barry

It needed trimming down

Revisado: 08-19-24

This tale, a kind of tragic pirate treasure hunt, went on and on and on and on until I no longer really cared about the characters or how the (x) tale reached its inevitable conclusion (marking its final spot). If it had been pared back by a third at least, tightened up, the willingness to suspend disbelief would have been left less wanting. The premise was interesting, the three main women characters all interesting at least to begin with, and the long period of the protagonist’s underground capture provocative, but after that, a long set of circumstances, similar to one another enough to become no more than a long ad nauseum. Lot of folks really like this novel, but given its early promise and its fundamental premise, the author really could have used a no nonsense editor telling him to tighten the whole thing up for its payoff to truly deliver rather than dwindle out like a once mighty river in arid country.

The narrator has an excellent track record with me, but in this case his reliance on overly, and somewhat unrealistic and hyperbolically ponderous tone in dialogue, especially between the 2 main characters, albeit stuck with what the text implied, added to the tale’s tedious feel. A fine actor, however, he did a decent job otherwise, distinguishing characters.

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World War2/Post Sp Civil War Grim Tapestry

Revisado: 03-26-21

Both the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath and World War 2 have served our contemporary imaginations in novel form. Actually I would give CJ Sansom's story a 3.5 star rating instead of a four mostly on the account of some of how its virtues played out. It does a vivid job of portraying the bleak situation for Spain in the first year of World War 2, the upshot of the various extremist cruelties of the civil war and what came after. But in doing so the central action of the story itself, fraught with the weight of moving toward its resolution at a glacial pace, feels lethargic. And at the same time while moving through its paces so ponderously and refusing to bring the plot to a satisfyingly melodramatic and romantic resolution, honestly enough, also does not really bring home the kind of tragedy, albeit tragic events occur, that might provide catharsis. And the epilogue, then, does a wash to the whole in a way suggesting the author really did not know the way out of the problem he had created for himself with his characters. Nonetheless, it is well detailed, and worth a listen, the main characters sympathetic, albeit sympathetic enough to have also been given better closure. History 4; characterizaions 3.5, story 3.

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Excellent Depression Era Melodrama

Revisado: 02-09-21

Kristan Hannah at her best is a very good, crowd pleasing melodramatist. Her novels, while lacking complexity, fight the good fight, have heroes one roots for, doing heroic things in times of crisis and danger, standing up to the Snively Whiplashes of the world. Her villains are a bit two dimensional and completely distasteful, and her lead characters tend to be pretty virtuous, admirable, and spunky. They are women and girls other women and girls can be inspired by and real men with real hearts can fall in love with, even though they are universally scorned by the sadistic and misogynistic many along with other women seriously suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

This is as true of The Four Winds as any other of her fan favorites. The scenes of the environmental devastation of the thirties in West Texas are probably the best written element of the novel, and her second lead character, the novel's protagonist's daughter, Lareda its most memorable character, deliciously teenage in her rebellious and idealistic tunnel vision. The whole thing quite hums along, wringing the tears out of listener (or reader), one tragic and devastating episode after another, as if he or she were a wet towel to wrap around one's neck on a West Texas midsummer day. We hate the agents of agribiz evil, and love the young communist idealist male love interest (think Bernie Sanders as a sexy young cool drink of water).

It is a feat in 2021 quite extraordinary as the same cast of characters, folks from the rural south and southwest in today's USA default at "evil" when socialism is raised to speak of a minimum wage after a year in which conditions in meat packing houses for immigrant workers who have plucked themselves from world wide diaspora and arrived here in the land of the free and home of Covid 19 have a tragically unredemptive contemporary novel in waiting. And these same folks clamor all the way to the Capitol building on belhalf of the very emblem of corporate greed running off with Ft. Knox by promising a pittance for a raise and a sawbuck on April 15. The difference of course being those folks were starving and living in third world conditions; these days one can be exploited and still watch the Super Bowl on a 60 inch television.

A great listen of a comfort food story with its tragedy safely packed away in our national past and those days when instead of working people trumpeting real estate magnates as if they were their best friends, guys like Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life were universally reviled.

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Solid suspence, well narrated.

Revisado: 12-08-20

I would more likely give the story a 3 1/2 * rating, because, while being entertaining and listenable, it is not all that memorable if you read/listen to a lot in the suspense genre. Nonetheless, the narrator does a good job; it contains a couple of interesting characters, and sufficient twists via cliff hanging chapter endings and red herrings, and it fundamentally sticks the landing.

