Out of the Past by Renée Pawlish

Title: Out of the Past
Author: Renée Pawlish
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

This novel sounded really interesting from the blurb, which only means that the blurb did its job - it lured me in. Unfortunately, this novel was not for me. I don't know what it was, but it made my skin crawl the minute I started reading it. It just felt completely wrong. I think part of it was that it tried way too hard to be what it patently was not: a hard-bitten noir-ish novel harking back to the classics of yesteryear. The problem with that was that it was set in contemporary times, so neither the attitude nor the lingo fit at all.

Instead of getting into it, I found myself stifling laughs at how ridiculous it truly was, with the caricature of Denver-based PI Reed Ferguson being beaten up in the bathroom by the even more caricatured brace of "goons" (yes, that word was actually spoken) named Tyrone and Oscar, when all they'd been sent to do was pick up the PI on behalf of some insanely rich dude. The PI's wise-cracks when he was punched were ludicrous. I have no idea what the author was trying to do, but none of it made any sense in the context in which it was presented, and the flashback to the eighties in the dance bar to which the PI was forcefully taken as the novel began was cringe-worthy.

The plot is that daddy warbucks wants the PI to escort his daughter because he thinks she's at risk for kidnapping. Why this is suddenly a threat now, when she's been all through high school with no issues, then all through college with no issues, and now she's been gallivanting around town partying all the time without even so much as a whisper of a threat is never explained (at least not in the portion I read). The PI is blackmailed into it because of some shady event in his past, but the assignment is so open-ended that it makes no sense. There is no threat to his daughter - there is only daddy warbucks's fear of one, so when is this assignment supposed to end? The PI is too dumb to even ask.

And why the PI? Why not hire a professional security detail? Why not hire a couple of moonlighting cops? None of this is even raised, much less dealt with. Worse than that, the girl is the polar opposite of Mr. Hard-Ass-the-PI. She dresses in pink and is a 'girly-girl' as far as I could see, so we're truly hit over the head with this tired cliché of square-peg versus round-hole (so to speak), which frankly held no appeal whatsoever for me. It's been done far too many times before. This one offered no promise of anything original or off-the-beaten-track based on what I'd read thus far, and there isn't even the promise of any mystery to it.

I cannot recommend this.

Dead Drop by Jesse Miles

Title: Dead Drop
(Barnes and Noble's website search engine doesn't seem to get the fact that if you type in title "Dead Drop" you really don't want titles like "Drop Dead"! No wonder they're losing out to Amazon!)
Author: Jesse Miles
Publisher: Robert Gordon Peoples (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

I had some really mixed feelings about this and wavered between a negative and a positive rating overall. Even as I sat down to work through my first draft of the review, I felt I was going to go positive in the hope that a new writer will season and improve on these scores as experience (and more reviews!) weigh in.

In the end I couldn't bring myself to rate this positively because of the gratuitous treatment of women in it which irritated more and more as I re-read what I'd written and considered it against the overall story. It was when I realized that I was in danger of having to make excuses for the writing by trying to argue that the overall story was good, that I knew that I had to change my rating, or take the road marked "Hypocrisy This Way"!

This is part of the 'Jack Salvo' private investigator series, of which I've read no others - I believe this is the first, although it feels like it's further along than that from the way it's written - it feels like we're starting in the middle of something rather than at the outset.

The blurb sounded intriguing, but it goes completely against my self-imposed ban on reading novels of any kind in which there's a main character named 'Jack' since that name is so over-used and is so clichéd that it almost makes me physically sick. I end-up wanting to name these characters Jack-Ass. And "Jack Salvo"? Seriously? Please, since this is evidently a brand-new series, can we not follow the road less traveled?!

Having said that, the story itself was good overall. In general it was well-written (apart from, for example, the use of the non-word "Thusly" on page 55!), it moved quickly, and was interesting, thoughtful for the most part, with some mystery and not too much machismo. The plot was believable and the main character's actions were also (for the most part) - except for the part where every woman no matter what her age or circumstances, seems ready to lie down and open her legs for Jack.

On the downside, there was rampant objectification of women, and some age-ism going on here and there, which I didn’t appreciate at all. I found myself trying to gage whether there was a favorable balance between sheer inappropriateness and decent story-telling, although a writer ought never to put their readers in that position! In the end I concluded that it was too much to let slide.

A problem here is one I have with a lot of books in that it’s told from first person perspective (Salvo's of course), which is also pretty much a cardinal rule for hard-bitten private dick stories, but that doesn’t mean that the PI actually has to be a dick. Plus it can be difficult in this case to be sure what is the character's thinking and what is the author's, which is creepy at best.

I know it’s all-but de rigeur to have this sort of predatory ogling of women in such a "hard-bitten and cynical" genre of novel, but this isn't the 1950's. Just because it's traditional doesn't mean we have to perpetuate it. Is there no one out there who can ditch convention and strike out on their own trail - one which has a PI story which isn't written in 1PoV and main character who doesn’t objectify or prey on women, no matter how indirectly?

