This is the weakest of the three I've read, and the furthest
from the
modern hardboiled kind of thing he does. Hardboiled
detectives are
supposed to be tough and cynical and crack wise, but Patrick
Kenzie
(the narrator) has turned into a smart ass. Come to think of
it, with
all the one-line paragraphs, he's getting more like Fletch.
Kenzie
and his partner Angie Gennaro are tough, that's for sure, but
they
need to drop the shtick.
The storyline didn't do much for me, and there are times when
Lehane
seems to have written himself into a corner so he just makes
something
up to get out. And how someone can kill a person in a
highway
shoot-out and then waltz out of the police station, I don't
know.
Michael Connelly blurbs the book and says, "He turns the
hard-boiled
detective novel into an elegaic treatise on the corruption of
the
soul." "Elegaic" is not a word I'd use, and Chandler or
Ellroy do a
much better job with corruption. I'm in no rush to read the
next
Lehane for a number of reasons, but the smart-alecky tone is
the big
one. He's taken cracking wise and pushed it into sitcom
territory.
Bill
--
William Denton | Toronto, Canada | http://www.vex.net/~buff/ | Caveat lector.
"Let's keep the party polite."
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.