Slow Burn by Ace Atkins: A Book Review

Not too much to say about this Ace Atkins effort. Pretty good. Not bad. He's done better. I've read a lot worse from writers hired by the Parker Estate. (Are you hearing me, Michael Brandman?)

This one is a comfortable pair of slippers for those who've read all of the Spenser novels. It fits in, and does not detract, from it. It doesn't add to it, either, exactly, but that's okay. That's not why people read #44 of a single series, is it? For something very different?

It was a little jarring to read that Spenser has had a knee replacement, though. Not quite as bad as Superman needing dentures, but still an unwelcome reminder that even our heroes get old. Spenser won't be keeping up with any long-distance runners (a la Crimson Joy), I guess. Susan Silverman, by contrast, seems to be getting younger, thinner, sexier. This is a glaring inconsistency that you'll go along with, because who wants to hear that Spenser's had a knee replacement, and that Susan needs to wear Depends? What's next, Hawk swinging around his walker and whining about taxes?

So it was pretty good. Not especially memorable. Not bad. A comfy, if worn, pair of slippers.

Back Spin by Harlan Coben

Photo: from books.google.com at this address

A slightly better book than The Final Detail, the one I reviewed previous to this, Back Spin is about a golfing family--man, woman and child--that is torn by the kidnapping of said child. There's a large cast of supporting characters for a book of this genre, and by the end all of them figure into the crime in one way or another. There's nary a red herring in the whole thing.

There's nary a Win, either, which is a first for me in this series. Granted, I'm only three books in, but it seems that Bolitar and Coben agree on the same point: For the good of the series, or for Bolitar (which is saying the same thing), a little less of Win may be more. You can't have his safety net for the whole series, or for the main character. Every once in awhile, it's important that he does it alone. Win does come into it, of course, but only for character development. He does nothing to help solve the crime. (He attains a copy of an important VHS--this is the late-90s here--but that's it.)

This book again shows Coben's flair for character development. In these CSI-type mystery novels--I say CSI not because of the forensics, but because of the reliance on the tried and true formula of presentation, as well as the dominance of the case over all else--it's refreshing that Coben remembers and insists on character development and even moral philosophizing, the latter more on the reader's behalf after the reading is done, as opposed to the characters themselves babbling and morally philosophizing, which hampers lesser writers. Robert Parker, for example, who was not exactly a lesser writer, did occasionally get bogged down with Spenser and Susan's and Hawk's philosophizing and moralizing, which Coben seems to purposely stay away from. Not Parker's exclusively, but the habit of this genre's characters to do so.

In fact, Coben's characters go out of their way--even more than Parker's did, which is saying something--to point out cliches and to downplay them. In fact, Coben's characters do it so often, that in of itself is becoming a cliche. He believes, apparently, that pointing out the cliche is better than falling back on it. Though, of course, by mentioning them so often, and panning them so often, he's falling back on his characters doing that. I'm sure Coben has noticed this, but by now it's a staple of his series, and it's therefore way too late to stop doing it now. I can see this after just three books, and violently out of order, at that.

So Coben also is good at the character development, or at least with the characters being aware that they are developing. Bolitar especially realizes this about himself, in every novel so far, and in each he says that he doesn't like what he's learned about himself, either. But Bolitar also goes out of his way to notice the personages of his other friends, each of whom (Win and Esperanza so far) has had his fair share of the limelight. This is better than usual for this genre. For the third time in a row, as well--noticeable because I've read them so out of order--a mother has to go to an extreme to protect her child. (Again, it's a son.) This has become a common motif so far in Coben's work as well.

The case is riveting as well, as it needs to be, or all this character and good writing stuff would be worthless. As Stephen King points out, story, people, story. Leave the theme, development, etc. for later, to enhance the book. But the story--or, in this genre's case, the mystery--must prevail. Here it does. There are so many characters in this one, and each has some bearing on the ending, that it's important to notice that Coben gives each of them a dominating personality trait, so it's easy to tell them apart and to give a damn about them in some way, even in a negative way. (There's a white neo-Nazi with a Hispanic first name, for example.) Coben gets a pass here for getting too generalized with a group of high school girls and their vernacular, each of whom seems to talk like Jimmy Fallon's teenage girl impersonation, a good fifteen or so years before Fallon made it popular.

