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By Nico Vreeland, on February 9th, 2011 [This riveting thriller is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Tom Rob Smith
2008, Grand Central
Filed under: Mystery, Thriller
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
When I started reading Child 44, some weeks after I got it, I had forgotten its premise and the jacket-back description that had convinced me to buy it. The novel opens in a hellacious frozen wilderness, where two starving children struggle to catch a scrawny cat, desperate for even the tiny sustenance it would provide. If anyone sees their prize, they’ll be murdered for it.
I assumed this was a futuristic dystopia, nuclear winter or some such premise. In fact, Smith set Child 44 in Stalinist Russia, which turns out to be quite a bit more terrifying than a post-World War III wasteland. Under the Generalissimo, people must make agonizing choices like either denouncing their friends or staying loyal and suffering the torture and certain death of the gulag. There is no crime in Stalinist Russia, because the MGB, the fearsome State Security force, swiftly deals with any citizen who is not perfectly obedient and lawful. Or, at least, that’s the Party line.
Against this backdrop unfolds a white-knuckle thriller more riveting than any I’ve read in a long time. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 27th, 2011  Author: Gerald Elias
2010, Minotaur
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
These days, writing a solid mystery is often not enough for an author trying to distinguish himself from the pack—he has to include a gimmick. Of course, I only call it a gimmick when it doesn’t work, such as the annoying Indian detective Vish Puri, or the defense attorney who becomes a special prosecutor for just one case. When there’s an interesting book behind it, a gimmick feels more like a unique frame for a good story—such as Millard Kaufman’s excellent tale about a real estate agent who gets embroiled in a murder.
As these things go, Gerald Elias’s Danse Macabre is extremely gimmicky, because the story at its core is cliched and poorly written. Instead of framing an interesting story, the gimmicks, plural (there are three), only draw attention to Elias’s poor judgment. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 29th, 2010  Author: Grant Jerkins
2010, Berkley
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
The title of this novel is a lie. Well, OK, of course it is; a story about a very simple crime would only last a paragraph. But the title is a telling lie. At first, the crime appears, indeed, to be simple: a woman—who happens to be both crazy and rich—gets murdered, smashed in the head with a crystal ashtray. I suppose that qualifies literally as a simple crime, but the complexity of a crime lies in the motives and machinations behind the act itself.
At first the police assume the woman was killed by her developmentally disabled son—the son once killed a roommate of his at a care facility in exactly the same manner. The case is about to be closed and forgotten when an intrepid (and desperate) lawyer—the former Assistant DA, shamed by a botched case—discovers that the murderer was left-handed, like the woman’s husband and unlike their son, and they put the husband on trial.
There are no witnesses and only a few forensic clues, primarily that nugget of detail, “left-handed murderer.” Which means that everyone—the press, the DA, and we readers—has to interpret people’s motives to solve the case. It’s in the ensuing messy whorl of emotions and characters that A Very Simple Crime finds purchase. At the end of it all, this is one of the most nuanced mysteries I’ve read this year. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 9th, 2010  Author: Andrew Vachss
2010, Pantheon
Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
3 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
1 |
This is going to sting a bit. I like Andrew Vachss a lot, and I’ve been reading his novels for 15 years. This is by far the worst book of his that I’ve ever read.
My favorite Vachss novels star Burke, a private eye with a group of friends who are ridiculous characters but great fun. For instance, there’s a silent assassin with whom Burke talks in pidgin sign language, and there’s a genius hacker who lives in a junkyard cave with a transsexual hooker and the child they adopted together. Every Burke novel plays out the same (gratifying) way: Burke and his band of merry misfits hunt down and punish child molesters and rapists.
For the past 40 years, Vachss has been an attorney specializing in helping children who’ve been abused. He wears an eyepatch. He’s a badass. He’s always used (I’m guessing) his experiences with scumbags, but the engine of his best work has always been his own personal fury and his outrage that things—and people—as dark as he’s seen are allowed to exist in the world. Burke is righteous and unstoppable, and unabashed wish fulfillment, written by a man who deserves some fulfilled wishes.
The Weight, on the other hand, is a half-plotted pamphlet about jail. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 1st, 2010  Author: Dennis Lehane
2010, William Morrow
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Dennis Lehane definitely ranks in the upper tier of bestselling mystery writers. To be fair, the requirements for that honor include only a flair for plot schematics and the ability to write at a 10th-grade level. But Lehane has both of those: thus, upper tier. Still, if you’re new to Lehane, start with a different novel—this one feels recycled and phoned in.
Moonlight Mile is the sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone, and it involves all the same people. Even the same girl, Amanda McCready, is missing again—but now she’s 12 years older and had been living, or surviving at least, with her biological mother and her mother’s meth-dealer boyfriend. Private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro once again investigate Amanda’s disappearance.
Lehane writes his ancillary characters pretty well. Amanda, brilliant and almost sociopathic, and Yefim, the charismatic Russian gangster who shows up later on, are real bright spots, a pair of the best characters I’ve ever read in a bestseller. More disappointing is Patrick Kenzie, which is unfortunate since he’s the main character. Lehane tries way too hard to make Kenzie funny and current and hip, and only succeeds in making him obnoxious and boring.
