Aww, Just SHOOT him, fer cryin' out loud!

Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
audiobook version

I should have checked out the hardcopy as well, because I got partway through and then just wanted to get it over with.

There is a lot that's good about this book. It's not often we get to see a Moscow police procedural, or at least I don't. I'm hoping this has given me insights into the Russian character and the current conditions in Russia, but I don't have enough information on the author to vet his depictions.

Again, the only problem I have is that it's not my sort of "thing."

The characters, while more than two dimensional are drawn with a heavy pen. The reporter is not only Jewish ... but hunchbacked as well. The love interest is a doctor AND has Chernobyl scars. The filmmaker doesn't just make porn, he documents his own gang-rapes (in other words, he's not just pathetic, he's stupid). All this serves to make the narrative more "gritty," I suppose.

Setting the mystery in Russia gives the author a chance to explore all those hard-boiled 1950s-type scenes, but with a fresh coat of paint: cell phones, exotic locales, etc. Still, it boils down to people trying to kill the detective, the detective being misunderstood, losing the girl, getting the girl back, losing the girl, the obligatory hellacious family life that made him completely different from both parents (which seems so unlikely). All in all, it was good -

but setting up the gun assembling scene? That just killed it. The gun is now on the stage and I was just waiting for it to pay off. Hurry up, Smith, let's just get the gun put together and get it over with. It was pure torture waiting for that.

And, bad guy has a gun, why suddenly decided to use a shovel? Why bury someone to come BACK and kill them? I just wanted to bang my head on the dashboard. And he'd been doing so well up to then. (In my mind I drift back to that great scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Jones rolls his eyes and just shoots someone. The story goes that the scene was changed from a whip-duel because Ford was ill, but this was just sooo much better. Shoot them! You have a gun! USE IIIIIIT!)

Otherwise, it was pretty good. Reader was okay, but should probably lay off the whiskey and cigarettes.


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Same Old Same Old ... Yum

Death of a Gentle Lady by M.C. Beaton

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is the reading version of Raisinets: nothing surprising in the bag, same old wrinkles larded up with familiar flavors, but gawd doncha love 'em?

Hamish's star system of babes grows ever larger, and while they have to die to escape his gravitational pull, they never seem to get close enough for a satisfactory relationship. I know I've said over and over that if you've got the sexual tension thing going, your biggest mistake is ruining it with a happy couple (see Sayers's Lord Peter series and the old Remington Steele program), however, it's been 20-some books now, Ms. Beaton! Time to move on! It's just painful now seeing all these women floating around him like so much debris.

This time Hamish goes outside the EU for fresh meat. Blair goes totally over the top. The victim is as unpleasant as ever, and an outsider (or Lochdubh would be a ghost town by now). And Beaton stoops to having the village put on a production of "Macbeth." Even using the same formulaic sentences (Hamish always going sibilant when angry - can guarantee that sentence will be worked into every single solitary book), the same failed relationships, the same characters (except murderers and murderees), Beaton somehow prevents this stuff from going completely stale. The villagers should only be two-dimensional cartoons, but I see them as whole for some reason. Maybe it's from seeing just one of the tv series with Robert Carlyle (totally wrong physically for Macbeth but so darn cute in that).

Oddly, I can't abide the Agatha Raisin stories, but I'll line up for these packets of sticky sweets each time.


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This man is soooo adorable .. when he's not playing a psychopath.