The James Deans

I loved the first two Moe Praeger books (although I see I that I only blogged about the first one).  They share with most hard-boiled detective novels a certain level of cynicism, but they also have an underlying optimism that people can find a personal redemption, even in an environment that is corrupt.  It's a rare combination with in the field, and Coleman's thoughtful exploration of hope and redemption was appealing.

Unfortunately, the third novel, The James Deans, is in much more standard territory.  There is a too-good-to-be-true politician, his wealthy handler, an corrupt policeman, and other standard accoutrements of the genre.  It's not a bad book per se (although the plot is a bit overly convoluted), and Reed Farrell Coleman is a solid writer, but it didn't really stand out for me.

All Cry Chaos

All Cry Chaos should have been a natural book for me to love.  A thriller based around the mathematics of chaos theory is right up my alley.  And, indeed, I liked it, but it had some nagging issues that kept me from really loving it.

Author Jonathon Rosen has a nice breezy style when explaining the basics of fractals (though it's a bit rough around the edges).  Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, he loses the fact that chaos means that you can't arbitrarily predict things, even with the right equations, because you're limited by the accuracy of your starting point.  It's a somewhat academic point, but it means that his characters shouldn't be able to game the stock market as much as they do, even granting an equation which could predict prices.

Another issue that bothered me was the American-centric nature of the writing.  The main character French, but he thinks, for example, that a person has "eyes like Charles Manson," or hair like Ronald Reagan's.  It's pretty jarring, though it probably wouldn't work to put in the French equivalent of Manson -- I and most of the audience wouldn't know who that person is.  Instead, a simile without reference to a person would've been a better bet.

On the other hand, the plot moves reasonably well.  Rosen tries to bring some philosophical depth to the story with musings on the nature of math, society, and God, although it didn't feel integral to the story.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Author Alan Bradley says that Flavia DeLuce, the heroine of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie sprang into his head, seized control of his novel, and wouldn't let go.  Flavia certainly comes across as very much her own character in this remarkably assured first novel.  Even better, she breathes life into the crusty old "murder on a country estate with a bunch of eccentric characters" story.  This kind of story is probably one of the oldest tropes in detective fiction, but Bradley somehow makes it feel very fresh.

Sacrificial Ground

Thomas H. Cook is largely known for his suspense novels, but Sacrificial Ground, written early in his career, is a fairly straightforward police procedural.  In this case, though, straightforward is not at all bad; in fact, Sacrificial Ground is quite a good novel.  It doesn't really break any new ground, but it's tightly written without feeling rushed, it develops its central characters solidly, and the writing is decent.

Out of the Deep I Cry

Out of the Deep I Cry, the third book in Julia Spencer-Fleming's Fergusson series, was not as enjoyable as the first two, and I'm not sure why.  The characters and setting are still strong; the writing is reasonable; the plot is fine.  I think it's partly that the romance angle is getting old.  Three books (and counting) is a long time for an unrequited love story.  But, more, I think that previous books shuttled back and forth between Clare and Russ's points of view.  Here, we're stuck with Clare, and it ends up feeling a bit claustrophobic.  Lastly, with the whole story being from Clare's point of view, I start having the problem I always have with amateur sleuths -- why aren't the police dealing with this instead of you?

The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse

Just like its title, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse, by Keith Hartman, is an overstuffed novel.  There are something like 15 point-of-view characters, sci-fi, witches, shamans, a mystery, social commentary, and so on.

The different pieces were mostly enjoyable, but they pull in so many directions that none of them really shines, and some really suffer.  For example, there's a whole sub-plot with Indian magic, and our gumshoe is set to be the next shaman, but it doesn't really go anywhere.  There are a few other similarly abandoned plots, which is just not good in a sprawling novel like this.

The other issue I had with the novel is that it feels very contemporary for a novel set 30 years in the future.  You could strip out the science fiction and the magic, and the resulting novel would be almost the same, except for the very end.

I think I might have enjoyed this novel more if it had been shorter.  At 430 trade paperback-size pages, it just dragged by the end.

Case Histories

Case Histories, the first Jackson Brodie novel, was Kate Atkinson's first foray out of the world of literary fiction into detective fiction.  Unfortunately, it fails very badly as detective fiction.

Some of the flaws stem from the heavy "literary" atmosphere Atkinson is building.  This is really a novel of character portraits, to the extent that we're about 2/3 of the novel when Jackson Brodie finally begins to work on all three cases, and the extent of his work is calling around to three witnesses.