So this one is also worth a read, and again it's a very fast read, as I finished it in less than a day.

Harlon Coben's Home: How Far Would You Go to Defend Your Child? Is It Ever Too Far?

Photo: from kirkusreviews.com, here.

It's been awhile since I've read a Myron Bolitar novel. I don't remember why, exactly. It's just one of those things: I picked up Nesbo, stopped reading him for awhile...and I've been reading other things since. But when my neighbor, a huge Bolitar / Harlan Coben fan (I'm more a fan of the latter than the former, because Coben was nice enough to buy me lunch once, and talk to me about how he wrote--but that's another story) asked me if I wanted to borrow his latest--in return for my letting him borrow all my Bolitar books--I said sure. (Thanks, Jim Fitz!) As it's a three-day weekend, and my sinuses are again out of control and I feel like crap, I started reading it and didn't put it down except to sleep. I started it yesterday and finished it today. (I read 90% of it yesterday, so there wasn't much to finish.)

It was that good. The mystery is very mysterious, and the pace and tension are so good that you'll be flipping pages, fast, like I did. The gist of the book is the title, though more specifically, it's about who your home is, not as much about the structure. Home is where the heart is, right? So where's your heart? That last question means more to the book than you'd think, and more than I'm letting on. (I'm a little proud of myself for this.) The book is about how far we'd go for our loved ones--specifically, how far a mother will go to protect her child.

The short answer: Very far. I know this. At my job I often see this, parents going to ridiculous lengths to defend their kid, even when the kid doesn't need defending.

This is an important distinction. We all know bad parents, right? Someone who lets the kid get away with everything: talking back, and badly, to them; showing bad manners, like not thanking people for gifts; and, perhaps the worst, defending them about everything, to the extent that nothing's the fault of the kid, so the kid never learns to grow up, to be responsible, to be self-reliant. We all know parents like this. Right now I'm sitting here, counting the ones I know who fit this distinction to a T, and I'm thinking 4, maybe 5--wait, there was a 6th, from a few years ago. It's more often the mother than the father, from my experience, though that last one had both.

So this book is about that question: How far will you go to defend your child? But...does the child need defending? And are you really defending the child, or are you defending, and / or celebrating, yourself? You ever see a parent so out of control with this defending thing that you wonder who, exactly, they're defending? Is it the kid who can never be wrong, or the parent who can never be wrong--so the parent, of course, couldn't raise an imperfect kid. Good God, if that happens, then that means the parent is also imperfect, right? Well--No, but they don't know that. Narcissists are not known for their logic. Watch for that, next time: Is the kid perfect, or is the parent defending the kid perfect, which is why the kid is perfect? From my experience, it's the latter.

This book isn't just about that, of course. It's about Win. In fact, it starts off with him, which threw me for a minute before I figured it out: Win's chapters are 1st-person narration; Bolitar's are third person. Limited or omniscient, you ask? Ah, there's my own caveat. (You knew there'd be one, right?) The third person omniscient narrator is almost a character himself. He hides behind the curtain, but he's there. He breaks the fourth wall to remind you he's there. Sometimes he masquerades as Bolitar's thoughts and voice-overs--and, unfortunately, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference--but he's there, trying very, very hard to be hip and snazzy. This third-person narrator (who reminds me a little uncomfortably of the narrator Snowman in those Christmas cartoons of the 60s) interrupts his own narration to often point out the obvious, or to point out the cliche, or to introduce the cliche, or to...You can either take it or you can't. Most of the time, I could.

