Cheap Shot--Book Review

Photo: The book's hardcover...cover?  From its Goodreads page.

Another good, compulsively-readable entry into the series by Atkins.

There's not much here you haven't seen before if you've read the others by Parker and Atkins.  But this one still stands apart from the others because of its purposely scattered structure.  Spenser's all over the place, from Boston to NYC and back again.  He speaks to old characters (Gerry Broz runs a fish store?!?), only some of whom are actually useful for this case.

This is the one startling aspect of this book.  Old, non-regular characters either come up (Broz; Tony Marcus; Ty-Bop) or are brought up (Rachel Wallace; April Kyle) simply to stir them up in the readers' minds.  Doing this could've led to disaster, almost like name-dropping, but Atkins handles it well.  It doesn't distract.  It adds.

This one reads a little more gritty, a little more true-to-life.  This is also different than many, but not all, of Parker's.  His often tended to get wrapped up neatly.  The better ones, now that I think about it, didn't end that way: Looking for Rachel Wallace and April Kyle's second (and last) come to mind.

Who-dun-it is not a surprise, exactly, although I was a little surprised about how it suddenly came to a head.  I mean this in a good way.  It makes sense, and the reader and Spenser were kind of heading there, but it all gets sidetracked, as did Spenser, as does the reader.  So when the ending happens, it all makes sense, and isn't really surprising, and yet it was a nice, little twist at the same time.

In a gritty, realistic kind of way.  Would it really happen that way?  The motel room?  The trunk?  Yes, I believe it really could happen that way.  But in the trunk?  Yes, because he just didn't care.  (I won't reveal the end, so you'll just have to read it to fully grasp what I'm talking about.)  Would it have ended that way in Parker's hands?  Nope.  But that's okay.

It works.  That's all that matters.  Things change.  People change.

And, often, they don't change.  The bad ones, when they get really pissed, tend to stay that way.  And then they do bad things.  And then everything sort of goes to hell.

Sometimes that kind of thing ends well.  Other times--I'm thinking Cormac McCarthy here--they don't.  As it is in real life as well.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King--Book Review

Photo: Book's cover art, from its Wikipedia page.

Mr. Mercedes is a much better book than King's last, the truly terrible Dr. Sleep.  (Is he starting a trend of putting titles in his titles?)  It is compulsively readable, as always--as is even his really bad stuff--but it is also better told, without author intrusion or author judgment.  He does not judge his characters here, and he even seems to go a bit out of his way to not let his characters judge each other, as well.  The result is a quick, satisfying read that's a bit skimpy on the supernatural--a pattern for King now as well, it seems.

It starts like an episode of Law & Order might, with a longishly short segment on some soon-to-be victims of a guy who purposely plows a stolen Mercedes into a line of people.  Soon we turn to a typical burned-out cop who's about to eat his gun--that is, until Mr. Mercedes (Get it?) sends him a taunting letter.  This revitalizes the cop, and the search is afoot.

It's told via differing limited-but-omniscient third-person POVs (another King staple) between the perp (who incorrectly refers to himself as the "perk") and the retired cop.  There's nothing in the perp's life we haven't seen before (including a sad little brother right out of "The Scarlet Ibis"), but it's told directly and honestly, and we believe it.  (If you've been watching Bates Motel, you already know almost everything there is to know.)  There's some good stuff about how this guy is all around us--that such people "walk among us," which is another common theme lately in King's work--and there's a bit of computer savvy here that almost is too much, but stops just short.  The peripheral characters in these guys' lives all ring true.  King took pains not to be as lazy with his characters as he was in Dr. Sleep.  Every single character rings true here.

The obligatory younger woman is here, just as she was in 11/22/63 and Bag of Bones, and it seems as real here as it did in those.  Which means, not so much.  This is one of the two minor caveats here: The protagonist's relationship with a woman almost twenty years younger (He's 62 and she's 44, but still...) is so unrealistic that almost everyone in the novel comments on it--especially the guy, who keeps saying to himself that he's unattractive, very overweight, and almost twenty years older than the woman, who's described as very pretty.  And she, of course, comes on to him.  Very, very directly, I might add.  This worked a lot better in 11/22/63 and in Bag of Bones.  As you read, you'll see why it's necessary for the plot, for the main character's motivation at the end, but still...It doesn't bother me too much, except that it's a pattern by now in his work, and it really sticks out in this narrative.  More of an itch than a problem, I guess.  The reader will roll his eyes and easily move on...

