Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
Just completed this thing, it was intense. 9/10 on the Matthew Reilly’s Contest scale. It was so intense that I’m not sure if I will dare to read the continuation. It also makes sense. Books like that tend to ignore the laws of physics, this is connected with reality.
Clear 5*/5 and a strong contestant for best thriller on my blog this year. Very impressive.
The smart homicide detective Naia Thulin has to supervise her colleague Hess, who messed up at Europol. They are faced with a case involving a serial killer who leaves rivers of blood and signature little chestnut figurines.
The book is engaging, well-written, but at the same time unnecessarily gory and disgusting. The main characters are repeatedly praised for being intelligent and brilliant, yet they constantly make silly mistakes that reek of foolishness and overconfidence. Real police officers probably make similar errors, but sometimes it becomes too much. Some of the mistakes feel like they’re straight out of a comedy horror movie—like when someone sits in front of a slowly moving steamroller for 15 minutes without taking the one necessary step to avoid getting hit.
The style is a mix of Chris Carter’s blood-soaked descriptions and the demigod hidden villain trope from The Mentalist. The Chestnut Man is excessively elusive, like Red John, but slightly more believable. His motivation is fully revealed and obvious almost from the beginning of the book. In this regard, The Mentalist falls short. Also, Hess is nowhere near as gifted as his TV counterpart, which makes the story far more interesting.
Naia Tulin is supposedly the lead character, but overall, Hess gets more page time and does more of the actual investigating.
Objectively, I’d rate the book around a 4.5—about 150–200 pages longer than it needed to be for a solid 5. What I didn’t like doesn’t make it a bad book, just slightly incompatible with my tastes.
I’d read other books by this author but maybe not right now.
A Deadly Influence is a crime thriller about Abby Mullen, a hostage negotiator assisting with a kidnapping case. Somehow, the kidnapping is linked to a cult. Abby Mullen grew up in a cult and is still haunted by the massacre that brought it to an end.
Overall, the book is fantastic—well-written, unpredictable, and somewhat logical. I don’t often read fiction about events that could actually happen.
The only issue was that the publisher used a very tiny font size to save from paper. It was painful to read. They squished a 450-page book into 300 pages.
5*/5.
The Waiting is Michael Connelly’s 39th book from the Harry Bosch Universe. Renée Ballard from LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit is going to chase a number of different cases at the same time, with the help of Maddie Bosch. Two of the cases are serial killers. Harry Bosch also makes a brief appearance. The avalanche of cases is something we can imagine from an unit that digs into the past and the entire series is plausible. It’s very satisfying because you read about multiple resolutions throughout the book.
Renée Ballard is my current most favorite character by Michael Connelly. She’s experienced but impatient. Doesn’t shy away from yelling at people. Relies on others to do the job. She chills by surfing, which puts her in difficult positions from time to time, including in that book. It starts with the theft of her belongings while surfing. She has no superpowers and doesn’t rely on Deux ex machina to solve the cases. I like the whole setup.
This thriller gets an easy 5*/5 Goodreads rating. It will be a hard thing to read a better book in January. The bar is set high.
I just completed book #29 from Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series called In Too Deep. I rated it 3/5 but it’s more like 1.5/5 and got a 1.5 point bonus because Lee Child is one of my favorite writers.
So, I asked myself a question, is it just me, or the series becomes unreadable? This is the ratings I gave the individual books, and the red line represents the community ratings on Goodreads.
Up to book 18, the community gives a pretty consistent 4.1-4.2 rating, then it hovers around 4 and goes under. The latest books may go under once they gain sufficient ratings as well. But unlike the community, my last 4 ratings are 3s and 4s, and I’ve been very generous. Feels like the community keeps liking the series.
According to some Goodreads sources, Lee Child felt like he runs out of steam and offloaded the actual writing to his younger brother, Andrew. Perhaps I just don’t like Andrew Child’s storytelling. Spoilers ahead.
Book 29 is about some world-scattering conspiracy. Reacher, a retired 60-something homeless vet who owns no phone, car, or ID, would interfere, overwhelming all the three-letter agencies in the US. There are stashes of property left unattended and owned by “the Russians”. There’s a hot police officer vigilante who wants revenge. What there isn’t is anything that’s remotely believable.
Of course, the Jack Reacher series doesn’t need to make sense but it follows certain math. Bullets are faster than people. Knives cut. A person attacks Reacher, Reacher punches back before person even sees it. This math is violated. We’ll see Reacher withdrawing, not using his head, not finding the location of enemies, and winning with absurd constraints that shouldn’t have been enforced in the first place because of the math. This enters the territory of the Marvel movies where the story is first, and whatever doesn’t make sense will be filled with CGI.
Reacher Book 29 – 1.5*/5. It’s like a Steven Seagal movie. The only thing missing is a chair for Reacher to sit during the book.
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