Good, but not extraordinary SF story taking singularity/nanotech concepts into the future. The plot seemed muddied by its own cleverness, and I couldn’t help but be distracted by the large number of typos throughout this edition.

(This quick review is part of my September 2005 “clearing the decks” exercise.)

First of the Jack Parlabane novels. Brookmyre is still finding his feet with this one: the opening scene is one of the funniest I have ever read, but later parts of the book drag a bit, and the computer hacking sequence didn’t work for me at all. Still, a good satirical comedy thriller, and a great introduction to the characters of the series.

(This quick review is part of my September 2005 “clearing the decks” exercise.)

It doesn’t scale the emotional heights of L.A. Requiem, and it doesn’t have the same cocky swagger of the early Elvis Cole books, but The Forgotten Man is still a fine detective novel. An unidentified man is shot dead in an alleyway, and with his dying words he claims he was looking for his son Elvis Cole. Elvis never knew his father, and he finds himself drawn to the case like a moth to a flame. But he is not the only one…

I’m not normally one for the “scientist discovers proof of God/the afterlife/reincarnation/souls” sub-genre, but I do like Kube-McDowell’s writing, and this book presents the “proof” as a very ambigious and tenuous thing, with hard choices for the characters to make.

(This quick review is part of my September 2005 “clearing the decks” exercise.)

It’s easy to see why The Da Vinci Code has become so popular. As one of the characters in the book says, “Everyone loves a conspiracy.” This one, involving a secretive Church organization trying to steal the Holy Grail from an ancient society that has been protecting its whereabouts for centuries, taps into a universal suspicion of authority. Cleverly, though, it keeps the paranoia focused on a small goal–the Grail itself–and doesn’t try to draw other fringe theories into its web. It’s paced extremely well, with new plot twists and revelations jumping at you in nearly every chapter. Many of the revelations tie in with pieces of art that almost everyone is familiar with (Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and the Last Supper, for example), which piques your interest by making you doubt your own memories of those things. The puzzles and cyphers presented to the hero and heroine are tricky, but not so arcance that they disappear into boring abstraction. It’s a cracking page-turner.

However… The characters are paper-thin; the identity of the hidden mastermind is painfully obvious; and the amount of background detail that has to be filled in (sometimes in preachy infodump asides to the reader, sometimes in “as you know, Bob” style dialogues) is enormous. Brown does his best to keep it all simple and interesting, but all the lecturing gets tiresome rather quickly. Overall, I found it very entertaining, but I don’t think I’m ready to read anything more by him just yet.

I found this a bit hard to get into at first–that main characters of Tony Hill and Carol Jordan took a while to come together for me–but after the half-way mark, things really started moving. By present-day standards The Mermaids Singing is a fairly predictable psych profiling/serial killer thriller, but the way McDermid interweaves the strands of the investigation together with the characters’ personal lives is entertaining. It’s very clearly the beginning of a series, and based on this first episode I’ll certainly be reading more McDermid in the future.

I went through the whole of Adam Hall’s Quiller series about five years ago when I was on an espionage kick. The books are pure high-speed secret agent escapism, and a quick dose of Quiller action was just what I needed to stir myself out of my current reading funk. The Mandarin Cypher is the first of the series I read. Upon re-reading it now, it has lost a bit of its sparkle, but none of its pace. Hall’s matter-of-fact stream-of-consciousness patter is great for keeping the plot moving and the pages turning. I always found Quiller’s Russian adventures the most engaging, but his outing to Hong Kong here has all the tense elements I remembered: hard targets, hard opposition, and impossible situations aplenty. If you want a throwaway afternoon thriller, you just can’t beat this stuff.

There are some books that an established author can get published but which, coming from a novice, would never see the light of day. It’s not always a question of quality, either. A “concept” book may only be saleable with a big name attached. This is a case in point.

The concept behind Changing Planes is that, given the right set of physical stimuli, a person can travel to other “planes” of existence, populated by intelligent nonhuman races. The stimuli in question include tiredness, boredom, and slight nausea. In our society, they’re best found in airports, waiting for delayed airplanes. In theory, you can spend the two-hour layover in O’Hare as a week-long holiday on some alien planet.

The book itself is a description of some of the other “planes”. Each description is almost entirely plot-free, and some are pretty heavily polemical. But the ideas are different enough, and intriguing enough, that Le Guin manages to sustain the idea for the entire book. She would be well-advised not to do a sequel, though.

Since becoming a parent, I’ve developed an almost allergic reaction to bad things happening to young children (babies, infants, and toddlers) in fiction and film. I first noticed this reaction when I was reading Michael Marshall Smith’s The Straw Men. There is a point about half-way through the book that literally took my breath away, and it took me a while before I was willing to carry on reading it. I had a similar reaction to No Second Chance.

The book starts with Dr. Marc Seidman being shot. He surfaces from unconsciousness twelve days later, and learns that his wife was shot and killed, and that his six-month-old daughter is missing. Then the ransom note arrives.

Like all of Harlan Coben’s books, No Second Chance is fast-paced and tightly plotted. In style and tone, it closely matches Tell No One. In that book, the protagonist thought his wife was dead, and fought throughout the book to find out what really happened to her; in No Second Chance the hero is struggling to get back his daughter. Both characters are completely devastated by their losses, and are driven to desperation by hopes of getting their loved ones back. Consequently, No Second Chance felt less fresh and original than Tell No One. Although I didn’t predict the final twist, it was obvious there was going to be one. I found it stretched the ending out just that little bit too far, though.

It’s a quick, thrilling read, but it’s not one of Coben’s best.

The fourth Myron Bolitar novel is set in and around Merion golf club at a US Open. Jack Coldren is in the lead. Myron is there to woo potential clients, but he gets drawn in by the Coldren family when Chad, Jack’s son, is kidnapped. Unfortunately Myron has to investigate on his own because Win doesn’t refuses to get involved. The reason for this is something that Myron will have to uncover if he is to rescue Chad, and find out who abducted him. Not quite up to the high standards of the first three books (it feels unbalanced, with the ending being much heavier than the light, jokey beginning), but still a top slice of detective entertainment.