Category: review

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.

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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 reduced—aside from the lawsuit Jackie files after Janeway hauls him off into the middle of nowhere and beats the crap out of him—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.

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Patience and Sarah (Isabel Miller)

The Plot
It’s 1816 and Patience White is a spinster whose father saw to it that she’d not be dependant upon the charity of her brother after his death. With food, money and a place to live assured, she should be content and able to enjoy her life, but she is restless. She finds herself interested in one Sarah Dowling, a daughter of a man with only girl children who has been trained up to be his “son”. The two form a plan to move away together, but Patience loses her nerve and Sarah attempts to go west (from Connecticut to upstate New York) without her.

My Thoughts
I’m going to try something different this time and write a running review as I make my way through the book.

I’ll be upfront: I was reluctant to read this book in the first place, but eventually capitulated. So I had a prejudice against it from the get go. This was not improved upon seeing the book’s cover, which for some reason turns me off utterly. The image is not actually that awful — two women, presumably Patience and Sarah — in somewhat cartoony form, standing next to one another. It generated instant hate in me and destroyed any possible urge to want to read the book.

So I didn’t. Eventually putting it off added its own block to my resistance to reading it and it became extremely difficult to pick it up. I finally forced myself to do so by bringing only it to work with me and reading it during my meal break.

The book thus far is decidedly mediocre. I venture to say that had this book not involved two women, it would have been long forgotten and weeded from any library collection. But it does and so achieves a status I’m not sure it really deserves.

Patience and Sarah inhabit an intensely chauvinistic world, where women have little value other than as baby machines. Their opinions are neither respected nor sought and they are made old before their time with repeated childbearing. The menfolk around them seem aware of the strange difference in status between men and women, mildly puzzled by it, but not especially driven to fix it. The women seem aware as well, but again, have no interest in fixing it. I’m sure this is a true description to some extent, but something about it just feels… off. Almost everyone around them seems beaten down and lifeless — Patience’s sister-in-law Martha, Sarah’s mother and father — unable to take joy in anything at all without the assistance of Patience herself.

Patience and Sarah find each other seemingly by chance. I found the development of their relationship to be too quick for my taste. First they’ve barely met and then suddenly they’re going to run away together and Sarah is enduring multiple beatings from her father because of her flaming passion for Patience? Eh. (Let it be said that I find this sort of goings on in heterosexual relationships twinky as well.) Perhaps it was meant as some kind of lame Romeo and Juliet metaphor (see previous comment about heterosexual twinkiness).

In any case, because they know each other hardly at all, they end up essentially breaking up over a misunderstanding (now there’s a plot I love. Not.) and Sarah sets off on her own disguised as a boy. Except that she doesn’t really have any idea of what ‘setting off on her own’ entails and she ends up wandering around western New England with a Minister who apparently has a weakness for young men. Huck Finn she is not.

Eventually Sarah returns, having failed at accomplishing much of anything, and Patience, who mysteriously has been allowed to work as a school teacher (this also struck me as odd; it had been my impression that the teaching profession as staffed mostly by young women was a post Civil War innovation) decides that they are going to get back together. By this point I was finding it really hard to muster any sort of interest at all in their doings, so their subsequent naughty make-out sessions at Patience’s house did little for me.

As the book continued, it seemed more clear that their relationship, while it may have had physical attraction, didn’t really seem founded on any sort of rational basis. They still hardly knew one another at all, and there was very little mutual respect or trust. One or the other of them seemed to be constantly in a panic that the other was no longer interested in them or would be mad about some random deception. Which deception would never have been necessary had they been actual friends who had real conversations.

That they had started to develop this sort of by the end of the book was good, except — it was the end of the book.

In Short
I didn’t go into this book with a good attitude and the book didn’t manage to erase my prejudice with its sheer awesomeness. The relationship between Patience and Sarah was poorly developed and I never managed to find myself concerned about their well-being or their eventual success in life.

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The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton: B+

From the back cover:
Readers of Wil Wheaton’s website know that he is a masterful teller of elegant stories about his life. Building on the critical success of Dancing Barefoot and Just a Geek, he has collected more of his own favorite stories in his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. These are the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest to his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky hobbies and values along to his own children, and painting, as vividly as possible, what it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

In all of these tales, Wheaton brings the reader into the raw heart of the story, holding nothing back, and you are invited to join him on a journey through The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Review:
The Happiest Days of Our Lives, a collection of stories by actor, writer, and blogger Wil Wheaton, focuses primarily on childhood and adolescent memories as viewed through the nostalgic lens of an adult and experienced parent. In “Blue Light Special,” for example, Wil tells the amusing story of how he ended up with a Lando Calrissian action figure. “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek” charts his entry into the world of gaming. And in “The Butterfly Tree,” he recounts the story of how he got in trouble at school for the first time, and manages to perfectly capture the painful moment when a child first discovers the fallibility of adults, as his teacher punishes him unfairly and his parents fail to defend him. Having had a similar experience myself once (though, happily, with much parental defense), I thought he nailed the feeling precisely.

I’m not a regular reader of Wil’s blog, so nearly all of this material was new to me. Sometimes this worked to my detriment, though, as there were references to other stories—one about a homemade Star Wars toy and the other an in-joke shared between Wil and Jonathan Frakes—that I just didn’t get. Still, growing up in the ’80s myself, there was much with which I identified, like watching Poltergeist and being scared silly (“Close Your Eyes and Then It’s Past”) or forever being tempted to equate raspberry sorbet with a certain song by Prince (“Exactly What I Wanted”).

I also enjoyed stories like “Suddenly It’s Tomorrow,” which is about Wil’s desire need to spend more time with his family. The story that resonated with me the most, though, was “Let Go – A Requiem for Felix the Bear.” This story, about the efforts of Wil and his wife to prolong the life of a sick and beloved kitty, had me in tears. It also made me love Wil quite a lot, not only for the efforts he made to help Felix, but for how profoundly affected he was by his death.

There’s not much negative to say about the collection. A couple of the stories aren’t really stories, but are more just snapshots of recollections, like “Beyond the Rim of the Starlight,” which is about Wil’s experiences attending Star Trek conventions, and “My Mind is Filled with Silvery Star,” in which Wil puts the ’80s music on his iPod on shuffle and writes about the memories that each song conjures up. While I preferred the tales with linear narratives, I still found both pieces to be entertaining. The only real sour note is the final story, “Lying in Odessa,” which has nothing to do with being a geek or being a parent. Instead, Wil writes about an illegal poker tournament that he participated in. Since I am not a poker aficionado, there were many terms that I didn’t understand and I questioned the choice to end with this story and not one of the warm and fuzzy “family togetherness” ones.

I’m not sure the experience of reading The Happiest Days of Our Lives will convert me into a faithful blog-reader, but it has at least sparked an interest in reading Wil’s other books one of these days.

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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.

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