One Shot by Lee Child
Series: Jack Reacher, #9
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Darn satisfying read. Pure Child gold. Some nice twists and turns along the way, but from the time that the suspect says “Get Reacher” you know that 1. He’s absolutely innocent and 2. The bad guys are going to pay. Just that simple. So why bother going on? Cuz the next 300+ pages will be impossible to turn away from, you will be sucked in the entire time and have a blast the whole time.
That’s simply Child’s way.
Persuader by Lee Child
Series: Jack Reacher, #7
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s really hard to say something about a Jack Reacher book–in a very real sense, if you’ve read one, you’ve read ’em all (maybe this changes after book 7, but I doubt it). But dang it all if you don’t come back for more and more and more — like Pringles, or Fritos, etc. Great action; totally outlandish, but (in the moment definitely) believable plot; lots of testosterone-y fun.
Two things I’d like to mention about this book.
First, there’s this fad in TV lately where you watch a scene or two at the top of the show, and then the chyron flashes “X days earlier” and you get to see how events led up to this, and even get a better picture of what happened. It’s a tired and overused gimmick. But in ’03 when this was published, it wasn’t. And even if it was tired then, Child does it right, and I would’ve been totally on board with it then. Great hook to begin the book. Really great.
Secondly, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the way that Child laid out Reacher’s motivation to hunt down this particular criminal in bits and pieces, scattered throughout the present day action. Sure, it was predictable after a certain point, but it was skillfully done. Giving Reacher the proper motivation each time to go after the baddie has to be a struggle, especially since it has to be sufficient motivation to get him to perform superhuman tasks. This was one of Child’s best efforts in that regard.
One more thing that I just thought of–since Parker’s God Save the Child and The Judas Goat I’ve been a sucker for a fight between big, tough hero and impossibly huge, strong, psychotic villain, and the one here delivers the goods in spades. Loved it.
Without Fail by Lee Child
Series: Jack Reacher, #6
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Taught thriller, starts off strong and snowballs into an adrenaline-filled blast. Pure popcorn fun.
After taking a book off from it, Child develops Reacher’s character a bit by bringing him into contact with people who knew his brother before he killed. Which is nice and commendable, but it’s not his strong suit.
Most of the time, he does what he does best: he puts a target in front of Reacher, gives Reacher juuuuust enough info to keep stumbling from one clue to the next, getting closer and closer to his prey. And when he tracks his prey down things really start going Reacher’s way.
The Universe Versus Alex Woods by Gavin Extence
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
At some point (probably later than I should have) I realized 1. where the plot was leading; and 2. this was a novel with An Agenda, which the novel (and likely — but not necessarily — the author) wanted to you agree with. My reactions were: 1. Didn’t make me happy, and really wasn’t something I wanted to read, although I saw that it absolutely what the characters would do; and 2. Never gonna happen. So I had to make a decision: do I finish this or move on?
I went ahead and finished it (which, by the way, confirmed 1 & 2), and I think it was a worthwhile use of my reading time.
Alex Woods is a socially awkward child/teen, an epileptic who’d been struck by a meteor as a child (and achieved a degree of notoriety because of this). He’s figuring out his way in this world the best he can, with little guidance from his fortune-teller mother (and even then, it’s dubious guidance at best), he mostly relies on the scientist who helped him understand the meteor that struck him and his neurologist.
That is, until, he meets Mr. Peterson — an American widower, who moved to England following his service in the Vietnam War and now that he’s widowed has no intention of sticking around. From the moment he’s introduced, it’s clear that Mr. Peterson will become a fixture in Alex’s life. That the two will form an unlikely bond, and this will form the emotional core of the book. (this would be clear even if the book didn’t open with Alex entering the country with Mr. Peterson’s ashes on the car seat next to him)
One of the things Mr. Peterson does is introduce Alex to the works of Kurt Vonnegut. They discuss the books as Alex works his way through them, Mr. Peterson explaining things — both in the books and in life — for Alex’s overly literalistic way of looking at life.
The strength of this book is Alex’s voice and personality. You’re drawn to Alex, you want to understand the way he looks at life, you want to hear how he ends up in the dicey legal situation he finds himself in at the beginning of the novel. If not for his charm, his naiveté, his humor, this book would’ve ended up on my abandoned pile pretty quickly.
