Scott
A flat, dull mystery that makes little sense, with characters who act like dullards more often than not, are saddled with limp dialogue and spout inane catchphrases like “Fry me for an oyster”, and who fall for ludicrous setups. There's a reason no one has published this one in 45 years, and while I generally have very good experiences with Hard Case titles, bringing some books back into print simply because they can should hardly be the benchmark. When crime readers think of famous detectives/lawyers/characters from yesteryear, they rightly think of Marlowe or Spade or Archer or Perry Mason (a creation of the author of this work) or perhaps Parker or even Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. No one thinks of Cool and Lam. And there's a reason for that.
I found this book dull, and the characters nondescript and flat. The story never became compelling, and I found myself skimming quickly through the pages in order to move the story at along.
Despite the fact she's missing a leg, you underestimate Dee Rommel at your own peril. With 7 Days, Jule Selbo has written a tight, propulsive crime novel with a unique lead character who ranks right up there with some of New England's best crime creations. Another worthy entry in the series!
Was provided as an ARC by the author
What an interesting dive into the creative mind of David Lynch. This book talks about a little bit of everything, from his childhood to art school to the moment he decided to become a filmmaker to the highs and lows of his career. All of it revolves around his deep love and longstanding practice of Transcendental meditation, the linchpin (pun intended) of his creative life. Well worth the read if you are a creative and interested in how other creatives think.
Incredibly fun debut of a new mystery series. Looking forward to the next installment.
A great read! It's got that LOST vibe without being TOO out there (you know, no polar bears in this one). Plus, the ending is a far better one than the one we got with LOST. In some ways it reminded me of the way Stephen King's IT ramps down, but I won't spoil just how. All in all, an excellent debut!
This one was just okay. As the third book written as John Lange, it feels like it was rushed in a way that the first book, “Odds On” wasn't. “Odds On” has a more robust cast of characters, more fully realized, and the plot was more complex and intricate than “Easy Go”. Given our world of high stakes Ocean's Eleven-style robberies, Indiana Jones adventures, and pulp fiction's mighty past with adventure stories, this one finished limply, and never really ascended to a level of edge-of-your-seat thriller that we have come to expect. Even being dated (copyright 1968), it still feels like a weak outing as an adventure yarn. Read it for fun, I suppose, but don't hope for high stakes. You won't find them.
A short, blitz of a thriller. There's nothing particularly new or unique about this book, and I suspect that was true when it was published back in 1970. But no one picks up a pulp thriller—which is essentially what this is—for the innovation. When you do find innovation in a pulp novel, it's a welcome surprise, and often a game-changer for the genre (looking at you, Jim Thompson). When there's nothing that's genre-shifting, the best you can hope for is to be entertained by some pure escapist fiction. And that's exactly what what the book is, and I enjoyed it because of that.
I'm not even sure how to start a review of this book. It is a mystery, ostensibly, but it so much deeper than a whodunit. A story about a the missing or perhaps killed leader of a deeply strange organization, a cult really, whose members believe that the removal of parts of their bodies brings them closer to divinity. And because the investigator—now private, after retiring on disability—happens to be missing a limb of his own, he is the only person the organization trusts to uncover the truth. Or do they?
Written as two separate shorter works and subsequently fused together into one novel, this is a fearsome and bold story, one of surgical-precise writing and highly efficient prose, written by a Paul, with a Paul as the central character, and the suspects, Paul, Paul, and Paul, are no more and no less twisted than Paul, who kills Paul, and used Paul to cover up for Paul when Paul found out that it was Paul all along.
This was a stellar outing by King. A straight-up crime thriller with the kind of deeply involving characters King is adept at creating. Despite clocking in at over 500 pages, it is a brisk read, with barely a moment that isn't compelling or gripping. Highly recommended if you're looking for a good crime read and always wanted to give King a try but were too afraid to ask.
