What I've been reading

mark@marktreble.com

 

What I’ve been reading over the past two months.

 I’m on a thrill ride, reading adventure-thrillers and a few mysteries. I had read all of John Sanford’s Prey Series to date in 1999, and dropped it. Over the past few months, I’ve read Silken Prey, Extreme Prey, Gathering Prey, Field of Prey, Golden Prey and Invisible Prey. I’m currently reading Twisted Prey. Sandford’s writing is excellent, his ability to describe a scene in a few words is among the best I’ve encountered.

 I’ve been trying out a few new (to me) authors. From Nolon King I’ve read No Justice and No Escape, the first two books in a series about a female detective and a clairvoyant who helps her anonymously. I believe I’ll read the remainder of the series, but I’m undecided about it. The same applies to Wayne Zurl’s Paradise series, about a small-town police chief in East Tennessee. I will probably read the rest of the series, but it won’t be a high priority.

 I’ve read most of James Harper’s ten novels about Evan Buckley, a private investigator. The books were of high quality through about book five, the began dropping. There was increasing reliance on shadowy organizations, mysterious groups of nefarious wrong-doers, to create the tension attendant to a thriller. Frankly, this is often a gimmick, easier to do than to keep developing the character of the villain, to make her or him less one-dimensional. I’ve now read the tenth book in the series, and there was no attention to detail in the villains’ characters. The mention of one of the multiple “bad guys” groups was supposed to take the place of the author’s hard work. I shall not be reading any more of them.

If you’re counting, you probably noticed that I’m reading about one book every day and a half. The average length of a book that I read is about 360 pages, so I’m reading about 240 pages per day. This is considerably slower than I used to read until about age thirty, but it does fill the hour and teaches me about how successful and unsuccessful authors write.