The Sleeping Doll by Jeffery Deaver

It’s a Jeffery Deaver thriller, only this time the pet crime-solving method is kinesics (magical lie-detecting by body language) rather than forensics. A spin-off series from the Lincoln Rime series, which I started because hi, disabled detective.

Oh, Jeff, look at you! You wrote a whole book, and you didn’t explain every last detail! There were a few things that you, actually, like, hinted at. Hinted very loudly, but hey, you’re working on it. Oooh, and the shallow waters of your “my detective also has a personal life” plotline are a lot less annoying when your detective isn’t disabled and you don’t manage to drown yourself in an inch and a half of deep water about his OMG disabled issues. Well, okay. A little less annoying.

Still, I don’t want to smack you repeatedly with my very pointy shoe right now, so good job!

Bios by Robert Charles Wilson

Zoe, a carefully engineered and physiologically augmented clone, is sent from autocratically-controlled earth to an exploration outpost on a new world. It’s hoped that she will be able to cope with the virulent Isis atmosphere, which eats people alive in under a minute. But Zoe has been tampered with, and no one knows that her mind and emotions might actually be her own now.

I’m reading Wilson’s catalog backwards, pretty much by accident, and it’s kind of shocking really. Sometime in the past twelve books he figured out how to write (see the mostly excellent Spin). It was a few books after this one, apparently.

Because . . . ouch. Good worldbuilding, flat characters, dreadful construction. This book doesn’t so much fall apart at the end as fail utterly to come together in the middle.

The idea was there, though, potentially rich and tragically . . . I was going to say under-executed, but actually I think it’s over-executed. I’m glad to see he’s always had good ideas, and something of a sense of how they ought to come together. Just, uh, it’s a lot better without all the flailing and hopping around on one foot.