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Thursday, September 19, 2013
big damn recap
I'm not going to individually post for everything I've read since February. At this point, I'm pretty sure this page only exists as a personal log of what I've read (it's existed longer than Goodreads, and nobody tracks me here). A gift of a nook for Christmas let me go through lots of books I downloaded from the library, and our new building has a little library in the basement. Between those, and a couple real books, I've read:
All of Michael Connelly's novels published up to today. Echo Park was my favorite. Good characterization and dialogue. The novels which do not fit into one of his series tend to be a bit weaker than the rest, but Harry Bosch is still the king of the Connelly version of LA. Mickey Haller makes a good read, though his slippery ethics make me a little uncomfortable sometimes, but even he can't hold a candle to his half-brother the cop. They have a combined story coming out this fall, The Gods of Guilt, and I look forward to it, but more for the detective than the somewhat shady defense attorney. Haller's a fun character, but there's a pattern to all of his stories, while Bosch continues to get into new situations, with unique twists and clever plots.
The first two books in Sue Grafton's Alphabet series. A little dated, but fun. Made me wish more of her books were on the shelf downstairs.
I've caught up with Alan Bradley's Flavia De Luce series (the most recent to date being Speaking From Among The Bones). Still entertaining, and he finally got to the twist I predicted in the first book, but I will have to wait until the next book (The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches), due out next year, for any resolution.
Craig Johnson continues to amaze me with Walt Longmire. I've read up to the short story Divorce Horse, wedged into the series between Hell Is Empty and As The Crow Flies, and, as always, Johnson inspires and intimidates me. As I read his books, I want to be able to write that well, and am constantly dogged by the feeling that I can't. However, Divorce Horse was a little disappointing. I'm glad I didn't spend any money on it. Too much guessing is left in the resolution (even calling it a "resolution" feels like a sham), and it feels too much like what it is: table scraps thrown out to keep ravening fans busy until the book release. I'm still two books (and a few short stories) behind in the series, but Steamboat Springs is due out next month. If I play my cards right, I think I'll be ready for it when it gets here.
Lamb, by Christopher Moore, is just as clever, funny, ribald, and entertaining as everything else I've read by him. I liked the new take on Jesus's youth (not being a religious person, I could tell there were several references I didn't get, but I was still pleased with the story and the references I did get), but I think the part that was most personally significant for me was the Author's Bio at the end, which assured me that Moore was a "late-blooming child prodigy" who published his first novel in his mid-thirties. That's about where I am, so I feel a little better about my late start in writing. Hopefully, I can get my book out to agents soon, and maybe I'll be a late-blooming child prodigy, too.
I think that's everything that matters. I've also been re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series on my nook, because sometimes I feel like reading, but I don't have a fresh book handy, and I've read that entire series so many times that I can dip in and out of it with aplomb, and not even care if I finish a chapter (though I usually do).Labels: decomposing bodies, demonic possession, ethics, girl power, mystery/detective, poison, western, young protagonists
posted by reyn at
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Sunday, August 26, 2012
Where the schemers and the meth addicts roam
Title: Death Without Company
Author: Craig Johnson
Bookmark: I shouldn't even bother anymore.
Sheriff Walt Longmire had a rough month. He nearly lost an ear to frostbite, his best friend to a twitchy and paranoid young man with a target on his back, and his (smoking hot) deputy to three prestigious job offers. He kept all three of them, but the woman he loved is gone and his prime suspect in a recent series of killings stuck the barrel of a high-powered rifle under their chin and pulled the trigger.
Naturally, there was a period of adjustment. He grew a beard. He adopted the woman's dog when it arrived on his back porch (though he still hasn't given Dog a real name), and he hardly ever itches his ear anymore. Henry Standing Bear has recovered from his injuries, and Santiago Saizarbitoria is on his way up from Cheyenne to interview for the position vacated when Branch joined the highway patrol. Vic is her usual (gorgeous) foul-mouthed self, and nobody would have her any other way, but her husband is gone and the divorce finalized.
