Booked to Die – Triple Take

J’s Take on Booked to Die

I suggested we read Booked to Die by John Dunning because it was about the world of books and it was a mystery. Not that I like mysteries, but my two other Takers do. I suppose, predictably, I enjoyed the book parts of it and not the mystery part.

The plot was a little odd. I haven’t read, or even watched, a lot of mysteries, but it still seems odd to me that we start with a dead body and a detective. And the detective goes off on some other tangent, seeking vengeance or justice or something on this guy who he couldn’t nail for previous crimes. And we’re supposed to be on the detective’s side when he kidnaps the guy and beats him up (in a fair fight, supposedly, but it’s off camera)?

So then the detective quits his job and starts a bookstore. But eventually he’s pulled back into the murder mystery when more people are killed. And then he goes and plays vigilante, basically because he wants to.

The women in the book get screwed. Usually literally. The main character’s treatment of them really bugs me, but then, if you think about it, he’s a jerk to nearly everyone. Under the guise of being a nice guy, with a heart, and guilt, but really, he’s a big jerk.

First he’s dating this cop, but we never really get to see her or know anything about her except that she’s a cop. Then when he runs off to be a bookstore owner, that ends. He hires a young chick to help run his store and you get to like her, so you know that can’t end well. Then he’s all older-guy, younger-girl angsting about her.

Then there’s the one-night stand, I guess, girl of the guy he hates. He messes with her head, and her life, and kidnaps her too. She would’ve been a whole lot better off with the guy beating her up than with the cop using her to get to him.

And finally there’s ‘love at first sight’ chick, who goes for bad boys. And that relationship is just totally messed up and freaking annoying. ‘I want to date you, but I shouldn’t, but I can’t.’ And somehow dating this guy makes her start eating meat and bad-for-you cinnamon rolls. And when they have sex, he’s holding his gun the entire time. Then they both joke about rape.

Yea, yea, yuck it up. Which is another problem. The main character thinks he’s funny. And I might actually think he was slightly funny if he didn’t make a point of saying he was funny and nobody gets it when he’s funny. (Old Man’s War by John Scalzi has the same thing, only his main char is actually funny. And not a jerk.)

I didn’t like the main character when he was seeking vengeance or justice or whatever on the evil bad guy I-have-to-take-your-word-for-it, so I didn’t enjoy reading those parts. When he’s all involved in the books and telling me how awesome rare books are and whatnot, that I found interesting. I’m not the sort to prize a valuable book over a nice readable paperback copy of the same book, but it was interesting to read anyway.

And then he goes tearing around the country, and not quite telling us what he’s thinking, and quite possibly going crazy for part of it. And that was deadly dull.

And then the book ended abruptly after the last final reveal.

Bleh.

If you’d asked me halfway through the book how many stars, I might’ve given it three. But the final overall impression inclines me to 1 star. Which is a crying shame, because the premise of a book-loving detective is a really good one.

Booked to Die by John Dunning: C-

From the back cover:
Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway may not always play by the book, but he’s an avid collector of rare and first editions. After a local bookscout is killed on his turf, Janeway would like nothing better than to rearrange the suspect’s spine. But the suspect, sleazeball Jackie Newton, is a master at eluding murder convictions. Unfortunately for Janeway, his swift form of off-duty justice costs him his badge.

Review:
Denver Detective Cliff Janeway has a grudge against one particular thug named Jackie Newton. Newton has managed to elude prosecution for the various crimes that Janeway is sure he has committed and Janeway has developed an obsession with pinning something on him, so much so that when a bookscout is found dead with a method of death similar to other crimes attributed to Jackie, Janeway immediately leaps to the conclusion that Jackie must be responsible and spends the first half of the book almost exclusively pursuing Jackie Newton rather than considering any other leads. He flagrantly breaks established rules of policework time and again and eventually loses his badge over it.

And we are supposed to like this guy?! I can’t shake the idea that author John Dunning worried that readers might find a sleuth who collects books to be too wimpy, so he took steps to make sure he’s seen as a macho tough guy. All of the posturing to that end gets exceedingly boring, and there was one section, featuring an unsympathetic doormat who’s essentially determined to do nothing to stop Jackie’s abuse and harrassment, during which I realized I hated every single character in the book, with the possible exception of Janeway’s long-suffering partner.

Thankfully, once Janeway gives up being a cop and opens an antiquarian bookstore instead, things improve a great deal. His contact with Jackie is reducedâ€”aside from the lawsuit Jackie files after Janeway hauls him off into the middle of nowhere and beats the crap out of himâ€”and there’s a good deal of interesting detail about setting up his shop and hunting for treasures. After a three month interval, however, Janeway begins to get embroiled in the now-cold case of the bookscout’s murder and once again uses whatever methods he damn well pleases to get to the bottom of it.

