Killer Book

I have never been an American Civil War buff. I’ve never been able to keep Vicksburg and Fredericksburg and Gettysburg straight in my mind, and I’ve only had a passing interest in rectifying the situation. I knew that the Union won, the Confederacy lost, the war both was and wasn’t fought over the issue of slavery, and Sherman burned Atlanta. Seemed like enough.

But then a family member recommended Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel, The Killer Angels, and it presented a good opportunity for me to begin to satisfy that passing interest. I will be forever grateful for that recommendation. The Killer Angels is one of the most rewarding reads I’ve had in a long time.

The story takes place from June 29^th to July 3^rd, 1863, in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Those days witnessed the leadup to and execution of the decisive battle of the Civil War, the battle of Gettysburg. Primarily through the eyes of Confederate General Longstreet and Union Colonel Chamberlain, but also from the perspectives of Robert E Lee and a few others, the reader witnesses this monumental battle. Witnesses it with stunning clarity and an uncanny sense of presence both on the scene and in the thoughts and emotions of the commanders who made it all happen. I felt as though transported to that fateful place and time, sharing the frustrations and doubts in the planning, the fear and exhilaration of the fight, the abysmal sadness or triumphant joy of the finish.

And the death. Although Shaara doesn’t dwell on it or glorify it, neither does he ignore that the story of Gettysburg is a story of death. Often death anticipated, sometimes death avoided, but mostly just death in obscene numbers and horrific ways.

Perhaps even more striking, though, is that death was faced so nobly, so honourably. One of the noteworthy achievements of this book is that it conveys effectively the martial honour of those soldiers, where it came from and how it shaped the individuals and the groups. In one scene a general who was leading his brigade’s advance came upon a soldier from another brigade who was crouched in fear, unable to face the enemy’s onslaught. The general appealed to honour: ‘Come on boy. What will you think of yourself tomorrow?’ While the pragmatist would rather think himself a coward than lose the ability to think, the man of honour would rather die than think himself a coward. Shaara brings this aspect of the Civil War mind to life with great authenticity. If you are put off by the notion of martial honour, thinking of it as eye-rolling machismo or romantic nonsense, The Killer Angels will make you think again. You’ll be put face to face with simple, beautiful, tragic honour. Without it the Civil War itself is almost unimaginable.

Related to honour is the depth of love and admiration the colonels and generals had for their men. A regiment was like a family and its leader was like a father. Together they faced extreme physical hardship, the killing of good soldiers on the other side (perhaps even a friend or a brother), and death itself. At the end of a particular day’s battle one regiment was moved to another part of the battlefield, but the colonel ensured that his C.O. knew they would have to return to the place, for they would bury their own dead. War was indeed a very personal, very intimate, thing.

The book also succeeds in bringing the reader into the intellectual aspects of the battle. The planning, the roles and expectations placed on different groups, the ways in which mental lapses led to setbacks, and desperation tactics led to decisive victories. The Battle of Gettysburg was won on the field, but lost in the mind. The other intellectual aspect that is of great interest is how different participants expressed for what it was they were fighting. Both sides thought of themselves as fighting for freedom, but each had a very different notion of freedom. Shaara reveals the Civil War mind, in all its variety, sympathetically, but not defensively or apologetically.

At times I had to remind myself that The Killer Angels is a novel. Everything about it rings true, as it should given Shaara’s extensive research into the battle and the minds of those who fought it. Of course, the book conveys Shaara’s own interpretation of the evidence for what went on and why, and there are other interpretations out there. But Shaara’s version is likely to hold sway in the minds of most of his readers, for his story is at once believable and highly engaging.