Walt is doing much better. His friend and predecessor Lucian Connolly is not. Mari Baroja has died in her room at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, and Lucian suspects foul play. Walt isn't convinced at first, but he plays along and soon learns there was far more to the Basque woman than met the eye. Like her three-hour marriage to Lucian, the granddaughter who owns a bakery in town, and the millions she holds in mineral rights on her land.
As Walt and Vic keep digging (with able assistance from Saizarbitorio--rechristened "Sancho" by Vic--, Henry, and Dog), they find that this mystery spans generations, and includes more bodies than anyone would have guessed. Lucian won't tell what he knows, key players are brutally attacked, and more subtle attempts are made on other lives. Walt has to find his way through all of these obstacles to find out who is behind the killings, and why. Meanwhile, an official from the treasury department is in town to go through abandoned safety deposit boxes, and she has her eye on the sheriff of Absaroka County.
I could go into the list of reasons I love the book, but they're the same reasons I love The Cold Dish. Great characters who work well with one another, an intriguing and believable plot, and Wyoming. It's still not Oregon, but it's close enough to make me homesick in the very best of ways. Reading Longmire books is like taking a trip back west for me, even if my days were never so exciting as Walt's.Labels: drugs, mystery/detective, o pioneers, western
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Saturday, August 18, 2012
Crime, Crime on the Range
Title: The Cold Dish
Author: Craig Johnson
Bookmark: Library receipt. I'm pretty sure that's why they provide those things.
By the third page of this book, Sheriff Walter Longmire was drinking a beer as he drove across town to meet his deputy, a foul-mouthed young lady from Philly. That was about two pages after I decided I really liked the book, and Craig Johnson.
Walt is sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. I loved the book because it was well-written, had great characters, a very good, very believable ending, and because I enjoyed the sparse dialog between Walt and Henry Standing Bear; a language borne of decades of friendship and two-sided sarcasm. I also loved it because, although Wyoming is not Oregon, it is similar in many ways, and reading Johnson's descriptions of the mountains, people, wildlife, and weather made me a little homesick.
Full disclosure: I discovered this series because I found episodes of Longmire on Hulu, enjoyed them, and found that they were based on a series of books. One of the episodes ("Unfinished Business") lifts its major plotline from this book, but there are significant changes, so that the two or three people I naturally suspected were not guilty of the transgressions for which I suspected them. I liked that.
Walt commits his open-container violation on his way to either visit a scene where was body was discovered or dispatch Deputy Victoria "Vic" Moretti to same. Vic gets the case. A young man had been shot in the back with what turns out to be a large bore rifle round. The weapon is rather particular; a .45 caliber Sharps rifle (according to Walt, the source of the term "Sharpshooter," thanks to its extraordinary range and accuracy, though Wikipedia is less clear on this point) which, except for some Italian reproductions which lack the legendary accuracy, are all historic weapons. In most areas, the rarity of such a rifle would alone break the case, but as Walt point out, this is Wyoming. Everyone has a good rifle, and most know how to use them.
They originally hope that it may be a simple hunting accident, but Walt and Vic both suspect otherwise; the victim was one of four boys convicted a year earlier for raping a young Cherokee woman with fetal alcohol syndrome. They try to reach the other three boys, but two are twins in a family apparently on vacation; the last was deemed least guilty in their collective crime, and his own family is tearing itself apart at the seams. He is the only one they are able to secure in protective custody, and he seems more broken than the Indian girl.
When a second boy is killed, Walt and Henry go into the mountains to find his twin brother, braving an early Wyoming blizzard swirling in off the mountains. Walt must fight the boy's urge to run, withstand the elements, and contend with an ancient, priceless, and possibly haunted Cherokee rifle which could be the murder weapon, were it not safely alibied. Plus, he has lady troubles.