The age-ism eared its ugly head on page 43 where Salvo first meets Wendy Storm, a fifty-year-old woman who may have some information which will help his investigation. I'm not remotely convinced that her age has to do with anything in this story, but it’s employed to generate this charming observation: "Thirty years and thirty pounds ago, she would have stopped traffic." Is that supposed to endear me to the main character, that this woman is fifty and somewhat overweight and is therefore somehow second-rate? It doesn’t. It makes me think Jack-Ass Salvo is a low-life, and it makes me dislike him immensely.

I know it flies in the face of Hollywood predilection (or predation), but you know what? There’s nothing wrong with older women (or older men). Anyone who is deluded enough to honestly think there is, needs psychiatric attention. There was no need at all for that observation, and it bothers me that this author seems to think, as evidenced by too much of what he writes here that involves on women, that the only really important thing is her looks.

That stinks regally, and we see it repeatedly expressed in Salvo's attitude towards most every woman he encounters, right from the start of the book. All he thinks about when he meets a woman is the superficial: how attractive or unattractive she is, how hot she is, how skimpily or provocatively dressed she is. It’s tiresome. Frankly, it’s pathetic and detracts from the power that this character could have, were he written better. The irony here is that Salvo is, believe it or not, a philosophy teacher. This leads me to believe that he must be also schizophrenic, to be a student of philosophy on one hand and to objectify women to an obnoxious extent on the other. I can't reconcile these things adequately!

Fortunately (for my continuing reading this and for my rating of it), although those kinds of references were common where women were "in play" in this story, they were thinly-spread through material because there were a lot of other things going on, most of which were good, and/or interesting, and/or intriguing. To be fair, there were occasions where women were portrayed positively: smart, capable, brave. The problem with that, though, was that the way these things were represented was as though they were something special - as though most women don't have these qualities, so let's be glad that this particular one does. Now maybe I got off to a bad start, having my perception tainted by his first interaction with a couple of women in the first few pages, but I wasn't the one who tainted that perception.

Some of the references were a bit off, too. For example, in one instance, Salvo makes the sarcastic observation that he could be the next Clint Eastwood (page 65), but Clint Eastwood hasn’t been a real movie star for decades. Making a reference like that makes the lead character seem like he's fifty or sixty, but he isn’t. He's younger than that and should, therefore, have a somewhat different frame of reference. For example, he mentions Brad Pitt at one point, so could he not have referenced Matt Damon or Vin Diesel, or Will Smith for his deprecating self-comparison? The analogy just leaped out at me as wrong.

On the subject of which, I have to also mention a cop's use of "…that broad's rear end…" at one point in the story. I don't have a problem with that particular observation because there are people who think like that in the real world, and it's unrealistic to pretend they don't exist in your novel, but in this day and age, does anyone really say 'broad' as a rather derogatory term for 'woman' or 'girl'? It seemed even more anachronistic than the Eastwood reference. Who knows? Maybe people do still say that.

The main female interest was Lilith, and she was written quite well, but I have to say I find it rather bizarre that she thinks that bad guy Faraday should be shot for putting his hands on her whilst "searching" her, yet she has no problem with Salvo ogling her and making remarks when she first meets him.

I also find it odd that when Salvo is watching Lilith's apartment because he fears for her safety, he outright lies when questioned by two cops in a patrol car, about his reason for being there. By lying, when there was no reason at all to do so and every reason not to, he put Lilith's safety in jeopardy. If he had truly cared about her, then he would have told the cops everything, putting her safety before all else. He hardly seemed smart or chivalrous to me after that. The only reason this was done was to achieve a certain end the writer wanted, and it was badly done.

There was another such weak spot when Salvo is fastened to an evidently wooden chair by a chain. I don't get why he doesn't simply break the chair. He has some ninety minutes before the bad guys return, yet he sits around and makes no effort to get free of the chair or to arm himself by breaking the chair and taking a piece of it for use as a club. I know he was concerned about making noise, but lives were in danger. This seemed too passive for the kind of guy we'd been led to believe he was.

Despite all those latter kinds of issues, I would have been willing as I said, to rate this positively, but I simply couldn't get past the way women were abused and misrepresented, thus (not thusly) I cannot recommend this novel.

Melancholy Manor by Ellie DeFarr

Title: Melancholy Manor
Author: Ellie DeFarr
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new novel is reward aplenty!

Erratas and curiosities:
P63 "Any suspicions of fowl play…" should be "Any suspicions of foul play…" unless the character has a pet chicken.
Chapter 31 (paragraph 4) "...preferring to follow from behind..." - how else would one follow?!
"He seemed do distraught." I forget the location, but this clearly should be "He seemed so distraught."

This novel, which has a title that sounds like a children's book, isn't. It is one of a series, but each episode is discrete, so you don’t have to have read the first, or the whole preceding set (however many or few that might tally) to enjoy this one. I appreciated that! I was immediately drawn-in because this is a PI story, but it isn't told in first person PoV, which I detest, so major kudos to the author for being independent and original in that regard. Unfortunately, it failed to keep my interest.