There are, as always, some quibbles. The editing of the book seems distinctly weak considering the calibre of both author and publisher. At one point a soldier squints into the western sun, but a few paragraphs later we discover it isn’t yet noon. At another point an individual slept either well or poorly the night before, depending on which page one is reading. And there are several typographical problems, one of which was the particularly distracting omission of the word ‘not’ from a key point in a pontification by Robert E Lee. The flow was interrupted and the impact lost. A second quibble is that the author admits he altered some of the language used because the original was too ‘windy’ and because ‘it was a naïve and sentimental time’ and the reader might think the religiosity too quaint. Undoubtedly it was Shaara who found it quaint, and for an author who so obviously valued conveying the minds of the characters, it is a remarkable choice to downplay the religious aspects of those minds.

Quibbles, though, only quibbles. Do not hesitate to read The Killer Angels. An experience awaits you.

 

Murder in Oxford

One doesn’t often think of the beach and the city of Oxford in the same sentence, unless it goes something like this: “I have got to get out of Oxford and go to a beach somewhere!” But those two things are brought together nicely in Guillermo Martínez’s book, The Oxford Murders. The book is short, tight, engagingly written, and fun to read. It is perfect for a day at the beach, in other words.

The setting is richly evocative, especially for one familiar with Oxford. Martínez keeps it mostly very accurate, and those who know the city will find themselves picturing the exact locations in which the action is taking place. The main character lives on Cunliffe Close, a mere two blocks from where I used to live, and the description of the area is faithful. One well acquainted with the city will note a few discrepancies, but nothing to get oneself in a dither about.

The main character is a graduate student from Argentina, in Oxford for a year course in mathematics (or in Oxfordspeak: maths). As the title implies, he is inadvertently involved in a murder, and begins a quest to find the murderer. He is aided in this task by a man who becomes something of a mentor to him, someone in the same field, a famous Oxford don. The two of them share a passion for the academic pursuit of logic through maths, and they form a fast friendship.

The book moves quickly, as the main character moves through Oxford’s various landmarks and sites in pursuit of his quest. He goes to several of the important pubs, and even travels out to Blenheim Palace (an Oxford must-see) for a musical concert. Martínez sometimes treats us to literary lectures on mathematics, but these are short enough to avoid becoming cumbersome. The book has a nice pace and is written in an engaging style that demands little of the reader while providing a significant amount of reward. And the final plot twist is quite nice, though not totally unexpected. It is handled quite well.

The Oxford Murders differs from many crime novels in that it is not really a noir, nor is it a pulse-pounder. It is really just a quiet, pleasant read that would be especially enjoyed by those familiar with the city of Oxford. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of read that one would wish for on a sunny spring day while strolling down leafy Cunliffe Close.

 

Tortilla Doesn’t Fall Flat

In 1935 Tortilla Flat started it all for John Steinbeck. It wasn’t his first work, but it was his first commercially successful book. At about 200 pages, it’s a light read in the literal, physical sense. It’s also a light read in the figurative sense, with a simple prose style telling simple stories about simple people. Tortilla Flat is more like Cannery Row than it is like The Grapes of Wrath. It is more charming than profound. But simplicity and charm were Steinbeck’s hooks, and within them he hid great story-telling and character development. Steinbeck’s ironic wit and his sense of the beauty to be found in nature and in human relationships permeate the work.

The book is set in the Tortilla Flat area near Monterey, California. It follows a group of friends, paisanos, through a few years of their lives after World War I. All are impoverished and unemployed, most are petty criminals. But their greatest desires are not steady work or financial security or staying out of jail, but rather camaraderie with each other and a gallon of red wine. Or several gallons. Scrounging for food and for items they can barter for wine, the paisanos drink, fight, connive, find love (short-term, of course), and give of themselves to anyone who has less than the nothing they have.

I will admit that, having read four of Steinbeck’s other novels before this one, at times the ‘poor in Monterey’ theme felt a bit tired. If you have read Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row you probably don’t need to read Tortilla Flat. Unless, of course, those books left you wanting more, in which case by all means pick it up. If you’ve not read Cannery Row or Of Mice and Men, read Tortilla Flat first because Steinbeck wrote it first. It’s an enjoyable read and a welcome break from the ordinary.