Because there are other books in the series (this is the first), you know he survives, and probably prevails, but I think the book really excels because Johnson, like Walt, is from Wyoming, and he knows that people scar. Walt has scars, he bleeds, he hurts, and though he prevails, he still needs time to heal.Labels: murder, mystery/detective, western
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Thursday, November 18, 2010
varmints, lawmen, and the like
Title: Law and Order Unlimited
Author: William Colt MacDonald
I read this a few months ago, then lost track of it in my book pile. I no longer remember my general feeling about the book. Lawman comes to town to investigate a murder, but the body's already in the ground, and the crime scene is someone's living room, so it's irrevocably contaminated. All he has to go on is various interviews and His Gut. Help from the local Barney Fife, who is generally competent but inexperienced, and hopelessly in love with the victim's estranged daughter. Lawman--and half the town's men--fall for the victim's new bride (he was killed on their wedding night. Romantic.) . Lawman talks to everyone in town, misses something obvious (I hated that I figured out the clue about the photo AGES before he did, but I couldn't solve the whole thing because he didn't tell all he knew until the Big Reveal, after most of the players went down in a shoot-out), uses contacts in several other western territories, and saves teh day, riding off into the sunset on the company train. Oh, right--he's retired from being an official lawman, but he's a detective for the train company.
fun, but fluff.Labels: murder, pulp, western
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Monday, October 27, 2008
Is it really worth all this chasing?
Title: The Chase
Author: Clive Cussler
Bookmark: one of thirteen thousand election-related fliers I've received in the mail over the past month.
Years ago, when my brother got home from school, he would watch Where in The World is Carmen Sandiego?, not because he was fascinated with geography, but because he liked to absorb as much radiation as possible from the television to ensure his mutations remained stable. I watched because we lived in a one-room shack, but I liked that I usually knew the answers. On each episode, there was a segment called The Chase which was always introduced by Rockapella singing "Oooooooooh, the chaaaaaase!" Every time I looked at the cover of this book, that three-word jingle ran through my head before I could start reading. Sometimes, it was the most compelling part of reading.
I've read two other Cussler books, and while they're exciting enough to make me keep reading, like Dean Koontz and Louis L'Amour, they often spend far too much time in Popcorn territory, and are supported by lots of WTF moments (like using quantum teleportation to fill a briefcase with oil and when Cussler himself appears in The World's Sweetest Yacht to save Dirk Pitt and the female lead). The Chase continues in that proud tradition.
Sure, I enjoyed reading it. I like any good heist story, and this one's also a western. Isaac Bell, an agent for the Van Dorn Detective Agency (an obvious parallel to the Pinkertons--even the motto is similar), is assigned the case of the Butcher Bandit, a daring and ruthless killer who single-handedly robs banks all over the west, kills all witnesses, and vanishes without a trace. Bell is Van Dorn's best agent, and as a typical Cussler hero, is suave, charming, crazy rich, and dashingly handsome to the point that every woman who sees him immediately swoons or entertains thoughts of humping his superior detective brains out.
Other Cussler standards are present: despite three chase scenes (posse vs. wagon, car vs. train, train vs. slightly faster train) across western deserts, divers are necessary to retrieve the wreckage of the train in the west's largest lake. Yeah, the train was at the bottom of a lake. That was necessary to use divers. Clive loves his divers. He also loves anything with an engine (cars, trains, motorcycles, bad-ass boats) or anything that floats (Viking longboats, high-tech yachts, the Titanic, paddle-wheel ferries, etc.), and describes them with a classic car enthusiast's loving detail.
But Clive? Honestly? I need to make a suggestion. Next time you send a book out to the stores, have your editor or someone hire a proofreader to check for continuity. I can keep track of an awful lot of characters if they're unique enough, and you do OK there, but it's a royal bitch when their names change. One kid was only in scene, and for one line in the middle, his name suddenly changed to Warren, then back to whatever the hell it first was before he was sent on his merry way twenty bucks richer. And names aren't the only inconsistency. Get it straight, man. I love to read crime stories, but it's confusing and hard to figure things out on your own when the author feeds you inconsistent facts. The last book I read so badly in need of proofreading was an advance copy that was hopefully released before a proofreader okayed the final release. They had an excuse; The Chase really doesn't.
