Back when I was a voracious romance reader, I used to read a lot of Justine Davis’s category novels. She’s now writing romantic thrillers under the name Justine Dare, so I picked up High Stakes used out of curiosity. This was a competent and unmemorable thriller about a former runaway who is on the run again after a murder, and the owner of a small hotel/casino who helps her despite her initial reluctance. It was a perfectly decent lunch book, and it went to the paperback exchange as soon as I was done, because I feel absolutely no need to ever re-read it.
Peters, Elizabeth: (01-04) Crocodile on the Sandbank; The Curse of the Pharoahs; The Mummy Case; Lion in the Valley (audio)
More audiobooks, this time the first four Amelia Peabody novels, written by Elizabeth Peters and read by Barbara Rosenblat.
First, let me say that Rosenblat is a superb narrator, with amazing flexibility and precision (though maybe a hair too much drama). These have also been recorded by Susan O’Malley, but I read one review that said she doesn’t use a British accent for Amelia, which is just wrong. If you’re going to listen to these on audiobook, I highly recommend the Rosenblat recordings.
The first Amelia Peabody novel is Crocodile on the Sandbank, which I found charming. Like the rest of the ones I’ve experienced to date, it’s in first-person retrospective, framed as journals written after events have concluded. (I understand that some of the more recent ones depart from this format.) I knew I would like Amelia when, after rescuing a young woman in 1884 Rome and hearing how she was seduced and betrayed, the first thing she asked was what sex was like. (At the time, Amelia was a spinster who neither expected nor desired marriage.) Amelia and Evelyn, the young woman, go off to Egypt and end up on an archaeological dig, where they find adventure, love, and in Amelia’s case, a lasting passion for “Egyptology.”
The plot of this book is so slight as to be transparent, and I found the ending a touch unjust. But I enjoyed the characters and the Egyptology enough to get the second one right away.
When The Curse of the Pharoahs opens, Amelia and her husband Emerson are in England going slowly mad. Emerson refuses to be parted from their son Ramses (a nickname) to go dig in Egypt, but doesn’t think Ramses’s health is strong enough to take him with them. Emerson is teaching, and Amelia is helping with his academic work, but they are really very bored. And their son is an absolute terror. Enter a distressed widow, begging Emerson to take over the dig that her possibly-murdered husband ran; of course they take it (leaving Ramses with his aunt and uncle). I enjoyed this section for its non-typical, and very in-character, portrait of Amelia as a mother, but a little of Ramses goes a long way. I was glad to get away from him too, and I don’t even live with him.
The actual plot moves a little slowly, particularly at the beginning, but has a colorful cast of characters and some more good Egyptology (including the strong suggestion that they were this close to discovering King Tut’s tomb thirty years early). And I enjoyed seeing Amelia forced to acknowledge an error, even a relatively minor one—Amelia is very prone to declaring how sensible and perceptive and stout-hearted she is, and it gave me hope that the author saw her more clearly than that.
In the third book, The Mummy Case, I continued to get progressively more irritated at Amelia’s pronouncements about herself, as well as her tendency to not so much jump to conclusions as to fling herself at them headlong. I was also irritated that the vital clue to the mystery is a piece of Egyptology that I didn’t already know and wasn’t told by the book. Finally, Ramses went on the dig with them, and long-winded speeches in piping child voices are much easier to take in text than aloud. I was strongly considering taking a break from these at this point, but I saw that the fourth appeared to be closely linked, and then the fifth was back in Britain. I decided to stick it out for one more.
This was a mistake. I stopped listening to Lion in the Valley less than halfway through because Amelia was driving me nuts. For one thing, she was being more bossy than usual toward the young people she accumulates each book. For anther, a master criminal (Sethos) first appeared in the third book, and Amelia’s continuing obsession with this individual rather grates. When I found myself greeting her orations regarding “that genius of crime” or “the subtle machinations of that great criminal brain” with “oh be quiet!”, I decided that for the sake of my blood pressure it was time to stop listening and just skim the text to see what happened.
It’s a good thing I did. The ending is on crack. I was almost literally reading with my head averted because it was so very embarrassing.
Can anyone tell me which of the remaining books contain the Sethos plot, so I can avoid them? I would like to see if Ramses becomes human, and if they ever get any really good archaeological discoveries, but I just cannot deal with Sethos, even skimmed at speed.
Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audio)
I’d read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul before, but remembered nothing useful about them. I listened to them as audiobooks read by the author, as with the Hitchhiker’s books, and Adams again did an excellent job (with one small exception).
Dirk Gently’s was a lot better than I’d remembered (the sum total of which was Coleridge and weirdness). The ending requires a fairly unjustified deductive leap, but the characters were much more emotionally engaging—I remember listening to the death and after-death of one of the characters, and thinking that Adams had really surpassed himself with the sequence. Except for that unjustified deductive leap, the book also struck me as a lot more carefully constructed than the Hitchhiker’s Guide books. It does something neat with the worldbuilding, which is carried through well and cleverly even though I was distracted and didn’t notice it at first. I think that as a novel, it’s probably Adams’ best.
Despite the title of Dirk Gently’s, I thought Dirk was a supporting character and was unsure he could carry an entire novel by himself. Fortunately, in Long Dark Teatime, he’s balanced with a sensible co-protagonist, Kate (who doesn’t sound American in the least in Adams’s reading). The characters and book were ultimately less engaging to me, however, because it’s much pettier than the first. This is the point, mind you (consider the title), but it’s still not to my taste. It also struck me as less tightly-constructed, though I’m afraid that with this backlog I can’t recall the specific loose ends.
I certainly recommend reading or listening to Dirk Gently’s, though, and I’m pleased to have rediscovered it.
Spencer, Wen: (04) Dog Warrior
Wen Spencer’s Dog Warrior is another series book with structural problems. It is the fourth Ukiah Oregon book (I logged the first three together). My immediate reaction on finishing it was that it’s a pity that Spencer couldn’t take the route that Mary Gentle’s Ash did in the U.K., and publish the series as a single book (Ash was broken into four for U.S. publication. I appear to have read it pre-booklog, so I’ll just say I didn’t like it and leave it at that). The weight of exposition to be got through, after three books’ worth of both action and history, is really crushing and does serious damage to the book’s pace.
On reflection, though, even the Ash route wouldn’t necessarily fix Dog Warrior, because though you could get rid of a lot of backstory put in for the reader’s benefit, this story switches viewpoint character. That’s right, after three books’ worth of Ukiah figuring out who and what he is and what happened to make him that way, we get someone else who needs to learn all this stuff from scratch!
The new character, Atticus, is Ukiah’s new-found brother (sort of), and so it does make sense for us to be in his point of view as he figures out what he thinks of Ukiah and all the odd baggage that comes with him. But the tension, pace, and exposition suffers so much thereby, that I really have to wonder if staying out of Atticus’ head might have been a better course—let us infer his mental journey from Ukiah’s keen observation of his actions. (And give us a straight-up “what has come before” prologue too; at some point you just stop being able to smoothly inclue everything important.)
Because of all this backstory to wade through, the actual plot seems almost an afterthought. More, it’s another stopgap action in an ongoing war, and I’m left wondering if the larger conflict ever will, or indeed can, be resolved. I found the first three fun and fast reads, and it’s too bad that this, the last for the foreseeable future, didn’t satisfy.
Pierce, Tamora: (114) Trickster’s Queen
Tamora Pierce’s Trickster’s Queen is the sequel to Trickster’s Choice. Pierce is always entertaining, and I really appreciate that she continues to try different things—here, she has her protagonist up to her neck in running a revolutionary conspiracy. I have to say, though, that I respect the idea of both of these books more than their execution. I reacted to at least two major plot turns not with feelings, but with, “Oh, so that’s how that obstacle is overcome; convenient.” Things were just a little too easy for our protagonists, undercutting the credibility of the gritty revolutionary plot. (This is related to my feeling that Pierce doesn’t convey grief in a way that grips me.) I doubt these will end up in heavy rotation as comfort re-reads, the way that Pierce’s Circle-verse books and prior Tortall books (minus the Alanna series) have.
Ross, Kate: Cut to the Quick; A Broken Vessel; Whom the Gods Love; The Devil in Music
More backlog clearing: the Julian Kestrel series, four mystery novels set in 1820s England written by Kate Ross: Cut to the Quick, A Broken Vessel, Whom the Gods Love, and The Devil in Music. (Ross died young, so sadly these are the only Kestrel novels there will be.)
