Books with too many titles
Feb. 24th, 2007 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraSo, if I’ve been thinking about Dunnett – why not read her? Because if I re-read the Lymond books I will lose at least a week – probably two, as I shall drag out my reading of Pawn in Frankincense for days and then go and track down both Dunnett companions, any related books and the Lonely Planet guide to Byzantium – and be of no use to anyone in the process. However, I’d never read the Dolly series, and I found the first one waiting patiently for me in a second-hand bookshop while looking for King Hereafter.
I’d forgotten just how well she plots, and how much she gets done in a small space. Rita, a make-up artist, takes a job for a film star that involves travel – and drugs, and death. I saw about two of the twenty twists this had, and they were all fair. Johnson Johnson is the all-knowing hero/detective, with Lymond’s trick of pushing everyone away and showing only his apparently bad side. The travel aspects, as with the Lymond and Niccolo books, are detailed without being guidebook rehashes and evocative without being exoticised.
I ordered the next one from an on-line second-hand dealer the next day – and, like the first one, it’s told in the first person, but it’s not Rita – it’s a self-assured soprano. Have not, so far, been able to deal with my offended sense of character displacement, but I’m also finishing a fantasy novel and reading two unpublished novels for critique, so things should settle down after that.
I’d forgotten just how well she plots, and how much she gets done in a small space. Rita, a make-up artist, takes a job for a film star that involves travel – and drugs, and death. I saw about two of the twenty twists this had, and they were all fair. Johnson Johnson is the all-knowing hero/detective, with Lymond’s trick of pushing everyone away and showing only his apparently bad side. The travel aspects, as with the Lymond and Niccolo books, are detailed without being guidebook rehashes and evocative without being exoticised.
I ordered the next one from an on-line second-hand dealer the next day – and, like the first one, it’s told in the first person, but it’s not Rita – it’s a self-assured soprano. Have not, so far, been able to deal with my offended sense of character displacement, but I’m also finishing a fantasy novel and reading two unpublished novels for critique, so things should settle down after that.