Obviously, this is evident throughout. The strongest example that I think of at this moment is Alex’s description of (and reaction to) being bullied is so close to the Platonic ideal, that it alone justifies at least half the time spent reading. The bullying characters, and the reactions on the part of the faculty/students of Alex’s school to his encounters with them were so spot-on, that if Extence wasn’t borrowing from his own life, his imagination is scarily correct.
The only two characters that didn’t quite work for me were Alex’s mother and his female friend from school*. Now, this is either because Alex is a teenage male and has a strange relationship with these two women (because they’re strange, he’s an adolescent male, and they’re women) or because Extence didn’t quite have the handle on them as characters as he did with the rest. I could go with either explanation — the latter seems unlikely, but it’s possible. In the long run, while I couldn’t understand either character as I wanted to, this didn’t detract enough from the book to spend much more time on the point than this. I do wish things had resulted in a clearer resolution between Alex and the schoolmate — if not a definite “they were X forever”, at least a trajectory suggesting something.
In the end, it was a pleasure to spend time in Alex’s company and hearing his take on how he grew up and started in his adult life, whatever my issues with the plot. It’s not the best book I’ve read in awhile, but I’ll keep my eye out for whatever Extence does next.
* Sorry, I’ve forgotten her name and returned the book to the library — and google’s not helping at all.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Blast it all, Larsson made me eat my words — many of them, anyway — about his ability to write a decent thriller with his third Millennium book. If anyone else had written this, I’d probably have given it 2.5-3 stars, but in comparison to his first two books, this one looks sooo much better.
A lot of the weaknesses of the first two books are still present–the persistent eye for irrelevant, and momentum slowing detail; an overabundance of characters; plotlines that do little-to-nothing to serve the main plotlines; stock characters abound; etc., etc.
But we see some real growth in Lisbeth, some potential growth in Blomquist, and a courtroom scene at the end that makes one wonder if there’s another female character that’s supposed to be the real hero of this set. In my book, that scene covers a multitude of crimes against fiction that Larsson committed.
Am I glad I slogged through the series? Not really. But having made it through the first book, and suffered through the second, I really enjoyed this one.
But man, am I so glad there’s not a #4
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
ugh. Really? Really world? This is the kind of thing you buy by the dozen? (or so it seems)
Okay…let’s go with the positives. This was better than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The way that Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol was better than Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.
I like Lisabeth Salander — yeah, in many ways she’s cliched…but in enough ways she isn’t. The parts of the book that focused on her — not the investigation into her, but her, are far and away the best parts of the novel. Actually, if you cut away the rest of it — which is almost wholly dead weight, it’d be readable.
Now, the problems…well, some of them.
There are just too many characters. Well, there are too many names tied a quick description and some sort of quirk which supposed to equal characters. You could eliminate 30-50% of them and not do a darn thing to the plot.
There are plot lines that do nothing other than chew up space. The whole new job for Berger thing, for instance. Sure, this might come back to mean something in book 3, but I can’t see how.
There’s just too much wasted ink. We don’t need three paragraphs describing someone leaving the house to go get a hamburger and that’s it. Doesn’t advance the plot, doesn’t reveal anything about a character (other than to buttress the theory, based solely on this work, that all Swedes eat McDonald’s obsessively).
I had a laundry list of things to whine about–but who wants to read that (much less write it)? Let’s just leave it as, an over-written, over-long, dull book with one heckuva good, mostly wasted, character.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I honestly don’t know why it took me so long to get around to reading this little international phenomenon, it wasn’t because I didn’t have access, my sister loaned it to me months ago. Something just kept me from it, maybe it was fear of the bandwagon, who knows. It certainly has a strong following, almost Tha Da Vinci Code-like, more than one person saw me carrying it and had to talk about it, which never happens to me.
The one thing that we all agreed on was that it started slowly. Like cold molasses slow. It was either brave or foolhardy of Larsson to start off his book with a detailed and plodding description of a financial crime. Hardly the kind of thing that sucks you in. Not only that, that type of crime doesn’t seem to match up with the cited statistics about assaults on females in Sweden that are so prominent. When, after more than 200 pages into the novel, when we finally do get our first assault on a female, it comes across as perfunctory.
