Confessions of a PDR

The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Fforde again injects silliness for its own sake into what this time is a typical Ken Follett tale. DCI Jack Spratt is taken off a case before it even starts, which queers his bid to enter the Guild of Detectives. He is on forced medical leave until it is determined he's sane enough to continue ... in a job where a little insanity helps. The case is the escape of the same serial killer he captured previously - who will certainly want his revenge, right? But there's much more than that - National Security is involved and, worse yet, his wife doesn't know he's a PDR, a person of dubious reality. What if she finds out? Who is killing champion cucumberistas? How are those bears getting their paws on controlled substances, such as ... porridge? Where's that Dorian Gray guy who sold Spratt his car?
There were so many characters that actually appeared (as opposed to mentioned or referred to or already deceased) in this book that I filled a whole 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper trying to keep track of them! I'm wavering between 3 and 4 stars, but hey! The piece about Pippa's pregnancy is just so precious!
Fforde sends up so many thriller/detective story conventions in this story that you wonder what's left to skewer in the sequels!

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Virtually Good Read!

Virtually Dead by Peter May


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
My heart is still hammering! Stayed up to 1 am to finish and then couldn't sleep. I like this book so much because I'm familiar with Second Life and I can relate to a lot of it on that level (by alternately going, "Oh, yeah - that's sooo SL!" and "You Can't Do That!" It's as exciting as seeing your home town featured in a book. It's like going to see "Ghostbusters" while living in Manhattan and watching some of the filming. My SL quibbles are all minor. There's not enough bad spelling in the chat dialogue (which I always think adds to the fun if not the realism - but I can see why you don't want to put out a book full of typos), if any. There was some lipservice paid to the abominable English perpetrated by otherwise very clever builders and scripters, but it just doesn't give the savor of the Real SL experience - "LOL" - that I find so delightful and that I, too, mine for humor.
So now I have to pull myself back and look at it as a "thriller" (because apparently women write mysteries but men write thrillers). It certainly has all the elements:
betrayal - check!
false identities - check!
switchbacks -check!
"dead herrings" [personal in-joke:] - ... umm, check!
transgenders - check!
and cybersex - wowza!
(okay, that last one wasn't typical thriller material). The protagonist definitely has his share of agony: emotional, personal, financial, and professional. (On top of it all, his co-workers have a sick, sick, sick sense of humor.)
May was also forced to use the rather hackneyed Villain Monologizes To Explain What Happened, but that's a tough one to get around. The chase scenes inside SL and Michael's struggles outside were exciting, the Villain's Master Plan was needlessly but delightfully convoluted, and the ending was sweet.
In short, it was good enough that I wish there was more of it, and, good thing my therapist doesn't make me walk through pools of blood!

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The Cat Sat on the Mat ... And Took Notes.

Cat Breaking Free: A Joe Grey Mystery by Shirley Rousseau Murphy


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Once I get past the problem of talking cats: talking, crime-fighting housecats ... come to think of it, maybe I can't get past that. This is definitely a series for cat lovers: soppy, anthropomorphizing cat lovers. Okay, I pretend my cats talk, but I don't go much beyond "Why don't you feed me?" and "Pet me, damn you, pet me!" and "I. Hate. You." I don't imagine some rich, inner life wherein they can reason, read (how does a cat learn to read when human children take years to learn and develop fluidity?), discuss clues, or call each other on cell phones.
I mean, try to imagine a cat manipulating a cell phone. I can hardly punch those buttons and I have opposable thumbs!
But once you get past that ...
And I also had trouble with the names of characters. Murphy has a tendency to give lead female characters masculine names: Ryan and Charlie. I'm still not sure about Scotty. Might be a woman, might not. This makes keeping track of people very confusing, even with the list I made of people and the names of their pets. It's a rather extensive list.
But once you get past that - no, really. It was an interesting mystery about, gosh, real crime! Real crime like burglary! Oh, and some murder. It might have been interesting as well if some humans were actually involved in detection! More than, say, informing the cats. Let's just be glad that these cats don't have opposable thumbs or they'd be running southern California.
I think now I'll read something more sensible, like Fforde's The Big Over Easy.

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