Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interesting characters with unique voices. A plot that is unpredictable but feels inevitable. A setting that has tone more than detail.

I’m a fan of Leonard’s work, even though I haven’t made a dedicated effort to read all of his books. This book, about a judge who wants to drive his wife away and blackmails a defendant into helping him–which naturally goes completely haywire, and stirs up a great deal of trouble–is a bit shaggy in the best way. I’m not sure what I’m going to read next, because this will be a difficult act to follow.

[Added: I had no idea there was a TV series based on this book. I’ll have to look it up.]

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Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A criminal mastermind has a plan to destroy London, which he promptly casts aside mid-book for a plan B that better matches the expectations of James Bond’s fans.

Set in the ’60’s, the novel portrays the setting in a detailed, concrete way, but almost nothing else about it is interesting. The characters are not much fun, the action scenes have little urgency to them, and Bond himself barely seems like a secret agent with a license to kill.

Honestly, if there’s one mistake that authors make, especially when they’re writing thrillers, it’s describing fight scenes as though recording the events of a movie. No one needs the blow-by-blow. What matters is the urgency and the feeling of it.

Still, amazingly detailed setting, though.

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The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first Matt Scudder novel, although it’s not the first one I’ve read. It’s quite good, especially for its time (1975).

Matt Scudder was a husband, father, an alcoholic, and a relatively honest NYPD detective. Then one day something terrible happened and he dropped out of his life, quitting his job and walking away from his family to live in a cheap hotel and drink all day. He makes his living as an unlicensed private investigator: he doesn’t fill out forms, or charge by the hour, or any of it. He does favors for “friends” and afterwards those friends give him “gifts.”

In this first novel in the series, one of Scudder’s cop buddies sends a client his way: a young prostitute has been murdered in her home by the young man she lived with. He was arrested in the street, screaming, covered in blood, with his dick hanging out. After a couple of days in jail, he hanged himself, closing the case for good.

But the girl’s step-father isn’t satisfied. Not that there’s any doubt in his mind about who killed her, but she walked away from college years before and went to New York. She didn’t keep in contact with her family. They had no idea what was happening to her.

Why had she walked away? Why had she become a prostitute? Why was she living with this young man?

Who was she?

And because he’s doing a favor, not working directly for a client, Scudder’s investigation becomes more wide-ranging in pretty much the way you’d expect.

It’s a fast-moving book, and it’s short, so it takes very little time to read it. I wish I’d started with this one so I could move through the series in order. Scudder eventually picks up a series of recurring characters and he joins AA.

But it’s appropriately bleak and tragic, something I’ve been looking for. Good stuff.

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Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Silly but fun, as long as you don’t think about the plot too much.

Criminal overlord plan: If you’re worried about an excellent team of investigators showing up to investigate a murder you’ve committed, and you want to lure them in on your own terms, wait until after you complete your $65 million deal with terrorists.

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In the Midst of Death by Lawrence Block
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Matt Scudder is a former cop and an unlicensed private investigator. Sometimes he does favors for people, and they give him money as a favor in return. This time he’s hired by a cop who’s accused of extortion; can Scudder convince the accuser to retract?

Of course things get complicated and there’s a murder. The cop claims he’s been framed by other cops, and Scudder is the only one who can help.

This is early in the series, when Scudder was still drinking heavily. It was much later that he joined a 12 step program and struggled to keep his life together. I’m not sure which version I prefer.

The weird thing is that, while I enjoyed the book–the tone, the characters, the plot–I’d completely forgotten I’d read it before. Read it and didn’t remember it at all, except for one sentence. I rarely reread deliberately, and this isn’t a book I would have tackled again if I’d recognized that utterly generic title.

Buy this book.

61 Hours by Lee Child
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Jack Reacher novels are interesting, in that they’re enjoyable but not particularly involving. Reacher is the basic competence-porn thriller hero, who can work out where a fugitive has run off to after nothing more than a brief phone call, but doesn’t recognize the killer when the plot needs him to assume something else.

The heroic levels of research that books like this are built on is often the best part, like reading an oddball magazine article on, say, congressional boondoggles during the Cold War. Unfortunately, “Show the research” can be intrusive, too. When Reacher is handed a gun, do we need a rundown of the manufacturer’s founding like some Wikipedia copy pasta? Nope. We get it anyway.

The climax was so absurd that I threw credulity aside and enjoyed it as camp. I prefer thrillers that strain credulity, and know it. It’s fun.

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