Kestrel is set on the path of a detective in Cut to the Quick, when he must clear his servant of suspicion in a murder (having otherwise spent his time in the feverishly pointless life of a Regency man of fashion). This is a well-constructed and engaging countryhouse murder mystery, seething with family secrets and suppressed passions. It does have its rough spots. For one, getting Kestrel to the murder, and giving him the very last piece of the solution, both feel a bit forced. For another, Ross has some point-of-view issues that grate a bit: it’s not apparent at first that it’s in an omniscient retrospective, and regardless of that, it’s never a good idea to have three consecutive paragraphs of this form:
X thought: [stuff]
Y thought: [other stuff]
Z thought: [still other stuff]
Those nitpicks aside, I was interested enough in Kestrel to keep reading the series (and also interested in the very suggestively-named Phillipa, the younger daughter of the family, who Kestrel befriends and corresponds with in future books).
I didn’t think that the second volume, A Broken Vessel, was as good. There’s a new viewpoint character who we spend a lot of time with, and I just didn’t find her as appealing as I was apparently supposed to. Relatedly, the story didn’t feel as tight as the first. However, it was an interesting shift from a countryhouse mystery to an investigation into the high- and low-life of London.
I liked the third volume, Whom the Gods Love, very much. It is perhaps a touch over the top, but I found very effective its slow, inexorable descent into revelations of duplicity and doubles. (I could say it reminded me a bit of two other books, but I think to name any of them would be to spoil all.)
The last is The Devil in Music, and the only one not set in England. It’s an Italy novel, political and passionate; I think it feels a bit long, and I’m not entirely sure it doesn’t cheat here and there. We also see a lot of a doctor sidekick that Kestrel picked up in the first novel, who I just don’t find that interesting either as a character or a sidekick.
Kestrel is an interesting detective, and I’m very sorry that Ross wasn’t able to take his career up to the founding of an English professional police force as she planned (and that I didn’t get to see what she had in store for Phillipa).
(Edited the next day to add: I meant to say something about the Regency setting. My principal associations with the time period are Heyer and Sorcery and Cecelia, so I tend to expect wit and archness with my Regency-era novels. I would say that this isn’t my principal impression of the Kestrel novels; there’s some witty dialogue, because that’s what a man of fashion does, but I remember the narration and the general tone as more serious. Also, they do spend time in settings other than the social life of the Ton or countryhouse parties.)
Robb, J.D.: (19) Visions in Death
Visions in Death, by J.D. Robb, was this fall’s installment in the ginormous Eve/Roarke series. No Roarke being awful, no relationship angst, just a (nearly) straightforward serial-killer tale—refreshing. I do think Robb ought to kill off one of the repertory company, though, just to bump the suspense level back up; I’ve stopped believing that she’ll kill or permanently disable anyone we’ve seen for more than one book, and the ending’s suspense suffered for it. It did have a little twist at the very end, though, which I thought worked pretty well.
Crusie, Jennifer: Faking It
Jennifer Crusie’s Faking It has the perfect title, about 1/4 to 1/3 too many characters, and a poorly-integrated murder (my brief notes to myself on it read, “[murderer’s name]???!”, as in, you must be kidding). This is the art forgery & fraud one (among many other meanings of faking), with Davy Dempsey from Welcome to Temptation (which I also wasn’t crazy about). I’m beginning to think there are two kinds of Crusies, ones with nasty stuff that jars, and ones without (either it doesn’t jar, or it isn’t there). While I read this fast over a few lunches, I’m still pretty sure that there really was not any particular need for a murder in this book.
Butcher, Jim: (01) Storm Front
Jim Butcher’s Storm Front is the first of the Dresden Files, following the career of a hardboiled first-person P.I. who is also Chicago’s only professional wizard. This was fun, fast-paced, and snarky, with some nice touches in the magic system—just what you want out of that setup. I read this while we were in San Francisco this summer; I started the second out there as well, but it got lost in the shuffle of coming back. I’m looking forward to the rest.
Stark, Richard: The Outfit
I also read one of Westlake’s books under the name Richard Stark, The Outfit (Westlake may be unique in doing the silly stuff under his own name and the dark stuff under a pseudonym). This is the third Parker book, which I read because Chad described how the middle section is a lovingly-detailed series of descriptions of organized crime rackets and the ways in which Parker’s acquaintances knock them over. That was good stuff, but the rest is too brutal for my taste. I know it’s silly and escapist, but I prefer not to read caper novels with actual, you know, hardened criminals (as Kelp says sometime or other, I prefer “crooks,” it’s jauntier).