Baked by Mark Haskell Smith
If you like crime fiction (as opposed to mysteries) Baked is the beach book for you.
At a paragraph and sentence level Baked by Mark Haskell Smith is one of the funniest and most entertaining books I’ve read in a long time. You can flip the book open to a random page and quickly find a perfectly distilled and humorous line, scene or character action. The characters can be described in nutshell descriptions (Young Morman missionary discovers he is into bondage) that make you scratch your head but these simple descriptions are merely the launch pad for them to knock around the madcap plot and, surprisingly, do allow for more growth and depth.
Bottom line is that this story of a botanist who gets shot and has his award winning pot crop stolen and tries to get to the bottom of it all is a lot of fun and should be read by all crime fiction fans.
Recommended
The Anniversary Man by RJ Ellory
This is a big serial killer novel with a few interesting ideas, for example the support group for people who have survived a serial killers attack was something I couldn’t recall having read before and added a nice dimension. The characters are realistically portrayed as flawed individuals with many different facets. It did have some slow moments for me, for example when the investigation starts to wind down, where I could really feel the drag.
The Anniversary Man is the second RJ Ellory novel that I’ve read and I’m having a hard time grappling with my feelings about what I’ve read so far. In a nutshell I like his books enough to keep giving his work a try but I’ve yet to find the one that really makes me love his work.
I have a feeling I’ll be in the minority on this one but I have to be honest.
Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto
When reading Galveston you do so to marinate in the characters and their lives not for any type of fast, wham-bam plot theatrics.
Galveston offers up two concurrently running plots, one in the past and one in the present, that become an exploration of and meditation on noir tropes, types and dialog. You may have seen some of these characters before but here Pizzolatto takes the time to really know them and what makes them tick.
Like Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya Galveston doesn’t so much deal in Redemption as it does in Atonement and Penance after something terrible happens (the reveal saved for late in the book).
The one thing that didn’t ring true for me was the voice of the protag. I never really bought into its aged, hard lived and full of regret qualities. This really stood out for me when I read Cemetery Road by Gar Anthony Haywood sometime afterwards, a book that really nails parts of the voice that I think Pizzolatto was aiming for.
Recommended.