I wish overall that Harlan Coben wouldn't do this, but I understand why he does: Something has to set the writing apart, right? Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Harlan Coben and a couple of others--Frankly, they write about the same genre, and the almost-same plots, and something has got to be different, right? I'm thinking now of Robert Parker's last 10 books or so. If you threw a title at me, and asked me to summarize the plot, I wouldn't be able to do it. I suspect that if I'd read all of Lee Childs's, or all of Coben's, I'd say the same about theirs. That's not exactly a drawback, either: One of the odd things about the genre is that a series character is like a pair of comfortable slippers. You slip them on, and you forgive their age, or their holes, or whatever, because they're comfortable. That the genre's books all blend together is actually part of the charm, not a detraction. The way to tell Coben's Bolitar apart from Parker's Spenser (as an example)? Why, Bolitar books have the narrator who frequently breaks the wall and speaks directly to the reader, even going so far as to use the second-person "you." That's no small thing, by the way, and it's a way to ease your feet back into those comfortable slippers. Every mystery writer wants a series cash cow with a main protagonist and his questionable sidekick / partner. Coben has Bolitar and Win as Parker had Spenser and Hawk. And, of course, if it works--which Coben's series obviously has--then you keep going, right? And you don't fix what's not broken.

So read this one, because the tension and plot and mystery are so good that you'll forgive the third-person narrator's trespasses, if that's even necessary for you to begin with. And at the end, you'll have a moral question to answer: Did the character go too far defending the child? (I'm having an image now of the adults who beat the piss out of each other to get the latest Christmas must-have. Remember those videos of grown people beating the snot out of others so their kid could get the store's last Tickle Me Elmo?) I would say Yes, because of the people I explained above, but I'll bet quite a few people will also say No, that you protect your child at all costs.

Even if the child doesn't need defending.

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.

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.

Fool Me Twice--Brandman's Newest Jesse Stone

Photo: Book cover, from its Goodreads page.

The new book in the Jesse Stone series, Fool Me Twice, is a good, quick read, as I read it in just a few hours.  Having said that, I can't say much more positive about it, since the plot is a rehash of Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace (with somewhat the same result for the characters), and the dialogue is almost stolen from Parker's style cabinet, but without the wit and flair.  I read it like I put on last year's professional wardrobe.  Quickly, without effort, appreciating the comfort, but still wondering why I'm still wearing it.  Ace Atkins has fared much better with his one Spenser novel so far.  Speaking of these series, both started, of course, by the late, great Robert B. Parker (who I met and spoke with a few times; he was nice enough to give me two autographs and his agent's name, the last of which is unheard of from an established writer to an unpublished one), I think we can now do away with the Robert B. Parker's tag before every title of each series.  Take a peek at the list of published works from the last three books since his last, and see how odd those titles look there.

What else?  Jesse Stone in Brandman's last seemed like Jesse Stone, I guess, after taking a blabbermouth pill.  This time, he sounds a lot like Spenser.  He even flirts like Spenser.  Brandman still hasn't pinned down his inherited character.  Jesse Stone is not normally interested in saving the badly parented juveniles as Spenser had been (Paul; April Kyle), so when he does it here, he seems to be putting on Spenser's shoes.  That series is so well-known for its bad parents raising screwed-up kids that it's blasphemy and overdone to see it here.  Jesse Stone is simply not as altruistic as Spenser; he's too insecure and unconfident about himself to be Superman for anyone else.  The series has already well-established this.  Brandman can change that, of course, but not without showing the change, and the cause of that change.  He never does that.

