I’ve decided to post a few more mini-reviews. I’ve read quite a few books this year and don’t have enough outlets to post full reviews. Enjoy!
When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead
By Jerry Weintraub
Twelve – Hachette Book Group
$25.99, hard cover, 291 pages, 978-0-446-54815-1 (2010)
This is a breezy novel about Jerry Weintraub’s job representing the rich and famous. He has chapters about Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and John Denver. He’s also promoted many well-known stars: Led Zeppelin, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Wayne Newton, Richard Pryor, to name just a few.
Later in his career, he turned his attention to acting and producing. Again, you might recognize his work as a movie producer: Nashville, Oh, God!, The Karate Kid (and its three sequels), as well as Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve and Ocean’s Thirteen. Throughout this rollicking trip, you’ll meet George Clooney, Bruce Willis, George H.W. Bush, Armand Hammer, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and many, many others. If they’re someone famous, then Weintraub knows them.
This book is a quick read brimming with fascinating stories. Along the way, you also find out quite a bit about the author and what it takes to be successful. If you want an untarnished view of Hollywood from the inside, pick up this book. It’s like watching Entertainment Tonight – without the pictures, but with all the juicy details very much included.
Buy it on Amazon here.
Blue-Eyed Devil
By Robert B. Parker
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
$25.95 hardcover, 276 pages, 978-0-399-15648-9 (2010)
Long acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction, Robert Parker began this western series in 2005 with the publication of Appaloosa, which was made into a hit motion picture starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen. Following Appaloosa, Parker wrote Resolution, Brimstone. Blue-Eyed Devil is the forth book in this series. Sadly, with Parker’s death in January of this year, the adventures of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch have ended.
For those who have only read Parker’s Spenser novels (or his Jesse Stone or Sunny Randall novels), it may be hard to believe that stories of western gunfighters Cole and Hitch could be as entertaining as his other works of fiction. But it soon becomes apparent that Parker’s clean, sparse writing style, engaging characters and multiple sub-plots make these novels as good as any he has written.
In Blue-Eyed Devil, Coal and Hitch have returned to the small town of Appaloosa where they once were marshal and deputy to find that things have changed in their absence. As in previous novels in this series, the book is narrated in the first person by Everett Hitch. Parker begins the novel this way:
Law enforcement in Appaloosa had once been Virgil Cole and me. Now there were a chief of police and twelve policemen. Our third day back in town, the chief invited us to the office for a talk.
They find out that the new chief of police is shaking down the saloon owners for protection money. Operating under his own moral code, Cole agrees he and Hitch will work for the saloon owners to provide security. This puts the men squarely in opposition to the big ambitions of the chief of police. They also throw another powerful local man’s son out of a saloon for abusing a whore and find themselves with another enemy.
Throw in a hired killer looking to fight Virgil Cole, and some Indians trying to burn down the entire town and you’ve got a showdown brewing with only the best men left standing.
Buy it on Amazon here.
61 Hours
A Reacher Novel
By Lee Child
Delacorte Press
$28.00 hardcover, 383 pages, 978-0-385-34058-8 (2010)
I read a review of this book that called it a “rare ground-shifting work.”
It’s not.
I also saw an interview of Lee Child in which he said that in writing his Jack Reacher novels, he believes that Reacher’s character is more important than the plot.
He’s wrong.
First let me say that I enjoy Child’s Reacher novels and have read nearly every one of them. The last couple of books have been wonderful examples of edge-of-your-seat reading where you rush doing everything else in life, just so you can return to the novel.
And Reacher is a quirky but extremely likeable character – a loner with no home, who only has the clothes on his back (and throws them away and buys new ones rather than wash them), who has no ties to anyone – but who has his own rigid moral code and is definitely not a man to be trifled with under any circumstances.
But a great character doesn’t sustain a novel: it needs action and this book sorely wants in that respect.
Reacher gets stuck in a small town in North Dakota in the middle of a savage snowstorm. Bolton, North Dakato is a small town with big problems, mainly due to the new federal prison just on its outskirts. There is a brave woman in town under police protection who is willing to testify against some criminals living at an abandoned military station a short distance from town. When murders start happening, Reacher offers his help to the local police chief and his assistant who don’t appear to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. To top it off, a Mexican drug lord is looking to make a score in Bolton and a hired assassin is ready to assist him.
So what does Reacher do about it all? Mostly, he tries to schmooze with a woman who has taken over the position he held when he was with the U.S. Army. So except for a little action in the beginning of the book and a lot at the end, the only thing Reacher does in the middle pages is flirt with this woman and show off his intelligence and highly-honed investigative skills.
Understanding how Reacher thinks and anticipates his adversaries is kind of interesting, but hardly riveting. For many authors, that is how they write. But Childs knows better – just read the first few chapters of Gone Tomorrow and see if you don’t agree. This novel would be vastly improved by Reacher doing more and saying less. Recommend only to the die-hard Jack Reacher fan.
Buy it on Amazon here.
