book reviews

Been on a cold streak lately - not a lot of recent reads have made the long-term list.

Robin Adair, Death and the Running Patterer - a murder mystery set in 1850s Australia among the transported convicts. It sounded good, it looked good, it started well - detailed and well-imagined with just a touch of humor. But it rapidly became clear that while the author knew a tremendous amount about the era, he shared it too frequently and too ham-handedly, often inappropriately shoved into dialogue that then sounded unnatural ... and worse, that the characterizations and plot were a distant second to the erudition. Now, I was prepared to enjoy that, too, because I found the details remarkably interesting (unlike Chevalier, in the previous set of reviews, who buried her details within the story and thus dulled their sparkle with the story's bland brush), but when the main character suddenly changed personality two-thirds of the way into the story, and then the denouement ... charitably put, stretched credibility ... well, it was too much. Sorry to say, I can't recommend this one.

John Updike, Rabbit, Run - I couldn't make it more than fifty pages into this one. It had the same flavor as The Catcher in the Rye, a book I personally can't stand - all depressed and down-trodden and gloomy and oh, what a dreadfully dull and hopeless place this world is. Not my thing, not in the least.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Hotel Transylvania - The first Saint-Germain novel is still the best. She was nowhere near as bogged down in historical detail, or in overly complex and intricate plots, as the later books, and Saint-Germain was still an enigmatic and exciting character, with few of the repetitive tropes that characterize the later books.

Elizabeth Peters, The Last Camel Died at Noon - I share Peters's love of the works of H. Rider Haggard, and this takeoff on Haggard's style was a lot of fun. The characters stuck in a completely new environment added an extra edge to their adventures, and it brought the author's inventiveness to the fore. My favorite of the series (after the first one).