I haven't been that enthusiastic about most of the books I've read recently, hence I haven't been motivated to write reviews. Am I losing my taste for crime fiction, I wonder? If you have read any of the books I list below, let me know what you think.
Black Maps and No Way Home by Peter Spiegelman
Malicious Intent by Kathryn Fox.
Brief reviews follow. Rage is professionally written and readable enough. As usual with newish Kellerman, it is a shadow of the earlier books, which offered genuine psychological insight. Sometimes I think Kellerman is oscillating towards writing a book that takes place entirely in a traffic jam on an LA freeway. Rage is mostly a conversation between Alex Delaware and Lt Milo Sturgis (LAPD) about a small circle of suspects, hypothesising about the various permutations until they hit on the correct explanation. It is well done, but mechanical. As is the "will it be Robyn or Allison?" subplot that features briefly in each book. This time, Allison spends most of her time at her grandmother's and Robyn reveals she's split with the man for whom she left Alex. But the pace is so slow, and the women such perfunctory characters, it is hard to care.
Black Maps is an excellent first novel, recommended (if memory serves) by Dick Adler of Paperback Mysteries.
Author Peter Speiegelman writes well and absorbingly, and although his protagonist John March is the rather predictable loner scarred by personal tragedy, ex-cop now private detective, the characterisation is good. So good in fact, and the plot so believable against a background of Manhattan financial institutions and insider trading, that I immediately bought the next two books.
The second of these, No Way Home, is a disappointment. None of the themes begun in Black Maps is developed as opposed to reiterated (apart from a bit of stautory girlfriend "will she won't she" stuff). The plot drags. The paperback has 469 pages, but the story only really picks up and grabs for the last 50. Had the editor got the length down to 250 pages, this would have been a lean, mean book. I have not yet read book 3, but will as I have bought it and I want to see if the early promise is borne out. Whether I carry on after that depends partly on whether Spiegelman writes any more and partly on whether he develops some of the interesting themes (financial markets, black sheep of wealthy family, what to do with your life when you are rich, how to deal with loss of perfect wife, Manhatten mores, etc), or whether he just mentions each of them at considered intervals throughout the book as part of his formula.
Goodnight Irene cracks on at a fair pace, thankfully, after No Way Home. However, the plot depends on the police being very interested in a 35-year-old murder case, and on the criminal(s) being set on stopping any investigation of same, both hard to believe. Irene is quite a nice heroine, a journalist of sorts (one of those journalists who never seems to have to be in the office or do any parts of the job other than work on the one mystery), and a woman who looks after herself, pretty much, rather than allowing the policeman boyfriend to rescue her from the inevitable "villain with gun" climax, but the book is not anywhere near as good as the mistress of this paticular genre, Mary Higgins Clark. Or as Elaine Veits' Francesca Vierling series. Irene remains feisty but cardboard. "Goodnight" is first of a series, but I don't feel a strong compulsion to read more.
Malicious Intent is hard work. It is billed as an Australian Patricia Cornwell, but so many extraneous bits of information are thrown together in a confusing mass of soap-opera prose that the reader almost gives up before any semblance of a focused plot emerges. Kathryn Fox is an ex-medic and that shows in the writing -- plenty of asides concerning details of deaths which seem plausible enough, but not very strong in terms of the storytelling. The book perks up a bit about two-thirds of the way through but ends frustratingly -- the villain is both obvious and is able to out-manipulate the otherwise intelligent and capable heroine purely to set up book 2 (if there is one). The heroine's domestic situation is potentially interesting, as she's divorced with a young child but does not have custody. But she's essentially too much of an unaware, almost willing, victim of her ex-husband, her past, the various lawyers she meets, journalists, and assorted others, to see her dilemmas as much other than plot devices.
Hi Maxine,
I did a longish reply to this earlier this evening, but it does not seem to have been posted to your site?
Shame.
Best,
crimefic
Posted by: crimeficreader | 05 August 2006 at 22:03
I think I have already commented here about my dislike for the Alex Delaware books! (Though there's something addictive about them, even in their awfulness.) I'm neutral on Jan Burke--I've read quite a few of them, maybe even all of them on the whole I enjoy them (also there are some good dog characters, which I find appealing), and yet they definitely are not my favorites. I find myself increasingly impatient with the mainstream kind of crime series--there are a few very good ones with fairly universal appeal (I'm thinking of the Michael Connelly/Harlen Coben/Laura Lippman-type stuff, writers who are really smart & reasonably consistent as well as having voice and character stuff down), but aside from those I find I tend to prefer the lesser-known series--they have the potential to be much quirkier and more interesting than the bestselling ones. I liked Steve Hamilton's books a lot, for instance; they're much, much better-written and more interesting to me than Burke's (also more plausible). Although of course I have found Burke very readable as well.
Posted by: Jenny Davidson | 05 August 2006 at 22:57
Burke's an author who's really progressed in leaps and bounds since that first book (which I thought was OK to mediocre.) But her recent stuff, especially BLOODLINES, has been excellent. I'd skip ahead to BONES and go from there.
Posted by: Sarah | 09 August 2006 at 00:32
Thanks, Sarah, for the tip. In fact it may have been your recommendation of Bloodlines that made me buy the first book in the series, so I may well give that a try.
Posted by: Maxine | 09 August 2006 at 20:19