Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This is a Virgil Flowers book, so it differs from the Davenport series as it’s more focused on a single guy out there trying to solve a mystery. In this particular case, it’s an advertising agency woman visiting a resort in the northern part of Minnesota who gets shot in the face while canoeing. The resort is women-only, kind of as a retreat from men, and draws a lot of lesbians. And some of them interact with the locals, including a lesbian folk singer with a menacing father and mentally different brother. As a result, Flowers plods along for 200 or so pages as Sandford lays it out and then starts to solving it in the next couple hundred pages.

The later Sandford books seem to take on this sort of pattern. Complications for 200 pages, starting to make progress for 150 pages, then resolution. As it’s a Flowers book, it also features a wide collection of band t-shirts that Flowers wears and sexual escapades or, in this book, tension.

And it’s not a Sandford book without the occasional clangs of wrongness. This book has two that stick with me: one where a couple bring in a small gadget and explain it’s an intercom that alerts them if their baby awakens. That’s called a baby monitor perhaps everywhere but Minneapolis. Secondly, when the sinister father talks about his daughter getting caught up in musical dreams, he refers to CMTV. Whereas it is Country Music Television, the tag and call signs are CMT. Maybe Sandford wants to show he’s out of touch. Given Sandford’s history of these sorts of boners, though, he should probably keep from that sort of subtlety.

It’s a pretty good book, a bit long, and it doesn’t drop in too many things from the killer’s perspective, although he does rely on it once. It’s a laziness in writing as are hitting the common series tropes. He’s not devolved too much here.

Oh, and he’s also laid off the Republicans for the most part, maybe because the book was written in that golden period between the election and the effects of the administration. He can’t lay off of Fox News entirely, though, but it’s easily bypassed since it doesn’t crop up every thirty pages like in Wicked Prey.

I wish I could have read this book more closely, but a previous owner had removed pages, probably pages whose reverse included pretty pictures the previous owner wanted for crafts or display. As such, I would read along into the life of Degas, for example, and suddenly would find myself in the middle of the life of Renoir. So I gave up reading too closely and focused on the paintings. Well, the paintings that the previous owner of the book did not think were worth tearing out.

As with any survey, it can give a broad overview or help broaden your perspective. Reviewing this book, I learned that I need to review the work of Mary Cassattm more closely, as I like it. However, I don’t like Paul Cézanne as much.

But that’s what these kinds of survey books are for. Also, they fill the time between plays with something cultural on a Sunday afternoon.

This book is a pretty detailed biography of Degas, one of the founders and/or inspirations for the Impressionist movement in France, and a number of full color reproductions of his work. He, like Remington among my recent art reading, did not live a life of penury. Instead, he was pretty comfortably comported with a banker father (who proved to be less successful than thought). Degas travelled abroad and studied art and achieved enough success that he could exhibit with the Impressionists at no real risk to himself. Apparently, showing with that riff raff instead of at the Salon was quite a statement.

At any rate, Degas’s work with the human form falls into my wheelhouse of Impressionist appreciation. As you might recollect, I prefer Impressionism to include human figures instead of just landscape. Degas also worked with sculpture and wrote sonnets, so what’s not to like about the guy?

I think I’m reaching a scientific breakthrough on these books. I liked the first, where Odd Thomas interacted with a lot of people. I didn’t like the second, where Odd was on his own thinking to himself as much. I liked third, where Odd interacts with lots of people, more than I liked the second. Now this one, the fourth, and Odd spends a lot of time wandering in the fog on his own being a bit of an action hero, and…. Well, if you were taking a standardized quiz, you would best fill in the circle for “He didn’t like it much.”

In this book, Odd Thomas is on a seashore town trying to prevent an apocalyptic vision from occurring. It somehow involves a cryptic mother-to-be who seems wiser than her years and seems to know a lot about Odd Thomas. And it involves Odd wandering around in the thick fog of the seaside town trying to dodge corrupt cops and to prevent the aforementioned apocalypse.

And he does, of course, almost as a matter of course. He seems to be in no real jeopardy as the story progresses, even as a woman mystically drawn to people in trouble appears out of the fog to give Odd a gun so he can be an action hero for a bit. Then the book ends as Odd and the cryptic mother-to-be head to parts unknown as he’s pledged to defend her with his life. Because he does. Never mind, I don’t get it either.

I snuck a look at the Wikipedia entry for the series, and I see Koontz plans a couple more books and has a graphic novel or two in the series already as well as a Web series going on. Ah, I see. That would explain a bit of it, then. The plotting and depth of the book sort of match what you would get in a graphic novel, but with more Odd Thomas interior monologue to fill it out. Not quite up to snuff. And this book ends kind of in the middle of a larger story, unlike the others, which detracts from it. I didn’t want to read a comic book without pictures.

I hope the other books in the series pick it back up.