There's a lot to like here, especially with the minor characters.  King gets a bit maudlin with one of them, the way Robert B. Parker did with Hawk, and it works as well here as it did for Parker--which, again, means not so much.  This is the second minor caveat.  It could've been cut and nothing would've been lost.  Now that I write about it, I see that this bothers me more than the relationship did in the paragraph above.  But, again, it was easy for me to roll my eyes and move on.  I actually skipped those passages as they came.  You'll see what I mean when you read it.  Feel free to skip those spots as well.  You won't miss anything.

Anyway, this is a likeable read with mostly-likeable characters, except for Mr. Mercedes, his mom, and a certain aunt.  I read its 436 pages in a few days.  It's not his best, but it's far from his worst, which is sort of all I hope from King these days.  That sounds depressing, but I don't mean it to be.  It's like watching a Hall of Fame ballplayer in his last few years.  Good enough is good enough (exactly the opposite of what I believe for most things in life), and you smile as you compare what's in front of you with what used to be.  Not a bad thing, at least for me.

Though I'm still waiting for him to write something really scary again.  It's been too long...

Damned If You Do--Book Review: If You Read It, You're [see title]

 Photo: Book's hardcover, from robertbparker.net. 

The real title is Robert B. Parker's Damned If You Do, but if you read my reviews, you know how I feel about using a name as part of the title, especially if he's dead, so I won't further go at it here.  But...argh...

And that's pretty much what I have to say about this book itself, as well.  This is a giant step back from the other two Brandman novels, neither of which were exemplary to begin with.  What a horribly written story!  The dialogue is wooden and preposterous.  The story is tired and distant.  It's told and not shown.  And it's got little writer edits at the end of some sentences, like Brandman's explaining it to us.  (Note to Brandman: Mystery and procedural readers like to remember such things for themselves.  Even if they're unimportant--because you don't know until the end what was important and what wasn't, right?)

There are too many examples to cite them all.  There were so many that I had to put the book down and do something else.  I actually groaned and complained out loud.  And I can't find the one now I really wanted to put here, so...From page 247, after Jesse Stone saw a character, who he'd liked, die: "He hoped that the scotch would accomplish what he was unable to achieve himself...He wanted it to erase the haunting look in her dying eyes from his mind and his heart."

First, that's just bad writing.  Second, that's telling, not showing.  Third, if you've read Parker's--and even Brandman's--Jesse Stone works before, Stone (and the 3rd person narrator) would never think or speak like this.  Fourth, we all know why people drink after they've seen someone they like die.  Fifth, we all know why borderline alcoholics (or former alcoholics, which Stone is) drink after such an event.  Sixth, that last sentence--melodrama, anyone?  And Stone, and Parker--well, they're so anti-melodrama that this is just blasphemy, in of itself.  And I know that comparing Brandman and Parker is unfair because they're different people--but Brandman is so obviously trying to emulate Parker's sparse style, and failing so miserably at it, that the comparison is just here.  I feel certain that Parker would be upset with this book.

And the action sequences are just as bad.  This from page 239: "Suddenly everyone was on the move.  Chairs scraped loudly and tables were overturned as people began to anxiously respond.  There were shouts of panic.  The crowd began a confused surge towards the exits."

Again, this is just bad writing.  The word "suddenly" was used tons of times in this book.  That's bad.  When chairs scrape, it's loud.  So that's redundant--and it tells.  And it overuses adverbs, which I learned in high school and college is bad to do.  When people are "on the move," what is that, exactly?  When settlers are on the move, they're just walking along, and slowly.  There's probably lots of dust.  And when there are "shouts of panic" and scraping chairs and overturning tables--that's not how people "anxiously respond."  That's chaos.  Stuttering is anxiously responding.  And notice the word "began" is used twice in this one short paragraph.  Nobody begins to do something.  That's a huge pet peeve of mine, and it's used a million times in this book.  You're either doing that thing, or you're not doing that thing.  In this image, the people were well beyond the "began to anxiously respond" stage, whatever that is.  They were panicked and running over each other.  By definition, a surge is an action in progress, so there's no "began" there, either.

Literally almost every sentence and every paragraph has an instance of lazy writing, bad writing, passive writing, and...Oh, man, it was just plain horrible.  What a disappointment!  I don't want the reader to think I'm just nitpicking here, or in a bad mood, or whatever.  I'm telling it straight--the writing of this book is that bad.

So bad I was shocked at its badness.

So bad it gives hope to all unpublished writers out there--if this can find its way into Barnes & Noble, your book can, too.

So bad I pictured Parker rolling over in his grave.

