I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

I Am Pilgrim: A Thriller by Terry Hayes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I almost loved this book, but it has two huge problems. First, as anybody who's read my mystery/thriller reviews knows, I hate mysteries that are solved by coincidence. The mere fact that the protagonist's involvement in a New York murder investigation gives him a cover reason to go to Bodrum, Turkey, where he's searching for a completely unrelated man, is unreasonable. But to have a second murder occur there, which is linked to the one in New York strains all credulity. That annoys me, but since this is more of a thriller than a whodunnit (and we actually know both the criminal and the crime, the story is actually about the search for the criminal), it's not as off-putting to me as it would be in a straight mystery. What was really driving me nuts was the foreshadowing at the end of many chapters. I really think that this could have gone from being a good book to a great book if Hayes had simply deleted the last line of every chapter. In the early chapters it wasn't too bad—"And he would have languished there… except that … the search for the Saracen hit a desparate impasse."—but the foreshadowing got heavier and heavier as we approached the climax. Much later, it's more like being hit with a clue-by-four: "I would never have found it if it hadn't have been for a set of traffic lights." The extra "have" was just a gratuitous freebie.

Still, Hayes is a really good, and graphic, writer (I confess to skipping many of the ghastly bits—he's a bit too graphic for me). When he describes a photo of a woman walking with her children towards a death-camp gas chamber, it's so vivid I can see the picture."

The villain of the piece is an Arab terrorist, planning an attack against the US. But Hayes isn't just picking the bogeyman-du-jour. Yes, the terrorist is a devout, even fanatical, devotee of a radical Muslim ideology, but he doesn't particularly hate the US. In fact, it's the Saudi royal family he wants to bring down, and he feels that if they don't have the support of the US, they'll collapse. He may well be right. Unlike most of our politicians, Hayes get that the Saudis are no friends of the west.

The particular attack being planned is incredible, but Hayes makes it (almost) entirely believable.

The protagonist (I can't simply name him, because even the name he grew up with wasn't the one he was born with, and as an operative of a US intelligence agency, he adopts and discards identities routinely) says "Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you're fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn't help but think of how many times I had violated our nation's deepest values in order to protect them."
I guess it's something that he still thinks of that—I suspect most of spooks never do—but I'm still not going to believe it's necessary. On the other hand, at the climax he sets up a particularly gruesome scenario, and I can't see the alternative either.

The Peripheral by William Gibson

The Peripheral by William Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've loved Gibson since Neuromancer and The Peripheral doesn't disappoint.

Gibson likes to throw you in at the deep end, where nothing makes sense. I eventually figured that what I really needed for this book was to have my left eye reading one page, while my right eye was reading two pages ahead—everything has an explanation, and he doesn't leave you waiting too long to get it, but you're going to spend those two pages completely baffled. And of course, by the time you understand one thing that had you perplexed, two more mysteries have arisen.

The story's taking place in two time periods: the first is maybe a couple of decades from now, and the second is seventy years after that (though not strictly the first period's future!). In that later period, a method has been found to communicate with earlier times, but that communication necessarily changes the past, resulting in the two timelines diverging from each other. It also necessarily causes a fair bit of brain pain in the reader...

I loved the characters and the plot, though some of the motivations seemed weak (sure Daedra is a spoiled brat, but it's not in the nature of spoiled brats to do something for nothing—providing her with a motivation would be easy, but it didn't happen). What do the conspirators get? It doesn't seem enough, but perhaps that's the whole point: that sometimes great evil is done for the most banal of reasons. As Flynne recalls her mother saying, "…evil wasn't glamourous but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room … to become its bigger self."

There was just one point where it became impossible to suspend my disbelief: "Jimmy's breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions." WTF? 

Murder 101 by Faye Kellerman

Murder 101 by Faye Kellerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So, Decker's retired from LAPD to work in a sleepy upstate New York town, and it's driving him crazy.

I'm okay with characters in series aging, but it's a bit telling about my own aging that the Decker's daughter Hannah is now in a Ph.D. program, and I've been reading these novels since before she was born.  Still, at least nobody (as far as I know) calls me "Old Man", which the rookie Decker is teamed with calls him.

I always enjoy Kellerman novels (slightly preferring Faye to Jonathan), but this one's a little uneven. It's a bit hard to believe that Greenbury NY is so small as to have practically no crime, and yet it has five detectives. I also hate the ending, which seems like she rushed it to get it under 375 pages, but on the whole I still enjoyed it.

Angle of Investigation by Michael Connelly

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disappointing. I generally like Michael Connelly, and I really like his Harry Bosch stories, but short story writers are often not novelists, and vice versa, and Connelly is not a short-story writer. These three stories actually read like outlines for novels he never wrote.

Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm not entirely sure how to categorize this one. It's hardly a "courtroom procedural", as it's far from typical court procedure. It's a bit of a "whodunnit", but your options are limited from the beginning. But mostly it's a lot of unlikeable characters bulldogging through a trial to come to the truth.

None of the characters are very likable. Josie, the protagonist, is a whiner. She does her job, gets a client (who she believes is innocent) off a murder charge, and then throws her career away when the woman turns out really to be a murderer. Josie's love interest, Archer, handles confrontation by retreating (perhaps understandably, but it doesn't make him any more likeable); her supposed partner, Faye, doesn't want her practising the kind of law she knows Josie is good at; the girl accused of murder doesn't want to be liked; the victim was a creep; his son is a victim of child abuse who turns into a creep; and the accused's mother—and wife of the son—is the biggest creep of the lot.

I Am Not A Lawyer™, but many of the courtroom scenes don't ring true to me—and at least one reviewer who is a lawyer agreed.

There are really only three possibilities for the killer, and Forster commits the cardinal sin in a mystery writer of telling us that somebody else did it. Misleading the reader is good; lying to the reader—not so much.

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I'm usually a big fan of Sawyer, but I just couldn't get into this one—a sort of Raymond Chandler goes to Mars. The science was almost non-existent—and I love Sawyer mostly for his science—and the characters were two-dimensional at best.

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Still interesting, but it seems Connolly might be trying to write Harry Bosch out of existence, as the ending leaves him very much in the air.