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.

Amazonia

Those of us who are video-game challenged have action author James Rollins, who provides slam-bang, over-the-top, Indiana-Jones style stories with more gobbling-up than a vintage Pacman.

In fact, Rollins has penned the novelization of the latest Indiana Jones movie, a paperback due in May, and in Amazonia he demonstrates why he is suited for that task.

Like the great action stories, Amazonia features a trip into the deepest, darkest regions of the rainforest, a sort of fountain-of-youth expedition on behalf of a pharmaceutical company. The mission begins when a member of a failed previous mission walks out of the jungle after being missing for years.

The thing is – he went into the jungle as an amputee, and stumbled out four years later having re-grown his lost arm.

There is a fortune waiting for whoever discovers the source of the medical miracle, and two pharmaceutical companies send in teams, with the second led – naturally – by a psychopath who will stop at nothing to steal whatever the first team finds.

Rollins crafts his quest with one chase after another, with the unfortunate first expedition falling victim to giant caimans (those alligator-like snappers), land-roving piranhas, panthers, a plague of locusts, and poison dart blowguns.

There is almost a videogame quality to the way the poor souls are dispatched, but Rollins keeps the action fast and furious, and it is nearly impossible to put the book down, even if some of the events have an eye-rolling outlandishness. (I couldn’t figure out why the psychopathic second-expedition leader had to blow up the source of the miracle-cure after obtaining only the tiniest quantity. The drug company might have bought it by the barrel!)

The book is a barrel of fun, regardless, and readers will likely begin a quest to read the rest of Rollins’ full-of-action adventures.

Not a Bad Bool, just...

It’s not particularly new anymore, but it was when I started it. I’ve finally made it through Lisey’s Story, the Stephen King offering that Nora Roberts has called a haunting romance. She says she loved it.

I believe it might have been a better book if she had written it.

Without question, King has earned the right to pen novels however he likes, and some of his quirks are assumedly stylistic traits. Readers have varying tastes as well, accommodating terse writers like Lee Child, whose action story might begin:

There were three men. One was a killer. The two with guns would be victims in a matter of minutes.

If that first sentence alone had been included in Lisey’s Story it would have sounded more like:

There might have been a question as to exactly how many men (if they were men at all, but you can be assured – yes, you can! – that they were indeed men) were at the point at which they intended to be. At least, they were pretty sure they were there. Truth be told (if you can handle the truth…) it was a trio, that is to say, there were three of them.

You get the idea.

Lee Child’s description of the book might read: A writer’s widow faces trouble. Buys a gun. Travels to a secret world to get power. Boom. No more trouble.

Obviously, there is more to it than that, but if King’s invented words and parenthetical insights were eliminated, Lisey’s Story might be closer to “Lisey’s Short Story.” It isn’t a bad bool (I mean book, “bool” is one of King’s invented terms…), it’s simply one in need of a reader who enjoys the constant forays into the thinking processes of the characters, a reader with patience.

Or a good skimmer.

Crichton's NEXT

Imagine this. You friend is telling an entertaining story. A bird flies up and begins to quote Shakespeare, sing county music, and mimic the voice of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry.

More than likely, you’d quickly find yourself listening more to the bird and less to your friend.

“Next,” Michael Crichton’s latest techno-thriller is a lot like that. He tells a story so well that Hollywood makes movies of them, stories like Jurassic Park and Andromeda Strain. He takes a scientific principle, like dinosaur DNA or deadly virus, and puts it to the fictional test.

“Next” tackles the human genetic code, and to lessen the burden of that weighty and ethical subject, Crichton introduces nearly three dozen named characters and – seemingly – just as many subplots. One of those subplots introduces Gerard the talking bird, who flies in and invites the reader’s attention span to fly out.

The plot centers around a scientist involved in an experiment that has human DNA injected into a chimpanzee. Later, he discovers that the chimp not only survived the experiment, but gave birth to a DNA-enhanced child that talks like a boy, thinks like a boy, and – cleaned up with a haircut, blue jeans and a soccer jersey – looks just like a chimp with a haircut, blue jeans and a soccer jersey.

Or, maybe the plots centers around the president of a foundering genetics lab who’ll do anything to save his company. Or, the single-mom attorney chasing down her son’s kidnappers. Or, the bounty hunter and his assistant. Or, the aging billionaire philanthropist.

You get the idea.

Amazingly enough, Crichton’s style keeps the pages turning, even if it isn’t clear which name goes with what character. “Next” is fun, and funny, with enough of the author’s research facts mixed in to provoke some actual thinking.