We see Rita Fiore (which is always a pleasure), but we also see the new Federal Guy in Boston.  Parker and Atkins made this guy an annoying dweeb, which is fine, but Brandman makes him one of the all-time dufuses of today's crime fiction.  This guy, as drawn by Brandman, would never have made it to his current position, or even be accepted into the academy.  He blames the star's bodyguard of having either the hots for her, or of having an affair with her, and it's her supposed rejection of him that makes him kill her.  Yet any guy with any decent people skills, intelligence, and five spare minutes with the bodyguard in question would know that this was simply not the case.  He ignores even the most obvious of evidence; I'm talking stuff that Fred, Shaggy, Wilma, Scooby and Daphne would've known what to do with.  Nancy Drew would've fixed her hair and then nailed the evidence and personalities involved here, and this guy flubbed both, with drama.  It's really bad, like he's never even heard the word "evidence" before, or like he's never had to read people's personalities before.  Have I made it clear that this guy was terribly drawn, written and executed?  Simply not believable.  We say hello to a couple of other Spenser cross-overs, too, but they seem to be in the neighborhood only for show.

There's a case with the local water company that's a head-scratcher for the reader, especially this one.  Not that I wouldn't mind having a word or two with my own local water guys, but this subplot is nonsensical and out of place in this book.  It has no relevance here, either thematically or in the plot.  It reinforces that everyone's messed up and untrustworthy, but we know that already.  We know what the novel's #1 bad guy is going to do, and though we're surprised by how Brandman delivers it to us, we're not surprised that it happens.  The real surprise comes later; since the bodyguard never leaves the area, and since any mail would be traced to him, thereby blowing his cover (he's in hiding for awhile), we wonder where he got the red ants from.  (I'm no insect expert, but I'm firm that biting red fire ants cannot survive between the Cape and the North Shore, in even the hottest of all MA winters.)  Again, not believable.

So it passed the time, and it was a quick and easy read.  I could probably say the same for Goosebumps and the Berenstein Bears, so I don't know.  The series is being kept afloat, I suppose, and the previous one must've sold pretty well for this one to come out so quickly after...and I see that it's got an average of four stars from other critics...It's a pair of comfortable slippers, I suppose, though I haven't consistently worn my slippers in years...And I'll buy the next Brandman/Stone book in the series, so...

Bleh.

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.

The Best American Mystery Stories--1998, Part 3

photo: book cover from its Amazon page

This is a continuing series of short story critiques and summaries from The Best Mystery Stories--1998.  While these stories are a bit old, of course, the hope is that the reader will check out the authors of the stories positively reviewed, as many of these authors are still pounding the keys today.  Check out the other blog entries here and here.

The Adventure of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, by John H. Watson, M.D., edited by John T. Lescroart

Shame on you and go to the back of the class if you didn't recognize the name of the good doctor as the character who was the author of his adventures with his friend, Sherlock Holmes.  Lescroart has apparently received permission from Conan Doyle's estate, or maybe the publishing company owned the copyrights and gave the series to him, or something, not sure of the legalities here.  I suspect it's like Jeffrey Deaver now writing the James Bond novels, and whomever else is doing Robert Parker's Spenser novels.  Might be worth a little Google search...and you might be wondering why the story would be in a "Best of..." volume of American stories.  Either Lescroart's American, which would be sort of blasphemous, considering Holmes is a very British creation, or the story was first published in an American publication--which would be even more blasphemous.

Anyway, the story is short and crisp and well-written, with all the little details that you would expect Holmes to get and you (and, often, Watson) to miss.  This one's a good one about the possibility of a nasty plague, which, if you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I'm interested in.  I won't give away the mystery here, so you'll have to get a copy of the book somehow, but I will say that the only problem I have with this series is that Holmes is portrayed as such a genius that we may not even try too hard to figure it out before it's told to us.  That's the trap I fell into here, which is unusual for me.  I put some of the pieces together before Holmes tells it all to us--and to Watson, which has always been a clever writer-ly trick, so that the reader doesn't feel spoken to, though of course we are.  (That trick is maybe original to Holmes, unless Poe pulled it off first.  Now that I think about it, I think Poe did, and Conan Doyle took it.)  I usually get pieces of these stories right, such as the dirt on the knees of the guy in "The Red-headed League," which, by the way, is one of the more ridiculous short stories I have ever read.  I mean, what moron wouldn't suspect that something is up when he's chosen, without reason, among hundreds of other red-headed guys, and is hired only to copy every letter of every word of a dictionary?  Ludicrous.  But I digress.  This one is not ludicrous, and is far better, actually, than "League," so read it.  Though it's a stretch that Holmes would notice the existence of the crime at all from the newspaper articles mentioned, but whatever.  That's Holmes's genius, right?  Again, you expect that he'd get things that you wouldn't, which gives the writer more of a pass than most mystery writers would get.  (I suspect Agatha Christie got away with much the same thing.)  But, when you're done, you'll be impressed with the author's cleverness, so he got that part of the series correct as well.  Memorable.