On a side note, for anyone else who watched Carmen Sandiego and now watches too much police procedural, this is a good NSFW spoof of both.Labels: action, hunky armed forces or government operatives, mystery/detective, trains, western
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Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Jason Bourne's Great-great-great-grandfather
Title: The Man Called Noon
Author: Louis L'Amour
Bookmark: business card from my last job
"You over there! You with the blue coat! Don't I know you from somewhere?"
"You might." Ruble Noon spoke easily. "I've been there."
The man was just drunk enough not to understand. "You been where?" he demanded.
"There," Ruble Noon said gently.
...
"I don't think you know me," Ruble Noon said. He finished his coffee and got to his feet. "If you did you'd keep your mouth shut."
If romance novels are brain candy (something you enjoy, even though you know it's bad for you, and you spend a lot of your time while reading laughing at the book itself) for women, Louis L'Amour is brain candy for men. I enjoyed it; after a long break, I might even read more L'Amour should a book find its way to me--but I don't know that I'll bother seeking it out on my own.
A nameless man comes to in an alleyway with nothing in his head but a flesh wound and a vague sense that he's in danger. He quickly comes to the conclusion that he had fallen from the window above (or been shot from there), and that the best course of action in the immediate future is a quick and distant exit. Just before he jumps a train out of town, he hears the name of the man who shot him. That, and the letters he finds in the jacket he's wearing (it later turns out to be someone else's jacket) are his only leads to figuring out who he is, who is hunting him, and why.
Sound familiar?
I'll give L'Amour credit: he did it first (Noon was published in 1970), but Ludlum did it better. There are inconsistencies in the plot, and there are a couple dozen characters who float in and out then make surprise appearances later on, but get hardly more than a name for development, so I usually had no idea that I had seen a character before unless their name sounded vaguely familiar, a problem compounded by the frequent dropping of names of characters who weren't even in the book. Plus, I kept thinking of Ruble as "Roland," but I can't blame L'Amour for that one. (The first book in the Dark Tower series was not published until 1982, but King started it in 1970)
Does he figure out who he is? Is he in repeated gun battles, and nearly killed at least twice? Does he feel conflicted about his past life of killin'? Does he ultimately save the day? Of course he does. He's the good guy, and it's a western.Labels: finding oneself, western
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Friday, November 23, 2007
Really, Nora?
Title: High Noon
By: Nora Roberts
This is apparently her latest hardcover release. Nora seems to be hurting for major plot development points, since she threw one in here that I was not a fan of.
Phoebe, a hostage negotiator for the Savanna police department, meets Duncan when she's talking one of his former employees out of jumping off a roof. Romance ensues. She's got a kid and an agoraphobic mother. He's a lottery-winner, though she wasn't aware of it because it happened during the kid's birth.
And someone's messing with her. She dresses down a uniformed officer for subordination, and (this is the part I wasn't a fan of) he attacks her in the stairwell at work and fingers her.
When it seems like someone's out to get her on several instances after that, he's naturally the first suspect, but it turns out that some lunatic wants revenge because of a hostage she didn't manage to save.
The big climax takes place in a jewelry store where Duncan was heading to buy an engagement ring; his surrogate sister and mother are already there, for consultation. Plus the asshole former cop (he was fired) works there as a security guard. And Phoebe has to prevent the crazy (who has a Gary Cooper complex of some sort, hence the title High Noon) from learning her connection to some of the hostages and killing everyone. She obviously succeeds, since failing would put a bit of a damper on her relationship with Duncan, and the crazy is taken out by a sniper, and then she and Duncan get married.