Still, Moonlight Mile is a brisk, if unoriginal, page-turner. It features a good plot, a bad ending, a few great characters, and relatively few basic grammatical errors. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on November 18th, 2010  Author: Michael Connelly
2010, Little, Brown and Company
Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
2 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
1 |
They say that great novels teach you how to read them. Evidently, so do terribly written bestsellers. I labored through the first 50 pages of The Reversal, bogged down by Connelly’s atrocious, middle-school-level writing; but by halfway through I’d learned his stumbling rhythm, and I cruised through the last 200 pages in a day.
This book is exactly what literary snobs mean when they deride “plot-driven” novels. Connelly’s a pretty good plotter, and he’s simply horrible at everything else. But if you’re trapped on a plane and you desperately need to kill a few hours, this book will keep the pages turning. You’ll forget it soon after and it will never create a lasting impression, but for the brief time you’re reading it, it’s probably better than staring at the back of a seat. …
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By Sean Clark, on November 4th, 2010 Author: Kevin Guilfoile
2010, Knopf
Filed Under: Thriller, Mystery, Sci-Fi
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
Part of me wants to discuss how much I enjoyed this book, and part of me wants to focus on how it bites off more than it can chew. As I wrote in a Read This, Not That entry last week, The Thousand is quite entertaining and does a few things right, but there’s also a solid chunk of the book that would have been better left out.
Basially, this book centers around 4 connected murders. As the book opens, superstar classical composer Solomon Gold allegedly kills a woman during a tryst. Solomon himself is murdered soon after. We’re told right away his lawyer did it, but he’s not even on the investigators’ radar. The case goes cold. Gold had completed a famously unfinished Mozart requiem–one that supposedly could unlock the secrets to the universe, because it doubled as the mathematic equation for perfection. The manuscript is never recovered (the murderous lawyer, Reggie Vallentine, has it but can’t decifer it) and falls into a sort of legend. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on October 14th, 2010  Author: Ruth Rendell
2010, Scribner
Filed under: Crime
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
5 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
3 |
I picked up Portobello because, on the back cover, TIME Magazine calls Ruth Rendell “The best mystery writer in the English-speaking world.” As it turns out, that’s not a good reason to read this book.
Portobello is not a mystery, for one thing. It’s a “crime” story, and loosely that, because it features only a couple of very minor crimes, none of which is strictly essential to the plot. More accurately it’s one of those serendipity stories, in which a series of near-random coinkydinks interweave a collection of unlike characters.
Let me say this: I’m a big believer in dramatic intent. I like drama that comes from choices and consequences, not chance and dumb luck. However, even without any true drama Portobello reads quickly and entertains on the way. Get this book from the library for a plane ride, but don’t go expecting a mystery, or a genuinely quality novel. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on September 22nd, 2010 [2011 Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel---see reviews of other 2011 Edgar noms here, or all Edgar-related posts here.]
 Author: Tana French
2010, Viking
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
Tana French won an Edgar award (and a slew of others) for her debut mystery novel, In the Woods, but she hasn’t garnered nearly as many accolades for either her follow-up, The Likeness, or Faithful Place, her third novel. Of course, 2010 isn’t over yet, so Faithful still has time to win a few prizes, but I don’t think it will.
Before Faithful Place, I’d only read The Likeness, but the two mysteries are quite similar: both feature small towns with limited suspect pools, undercover cops, and the themes of identity, trust, betrayal, and community. French’s prose is half a notch above your average paperback, but her plotting—especially the second time around with her—is half a notch below. Faithful has a literary novel’s sensibility without the depth, and a mystery’s plot without the intricacy. If you’re looking for a light, untaxing read on the sappy, semi-suspenseful side, you could do worse; but if you’re looking for a great book—either a great mystery or a great literary novel—this won’t fill you up. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 11th, 2010  Author: Carolyn Parkhurst
2010, Doubleday
Filed under: Mystery, Literary
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
| Structure..... |
2 |
Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel, The Nobodies Album, is a frustrating read. Parkhurst clearly has great talent, but the convoluted project she sets for herself makes genuine success an impossibility.
Nobodies centers around Octavia Frost, a novelist in the second (or possibly third) act of her career. As the novel opens, Octavia arrives in New York to personally hand over a hard copy of her new book, The Nobodies Album, which is a collection of endings from her previous novels, along with revised new endings. (The text of Octavia’s The Nobodies Album is included, chapter by chapter, interspersed throughout the novel.)
But before she can make it to her agent’s office, she gets a call: her son, Milo, a famous rock star, has been arrested for killing his fiancée. Octavia and her son have been estranged for four years, and it has something to do with the deaths of her husband and daughter (but those happened decades earlier).
Almost every passage in The Nobodies Album is, by itself, well made and beautiful. But the overall effect is like using exquisite tiles for a bad mosaic: if you step back to take in the whole work, it’s utterly disappointing compared to any individual piece. …
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Author: Tom Rob Smith