Night Crawlers, by John Lutz

This one is passable, though just a solid okay.  Nothing you wouldn't see coming, really, and there's a bit of a cliche about motorcycle gang members with tattoos.  And that the whole town is scared into silence by these three guys.  Wouldn't they just get ten townspeople together and take care of them?  Guess not.  Anyway, the swampland is used to good (cliche) effect, and it's well-written on the whole.  It's just that what happens and what's said is what you'd expect to happen and what you'd expect to be said.  But still done well, I guess.  Not a big fan of the "this happens then this happens" type of mystery, as the writer never tries to hide the mystery too much, and the bad guys are very clearly bad guys right away, so the suspects aren't the mystery, either.  In fact, there's no mystery to this mystery, but it's readable and you won't be worse off for reading it.  'course, you won't be better off, either, but, hell, at least the title means two or three things at the same time.  Just read it and move on.

Prayer for Judgment, by Margaret Maron

This one is a small, impressive little nugget, solved practically between cases in the judge's spare time.  It starts off with a well-written description of North Carolina flowers and scents, which has been done a billion times before in short stories and novels, just change the state.  (It also frequently repeated the word "gardenias," which was discomforting to me as it reminded me of one of Marlon Brando's bald head in the darkness blabberings towards the end of Apocalypse Now.  But that's me; not the writer's fault.)  Anyway, the author tried to glaringly bookend it with a two-sentence mention of the same at the end of the story, and it didn't work.  The whole flower/scent thing is unnecessary at the beginning and at the end.  Luckily, the mystery in the middle is set up as a minor puzzle, and you should be able to follow along and piece it together as the judge does, so that when she pulls apart the curtain at the end, you're nodding along, and satisfied at your own cleverness.  Well-written but for the flower nonsense.  Title sounds like it'll have more gravitas than it actually does, as you're waiting for a double-meaning that never really asserts itself.

More to come.

The Girl Who Played with Fire--Stieg Larsson

Photo:  First edition front cover of the Swedish book, from its Wikipedia site

Second book of the deceased author's Millenium trilogy, in many ways superior to the first.  It continues the trend of bucking the solid rules of publishing--jumping between even more 3rd person limited characters than the first one did; not getting to the crux of the mystery until well after page 100; many pages of frankly unnecessary pages of exposition...But, again, it all works.  And, of course, that's what matters most.  If it works, do it.

To be honest, this one actually dragged a bit in the first half, but it really took off in the second.  Lisbeth, who Larsson must've known was his most intriguing character when he was maybe a quarter into the first manuscript, is largely out of the picture; she's been accused of three murders, and she's hiding.  The reader, through some clever trickery in Larsson's 3rd person limited narration, has to admit that maybe she did kill Bjurman (I thought so); but it won't take an ingenious reader to see that Larsson leaves us with Lisbeth at the apartment of the other two victims, hoping we'll think she killed them.  You won't think so.  But I'll bet, if you've already read it, that you thought she did kill Bjurman.  It happened according to how she'd threatened him in the first book; he was naked, kneeling and begging.  When it was disclosed that she hadn't killed him, I was surprised.  So that's a good thing about this book--you're somewhat surprised by the actions (or, the non-actions) of a now-familiar character.  (If you weren't fooled like I was, more power to you.)

