lightreads

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!

Fiction. Murder mystery with hackers and an online killing game that gets too real. I read this a few years ago, and it's the single reason I persist withDeaver's other work. It's got the irritating narrative tricks that drive me nuts, but he’s stumbled on a set of characters who are wonderful (and incredibly slashable). The technology is now dated and laughable, and the portrayal of the internet as an inevitably destructive addiction is irritating, but the thing where the quietly brilliant cop gets the disillusioned young hacker out of prison to help solve crime and then takes him home with him totally gets
me. I can't help wondering whether the quality here is due to the fact that these are not Deaver's regular series characters, and so it's not so glaringly obvious when he repeatedly does unbelievable things to their portrayals in the name of plot.

Fiction, mysteries. Quadriplegic forensic scientist chases criminals. And wow how much do these books piss me off? It's not just the handling of the disability (which is rather ham-handed and painful) or the plotting (baroque to the point of near incomprehensibility and to the detriment of any consistent characterization). It's mostly the grating style, the ad nauseum use of a select few storytelling devices (show black hats planning something nefarious, show white hats walking into trap unawares, switch to black hat narration and watch white hats save the day followed by painful "this is how" explanation). Mostly, I'm resentful of writers who are frankly mediocre, but who sell books hand-over-fist. I keep waiting for this guy to get better, because there really are flashes of hope: the fact that the quad actually has a partner and sex life, the very occasional bit of evocative or lovely writing. But he's just not cluing in, and eventually I'll run out of patience and bail on the whole thing.