 

Empressive Literature

I found this book at the airport, and chose it for the sole reason that the New York Times Book Review voted it the best book of the year (presumably 2006, as that is the copyright date). Naturally, being a conservative from the the Western part of the country, I wanted to hate it. What do those pretentious snobs at the NYTBR know, anyway?

Well, in this case at least, they know good writing. Or great writing, rather. Messud’s prose is a feast for the mind: elegant, evocative, in turns elaborate and succinct (well, mostly elaborate). Perhaps at times she is too wordy, perhaps a bit too confident in her ability to guide the reader through labyrinthine sentences. But in the main she uses her mastery of the language to paint pictures, give life to interactions and events, and reveal the characters’ souls, with power and precision.

A quote on the book’s cover calls it a “comedy of manners”, and it is that, but it is much more. The characters are not merely the objects of satire. Messud displays the thoughts, emotions, motivations, and regrets of the characters splendidly, eliciting both sympathy and judgment. The characters are real, three-dimensional. The reader is not told that a particular person is shallow or deep, but the author patiently discloses the depth of each character through that character’s interactions and thoughts. Some characters emerge as more shallow than others, but none is treated dismissively and by the end of the book I felt I knew each one.

Knowing the characters was not, by and large, a pleasant experience. None of them would be a likely friend of mine, nor me of theirs. For the most part they are selfish, even narcissistic, and nearly all of them at some point accuse another of just that trait. They are liberal, atheistic, opinionated. Simply put, they’re distasteful and pretentious New York elites or wannabes. There were points early on at which I wondered whether I could finish the book because it didn’t seem to be written for someone like me. But my persistence paid off, for Messud’s genius is that she made me want to know these people in spite of myself, in spite of them. She gave me just enough sympathy for them to keep me turning pages, even eagerly.

The storylines are not complicated: members and wannabes of the New York intelligentsia struggle with their professions and relationships over the course of a few months in 2001. Frederick Tubbs has dropped out of college for reasons that would have made Holden Caulfield proud (were that possible). He then seeks to make it as a New York intellectual by hitching himself to the wagon of his uncle Murray Thwaite, an aging 60’s radical and leading liberal commentator. Along the way we come also to know Murray’s daughter, her friends, and her love interest. What fills the nearly 500 pages is the interior lives of individuals. Messud’s human insight is profound, and her ability to convey it is no less. Her commentary on the human condition as it exists in this miniscule subset of the populace is subtle yet distinct, sad and rarely hopeful, yet not wholly dark.

The Emperor’s Children is not a light read and it is far from being my favourite novel (Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is still king of that mountain). For all of Messud’s insight and literary prowess, I cannot yet say precisely what I’ve taken away from the book. It’s too good to be merely entertaining, yet it needs something (I know not what) to push it into the next echelon. Perhaps if you pick up a copy you can tell me what it lacks, or that I’m the one lacking. If you can stomach the characters, you won’t regret the purchase or the investment of your leisure time.

 

Sequined Love Nuns

As we enter the spring, thoughts turn to beaches, sun, sand, warm sun and cannibalism. Ok, perhaps most of us do not think of that last one. But for one member of the Shark People, thoughts have definitely turned to the consumption of human flesh. And his prime roasting candidate is one Tucker Case, a disgraced former private jet pilot with a severely injured penis. Add to the mix a cargo cult, a talking bat, and a transvestite navigator and you have the irreverent, wacky, and combustible mix that is Christopher Moore’s Island of the Sequined Love Nun.

The book follows Case, a private jet pilot for a cosmetics mogul who is felled by his two weaknesses: women and drink in a hilarious, though painful, scene. Cut off by his strict boss, he is rescued by a mysterious job offer flying for a missionary couple who live on a tiny island in the South Pacific. With no other options, he is forced to accept. His journey to the island and what he finds there defy description in this review. Suffice it to say it is not what he was expecting.  It’s an island paradise, inhabited by a eccentric doctor, Japanese henchmen, and betel-chewing natives.

