For those of you keeping track, it’s been awhile since I posted. And that’s because I let myself read Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls trilogy (Broken Promise, Far From True, The Twenty-Three). Guys. None of them are that good. (If you were I. you’d launch into a thing about how great Tana French is and how she’s the only mystery writer you should read, but I like to give new mysteries a ride).
Why then, why did I persist? Inertia? Guilt because I’d taken all three from the ‘take a book leave a book’ shelf at the local coffee shop and the barrista had given me the side eye for taking three books and leaving none? Deep moral failing? I don’t know. But I did.
They’re just not all that captivating, the detective isn’t endearing, the mysteries themselves don’t feel like there’s too much at stake (even when the town’s water supply is poisoned you’re sort of like shrug).
So… skip, pass, move on. And deep apologies for wasting so much of my own time. Like it was so bad I just read My Name is Lucy Barton and only realized in the last twenty pages that I’d already read it. Like I needed some kind of palate cleanse… Anyway.
Literary Vice 