March 18, 2006
Wanna talk books? Just some random meanderin' thoughts.

Just finished reading Tami Hoag's "Prior Bad Acts." I would rate it very good, though not excellent or great. The big plot twist at the end was telegraphed about 350 pages prior to the end, but there were plenty of other complications that worked quite well. On the very, very borderline of having cliched characters, but aside from her idiosyncratic dialogue issues that I wrote about earlier, she's a pretty decent writer.

"Trace Evidence" by Elizabeth Becka. I'm thinking about this because I got an e-mail from her out of the blue the other day thanking me for a review I wrote of her book sometime early last year. It's a forensic procedural written by a crime lab expert, and it has the interesting quirk of taking place in Cleveland, of all places. Not great, but good, and it was a first novel.

"Panic" by Jeff Abbott. I see this is nominated for the first ever "Thriller" award for Best Novel by the International Thriller Writers, Inc. I've never read Jeff's first few mysteries, but I was very hooked on his thrillers featuring a Texas Justice of the Peace. Then he wrote this stand-alone which is about an award-winning documentary film maker whose life suddenly goes to complete hell and he discovers that everything--and I pretty much mean EVERYTHING--that he believed about his life, his parents, and his work, was not true. I've read a couple of the other books nominated for this category, but not all... I'm rooting for Jeff, though. Highly recommended.

"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire." We got the movie for my youngest son's birthday and so watched it. I saw it twice in the theater and I read the book and liked it very much. I think I like the movie of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" better, and Azkaban is probably my favorite of the books. But this book and this movie are very, very good. Basically a thriller built around a Tri-Wizard Tournament that Harry gets pinned into being involved in, with horrible consequences. This is probably the book in the series where the stakes start going up--Voldermort is back and you can finally see where Rowling's going with the series. I like Azkaban better because it fills in so much of the plot's backstory and Harry's parents' issues, but in the books and movies Harry and friends become more and more complicated and real.

"The Deal" by Peter Lefcourt. This book always makes it to the top of my favorites list, and I was just letting my gaze drift over my bookshelves to write about "just one more." The main character is a burned-out movie producer of schlocky horror movies. In the opening scene of the book, he is planning his suicide. He's a pretty cheerful suicide, but he's debating on what type of music to have playing when he gases himself to death in his garage. Low and behold, his nephew from New Jersey appears at his door, an aspiring screenwriter with a script. The script is about British Prime Minister Disraeli's life. It's a slow, talkie, arty historical, exactly the opposite of the type of movie Charlie Berns usually makes. He, however, is back in business, and goes about wheeling and dealing the script, having it re-written as an action flick for a black action martial arts actor--kind of like Wesley Snipes or a black Jean Claude van Damme--and convinces the studio to go ahead, and off they go to then-Yugoslavia to have it filmed using Yugoslavian dinars that are owed the studio for other movie releases and can only be used in Yugoslavia. But their star gets kidnapped by terrorists just long enough for his pay-or-play contract to run out, and he heads back home. But Charlie and a young studio exec, his nephew and the cast decide to use the dinars to film the original script about Disraeli before the studio finds out about it and shuts them down.

It is a wild, hilarious, wonderful novel, and I haven't read it in a long time, so maybe I should again.

How 'bout you? What's up?

Best,
Mark Terry