Tag Archives: mystery

Death Masks

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The awesome thing about reading a Dresden Files book is that I’m guaranteed it will be good, between the quality of the earlier entries in the series and the universal acclaim it has received among my friends who have read them. Plus, reading them spread out like this means I’ll still have new ones ahead of me for at least months, if not years. The downside is that it’s really hard to convince myself to read something else instead once I’m done with one. Like now!

Death Masks follows Harry Dresden[1] as he fights a new battle in the war between the White Council (of wizards, which Harry is one; but you probably knew that) and the Red Court (of vampires, which you may also have known, but not as certainly), a war that some on each side would claim he is single-handedly responsible for starting, himself included. But since that’s not enough action for one book, he also needs to track down the Shroud of Turin[2], wage war against some arch-demons in pursuit of the apocalypse, and sort out his relationship with Susan, former paranormal reporter and current semi-vampire. Plus, quips, a little bit of the inevitable-for-the-setting sexy, and slathered chunks of extreme danger! Read it now! Unless you need to read the earlier ones first, or something.

[1] So, the Dresden Files are among my favorite books, and the Dresden Dolls are among my favorite music. What is it about that little bombed-out German town that holds such massive appeal?
[2] Yes, that Shroud of Turin.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

51Q3J1TK9TLSo there’s this guy, Dexter, right? And he’s a CSI guy in Miami, analyzing blood spatter patterns to determine facts about murders. And he has a TV show, which I have watched two seasons of now, and which first season was based on a book that I have recently read. The thing about Dexter is, his off-hours job is to be a serial killer. Many people might find that to be distasteful reading material, but Dexter, see, he’s not like other serial killers.

As the first season of the show and Darkly Dreaming Dexter explain (in very similar, but eventually divergent, ways), Dexter is different from other serial killers. He was adopted by a cop who saw the darkness inside the growing boy, understood what it was, and chose to channel it in constructive ways rather than doom him to a lusterless existence in the mental health system. Dexter has a code that he follows, in which he only murders people who are themselves killers, and he only acts when he is completely certain of their guilt. And that life has worked out pretty well for him: he’s able to fake charm while making use of extensive wit, maintaining shams of relationships with co-workers, his sister, and a girlfriend; and every few months, he strikes again. All that is about to change, however, with the appearance of a new serial killer in Miami, one to whom Dexter feels a disturbingly close bond. (When the guy who stalks around murdering people, even really bad people, is disturbed? That can’t be good.)

What makes the Dexter series stand out from the stacks of murder mystery books and shows out there isn’t that he’s a serial killer himself. Well, okay, that does make him stand out, but what makes him appealing to me is how very funny he is. And the way he views people, and views himself as a separate species from them. What could have been a weakness of the show in copying so closely from the book feels more like a strength to me: that they managed to capture the First Person Bemused viewpoint Dexter brought to my reading experience. In any event, very good book, and slim enough to easily read much more quickly than the show could be watched. But if anything, I’d recommend doing both.

Déjà Dead

0671011367Something like a year ago, I was consistently trolling the mystery section of my various Half-Price Books in search of the Dexter books, because of how that show is so very, very good. And it occurred to me, hey, why not look for the Bones books, too? Bones, see, is this show on Fox starring TV’s Angel as well as a forensic anthropologist, and together they fight crime in Washington D.C.! Except, despite how ironically I’m painting the picture, it really is awesome, and mostly because of the character of Temperance Brennan and her inability to put up with people being all needlessly human. Plus, the show is really funny, and rarely gets bogged down in CSI-style self-congratulatory evidence analysis. Plus plus, anthropology is one of my secret interests. Anyway, said show was based on this series of books, right? And that’s what I was looking for, and I found some, and now you know!

What you don’t know is that I managed to pry myself away from Harry Dresden long enough to fulfill my long-standing rule against consecutive books and read Déjà Dead this week. In thumbnail, Dr. Brennan uses her skill at analyzing bones as well as some natural investigative talent to catch a serial killer, much as you’d expect as a fan of the show. (Which surely you are.) But in the details… well, there’s Brennan, who is at least pretty close to the one on TV, but she lives in Montreal and mostly hangs out with French police who are not in any way reminiscent of vampires. Plus, the research team part is entirely missing. Plus, lots and lots of French. So that took some period of adjustment, but after a few dozen pages I started pretending that these books are being written by TV’s Bones (as she is canonically known to do), and then it became a lot easier to adjust to, even down to maybe trying to pick out some of the character-analogs from the show (as they are canonically known to do; try to find themselves as characters in Bones’ books, I mean.)

Upshot: extremely well-written thriller without too much technobabble, no danger of anyone starting up a vampire-werewolf love triangle (this is a bigger problem with modern fiction than you might expect), and more than one engaging character. I was starting to get annoyed by the way that she’d keep going off by herself into danger for no obviously good reason, but even that was handled fairly plausibly, and I think it will be less of a concern in future books.