So bad it was a blight on all the Jesse Stone books I've bought and read before--all in hardcover, too.

So bad that if someone else hadn't bought this book for me for Christmas, I would've stopped reading it.

So bad that I can't even say to save it for bathroom reading, which is the advice I usually give for bearably bad books.  But this isn't even bathroom reading--unless you need to use its paper.  Which you probably should.

This is so bad that it reminded me of Dorothy Parker's quip: "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force."

By the way, the characters and story are bad, too.  Stone, a police chief, tells a mass murderer that he feels "surprisingly comfortable" that he's watching his back.  I'm not kidding.  I actually disliked Stone at the end.

The best things about this book are the title, and the cover.  And that it ended.

Skip it, even if you have all the others.  It is worth having a hole in your collection so you don't have to put yourself through this.  It is that bad.

Don't even buy it in the remainder bin.  Don't start off the new year with this.  Don't do that to yourself.
   

Book Review--Robert B. Parker's Wonderland, by Ace Atkins

Photo: Book's hardback cover, from robertbparker.net

I've gone on before about titles that contain the name of an artist as its main selling point, so I won't do so again here--except to say that book titles that contain the name of a deceased writer is even worse.  At least when John Carpenter used to title his movies with his name in it, he was still alive, directing them.  But when the publishing house (or perhaps it's Parker's estate) does so, it comes across as a bit gauche to me.  Especially when the real author, Ace Atkins, is doing such a credible job since taking it over.  How about giving him a little credit now?  Or does someone think that Spenser's loyal fans will forget that Robert B. Parker gave birth to him?

Having said that, Wonderland is a good book that could have been better if Atkins hadn't tried so hard to make Spenser so witty.  Even Parker didn't make his narrator this much of a wiseass.  Here Spenser drops something sarcastic, or witty, or banal (depends on your appreciation for what he says, I guess) in his dialogue and in his narration, a double-whammy here that makes it seem that Spenser is a little verbally out of control.  One minor character even says that he comes across as immature to people who don't think he's funny.  (Nobody ever dared call Parker's Spenser immature, except maybe Susan.)  There's way too much here, and it comes across as Atkins trying too hard, and not, surprisingly, like Spenser trying too hard.  Some of it is funny, but occasionally one sounds forced.

Another distraction here is that every now and then a piece of Spenser's dialogue simply doesn't sound authentic.  I've read every single Spenser, since the first--The Godwulf Manuscript--and I'm telling you that every now and then Spenser says something that sounds inauthentic, and it clunks.  A major tell-tale is that Atkins makes him speak on occasion too grammatically correct: he doesn't use contractions when anyone--especially Spenser--would.  One example of many is on page 273.  Henry Cimoli and Spenser are talking about how bad Spenser's psyche got when he got shot up by The Gray Man.  Henry calls it, "The really bad time."  Spenser responds: "They are all bad times when you are shot."  It's just too stiff.  Spenser, one of the more comfortable conversationalists in all of detective fiction (if not fiction in general), simple would not have sounded so formal, especially to Henry.  He would've deadpanned: "When you're shot, they're all bad."  Or something like that.

But, of course, this is a very quick read.  I might read faster than some, but I'll bet a Spenser fan will read this in a couple of days.  There are no great surprises here; the supporting characters are all users and being used.  The main characters go back and forth guessing who the guilty parties are, but the reader shouldn't.  Truth be told, the family-relation reveal towards the end shouldn't have been a surprise to Spenser, Healey, or Belson.  It is, though, and it's handled well.  I didn't consider the oddity of it until I'd finished reading, so that's good enough.  Your suspension-of-disbelief won't be ruined.  The writing is good, but Atkins has done better with Spenser.  I like the way that Atkins says a lot with very little, as Parker had.  Atkins might actually say more with his little.  Spenser fans won't be disappointed.  New readers to the series won't be blown out of their socks, but they shouldn't throw it away with great force, either.  It's a good read.

One caveat: Atkins shows his hand a little bit with the dating.  As Parker had, he throws in a sentence or two to let us know Spenser is narrating from some future date.  Something like, "The winter was especially cold that year..."  In Wonderland, Spenser frequently mentions how very, very bad the Sox are with overpaid stars and a manager that has won with them in the past.  So it's got to be 2011.  They were disappointing under Francona in 2005, 2006, 2008-2010, but they still won more than they lost, and they made the playoffs--or almost did--pretty consistently.  But the book says they were very, very bad, so it's got to be 2011.  Spenser has always gone out of his way to remind us that he exists in our real universe, during our real time--just an indiscriminate year in the past.  Here, he seems to have almost caught up to us.  This was a little jarring to me, though it may not be to anyone else.  I'm just putting it out there.  Feel free to politely disagree.

