nocto

[These comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers....]

[on the characters]

I don't remember any of the characters other than Michael appearing before and I didn't find him as interesting as in previous books. He seems rather nondescript in this one, I expected his history background to come into use at some point and I want to know how Eli and Tzilla are getting on with their baby but apart from a brief mention of Michael's son there's very little continuity of characters from the last book.

I almost wonder why Gur wrote this as a series. The recurring character of Michael doesn't add very much to the books.

I think Avigail is an interesting person, the policewoman who is working undercover as a nurse, but I hold out no great hope of seeing her in the next book. Nearly everyone on the kibbutz seems unlikeable, Moish and Dave are the only two I can recall thinking were ok, but on the whole they are quite an interesting bunch to read about.

I think it's hard, without knowing anything about a kibbutz, to know if the relationships between the kibbutz members are realistic but they feel quite realistic to me and they certainly seem more real than Michael's relationships with his colleagues.

[on the plot]

The big weakness of the plot was that it was full of devices that had been used in the first two books. I've no problem with them in theory and the closed community theme was fine but it was just a bit predictable that the killer would be protecting the kibbutz from change and preserving an ideal. So I think the plotting was plausible just not very innovative from the point of view of the series.

I think if I was reading these books further apart and not thinking so much about them I'd like the structure more, as it is, apart from the diverse settings they are becoming rather samey.

I'd like to have heard more about the side issues like the face cream fraud. Gur puts tons of stories into her books but doesn't develop them into full sub plots, it's like having too much to read and not enough to read at the same time. I feel the only real thread is the murder and everything else is just bits of cotton lying around being too short to sew anything with.

The conclusion was satisfactory enough but I found the journey a bit empty, lots of scenery and not that much substance.

more to come...

Purchased on 15th January 2002.

I'm not an objective judge of Marcia Muller's writing - this is book 22 in the Sharon McCone series and it would be near impossible for Muller to come up with a plot twist which would alienate me at this point. That said, I thought the introduction of a "dot com" business into this book was likely to make it end up being rather lousy. I should really trust Muller more than this. She's always woven topical themes into her books and it doesn't age them.

Sharon's been investigating for 25 years now and if anything the problem I have is that she's become more of a business woman and less of an investigator in recent books. She's not aging so fast, I think she's aged from 28 in the first book to 41 in this one which is about half the real rate of aging (and interestingly this is the same rate that Reginald Hill claimed Dalziel and Pascoe were aging at in Asking for the Moon). One of the good things about this book is that it seems to mark a return to regular investigation with Sharon investigating things that aren't to do with her own family and though her own family's tragedies feature too they are extra background material that adds realism and not the focusof the story. I also hold out great hopes that Sharon's newly hired investigator Julia Rafael will prove to be an interesting colleague in future books continuing the trend of this series to have not just a central character who makes me come back for more but a whole family of a cast I want to come back and visit.

I have a few reservations about the way the story ended up, I liked the conclusion on the whole and the "dot com" business didn't turn into the cliche that it could so easily have done. My problem was what I felt to be a lack of coherence between the hook that started the story and the ending. Something didn't come full circle enough for me to be totally satisfed.

On the whole though this is another excellent entry in one of the best detective series around and McCone is as fresh and interesting as the day Muller conceived her.

Purchased on 11th July 2002.

Before I read this book I'd heard that the ending was a bit odd and I've read advice to stop reading a few pages before the end which seemed like very very odd advice for a mystery. It's also impossible advice to follow. As I neared the end of this book I found myself thinking "Well that's not as bad an ending as I'd expected" and I just had one unresolved question that I wanted to read on and answer. But it's the answer to that unresolved question that's the weird thing at the end of the book, the weirdness in the ending is entirely necessary to complete the plot, to stop reading before the final ending would be to cheat and have read an entirely different story. As you can tell, it's hard to explain this without explaining what the twist in the tale is which I'm trying not to do.

I'm torn between thinking the ending is bloody awful and thinking that it's very clever, I'm not sure if I'll make my mind up. It might be one of those things where I just have to accept that it's both extremes together.

This story is mixture of mystery and suspense and concerns Dr David Beck (an unfortunate moniker on the right side of the Atlantic since it's hard to read the book without picturing the English footballer David Beckham and it's also hard to imagine David Beckham as a paediatrician) who gets sent an anonymous email to tune into a webcam at a certain time. When he looks at the webcam he sees his wife walk by - she died eight years before.

The narrative switches between a first person view and the odd section of third person view. In the beginning of the book these viewpoints are kept in separate chapters but as the book goes on they begin to flip back and forth more often and for shorter periods of time. I don't have a huge problem with this device other than finding it a bit weird to have a first person narrator and yet to know more than him. On the whole it added to the suspense for the reader to have greater omniscience. It did get confusing in parts where it wasn't immediately clear to me at the start of a section which viewpoint we had.

There's a ton of technological bits in this book, lots of email, web stuff, digital imaging etc. I can't help but wonder if Coben was planning on selling the film rights to this when he wrote it. My feeling is that it will make a better film than it does a book. The twist at the end would make you leave a cinema thinking whereas it makes you close the book shrugging.

On the whole it's a good book if the ending doesn't throw you too much, and you don't let the prospect of a bit of bizarre stuff put you off the rest of the book. It feels like it was written both for the screen and to move Harlan Coben off the mystery shelves and onto the bestseller racks at airports. I can hardly blame Coben for wanting to make his fortune and he's a lot better writer than many who feature on those bestseller racks.

[p.s. it looks like this will indeed become a film.]

Purchased on 4th February 2002.

3 copies of this book are available on BookMooch.