Another reason I was drawn-in was that private investigator Hera Hunter (yeah, I know the name is a little bit too much like 'Hero', but I let that slide!) is very different. We first meet her in this story dispatching a child molester and murderer who got away with his last crime. Hera, 29, was a marine sniper and she took out this criminal in a park early one morning, and sauntered off home without a hint of guilt for her action. This lack of remorse or feeling is important for her later inexplicable reactions.

Next she's breaking into the home of a dishonest collector of valuables to steal back a precious diamond which the collector stole on behalf of some criminal element, and additionally, she's worrying over the unidentified body of an Asian woman found in a park. The body is unidentified, yet the police are somehow convinced she's not a prostitute. I don't get how they figured that out! I also found it rather too convenient how many useful coincidences crop up during Hera's investigations! She's always overhearing vital conversations, or seeing odd things going on that prove of use later, or meeting or hearing of people who are crucial to her solving the crime. It was too much.

I had an issue with the ubiquitous invincible hacker motif, too. Hera's partner at her PI agency is able to hack into anything just by tapping a few keys. Bullshit! That trope is tired and sad, and not even remotely realistic. As I said, I did like the story from the start, but the big question was, with issues like this cropping up so often, could the author keep me liking it? No, she couldn't.

There were too many white caps that hindered smooth sailing here. One big one, was a little yappy dog named "Lucky" belonging to Hera, which she literally takes everywhere with her, including into bars and along to visits with potential clients without even offering them courtesy of asking if it’s okay. This was absurd at best. I'm a dog lover but even I would draw the line somewhere. In this novel no one ever does and that was way beyond the bounds of credibility.

Like Lassie, Lucky has almost superhuman (or more appropriately, super-dog) instincts which are slightly improbable at best and farcical at worst. For example, Lucky can always tell if someone is a bad person, and is almost shark-like at detecting the faintest trace of a smell. That made the dog seem like it was from some cheesy kid's story.

The dog was written just like a human character, being given little comments here and there, such as in: "Arf, arf," the dog said, or as in: Lucky added, "Yip Yip", and so on. I found this juvenile and annoying, worthy of a middle-grade children's novel, but not an adult private-eye story. Initially this dog feature didn't irritate me too much, but the dog kept cropping up like that sad-ass Microsoft Windows "help dog" they used to have, and it was for no good purpose at all. I thought the dog was going to play a part in the mystery because it was featured so much. Thankfully it didn't, but this begs the question as to why we're hit over the head with little growly dog every few paragraphs?

Another oddity was that pretty much every significant guy Hera meets is very tall. I have no idea what that's all about, but this novel was introducing one such guy almost every ten pages in the first half of the book! Weird! It's not surprising that I quickly reached the point where there were too many things bothering me to enjoy this. One of the tall guys was a sleazy politician who happened to be related to Hera's assistant. The number of times he stopped by her office, the two of them had ample opportunity to record his voice and get him into serious trouble, yet they never did. Given Hera's radical action with the child molester, it seemed that she had way too much forbearance with the politician. It made no sense.

Another annoyance was the author's habit (I noticed it more than once) of reminding us of things which happened only a few pages before, and which were significant enough that your typical reader is highly unlikely to have forgotten unless they have some serious cognitive issues. One example of this is that Hera's (foster) sister is the proprietor of a brothel called 'Knickers' in town. Once I read that I didn't need to be reminded of it.

Hera is represented as a bit of a vigilante, hunting down the bad guys, and especially the ones who got away with it (that is until her own brand of thug-justice catches up with them), but the problem with that is that it disappears when she discovers her father! This is the man who shot her mother when she was a child and then fled, and who has been on the loose ever since - and who is very possibly a material witness in a case upon which she has just begun working. In fact, he's worse than that, but Hera does nothing about him!

Instead of shooting him out of anger, or more smartly, turning him in to the police as a murderer and a potential vital witness in another shooting, she just walks away. This was not only totally out of character given her previous behavior, it made her look completely inept if not downright stupid.

The situation was made worse by her schizophrenic attitude towards her dad. At one point she almost feels sad for him, at another she walks away from him, indifferent, at another she's infuriated by his behavior. It made no sense whatsoever, and served only as another annoyance for me. Admittedly Hera's idea of love is rather warped, and kudos to the author for not giving her a trope male love interest, but her attitude towards her foster parents was at best oddball.

As for the mystery, it was rather run-of-the-mill, and not very gripping. It was obvious who the bad guy was from the beginning, so there was no mystery there. Once we knew 'who', it was only a matter of what he was doing. This will probably be obvious to some readers, although it wasn't to me, I confess, but it seemed highly unlikely he would be doing what he was doing in such a relatively small town.

So while I was really drawn into this to begin with, it quickly became an annoying novel which I was glad to have finished so I could move on to something more engaging. I can't in good faith recommend this one. It didn't leave me with any desire at all to read any more in this series.

