Let's Book!

Colin Harrison seems to really, really want to be Tom Wolfe. His suspense novel The Finder is filled with the kind of reporting that Wolfe uses to such good effect (and which itself is modeled on Melville's Moby Dick or Hugo's Les Miserables). Wolfe skillfully inserts his reportage into the story in such a way that the reader simply follows it along in the narrative. Finder isn't nearly as interesting or skillful. The fact that he's setting a crime thriller in the middle of some high-finance shenanigans in New York City invites further comparison to Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which doesn't serve The Finder very well. Mysterious loner Ray needs to find his ex-girlfriend Jin Li, who's on the run because some folks have apparently stumbled on the information theft ring she and her brother run from their office cleaning business. The brother wants Ray to find Jin Li and bring her in to both save her and cover their tracks. Mobsters want to kill her. It's pretty standard and written in an arch style that deadens the action and characterization suspense novels live on.

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A few years ago, thriller author James Patterson began a young-adult series called "Maximum Ride," about six genetically altered kids who had wings and could fly. Their leader, a 14-year-old girl who gave herself the name Maximum Ride and who goes by Max, tries to keep her flock safe and alive as they are pursued by the staff of the vicious School, itself a front for the giant corporation that experimented with the childrens' DNA. Over the course of the first three novels in the series, Max and the flock begin to learn they have a destiny greater than they've ever imagined, and finally defeat the corporation that created and then tortured them with experiments. The series quality deteriorated through the trilogy, with the final battle against the corporation featuring an army of protesting kids who've been following the flock on their blog and who join the flock to defeat their enemies. Even the uneven third book of that series stands head and shoulders over The Final Warning, which finds Max and the flock helping a group of scientists studying global warming, which they learn is like, really bad. Lots of young adult reads trim their story as much as possible to keep it moving forward and keep their young readers interested. But Warning has a Kleenex-thin story to start with and fills out the pages with mini-lectures from Patterson about global warming, which, you remember, is bad. It even spawns a giant hurricane that's earlier and stronger than any hurricane ever has been, because global warming does that. The publisher printed the Warning mass-market paperback with a cover styled after Patterson's adult thrillers -- whatever eyeballs you can grab, I guess.

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Way back in 1992, author Christopher Moore published Practical Demonkeeping, a comic horror novel that promised a career of fun reads. Although his second novel, Coyote Blue, was a definite fall-off, Bloodsucking Fiends restored a reader's faith in his skewed talents. That faith has yet to be rewarded, and his 2002 Lamb wasn't any reason to hope it will be. Purportedly a story from Biff, a childhood pal of Jesus, it suggests the real story behind the youth and early adulthood of Jesus, a period not covered by the four gospels. Biff mainly serves as an author stand-in, offering us the chance to see how the common-sense kind of viewpoint of an American baby-boomer (Moore was born in 1957), as well as an education in the baby-boomer's favorite spirituality of Buddhism, helped improve Jesus as a savior. Biff's been brought back from the dead by Raphael, a not-too-bright angel who rides herd on him while he completes his corrected version of the history of Jesus. There are definitely scenes that many religious people would consider blasphemous, but Moore is up front that he isn't writing a "real" life of Jesus, just a novel. Which sets him apart from dolts like Dan Brown, anyway. The problem is that Moore can't stop throwing jokes against the wall to see if they stick and eventually it's like being locked in a room with Robin Williams after he's had a six-pack of Jolt Cola. Too much, not a lot of it as funny as Moore thinks it is and a significant portion not very funny at all. But maybe one of these days he'll get back to using his jokes in service of his story instead of using a slapped-together story as a hangar for too many jokes.