The plot mostly follows Blomqvist and the many minor characters this time.  Larsson ingeniously pulls a Bram Stoker/Dracula move here: Lisbeth is largely absent through the majority of the book, noticeably visible only in the beginning and in the end.  In the meantime, all of the characters, major and minor, are looking for her.  She's the Hitchcockian McGuffin.  But as Dracula was more of a force in Stoker's book precisely because he was absent and sought after throughout most of it, Lisbeth here is, too.  Everybody talks about her; everyone's looking for her; some are trying to slander her (notice the similarity to her name there; I'll bet Larsson had an extensive outline for all three books at once, and so knew that slander would be how most of the characters attacked her in all three novels--I'm halfway through the last one now) while others are trying to unsmear the many smear campaigns.  And so by omission, her character actually becomes stronger and more dangerous.  And more poignant: when she finally re-appears, the reader is happy to see her again.  Her character is the dessert that you cherish because you're not allowed to have it very often.

And when she does re-appear in the last small percentage of the book, she owns it.  She's a force, not just for the reader; not just for the characters she (righteously) beats up.  She's simply a force, in of herself, like the waterspout she sees in the beginning.  (Which remained a largely unnecessary section, but for the theme just mentioned.  Hopefully the second half of the third book will tie that together, but I'm not feelin' it.)  She is the force that all of the other characters revolve around, are attracted to, and are repelled from.  She is their Sun.

Which is not to say that all is perfect.  A nationally-famous boxer comes to the rescue at the last minute.  (That scene reminded me of one in one of Robert B. Parker's books--which Larsson undoubtedly read, as the constant allusions to the authors of the genre show--in which Spenser and Hawk have to bring down a monster of a man, which they are barely able to do, even together.)  Again, it works, and it shouldn't have.  Lisbeth survives a premature burial, a la Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2.  She gets out by digging with a cigarette case, after getting shot three times, including once in the head, which exposes a bit of brain.  (How that didn't get infected by all that dirt, especially when she touched the brain with one dirt-encrusted finger, is a mystery.)  This sounds ridiculous, but the scene (and the ones immediately following) was remarkably effective, so much so that when I awoke at 3 a.m. afterwards, for no reason, it was the first thing I thought of (though getting up for work in three hours should've been), and even just the memory of it was smothering.  (This is a high compliment from me.)  The remaining pages is as much of a suspenseful page-turner as you are likely to read.  You will find yourself actually rooting for a character you know is not real.  This is not something I do often, even with books and characters I like a lot.  I amazed myself at doing so.

P.S.--Accolades must now be given to the translator of all three books, Reg Keeland.

Killing the Blues by Michael Brandman (and maybe Robert B. Parker, too)

I wanted to dislike it because the continuation of someone else's baby by another writer just doesn't sit well with me--and they usually fail, or seem intent to just make money (see: James Bond).  But Brandman does a good job here, keeping most of Parker's Jesse Stone while adding the inevitable small changes.  Most of these changes work.

Jesse talks a little more; he actually sounds a bit more like Spenser.  I thought the original character was too quiet, as Brandman apparently did.  Parker also got hung up too much on Jenn; it was time for her to go, and she has.  The Parker combination of Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall always seemed forced to me; perhaps he felt he had nothing much more to say about her,especially after Helen Hunt turned down the role.  I don't know, but they definitely needed to break up, and they have.  Stone also comes across here as a little more...stoic (sorry), which is odd since he speaks more here.  But he admits directly that he didn't miss Sunny.  In a Stephen King story, he'd be asking Parker directly why he had to date Sunny, anyway.  His direct actions and verbosity work for me, though he also seems too Spenserian when he helps the ex-hood find a job, and when he talked to the female students, the teacher and the principal.  (Note to Brandman: Massachusetts doesn't have homeroom anymore; it's now called advisory.)  Parker's anti-teacher torch is definitely carried on.

