I've got to hand it to the BookPeople. The three books they sold me? I'm devouring them in record time. All done with the two thrillers, and now I am greedily making my way through a science-fiction novel set in Kazakhstan. Yes, Kazakhstan!! I'll have to watch this author; I like this story so far; I hope it holds up to the end. That's usually my beef with novels - will the end hold up and at least make for a plausible story (I don't even expect a GREAT ending every time), or will it be totally contrived and insult my intelligence? (I hate that. It's my main gripe about action movies and thriller novels.)
The two thrillers I just read held up well. A smidgen of contrivance and a couple of gratuitous plot twists along the way, but not enough to really piss me off.
I read Oblivion first, where a detective starts working a missing persons case. Then he has a stroke, and can't remember the last few days before that. So he tries to piece the case together best as he can. I liked this - good mechanism to let the reader know more than the detective, and entirely plausible. I could see the ending come from a mile away (or at least I knew who the bad guy would turn out to be), but it didn't offend me. Like I said, the protagonist having trouble putting the clues together was entirely plausible.
Then I moved on to Death's Little Helpers by Peter Spiegelman, for whose latest novel I had seen an advertisement. I'd really wanted to start with the first book in the series, but I couldn't find it anywhere, and amazon.com says it'll take two to four weeks to ship, so I settled for this second novel about John March. He's a modern detective who uses the internet for research and whose girlfriend works for a dot-com, and I felt thoroughly at home in his world. The case here is also a missings persons case, although no one wants to involve the police in the search for a stock-market analyst. Everybody seems to have something to hide, and it takes March a long time to find very few clues. Still, it never got boring. The conclusion took a gratuitous twist, in my opinion; he could have left out the last turn, and it would have been more believable, but I still enjoyed it all very much.
And like I said above, I currently find myself in Kazakhstan and another world that is somehow connected to it. I don't understand the connection quite yet, but I am not supposed to. And the journey there is a lot of fun. Liz Williams is definitely staying on my watch list. (That is, unless she gives me a contrived, completely implausible ending. I'll report on that in a couple of days.)
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