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Vintage Connelly

Revisado: 11-14-20

Edit (for emphasis): I find the "Just Dribble the ball Le Bron" reviews here quite offensive. Why are all of you being so insulting to the 81 million of us who rejected the past four years of incompetence and intransigence by taking one character's pov and turning it into something so mind blowing you cannot understand how someone, let alone 81 million of us might feel that way, let alone a liberal leaning lawyer in liberal leaning Los Angeles? Talk about the cult of personality--you folks are worse than religious extremists. There is almost nothing in this novel beyond a few sentences that make any hash out of politics. Have any of you read the novels of John Grisham? Now there is a liberal. In The Law of Innocence, there wasn't for example a long and detailed diatribe about how our previous President bungled the first two months of the Covid pandemic and that along with his feckless policies and administration cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. That might have been a political diatribe. Simply that from this one lawyer's perspective a follower of Donald Trump might not bring about a jury decision he was interested in getting. (End Edit)

No one in the states does this kind of thing better than Michael Connelly. And this is one of his better go's. I am a tough rater, saving 5 stars for grand literary pieces, But this is an excellent and entertaining legal thriller, neither just another grocery store or airport book shelf pot boiler, nor in any way the kind of high brow that it for one second plods. Simply Connelly, Mickey Haller iteration, a good listen.

In re some people's objection to a character having a pov about Donald Trump, particularly someone living in Los Angeles having a particular POV about Donald Trump, or injecting a reaction to the Covid 19 pandemic in its initial stages in the US, what is there to say? In my neck of the woods, small town Texas, aka "Trump Country," someone having a Trump sticker on their bumper would distinctly tell a local lawyer something as well about the car's owner, something he or she might find agreeable. We just had an election in which the largest number of Americans voted in our history. Everyone in the United States has an opinion about Donald Trump and what that might say about someone's open advocacy of President Trump or the lack thereof. Everyone has been touched by the pandemic.

This is a far less, not in the ballpark, political novel than all of Grisham's early best sellers; a fundamental trope of almost all these kinds of genre novels contain a love/hate relationship with the administration of justice field, and methinks those who do not like what Connelly's characters have to say, almost entirely in passing and presented in the distant background when done so, are being a bit thin skinned and protest too much.

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Well prepared misery and gloom

Revisado: 10-28-20

If you like your lamb kidneys with boiled potatoes and peas washed down with a very bitter stout, chased by copious cheap whisky, the rain pouring down outside the noisy, cigarette smoked out pub you are in after walking through it from a nearby grim cathedral stinking of incense, dust, and the fabrics of old dried up priests and nuns, and puddling up the guilt in your shoes; toss on the plate as well a narrator whose cadences evoke the novel's bitter aromatics of corruption among the 50s Irish upper crust and the even more corrupt Irish Catholic church in its American iteration--skeazy sex, twisted marriages, bad, bad grandpas, alcoholism, rape, torture, child abuse, and murder, you'll love this. No one in this is likeable in the least, but it is immaculately written by a master of vivid sentence construction, and its strong flavor is oddly compelling. Not something I would make a steady diet of, but certainly a fine dining, one Michelin star noir, about which you may well be talking later. Quirky and bleak.

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Simple Entertainment

Revisado: 10-27-20

Unlike others, I liked The Searcher, in part because it was such a departure from her Dublin Squad Mysteries. Since her first foray in Irish cop suspense, other authors, some very good--have also moved into the neighborhood, and one can see why there might be an allure to ploughing new ground. Her previous one off, The Witch's Elm, for me, fell flat as it was a similar kind of novel as her earlier work without the charm of her Dublin squad protagonists.

This novel had a couple of protagonists to work using a number of typical tropes with simple variations upon them. Her world weary "bachelor" cop is a divorced retired cop, also somewhat estranged from his grown daughter, from the mean streets of Chicago transplanted in rural village Ireland, his attempt to leave the complex moral quandries of contemporary urban life in the peatbog of his new home. There is an ill-mannered, but charming for [SPOILER] her spunk and honesty waif, a character going back to the earliest novels ever written, the outcast youth holding a mirror up to the horrors and corruption of the adult world. And their relationship, a kind of archetype cross gender, cross generation, non erotic, yet tension filled interaction not only makes for the mystery's rather simple plot demands, but leads, redemptively, to a mutual healing, soulful and spiritual.

French does okay with her brief foray into her protagonist's cop past highlighting the crux of the well publicized challenges of contemporary policing in America today. And she knows Irish village life, its charms and evils, the countryside, well enough to point them out in the tradition of genre writing everywhere--it too is a common motif.

Her two main characters are likable, something one cannot always say about such characters these days. The lead supporting character, an old and salty neighboring farmer, is on the other hand a complex ball of wax, providing just enough counterpoint and flavor to give the novel the requisite amount of edginess required by the genre. And the minor supporting character, a local widow, provides a similarly down to earth but on the other hand very likeable representative of the self reliant folk inhabiting this small patch of earth. There is also a local hoodlum sufficiently brutal and stupid to provide a small dose of menace as well.