But there are also some elements of this novel that are just inexplicable from any sort of perspective.  For example, there's a subplot about a threat on Jackson Brodie's life which seems to come from an airport potboiler.  It has no bearing on the plot, and enters into the realm of absurdity for a supposedly realistic novel.  (Like trying to assassinate a person by dynamiting his house.  Seriously.  This is the sort of thing you find in a Road-runner cartoon, not a serious novel).

So how is the novel as literary fiction?  Well, the above-mentioned stupid subplots have to be glossed over.  And you still have to ignore coincidences that would make Dickens blush.  And then you're left with a bunch of character sketches that don't really go anywhere, because you've just had to gloss away the little forward motion this novel has.

Maybe I'll try one of her non-detective novels, but I think that I'm done with Jackson Brodie.

The Monkey's Raincoat

After my recent reading of L.A. Requiem, I had a yen to re-read the first Elvis Cole novel, The Monkey's Raincoat.  For what it is, it's a very good novel.  The Monkey's Raincoat falls squarely into the tradition of the wise-cracking PI with a heart of gold, and Crais pulls it off well.  Elvis is interesting enough, and the story moves along fast enough that you don't quite notice how implausible the ending firefight is.

Crais also at least acknowledges the potential PTSD that will come as an aftermath of the events in the novel, even if he doesn't do much with it.

Overall, a very solid book, and I can see again why I stuck with the series.

L.A. Requiem

I ended up re-reading L.A. Requiem by mistake -- audible had a 2-for-1 sale, and I thought it was a different Elvis Cole novel.  But this book is one that improves on re-reading.  The first time through, I was disappointed that Crais never really gets into what makes Joe Pike, Cole's enigmatic partner, tick.  We get a few scenes from his point of view, but they don't really form a portrait.

This time around, knowing not to expect those things, it's more clear how much Crais expanded his palette for this novel.  His characters are richer, Elvis is more believable (and less snarky). and it's overall one of the best in the series.  This is still light reading, but it's got enough weight that it doesn't just blow away.

Quick addendum -- I've moved on to reading Denise Mina's Slip of the Knife, and the contrast makes it clear how light-weight L.A. Requiem really is.

The Man Who Died Laughing

Tarquin Hall's The Man Who Died Laughing is, like its predecessor, The Case of the Missing Servant, lighter than air.  It also didn't really bring anything new to the mix, and wasn't quite entertaining enough for me to want more.

Dissolution

I've felt for a long time that one thing that mysteries do well is provide structure to a novel, giving the author a  skeleton for hanging characters, setting, etc on.  C. J. Sansom provides yet another example with his novel Dissolution, set in the Tudor period at the height of Cromwell's power, a period I wouldn't normally be particularly interested in.

Sansom manages to work in a fair bit of the politics and history of the time without turning the novel into a history lesson.  More interesting to me, though, was his central character, Matthew Shardlake.  Shardlake is a reformer, somewhat liberal by the standards of the time, but Sansom resists the urge to put a 21st century person into the reign of Henry VIII.  Shardlake's attitudes toward class and religion are pretty regressive, and he's also willfully blind to Cromwell's abuses.  One could easily imagine a version of this novel with Shardlake as the villain of the piece.

My one quibble with the novel is one I have with many historical novels -- Sansom ends up dragging in extraneous historical characters (other than Cromwell, who is important to the novel), where it feels they don't necessarily belong.  But it's hard to run down this novel for a pretty frequent failing in the genre.

Polar Star

Martin Cruz Smith's follow up to Gorky Park is the excellent Polar Star.  I mostly liked the former novel, but felt like it was aiming for a take on international espionage that it didn't quite pull off.  This novel isn't really focused on the espionage angle so much, which is a plus, but, more importantly, Cruz uses the setting of a fishing factory boat to brilliant effect.

As the novel starts, Arkady Renko is hiding out on the eponymous "Polar Star," a huge Soviet factory ship taking in the fish trawled by some American fishing vessels in a joint American/Soviet venture.  When one of the fish-cleaners on the ship dies mysteriously, Arkady is briefly rehabilitated so that he can find out who killed her.

