REVIEWS

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects, Broadway Books, 20

2006  reviewed by WF Pray, whose books all have well-defined plots.

Let me say first that Gillian Flynn is an incredibly talented writer. She gives every appearance of being endowed with a natural gift for spinning a yarn and is wordsmith enough to deliver some fine writing. Flynn herself admits that she had scads of assistance and encouragement; however, none of this boosting would have meant a thing had Flynn not possessed the inner artist. Her writing skill is much to be admired.

Having said that, together with the realization that Sharp Objects is not recognized as her best work, the vessel of Sharp Objects is kept from failure by Flynn’s masterful writing. Imagine a story without a single sympathetic character, where all of the actors dislike each other, intensely, and where the principal is a distressingly pathetic and self-pitting alcoholic lacking a single redeeming attribute. The plot (to be discussed later) is rather awkwardly woven in and out of a psychological sketch representing a horribly disturbed family. Maybe Dostoyevsky could have kept this tragedy from rolling into farce, but Flynn either lacks the depth or refused to dive deep enough to save it.

You may purchase the book thinking that you are getting a mystery. This is not a mystery story. If it were, nearly all the following criticisms could be forgiven. This is a story of a sick family (the Preakers), locked in a piteous, destructive psychotic embrace. The mystery, such as it is, acts only to frame the melodrama – and is more farce than tragic.

The mystery plot is a bit awkward and somewhat hackneyed: Struggling reporter (Camille Preaker) goes to his hometown to cover the murders of several children, who have their teeth removed to gin up the insane angle. As the real plot concerning Camille’s lunatic family takes over, the murders only pop-up now and again to remind the reader that the book is supposed to be about a serial killer.

Camille Preaker, our schizophrenic and self-mutilating reporter, spends nearly all of her time driving around boozy and drinking vodka from a bottle and lamenting her disassociated relationship with her nutty mother and sister – and another sister who is dead. The solution to the serial murders comes in the last few pages. It is supposed to be a surprise ending so I won’t give it away, except to say that through a process of elimination you’ll know the bad guy(s) about halfway through the book. After you suspect the source of the villainy, the balance of the ‘mystery,’ in spite of the good writing, you must drag yourself through.

While reading, I often gritted my teeth wishing that this talented writer had either written a mystery or a psychological drama in stead of this jumbled concoction where each; the mystery and the emotional drama, threatened to overwhelm the other, leaving neither satisfied. At the end of the day, I feel certain that readers with a keen interest in psychological drama will be just fine with Sharp Objects and will find the mystery an annoying interruption.

At this point, and before I render any final judgment, I feel obliged to move on to Gone Girl, Flynn’s much acclaimed work. Perhaps there, the plot may be more balanced.

The Girl in the Spider Web by David Lagercrantz

Reviewed by WF Pray, author of A Dozen Miles of Unpaved Road and Terminal Cure

Flushing out the plot line is more difficult that one might expect. This is a complicated novel and one not tightly wrapped.

The Plot: An ace computer scientist is murdered. His autistic son can draw a picture of the killer. The killer(s) wants to eliminate the autistic boy. The anti-hero, Lisbeth Salander steps in to protect the child. This tangles her up with the Spider Society – Russian criminals who are busy hacking the NSA – and this pits her against the leader of the Society, her own twin sister, Camilla, who has it in for Lisbeth. Mikael Blomkvist enters to help Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth and the boy race toward a crescendo of violence at the climax, with Salander and the boy escaping. By the ending, Lisbeth Salander has morphed something of a superhero; a woman described as weighing around 100 lbs taking down and beating up professional mercenaries. At times, the superhero bit becomes a bit much. The final dozen pages are something of an epilogue, spent in trying to tidy up the loose ends. However, given the complexity of the plot’s presentation, and all the sidebars, the effort is only marginally successful. I would say, at the end of the day, if you are a lazy reader, this is probably not the book for you. 

Offhand Details: The first thing to note is that David Lagercrantz is taking over the Lisbeth Salander series from the deceased Stieg Larsson. The fact that Lagecrantrz is a different writer is apparent from the beginning. This does not make The Girls in the Spider’s Web a bad book; Lagecrantrz is a competent, professional writer. However, this book is far more complicated than the Larsson books. 

