June 10, 2009; Enroute UA896 HKG-ORD
Paperback 2008, 414 pages
In an attempt to get her family together, Katherine Dunne takes her three children on a long sailing trip, on their 62-foot sailboat captained by her deceased husband's brother Jake. It turns out her new husband Robert Carlyle has hired a former CIA operative to kill them to get Katherine's $100 million wealth by sabotaging the sailboat. The eventual explosion kills Jake and leaves the four Dunnes stranded on an uninhabited island in the Carribbean. A group of fishermen discover that the Dunnes are still alive from a message in a bottle, and Robert manages to find them before the Coast Guard does. His attempt to kill them is foiled but he manages to get acquitted in the subsequent trial. His girlfriend, however, is in cohorts with the assassin and kills Robert, and the assassin in turn kills the girlfriend to tie up all loose ends. The assassin, however, is hunted down in Paris by a federal agent.
The book was an easy read. There are some parts that defy logic, such as the crew's decision not to call an emergency even as the boat was taking on water, or were about to be swamped by a storm, and that an infection caused by a shin bone reset while in a liferaft goes away on its own. Nonetheless, the story is intriguing enough that I finished it basically in one sitting (during a 14-hour flight). The lame ending was a bit of a let down.
Still, this is one of the better Patterson novels - I have panned all the other novels that I read. Must be that Howard Roughan is a pretty good writer.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman
June 6, 2009, Hong Kong
Paperback 2008, 327 pages.
Tess Monaghan is hired to guard a star Selene Waites during the filming of a TV series called Mann of Steel. The main threat is from George Sybert who thinks he, together with his good friend Bob Grace, gets his story stolen by the producers. This resulted in two murders. To complicate things, Selene and Johnny (Mann) also are sabotaging the show so as to get out of their contractual commitments.
The author seems to use two major techniques in her writing: boring the reader with all the minutiae of how a TV production works, and throwing in extra suspicious characters to keep the reader guessing. By so doing, she transforms a reasonably good plot into a work of mediocrity. Which is too bad as I am sure the book would be much more enjoyable if she just keeps to the knitting. Nothing is gained by describing the inner workings of TV production in detail (you get the feeling she doesn't want to waste any of her research) and putting nearly everyone under suspicion. I am no writer, but I did learn early in life how difficult it is to edit anything out once it is written. But I thought only amateurs have that problem.
Given all the panning I did above, I still think this is a reasonable book to read. I actually started reading it, put it down for several months, and picked it up again. And didn't miss much.
Paperback 2008, 327 pages.
Tess Monaghan is hired to guard a star Selene Waites during the filming of a TV series called Mann of Steel. The main threat is from George Sybert who thinks he, together with his good friend Bob Grace, gets his story stolen by the producers. This resulted in two murders. To complicate things, Selene and Johnny (Mann) also are sabotaging the show so as to get out of their contractual commitments.
The author seems to use two major techniques in her writing: boring the reader with all the minutiae of how a TV production works, and throwing in extra suspicious characters to keep the reader guessing. By so doing, she transforms a reasonably good plot into a work of mediocrity. Which is too bad as I am sure the book would be much more enjoyable if she just keeps to the knitting. Nothing is gained by describing the inner workings of TV production in detail (you get the feeling she doesn't want to waste any of her research) and putting nearly everyone under suspicion. I am no writer, but I did learn early in life how difficult it is to edit anything out once it is written. But I thought only amateurs have that problem.
Given all the panning I did above, I still think this is a reasonable book to read. I actually started reading it, put it down for several months, and picked it up again. And didn't miss much.
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