This is a fun entry in the hunted house genre. It had moments were it literally raised the hair in my arms. There is an aspect where it escalates a little too quickly. It goes from slow build dread to a sudden life-or-death struggle for the remainder of the book. But outside of this jump, it was a very satisfying and often scary book.
This was the “it” book of the summer about five years ago, the one everyone was talking about and that everyone couldn't put down. It was supposed to be the page-turner with the twists you couldn't see coming. And so I too engulfed this one to see what everyone was talking about.
Truthfully, if I had to sum the book up in a word, it would be “meh”.
It's hard to give too much of a plot summary without giving too much away, and while I, unlike the rest of the world, did not think the book was all that and a bag of chips, I still don't wish to spoil it for those you enjoy these things more than I do. Or as my wife would describe it, “everyone else but you.”
Fair enough.
The essence of the plot, then, is that a woman named Rachel, down on her luck and sipping gin and tonics from a can while taking the train back and forth to London, fantasizes about what the people in the houses behind the tracks do, the kind of lives they lead. Her own life has fallen apart and she takes a kind of solace in the lives these fantasy people lead in her head. She has even given them names, since their real names are unknown to her.
Then, one day, she sees something as she's staring through the train window, something that turns her fantasy on its head. At that moment, her life changes from fantasies about these people to an all out obsession about what she saw. An obsession so deep, she risks her life and livelihood, and perhaps darkest of all, her integrity to get close enough to discover the truth.
It sounds like an enthralling premise, doesn't it? Critics have been using the term Hitchcockian to describe it. It does have a certain “Rear Window” quality to it, that strange voyeuristic quality of Jeff Jefferies looking out his back window and seeing something he thinks is a murder. But that's were the comparison ends. It starts with a voyeur and turns into a study of a life in freefall. In that regard, the book actually became hard to read. As the main character made bad, then worse, then catastrophic decisions, I wondered how much longer I could read until the unraveling of her life became too unpalatable. It never quite got there, but it came really darn close.
The plot relies largely on what the New York Times referred to as “unreliable narration”, meaning you can't trust what the narrator is telling you. Except that you can. The narration flickers between three narrators, all of the women, all of whom are involved in the plot. Each one has their quirks and problems, each has moments of fooling themselves, but that's really all they're fooling. Unreliable narration only goes so far, and when at least one of the characters is a blackout drunk, you can readily expect that their memory will be a bit, shall we say, fuzzy.
Another of the devices used to confuse the reader is a jumbling of the timing of the scenes. The cutting is designed to bring the reader back and forth and possibly add some confusion, but a careful reading will show that each chapter is timestamped. You get a certain anticipatory feeling as you near the time when you know that the precipitating event happened, and that you'll finally get to see it, feeling like maybe you'll be surprised by what's around the corner. But you aren't.
Or at least I wasn't.
Also, the book was written in the first person present tense. Don't get me started.
The climax doesn't twist nearly as much as everyone had been claiming it did. I found myself unsurprised at the ending, indeed, hoping for something different. I was disappointed when I was right.
Good story, competent (sometimes overly so) main character, but a little long-winded.
So good. Continues the excellent style that Cooke started with The Hunter. Also contains a quick, clipped graphic version of The Seventh, which boils that story down to its bones. Great surprise little addition.
There are a lot of big ideas in this book, many of which are interesting. However the writing itself gets in the way of the storytelling. Choosing an omniscient, present-tense style in an attempt to make a “literary” genre novel only serves to make the book a very sterile experience. As an entry in the canon of werewolf novels, it has merit for the hyper-scientific approach to lycanthropy, and for the politics of known lycanthropes living in the real world. It's too bad the ending is so rushed it almost makes the reader's journey seem like a wasted effort, or that we don't really care about the fate of the characters. We want to, but somehow we just can't muster the empathy.
Easily one of the best ghost stories I've ever read, seamlessly blending ghosts and old world fairies and the angst of a thirteen year old girl together in a stirring and moving story. One of my favorite books of all time, and have re-read it several times.