So Stone doing his Spenser impersonation didn't work for me, and Stone is certainly not a cat-lover.  I guess Brandman wanted to set up a Stone/Spenser duality; maybe he's taking over Spenser, too.  If so, it was wise for him to turn out a Stone book first, before he tackled the iconic Spenser.

Brandman's book is a little edgier than Parker's would've been, maybe a little more noir.  That's okay with me.  A few things didn't work, but that's to be expected.  And Brandman creates an admirable mixture of a book that's 70% Parker and 30% Brandman.  Perhaps Parker, notoriously productive, already had a large part of the ms. written--notice that the copyright belongs to the Estate of Robert B. Parker, not to Brandman.  Had this been 100% Brandman, I doubt that would be the case.  We'll have to see with future Stone books.

The torch has changed hands, but it hasn't gone out.  Brandman has earned the right here to run with it.

Parker's Last Spenser

Sixkill wasn't bad, though it's not anything we haven't seen before.  Since it's perhaps the last Spenser, it's too bad because Hawk doesn't make an appearance.  In fact, that's the curiousity here.  It's like Parker had nowhere else for Hawk to go; Hawk's been in Southeast Asia for awhile now.  Yet Sixkill is another Hawk, really, except a Native American rather than an African American.  Same poor chances as a youth (though certainly his chances had been better than Hawk's); same transformation into strong, bench-pressing gym rat and killer with little conscience.  Odd Spenser as 'enry 'iggins thing there.  Anyway, a comfortable and quick read; finished the whole book in a couple of hours, which is a very positive thing and a slightly negative thing at the same time.  But it's like the latest Pirates and Indiana Jones movies: You know what you're going to get, and you don't even want anything better because you just want what you're comfortably happy with.  If you wanted deeper complexity, you'd read James Ellroy or Cormac McCarthy, right?

I knew Robert B. Parker, having spoken to him a few times when I worked at Borders and then many years later at booksignings.  Very honest man; admitted he wrote just for the money these days.  Admitted he had a thing against college because he'd been pinkslipped from Northeastern.  He had grudges, apparently, but he was honest about them.  And he gave me the name of his agent and said for me to pitch to her, and drop his name.  How awesome is that?!?

Quick, Random Reviews of Four Spenser Novels by Robert B. Parker

Cold Service


Very good, better than many in the series. Maybe a little too much back and forth comparing Spenser/Susan with Hawk and his temporary girlfriend, and the way it finally went down in Marshport wasn't very satisfying, and the off-stage ending with Hawk was also a little strange...but the story wasn't really about that final confrontation, and there was no doubt of the outcome, so the story was about Spenser and Vinnie being there. Didn't like how Vinnie was sort of treated as the loser of the group...but overall it all worked, anyway, despite its flaws, as is also typical.


Painted Ladies


I'd forgotten to post a review when I'd first read this in October 2010, but as I look at the cover now and try to remember what it was about, I find that I cannot do it.  Which doesn't mean the book was bad, per se, as I don't believe I ever read a bad Spenser book.  But it does mean that there was nothing in it to separate it from the rest, and while that's not terrible, it's not good, either.


Rough Weather


Read this one already, as I have every Parker book, but I read something about The Grey Man, so I thought I'd give this another shot.  Better than I remembered, but not one of his best. You would think Rugar would have killed him right away, esp. to protect his daughter.  Since Rugar knew he was tough to kill, as he mentions in Small Vices, he would have done it himself.  But everything good about the series is evident here.  All minor characters from the series make an appearance here.  Overall, very good and, as usual, addictive reading.


Small Vices


Read this one already, as I have every Parker book, but I read something about The Grey Man, so I thought I'd give this another shot.  Better than I remembered, but not one of his best. The time passing seems oddly handled, and you would think Rugar would find him immediately again once he got his apartment back.  Fairly long for Spenser/Parker, but everything good about the series is evident here.  All minor characters from the series make an appearance here.  Overall, very good and, as usual, addictive reading.


My similar reviews of these past two books tell you how similar the last two books were!