Compliments of a Friend by Susan Isaacs

Title: Compliments of a Friend
Author: Susan Isaacs
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

I really had a bit of a time trying to decide how to rate this. It was not that interesting to me, but it was short (and there was no prologue! Yippee!). Unfortunately, it was in the first person, which is almost never a good thing in my book. What made me want to rate it worthy was that it featured an older woman doing the detecting. It's about time, when we're undergoing a flood of young and sassy female detectives, that someone swam upstream. Kudos to Isaacs for that.

This novel wasn't smart mouthed - although Isaacs isn't afraid to to go potty mouth when called for. I appreciated the honesty, so kudos again. What really put me off was all the snobbish brand-name-dropping. I detest novels which do that because it keeps destroying my suspension of disbelief. It's especially obnoxious when the writer tries to dismiss the name-dropping by pretending it doesn't matter, like even they are embarrassed by how pretentious they are. And on this topic, why isn't Isaacs embarrassed by the price she's asking for a 69-page ebook?

The detective part of the story wasn't that interesting to me either - there was nothing brilliant or dramatic about it. So despite my initially wanting to find this short-story 'worthy' because of the older woman PoV, it was because she offered me nothing else to rave about that she left me no choice but to rate it warty.

The Doll by Taylor Stevens

Title: The Doll
Author: Taylor Stevens
Publisher: Crown Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

So why would a nation which overthrew the monarchy sport a publishing company called Crown Publishing? Another mystery for Vanessa Michael Munroe to crack?! This novel, published by Crown, is the third in an ongoing series of which Munroe is the main character. Note that I haven't read the previous two. The back-cover blurb compares Munroe with Lisbeth Salander of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo fame, but apart from the fact that both were abused when they were younger, they have absolutely zero in common. Let this be a warning to all who do not self-publish: there is no limit whatsoever to the stupid things your publisher will lard your novel up with, and no end to how misleading back-cover blurbs can be! Those blurbs are not there for your guidance or for your education; they're there for one purpose and for one purpose only: to trick you into buying the novel! Fortunately, since I borrowed this from the library, I was far more willing to take a risk, so it wasn't an issue for me

There is some prior history going on with this volume, but it's almost completely irrelevant to the story told here as far as I can see, so if you picked this up out of order, as I did (and there is no indication on the cover to tell a prospective reader that this is "Book x of the Blah Blah series") you won't miss anything. Plus, it's blessedly told in third person (maybe the fourth in this series will be told in the fourth person? Hmm!), so there's none of that absurd and obsessively self-important "I did..., then I did..., then I wanted to..., then I saw...." garbage to wade through.

This volume doesn't even open with the main character except in that her colleague (and romantic interest, evidently) at a private security company observes her being tranquilized and kidnapped from the parking lot as she comes in to work. He's so incompetent that he can't do anything about it! As they try to trace who took Munroe, we meet her in person in the company of her foreign and very callous kidnappers, from somewhere in central Europe. She's required by these people to transport a "package" from A to B, or her brother Logan (no, it's not The Wolverine!) will be hurt even more than he was hurt already when they kidnapped him. The package is also kidnapped. She's a young, Hollywood celebrity: Neeva Eckridge who, we're told is the daughter of a US senator, but no one seems to know this? I don't buy that something like that would never have been ferreted out by the media. Or that someone would be so stupid as to try and kidnap a celebrity of her stature for his own personal use.

I picked up this novel because I was interested in Munroe, but the chapters roughly alternate between her and her partner, Bradford, who was completely uninteresting to me. I started skipping any chapter in which he was featured, and honestly didn't feel that I missed anything! What does that say about one third of this novel?! I got everything I needed from spending my time only with Munrow and Eckridge. I found their relationship fascinating - one kidnappee effectively forced to kidnap the other and take her across Europe to Monaco! Not that this made any sense whatsoever.

I was interested because I don't recall reading a story of this nature before. It was (to me) a really good and intriguing idea; it didn't develop in the way I had thought (and hoped) it might, though, and the ending really was pathetic and inexplicable. Plus Stevens left way too many loose threads to carry over into the next volume - just like she left some from the previous volume carrying over into this one. The main loose thread was Kate Breeden, apparently a friend of Munroe's from earlier adventures, but who betrayed Munroe and got herself jailed, then betrayed her further, from inside the jail - and then escaped from jail to no doubt reappear in Volume 4. That did nothing for me save inflict a mild feeling of déjà saturé (already nauseous). I only mention this because it's important for the ending (not my nausea; the fact that Munroe did not terminate Breeden with extreme prejudice in whatever earlier volume she'd had the chance to do so).

There is very little exchange between the two kidnap victims to the point where they start their road trip, and not a whole heck of a lot afterwards, unfortunately. That's' what I'd been looking forward to, and I didn't get it! Eckridge's new "captor" is more interested in how to get out of this mess, obviously, but there is an added twist in that one of Munroe's kidnappers, a younger man, the nephew of the man who orchestrated all of this, seems to be developing some remote low-level feelings for Munroe. He and a heavy (conveniently the one against whom Munroe has a grudge) are following their victims, observing them from out of sight, tracking their every movement, and controlling those movements by means of text messages to a phone Munroe is carrying. Plus both Munroe and Eckridge have their clothing bugged as well as the cheap crappy car in which they are traveling, and as well as the phone they were issued to stay in touch with the kidnappers.

