The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz

Rating: WARTY!

This is purportedly a continuation of the Millennium trilogy written by Stieg Larsson, but it contains none of Larsson's material which is being held in contention between Larsson's surviving girlfriend of longstanding and his family. This "authorized" version (that is authorized by everyone but Larsson who is dead, and his girlfriend who has possession of his material) was written independently by David Lagercrantz. Once again the title has been changed from the Swedish original, which was Det som inte dödar oss or, That which does not kill us.

The volume runs to some 400 pages, but is so full of fluff and padding that, had the extraneous detail been removed, I would have read the whole thing. As it was, I read only half of it before I gave up out of boredom and disgust. If I had to read the word 'gatan' one more time in any form, I would have honestly puked. I seriously do not need to know every detail of a city in which the characters live and move, and have their being. Indeed, I don't need to know any details of it unless the details are somehow important to the story. A bit of filler I don't mind, but what amounts to paragraphs of it stuffed between the actual interesting bits is just annoying and pretentious. And there really were not any interesting bits here.

The front cover tells us this is "A Lisbeth Salander Novel" but in those two hundred pages I read - the entire first half of the novel - she barely put in an appearance, was absent for most of the early chapters, and hardly even garnered a mention for that matter, let alone actually showed up. How a novel can be deemed to be about a specific character when she not only fails to appear for more than fifty percent of it, but isn't even a topic worth bringing up, is a bigger and more intriguing mystery than the one the novel itself is supposed to relate.

The first nine chapters don't even get us beyond the first day. I know this because the author tediously labeled every chapter November 20th. I care. Any author worth their salt would have made this clear from the writing instead of having to use it as a chapter heading. Hell, put it in 'Part 1' (or part 'November 20') if you have to be that pedantic. Quit hitting me over the head with it every few pages. If I wanted to get 'being hit over the head lessons', I'd contact Terry Jones....

In short, I can't recommend this at all. If you insist on reading it for yourself, I'd suggest you skip the first 120 pages, because literally nothing worth reading about happens before then. Not much happens afterwards, but at least something distantly resembling a thriller begins around there. Unfortunately by that time, I'd lost all interest in pursuing this. I simply didn't care and had no faith whatsoever that this author could replicate what Larsson did without actually cloning what Larsson did. This novel seemed to be every bit as much of a brand new episode in the Millennium universe as the execrable The Force Awakens was a "new" episode in the Star Wars universe.

I saw the movie based on this novel - based on, but barely resembling it. If I had thought it followed the novel I would never have gone to see it, but from preview, it looked like it might be worth watching and I was curious to see how Claire Foy did. She did the best she could with the lousy material, I guess, but the movie castrated Salander and rendered her, as one reviewer put it, into a Goth James Bond. I wouldn't have been that kind. It wasn't a Lisbeth Salander movie in any meaningful sense.

I have to admit I lost some respect for Foy in that she actually chose to do this movie. It was far too Hollywood-ized and neither she nor the writers understand Salander at all. Consequently, it had none of her soul and was essentially nothing more than an attempt at a purse snatch (your purse) by the surviving family of Stieg Larsson in my opinion. In truth it's an insult to Larsson and to his memory as was the novel. I actively dis-recommend both.

Dragonflies by Andy Straka with Durrell Nelson

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second Andy Straka book I've read. I reviewed A Witness Above favorably back in May, 2015, but I could not get with this one, which evidently incorporates books 1 & 2 of a series. The biggest problem, for me, was that it felt like I was reading a book aimed at middle grade boys.

It's a novel about spying using the latest drone technology – the one where next-gen drones are so small they can sneak in through your a/c vent. You can barely see them even if you're looking, and they're quiet. This era is coming. Some of it is already here, and this bugs people...! The book was accurate in mentioning military surveillance programs such as ARGUS-IS, Gorgon Stare, and Constant Hawk.