Many adjectives are applied to humorous novels: comic or darkly comic, comedic, and so on. I don’t know which of those applies to this book. But it is funny. It is hard not to wonder at the mind that created this insanity. Regardless of Moore’s mental state, I am thankful that he provided me with a few hours of levity. I certainly recommend this as a light read that won’t make you think, but will make you chuckle.

 

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

 

I pulled this book off a shelf because I was intrigued by the title. I had never heard of the book, though a little gold disk on the cover informs me that it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. (In my defense, I was reading a lot of tax law in 1993…) I decided to read the book because the first sentences of the first story are enchanting. “I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that.”

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain consists of 15 short stories each narrated in a different voice—all the narrators are Vietnamese refugees living in Louisiana. They range from a teenage girl trying to understand her American father to an elderly man dreaming of Ho Chi Min—not the Ho Chi Min of the war, but the nineteen-year-old pastry chef in London. While each narrator has a distinctive character and perspective, there is a continuity of tone that makes for a very satisfying reading experience. [An hour of reading from a short story anthology can leave me feeling like I’ve been on the Tilt O Whirl.] All the narrators are struggling to come to terms with what they’ve left behind and what’s ahead–both the opportunities and the disappointments of American life.

As with any collection of short stories, some are better than others. “Relic” about a man who owns one of the shoes John Lennon was wearing when he was killed seemed particularly hollow. My favorites of the collection are probably “Crickets” and “The Trip Back” “Crickets” is about a man trying to connect with his very Americanized son. It is a story so very simple and quiet that the final line “see you later, Bill” hits you like a sledgehammer.

“The Trip Back” features a car trip with a much admired, but now senile, uncle. This story contains the passage that I will remember longest. “I am afraid deep down I am built on a much smaller scale than the surface of my mind aspires to. When something finally comes back to me with real force, perhaps it will be a luxury car hanging on a crane or the freshly painted wall of a new dry-cleaning store or the faint buzz of the alarm clock beside my bed. Deep down, secretly, I may be prepared to betray all that I think I love the most.”

The stories gather emotional weight subtly, almost surreptitiously. Despite serious subject matter the stories have a delicate almost fairy tale tone. By fairy tale I don’t mean this is some sort of sugary Disneyfied pap. Real fairy tales are often quite dark and disturbing. These are fairy tales in the vein of George MacDonald or Ian McEwan. Imagine if you can a story about Australian soldiers watching pornographic movies and the suicide of a Vietcong defector that might be described as delicate.

The language is simple and direct. It has a purity and elegance which sounds convincingly like the speech of a fluent but non-native speaker—quite unlike the cheesy malapropisms of Everything is Illuminated.

How is it that a man named Butler has such a clear sense of Vietnamese speech and culture? Butler is an American who served in Vietnam as a translator and loved to wander the streets of Saigon at night speaking to people. Since then, he has written ten novels and 5 volumes of short stories. His short stories have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Atlantic Monthly and Zoetrope:All-Story.

Butler has a passion for high concept story collections. Tabloid Dreams consists of stories based on tabloid headlines. The stories in Had a Good Time are based on vintage postcards. And most intriguing, Severance is a series of stories in the voice of beheaded mythical and historical figures. Each story is exactly 240 words long because that is apparently the number of words one is capable of uttering after the head has been severed from the body. Don’t ask me how this has been determined.

Admittedly, some of these sound too contrived for my taste. However, A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain is an excellent collection of stories that has left me eager to investigate Butler’s other works.

 

Imperium

The difficulty, as I have remarked in a comment on a previous post, in producing compelling historical fiction is bridging the inevitable gap between reader and narrator. The two are separated by time, which is a great alterer of cultures and assumptions, and therefore it is difficult for the modern author to present some plausible piece of historical work that does not alienate his reader with its strangeness. One way around this that I had not previously considered was to write a novel set in classical times, specifically in the days of the Roman Republic and Empire. Records from that time are so many and so well known that it is eminently possible to create a plausible piece of fiction set during that period. Robert Harris has done just that with Imperium.

