Tony Hillerman reprise
Tony Hillerman's Navajo mystery novels are one of the eleven different series that I'm trying to keep up with. I read a couple of them before I got married, and Bernadette had several in her library, and for some reason I managed to skip around and ... well, I'm not entirely sure which ones I've read and which I haven't. Solution? I planned to start at the earliest point I was sure of, read the first two chapters of each title, and skip the book if I recognized it. Now I'd already read Listening Woman but I thought I'd refresh my memory as to the plot by reading those first two chapters. And then I'd move to the next book.
Well, so much for that plan. At the end of two chapters I remembered exactly what I remembered before I started, the bank-robbery-and-missing-helicopter thread, and the blind woman who walks through a murder scene. But the rest of the story? Nothing.
Which reminds me of the problem with most of the Agatha Christie novels, being that they are enjoyable while you read them, but one week later you've forgotten the plot. And one year later you can't be sure you even read the dang thing. (Ogden Nash has a poem about retiring to a desert island with just one book, an Agatha Christie, because you could just keep rereading it...)
So the "hook" of the book works really well, because I just decided to reread it despite my sure and certain knowledge that I'd read it before. And yes, it was entertaining for the most part, and then when I came to the last quarter I remembered that this was one of the Hillermans that display his main writing flaw--"over the top" elements. In half of his books he puts too much strain on the reader's credulity, and a police procedural starts turning in the direction of 007. No spoilers, but this thing ends with too much shooting and things getting all blowed up. It spoils the tone.
But not enough to keep me from picking up the next one.
CBsIP: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, Ross E. Dunn
A History of Warfare, John Keegan