Pier 70 was a good place for a murder.

[oddmonster]

Cry Baby by Gloria White:

"Flooded the engine," Blackie announced when the cop strolled up to the side of the car. He was a sturdy old-timer with gray hair and a pot belly. I'd never seen Blackie do jovial before, especially with a cop, but he'd called it right and did it well. It worked for the cop. It was like watching two grizzly bears bond.

Comments

[little_tristan]

Wow. I didn't know series like these actually ended. I thought they just went on until the author died or ran out of letters or something. Just out of curiosity, do you favor keeping the series going even if the quality drops, or seeing a beloved character end on a high note?

[oddmonster]

Wow, that's a really great question. I'm sitting here trying to think of series which have in fact gone on and on and on and on, well past their sell-by date.

Some critics say that's true for poor old VI Warshawski, but I disagree. Paretsky made the slightly controversial decision to have VI age in real-time, as in each book that came out every two years would find VI two years older. I love that. VI is older and crotchety and I love the way in which she responds in an age-appropriate manner to current events, like in Body Work, the war in Iraq and problems facing Gulf War vets

[little_tristan]

Fascinating. It sounds like I'd hate Hannah, too, even if I was all about the mystery. What I'm getting from this is that they need to stop whenever they start to suck, which Ronnie never did.

Where does Serge Storm land on the scale? Or is he too much another genre?

[oddmonster]

Serge is a great example, although I fear I might be biased, as several of the books in his series qualify, for me, as comfort reading.

I think I've read all of them save the very newest, The Riptide Ultra-Glide. I own all but one and have read them all multiple times. I don't feel like he's aging at all, but then again he entered his series being like 50 but with this kind of timeless persona. I wish I could say that it beggars belief that a schizophrenic super-genius with a history fetish going off his meds and killing this shit out of people would get old but uh, it hasn't. At all.

Serge's fans, as far as I can tell, though, fall into two camps: love him or hate him. So if you hate him, you hate him from book 1. Love him, you're like, these books are still grand, 15 books in (Riptide is #16).

Did you ever get tired of Anne of GG? Did she ever age out of her series or get otherwise tiresome?