Jonas
Ugh, this book.
At times it felt like it was written by ChatGPT or something. I don't literally think it was, but there is some very strange use of language in here. Not strange in an interesting way, strange in an irritating way.
Also, Mina calls the parrot “the yellow one” for some reason? Very odd.
I did keep reading. I wanted to find out what happened, so I guess this book has that going for it. I ended up skimming large chunks of useless text to get to the end, and I was annoyed and bewildered the whole time. This could have been much better with an editor's heavy hand.
The first three books have some decent reveals, interesting enough to keep me reading. But the last two books were an awful slog to get through. There's a really obnoxious preference for telling over showing, with the narration explaining ad nauseam how characters feel when it's perfectly obvious how they feel.
Also, it feels, oddly, like a young adult novel. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the characters are all adults and yet they feel like teenagers. It's a weird dissonance when someone's age is mentioned, because they don't feel like they should be that old.
It's clear from multiple comments in this book and over the course of the Hoke Moseley series that Willeford really really hates affirmative action. It's pretty gross and I got tired of it so DNF.
Best book ever about ghosts. Concerns itself only with actual, factual ghost sightings related through firsthand accounts and honest journalism.
Anxiety-inducing. At first I was rooting for Carl but by the end I just thought he was awful. That's not a criticism of the book, I enjoyed turning against him. I also hated Dermot and Sybil, but somehow I really liked Lizzie and her petty schemes.
If you've read the rest of the series, there's not a lot new here.
The bad guys try to capture Jane so they can sell her off, just like in book 7. And just like in books 1 and 3, Jane leads them into the wilderness where the hunted can become the hunter. The one new element comes near the end, when they actually manage to track Jane to her home.
One thing that's funny here is that Perry seems to have reluctantly included modern technology, but he doesn't have the most natural grasp on it. Some example phrases that stood out awkwardly to me: “he engaged the app for the car”, “She used the app on her phone to call a rideshare car”, “she texted his phone”.
And at one point Jane quickly removes the battery from a smartphone before throwing it away, which isn't exactly easy to do, at least not on most phones!
This is the worst Dortmunder I've read so far. It's not bad, per se, but not as satisfying as the others. The fun part of the premise is to have Dortmunder and crew working as employees on the estate, but that doesn't happen until about 60% in.
Because I've read Thomas Perry books, I was yelling at the kids for every dumb mistake they made. I was rooting for the kidnappers, and I was bummed that ultimately the book was on the cops' side.
What was the point of the twist that one of Joni's daughters was dead, and that Joni was imagining her? Why was that in the book?
The best Jane Whitefield books are the ones with a great villain (see books 2 and 3). The villain in this one, however, is pretty much a dud.
Pretty standard Perry cat-and-mouse stuff. Not bad but far from his best.
I had a hard time believing that the “heroic” act at the crux of the novel would be a multi-day news story.
This book is tagged as mystery but it's not a mystery—a pet peeve of mine.
More stories missed than hit for me. The only one I really liked was The Summer People.
A frustrating read. There was some good stuff in here, like the time slip early in the book. But overall it was very flat and the action never felt like it was ramping up or going anywhere. I couldn't tell the characters apart.
I just finished the first book in this omnibus edition. So far it's mostly nonsensical. Nothing at all happens for the first third. Then it becomes a sort of picaresque, in which the protagonist wanders around and meets a bunch of characters, and for every one he thinks, “I felt that we had met somewhere before.” I get the sense that everything is intended to be a clue as to something else, but I have no idea what I'm supposed to be figuring out. And it's kind of painful to be subjected to (very important and portentous, I'm sure) dream sequences in a narrative that's already so surreal.
Anyway, I'm going to soldier on and tackle the second book, hoping that things become more clear.
The protagonist is really frustratingly passive.
She doesn't do anything when she learns there's a mole in her organization. She doesn't do anything when she learns there's people who have a weapon from the future. When her colleague gets killed right in front of her, she investigates until she finds out someone is trying to frame her for it, and then—she doesn't do anything.
Whenever anything interesting starts happening, she just, like, goes home and waits?
300 pages in, I just decided this isn't worth continuing. It's not interesting enough to be any fun, and it's not well-written enough to excuse that.
This book has an all-time great premise. When I heard it I immediately wondered how an ordinary person would deal with the situation. Unfortunately the book undercuts this somewhat by having the protagonist's brother be an ex-marine with all kinds of useful knowhow. They also meet a math professor character who gives them a bit of magical tech that no one else would have.
