I posted my review of FaceOff, the new anthology from the ITW, at Onyx Reviews this weekend. It’s a neat concept, pairing up mystery / crime / thriller writers and their characters. Also a good way to sample the work of writers you haven’t read before, except there’s no way of telling who wrote what in any given story. Also, I would be very curious to hear who decided the pairings. There’s nothing wrong with them, I’m just curious.
I’m currently reading The Son by Jo Nesbø. It’s about a young man who has been in prison for over a decade and has become a heroin addict. His father, a cop, was supposedly a mole for the criminal syndicate and committed suicide. Now he finds out that wasn’t true, so he escapes and goes on a Count of Monte Cristo-like vendetta. One interesting thing I noticed is that, although the son is the main character, he is only seen through the eyes of other characters. This means there are a lot of viewpoint characters, some of them present in the story only briefly. It also means that he is never seen alone, since there’s no one else to report his movements. I’m sure this decision was made to keep out of the guy’s head, so readers don’t know what his master plan is, but it’s an interesting approach.
I love a “good” bad retail experience. I ordered a pedestal speaker for our TV from Amazon. It arrived on Friday and, when I plugged it in, it emitted an ear-splitting howl that nothing could stop. So, on Saturday I emailed the manufacturer, detailing the problem. I had a response within minutes that it sounded like the unit was defective. So I logged into Amazon and requested a technical specialist. Got one on the phone in two minutes. Since I’d already contacted the manufacturer, the specialist said they’d ship out a replacement immediately, and he emailed me a UPS return label. Total elapsed time, maybe five minutes. Dropped the defective unit off yesterday morning and the replacement was waiting when I got home last night. Can’t beat that with a stick.
A really good episode of Castle this week, finally putting an end to the series-long storyline of Kate’s mother’s murder. Castle was there for moral support when things got dire, but this was all Kate—she got herself out of sticky situations and put the clues together and got to see the payoff. Good stuff. Next week: nuptials?
I haven’t always watched 24, and there was at least one season when I quit partway through, but I liked the opening 2-hour segment of this new series. That it has Yvonne Strahovski is a plus. I really liked her in Dexter and was delighted when her character was the least scathed at the end of that series. I thought the second hour was far better than the first, and the last few minutes came as a huge surprise. As long as it keeps up this level of excitement, I’m willing to stick with it for a few months.
Also a good episode of The Blacklist to set up the season finale. Lizzy played hardball with the doctor who was blackmailing people—by poisoning him using his own playbook. I thought maybe it would be revealed that she’d used something non-lethal to trick him, but, no, deadly virus it was. Interesting that the episode ended almost like the series began, with Reddington on his knees with his hands on his head.
Who would have guessed that the cowboys would be outplayed by the four remaining teams on The Amazing Race? If it’s a footrace at the end, it could be interesting. There’s a team with an old guy with known leg problems, one of the “Afghanimals” is lame, there’s one team that apparently can get lost crossing the street, and then there Brendon and Rachel, who at the moment seem like the strongest team. Also the most annoying.
I finished watching the first season of Helix. It started out decently, but really descended into chaos and confusion. Small wonder the little logo “bug” on the show refers people to the series website with the caption “What the hell’s going on?” Hatake has to be the most frustrating character in existence: he knows everything but tells nothing. “I was trying to protect you” must be his most-often-uttered line in the series, said whenever he got caught in another lie or obfuscation. I doubt I’ll pick it up again when it returns. The internal logic went completely to pieces toward the end.
