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Doing less and writing more.

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Category: books

  • Conviction (2019) – Denise Mina

    Denise Mina is a really, really good writer, but I don’t really dig her books what much.

    My daughter has a theory on why she never likes the books I recommend to her. Namely that they are “guy books”. They never quite hit the spot for her because she’s a girl. These include the Bosch books, books by Le Carre, and the Aubrey-Maturin series for goodness sakes!

    Fair enough if that’s how you want to be, but in that spirit I wish to assert that Denise Mina writes “girl books”.

    Girl-book warning sign:
    The narrator is telling me way more about her feelings than I want to hear, frequently and at length.

    As we read on, it appearss that the protagonist moght be clinically mentally ill. Her actual life is falling (has fallen) apart, and she’s obsessing over a podcast.

    Finally 2/3 the way through (and I skipped maybe 1/4 of that!) she is peeling the layers back a little bit. It’s all very modern, her sidekick is twittering and even podcasting from the grocery aisle, which means DRAMA, since shadowy forces are trying to kill her. It’s all pretty exhausting.

    OK, after all this whining, the last 60 or so pages were quite fun!

    The ambient paranoia was getting a little tiresome when it turned out that some of it was well-founded!! There really were creepy things happening off stage!

    In the end, good things happen for the good guys. The super-villian was in fact the tool of (or the assistant to) the woman who was the actual super-villian, and she did get hers, so the whole thing almost made sense at the end.

    And shame on me for being so old-fashioned, but I do really do prefer endings where justice is served and the loose ends of the characters’ lives are somewhat tidied up. So I’ll give Mina another chance down the road 🙂

  • The Bitterest Pill (2019) – Reed Farrel Coleman

    A Robert B Parker – Jesse Stone book

    Damm, I’ve done it again. I already read this book! I actually keep a Wordflowy list of books I’ve read to prevent this, but if you don’t read your own damn notes, shame on you!

    So far it’s very well executed. Coleman does a darn good job of writing a Jesse Stone book that sounds like Parker wrote it … which I guess is the point, duh.

    It’s a terribly sad story so far, a star cheerleader has died of a Fentanyl overdose. I’m sure we’ll learn about soon.

    Also, Jesse has stopped drinking. We hear about that ad nauseum, every few pages. Very Parker-like to recapitulate his own recovery process for us all.

    Also, Jesse’s estranged son (which he didn’t know he had) has moved across country to sleep on his couch and secretly enroll at U Mass to be a Mass State Trooper.

    Heartwarming … also shades of Bosch and his daughter. Also very much NOT a touch I would expect from the original Parker…

  • Agent Running in the Field (2019) – John Le Carre

    I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed reading Le Carre until I started this book:
    the Brit spy stuff AND
    the Eastern European agent stuff.
    Running Latvian agents, Estonians agents, going to Tbilitsi. Such loving descriptions of a place called Karlovy Vary, a hot springs town in Czechoslovakia got me so worked up I spent 20 min reading about it on the internet (I am a sucker for hot springs, however you can work them into the story. 🙂

    I really enjoyed the first half. The middle got a little tedious … I skipped some pages, then about 2/3 through, the defining event of the whole damn book happened. The first 2/3 were just the build-up turns out. The rest of the book is figuring out what to do about the mess.

    That got a little tedious also, but in the end all the good people in the book had good things happen for them, even though the long-term prognosis was a little fuzzy for everybody. … but that’s the Cold War for you!

    I basically loved it!
    I’ve always loved Le Carre’s writing! By the end I felt like I knew the major players better than I know of my neighbors.