Robert B. Parker's Ironhorse

 
Photo: Book's cover, from Amazon

I've gone into how I don't like it when publishers sell a book with the (more popular) deceased author's name in huge letters on the top of the title, then the actual author's name in smaller letters below it.  Just a pet peeve, but the practice clearly says that the money made from the book is more important than is the name of the guy who actually wrote it, or the memory of the guy who created the series, who is no longer with us...But that's not much of a surprise, is it?  The copyrights are owned by The Estate of Robert B. Parker, so maybe it has to be titled like this, legally.  Whatever...

Anyway, nobody would get confused about the authorship once they've read it, because, although it's very good, nobody would believe that Parker wrote it.  Just not his thing.  There's no message here, no statement of any kind about honor, or the code of being a real man, etc.  Nothing even about the knight-in-shining-armor thing, though there are women saved by the strong, silent types of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch.  They save the day without saying much, and they're both great shots and they're great at what they do, so what else can you ask for?

I read this very quickly--371 pages over a day and a half or so--and the writing flows as quickly as a river with rapids, so it's worth your time.  Even Ed Harris says so, in a blurb on the back.  If you liked the series with Parker writing it, you'll like it with Knott writing it.  He is his own writer, and he may or may not have been trying to emulate Parker--I'm guessing half yes, half no--but it will go off now in Knott territory, I'll bet.  This was a mostly-smooth transition.

Except for a few spots.  One that glared at me is on page 212:

"What do you allow, Virgil?"

"Hard to speculate."

I didn't say anything else as we continued walking.

"You?" Virgil said.

"Don't know," I said.  "Been sort of expectant about it."

"Sort of?"

"More than sort of."

And so on.  You get the idea.  So what was glaring here to me?  The clipped responses and the distant first-person were always done well by Parker, even when it was all perhaps too spare. 

But it isn't Knott's thing, exactly.  He writes better when he writes medium-length sentences and paragraphs.  When he writes short, clipped stuff like this, it's a low word count that doesn't say much.  Which is fine, but when Parker used few words, he did so to say a lot.  When Knott uses few words, he just says fewer things.  With Parker, less was often more.  With Knott, less is just...less.

Again, there's nothing wrong with that.  But look at the excerpt above.  See the sentence where Everett Hitch, the first-person narrator, says that he walked and didn't say anything?  And then see where he almost immediately responds to Cole's question?  With Parker, they both wouldn't have said anything, and that would have said something.  Here, Hitch says he didn't say anything, and then he says something, and there's nothing said or meant by that odd interchange.

That's Knott trying to be Parker there, and not succeeding at it.

Which is fine.  But now it's time to move on, as much as I hate to say so.  I liked Parker as a writer, and I really liked him as a person.  I'd spoken with him three times: once when I worked at a Borders he was signing at, and twice at a Barnes & Noble, once extensively, during a Q&A.  I'd asked him about his apparent bias against the high school and college education system.  He admitted to the bias, and blamed it on an experience at a college where he used to teach.  And I had to chase after him when he left his prescription glasses behind at that Borders.  And he was even gracious enough to give me his agent's name, and permission to speak with her.  (I've yet to do so.)

Knott goes into many things that Parker never would have, including everything you'd ever want (and not want) to know about how to operate a coal-powered train, and about how to operate, and trace the operation of, a telegraph.  It was mostly good stuff, though I'm biased because I like accurately-told, well-researched, historical fiction.  You won't have to like westerns to like this, either.

Anyway, it's time now for Knott to ONLY write like Knott.  From what I saw here, that should be more than good enough.

Guilt by Jonathan Kellerman

Photo: from kirkusreviews.com
 
Guilt is Kellerman's best book in quite some time.  I'd long given up on the author and on the series; things had just gotten too graphic, too gross, too judgmental.  In short, Kellerman had gotten lazy, and his prose spoke of too much self-opinion and attitude and not enough mystery and characterization--you know, the reasons you read series like this to begin with.

Finally, he returns here with a book that is more mystery than attitude, more puzzle and who-dun-it than gross-outs and psychos who come out of left field to be the bad guy.  The end result is a winning work that hopefully will remind Kellerman of what he used to write.  Here's to hoping that he produces more like this.

