The new issue of The Big Thrill is up. This is the International Thriller Writers newletter, and the current issue features an interview with me about the Stephen King Illustrated Companion. The new book also got a nice plug on King’s official message board, and someone posted their thoughts about the book on that board, too (quoted here). So far, response to the book has been uniformly positive, and I’m even seeing a bump in sales of my Dark Tower book, I think.
We were supposed to have a local clinic come in to give us flu shots tomorrow, but they ran out of the serum and canceled. However, a nearby Walgreens started giving shots at noon today for $25 and the company is reimbursing us, so my wife and I went and got shot a while ago.
I’m getting near the end of 9 Dragons, by Michael Connelly. He’s through with his trip to Hong Kong and back in L.A., on the verge of figuring out who really killed the liquor store owner. For a book that contains serious jeopardy for both his daughter and his ex-wife, it is an unusually unemotional book. It almost seems like Connelly decided he was going to go balls-to-the-walls and not dwell on anything for more than a moment or two. As a result, the book feels somewhat sterile and superficial. Also, when a character feels obligated to comment on how fortunate he’s been that everything worked out the way he guessed it would, when he was going on sheer gut for most of the time, you have to sense the author’s heavy hand. If one clue hadn’t led to another and another and another, if the trail had gone cold, his trip to Hong Kong would have been a failure, because he had less than 40 hours to do the near-impossible. Find a needle in a vast haystack.
I decided to give Law & Order: SVU another shot last night. It was actually a pretty good episode, up until the last 2 minutes. I despise Christine Lahti’s character, the new DA, though. She seems completely off the reservation. She’s either a hardass or a bleeding liberal, depending on which moment she’s on screen. Eric McCormack was very good as the putative guest villain. However, you could see the thoughts going through the stars’ minds as they had to hold their “shocked reaction” faces for far longer than necessary in the closing minutes. Sometimes things happen organically, and sometimes you can see the strings yanking the characters around, forcing them to do one stupid thing after another until the inevitable but highly unlikely events can take place. Hargitay: WTF? Meloni: OMG.
Criminal Minds, on the other hand, was pretty good. Of course we have to deal with Hotchner’s PTSD, but his PTSD isn’t like anyone else’s. Sean Patrick Flannery gave a creditable performance, and the story was overall satisfactory from beginning to end. I like it that they had to shoot one of the main characters (last week) to explain why he’s hobbling around on crutches.
We have another cold front headed our way. It’s hot and muggy today, over 90°, and it’s not going to get that much cooler, but we’re supposed to get a doozy of a storm tomorrow afternoon/evening.