Harris has tackled one of the more well-known historical figures from the Roman period, the great orator and writer Cicero. Harris reimagines the now lost life of Cicero written by Cicero’s own personal secretary, Marcus Tullius Tiro. Tiro is well known to historians; though nothing he wrote survives, other contemporaneous authors cite his work. Tiro is also famous for being the eponymous inventor of Tironian Notes, a form of shorthand that used some 4000 symbols for words and phrases in Latin, and allegedly allowed him to record verbatim many of Cicero’s speeches. This system was expanded during the classical period, and was adapted by monks for use in copying the Bible during the Middle Ages.

Harris’ Cicero is a man who is above all a pragmatist, but at least a somewhat principled and dignified one. Unusually for a Roman, he is non-martial, but is primarily concerned with his ambition. Early on, Cicero makes enemies of the aristocracy, forcing him to ally himself with Pompey, who was despised as a commoner by Senate blue bloods. Conflict with the aristocracy drives the book, which examines 2 major episodes from Cicero’s life – the trial of Gaius Verres, and Cicero’s pursuit of a consulship.

The novel has a few features that niggle. It is boring at times, as I wondered exactly when something was going to happen. It takes a while to get to the actual conflict in a couple of places. In those places, I kept reading because of the historical setting - when the narrative is boring it is still possible to enjoy the setting as if one is in a museum - but if it had persisted, I would have struggled to stay engaged. At a few points, Harris uses terms that very well may be authentic to the period, but set off my modernity alarm – “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “backbencher” are two examples. And the complicated politics and social organization of Rome are confusing to the reader, making certain parts confusing.

One need only to stroll the front tables of the local book megaseller to see that historical fiction is all the rage – there are novels that describe everything from Actium to Thermopylae, from Cicero to Alexander the Great, and from the Persians to medieval France. In such a clamor, Harris’ novel stands out as a very fine example of the genre, though it does not transcend it. Compared with another best-selling series set in the same period and following Julius Caesar – Conn Iggulden’s Emperor series – I found Imperium to be more engaging and more serious.

Imperium is a good read, especially if one is interested in the Roman period. It is certainly better than much of what one finds crowding the shelves and adorned with historical images. Perhaps it is not a great novel, but it is a very good historical fiction novel.

 

Ranking Crichton

This post is going to be a bit of departure for this site. But it’s Friday, we all just want to get to the weekend, and sometimes it’s good to have a little change of pace. So today, I want to rank the novels of Michael Crichton. He is the dean of thriller writers, and his stories regularly populate both the bestseller list and the local cinemas. There are some, no doubt, who do not think him a ‘serious’ author – but more often than not those are frustrated authors who secretly wish that they were as rich as he is.

Nevertheless, he is not perfect. In fact, I hesitate to call him great. Despite several blockbuster successes, he has had some real clunkers, too. We are all familiar with his work, though he is never mentioned in the same breath as Cormac McCarthy or Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or even Tom Wolfe. No, Crichton’s name is more often associated with writers such as John Grisham or Stephen King. The point of this post, however, is not to examine why Grisham, King, or Crichton are not studied in classrooms, but rather to rank the novels of Crichton.

First, a couple of rules:

1. Movies are not taken into account. For instance, Timeline is a great novel, but an awful, awful movie. This will not count against it. Conversely, if Congo were a good movie (it’s not), it would not benefit the book’s ranking at all.
2. I can’t evaluate the science. Crichton will settle into a lengthy lecture on science to set up his plots, and I often skim it or skip some of it altogether. After all, I am not a scientist, and so am not equipped to judge whether it’s good or not.

With those ground rules established, let’s get to the rankings. Crichton has published 15* works of fiction, ranked below from 1-15, with some explanatory comments.

