RARA-AVIS: Fast Lane

From: DJ-Anonyme@webtv.net
Date: 27 Jun 2005


I finished Dave Zeltserman's Fast Lane last night. Quite a read. It's really something how this unreliable, or is he, narrator pulls you in.

SEMI-SPOILERS (I'm not giving away any specifics, but in dealing with the plotting in general, I hint at some things I'm not sure I would have wanted to know before I read it.)

Johnny Lane's folksy voice immediately made me think of Thompson's Lou Ford. So I was suspicious of how reliable he was as a narrator from the very beginning. However, I was wondering whether Lane was just fooling the directly addressed reader or himself, too. It becomes increasingly clear it's the former as Lane "remembers" to tell the reader things he previously "forgot" to mention.

The pacing is also very good. At first I was kind of afraid that the book would end with a revelation that, while startling, would not have been at all surprising, since Lane often exposes more of himself than he seems to be aware of (which is a very neat balancing act of Zeltserman's). However, the reader officially finds out this secret just before the halfway point and the rest is an increasingly wild, dark ride as the consequences are dealt with and the true Johnny comes forth more and more.

Yes, the book all flows from a pretty incredible coincidence, but once you get past that (which really isn't hard, one of those things we tend to accept more easily in crime novels than real life), everything flows quite naturally.

So Dave, when's the next book coming out?

And thanks Juha for publishing books like this.

Mark

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