I enjoyed this cat and mouse, finding it entertaining, and I was interested in how Munroe was going to get out of it. The problem is that she didn't. She made no attempt whatsoever during the two sleepless days of the trip to communicate anything to Eckridge about her plans or her reasons for doing what she was doing. Thus when Eckridge tried to make a run for it, I had thought the two of them had planned it when they were out of earshot of their trackers, using a noisy rest room. They had not. Eckridge was going it alone, and Munroe used this attempt to procure for herself a cell phone, which she then used to send her partner Bradford some text messages communicated in Morse code (since the car was bugged and she couldn't tell him everything in plain English). Superficially, this seems ingenious, but it's really stupid given that Munroe could have simply (and in Eckridge's ignorance) turned on the phone, called Bradford's number, and then simply engaged Eckridge in a conversation explaining to her where exactly they were and what was going on - fooling the kidnappers into thinking she was educating Eckridge, when she was really cluing-in Bradford.

There was an interesting problem from the writing perspective here. On p139, Stevens writes: "Bradford lay back on the sofa, head to one side...". When I reached that point I had thought it meant his head was turned to one side, but Stevens finished the sentence: "...feet to the other..." Obviously he was laying down length-wise on the sofa, but the way Steven phrased it robbed me of that understanding to begin with. Why did she choose to say "head to one side", rather than "head to one end"? I don't know. It's just another thing which can trip-up your narrative flow, and let your reader stumble. It's very minor - the rest of Stevens's writing is quite acceptable, so I wouldn't fault her for this. It's just one thing, but something for which a writer needs to be constantly vigilant when putting words on paper. Which, of course, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch (as so most things!). As John Cleese put it, "Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words! I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important." I can't add anything to that. And now let's go straight over to James Gilbert at Leicester....

Anyway, in conclusion I'm going to have to rate this warty, because there were problems and the ending was a disaster in more ways than one. One problem, for example, was that Eckridge did not even realize that Munroe was a woman until a day into their trip! Now admittedly, Munroe was inexplicably disguised as a guy for the trip, but really? They had been living in each other's laps, talking from time to time, and using the rest room together for a day, and Eckridge never figured out the obvious? Nor did Stevens communicate Eckridge's knowledge deficit to the reader in way way, shape, or form! The ending? It was not only unsatisfactory, it was downright stupid. Let me give one spoiler. In the closing chapters, and knowing that Kate Breeden - whom she let live in an earlier volume - has totally screwed her over and caused deaths in doing so, Munroe then blithely chooses to let one of her kidnappers live, when the smart thing to do, and especially to do in light of her gross error of judgment with Breeden, would be to kill him.

She fails, and with that (and other issues), so, too, does this novel. I don't want to hear how tough, and mean, and decisive, and can-do, and feisty, and Salander-like she is and then find out she has let two dangerous people live, the second one in full knowledge of what a deadly mistake she'd made by letting the first one live. Her interaction with this kidnapper guy reminded me of that Woody Allen line in what, for me, is his best movie: Annie Hall when he does battle with two spiders in Annie's bathroom, armed with nothing more than a large tennis raquet, and she's crying over her sad life when he returns. Thinking she's upset about the passing of the arachnid couple, he asks her, "What did you want me to do, capture and rehabilitate them?"

I am the first to admit that trite, happy endings are never good, and even decent happy endings are sometimes not as good as a sad ending, but for Stevens to end this one the way she did turned me right off. If it were not for the crappy way she rolled this up, with so many loose threads the pages were almost falling out of the binding, I might have been willing to give this a 'worthy' rating, but given the totality of what I had to deal with here, I'm rating it warty, and advising you that I have no plans whatsoever to read any more of this series which is sad, 'cause I could have used another really good femme fatale in my life!

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: WORTHY!

For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Flickan som lekte med elden, see here

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

TGWPWF begins with Lisbeth on an extended vacation in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, Blomkvist at home wondering what the heck happened to her, since she left without a word and refuses to have anything to do with him, and Bjurman, technically her legal guardian, plotting her demise! Staying in Grenada, Lisbeth seduces a teen-aged boy who lives in a shack on the beach, and in between sessions of reading a massive tome on the history of mathematics, which is fascinating to her, ponders what to do, if anything, about an abusive doctor who is staying in her hotel, accompanied by his abused wife. Meanwhile there's a hurricane on the way. How great a start to a novel is that?!

This epic premise is a bit let-down by the execution, unfortunately! The hurricane (if that's what it was) comes and goes. Lisbeth rescues another woman from abuse in the middle of it: the doctor's wife. The doctor is found dead, blown 600 yards down the beach. We follow her back to Stockholm where she goes shopping for an apartment and furniture. This is the most mind-numbingly tedious episode in the entire trilogy so far. It was like reading Charlaine Harris - that's how god-awfully bad it was. I have no idea what Larsson was thinking of when he wrote this section. And actually, I don't really think I want to know!

