clock … watching time, the only true currency

John Gardner’s Troubled Midnight was a jacket pickup. Meaning, I picked it up in the library after reading the book jacket and finding that one of the blurbs grabbed my attention. Readers with a taste for intelligent international suspense in the spirit of Frederick Forsyth…should find this an exciting thriller. Only after I got home [...]

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I’ve read a few of Patricia Cornwell’s novels about Dr. Kay Scarpetta, most recently The Last Precinct. From an airport book exchange, I picked up Blow Fly (2003), as a big paperback to fill some time on the plane a couple of weeks ago. Blow Fly did the job quite well, and I left the [...]

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Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan felt right in line with Lethem, but with more of a William Gibson flavor. The language didn’t thrum like Gibson’s, but the world-framing theme of ‘sleeves’ (human bodies as replaceable wrappers for your ‘core,’ or brain in a digital form) read well, and even original when taken to its [...]

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Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music (Wikipedia page) read like a Philip K. Dick novel that wasn’t prepared to go all the way to the (crazed) edge. Similar first-person narrative, resonant mix of current culture with a future which has gone mildly awry with its reliance on central control (with a pervasive, encouraged use of [...]

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Michael Jecks’s The Last Templar is the first of a series of mysteries set in medieval England. I picked it up because I wanted a mystery, and there were a score of titles on the shelf with the same author and theme. Worth an airplane read, which is what it was… but this introduction to [...]

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