Raina Sanchez was a chopper pilot for the military in the Middle East until a grenade launcher attack brought her chopper down hard, killing her buddy. Invalided out of the military less one foot (as in limb, not in height), she found work with a military contractor, but was tired of being a drone herself stuck in a cube like a bee in a hive. She could only dream about her previous life - and not in a good way. She leaped – as well as she was able - at the chance to pilot miniature drones for secret military operations in the civilian sector, especially since it gave her the opportunity to work with the very man who pulled her from the chopper wreck that night: Staff Sergeant Tye Palmer, who she hadn't seen for four years.

The start of this novel was great, but it quickly went downhill for me, and I had to quit reading it after chapter five or so because it was becoming increasingly less credible with each screen I swiped. It simply wasn't entertaining for grown-ups in my opinion. Neither was it really edited for prime time. I came across a lot of writing mishaps, such as phrases like "beautiful creatures staged for battle" In the context I read it, this made no sense. It was describing horses, which are not staged by any means. Trained, maybe? Bred? Not staged.

A lot of times the author meant 'breathe' but he wrote 'breath'. This happened at lest twice in the short section I read, as in "At least she could still breath." and "He didn’t allow himself to breath easier until they were well away from the building". In another section, the author made the error of conflating character speech with narration and gave us this: "...could endanger both you and whomever else might come into possession of such information."

I can see how an author might feel pressured to write that in the narration if only to try and establish some English language cred, but no-one speaks like that unless they're queen Elizabeth, or unless they're absurdly pretentious or play-acting. No one says 'whom' in everyday speech. Indeed, the very word 'whom' needs to be banned from the language as far as I'm concerned. To borrow the immortal words of John Cleese, it's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible!

Then there were sections which were straight out of a young adult romance: "Raina didn’t normally swoon over men - she was attractive enough in her own right. But Murnell was off the charts." I don't even know what that second clause even means. What I really don't get is what Raina's looks have to do with anything. If this were a male soldier, no-one (except for Harlequin and gay romance writers) would be writing about him like this so why pick on women? Not that female soldiers can't be good looking by any means - but its simply not relevant and it's demeaning to a female character to treat her like an object.

It's also evident that the author is setting up a young-adult style love triangle, but I'm not interested in that when there's a tech-thriller to read. I want the tech, not the trope. Talking of tech, that which was employed here was right on the border line of not credible, promising to step over it, but never quite doing it until Raina is rendered. Yes, you read that right. This was when I quit reading because this was just too improbable and ridiculous to credit at all.

This is where I lost all my faith in this story for two reasons. First of all, Raina didn't seem very soldierly. She seemed like a first year college girl with confidence issues. I know that not all soldiers are the same, and there must be some, somewhere, who are like that, but for someone trained to be aggressive and deadly when the situation called for it, she just didn't seem to have it. Admittedly, she was handicapped and had been through the mill, but I would have expected to see some of that grit somewhere inside her, and it simply wasn't there. I also found her high tech foot prosthetic to be a bit unbelievable, considering the way the laughably under-funded veterans administration treats its wounded.

Worse than this though, is that Raina gets rendered by the Department of Homeland Security, and carried off handcuffed, hooded, and drugged. She wakes up in an underground bunker of some sort, and this snotty, good-looking guy is going on about how they need her for something, and she's all flirty and perky and drooling over how good looking he is? It quite simply didn't ring true and actually rendered her violently away from being viable and credible strong female character that I could follow and admire.

Soldier or not, any women with self-respect and integrity would have been pissed-off as hell with this kidnapping. She wouldn't be ogling the jerk who kidnapped her. Any soldier would have been fighting mad. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence would be a closed book to these people. not trusting a word they say, and not telling them anything. Raina placidly believes every word they say, and drinks anything she's offered without the slightest hint of a suspicion that it might contain other drugs or that these people might not be who they say they are. She wakes up bouncy and flouncy, and lusting after this guy. She's not even remotely frustrated, let alone angry. She's joking around. She had no thought of letting her partner Tye know she's OK. She's completely unrealistic. This character was already traumatized by her injury, and on top of that, she feels bad because she feels handicapped (and is in the military's eyes), and yet she has no reaction whatsoever to this, other than treating it like it was some college prank? No. Just no.