Hotel Dusk: Room 215

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I’m definitely liking the DS. It’s eminently portable, being pocket-sized even in jeans (if admittedly only just in that circumstance), yet it has good enough graphics to look really nice in the amount of screen real estate available. Plus, there are a lot of fun small games to play on it. It’s no wonder it’s selling so well, really. I played such a game in various bits of free time over the last few weeks. Hotel Dusk tells the story of a down and out ex-cop consumed by his quest for answers about the fateful day when he shot his turncoat partner. In his day job as a door-to-door salesman, he washes up at a shabby hotel in Los Angeles which holds all of the answers he seeks, and the answers for a few other people besides.

It’s a fun game, but having reached the end of it, I’m left with the conclusion that the best way to describe it is ‘not enough’. The side characters wandering the hotel (with the notable exceptions of bellhop with a criminal past Louie and little girl without a mother Melissa) just aren’t quite interesting or entertaining enough. Their stories don’t have quite enough depth, especially chick with a missing sister and who may or may not be a pre-Maxim model Iris and maid who is estranged from her son Rosa. The solved mystery, though itself reasonably compelling, doesn’t lead to an entirely satisfactory conclusion. The leaps of logic that you are required to make (and which sometimes can result in the game ending upon failure) waver between way too easy and choosing blindly. The puzzles to be solved are often fun, but sometimes result in frustration if you’re trying to solve them too early or if you’re trying to do the right thing but in the wrong way. (I maintain that a flathead screwdriver would be an easy tool to use to fix a partially unspooled cassette.)

That said, most of my complaints didn’t materialize until right at the end, when so much had seemed undone. The noir thing was pretty cool, and like I said, there were certainly genuinely compelling characters. And I liked the book aspect of it. There was a lot more reading than playing, but with a better story and better characters, I would be down with that. And the part where you hold the DS in book orientation and look back and forth as the characters speak and react to each other? That was just cool. Not cool enough to make up for the flaws in the game, but definitely cool enough to play through the next DS novel that comes out. It occurs to me that we are officially one step closer to the holodeck.

The Number 23

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Numerology is kind of cool, I guess. It’s like astrology or fundamental Christianity in that you can grab the parts that you think fit with your life and run with them, and ignore the parts that appear to be irrelevant. Or even better, you can go in for that one Jewish Kabbalah group and get the best of two worlds! None of which is particularly relevant to my having seen The Number 23, except for the part where it’s all numerological its own self. And particularly with 23, since it’s been popularized via such well-known groups as the Illuminati and the Discordians and so forth.

The movie, of course, takes little note of any of this. Except the numerology, I mean, because it’s all about that. So Jim Carrey gets this book, and notices strange parallels with his own life, just off enough that it’s not literally a retelling of his childhood. And as soon as the main character takes note of the frequent occurrences of 23 happening all around him, Jim Carrey starts noticing the same things in his own life. Letters in names adding up to 23, the number appearing in odd places, birth dates, social security numbers, pretty much everything. (And, fun for the audience, it crops up in all kinds of places that he doesn’t notice even though the camera does.) Unfortunately, the number eventually drives the book guy to kill, which sets off Carrey’s paranoia about what he might do in his real life. And then he discovers a real murder which, if it’s possible to believe any of the thoughts bubbling around in his mind, can easily be attributed to the man who wrote the book.

The mystery part is pretty good, the filming of the book’s story is a delight to behold, and for the rest, any of the rough patches in believability or dialogue are smoothed over by the eternal quest for more references to 23 scattered across the filmscape. No rough acting patches that I can point to; I was pretty happy with everyone. I got to have a treasure hunt and laugh frequently, which gives it a leg up on most movies I see. (The treasure hunt part does, I mean.)

Saw

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Having seen Saw II, I decided that it was time to… watch… Saw. And I have to say I liked it. I claimed a few weeks ago that a scene in the sequel ruined the original. As it happens, that was not true. So, I still got even to enjoy the ongoing plot as it unfolded, although it turned out there was a whole different issue where the reveal of the bad guy was a major plot element, and I already knew that part. Still, not so bad on the whole.

Saw is the tale of two men chained on opposite sides of the room, how they got there, and what they have to do to get out. (If you think a saw will be involved, you just might be surprised! But probably not.) As good as it was (and I’m willing to proclaim any future sequels must-see for horror fans; finally, some good footage is getting put in film cans instead of direct-to videos), it could have been an order of magnitude better if they’d managed to tell the same basic story and keep all of the action in that room. Tension, cat-and-mouseness, substantial gore, it was all there. Luckily, the outside scenes mostly involved Danny Glover, who seemed to know even if he didn’t admit it that he is definitely getting too old for this shit, so the remainder of the movie was pretty well saved too.