In counterpoint, we do see Bjurman get really steamed (in a bad way!) about Lisbeth and he starts plotting how he can murder her. He begins by digging into her affairs because he can, being her guardian, and he starts to get a faint whiff of the fire she started - on her dad who was abusing her mother! We also learn that Lisbeth has a twin sister. Two Salanders are quite obviously better than one. Evidently they were separated from their mother when she proved incompetent to take care of them, but they were also separated from each other. This kinda made up for the Ikea shopping list!

We also learn of the affair between Harriet Vanger and Mikael Blomkvist (as does Erica!), but this goes nowhere, and Vanger disappears from the novel at that point, never to reappear. Lisbeth rekindles her relationship with lesbian lover Mimmi, and offers Mimmi her empty apartment to move into, since she has now moved herself considerably upscale. This happens right after Bjurman, in complete ignorance of Lisbeth's newly-won billionaire status and consequent change of address, has indirectly hired a huge blond German who is built like a brick outhouse and can feel no pain (Larsson evidently ripped this off from The World Is Not Enough. The German is supposed to kidnap Lisbeth from the very address Mimmi just moved into! Lisbeth's sixth sense is onto Bjurman even though she doesn't know exactly what he's doing. Oh, and Mimmi studies martial arts, so while this promised to be explosive, it actually wasn't quite written that way, but this definitely helps to clear out the dead wood from the wooden tour of the Ikea store with which Larsson earlier bored (or should it be board?!) us....

The novel picks up pace even more when the person tasked by Nils Bjurman to deal with Lisbeth Salander kills Bjurman and two friends of Mikael's who are working on exposing the Swedish sex-trade. Why Larsson didn't start his novel here is a really interesting question, because this is where the intrigue and the real story begins. Larsson leads us on an intricate and engrossing tour through the life of Lisbeth Salander. It's as disturbing as it is endearing, and as angering as it is heartening. If you started reading this novel at Chapter 7 you really wouldn't miss anything of significance or relevance. If a new author had written this - without having had the success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) under their belt, an editor would doubtlessly have told the author to seriously edit this novel. It just goes to show how indulged a successful author is, whereas a new author is abused cruelly on this score. All hail self-publishing!

Salander is now hosed with three murders (her prints are on the murder weapon), and a nationwide police hunt for her begins. But the findings make no sense at all to the police. No matter how they try to piece this jigsaw together, there are problems: the pieces seem to fit, but when you come right down to it, something is noticeably off. The pieces don't fit properly. Something is missing.

Meanwhile Lisbeth has dropped from sight, and she begins her own investigation, as does Blomkvist, as does Armansky! All the time, the puzzle pieces fall into place, one-by-one, but not always where you expect them to appear, and the picture which is emerging is one of unexpected weirdness. In the end, Lisbeth is shot in the head and buried. And that's all you're going to get from me! Ain't I evil?

It's hard to believe that I've read - or at least started on - ten novels since I first started listening to this on audio disk, but finally I finished it in paperback form this morning, and once again we have a worthy read. Yes, it got really boring during that one spell, but it picked up wonderfully after that, especially in the last hundred or so pages. Highly recommended (just skip over the Ikea obsession portion!).

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Rating: WORTHY!

This story starts in December 2002, in Sverige, known to us English speakers as Sweden. The original Swedish version of this novel was titled Män som hatar kvinnor which means "Men who hate women". The second novel in this trilogy is the only one to retain its original Swedish title, and that title has appeared in two forms in English due to the fact that people have no idea where to place apostrophes! Thus we've had both "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (for dumb North Americans) and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" (for all actual English speakers)(reference wikipedia), each title meaning something slightly different. The third novel was titled Air Castle Blowing Up in Swedish, and the three together form the Millennium trilogy. Sadly, all of these were published after Larsson died in 2004, so he saw none of the success these novels have enjoyed.

In the novel, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, known humorously as Kalle (a name which annoys him - it would be like an American investigative journalist being called Nancy, after Nancy Drew), is judged guilty of libel, and fined as well as sentenced to three months in prison. The suit was brought by a very rich businessman called Hans-Erik Wennerström, about whom Mikael had written an exposé in his magazine, Millennium, which he co-publishes with his some time love interest Erica, who happens to be married.

Mikael is in process of contemplating and adjusting to what this significant set-back means to his life when he's contacted indirectly by Henrik Vanger, a retired CEO of the huge of Vanger Corporation. Vanger decided to hire Blomkvist based on a background check undertaken by Lisbeth Salander, a skilled hacker and investigator who has done research for him before. Salander excels at what she does, but comes with a host of baggage. She looks more like someone who would be found at a punk music concert than she does a top researcher for a detective agency; however, as we follow this story, we discover that Lisbeth is really no more screwed-up than any other character in the story when you get right down to it, and probably doing better than most, but her problems are far from over.