It starts off with a baby's skeleton found deep in the now-exposed roots of a tree in a rich woman's front yard.  Then another baby's skeleton is found.  Then a young woman's--these last two in the same park.  Then more turn up, but by then you know that they're amongst the villains, and the reader will know who did it about 75% to 80% of the way through.  The rest is explanation, proof, and arrest.

But that doesn't spoil the read, which is a good thing, because once again Kellerman uses real-life L.A. types for his work, without bothering too much to hide the real identities for his characters; this is a habit that had grown thin with me, and still does.  But here it works, sort of.  But it's still lazy writing, as the real-life people are the characters and characterizations that he's supposed to work hard to show us on his own.  Instead, there's an obvious Brangelina here, using the real-life couple and their fame, eccentricity and adoptions to substitute for the work that Kellerman should be doing with his writing to supply us with the characters.  By the time it ends, the similarity to the real-life couple has long since entered fiction and separated from the real-life people, but that doesn't disguise the fact that he used them to get us there.

Whatever.  I read the book in two days, so it's an easy and interesting read.  It's free of Kellerman's usual judgments, and, thankfully, the sparring and relationship troubles of Delaware and Robin are long gone--and about time, since they're not the reason we read this stuff, anyway.  Their troubles were like Robert B. Parker's former use of chapters and chapters of describing Spenser's cooking prowess--unnecessary and a disturbing deviation from the plot and storyline.  Give us characters, not forced character traits or character drama.  In other words, story over anything else, always.

That rule was followed here, to everyone's benefit.  Now, when I buy the next one in the series, I won't feel bad as I do so, and I won't have to tell myself that I'm buying it only because I have all the others.

For my reviews of other Jonathan Kellerman books, many Stephen King books, and dozens of others, click on this link to my Goodreads book page.

Lullaby by Robert B. Parker and Ace Atkins

Photo: Lullaby's book cover, from Kirkus Reviews, at www.kirkusreviews.com

The title says it's "Robert B. Parker's Lullaby," and the copyright belongs to the estate of Robert B. Parker, but this novel, the first without Parker, is all Atkins.  The names are the same, but the writing is completely different.  Not that this is bad; the writing is adequate, sometimes good.  Better than most in the genre, probably.  But the benchmark's of Parker's writing--and though the comparison is unfair, it's inescapable when you take over someone else's iconic series--were the sparseness of his prose, and the breeze of his wit and descriptions.  In short, Parker made it all look effortless.  Atkins simply tries too hard; his wit is sometimes strong and real, and his writing is often funny, but there are obvious instances in which he simply tries too hard to be witty or funny, and, at those specific moments, everything falls flat.  I found the writing too self-aware.  Characters would often say that now, to fit the genre, the other guy should say or do X, or behave like Y.  Even Spenser tries too hard, and the funny thing about his character used to be that he so much didn't give a damn, that that was what partly made his lines so funny.  He simply tried to self-amuse; here, he tries to amuse everyone else.  Doesn't work most of the time.

And the transition novel also too clearly shows the age of the minor characters (Parker had purposely aged Spenser lately; here there's an odd combination of his world, and the other characters, getting old, but he doesn't.  Necessary, of course, for the main character of the series--and Rita Fiore, more than everyone else, clearly hasn't aged a bit--but here it was just a weird juxtaposition.) and the carrying on of the world.  Joe Broz is in Hospice care; the Fed who called Spenser Lochinvar is in a Jewish retirement community in Florida.  Characters lament about how it all used to be, and frequently.  Even a Whitey Bulger-like hood is frowned upon for being with a woman vastly younger than himself--though that's what Hawk does every night.  The plot unfolds much like Parker's might; you'll see nothing new here if you've read his stuff.  Yet it all does seem new anyway, somehow; Atkins clearly goes out of his way to make it his own, and mostly he does it well, and it's okay and necessary that he does so.

Overall it's a good book, sufficiently nostalgic and new at the same time, old and young at the same time (the main minor character, if you will, is fourteen, and the older guys respect her young toughness), Parker's and Atkins' at the same time.  If you liked Parker, you'll like Atkins, and you might like Atkins if you didn't like Parker.

This is because his writing purposely does things that Parker's didn't.  There's lots of imagery and extended metaphor here; outside of Crimson Joy, Parker usually stayed away from those.  The paragraphs and sentences are longer; none of the action is as tightly written as Parker's was.  This last could be worked on.  Two scenes in the novel should've been a lot more tense than they were.

But it's a good transition novel.  Atkins has now made the series his own; it'll be interesting to see what road he travels with it.