Sometimes, you really can judge a book by it's cover. This cover is familiar enough to evoke the Longmire brand but it's grey and a little tired and oSometimes, you really can judge a book by it's cover. This cover is familiar enough to evoke the Longmire brand but it's grey and a little tired and offers no new incident or symbol to excite a reader's curiosity. It says, 'Read Me - I'm a Longmire novel' and not much else.
If I wanted to get someone to understand why I read so many Longmire books, I'd point them to 'The Cold Dish' or 'Another Man's Moccasins' or 'The Western Star' but not 'Land Of Wolves'. It's not that the novel is bad, it's just that it's only of interest to someone who is already a Longmire fan.
'Land Of Wolves' is the first book after Walt's traumatic, violent, only-I-working-alone-can-save-my-daughter mission in Mexico in 'Depth Of Winter', I was disappointed by 'Depth Of Winter' as a resolution to a long-running story arc and angry with Longmire's lone-martyr act but even I could see that the violent events of the book would alter Longmire and redefine the series. I went into 'Land Of Wolves' wanting to see what those changes were.
One of the things that I liked about 'Land Of Wolves' was the quiet, almost gentle way, that Craig Johnson made those changes apparent. At first, nothing much seemed to be different. I thought 'Land Of Wolves' was going to be one of those leisurely let's-talk-philosophy spirit-quest Longmire books with a bit of Basque culture thrown in to spice things up. After 'Depth Of Winter', I welcomed the return to the familiar and found myself relaxing into the book as I listened to George Guidall's distinctive voice take me through Walt's thoughts.
The plot was spun around two investigations, one into the presence of a lone wolf in the mountains and the other into the death by hanging of a shepherd alone in the same mountains. This being a Longmire book, I knew that neither the wolf nor the shepherd's death would be what they first seemed to be. The unexpected presence of a large wolf was bound to trigger Longmire's mystical side and the shepherd's death was bound to lead to dark secrets being revealed. I was happy with that.
The storytelling was slow, almost sleepy, and lubricated by gentle humour. The pace reflected both Walt's state of mind and his newly-limited physical abilities. The new scar on his face wasn't the only souvenir he brought home from Mexico. What he did there makes him reassess himself. The head injuries he suffered mess with his memory. The wound in his side limits his mobility and has taken away his stamina. These things combine to produce points when Walt spaces out entirely, disassociating and hallucinating. As the story is told entirely from Walt's point of view, it's not surprising that the novel had a distant, slightly confused atmosphere to it.
The plot around both the lone wolf and the shepherd works well, even though Walt is labouring under severe disadvantages that he's too stubborn to acknowledge.
The real point of the book seems to be to show Walt questioning whether he can or should continue as Sheriff and what he might do, who he might become if he took off his badge.
I'll have to wait for the next book to find out....more
I'm working my way through Christie's novels at the rate of one a month in their order of publication. Most of them are fun and some of them are remarI'm working my way through Christie's novels at the rate of one a month in their order of publication. Most of them are fun and some of them are remarkable but 'Hickory Dickory Dock' is the second book in a row that I've set aside halfway through. I could put 'Destination Unknown', last month's disappointment, down to Christie trying to revive her thriller writing and not getting it right but 'Hickory Dickory Dock' is her thirty-fourth Poirot book so I'd expected her to have the hang of them by this time.
'Hickory Dickery Dock' had all the signs of a crank-the-handle offering from a franchise that the author has grown bored with. From the first page, the book plods. The plot is slight and what there is of it is hard to take seriously. The exposition is clumsy and repetitive. The foreigner stereotypes are annoying. There is no tension. Unlike earlier Christie books with a nursery rhyhme title, the plot has little or no connection to the rhyme.
Some of the early character sketches were interesting but they tended towards the stereotypical if not the straightforwardly racist, It was as if Christie had based her characters on newspaper reports of what hostel-dwelling young people from multiple nationalities were like in 1955, rather than basing them on people she'd met. Miss Lemon and her sister were interesting but not interesting enough to stop 'Hickory Dickory Dock' from being too tedious for me to read the second half.
