The Gate-Keeper by James Byrne

 

Um, since my thoughts about last night's book got me thinking about Ludlum, it's possible I'm going to see connections and debts to him as more present than they are for a while. That said, this book seems as though it owes a lot to Ludlum: There's the conspiracy to carve a new nation out of part of the US West Coast, there's international involvement, there's ground-level Bad People being manipulated by ivory-tower Bad People, there's a single smart and clever man pushing conspiracy plans in unexpected ways until the whole edifice collapses. Thing is, it works. It helps that Byrne has some knack for turning phrases, and that Dez is an interesting and intriguing protagonist. There are hints at the end of some expectation/s for a series of novels, but that's nothing I can object to, it's where the money is for novelists these days.

The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

 This is an interesting riff on an internal (as opposed to international) thriller--the sort of thing where there's some conspiracy afoot that might destabilize at least an important fraction of the government--set in a world where there's magic, where monsters of myth and legend exist, where the governments of at least the UK and the US have small attachments to defend against such things. It's written with verve and wit, and there are some ... interesting Easter eggs for someone with enough knowledge of myth and legend; the story is pretty good, too, though there's some escalation that seems at least mildly implausible, even given the novel's premises, and the deescalation at the end seems likewise from nowhere. While the instigating event has a strong whiff of The Bourne Identity, there's probably a broader debt to Ludlum here: He wrote a lot of novels where some group or other was looking to destabilize some government or another.

The Elusive Shift by Jon Petersen

 

This book has a lot of information in it, but while Peterson's prose has gotten more readable the past decade-ish, his voice is still distinctly soporific. I don't know that an authoritative history of early TRPGs is possible, but Peterson's work overall might be pretty close. People in this particular hobby (not all people in it, just some of us, I'm one) are still arguing about if not the exact same things, then like rhymes of those things. The fact that TRPGs first appeal to a lot of us when we're teenagers, and our preferences change as we get older, complicates things a lot. That said, the thing that jumped out at me from the book was the extent to which practically everyone arguing about TRPGs then was wrong about something or other; that's a thing that hasn't changed.

The Firmament of Flame by Drew Williams

This is third book in what is apparently intended or expected to be an ongoing series--either that, or it's got one mother of a downbeat ending--but that I can tell, no further books have been published, and it seems to be kinda spiraling the "I don't know how to end this" drain. The wit and snappy dialogue are still there, but there's a bit of a sense that Williams wants to keep making the story he's telling in these books bigger, and is running out of obviously bigger things to throw in. I'm not happy about much of this, Williams is a solid writer, I'd like to see more from him (just, probably, not necessarily more in this series).
 

Return of the Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

 

This is two novella-length story treatments Hammett wrote for movie sequels to *The Thin Man*, and it's worth reading. There's less of Hammett's prose as narration but his gift for dialogue glows like a beacon, here. The stories are a little complicated, and if you know what to look for you can see where the screenwriters had gotten tired of Hammett, his characters, and the actors who portraied them; but between the stories and the brief explanations of the movie-business context, it's a very worth-reading book.

"Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish... He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself [The Glass Key] is the record of a man's devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." -- Raymond Chandler

Inspection by Josh Malerman

 This is a really weird novel set in something that purports to be a lot like the real world, but which ... really fails pretty badly at disbelief suspension. The prose and pacing are pretty reasonable, I guess, but the events and the characters, and ... what I suppose is backstory (or maybe premise) aren't plausible or really believable if you think about it for more than like seven seconds. The little downbeat ending, indicating that one of the more or less antagonistic characters didn't learn much from the novel, is kinda cute, probably not as effective as Malerman thinks or wants. Not horrible, just not really good, either.

The Line That Held Us by David Joy

 

I said I was going to keep an eye out for more by David Joy, and I did, and ... wow. This is a pretty short (~250 pages) novel, but it packs a punch. It's probably too hillbilly-rural to really be like chewing on a live wire, but it's close. Characters that are human and flawed but mostly (arguably including the main antagonist) doing the best they can given their natures and their situation/s. Sure, the instigating event leads to a situation that arguably could have been made ... better for everyone, but the thing about flawed humans is they make flawed decisions. Did Darl deserve what happened to him? Probably not, but he wasn't the only--or even the most--flawed human in the novel; things ... escalated. ("Things ... escalated" is a thing I want to remember, it seems like a core mantra for at least some of the novels I enjoy most.)

Embassytown by China Miéville

 

I've heard lots of really good things about China Miéville, so after seeing this book a couple of times at the library I figured I'd give it a read. It's really not all that great: the voice is kinda clunky most of the time, the timeline jumps around jarringly for not much in the way of good reason that I could see, the characters are varyingly unlikeable and giving off unreliable narrator vibes (though I don't think the POV at least is supposed to) and the setting pretty persistently failed to sustain suspension of disbelief. There's a speech near the climax, though, that packs one hell of an emotional wallop, if you can get through everything that proceeds it. I dunno if that one moment is worth the ride, but it's there. Deeply underwhelmed, I am.