It is a simple novel with a simple plot, but an enjoyable way to while away a few hours with such an entertainment. The plot itself unfolds at a leisurely pace, but then it is meant to be a leisurely novel in which the author seems to wish both the reader and herself to keep her characters company and vice versa.

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Exposition in dialogue

Revisado: 09-26-20

Maybe I will change my mind about this, but five hours into it, I have to say, so far it is all backstory exposition via dialogue between Strike and Robin. Almost nothing happens in real time: there is, after all dear author, something to the very first rule of narrative propulsion; ie., showing rather than telling. I love Rowling/Galbraith and love this series, so I will keep up with it, at least for a while longer, but as a result of this narrative strategy, I am having difficulty following the story, the characters, or why I should care, all qualities part and parcel of her work elsewhere.

Actually, I am surprised no other reviewers up to this point have seemed to notice how the book stagnates at the beginning with so much "I found out this"; "oh yeah, well, I found out that." The story only comes alive when it focuses on Strike and Robin's personal problems that have nothing at all to do with the plot at hand.

And alas for Ms. Rowling, having found The Faerie Queene largely forgettable in undergraduate English, and not quite sure what to make of the quotes, thus, introducing each chapter, indeed feeling somewhat like saying, "please Mr. Galbraith, let the story carry its own freight," I am finding this affectation adding to the sense of the novel, if I did not know better, being the product of a sophomoric writer, rather than one of the two or three greatest popular story tellers of our time.

Like I say, I will give her the benefit of the doubt, and keep on with this--she has earned that much in my book, but if it does not pick up after ten hours, I am afraid I will likely return it unfinished.

Edit: Less than three hours remaining, and to be honest, while I do not find the novel as utterly impossible to like as I did at the beginning, I keep wondering how all these rave reviews can possibly be about the book I am listening to.

Do those listeners really care a single whit, let alone remember, who is whom with regard to any of the litany of characters in the mystery itself? Do they find the annoying chapter by chapter quotes out of Faerie Queene essential edification? Have they reveled in the high school research essay writing on popular astrology or Crowley's Book of Thoth pertinent to anything? Or consider it some kind of cool quirkiness written into the mystery?

Is the somewhat sneering disquisition on the tawdriness of the English male or emotionalism of the English female of any real revelation? I mean, do we suppose that most English men and women behave or think or speak thus? Perhaps those who do so should really take some time with the great popular novelist of the 19th Century Dickens, because we remember his characterizations and caricatures vividly.

Strike and Robin are the whole show (Glenister does fine as the narrator) , and when together or each in their own messy life struggles the book comes alive, and having followed the pair of them through earlier far more successfully written and plotted novels, they have kept me in the game. The novel deserves to be panned, and it is too bad that Ms. Rowling's unfortunate, or unfortunately phrased, sentiments have gotten in the way of a clearer view of her work. Those views, whatever they may be, have nothing to do with why this book is a big flop.

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McKinty, Doyle at their best.

Revisado: 09-23-20

At his best, Adrian McKInty is as good as any writer of Irish or Scottish suspense, and a tad more literary. When his stories are steeped in Irish characters, Ireland, he is especially good. This one off because it does not have to sustain a series long protagonist, is liberated somewhat from some of the necessary plot developments of such, and Killian, McKinty's "Tinker" protagonist, while following a hero's journey one familiar with McKinty's style can spot, as a result is someone allowed to go even deeper into a particular cultural identity and the novel into literary territory than that of either of his Irish noir series.
Gerard Doyle is the perfect reader for McKinty's novels. He is eminently listenable, eminently terrific at projecting his voice into the protagonist's essential character and flavor.
Recently in order to reach a wider audience McKInty went after an American style thriller, seemingly made for the big screen; but while that work seemed pretty generic to me, his Irish novels stand out even among the whole raft of fine Irish noir novelists out there these days, and Falling Glass is as good as any of his best.

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McTiernan on a roll

Revisado: 06-19-20

Dervla McTiernan is rapidly becoming a real go to audiobook listen for me. The woman knows how to, using the Irish detective genre, one of the richer veins out there to begin with, spin a yarn: sympathetic protagonists, interesting characterizations, plot complications and sub plots both easy to follow and interesting, and the most difficult element, sticking the landing.

Somewhat timely although it is not really polemic and the theme is hardly unusual for detective novels, the book casts an eye on both police corruption and the dangers of policing, exacerbated by corruption at administrative levels, insofar as it might go in a city and small town in contemporary Ireland.

Ms. McMahon is an exemplary narrator. I do not know if she can shed her Irish inflections to read books from other venues, but she is as good as it gets in differentiating voices and bringing her novelist's characters to life.

It's only Irish detective rock and roll, but I like it. As good if not better than anything by Tana French.

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