1. Jurassic Park – Must anything be said about this? Crichton’s tale of cloning and greed gone bad is a classic suspense novel. The first time I read it, I literally could not put it down. Cliché I know, but true.
2. Timeline – As a historian, though not a medieval one, this novel captured me from the start. Archaeology, history, knights fighting, I was hooked. So what if I still don’t understand all the quantum mechanics/multiverse gibberish? Once the group gets back in time, the book races at breakneck speed.
3. Airframe – Another novel read at one sitting, in a public library. This one is almost more of a mystery, with lots of fascinating insight into the aircraft building business. Underrated among Crichton novels.
4. Rising Sun – Another excellent mystery, set against the backdrop of Japanese-American business relations. Crichton’s somewhat strident rants against Japanese business practices aside, the novel is gripping and fast. Well worth a read.
5. Disclosure – a tale of sexual harassment in the IT industry without references to “hard drives” or “floppy disks.” Just a hard-hitting, scary story about how one guy can get screwed over, and how he fights back.
6. The Great Train Robbery – One of two real departures from the suspense genre, this reads more as an amusing tale set in Victorian England. A fun read, but not one to set the heart pounding.

 

Simmering Bethlehem

The Bethlehem Murders
Matt Rees

From an outside perspective, the Palestinian territories appear as cauldrons of simmering hostility. Despite the best efforts of diplomats and Presidents – Carter and Clinton chief among them – peace in the region seems ever more elusive. Complicating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the tension within the Palestinian community between Hamas and Fatah. These events dominate the news coverage of Palestinians, and Westerners are rarely treated to a more in-depth picture of the day-to-day life of ordinary Palestinians.

It is within these broad strokes that Matt Rees presents his rather ordinarily titled The Bethlehem Murders.* Rees, according to the dustjacket, covered the Middle East as a journalist for 10 years, and spent six of those as Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief. So he writes from a position of experience.

Rees’ Palestine is run by gangsters who shoot rockets across the border into Israel, and intimidate fellow Palestinians into silence. These gunmen are unafraid to victimize Palestinians who are not sympathizers, and ordinary citizens are pawns in their political power plays. And not one Palestinian is immune to their brutal exercise of power. Notably, in Rees’ novel, the Israelis are but bit players. They impose when they must, and then they disappear. This is a Palestine victimized from without, but more disturbingly, from within.

Rees’ detective, Omar Yussef, is not a man blessed with any special skills or talents, but a devotion to his good friend George Saba, whom he believes has been falsely accused of murder. Yussef takes us through the warrens of Bethlehem, where we meet a variety of characters with a diversity of ideologies. Yussef himself is old, tired, and apathetic towards the Palestinian struggle, and his encounters with other characters bring color to what is often seen as black and white. In fact, one of the triumps of the book is the humanization of a Palestinians. We see people who just want to live their lives in peace, who just want to enjoy their marriages and their children and find reward in their work. There are also those committed to jihad, to the destruction of Israel, and two their own dishonest financial gain.

The plot possesses all of the conventions of a good detective novel, though some are executed clumsily. Some of the clumsiness may be attributed to Rees’ attempt to write from what is essentially a non-Western perspective, a very difficult task to accomplish successfully. Rees has done a marvelous job with this so far as I, a Westerner, can tell. Yussef is an eminently likeable character, and his charm kept me reading the book at some of the slower moments.

The Bethlehem Murders is a good illuminating read. One must always be wary of drawing conclusions about real life from fictional works, and this comes with the same caution. Nevertheless, its environment both sets it apart and drives my hearty recommendation.

* This is the title for the UK publication of the book, and the title of the version that I read. The US title is The Collaborator of Bethlehem, a rather better choice in my opinion.

 

Put The Sleeping Doll to Bed

It is rare, I think, that one writes a book review before one has hit the halfway mark of the book. But some books require an immediate reaction. Jeffrey Deaver’s The Sleeping Doll is just such a book. So I wrote half of this review before I finished reading. The second half of the book, however, did nothing but confirm my impressions of the first half.