The story takes place almost entirely on the titular "Polar Star," a claustrophobic environment that Smith uses to great effect in a few cat-and-mouse sequences.  Smith's writing is spare but evocative -- one can almost feel the cold while reading this novel.  His cast of villains is various and impressive, from the smug Communist official Volovoi to an old criminal from Arkady's past.  It's also a nice touch that, although these various bad guys are sometimes allied, they each have their own agendas and none of them really knows the full story of what's going on.

All in all, I very much enjoyed this novel, and am looking forward to reading the third Renko novel.

House of Silk

House of Silk is the first official Sherlock Holmes novel approved by the Doyle estate (or the first in a long time, not sure which), and I was interested in tackling it.  But I think that Anthony Horowitz drops the ball in a couple of ways.

The hard thing about writing a Sherlock Holmes novel, I think, is that the detective is so brilliant that it's hard to keep him stumped for the length of a novel.  Horowitz solves this problem by intertwining two mysteries, "The man in the flat cap" and "The house of silk."  The first one (the flat cap mystery) starts off the novel, then Holmes is drawn into the house of silk story, and then there's a coda in which he solves the flat cap story.

Part of the problem here is that by the time we return to the first story, the stakes are so much lower than those of the main story, and we haven't seen the characters for so long, that the ending doesn't feel so interesting.  And this is unfortunate, because of the two stories, I felt like the flat cap story was much more authentic.  The resolution of that mystery felt like the sort of thing Conan Doyle would have written.

The house of silk mystery, on the other hand, is more problematic.  Part of the problem is that it's obvious from early on what the resolution is, because Horowitz tells us it's too shocking to be published during Watson's lifetime.  That doesn't leave too many options, and it was clear to me that Horowitz was going for the most obvious one.  In addition, I thought that his usage of Moriarty was gratuitous, as is giving Watson's wife a deadly disease just to show (I assume) that he knows that Doyle is contradictory about her, and that some fans speculate there was more than one wife.

Broken Harbor

Tana French  writes psychological studies that happen to be mystery novels.  Her novels are at least as much about the investigating officer as about the mystery of whodunit.  I thought that her best integration of plot and psychology was in Faithful Place, her third novel.  Sadly, I still think that's true after reading her fourth novel, Broken Harbor.

Not that Broken Harbor isn't good.  As a view into the mind of detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, the novel works very well; we see his journey from complete control over himself and his emotions into a man who can't keep it together.  His relationship with his sister gives an extra fillip to his story, and his fraying nerves are on display most when he's trying to deal with her.

But the story itself is overly complicated.  For the whole thing to work, French puts two borderline crazy people into the story, then adds in a third person who has a nervous breakdown.  Throw in Mick's schizophrenic sister and suicidal mother, and it feels like sane people are a small minority in French's Ireland. This novel is not so much as disappointing, particularly after the very successful Faithful Place.

The Complaints

After Exit Music, Ian Rankin rather boldly decided to end his long-running Inspector Rebus series and start a new, unconnected one.  I thought this was a really positive move; the Rebus novels hit their peak about five books before the end of the series, and I was happy to see something new out of Rankin.

Of course, it's hard to review a novel like this in a vacuum; the first question one has is whether Malcolm Fox is just Rebus redux or something new.  Fortunately, he's actually pretty different, but not just a photographic negative of Rebus, which would have felt about as pointless as an exact copy.

Suffice it to say that Fox has his own quirks, the team he works with is reasonably interesting, and the mystery itself isn't bad.  The only odd thing to me was that it seems like Rankin was ready to resolve the Breck sub-plot in a completely different direction, and it felt like that ending was just dropped on the cutting-room floor.  A lot of the minor bits with Breck don't quite make sense with the pat ending; I wonder whether Rankin will pick up those pieces in a later novel.

Ultimately, I felt like this was an improvement over the last couple of Rebus novels, even if it didn't quite reach the heights of the middle of the Rebus series.

The Moonstone

Just as The Woman in White is considered one of the first suspense novels, so is Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone considered the first detective novel.  Unfortunately, although I really liked the former, I didn't really like The Moonstone.  Caveat lector: I've only read the first 2/3 of The Moonstone; I didn't like it enough to finish.

Maybe if I had read The Moonstone first, I'd have liked it more.  The epistolary style feels much fresher in The Woman in White than in The Moonstone.  But I'm not sure that's entirely because I read the former first; The Woman in White has more formal innovation, including extracts from a diary, a grave marker, and so on, whereas The Moonstone only has straightforward 1st person narrative.

