This Train by James Grady

This is not as bad a novel as last night's novel, but it's not very good, either. It's dominated by a voice almost as affected as late-stage Elmore Leonard, it feels as though the author was more concerned with the voice than with actual, you know, writing: it judders and stop-starts and rings false and hollow every time it tries to slip inside someone's head--and it tries to slip inside practically everyone's head who's on the fricking train--because the voice does not put words together in a way at all like how people put words together as they speak. The dialogue is mostly in that authorial voice, so it likewise rings false and hollow. There are occasional moments of like authorial insight, but they are quickly and inevitably subsumed into the voice. The story is a pretty basic heist--shockingly, on a train--with some honor-among-thieves stuff especially toward the end; there might be interesting stuff going on with that story, but (say it with me!) it's buried under and subsumed by that immensely annoying, gruesomely affected authorial voice.