As Mikael travels north to visit Vanger and find out what this job offer entails, Lisbeth is tasked with investigating the case which Mikael just lost. The reason for this is that Lisbeth had remarked that she thought that there was something fishy going on there, and if she said so, there probably was. Lisbeth Salander is one of my all-time favorites up there with other great female protagonists which I've remarked upon in various places in my blog. More on this later.

Mikael ends up taking Vanger up on his job offer. His cover story is that he's writing a Vanger family history. His real job is to investigate the disappearance - the unexplained disappearance almost forty years previously - of Harriet Vanger, Henrik Vanger's brother Gottfried's daughter. No one has even come close to solving what is, in many regards, a "locked room mystery". Harriet was in the nearby town at the annual children's parade, then she came back to the island and sought to speak with her uncle, but he was busy. She disappeared, quite literally, after that, and no trace had ever been found of her.

Mikael takes up residence in a cottage across the street from Henrik Vanger's home and begins meeting with him regularly. Henrik delivers several boxes of evidence connected with Harriet's disappearance, which Mikael starts looking through. He also starts an affair with Celia Vanger, a middle-aged school principal who lives next door to Henrik. He can find nothing of interest regarding Harriet's disappearance but he makes real progress on actually writing the Vanger family history.

While he's having sweet sex on the Island, Lisbeth is raped on the mainland. Here's where there is a difference from the movie. In the movie, Lisbeth is attacked in the subway and fights off her attackers, but her laptop is broken in the process. In the novel, there is no attack in the subway. Her laptop is broken when she's securing her bike in a garage, and a car reverses over her backpack which she had temporarily laid on the ground.

I think the reason they changed it in the movie was to summarize Lisbeth's life history, which was one of intransigence on her part and abuse from others, of one form or another. But one characteristic was that she never backed down from a fight, not even from someone who would bloody her up pretty badly if she tangled with them. She was abused not only by other people, but by authority too, and part of the reason for this was that she would never cooperate with authority even when it would have actually served her best interests. She realizes this too late to change her early years, but not too late to change her future, and she refuses to see herself as a victim.

Since her old guardian died of a heart attack, and her new guardian, Bjurman, is a sadist and a control freak, she lost control of her own money, and was required to go to him to ask for the money to buy a new computer. She wants the best there is and cannot finance it from the money she has squirreled away at home. Bjurman begins fondling Lisbeth, convinced she has no power to stop him - and makes her fellate him. On her next visit, he makes her come to his home, where he handcuffs her to the bed and rapes her anally. What he did not realize was that she was recording this visit on a security camera she borrowed from her job at the Milton security agency where she works!

So the next time she sees Bjurman after that, she tases him and tattoos on his chest that he's a sadist and a rapist, applying some of his own sex toys to him in the same way he applied his self to her. Lisbeth then explains to him in detail how it's going to be: that she will never see him again unless she needs to for whatever reason. He will nonetheless file monthly reports saying she's doing great. He will turn over her finances to her own control immediately, and a year from now he will recommend that she should be given her life back, free from any guardianship. Either that or the DVD she made will go to the press and the police. She also takes his keys, informing him that she will visit him now and then, when she's sleeping, and if she ever finds a trace of another women in his home, she will publicize the DVD. Now she has control. We hear no more of Bjurman in this entire novel.

When Mikael returns from his jail sentence, it's well into spring. He gets out a month early and has an amusing visit from Erica while he's in bed with Celia, which causes Celia to quit their relationship. On the Harriet front, Mikael discovers something no one else has seen. He has dug up archive photos from the local newspaper, and in a series of these, showing the children's parade, he notices that while everyone else is looking at the parade, Harriet turns sharply and looks at something across the street, something which appears to shock or scare her. It was immediately after that, whatever it was, that she went to talk to her uncle, failed in that endeavor, and subsequently disappeared. Mikael also notices that there was a couple behind Harriet who were taking a picture at the precise time her facial expression changed. If he can only track down that couple, and if only they have that picture, he will be able to see what Harriet saw.

No doubt you know by now, but he does indeed track down the couple - one of them at least - and recovers the photograph. But he doesn't know who is in it. He returns to Hedeby Island to check on Henrik and gets chewed out by one of the family with whom he has had almost no contact, but worse than this, he gets chewed out by Celia Vanger as well, which quite startles him.

One of the most amusing parts of this novel is when Mikael discovers that his computer has been hacked, and he then learns via Henrik's lawyer that it was likely Lisbeth who did it. Lisbeth is quite flummoxed to discover Mikael outside her door one morning. This is the start of their working relationship - or should I call it a working relationship with benefits? Mikael tasks Lisbeth with finding out whether that list of names in Harriet's Bible is a list of murder victims. It is, and Lisbeth tracks down who they were along with an additional set of names which should have been on the list. The unanswered question is what does that have to do with Harriet?

