Amor Towles, Rules of Civility - Towles writes well. He's got a way with words, and he puts them together attractively. Unfortunately, the book's characters were little more than paper dolls, emotionless and unchanging. The main character drifted through the pages, meeting people, parting from people, changing her life, and by the end of it, I had no idea why she'd bothered to do any of it, since she seemed to feel absolutely nothing.
Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool - Peters isn't a perfect writer, but there is no question that she has created dynamic, interesting, emotional characters. I want to know what's happening next to Amelia Peabody Emerson and her extended family, I want to spend more time in her head, and so I forget that I'm reading a book and simply immerse myself in her adventures. The plots of the books are remarkably varied for a series that takes place in the same rather narrow niche, and they call to mind some of the old adventure novels I love.
Robert Service, The Yukon Poems of Robert W. Service - Service's poems tell a story and take you to the land of the Yukon, with its varied denizens. They're not perfected, they're as rough as the boards of a shanty, and that gives them an added feeling of tangibility.
Erle Stanley Gardner, Perry Mason and the Case of the Foot-Loose Doll - Gardner is another who takes what could be a formulaic setting and twists it around into what manage to be remarkably varied plots. In this case, the defendant is attempting to lead a life under a false identity, and gets herself embroiled in an entire world of complications ... and then doesn't entirely come clean to Mason until she has to. It's a clever denouement and has some nice twists.
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