Dark Roads by Chevy Stevens

 

A pretty mediocre thriller novel, really, with all sorts of "twists" that come off more like rugpulls, and a really unfortunate "spiritual" prologue and epilogue that just made me want to gag. This feels a lot like a less-skilled riff on The Weight of Blood, which doesn't mean there was anything like direct influence, just that writing a novel where someone disappears and someone else comes through later to work through the hows and whys is probably a trope; and the structure, with the first part being the victim's POV and the second being (mostly) the investigator's likewise. This doesn't have the generational breadth or thematic depth of that novel, though; read that, not this.

Paradox Bound by Peter Clines

 

This is a really fun time-travel novel that doesn't particularly concern itself with any putative science (or "science") of time travel, just says things work a certain way and they do, and that's that. There are some Easter eggs--people, places, events one might recognize--but the story does focus mostly on a couple of characters, as they go times and see places and eventually kinda resolve the core problem of the story. There's a lot to be said, given the current state of things, for a novel literally about restoring the American Dream, especially one as overall hopeful as this one. It's not perfect, there are some bumps on the road, but it's more than good enough.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

 

Apparently this novel gets assigned to middle-school students; the only really obvious reason for that is that the main character is about middle-school-age. There's no other good reason I see to assign it to them, or really to anyone else--though of course there's nothing wrong with anyone reading it if they want. I got kinda tired pretty quickly of the affected, mannered narration--the premise that it's being narrated by Death (or maybe the Angel of Death) didn't strike me as being worth the mandatory level of remove, nor did the flickers of nonlinearity do anything for me but deaden the emotional impacts I have to expect it was supposed to be magnifying. It's kinda a shame, really, because many of the elements of the story itself seem as though they could have been at least a pretty good novel (if admittedly a pretty standard Holocaust story). Of course, J. Random Tween likely doesn't know the tropes at play, here, and might take a hard shot in the feels.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

 

After the mess that was Tuesday's attempted read, I needed something reliable. Hiaasen does not write normal, or rational, crime novels, but he is reliably fun and funny; this novel is no exception. An unhinged storyline, deranged characters, and delicious turns of phrase; all with satisfactory or better payoffs. This is not the full-on satire of some of Hiaasen's novels, but there is a lot in it about Florida and corruption and wealth and development and people just trying to get by without being total shits. Many of his characters are implausible and deranged, but the ones at their hearts tend to be remarkably unselfish; it's nice to spend time in their heads. Yeah, it's a movie tie-in printing, I don't care; if anyone deserves to have his novels adapted and make more money, it's Hiaasen.

Fever House by Keith Rosson

 

This is my first DNF in a while, and I've read some really mediocre-at-best books over at least the last couple-three months. The prose is, I suppose, competent enough; other than persistent use of "alright" as a word, there weren't like glaring infelicities. The story, though ... oh my brain the story. I couldn't really muster any caring for any of the characters, they all seemed fated for the chipper-shredder at any time; the events started kinda ludicrous (the archangel Michael is a character for the luvva the gawds, and the primary Maguffin of at least the first half of the novel is a fucking hand that seems to be fucking Satan's) and got worse right up to the moment when a couple of characters got chased out of a morgue by the fucking undead. I loathe zombie fiction, at this point, and that was when I lost the willingness to keep trying to suspend my disbelief. Also, there's a goddam sequel, which I hope it's obvious I won't be wasting my time on.

Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

 

This may not have been as ambitious a novel as last night's, spinning pulp mystery with queerness elevated from subtext to text isn't something wild and new (Christopher Moore did it with a touch less queerness and truckloads of humor in *Noir* and *Razzmatazz*) but this is a more enjoyable, and I think better, novel. It kinda reads like mostly a riff on the Nero Wolfe books, but I suspect there are others in the mix (the fact the narrator never mentions Rex Stout among the novelist she enjoys reading seems like a bit of an authorial ...  choice, maybe an attempt to avoid direct comparisons to the closest inspiration, I dunno) though the primary detective--the narrator's employer--is more active in a getting out and getting things done way than Wolfe is, in spite of her multiple sclerosis. This is Book One of the series, and it's enjoyable enough that I can see it plausibly leading to more, but it's not so charming that I'm going to read them.

Bridge by Lauren Beukes

 

I'd read another book by this author that seemed like a reasonably well-executed novel that just made some weird choices, especially around trying to mix genres that kinda argued with each other using sheer authorial force. This is ... not as well-executed as that one was, and in fact was really a struggle to get through, just because there were large parts of the novel that really weren't at all interesting, and they really didn't do anything to sustain my suspension of disbelief. Pretty basic multiverse crap with weird psychological layers and a wacky parasitic threat tossed in. Not a good novel, barely not bad enough to put aside.