New Michael Connelly: Dragons

“no dash, no flash, no flair, no flights of rhetorical fancy.  No extra words.  No wasted motion.  A Michael Connelly novel is a thing of cool beauty, meticulously plotted, rigorously controlled.”  So says Julia Keller in the 10/18/09 Detroit Free Press.   I saw Nine Dragons, the new Harry Bosch story, at Costco yesterday for $15.95 and was seriously tempted.  But I think I’ll just put in an order at the local library.  If I can wait.

Plot, language, character & psychology

I just finished reading Dianne Emley’s debut thriller The First Cut and John Sandford’s Dark of the Moon.  Truth told, I read the Emley in two session, interrupted by the Sandford.  While I though The First Cut was OK, and I acknowledge that it was her first and his 23rd, the two books do illustrate the importance of plot, language, character and understanding the human mind.

When I read books by the best writers, like Sandford and Michael Connelly, even if I’m not putting a timeline down on paper, I subliminally know that the timing is accurate.  Their plots are well-structured.  When character A learns something, there’s time for him to tell it to character B and for our detective to trip B up in her subsequent lie about it.  I’m not saying Emley doesn’t do that, but I didn’t feel it.

Yes, Sanford has always been a master of cop-speak, and I’m sure that comes from a lot of research.  I was once a reporter covering urban police and I know their unique parlance.  While she did spend time with police during her research, Emley doesn’t quite capture their voice.

Here’s an example of how Sandford uses language to convey character. A police patrol officer in a hick Minnesota town says, “You could of gone all day without asking me that.”  On the next page, protagonist Virgil Flowers says, “Could have gone all day without saying that.”  Of.  Have. They speak volumes.

Then there’s the psycho killers.  Such a convenient device, and common, too — at least in the kind of books I read. Subtlety is everything here.  He can’t just be savage and random.  He always has an inner logic and it’s the author’s duty to leak that out, so the revelations about his mad motivation juice up the plot at a steady page.  Sandford 1, Emley 0.

My real love is police procedurals, and that’s where both books fall short.  EVIDENCE HAS TO BE HANDLED PROPERLY, PEOPLE!  Neither of the cases in these two books was going to stand up in court.

“R is for Ricochet.” Feel like I’m already at ZZZZZZZ.

I idly picked up R is for Ricochet after a long hiatus (K? L?) since my last Sue Grafton novel.  Boy, was I disappointed.

I’m not at all sure what about it made it a Kinsey Milhone story, other than the fact that she’s in it.  The plot, about a privileged young woman and the money-launderer for whom she went to jail, is OK, but it bubbles along all by itself, with Kinsey just along for the ride and to get laid (sub-plot).  The second sub-plot, involving her octogenarian landlord, a lady friend and his brothers, goes boringly nowhere.

Not following the series leaves me a little in the dark about when “R” takes place.  The text suggests that it’s 1988 and maybe, while writing a book a year, Grafton has to slow the clock to avoid having Kinsey turn into Miss Marple. But denying Kinsey the use of Google or Orbitz to research airline schedules makes the story archaic without being old enough to be retro.

Russian mysteries

I’ve recently read two mysteries set behind the Iron Curtain.  Vodka Neat by Anna Blundy has newspaper correspondent Faith Zanetti in modern Moscow trying to clear herself on a 15-year-old trumped-up murder charge by tracking down her ex-husband black marketeer.

Author Olen Steinahuer sets Bridge of Sighs in a soon-to-be Soviet bloc country right after World War II.  His Emil Brod is a homicide detective fresh out of the academy, assigned to investigate a political hot potato of a murder.

Whether it’s 1945 or 2008, both Zanetti and Brod operate in murky and opaque environments, both human and climatological.  All cops know that everybody lies, but in both books, the reasons for those lies, by  the innocent and the guilty, have motivations that are difficult for the western reader to guess.

And man, do those people drink!  Showing up at work drunk or hungover is unremarkable in either era.

Maybe I should have read Crime and Punishment?  Yeah, it’s not too late, but first I think I’ll try Steinhauer’s latest, The Tourist, which is  sitting here.  Looks like more of a traditional CIA tradecraft thing.

Polo in the Rough by Jerry Kennealy

I picked this 1989 book because it looked noirish and I thought it was about golf.  Right and wrong.  Private eye Nick Polo is in Carmel, California body-guarding a famous author who’s in town for what was then called The Crosby and is now called the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.   The author bites the dust well before the Monday practice round and Nick is off, detecting circles around the local sheriff, the FBI and the Secret Service.  Kennealy writes with perhaps too much economy.  The dame in the story falls a little too easily into Nick’s bed, witnesses cheerily volunteer details they omitted from multiple police interviews and Nick solves the crime ba da boom ba da bing.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

It took me a while to get into this  1987 swords-and-horses-without-many-horses fantasy.  Once I did, though, the intrigue and period detail drew me in, reminding me of Les Liasons Dangereuses.  In this Regency-flavored world, disagreements are settled with swords, often by proxy swordsmen like Richard St. Vier, who lives with his mysterious lover Alec among the lower classes in Riverside but earns his keep fighting the battles of the lords on The Hill.   I was sorry when we lost track of the noble young rake and aspiring swordsman Michael Godwin, and hoped we see him return in a sequel.  Alas,  Kushner waited  13 years to write The Privilege of the Sword and the online summaries don’t mention Michael.

Alex Berenson’s The Silent Man

By Sharlan Douglas

Can’t say too much, because Ken still has to read it, but …

Berenson’s first book, The Faithful Spy, is one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read.  In this latest book he continues to demonstrate his plotting skill and his  knowledge of Muslim terrorism, but I fear  he may have worn out John Wells as a subject.  Berenson has to invent increasingly implausible circumstances to insert Wells into the action.  That’s OK in something like the Vince Flynn books — they don’t even pretend to resemble reality – -but the versimilitude of The Faithful Spy leaves my hungry for a little  more logic.

Tom Clancy fans will love the details on how to manufacture a nuclear weapon.  I just kept thinking COMSUBSYNCPAC.

Estleman coming to Ann Arbor Book Fair

We’ll be at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair this Sunday, May 17 at the Michigan Union.  There’s a good chance Loren Estleman will be there (he lives in nearby Whitmore Lake),  and he’s always kind enough to sign what we’ve got, so we’re bringing just a few of  our 87(!) Estleman books.

Check our inventory: http://tinyurl.com/q4qday.  If there’s anything there that interests you, call or email us before Sunday and we’ll sell it signed for the list price.

Ken’s been hitting the book sales …

New acquisitions awaiting processing, as seen from my desk

Most days we look at each other across our adjacent desks — except when Ken’s been shopping.  Now, not only do I not see much of him, but I fear for my life.

How to Get Balled in Berkeley

Subtitle:  A Historial Romance of the 60s, by Anne Steinhardt

Just picked this book up at a book sale and here’s what I want to know:  Was it so difficult that a how-to book was necessary?

By the author of Thunder La Boom.  We have a copy, if you’re interested.  Blurbed by Terry Southern.