Not the most satisfying book. I was with her until the rape, then wondered why Nora had to take what should be a feel-good trashy romance and make it a bit too graphic and real-life. Eh.Labels: depression, hunky armed forces or government operatives, romantic "suspense", tragedy, western
posted by ket at
11:41 AM
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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
usually I identify with the heroine, but in this case, not so much
Title: The Hunt
By: Allison Brennan
Miranda was kidnapped as a college student, was tortured and raped, and somehow escaped the killer by falling into a river. He likes to torment his victims by telling them to run (after several days of the torture) and then he actually hunts them, like deer. He does this every few years, and Miranda’s the only one to ever get away. She, of course, decided to join the FBI so she could bring the bastard down, but was thwarted by her former lover, Quinn, an FBI agent who worked on her case, who thought she was to emotionally tied to the Hunter. Therefore, she remains in her small Montana town, acting as the local search-and-rescue guide and leads the hunts for the girls (more realistically, their bodies) each time the killer strikes.
The authorities, including the sheriff, a rebound boyfriend who didn’t work out because she’s still in love with Quinn, obviously bring back her former lover several years later, and they work together to bring in the killer. Which they do. And he and Miranda live happily ever after – or as happily as one could expect for people brought together by torture, rape, and murder. Oh, and the killer is a weirdo falcon-watcher who had an incestuous relationship first with his mother, and then later with his sister, who also happens to be married to the local judge.Labels: romantic "suspense", trashy romance, western
posted by ket at
5:07 PM
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Seamus Redfeather
A man on a plane is trying to open up a conversation with a hot chick sitting beside him, and finally decides upon, "What's that you're reading?"
She says, "oh, it's very fascinating; they did a study of penises from several different cultures, and this article discusses the trends they discovered."
"Really?" he responds, warming to the idea of talking about one of his favorite body parts. "Like what?"
"Well, they discovered that Native American men have the longest penises, and Amish men's are the thickest."
"Wow," he responds, liking her already.
"My name's Gretchen," she says, "what's yours?"
"Tonto. Tonto Yoder."
Ghost Walker, by Margaret Coel
That has nothing to do with the book, but as I was reading it, I kept thinking how it seemed like a cross between Father Dowling and Tony Hillerman, and even though Dowling's Catholic, the thought still led me back to this joke.
The joke is unrelated, but the comparison to the book is pretty apt. Father John is a jesuit priest at a mission on an Arapahoe reservation. Vicky, whose last name I also don't remember, is an Arapahoe lawyer who grew up on said rez. On his way to a very important meeting one night, John's truck craps out on him, and on the walk to the main road in search of a lift (in the middle of nowhere, during the dead of winter--good plan, John), he finds a body tossed in the ditch. Once he gets to the main road, he manages to hitch a ride with--as he soon figures out--the dude who dumped the body. Wisely, he doesn't mention it.
By the time the police arrive on scene an hour or so later, the body's gone, everyone is convinced that there's a ghost wandering the earth and causing mischief (like causing John's truck to break down), and John has missed the meeting entirely. Believe it or not, those are all connected. Because John spends the rest of the book trying to figure out A: what happened to the body, B: what happened to a young Arapahoe man who's been missing for a few days, and C: who is trying to shut down his mission, why they'd want to do it, and how to keep it from happening. I know, that last one sounds like three things, and the first two seem like a slam-dunk (oh, yeah--there's basketball, too), but just go with it. It'll work out. I promise.
It's another mystery, which I dig, and I usually didn't get it exactly right until just before John, which I also dig (at least one of those was just a good guess anyway), but the part that really bugs me is... going to blow it for you if I tell you here. Let's see... I would have preferred that things had not been tied up as neatly as they had been. Yeah, that works.
There are some familiar stereotypes, like the alcoholic Irish priest, and some thoroughly unpronounceable and indecipherable spellings of the Arapahoe language (there are colons and threes in the middle of the damn words), and I'm not entirely convinced that the cultures are depicted truly, or that they would mesh so well, but that didn't mean it wasn't fun to read.
Also, I feel the need to add that if this had been one of ket's books, the priest and the lawyer, instead of just taking mental notes of hot the other is, would have broken that habit (HA! ...oh, wait, that doesn't work here) and just got their freak on. Instead, she gives him a cassette player.Labels: joke, mystery/detective, Native American, western
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