I'm hoping that next month's book, 'Dead Man's Folly' (1956), another Poirot book but this time in the more familiar environs of middle-class village folk, will be better....more
I found this novel deeply disappointing. It started with a Hitchcock 'Pscho' vibe and devolved into a Hallmark Happy Ever After fantasy. The struture I found this novel deeply disappointing. It started with a Hitchcock 'Pscho' vibe and devolved into a Hallmark Happy Ever After fantasy. The struture of novel was clunky and disjointed. There were multiple continuity problems which came to feel like tricks played on the reader by a clumsy magician who assumed the reader had short-term memory issues. The big twists lost impact because they only worked if one of the characters had a complere personality transplant. The ending left reality so far behind that it had me laughing in embarrassment of the "Surely she's not going to... Wow! She actually went there." eye-rolling kind.
So, if it was that bad, why did I spend the best part of eight hours listening to it? Well, firstly. some of it is well written. There are some clever ideas, some creepy situations and some love-to-hate-them characters. Secondly, I downloaded this (for free I'm glad to say) to listen to on two long car journeys. I reached the halfway mark on the first journey and, while I wasn't that engaged, I wasn't disappointed either. It was on the second journey that the novel fell apart. If I'd been at home, I would have skipped the last third of the book.
I'm not going to give away any spoilers as not knowing what's going to happen next is one of the main things that kept me reading but I will share my experience at a top level.
The first half of the book was a little slow but seemed to be setting up an interesting story. Even though the book opened with Quinn washing someone's blood from her hands, the tension in the first scenes felt muted. For me, it was an arms-length experience rather than an edge-of-the-seat read. Some of this was the pace, which seemed to me to drag. Some of it was Quinn's inablity to think things through and me being put off by Quinn's 'poor little me' act.
The motel set up: remote, deserted, decrepit motel, found at night during a snow storm, had a 'Bates Motel' feel that should have pulled me into the story but again the storytelling felt a little slow and it didn't deliver the sense of threat that it might have done.
Then, just before the halfway mark, there was an unexpected rollback in time and a switch from Quinn to her older sister, Claudia.
The switch killed the plot's momentum but did introduce a more interesting character. Claudia, like Quinn, was difficult to like but she brought a faster pace to the storytelling and for a while, things went well.
Then the next rollback happened at the 60% mark and the plot lost all momentum for a second time. This time the story went back by a decade or so while Rosalie told me the story of her life with Nick and how he and she came to run this now dilapidated motel with the boarded up restaurant called 'Rosalie's'. For me, this was one of the strongest parts of the book. Rosalie's story and her relationship with Nick felt real. The nature of that relationship also made me question a lot of what I thought I knew about the plot, which justified the disruption of the flow.
About the 80% mark, there was another clumsy shift in perspective to Rob, Claudia's husband and another plot momentum-killing rollback in time. The real decline of the novel started here. We were working towards the big reveals in the final hour and it quickly became clear that those reveals required one character to have a complete personality transplant and made a number of things the reader had been told seem like deceptions that misinformed rather than just mislead.
The deceptions annoyed me and spoiled the big reveal (which was actually quite clever). If the book had stopped there, I'd have grumbled about thriller writers who cheat to make their plots work but I'd also have acknowledged that there were a few good character portraits in the book and that, despite the clumsy transitions, it was mostly entertaining.
Then I endured half an hour of 'Epilogue'. An epilogue is supposed to bring a reader closure. It's not supposed to have the reader alternating between rolling their eyes and grinding their teeth. It also typically doesn't have a 'So THATS who killed..." in it. The big reveal in the epilogue was ok. Not unexpected but it made sense. The rest felt like a fairygodmother had arrived to make sure that all of the remaining characters got their wishes granted. It was pure sugar and very out of place....more
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