The Unquiet: a THRILLER!

The claim is right on the cover. “The Unquiet,” a thriller. The blurb on the front vows that John Connolly is “one of the best thriller writers we have.”

Apparently, a “thriller” involves a crisis of epic proportions. If it’s just a guy and his family who have been kidnapped – that’s “suspense.” It’s clear enough until you factor in the Hollow Men, Connolly’s ghostly specters that inch eerily toward “horror” writing.

“The Unquiet” features detective Charlie “Bird” Parker, one of those series investigators with a troubled background. Some private eyes make the right moves, in time. Parker arrives late, at times.

A woman is being stalked, and Parker quickly finds there’s more to the story. The woman’s father – a child psychiatrist whose patient disappears – had been linked to a seedy exploitation ring just before he disappears. A detective sent to find him also disappears. Parker must find them all.

The stalker (only he’s not the Stalker, he’s the Revenger. Connolly uses one-word nicknames in “The Unquiet,” which also features the Collector and the Guesser) – anyway, the Stalker/Revenger is a really, really bad guy, just out of prison, who wants justice for his vanished daughter.

For a rural area of Maine, the results have to be akin to all of the Roaring Twenties gangland hits occurring on a single day in New York.

Connolly is described as writing poetic prose, which is usually a euphemism for being “wordy,” but there truly are some poetic lines and images scattered throughout. There is also a “poetic” section about Maine’s early-day explorers who ventured into Canada, a history included just to describe the woods.

“The Unquiet” is a – well, it’s a thriller, if you reduce it to a single word, something that author John Connolly generally avoids in bringing along his otherwise gripping story.


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COYOTE WAITS

There is a certain appeal in books that feature Native American culture. From a practical standpoint – there just aren’t that many. Then there is the nagging feeling that much of the culture being explained in the telling of the story are things Americans should already know, especially those of us in Oklahoma, where Tony Hillerman was born.

His settings are west of the state line, and Hillerman uses Navaho tradition to provide the characters for his series of Southwestern mystery novels. Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are regulars, and in “Coyote Waits” the two take different routes while investigating the death of a fellow officer.

It’s almost soothing to hear the Navaho philosophy as Hillerman spins it. Every conversation carries some traditional observation, but his dialogues ring true, as though he has kept a chair vacant to allow his readers to sit and eavesdrop on the story.

Most mysteries include numerous suspects, required red herrings, and a surprise revelation at the end, but “Coyote Waits” provides an almost caught-red-handed suspect in a Navaho shaman. There are some doubts, though, and before you can say yaa ah t’eeh (hello in Navaho…) Chee and Leaphorn uncover others with credible motives.

Hillerman has a legion of fans, and enough awards to build a ceremonial pyre. With last year’s release of “Shapeshifter” there are eighteen stories built from his knowledge of the Arizona/New Mexico landscape. He manages to construct his fictional world in a way that readers don’t have to read every book in a special order, while managing a continuing story line.

In the Navaho spirit world, “Coyote” is an evil presence and “Coyote Waits” hoping to satisfy its ever-present hunger. In the world of mystery stories, it’s a fact that “Reader Waits,” while Hillerman pens his next satisfying offering.

Watching the Watchmaker

A “Cold Moon” is the one that circles the earth during the winter months, like the “Harvest Moon” does in late fall. In the hands of suspense writer Jeffery Deaver, “The Cold Moon” circles around a cruelly-evil serial killer who calls himself the Watchmaker.

Deaver’s novels follow the crime-fighting forensics team of Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, the former being a near-genius investigator who is wheelchair bound as a result of a job-related paralysis. (In earlier books, Rhyme is confined to bed.) The footwork at the crime scenes is provided by Sachs, who stays in contact with her partner by way of a special radio headset.

They’ve worked a number of cases together, “The Bone Collector” being the first and perhaps best-known, from the movie adaptation. Over the years, Deaver has introduced readers to enough background about his stars that they seem like members of the family.

The Watchmaker is so good (read that “evil”) that he leaves few clues, and the forensics skills of the crime team need a little super-interrogating assistance. Enter Kathryn Dance, a California investigator whose specialty is getting to the facts. No waterboarding here, it’s more like a tingly-spiderman-sense-thing. She knows a fib when she hears it, and she ferrets out the truth just like your mother did when the antique lamp turned up broken.

The Dance character is so strong that Deaver made her the primary player in his next hardback and plans to alternate his writing between Dance and Rhyme. In the meantime, he continues to layer on the depth of his characters, and in “The Cold Moon,” Amelia Sachs faces enough hard truths that she considers leaving the force.

Holmes without Watson? Rhyme without Sachs? Rhyme without Reason? In the case of “The Cold Moon” and the Watchmaker, only time will tell.

Fresh (and tasty) Disasters

The last Stuart Woods book I tried was started after dinner and finished before bedtime. I’m a fast reader.

But not that fast!

Taking on “Fresh Disasters,” I figured out why the Stone Barrington novels are such quick reads. A new chapter starts every three to four pages, and only half a page is printed at each chapter start.

Then, there’s the dialogue. The conversations are quick quips between old friends (it’s the 13th Barrington novel) and with each line is an indented paragraph. With page after page of two and three word exchanges, there just aren’t that many words to consume.

Reading “Fresh Disasters” is like watching television from the other room. It’s all talk and not a lot of visual information. The condo building is “new, very skinny, one apartment to a floor.” The imagination has to fill in the rest, and the mental images come from spoken descriptions, like when the hapless client calls the men chasing him “gorillas,” and identifies them as Goon and Gus.

