Just finished Liberty (A Jake Grafton Novel) by Stephen Coonts. Good no-thought-required entertainment, but marred in quite a few places by cliched phrases and just plain wrong facts.
One of the things that really irks me in action-adventure fiction is when writers don't get combat right, either unarmed (martial arts) or firearms. Coonts had one of the villians "setting the safety" on a Glock. That's an error Clancy would never have done.
Just started: The Master of Rain by Tom Bradby. This one is looking to be pretty good, set in 1920's Old Shanghai when it was a Berlin-like city-state with different foreign sectors. Like the Amazon reviewers say, it is turning out to be a modern serial killer vs. honest hard-working cops story, just set with period costumes and accents. Like the autopsy scene I just finished, where the cops and medical examiner discuss the murder of a Russian prostitute by a wacko sex fiend killer, is right out of a CSI: Miami episode.
Posted by jameshom at July 26, 2005 10:51 AM | TrackBack