jdcorley's Reviews (191)

MacDonald can give you a dose of noir that's pure - very, very clean, and in this short story there is everything you need for it: two men who are after the same girl, the girl tired, so tired, but perhaps hanging onto a sorrow that might drown her or save her. And, naturally, a deranged robber with a pile of money. You might think of it as simplistic, but our main character's life is sketched out in a day, and the question of the story is a question of her integrity. That's noir.

This book embodies charm - the client is charming, Wolfe and Goodwin are charming, a set of deranged suspects are charming (in their own way), and the whole Wolfe extended universe puts their head in, even the B-list hops up on stage to take a turn. A lot of people say that there's no real difference between the Wolfe novels, and that's true to an extent, there's no worldbuilding in the Nero Wolfe series. But there is a certain warmth to this book that is lacking in other Wolfe outings. It's a pure pleasure even if you spot what it seems Wolfe is too stubborn to spot earlier than he does, which is shockingly possible.

While I appreciate the shared drives of the main characters, and the bad guys are truly despicable, the book spins its wheels for several chapters before anything significant happens. I almost would rather have had at least one of them on the chase from the moment they arrived on the scene.  The bad guys are bad enough to provoke that kind of response!

A bit of a sophomore slump; the setting is highly Christie-an, and the collection of characters is nicely rounded between the horrific, the milksop and the average, but the Poirot insights often turn on very specific types of word selection that don't always seem to add up.  There's other interpretations that work just as well. The only reason Poirot can  solve it is because of the thumb of the author on the scale. You don't come out thinking Poirot is any too sharp. Mon dieu!

Poirot is more in the mix in this novel than either a central character or  a welcome rescuer. He pops up, then disappears, then pops up, then disappears. This would be fine if the main characters were truly appealing (or appalling) but with a single exception they do seem to just be a pile of wet laundry.  The big revelations at the end are weirdly unnecessary (if you think about what the culprit says earlier in the book it makes sense that they could just be a little more of who they seem to be and the answer would be the same), meaning that the puzzle elements are also unsatisfying. Unless you're a real Poirot-head (that's what we call them, right?!) you can skip this one.

The "cops of Gotham City" story has been pursued by various creative teams over the years, but none more ably than by Actual Crime Writer Ed Brubaker. Here, he lays out a simple, straightforward remit for Gotham Central stories going forward - a broad cast of characters and hints of traits among them that can bring them into the spotlight in future stories. The plot's pretty thin - but that's a trait of comic books.  Brubaker's the best of the best and this is his introduction to one of his best productions.

A fun setup for a mystery series - a woman, formerly an influential part of the prison system, on her way down after a traumatic incident being taken hostage - is assigned to locate and arrest parole violators who have disappeared.  She is still trying to see it as an opportunity despite being trapped in a downward spiral of depression.  It's this depression that causes the biggest issue with the book. Tonally, most of the characters are quirky, even a lot of the dangerous ones are also a little weird. But the main character's self-hatred (and we're over her shoulder a lot, so we constantly get an emphasis on her loathing of her own body, reflected in how others see her as well) makes this a hard book to truly enjoy on the level that the author clearly wants us to. This book clearly wants to be a caper, with serious elements of course, as befits any crime novel, but the relentless trauma and depression of the main character makes it more of a slog than it should be.

A rarity among the endless slew of Cthulhu-mythos themed anthologies:

* It sticks to the theme, yet explores it in many ways, from the far-distant surreal to the near-future science fiction extrapolation on existing technology.
* The stories are all, recognizably, short stories, not novellas or novels that have been over-trimmed and need further fleshing out. They each provide one little insight - often a single scene or feeling.

The stories are not all of equal quality (of course), and are highly stylistically distinct (to their credit), making this collection one of the most effective and interesting in an overburdened field. (Just don't read the "about the author" sections.  As the kids say, "cringe.")

There's things to like here. Kiernan's take on the spies vs. Cthulhu Mythos pastiche has a distinctly American voice to its protagonist Signalman, differentiating it crisply from the other spy vs. Mythos series giong.  It's also sadder and feels older. The Signalman has enough experience to know how far out of their depth the people that have come along after him are; the immortal, time-jumping counter-agent is thoroughly, completely alone.  But once it wraps up you don't feel like much has actually happened. The narrative also jumps around in time, robbing the character that does so of some of her unique point of view and not giving us much in the way of intrigue or tension as a result.  I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy it - I did. But it could have been a short story, just a little sting of a glance into this terrible world, or it could have had more go on in it.  As a standalone work it didn't really go anywhere.

The sharply observed political elements and passion for the locale elevates this private eye tale, but what makes it truly memorable is the deep, deep dive into the points of view, relationship and experiences of our two leads, Kenzie and Genarro. Yet the book's deep dive into racial politics falters on the lips of our hero. You can't put multi-page analytic insights into America's racial situation in the 1980s in the mouth of a tough-guy PI, so he has to be a bit short-sighted and noncommittal. Yet if you keep him just a mug from a tough neighborhood eventually he starts repeating himself and what he's saying isn't too interesting.  (I smirked when the "wilding" of the Central Park Five was mentioned by our hero as an example of why gang members were "animals"; of course the Central Park Five were completely innocent and railroaded into essentially life sentences by a deranged, racist system. Of course when this was written, Lehane couldn't have known this for sure...but perhaps he might have thought about it twice if he were going to make the racialized justice system such a core part of the book.)

The real darkness in this book is abuse - spousal abuse, child abuse, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, abuse of every kind and variety. Every character swims in it and it leaves its mark.  This is where Lehane's observation shines, not in the racial stuff.