National Treasure

I drive. A lot. Also, I hate driving. This makes for hours per month of unpleasantness, and leads me to spend too much money on pleasant cars that improve the experience, and it leads me on fruitless searches for good radio stations, books on CD, and such. At least it used to, but now I’ve found enough good talk radio to keep me in business. Music is lame about 75% of the time, and I love a good discussion, so it was a perfect match for me, and now I find the majority of my driving accompanied by someone to argue with, even if they can’t hear my side. Hey, it’s enough to keep me awake and lively, so I’ll take it.

Which is how I found myself winning a contest on my way home after Thanksgiving, picking up the prize on Monday morning, and strolling into the theater to see National Treasure on Monday afternoon. (The other alternatives were Ocean’s Twelve, which I very much want to see, and Blade: Trinity, which I’m sure I will see at some point, if only to determine if it was a bigger techno nightmare than its sequel predecessor, but this was basically free, so a-Cage-in’ I did go.)

I haven’t seen a lot of CSI, but I’ve seen enough to know that Jerry Bruckheimer is enamored of it. I can say this with great certainty because the first third of the film was chock full of the trademark CSI speculative flashes back and forward, while l’il Nicky Cage learns to be a treasure hunter and follow those clues all over the northeastern US. Unfortunately, he’s being hounded by one-time partner Sean Bean, who wants the treasure for himself. Presumedly because he heard it contains the Ring of Power.

Luckily, our plucky everyman-with-sad-eyes hero is accompanied by WiseCracking Cowardly Sidekick and Blonde Love Interest Who Is A Strong Woman, Really, But Sometimes Just Wants/Needs To Be Rescued. All the guns and money in the world can’t stand up to a trio like that, now can they? I assume they had names, but I honestly can’t remember what they are, especially since my head is full of the lead treasure hunter being named Benjamin Franklin.

So, typical Bruckheimer flick, with the paper-thin characters, vaguely unplausible premise, and lots of cool visual scenes. If that kind of thing makes you hate Hollywood for being so carbon-copied-crappy, then this is exactly what you’re talking about. If you enjoy watching people run around being shot at, blown up, or actioned in other various ways, well, it’s Bruckheimer, and I think we all know he delivers. If you wonder why it came out in November instead of late June, then you’re just like me.

To the movie’s credit, there even is a bit of a mystery. Sure, it’s impossible to doubt that Cage will solve all the clues and elude the bad guys, but is there really a treasure at all? And is it being guarded by horrifying Egyptian (or possibly Bavarian) jackals, golems, spirits, and pit traps? For that, you’ll have to actually watch it.

Cry No More

I got a book from my grandmother a few months ago, about a lady whose kid was stolen from her arms in Mexico, so she devoted her life to searching for missing kids / people. It’s all very predictable, in that you know basically what will happen and who the heartbroken lady will end up with within the first 30 pages. The rest is an exercise in drama!, with doses of mildly effective misdirection and a few helpings of romance novel porn to keep the attention. The story isn’t too bad, but unfortunately changes focus completely right at the end, wrapping up the mystery as neatly as a bow with too much haste and getting on to the emotional consequences.

The one thing I really don’t understand is the title, Cry No More, which seems to have no dramatic or particularly thematic connection with the rest of the story. (Well, okay, it might have a thematic connection with the last 30 pages or so, but since that part has no connection with what came before it, it’s hard for me to count that.)

So, it sat on my reading shelf for a while, as I plowed through a doorstop and a Pratchett and a I’d-verify-what-else-but-I’m-typing-this-in-notepad-due-to-no-real-internet-from-here. I’d planned to snag it after the first Pratchett, but I got in a hurry packing to get out of town early a few weekends ago, what with said grandmother being in the hospital, so I forgot it and ended up reading more Pratchett, as that was what was in the trunk. Which sucked, because she asked me if I had yet, and I had to sound like I was making up some lame excuse to placate her.

It’s funny, the things we feel guilty about. For not knowing she had died until the nurses came, even though I was holding her hand. Whether I read a book at request, or at least finished it in time to talk to her about it. And I genuinely wish I could, too, not just for the rose-tinted, shiny vision of some earnest conversation that would have made her happy. I really am curious what she wanted me to get out of it. I’m sure it wasn’t the porn, but I’m sure of little else. (I’m seriously here. There was a substantial amount of explicit hardening and penetrating going on. Very strange, even from a lady who thought Grand Theft Auto 3 was the funniest game she’d ever seen.) Now I won’t really ever know for sure, and that sucks.

I guess it’s strange that my symbol of loss for my grandmother, the one thing that I know I won’t ever know now, but I could have known if I’d tried harder, is about a book we both read. I’m glad that’s what it is, though, too, because it will remind me that we were closer in very fundamental ways than I would usually describe us as being. And that’s comforting to me.