I'd saved away a book to read while I was away at Jason's wedding: the new Atticus Kodiak novel, Walking Dead, by Greg Rucka. And, it was a well-selected book for the occasion. I started it on BART headed toward Fremont and finished it shortly after we got back home.

Though I'm going to mark this post with my 'mystery' tag, Walking Dead is a really a thriller (as is generally the case for the Kodiak books). I don't read a lot of these but Rucka's are quite good, because he's continually grown the series and evolved the hero over time. This time around, despite being in a really morally questionable situation, Kodiak pretty much acts the hero, going after the daughter of a friend when she's taken.

It's a really good book, as is this entire series (though the first couple are a bit weaker than what follows).

It'd been a while since I read a Sharon McCone mystery, so I picked up Eye of the Storm, the next in the series, at the library last week. I liked it quite a bit.

One of the most interesting things is that Muller really moved out of the series' comfort zone. This one was pratically a Gothic horror. It was complete with haunted house (an old mansion on the delta), a disaster keeping everyone inside (the nominal storm), and an old family mystery. I thought it was quite well done.

I'm also struck by how much trying-to-figure-out-a-major-life-change is a trope in these mystery series. Spenser had it when Susan abandoned him for three books. The Nameless Detective had his existential angst when he thought he was dying of lung cancer. Jesse Stone had his in his latest book when he finally put the issue of his ex-wife to rest. Here, Sharon McCone has a lingering sense that her life is going wrong, and decides to put it right when she gets home.

(Oddly this trope is also usually accompanied by some time spent away from home.)

Anyway, good book.

I've finished reading Night and Day, the 8th Jesse Stone novel by Robert B. Parker. I'd been expecting a Sunny Randall novel this year, since he hasn't added to the Randall series since 2007, but I suppose it's no surprise that he's working harder on Jesse Stone when the series of TV movies seems to be successful.

(I should really watch them some time.)

What struck me particularly about this book is that it's almost all dialogue. I was talking to Luke at Endgame about it last night, and he mentioned that all of Parker's later books tend to be so. I hadn't noticed, but it surely explains why they read so fast.

I liked this one. I particularly liked the fact that it was about some more minor crimes, not yet another murder in Paradise, and the fact that it connects heavily with Stone's own character plots (and finally, perhaps, brings them to resolution).

The final chapter made me smile, and I hope to see more Jesse Stone books down the road.

Unfortunately, Parker's next book appears to be a Young Spenser novel.

Sigh.

Having completed SPQR II, I see what Mary meant when she said that she got a bit bored by the sameness of the books.

Herein, our hero investigates a murder, learns that it's part of a larger conspiracy, is seduced by a girl who tries to lure him away from the investigation, meets numerous important historical figures, eventually is able to bring lower-prestige members of the conspiracy to justice, but has to watch the big fish get away, makes some powerful enemies in the process, and decides that he'd do well to leave Rome for a bit as a result.

Which could describe the plot to either I or II.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book. Kimberly & I are still watching Rome, so one of the great pleasures was seeing some of the historical elements in a slightly different context.

I was most surprised by how far the timeline jumped in this book, from year 684 of Rome in the last book to 691-692 of Rome in this one, which should be 63-62 BC or so.

I'll do my best to resist the next book for a while, rather than ruining the series by reading it too fast.

This was a book that I picked up based on a description in NPR. I actually requested it from the library about 6 months ago; they're usually better than that.

In any case, it intrigued me because it's the story of a murder in a Piazza Italy, centering on interviews with the nine people in the Piazza concerning the suspected murderer. I was drawn to it because of the "interesting structure" of the story, always one of my likes in reading.

Overall, I thought it was OK. It's a (translated) Italian book, and there's a lot in it about immigrants and Italy, which I found sort of interesting, but which Italians would probably find much more meaningful.

The "mystery" was just something to give substance to the book. The structure, with everyone offering different points of views of the same person, wasn't as unique as I hoped; I've seen it done elsewhere, and with more subtlety.

Nonetheless, a book worth reading.

Last month on Xenagia, bofh asked how you find new books to read. I find, as often as not, that new books fall into my lap my serendipity. Take as an example, SPQR, a series of Roman mystery books by John Maddox Roberts.

I was predisposed to be interested in a book about ancient Rome because I've been watching the Rome TV show on DVD. Then, George R.R. Martin mentioned in a blog post that he was sharing a signing event with John Maddox Roberts, who just released SPQR XII. Serendipity!

(I should also thank the internet, which makes it possible for me to remember to get a book that interests me, where it might have just slipped my mind 10 years ago. Now I log straight on to my library's web site, and reserve a copy, and somewhere between 1-7 days later, they tell me it's ready to be picked up.)

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Anyway, SPQR. This is a set of mysteries taking place in ancient Rome. The first one is set in "year 684 of the City of Rome", which I think makes it 70BC, or about 15 years before the events of Rome.

The mystery itself is very complex, involving political machinations and many powerful folks in Rome. I'm not sure if that's going to be par for the course, or if we're going to get smaller mysteries as well. I kinda' hope the latter.

I adore the fact that Roberts freely plays with many historical personages, among them Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Tigranes, and Cicero. It really makes me want to learn more about this period of history. Roberts manages this all in a very immersive way, giving me a great feeling of cultural authenticity.

In many ways, I find the fact of the mystery perhaps the least element of the book, something to hold together all his great cultural history.

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I chatted with Mary about this book over the weekend, and she said she'd read the first 3 or so books in the series before getting burned out due to a sense of sameness ... which tells me I should read these books slowly so as not to ruin then. Which makes sense; the SPQR books aren't the pure brain candy of many of the mysteries that I read.

