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.