Month: September 2019

Melbourne thriller writer Matt Rogers follows the tradition of Matthew Reilly with combat-centered action tales, and “Contracts” is a solid, if unassuming story set on the standard route to Everest. The second of a new series combining previously separate heroes, Jason King and Matt Slater (one is bigger, one is faster), the story revolves around the kidnapping of an American teenage girl, daughter of a senior secret service official. Battle after battle ensues, with the perils of high altitude sickness a further obstacle. Rogers choreographs the violence well but for me, little made the two nigh-superheroes stand out above the scrum of many similar Ethan Hunts in a crowded marketplace. Entertaining, nonetheless.

The cunning interloper … an entire thriller sub-genre has developed around the idea of someone worming their way into the lives of innocents, with deadly aims. Perhaps Killing Eve’s Villanelle is the ultimate example (except she infiltrates with ease again and again and again). “Deserve to Die” is an entertaining entrant into this field, with gorgeous Tamara entering the world of designer Dom and his author wife Stacey and their two children. Miranda Rijks writes with great confidence, her dialogue especially admirable, and the mechanics of Tamara’s misdeeds are plotted with finesse. The characters are credible if a trifle shallow, so that “Deserve to Die” makes for a fine one-sitting read that underplays the implicit tension. A satisfying meal without being a wonderful night out.

The wondrous, hard-sci-fi worlds of Neal Stephenson crown him as the king of futurism. No one can match his entertaining, minutely imagined unravelling of fascinating futures. In “Fall: or, Dodge in Hell,” Dodge Forthrast, the super-smart, super-rich games developer at the heart of near-future techno-thriller “Reamde,” dies and is accorded a second existence in virtual reality. Stephenson, of course, delves into the very notions of cryonics and virtual reality with depth that is in itself fascinating, and he is a brilliant plotter who also gets under the skin of his numerous characters. This is a typical hefty book (nearly 900 pages) that mostly intrigues and entrances. If you love to witness a fantasy world – in this case the virtuality reality Bitworld in which Dodge emerges – unfurl in kaleidoscopic cacophony, this book will delight. And Stephenson loves to puzzle out the thematic possibilities of his futures. But for all the pleasures of “Fall: or, Dodge in Hell,” two aspects detract. Once upon a time, back with “Snowcrash,” Stephenson wrote with exuberant style. No longer: his late-career discursive style, while never shallow, is now almost pedestrian. And Bitworld, I’m sorry to say, quickly becomes numbingly tedious. No one is like Neal Stephenson and for that reason alone, I commend this book to readers, but there’s a world of pity in me that he doesn’t curb his excesses and focus more on the on-page experience.

An idiosyncratic, involving mystery, “Heaven, My Home” is the second outing for African-American Texas Ranger Darren Matthews. Battling his own recent murky past, he sets out to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a white boy, son of a jailed Aryan Brotherhood thug. Locke’s tricky plot often seems a sidelight to Darren’s quest, the fraught racial politics everywhere, and wonderful descriptions of Marion County, but I raced through the book, quite caught up in it. Authorial pacing ebbs and flows, and the writing style feels unusual. All in all, a sense of dislocation accompanied my reading but I can recommend the book to lovers of procedural mysteries.

2019 has been a year of benefitting from a number of sage books on focusing and dealing with modern information overload. “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” is a welcome addition to this congo line. Employing a smooth, helpful prose style and a comprehensive, logical structure, Nir Eyland addresses first the roots of distractibility, highlighting the new triggers of social media and email, before sensibly recommending internal analysis, trigger research, and time blocking as the fundamental steps in taking time back from our distractions. He then offers plenty of useful ways of “hacking back” time, including two that intrigued me: finding online work stint buddies and setting out challenging self-pacts. If you’ve known for ages that something is wrong with how you spend your time, this is the book for you.