This was the missing Nameless Detective book which I failed to get from the local library before my trip to Hawaii. I ordered a copy of it from Mountain View, and had it waiting upon my return.

This book showed me both what I like and what I don't like about the Nameless Detective.

On the one hand, it's pretty good procedural, with the protagonist slowly moving through an investigation, finding out things as he does. On the other hand, there's one murder by ingenious death trap, hearkening back to the writer's flirtation with Holmesian deduction.

And this is really typical for Nameless: "Things began to stir inside my head. Then they began to run around, tumbling together like little rocks in a landslide. Things I should have added up before. Things that got me a little excited because maybe, just maybe, they were some of the answers I had been looking for."

(At which point Nameless typically stumbles off after the killer(s), get caught, gets almost killed, escapes, then explains what he figured out--which was indeed what happened in this volume.)

I'm now back in sync with Nameless, having read the first 14 volumes (through Double), and with Sharon McCone, having read the first 7 volumes (though There's Nothing to Be Afraid Of). And after a few mysteries in a row, I'm back to reading fantasy ...

I started one other book while in Hawaii, There's Nothing to Be Afraid of, by Marcia Muller. It's the 7th Sharon McCone book, and it's enjoyable to be back with the series after a long time away.

Unlike Double, which was set in San Diego, this one is back in San Francisco--which is good, because that's one of the primary reasons I started reading this series. This one in particular is set in the Tenderloin, which generated a laugh-out-loud line for anyone familiar with the area: "Marin County presented a marked change from the Tenderloin."

I find it interesting that between Marcia Muller and then-future-husband Bill Pronzini, the two have covered many of the ethnic groups of San Francisco. Pronzini wrote about the Chinese in Dragonfire and about the Japanese in Quicksilver. Now Muller covers the new (in the early 1980s) influx of Vietnamese in There's Nothing to Be Afraid of.

Comparing Pronzini and Muller, I noted how much more emotional this book is than Pronzini's. It's really about people and how they interact and how that affects the main character. In comparison, Pronzini's Nameless is a lot more cut off.

Overall, it was another enjoyable book. Though the mystery seemed fair, it was buried in ramblings that I paid little attention, but I won't complain about that too much.

I haven't read many books while in Hawaii. In fact, I just finished the book that I started on the airplane, Double, which is both the 14th Nameless Detective book and the 6th Sharon McCone book (or somewhere thereabouts, as I haven't bothered to look up the numbers).

No regrets on the lack of book reading, though, as I've got to spend lots of time in the ocean and spent lots of time with family.

Though I'd intended to hold out and read Double in its proper place, I actually skipped the penultimate Nameless Detective book, because my library lost its copy of it (a frequent problem at the Berkeley Public Library). Ah well, I'll have a copy of that missing book, Night Spectres or something similar, waiting for me via a LINK+ loan when I return.

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Double is a very fun book because it's a crossover between Pronzini's Nameless Detective and Muller's Sharon McCone. There's actually a detective convention, and so a few other named folks make cameos as well. I recognized Kinsey Millhone, who is from the alphabet series of detective of books. In any case, the crossover is fun, and you wish these two would get together again (though I don't think they do, despite the fact that the two authors were a married couple who may well still be together today).

The use of the two detectives is quite well done. Chapters alternate between their two points of view, and they're constantly following different threads of the same case, neither one ever seeing the whole picture (although the reader does). I was impressed by how adroitly the authors carried this off.

I also enjoyed seeing the contrast between the two characters. I've noted before how Nameless follows the law much more closely than any other detective I've read about, and that was pointedly mentioned here, as both Sharon and Nameless reflect that she does things that he wouldn't.

The structure of the book itself felt much more like Proznini than Muller, as it involved multiple cases all tightly intertwined so that they looked like the same mystery. It's a structure that he's used in the past.

Overall, a fun book, and one that kept my attention enough to be worthy of being an airplane book. And now I finally get to read Sharon McCone books again, after I'd stopped for the last year or so, while I caught my Nameless Detective up to the same chronological point (1984) so that I could read this volume.

This second Bond book was quite hard to read, primarily, I think, because it was a product of its time.

The problem is that a good chunk of it is set in New York and on the East Coast, and that it centers on black culture. Or, rather, the problem is that writing from 1954 (or thereabouts) and from the UK, Ian Fleming has a terribly stereotypical view of American black culture at the time.

I don't believe that Fleming was intending to be racist, but his writing would certain come across as such today. One of the biggest annoyances is that he uses a pretty offensive black dialect (not that I ever like dialect, mind you), and the other is that he seems to envision that many or most blacks are engaged in some big Voodoo criminal conspiracy.

Let me just say, bleh.

And also let me just say, today being what it is, my god how far we've come in 54 years.

The book beyond that is OK to good. It feels a bit more like the Bond of the movies, as there are some gun battles and a big villain who explains his over-complicated death trap to Bond. There's also some nice tension and a very good finale.

However, the actual Bond is still a bit different: he's willing to admit fear. However, it looks like he might be one more step toward the womanizing of the movies; we'll see what happens to this book's "true love", who actually survives to the end of the book.

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I talked to Donald about the ethnic stereotypes in this book and he said, "Wait until you get to the one set in Japan."

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And glancing at the synopsis of the movie "adapted" from this book, I'm humored to see that it enjoyed a totally different type of ethnic stereotyping: it was released right in the middle of the blaxploitation era.

I really gotta run through the movies some time after I've read the books.