While the second half of the book is definitely better than the first, I can’t say that I really am much impressed with the mystery itself. It involves too many indistinct characters for one thing, and for another is just plain boring and predictable. Janeway continues to make a lot of assumptions about things, and seemingly has no compunction with carting away boxes of evidence (rare and valuable books) rather than leave it for police to find. I have to wonder whether anything he uncovered would ever be admissable in court. During the investigation, he also strikes up a relationship with a lady (I fight the compulsion to call her a dame, in the tradition of hard-boiled mysteries of yore) and, in Dunning’s attempt to depict how gritty and visceral their attraction is, keeps his gun in his hand throughout their first moment of intimacy. The lady is apparently fine with this, since she has a thing for violent dudes.

Ultimately, Booked to Die is a big disappointment. The idea of a mystery series with a bookseller as amateur sleuth has definite appeal, but there are so many things I dislike about the actual execution that I don’t think even the lure of booky goodness could entice me to continue with the series.

Booked to Die (John Dunning)

The Plot
Cliff Janeway is a Denver detective with a weakness for book collecting. He likes to read, too, though that’s not a given. The year is 1986 and eBay and the internet have not yet transformed the antiquarian book market into something completely unrecognizable from its previous incarnation. A book scout — a person who makes the rounds of yard sales and thrift stores in search of underpriced used books — is murdered, and Janeway finds himself oddly determined to find out who was responsible. The path he takes to the answer puts his career and even his life in danger.

My Thoughts
This was not a mystery series I had ever heard of until it was suggested for one of our reviews. I suspect it was the alleged subject matter — the book trade — which was the attraction. And I freely admit, had I found this on my own, I might well have been tempted to pick it up.

And it succeeded in one goal at least: I was able to finish the book. In spite of my near obsessive need to finish things like books, there have been quite a few mysteries that I’ve picked up off the shelf at the library due to an interesting cover blurb which later proved to be entirely unreadable for a variety of reasons. (Off the top of my head, the recent failures include The Rabbit Factory, Southern Fatality and Consigned to Death.)

The story centers around one Cliff Janeway, who seems to be writing or telling this tale from some unspecified point in the future. At the time described at the beginning of the story, he is a police detective who has been having some problems with a wealthy scumbag to whom no charges will stick. He’s also involved with another police officer, Carol, supposedly to the point of considering marriage with her. But it’s telling that the author lavishes far more time and effort in detailing Janeway’s feelings and emotions toward the scumbag than his relationship with his girlfriend. She remains a non-entity and pretty soon they randomly break up and she disappears from the narrative altogether. Janeway, in fact, is really a loner in spite of a superficial effort (purposely superficial? It’s unclear) made to give him connections and friends and other contacts. And honestly, loners can be hard to make interesting.

The mystery itself doesn’t really ramp up until the second half of the book. The first half, though the mystery is presented on the very first pages and there is some desultory detective work put in, is totally there to explain how Janeway came to leave the police force and enter the book trade. I would have liked to have seen this fact a bit more well camoflaged, because as it stands, there’s a very clear break in the middle of the book where this tale ends and then suddenly the real detective work begins.

I also found some of the writing and characterization to be sloppy. In the middle of the book especially, Janeway starts to make sweeping statements about the passage of time which makes it seem as if years have passed. But then when we move in to the second half of the book, it’s clear that this is taking place just a few months after the first section. So where did those statements come from? Is he narrating this from a time far in the future? This could be made more clear. As it was I spent several minutes flipping back and forth trying to figure out how it could work that there wouldn’t be a contradiction.

And then the characterization. Janeway was all right; by the end of the book I did feel like he was starting to take shape, if a still nebulous one. But the secondary characters were very vague, and many of them (like his police detective partner) never made it past cardboard cutout. I also felt cheated — one expects to lose secondary characters in a mystery, that’s a danger of the role, but if you spend the first half of the book tearing apart the character’s life, you tend to expect that when he finally begins to rebuild it that you’re going to start meeting the characters who will people the series from here on out. This is obviously not the case here, as by the end of the book there’s perhaps only two people other than Janeway who seem likely to return in any future stories.

The mystery itself was pretty weak. The author dropped enough hints about who the culprit was that he might has well have erected a sign. That he managed to spin it out over half the book was impressive; it just wasn’t complicated enough to go on longer than that, so it’s a good thing there was all that other stuff to occupy the other half.

In Short
This was an okay, but not stellar mystery book. It was made more interesting to me by its description of the used book trade of two decades ago. The author could have done more to tie the two halves of the book together, and there were some sloppy phrases that made the timeline of events confusing to me. The secondary characters were also pretty weakly drawn in several cases, with little to make them memorable in any way. I probably won’t be continuing with this series, though I may check out the jacket summaries just in case.