First, some background. I picked up this book on the recommendation of The Economist, which in a 26 June article called Deaver “a masterful plotter” and put The Sleeping Doll in “A Better Class of Whodunnits.” This is the third or fourth crime novel I have read in a row, and perhaps I have just grown weary of the genre’s conventions, but The Sleeping Doll is just awful. Nothing about the book: prose, characters, or events, sets it apart in any positive way from any run-of-the-mill crime novel. Many of the problems with the book are glaring, and I have highlighted a few of them below.

Deaver seems intent in showing off his research and knowledge. At the start of chapter thirty (page 216), we get 2 paragraphs about the attractions of Vallejo Springs, in Napa, in addition to a shot at the movie Sideways. These little asides litter the book like flotsam, not advancing the story or revealing characters. They just take up space. Moreover, numerous times in the story, Deaver takes pains to show us how the science of kinesics (study of body-language) is used in interrogation. It’s not bad information, and some authors can work it into a story seamlessly, but Deaver doesn’t. Information about kinesics is used to justify what appears to the reader as nothing more than the main character’s intuition. This is less CSI than it is Psychic Hotline.

Unfortunately, Deaver’s research didn’t seem to extend to police procedure, where the holes are obvious enough for even me to spot. There is a scene early in the book where Dance and her team interrogate a witness/suspect. When he provides evidence of his innocence, they just permit him to remain in the office while they discuss the status of their investigation. Now I am no policeman, but I don’t think it is standard procedure to allow random people the opportunity to just sit and listen to the police discuss the status of a high-priority and sensitive investigation, especially if that person is a writer/journalist.

Deaver too often falls prey to the trap of telling the reader about the characters rather than letting the characters show themselves. A typical example occurs on page 223, which reads “She gave him the news about [name redacted] too, and the young agent responded with utter silence, a sign that he was truly shaken.” (emphasis mine) A decent writer (or editor!) would have simply removed the highlighted portion, and let the character’s lack of response speak for itself.

These issues are not helped by the prose, which is at times clunky, like this 5-sentence gem:

“Dance’s administrative assistant, short, no-nonsense Maryellen Kresbach, walked into the room with coffee for all (Dance never asked; Maryellen always brought). The mother of three wore clattery high heels and favored complicated coiffed hair and impressive fingernails.

The crew in the conference room thanked. Dance sipped the excellent coffee. Wished Maryellen had brought some of the cookies sitting on her desk.”

If Deaver wanted to adopt that sort of elision as a prose style, it might have been good to do it consistently, but this is the only place it occurs. Stands out like a flashing light. Groaned out loud when I read it.

Then there is this cliff-hanger to end chapter sixteen: “It was just then that she got a call from someone who, she realized, might have some thoughts about what the killer might have in mind.” Anyone who has ever done any writing at all knows that two ‘mights’ do not make right, and in fact make it horribly horribly wrong.

Poor editing compounds the awkward prose. We read on page 45: “Dance introduced them and instantly the writer disappeared from the agent-in-charge’s radar screen instantly.” This is simply the biggest howler in a list – just a few pages later, on 74, there is an open parenthesis with no corresponding close parenthesis.

Deaver is clearly experienced, and he does engineer a couple of mildly exciting scenes, but the twists at the end are unsurprising and not compelling. And the few good scenes that occur are too few and far between to offset the bad parts. Further, I knew certain characters couldn’t last beyond the end of the novel (since the front jacket says “Introducing Kathryn Dance” one knows that this is going to be series of novels) and their demise was anticlimactic.

It should be clear from this review that I do not recommend The Sleeping Doll. In fact, it was extremely disappointing – I expected more out of Deaver, as the jacket does proclaim him as “The Number One Bestselling Author” after all. Suffice it to say that it will take something pretty radical for me to pick up another Deaver novel.