But I'm not really looking for formal innovation in a Victorian novel.  I think the bigger problem is that The Moonstone doesn't have any really interesting characters, except possibly Detective Cuff, who barely shows up.  Wilkie Collins showed that he could create a strong female character in Marian Holcomb.  But Rachel, who is supposed to be strong-minded in the same way, comes off as merely spoiled.

She knows a good deal about the crime, but won't tell anyone what she knows.  This is bad enough, but Collins has all the other characters (except Cuff) basically shrug and say, "Rachel says that so-and-so is innocent, so that's good enough for me."  I think this is actually pretty patronizing; it's hard to imagine them doing the same for a male character.  More than that, it rings fairly hollow to me -- I would think that in real life, she'd get pressed pretty hard by her family (not to mention the family lawyer) to tell what she knows.

Really, I think that it's not a very good novel.  Instead, it's the sort of book that gave mysteries a bad name for decades -- contrived and plot-driven.

End Games

End Games, published posthumously, is the last of Michael Dibdin's uniformly excellent "Aurelio Zen" series.  Not one to fall into a routine, Dibdin took on a number of different voices and styles through the series, from high farce through depressed tragedy.  End Games is pretty squarely on the humorous side of the spectrum, with a few broad caricatures in the cast, and a plot involving the the Golden Menorah from the Jewish Temple, a movie about the Book of Revelation, and the burial place of Alaric, the leader of the Goths who sacked Rome.

The story takes a little while to get into gear; it takes Dibdin a little while to establish his cast and the tone of the novel.  In addition, the plot is very intricate, with several plot threads running simultaneously; in a masterpiece of plotting, Dibdin keeps them clear for us, even though nobody in the novel ever sees more than a couple of them.

The humor tends to be broad, as I mentioned above.  (Are there really any Microsoft millionaires who don't realize you need a passport to get into Italy?)  But I think that's really a part of the style of this sort of novel -- it's as silly as criticizing Bertie Wooster for being so ignorant.  It's a deliberate story-telling choice, as we can see from other Dibdin novels, where he adopts a completely different voice, and this novel needs to be reviewed on its own terms.  On those terms, it's a huge success, and a fitting novel to end a series on. 

Lady Killer

Ed McBain's Lady Killer is something like the seventh entry in his 87th precinct series.  I've read a few of the later novels (and some of his other work), and it's quite good.  So a while ago, when amazon was offering big discounts on a lot of the early 87th Precinct novels, I scooped a few of them up, hoping to see the evolution of a writer.

Unfortunately, even at 7 books in, this is not really a strong book.  The officers of the 87th are on the trail of a killer who has sent a note saying that he will strike at 8 PM.  They have 12 hours to find the killer and victim in a city of millions.  Luckily for them, McBain pulls the old "killer wants to be caught" bit, and so the note has clues within itself.

In the end, it's an inoffensive story, a quick read, but very slight.

I've still got a couple more of these early ones, so hoping for better luck next time.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Juliet Spencer-Fleming's In the Bleak Midwinter is a very solid first novel.  I liked several things about it very much, and there wasn't really anything to dislike.

First, there's a real tangible feeling of place in her upstate New York setting, and it feels almost like another character.  The ice and snow are constant companions, from the beginning of the novel when Rev. Fergusson rescues a baby from hypothermia, right through the climax when she again confronts the driving snow and cold.  But even in the normal scenes of driving from place to place, the cold and ice are there, whether it's in the driving conditions, the cold feet, etc.  Reminded me of my days in Rochester.

Second, the two main characters, Rev. Fergusson and Russ VanAlstyne are very believable.  I've mentioned before that it seems to be hard for most authors I read to make interesting/believable religious characters.  Here, Spencer-Fleming has created a nice dichotomy between Rev. Fergusson and Van Alstyne, without tilting the field toward one or the other.

I look forward to reading more novels about these characters.

Hose Monkey, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

A couple of disappointing novels which I couldn't finish.

I was looking forward to Hose Monkey by Reed Farrell Coleman, because I very much enjoyed Walking the Perfect Square.  But I found the first 40% to be fairly pedestrian, and gave up at that point.  It's not that's it's an bad book, it's just not a stand-out in any way.

On the other hand, I found Jonathan Saffron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to be actively annoying.  The narrator, Oskar, is putatively nine years old, but he doesn't feel like a nine-year-old, not even a very smart (asperger?) one.  I just couldn't get into this one, and gave up about 15% in.