Whiskey Sour, by J. A. Konrath

Whiskey Sour was a decent book with an interesting protagonist, good suspense and efficient plotting. There were several times where I thought the story was going in one direction only to take a completely different turn which made it more exciting.

Konrath is a solid writer who excels at plot and suspense, and Whiskey Sour is a good example.

Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

I loved the first third of this book, and thought it would compete with Misery as my favorite Stephen King book. He introduced two interesting characters, one a thief with mother issues who is passionate about a particular writer, and the other a high school student from a troubled home who is passionate about the same writer. King goes into the magic that writers can have on people and the soul-filling nourishment that a good book can give people, especially ones who feel alone and alienated in the world. Finders Keepers was heading for great things with an important theme, something King hits upon once in a while.

And then Bill Hodges and his detective gang entered the book, and everything changed. Hodges was no longer the suicidal ex-cop looking for a reason to live (as he was in the first novel) and instead worries about his cholesterol. Gone were the important themes about literature to be replaced by an ex-con on the loose threatening people to get back what he stole thirty years earlier. The book became a standard detective thriller, which in itself wasn't bad, but it could have been so much more based on the first third of the book. I had gotten my hopes up for something along the lines of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption, but instead got the more pedestrian Under the Dome.

The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane

This is the first Dennis Lehane novel I've read and I think I selected poorly. I was looking for a suspenseful thriller, which his earlier works apparently are, but with this book he was going for more of a "literary work." Unfortunately, "literary" appears to include a meandering plot and a main character who acts inconsistently and doesn't really believe in anything. I kept waiting to see what the book was really about, but I never found out.

Lehane brought up many potentially interesting themes--worker's rights, immigrant's rights, police men's rights--but the main character never took a consistent stand on these and so the book ended up not having any theme. The two mostly separate sub-plots involving a black man on the run after committing murder and Babe Ruth rising up to become a star were actually more interesting than the main plot because at least these characters knew what they wanted and fought for it (more in the former than the latter).

I plan to try one more Lehane novel, probably one of his earlier ones, and I'm hoping it's much more suspenseful. Lehane has a good style and can create interesting characters, but unless those characters do something that has an overall purpose, the books will be boring.

Pocket-47, by Jude Hardin

Pocket-47 was recommended by J. A. Konrath whose writing I like. Unfortunately, I did not like Hardin's writing. Sometimes the writing is clumsy, especially with the use of cliches, and this calls attention to the writer and takes the reader out of the story. The characters are also not very deep. We are allowed into the main character's head, but only just below the surface.

But the real problem with Pocket-47 is the structure. The first three-quarters of the book has the typical set-up, response, attack and semi-resolution, but then there's still a quarter of the book to go! The story then takes a three-month break and has the main character discovering that one of the bad guys is actually still alive. He proceeds to chase the bad guy into a white-supremacist military compound in order to expose them and their evil ways. But all the while this is happening we don't care because the girl from the first part is still dead.

It's very shocking to have to start a book all over again from the set-up stage when the reader is three-quarters of the way through. Hardin does tie the second story back to the first in the last several pages, but by that point we've given up caring. He has a few pages of exposition explaining how all the events were connected together--but we need to be figuring that out during the book, not at the end.

Perhaps Hardin thought he was doing something exciting with structure which would make his book more interesting. But for this reader, it backfired and made it more boring. Why is it so difficult to find a book with a standard structure which is well executed?

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

For the first three-quarters of the book, I thought this was one of the best books I'd ever read. I loved getting deep inside the heads of the two main characters and really learning what makes them tick. The suspense of trying to figure out who was the good guy and who was the bad guy was very well done and kept me reading. I was also very impressed with how well the female author wrote from the husband's perspective--she clearly has an excellent grasp of the differences between the sexes.

Even when the book started to get complicated and less plausible, I was still along for the ride. Things worked out well for the scheming wife and she had her husband right where she wanted him. But then...nothing. She didn't really want anything except to go back to having an adoring husband, something she should have known would be a lie. It was just too much that she went to all that trouble just to get her husband back as a doting fool. If the ending had been more meaningful, this would be one of my favorite books. It had the same potential of Replay, but in that case the book paid off with an excellent ending, and it is one of my favorite books.