Tuesday, December 06, 2011

bones to pick

Title: City of Bones
Author: Michael Connelly
Bookmark: a bookmark

Many years ago I read The Concrete Blonde (so long ago that it predated this blog), and was reminded of it recently when I saw someone reading it on a Kindle during a flight.  I saw enough to recognize the story, but I had no memory of how it ended.  Connelly's good like that.  Even if a step or two in the investigation is predictable, there are enough weird turns to make the ending feel clever.

City of Bones opens with Connelly's usual hero Harry Bosch fielding calls on New Year's Day.  After two suicides, he gets called into one of the canyons of LA where a doctor's dog has retrieved a bone from the woods, which the good doctor assures Harry is from a child.

As Harry and his partner Jerry Edgar investigate a case which hits home for both of them (Edgar has a son; Harry was a foster kid after his mom died), Harry gets close to the rookie beat cop who was on scene at the doctor's the first night, and the deputy chief takes every opportunity to try to force Harry out of his department.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
I just wish there were more depth in the death of one of the main characters.  When it happens, it seems abrupt and perfunctory, and we never get a clear explanation of what happened.  Character traits explained by Bosch to the department shrink at the funeral feel like they were introduced at that very moment; there really isn't much sign of any of it before he mentions them.  It feels like Connelly ran out of ideas for her and killed her off so she wouldn't be his problem anymore, which is unfortunate for other characters and the reader.

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posted by reyn at 4:01 PM

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the butler, but only once

Title: Whodunits: More Than 100 Mysteries For You To Solve
Author(s): Tom Bullimore, Hy Conrad, Derrick Niederman, Stan Smith
Bookmark: a picture of a deer attacking a police cruiser

The book is split into four sections; it seems like each author did his own thing, because there are pretty obvious stylistic differences between them.  I don't think they all got the same memo describing the collaborative project.

There are big differences in what each of them thinks constitutes a "mystery."  The first does a solid job of laying out a short story, giving you just enough information to solve it, and explaining the answers well (all solutions are in a separate section in the back of the book).  The second also does well, but the stories are more like elaborate logic puzzles, or simple logic puzzles dressed in a new story (lots of variations on "X always tells truth, Y always lies, Z just likes to set fires" kind of puzzles).  The third apparently set up the stories on a website and invited people to ask questions to help them solve the mysteries.  The questions asked and answered are not always very relevant, and certainly not what a real investigator would need to know.  One particularly annoyed me because the solution hinged on obscure sports trivia and the date of the "crime," which was never mentioned until the solution.  The final section was a long parade of simple (in execution and presentation, though not always in solution) logic puzzles.  Several times I encountered one which I didn't think included enough information for pure logic to derive the answer, and at least once it was just flat-out wrong.  Most annoying was that the solutions offered no explanation whatsoever, so that if you weren't clear on how to find the answer, you would always stay that way.

For the most part, it was still a lot of fun.  The first two sections were great, and I think the third offered a neat concept, but the execution was a little bit flawed.  If they ever make Volume II, they will hopefully have the wisdom to not call the fourth guy.

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posted by reyn at 3:40 PM

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