Recent Reading 4

Bad Blood by John Sandford

I've finally caught up and read all the Virgil Flowers novels. Part of what makes them great reads is the way the chapters are subdivided into chunks a few paragraphs long. You finish one and think, "Okay, just one more." Then you read the next, and the next, and pretty soon it's deep into the night and the book is done. The other great part is Virgil. He's fun, smart, and just rebellious enough to keep things interesting without making him cartoonish.

Bad Blood has all those traits which made the previous entries fun, including a pulse-pounding shoot-out, but the subject matter is one that even makes crime and mystery buffs recoil: Virgil is investigating murders related to the sexual abuse of children in a cult. That makes it hard to have as much fun as with the other novels, but Sandford ultimately pulls it off, mostly by following that most Elmorian of Elmore Leonard's maxims: leave out the parts readers tend to gloss over. The action unfolds crisply, and the shoot-out this time is just electric.

A Killer Plot by Ellery Adams

I read this after I read the second novel of the series, A Deadly Cliche, so I had the curious experience of being reminded of characters I only knew from things that hadn't happened to them yet. I read it with the later book handy so I could flip through it and, in effect, get things in order.

Between reading the second novel and this one, Ellery mentioned something on her Facebook page about some people not liking the series' protagonist, Olivia. Going in I wondered what they might be reacting to, since in reading A Deadly Cliche I found Olivia willful but not in a bad way. In A Killer Plot, she is introduced in an unflattering way by townspeople gossiping about her, and Olivia has a bit of a fit of pique in a store, so I'm guessing that some readers may have taken too much stock in that and not given the character a fair shake afterward. I find Olivia to be a challenging character, not unlikeable, but challenging in that she's very guarded, and Adams lets her be guarded even to readers at first. But she's a rich character and worth the wait.

Speaking of, now that I'm caught up on both these series, I'm going to have to wait for new installments! Oh well, next time I'll be writing about another series I'm knee-deep in: the Joe Pickett novels by C.J. Box.

A Deadly Cliché

There are some books you just want to live in; books that take you away for awhile. I read Ellery Adams' new novel, A Deadly Cliché, while recovering from a cold and as nature here in Michigan laughed at the calendar's insistence that it should be warming up. But Adams had me on a North Carolina beach, watching a club-clawed hermit crab digging a hole in the sand.

Oh, and there's a murdered naked guy buried in that sand. Good times. The murder comes in the midst of a series of cliché-themed burglaries. Add in a hurricane about to strike and some personal upheaval for tough-cookie protagonist Olivia Limoges, and the residents of Oyster Bay are having a hell of a summer!

The characters are real and fun, both intuitively familiar enough to be accessible and complex enough to satisfy. What I mean is that I didn't feel like an alien, as I have in small towns both in real life and in books. Oyster Bay is a tourist town, and you don't have to be initiated to fit right in. This was important to me, because I haven't yet read this novel's predecessor, A Killer Plot (I know, why must I do these things out of order?), but didn't feel lost at all with these characters. I think the only place they'd kick me out of is Olivia's five-star restaurant, and that'd be for asking for ketchup. There's some good foodie stuff in here; even the poodle, Captain Haviland, eats gourmet.

The pace compliments and serves the story well. Pacing is like clothing, you can just tell if it fits and seems right, and it does here. The investigation and other events unfold in a faithful manner, without leaps or lags. The narration lets you breathe the salty ocean breeze but never lets you forget there are things amiss in the idyllic town. There's menace, but beauty, too (occasionally at the same time like before and during the storm, which are some of my favorite pages in the book).

Without giving anything away, of course, I can say that Adams wraps things up nicely. Not into a neat bow, because people don't form neat bows, but in a way that was satisfying by itself and also sets the stage for the next book in the Books by the Bay series.

Before that, though, I've got to read the first one. Judging by A Deadly Cliché, it's going to be a pleasure.