Stone Barrington is the ultra-suave lawyer, whose latest case has him taking on a NYC mobster, who is after a scrawny, repulsive little deadbeat. Readers of Janet Evanovich’s “Stephanie Plum” mystery series will recognize the formula and stereotypical characters. But hey. It works.

In fact, it has done so well for Woods that another Stone Barrington novel is due in May, the paperback version of last fall’s “Shoot Him if He Runs.” The speedy reads might give you time to chew through the entire series before its release.

The quick banter between the likable characters makes “Fresh Disasters” a fun and easy morsel to devour, the way a tray of tasty party appetizers disappears before the main course arrives. What? There’s no main course? That’s okay, we’re all stuffed with cheesy cracker snacks.

Never Look Back: Ooops, I did!

It might be great advice – to follow the admonition of Ridley Pearson’s first novel, “Never Look Back.” After all, who wants to remember drivers before cell-phones, teenagers without iPods, and television without CSI?

Now that I think about it, maybe it wasn’t such a bad time.

It was back when the bad guy in a story could come from a Soviet-bloc country and readers immediately gave a shiver. Ooh. Baaaad guy. In “Never Look Back,” Pearson relies on that sentiment to give dimension to his evil-doer, but – looking back on it – the Villain comes across more like Boris Badenov in the long-gone Bullwinkle cartoon series. (Anyone remember that No Goodnik?)

The flipside is, long before terrorism became a North American threat, Ridley Pearson wrote a believable scenario in which a series of attacks knocks out communications all across Canada as part of an assassination plot. The Good against Evil plot and the resulting chase hold up nicely, and there are no head-knocking technology references that many stories of the period suffer. There are some stops at payphones, but hey! – most people still remember those.

It’s safe to assume that writers improve with experience, and Pearson has a new suspense novel out this summer, and a just released young reader suspense story. He has developed a loyal following of readers and one of his tales has made it to the movie theaters.

The mark of a good story is how well it holds up through time – and for lovers of espionage in the Robert Ludlum vein, it’s worth going against the author’s advice to “Never Look Back,” – to take in the start of an author’s successful journey.

Rest assured, there’s no Natasha and no Fearless Leader (even if there IS “bomb in squirrel’s briefcase…”), and – of course – Rocky saves the day.

Back to the Jungle!

Douglas Preston is half of the thriller-writing team of “Preston and Child,” and is more prolific than partner Lincoln Child. Preston is currently touring the country promoting Blasphemy, his latest solo work set in the American southwest. Can’t wait for the paperback? Try on The Codex, the author’s latest.

Preston has a rollicking story set in the jungles of Honduras that could be the twin brother of Amazonia by James Rollins, although his smattering of misspelled Spanish is proof that Preston is more comfortable in the Tex-Mex American Southwest. Among other errors, buenos tardes (good afternoon) is actually spelled with an A, as in buenas. No big deal. Good afternaan. (It is a little off-putting misspelled in English, isn’t it?)

Eccentric billionaire Max Broadbent has a fatal illness and has traveled to the jungle to die, but wants to take his treasure with him. He does leave his three sons the option to come and get it – if they want it. Not surprisingly, they do. Somewhat surprisingly, the codex of the title is an ancient key to all the pharmaceutical uses of rainforest plants, the same mission undertaken in Amazonia. Both books feature the attractive female, the strong straight-shooter, the evil maniac who wants to derail the whole mission for personal gain. Jungle dangers. Snakes.

Fans will have no problem ignoring some of the implausible elements, since Preston opens the throttle on his jungle chase and keeps up the pace throughout – never taking the ride too seriously and even tossing in some well-placed humor as the three sons set out to retrieve their inheritance.

There are books that are worth laboring through to the end, and then there are those like The Codex in which the end seems to come along altogether too quickly. It’s un libro bueno. (One good book!)

The Collectors

Clark Kent lives in Metropolis – which we all recognize as a fictional place – and, knowing that, we can go along with anything that happens there, like the way that simply slipping on a pair of eyeglasses hides the secret identity of Superman.

David Baldacci sets his thriller “The Collectors” in Washington DC, and since we know that place exists, it is a little more difficult to accept those single-bound leaps beyond believability.

Bringing back the eclectic Camel Club from a previous novel, Baldacci sends the aging protagonists on the trail of a spy ring. Members of the informal group, led by a former CIA hit-man who now calls himself Oliver Stone, are little more than misfits, but the ex-spy keeps them on the trail by pulling clues out of thin air, the way many fictional detectives manage to do.

The second storyline is too strong to be called a sub-plot, and might have made a better stand-alone book. The daughter of a career conman sets out to scam the casino owner responsible for her mother’s death. Unfortunately, the book ends with the casino owner on his way to exact his revenge for the theft of his money, a cliff-hanger for the obvious sequel.

Meanwhile, the Camel Club detectives finally discover that a coworker has been donning a hat and a fake beard and completely fooling everyone as to his identity. While comic book readers have accepted the Clark Kent glasses disguise for decades, it is pretty hard to believe that a US Government employee can’t recognize a long-term coworker wearing a silly hat and fake beard.

Still, his writing style is compelling, and the eccentric characters are a hoot. It’s too bad Baldacci didn’t split the book into two separate stories, but readers know that’s exactly what sequels are for.