Let's look at it from the other PoV - the DHS wants her to help them with a job, yet instead of approaching her and asking her to help with this job, they drug and kidnap her? Do they seriously think this is the best way to get someone to do them a favor?! No, it's not realistic. If you want to kidnap her in your story, fine, but for god's sake come up with an intelligent reason to do it and have your character react realistically to the event!

That was the "Check please, I'm outta here!" moment for me in this story. I cannot recommend it.

Quantico by Greg Bear

Title: Quantico
Author: Greg Bear
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Rating: WARTY!

Today is the 17th, so it's time for a novel which begins with 'Q'!

Normally I write my reviews as I read the book, but in this case I had finished it long before I could be bothered to put pen to paper - or more accurately, finger to keyboard! By the time I came to write it, I had pretty much forgotten the entire book, which is a review in and of itself. Obviously it didn't leave very much of an impression on me! I had to go back and read the blurb just to get my thoughts on track.

I'm a fan of Greg Bear's writing in some instances, but not a fan of everything he's written. I loved the "Way" quadrilogy (although I have yet to read the fourth book in that series), and I liked the Forge of God dilogy (the second volume better than the first), but I could not get into the loosely bound hexalogy which begins with Quantico. Indeed, it's so loosely bound that I was able to read several books out of order before I even knew it was a series!

I think the whole hexalogy goes: Quantico - Mariposa - Queen of Mars - Slant - Heads - Moving Mars but don't quote me on that. I read Mariposa too, but all I remember of that - essentially - is that I didn't like it much. It borrowed too heavily from Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation. Queen of Mars I never finished and it's been sitting around on my shelf while I try to decide if I want to start over with it! Moving Mars I read and liked, but Head and Slant I have not read. The latter does intrigue me, however.

This particular novel was a bit too much like the preachy later works of Michael Crichton - it felt too much like a lecture, or a Tom Clancy military training manual to enjoy it as a novel. The high-tech was interesting, but that's not a story. The story pursues new FBI special agents Fouad Al-Husam, William Griffin, and Jane Rowland, who team up with bio-terror expert Rebecca Rose, and find that they're in a lot deeper than they expected to be when they begin chasing what appear to be your run-of-the-mill terrorists. It takes place in the second decade of this century, which is another reason why it seemed so unrealistic, for me. It actually has nothing to do with the FBI training facility at Quantico!

The novel pretty much takes the most disturbing terror attacks of recent years and augments and modifies them to make a series of almost non-stop attacks in the very near future - a building wrecked in DC, a plague attack, and so on - but the diversity of the attacks and the number of people, and plot-lines drafted in to swell this story makes it a farce more than an entertaining story of terror. In the end, it makes it a confused mess, which is why my recollection of it isn't exactly crisp, I'm guessing.

So in short, I can't recommend a novel which is such a mess and makes so little impression - in other words, which does exactly the opposite of what the author intended!

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Title: Reamde
Author: Neal Stephenson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!

The reader on this massive audio book version of this novel was rather annoying. He seemed obsessed with enunciating every single word with extreme precision, and it was really distracting. For example, instead of saying the indefinite article in its shortened form, as in 'hat', he insisted upon saying it as in 'hay' regardless of context. He also pronounced 'shone' as 'shown' instead of 'shonn' which just sounds weird to me.

The last thing I read of Stephenson's was his dreadful Baroque Cycle. I ought to have realized that anything which combines the words 'baroque' and 'cycle' had to be the most offensive collection of maximally tedious material ever put between six covers, but what can I say except that I was young and foolish? I pretty much swore off him after that, but Reamde struck me as something a bit different, something which harked back to his halcyon days of Snow Crash and Diamond Age, two of his which I did love.

Unfortunately, Reamde started out determined to prove that to was, very much, a Broke Cycle redux, if not in period then certainly in pedantry. There was a long and mind-numbingly tedious info-dump which seemed to be dumping as much flotsam as it was jetsam, and I found myself skipping track after track on the audio. Reamed is certainly how you'll feel if you read this drivel.