Friday, September 17, 2010

Light reading catch-up (travel edition)

Back in Cayman, after a very long day of travels yesterday. Hit the Book Market in Ottawa and got a decent stack of used paperbacks there, so had an adequate and highly affordable supply of reading for the trip.

Jane Adams' Final Frame was decent but broke the cardinal rule: it didn't work as a standalone installment in a series, it really seemed to assume knowledge of the previous installment. Lauren Henderson's The Strawberry Tattoo was poorly plotted but reasonably amusing otherwise. Caro Fraser's Beyond Forgiveness was a fairly mediocre example of a genre I do not really like, but I found it more or less readable.

Then I read two spectacularly good thrillers that had me on the edge of my seat in delight and pleasure: Caroline Carver's Blood Junction and Dead Heat. The second is even better than the first - richer, more complex - and I am certainly going to read all her others as soon as I can get hold of them, they are so much what I like (imagine somewhere on the spectrum between Peter Temple and Lee Child - not with the sheer intellectual force and stylistic beauty of the former, nor with the economy and genius elegance of the latter - but really, really good, and with eminently plausible female protagonists).

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