Tag Archives: book review

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (1990) – BR00273 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
May 27 2025

Plot or Premise

The Wheel of Time turns, and the battle between the Dragon of Light and the Lord of the Dark occurs over and over, with destiny weaving people’s fates or people’s actions nudging destiny. Three young men from a distant village are attacked by beasts of the Dark and are pursued across the countryside, aided by an advanced witch, a soldier, two novice witches, and various travellers that they meet along the way.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

The story is epic, with a wide breadth of story and a lot happening across the pages. As the first of 14 stories, even the first one is amazing in its piece of the overall storyline. The steady young shepherd, Rand; the quiet young blacksmith, Perrin; and the mischievous farmer, Mat, are targeted by the Dark Lord for reasons none of them understand. The forces at play, the history of the battle…it all seems like simple legends and stories to their quiet area of the world. Until Trollocs and Shadowmen attack their homes and start chasing them across the countryside.

I love the main characters and most of their story (Mat is affected by some dark forces that get a bit monotonous over time). Spoiler alert, but it turns out Perrin can communicate with wolves, which is startling and disturbing news to him. Egwene and Nynaeve, two young women from the same small village, turn out to be potential powerful witches. And a powerful witch, Moiraine, plus her protector, Lan, are all great characters. Any one of them could be a story in and of itself, but the pattern weaves them together. I also like that the first book is relatively complete at the end…while there is a continuing storyline, the first part is “done” and thus self-contained.

There are two things I don’t like about the book, and the first is a bit pedantic. Or pedestrian. There is some seriously bad editing in the book. I can accept some things being repeated a few too many times…if it’s an important plot point, you don’t want anyone to miss it. It’s a little heavy-handed in some places, but well, okay. However, there is a point where Mat and Rand are on a long road, lasting about 10d perhaps in total. Maybe two weeks, it’s hard to tell. Anyway, as they are on one stretch, it is really dusty. But there is a reference to how it’s okay because they have neck scarves that a local farmer and his wife gave them, which used to belong to their sons. No biggie. Except fast forward about six chapters, they’re almost at the end of the road, nearing the big city, and another farmer gives them two scarves that used to belong to his son. It’s the live version of the scene that they already told us about six chapters / days earlier. Huh? Are we supposed to believe it happened identically twice? Or did they somehow time-travel and not tell us? Just bad editing. That shouldn’t happen in a majorly commercial book with multiple printings.

The second problem is much bigger and endemic to the series. There are way too many characters. Note that I read book one, then watched three seasons of the TV show, started book 2, and I had almost no idea who was who. I’m usually pretty good at keeping track of characters, even with similar names, and I had actual faces from the TV series to help me remember who was who. Nope. I got 3 chapters in and was almost completely confused. Partly because I realized that with OVER 250 CHARACTERS in book one, I didn’t really know who everyone was going into book two. FYI, some of the books in the series have over 600 referenced characters. Now, sure, many of them are simply names thrown out as part of historical references. I finally had to go online, find a list of ALL the characters in book 1 and create my own cheat sheet. The laundry lists at the end of the books were just not cutting it.

Here’s my cheat sheet for Book 1 of 14, with only about 35 (!) particularly relevant to the outcome.

The Bottom Line

Epic storyline, too many characters

A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald (1965) – BR00272 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
May 13 2025

Plot or Premise

Sam Taggart is an old buddy of Travis McGee, and he swings back into town carrying a Mexican gold statue. There are more where this one came from, but they were taken from him, and he wants McGee to help him get them back. Before anything comes of the plan, Taggart is murdered. So McGee sets out to find the gold and, if he can, avenge his pal.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

The story is somewhat unusual as a big part of the timeline takes place in a remote coastal area of Mexico with a small hotel, a nearby town, and some local houses. An out-of-the-way spot where you can avoid the hubbub and remain almost anonymous, if you wish. The remote location works well, and there’s some ongoing intrigue with a potential Cuban exile.

There’s a slightly repeated storyline from book 3, with someone getting fleeced, but it’s different enough not to cause too many problems. It is almost incidental to the issue of the gold. And to be honest, nearly ALL of it is incidental to the gold. There are a lot of things going on. So much so that when a big event happens about two-thirds of the way through the book, it feels like a finale.

Except that a whole third act takes place in L.A.; action, subterfuge, and new recruits to the team. And a somewhat violent episode. McGee doesn’t escape unscathed, taking physical and substantial emotional damage through the salvage operation.

