching, inevitable in retrospect, but still surprising the first time you read them.
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