Tag Archives: Good Reads

The Enemy by Lee Child (2004) – BR00163 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
November 3 2019

Plot or Premise

Jack Reacher is still in the military and gets transferred out of Panama just before New Year’s Eve, 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling, Panama is heating up with Noriega, and Reacher is watching grass grow at his new post, until a General drops dead at a seedy motel.

What I Liked

The story gives more of Reacher’s back story, and it is interesting to see the “man alone” working within a command structure with others. And it is an interesting premise — what do you do in the military when the future looks like you’re about to become obsolete? The supporting characters were good, and it was nice to see Reacher with his brother and mother. At the end, there is a twist about an error Reacher makes early on that comes back to bite him, and it is a great element to keep. The aftermath is kind of abrupt, with who went where and what happened next, but hard to avoid in a “flashback” style story.

What I Didn’t Like

The premise for the story is a little far-fetched, but when they get to the final reveal, the real specific motive is ridiculous as the people involved would never have done what they did, at least not on paper, and not openly. Reacher stumbles around in the dark long past where certain lines of enquiry should have been obvious, particularly for the identity of a specific witness. And the killer.

The Bottom Line

Nice backstory, weak mystery.

Bear by Marian Engel (1976) – BR00162 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
July 11 2019

Plot or Premise

A historical librarian gets a chance to catalogue the books at a remote island home for a summer in Northern Ontario and encounters locals, free time to figure out her life, and a pet bear.

What I Liked

This book was given to me back in my teens, a gift of quality literature as it had just won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. I knew nothing about it as I started to read it. And I was relatively shocked to see “high literature” include bestiality and graphic descriptions of oral sex performed by the bear on the main character. The historical parts were awesome, as was the descriptions of the island and the passage of the summer.

What I Didn’t Like

I found the romanticization of the relationship with the bear a bit odd, as was the depersonalization of her other sexual partners during the summer. I also felt there were gaps in the ending — we saw what she intended to do, not what she actually did once she was back in Toronto.

The Bottom Line

Bestiality is a strange theme for an award-winner.

The Burglar by Thomas Perry (2019) – BR00161 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
July 10 2019

Plot or Premise

Elle is an old-fashioned cat burglar with updated methods to tell her when houses with valuables are likely to be sitting empty. And she happily liberates them, feeling no remorse because the people are rich and she mainly takes things that are insured. Cash, jewels, guns. Which is all fun and games until she walks into the master bedroom at an empty house and finds three dead people sharing a bed after sharing each other.

What I Liked

The initial premise is strong, and watching her case, enter and rob houses is exciting. The initial twist is that the murders were accidentally recorded on a nearby camera, and Elle has to steal it to wipe the memory of her entrance. Her sense of ethics requires her to edit the footage to remove herself and then return the camera before the police find the bodies. But somehow the killers are looking for her, they know she was there and maybe saw too much.

What I Didn’t Like

Elle is supposed to be young, hip, and in the criminal underworld…and then spends more than half the book thinking the rough crowd in suits following her are probably cops, even after it is clear there is only one group looking for her, not two, and somebody killed her friend and the friend’s boyfriend. Everything about them screams mercenaries / ex-military even down to their office location, but nope, she keeps thinking they might be cops. Right up until she sees them shoot two people. A little slow on the uptake. In the middle of the “case”, a hit man comes after her, but rather than kill her as he is supposed to do, he plays with her for days trying to get her alone. Which he could have done by force ANY day and moved on. Whatever. She then turns into super sleuth to ferret out who they are, document all the evidence she’ll need to turn over to the police (i.e., days of surveillance and note-taking). At the end, the entire motive for everything is revealed in page after page of exposition, just dumped on the page by the bad guy which she conveniently records. And then it ends with only the barest of explanations of what happens to people, and her looking for work after getting out of the burglary game. Like maybe being a private investigator in a sequel, perhaps? While dating a new boyfriend she didn’t even really like. 

The Bottom Line

Love Perry but this is not his best work.

The Lolly-Madonna War by Sue Grafton (1969) – BR00160 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 22 2019

Plot or Premise

I loved Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, and since I’m a bit of a “completist”, once I like an author’s books, I try to read everything by them. Although it was made into a movie, this book has been long out of print. Which made no real sense…how could a book written by an author as prolific and popular as Sue Grafton, and that was made into a movie, not be available ANYWHERE? Now that I’ve read it, I can see why. Like Keziah Dane, one of her earlier books, the characters are dirt poor backwoods families. Isolated from town, this story takes place entirely on the properties between two neighbouring families. If you have ever heard of the old Hatfields and McCoys feud of two warring families, fighting for reasons they no longer remember, you have the Lolly Madonna War.

What I Liked

The book picks up mid-war with the latest skirmish. The one family, the Gutshalls, has let slip to the other family that there is a girl coming to their house, a girl named Lolly-Madonna who will be a potential mate for one of the sons. Except it is entirely fictitious. Until the second family, the Feathers, sees a girl hiking along the road and decides it must be Lolly Madonna and therefore kidnap her to get back at the Gutshalls, depriving them of their prize. The girl protests, but to no avail. The war escalates with incursions on each other’s territory, shots fired, stills overturned, pigs slaughtered. And a budding romance with the girl.

What I Didn’t Like

The story is incredibly depressing from start to finish. With a giant plot-hole right in the middle…three of the kids are still friendly and talk occasionally, pretending to fight when they need to but not doing any real harm to each other. And when the Feathers tell their Gutshall friend that they have Lolly Madonna, he doesn’t say, “But we made it up”. It would have ended the story. Instead, he decides to say nothing, tell his parents, and they get it in their head to say nothing but maybe they should rescue her. Just as an excuse to keep the feud going…if one does something, even in retaliation, the other has to respond. And the ending is beyond depressing, not to mention you don’t really “see” the ending, you just turn the page and find out how it all ended.

The Bottom Line

There’s a reason this is out of print.

Unlucky in Law by Perri O’Shaugnessy (2004) – BR00159 (2019) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
April 19 2019

Plot or Premise

Nina Reilly gets a call from her old mentor to sit second-chair on a murder case that started with a grave robbery.

What I Liked

The story that the client tells is surprisingly plausible…he was hired to rob a grave, which he did. Except when he’s caught, the cops go back and check the grave he robbed and find out that there’s now a fresh body in it so he’s charged with murder. It’s a simple twist but there is little doubt through the case that he’s not guilty and that there is “something else” going on. And just to complicate things, her mentor is basically dumping the case on her, has done almost no prep, is showing early signs of dementia, and the PI he hired did almost no work either. Nina has her hands full just as Paul proposes.

What I Didn’t Like

There are two threads running through the story that are less than optimal. First, the premise of the mystery is that the dead body that is stolen is tied to a society of Russian conspiracy theorists who suspect he was tied to the Romanoffs (hey, he’s Russian, he must be, right?). This is about the fourth book I’ve read in the last two years that threw in a Romanoff angle, and it’s not handled that well, although most don’t anyway. Second, the marriage proposal from Paul leads to a bunch of emotional drama and angst, and detracts heavily from the story. It reads more like a bad romance novel than a mystery.

The Bottom Line

Good story with the mentor, but the other stuff detracts.