Don't Let Go follows the familiar Harlan Coban pattern of a modern-day character dealing with a long-ago tragedy in the middle of a seemingly peaceful suburban environment. Leo's death has been accepted by everyone as the awful result of teenage stupidity, but not by Nap, at least not fully. Maura's disappearance is too coincidental. The lack of processing keeps Nap from really engaging in the world around him, even though he has close friends and a reasonably happy-looking life. The house of cards tumbles down and his obsession over what happened to Maura takes the driver's seat when the prints are found, though, so we watch that life crumble.
As always, Coben's storytelling skills can mask a lot of flaws and are good enough so that it's not until after the last page is turned that you start asking things like, "Um, why did that happen that way again?" Don't Let Go is brimful of convenient coincidences and just-so situations that don't hold up under much questioning. The ultimate resolution keeps twisting until it's almost silly instead of surprising, and nearly every revelation Nap uncovers is preceded by a character saying, "I'll tell you, but you're not going to like it." The same is not exactly true of Don't Let Go, as you probably will like it while you're reading it but a couple hours later will not be sure why you bothered.
-----
2008's The Moonpool is the third Richter novel, following The Cat Dancers and Spider Mountain. Cam has settled in to his role as a private detective, wealthy enough to do the work he wants and let someone else do the work he doesn't. Allie was one of his detectives who liked following philandering husbands, so the first suspicion at her death falls on her previous cases. But the presence of radioactivity in her body turns attention to the Helios nuclear power plant, and no one there is much interested in letting a private detective with no security clearance nose around to find answers.
Deutermann has an easygoing style and has done a clear job of painting Cam over the three novels in the series to that point. Although Spider Mountain had significantly tamed the Plot Hole Syndrome that tangled Cat Dancers, the remission seems to have been only temporary, as the condition returns in force here. Both the ultimate villainous plan Richter has to thwart and the roadblocks he has to handle to get there are vaguely drawn and more than a little ridiculous where they aren't. Even Allie's death, the original spark for the who sequence, winds up resolved with an "Oh, by the way" quality that can make you wonder why any of these things happened -- or, indeed, why you should sit through more of them.
-----
Writers Stephen and Tabitha King have three children, two of whom have become writers themselves. Youngest son Owen teams up with Dad for the fantasy horror novel Sleeping Beauties, the story of what might happen if all of the women in the world were to suddenly go to sleep and not wake up.
Although they include a couple of brief scenes of other parts of the world, the Kings focus their story on Dooling, West Virginia, home to a women's prison and not a lot else by way of economic prospects. Clint and Lila Norcross are the two main protagonists out of a cast list that runs into the low 70s. Lila is the sheriff and Clint is the psychiatrist at the prison. While Lila struggles to avoid sleep, she and Clint focus their attention on Eve, a strange woman arrested just before the "Aurora Event" began who seems have much more knowledge about it than anyone else as well as supernatural powers. But Eve isn't answering questions -- not in any way that makes sense -- and there are no answers on the horizon. If none can be found, then the human race is in big trouble, because the women aren't waking up and anyone who tries to open one of their mysterious cocoons becomes the victim of their homicidal rage.
The Kings quite obviously intend their novel to have some comment on the way women are treated even in more enlightened Western societies. Eve's dialogues and warnings make that clear, and the plot includes plenty of toothless evil rednecks and such who bully them and take advantage of their power. The women's prison might as well have "Attention Cliff's Notes Readers: Important Metaphor" emblazoned on its walls.
Whatever their intent, their execution is pretty poor. The rage cocooned women have when disturbed sounds like two men chuckling over how grumpy the little darlings are when you interrupt their naps. Halfway through the book we find out that the spirits of the sleeping women have been brought to another world, without men (except for the boy babies being born). Eve says they can make a world without men's evil and train the boy babies how to be better than the rotten bastards infesting the old world. Except that in the end, born of motives never explained, she offers the women a chance to go back to the old world if they want. Which they do, largely because their feeling of being needed depends on the fact that the men won't survive without them -- making even this ultimate choice less about them than about men. The Kings also drop an question of racial injustice into the story almost at the very end, long after it has any chance to develop into something. So they conveniently tell us how important it is in the series of "what happened to these people" epilogues.
You might wonder why this review of a fiction novel chooses to engage with its politics rather than the novel itself. Because the novel itself is like a story being told by a very bright four-year-old, and that's hard to engage. Its 700 pages could drop by at least half if we didn't see incident after incident repeated and rabbit after rabbit being chased as the Kings' narrative discipline goes to hell in the presence of this or that shiny object.
Don't believe me? Ask the talking fox.
No comments:
Post a Comment