I have a few niggly concerns about the ending, the way some things worked in Mexico, and even the way things unfold in L.A. Just enough to drop the rating down a level. But it is a “bigger” story than most of the McGee series, more ambitious, and it mostly delivers.

The Bottom Line

McGee goes international and gets involved in Cuban politics

A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00270 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
May 8 2025

Plot or Premise

McGee is running low on cash and is looking for some work. A friend of a friend asks him to come out to Nevada to discuss a possible salvage job, but it’s looking like a bust for good old Trav. She’s been robbed of her father’s estate by her husband, and she needs lawyers and accountants, not Travis. Which he is in the process of telling her when a large rifle bullet takes her life.

What I Liked

The explosive opening leaves McGee somewhat ticked off, as you can imagine, and he immediately reports the murder. Except when the Sheriff comes to check, the body and all evidence are gone. Someone has made it look like the wife ran off with a lover, even if McGee swears he saw her die. It’s an interesting plot after that, as the only person who would seem to want her dead doesn’t seem like the person who killed her. And there doesn’t seem to be any other rationale for the death. It’s well into the third act before the likely killer becomes more obvious. There are a lot of red herrings, too, with crooked business dealings, rival businessmen, and the IRS sniffing around.

What I Didn’t Like

The pseudo-runaway wife was having an affair with a young professor, who had an unhealthy relationship with his sister, both depending on each other too much. But the sister is written as a terrible cliché from start to finish. To be honest, the story would work a lot better without her involvement, and it would have left more room for McGee to play Sherlock.

The Bottom Line

Great story, lousy secondary character

Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00269 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 8 2025

Plot or Premise

An Army buddy of McGee’s asks for help looking into the death of his sister’s fiancé, Howard Plummer. While Plummer looks to have been the victim of a simple mugging, the sister isn’t so sure that her pure, sweet Howard wasn’t somehow into something shady involving extra cash. McGee wants to help the buddy, but he also wants to know about piles of cash.

What I Liked and Didn’t Like

There are really four parts to the story, and I confess I don’t like them equally. The first part is the fiancé, the sister and the Army buddy. They may be the clients and written sympathetically, but they’re not particularly interesting.

The second segment is the crooks who have their hooks into a wealthy man who lives a bit of an isolated life from his ex-wife and two kids. While there’s a femme fatale running around, there’s not enough substance to her to make her truly menacing or truly attractive.

The third segment involves some badly written noir involving an involuntary stay at a psych hospital, overuse of some bad drugs, and the fear of lobotomies mixed with brainwashing. It’s just all way over the top.

However, there is some fifth business in the mix. One of the tertiary characters that McGee goes to talk to is an aging well-to-do woman who McGee knows from back in the day, and they work well together. She is the most interesting person in the story, albeit a bit shallowly developed. I’d love to see a story just about her life, to be honest.

The mystery is decent, the plot / grift has some spark for the time, but the roller-coaster reads as way too farfetched even for the period. A little too pulpy, even for McGee stories.

The Bottom Line

Too much psychobabble, not enough mystery

The Deep Blue Good-by by John D. MacDonald (1964) – BR00268 (R2025) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
May 6 2025

Plot or Premise

A dancer, Chookie McCall, has a friend, Cathy, whose father might have had some buried World War II loot. A guy named Junior Allen seems to have found it and run off with it, and she has no way to get it back. So, Chookie introduces Cathy to her friend Travis to see if he can help.

What I Liked

The classic series of 21 books starts with this one, with all of the main elements of the series apparent in the first two chapters.

Travis McGee is taking his retirement in fits and starts, not waiting until he’s 60 to take it all at once. He lives aboard a houseboat he won in a card game, and specializes in difficult salvage, retrieving things other people have stolen or conned away from rightful owners who have no legal way to get it back. His usual fee for a successful recovery? 50% of anything recovered.

Junior Allen is a piece of work and delights in destroying women. In addition to stealing from Cathy and her family, he also moved into a house of a rich widow named Lois, and raped, abused and gaslit her into a puddle of a human. Travis manages to help her heal and get back on her feet while he goes after Junior. Some teens get involved as further victims, but in the end, Travis is mostly the smarter man.

What I Didn’t Like

Travis’ relations with women are always half-positive/half-negative. He always treats them relatively with respect, far ahead of his time, but his solution to most of their healing is hanging around his houseboat, enjoying the sun, until they have enough self-respect again to want to bed the knight who saved them. This story is a bit raw in places, more so than some of his later books. But it’s still an amazing story.

The Bottom Line

The legend begins with a busted flush