The book follows the path of 2 protagonists–Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter with a superiority complex, and Lisbeth Salander, a young investigator for a security company whose talents far exceed her appearance and age. Blomkvist is in the middle of some legal trouble, which has forced him out of the news biz for awhile, so he takes a job researching a decades-old missing-persons case for an aged, reclusive industrialist. Salander’s dealing with her own legal and personal issues, and apparently the near universal belief that horribly thin girls with tattoos and piercings are stupid and unreliable.
The book plods along, almost but not quite capturing my interest until soon after obligatory (yet unnecessary for either plot or character development) assault that the two finally meet, and then–finally the plot begins to pick up. The two join forces and quickly uncover clues that lay hidden in plain sight since the fateful day when the industrialist’s niece disappeared. These lead them to the trail of a serial killer.
Larsson gets both the investigator and the reporter to discover the killer’s identity at about the same time, when, naturally they are miles away from each other. This leads to both being in some kind of jeopardy. But honestly, I didn’t once feel any tension, it was clear that the jeopardy would be thwarted without permanent damage of any kind being inflicted.
Things were tied up in a tidy, and somewhat satisfactory bow, and the further along in the novel, the better things moved. But there’s really little to recommend the book on. Blomkvist reads a lot of detective fiction, usually dropping the name of the author and title along the way. There are at least two mentions of a Val McDermid novel. And as many problems as I have with her stuff, it’s a darn shame that Larsson didn’t pay more attention to her, he could’ve learned how to make even an obvious conclusion not seem entirely forgone, and with enough tension and suspense to spare. The “Thriller” label that’s applied to this book is very misplaced.
Why bother to finish it? Curious to see what all the fuss was about, really. Also, the Salandar character was intriguing enough. Which is why, incidentally, I started the sequel.
Suspect by Robert Crais
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was a little leery of this book, I haven’t been all that satisfied with Crais’ standalones — Hostage was okay, Demolition Angel was enjoyable, but I haven’t been able to read more than 50 pages of The Two Minute Rule. But, hey, it’s Crais (and about a dog!), so I had to give it a try.
So glad I did. If you don’t come out of the first few pages deeply invested in Maggie, I fear you may not have a soul. Not that Scott’s story and character aren’t compelling enough, it’s just Maggie’s the star of the show and the heart of the novel, make no mistake. The action’s intense, the plot moves along well, and the suspense is real. Great read.
The fact that this is part of the Cole/Pike-verse is an added bonus.
I don’t think this is the best Crais novel (and I’ve read them all–except most of Two Minute Rule), but given the way this worms into your heart, it’s probably my favorite. I hope there’s more to come. Or at least an appearance from these two in a future Cole novel.
Recommended for fans of David Rosenfelt and Spencer Quinn.
Beautiful Chaos by Kami Garcia
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So, this is still a really well-written series, with a rich cast of characters and a fully-realized setting that puts The Caster Chronicles ahead of several similar series. However, this installment — by and large — seems rather pointless. Its main task seems to be setting the stage for Book 4.
Yes, there’s some character development — but not enough, it’s like they’re afraid to go too far with some of the supporting characters (like Link and Ridley) at this point, they have to leave something for the next installment. Yes, we get some vital back story, but . . . well, that’s pretty much it. There’s a couple hundred pages of set up, a quick action scene and a conclusion that isn’t.
A few other notes:
I have confidence that Garcia and Stohl will pull this off (mostly) in the last 50 pages or so of Beautiful Redemption, and this will just fade into memory as a prolonged setup. But right now, it’s left a sour taste in my mouth.
As I dust this one off, I can’t help but be disappointed in how brief this review was. It’s been too many years so I can’t augment this review much, but I remember laughing a lot and scribbling down quotations like crazy (don’t ask me where they are now, tho’).
—–
How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
hilarious, over the top (yet probably really tamer than reality) satire about the publishing industry and the selling/making of books. Not literature, but the stuff that people read (or at least by). Best satire I’ve read in a long while
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