I'm not going to go all the way into the solution to this mystery here. But the rest of the reading is awesome, and rest assured that not only is the main mystery solved, another is resolved along with it. Stieg Larsson knows how to write, and Lisbeth Salander is one of the most engaging and intriguing characters ever written, and I put her up there with the early Honor Harrington (not the late, boring, Honor Harrington), with Katsa, with Kitai, and with Molly Millions. I fully recommend this novel and shall now be happily moving along to the audio book version of volume two in this trilogy.

I have to warn you that the ending to this novel is very different from what was shown in the movie (that is, in Män som hatar kvinnor - I have yet to see the remade US version). I'm not sure why they chose to end the movie as they did, but the novel ends on a rather depressing and sad note. However, I fully recommend the novel, because (as I've indicated!) it is excellent, and the ending in particular is a much better read than the movie is a view. Now that I've completed this one, I'm very much looking forward to volumes two and three, which I have never read.

The Geneva Decision by Seeley James

Title: The Geneva Decision
Author: Seeley James
Publisher: Seeley James
Rating: warty

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley.

I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of his story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

First, a litany of nit-picking! I found this novel a bit inexplicable. The premise is that an outstanding Olympic soccer player, Pia Sabel, has given up her career at a young age (mid 20's apparently), to take over as the head of her father's security firm, Sabel (of course!), whose operatives use tranquilizer darts instead of regular guns, even though this always places them at a disadvantage because the darts have a really poor range!

Pia is incompetent. She's had no training, and was not even a field operative, yet she assigns herself to protect the life of a Swiss banker, and stands nowhere near him on this assignment! The two military-trained people who were with her on this op were evidently equally as incompetent, and Pia offered them no warning whatsoever even though she had spotted the assassin a significant time before he struck. She spotted him because even though he was a professional, he was sweating like an amateur! Thus, her charge is assassinated.

The assassin is taken into custody, but he escapes from the police. His assistant is let go by Pia, as she tries to take him in a soccer slide tackle (on asphalt! That's going to leave a mark! But it inexplicably doesn't!), instead of using her tranquilizer gun when she was well within range.

Shortly after, her team of three tracks down the assassin to a store in a back street, but instead of alerting the police, they enter the store and the assassin gets away again - and like in all the best TV shows, instead of giving chase, they stand around whining about how he's getting away! Pia is incompetent. Her team is incompetent.

Shortly afterwards, Pia is walking across a bridge when the assassin shows up out of nowhere, her team is nowhere near her, and she has to jump into the icy river to escape him, yet her phone still works fine afterwards. Hmm. I wish I had a phone like that!

The wife of the assassinated guy, Lena Marot, wants to hire Pia to find her husband's killer. She thinks Pia can do it because she was so good at soccer! She apparently fails to grasp that there's a massive difference between a trained soccer player anticipating the moves of her opponents on the pitch, and a fish-out-of-water trying to guess at what trained killers will do. They’re not in the same league!

And that's the problem with this novel: it's too much contradiction, too many fish out of too much water, too much over-superhero and not enough personality; Pia is so impossibly wonderful at everything she does (except her job, of course!) that instead of impressing me, she makes me want to vomit. She reminds me of the intentionally hilarious Peter Swift in the Tom Selleck movie, Her Alibi (which I highly recommend. It's a blast, and I'm not even a Tom Selleck fan, but in this, both he and his co-star Paulina Porizkova were perfect).

But just as in that movie, Tom Selleck's narration imbues his absurd private dick with extraordinary powers, we see the same thing here. Pia's parents were killed in front of her when she was only four years old, and I have to wonder whether Peter Swift was her real father, and if her mother wasn't that chronic over-achiever Honor Harrington, from the eponymous series by David Webber. That series started out excellently, but then went rapidly downhill as it became far more of a naval warfare info-dump (why - it was set in space!) far worse than anything Tom Clancy ever inflicted on us, than ever it was a stirring story of a woman fighting genderism in the military.

But I digress! The story goes to Cameroon, and back, and it continues to go back forth and back and forth all over the place without ever putting down any roots to give us something to root for. It goes to a lot of places, but 'engaging' isn’t one of those venues. Pia makes too many dumb decisions, which flatly contradicts the endless attempts to establish her as a paragon of physical perfection, superb skill, profuse poise, and men-defying feats of superhero stamina.

This endless perfection was too much to take in the first place, and when set against the dizzying number of escapes by the bad guys was completely undermined. The last line of the novel is "What's the matter, Dad? Afraid I'll find out who ordered my parents' assassination?" which seems really weird, but Pia was adopted after her parents were killed - killed apparently for no reason whatsoever other than to give her the tired cliché of chasing that muddied rainbow over a series of novels. She was adopted by her "Dad" but there's no explanation as to why he made her change her name instead of allowing her to preserve her family name, or why she didn’t change it back when she grew older.

I can’t get invested in this person at all. She's too "perfect" and simultaneously too incompetent. I have no faith in her, no trust in her, and really no interest in her or anything she's going to do. I think I am going to request no more of this kind of novel from Netgalley. I seem to have an awful lot of bad luck with them!