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.

Phantom--Book Review

Photo: Jo Nesbo, from crimefictionlover.com.

This one took a little while to get going, but of course was well worth it.  Harry Hole is back from self-isolation in Hong Kong because the son of the love of his life has been accused of murder.  Helping Hole to hopefully set this boy free are his usual suspects, though they're mostly given short shrift here.  They pop up essentially to help out and then they disappear again.  I would've liked to have seen Beate some more, but I admit that there wasn't enough in the plot to place her there more often without making it look forced.  So...maybe later.

At any rate, the crime itself again isn't a mindbender.  An experienced reader will know who done it, though, again, the proof is hard to come by.  Watching Hole figuring it out and gathering it is why we read these.  But it shouldn't surprise you.  Also not much of a mystery to me was the identity of the old man who keeps showing up.  It probably won't be for you, either.  The italics portions struck me as unnecessary, but it was different for Nesbo, and so maybe that's what he was looking for.  It also provides a decent book-ending to it all, so okay.  I guess.

What will be a surprise, however, is the ending.  Rather infamous now, as this review comes a few years too late for the surprise ending, and since the tenth book, Police, has been out for awhile now.  If you haven't read this one, I won't spoil it for you, but...yeah, there's been a sequel, so...

And, yeah, I know I'm reading the Harry Hole books out of order.  I don't have them all, so bear with me.

The best part of these books, to me, is the honesty in which Nesbo writes them.  He doesn't shy away from the depressing, bottom-line truth of things.  The ending of Phantom is yet another, and perhaps the most glaring, example.  I had that part figured out because that is the way of these types of things, as Nesbo shows time and time again in this book.  It really couldn't have been anyone else, for any other reason, at the end.  Mattress Girl, in my soon-to-be-finished ms., can attest to that.  It is what it is.  Let's deal with the what-is before we try to make it the way we want it to be.