Within the first few pages it is obvious that reading the previous books in the series is strongly advised. A lot of info quickly comes your way. Without previous understanding it is occasionally difficult to follow. Then too, Lagecrantz throws a blizzard of names at you which he does little to individualize. For example, the anti-hero, Lisbeth Salander, has a twin sister (Camelia) who has several aliases, which only adds to the confusion. Consequently, at times the reader will experience a certain amount of congestion as a crowd of underdeveloped characters move across the page; I want to stress that this is not typical, but it does occasionally led to several passages where increased focus is required to follow the story line. 

Somewhere around page 350 fatigue sets in. There was a point where I actually had to go to Wikipedia to review the book’s plot line. I would say that part of the problem is the great number of characters in the novel. At the very beginning, Lagecrantrz provides a list of 23 characters found in the first three books. To that list add at least 5 to 8 more characters he will introduce. This sheer top-heavy number of characters occasionally makes the novel an effort to follow. This is compounded by the author’s extensive use of pronouns rather than proper names; the overuse of “he’s” and she’s” makes losing track of the characters a very easy thing to do. There are times when there are several pages of running dialogue, with sparse identification of the speakers. It gets downright irritating.

Will I pick up another in the Lagecrantrz series? Probably not. It would only cause me to miss Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander all the more.


The Disappeared (a Joe Pickett book) by CJ Box 

Review by WF Pray, author of A Dozen Miles of Unpaved Road and Terminal Cure

The Disappeared is the tale of a missing English businesswoman, the mysterious burning of bodies in a lumber mill’s furnace, and a governor’s political shenanigans surrounding a puzzling green energy project; these are some of the plot features that propel this story forward. I selected the CJ Box, Joe Pickett book, The Disappeared, largely at random, hoping that it would be a fair sample of the author’s extensive Joe Pickett series.

I liked the story line and I liked the writing. The story of The Disappeared is largely carried by the narrative of the hero, Joe Pickett, Wyoming Game Warden; there is just enough complexity in the tale of a missing British businesswoman, numerous mystifying cremations, and corrupt politicians, to titillate your interest, but not enough to get you lost in the weeds. There’s not a lot of fat in this novel, but where the story line does begin to wander out of frame the skimming is quick and easy. The Disappeared is not a page turner, but it is smooth, easy reading by an author with solid writing credentials and a good story to tell.

Be advised, however, that like most mass marketed novels, The Disappeared is formulaic. Think back to the Robert Parker’s Spencer series about the Boston Detective with unorthodox methods. Only instead of Spencer we have Joe Pickett, and Spencer’s sidekick, Hawk, becomes Joe’s sidekick, Nate, and Sheridan (Joe’s daughter) as Spencer’s girlfriend, Susan Silverman---except that daughter Sheridan gets involved in the plot in ways far deeper than girlfriend Susan ever did. While the formula is noticeable it is not in the least distracting. In fact, there is not much to distract the reader from an unhurried, developing plot. Except for a few romantic scenes between the daughter Sheridan and a ranch hand named Lance, which does brush up against campy, yet never quite gets there, there are few speed bumps that get in the way of the investigation, e.g., random, undeveloped characters that suddenly pop-up to bridge a gap in the plot line; evidence and records dropped from the story line for unexplained reasons, etc. While these glitches are rare, the use of Nate – Joe’s sidekick – as a knuckle dragging thug that allows Joe to keep his hands clean is high camp and does seriously strain credulity. Even taken all together, and in a 400 page book, these are minor hiccups. Aside from these diversions and a couple of awkward coincidences, the threads of the plot run smoothly, but unfortunately toward a confused ending.

There are several unrelated plot developments running through the story of The Disappeared. They are, as we get to the end, not only insignificantly related to each other, but do tend to draw the energy from each other. It must also be noted that none of these threads reach an independent satisfactory conclusion. The ending of The Disappeared ran from awkwardly confusing to weird. In fact, so little was explained that the ending pushed the rest of the storylines in the direction of a nothing burger. This seems a little harsh and may not be any fault of the author. I honestly had the feeling that the publisher objected to the original ending and demanded changes from Box. Every published author has had this experience. Consequently, Box might have had to cobble together a different ending that satisfied the desires of the publisher. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the ending as length is an issue here, and then too I don’t want to completely give away the twist at the end. And there was a twist – in fact there were several that merged in the final pages– but again, none of these resolved independently in an entirely satisfactory way.


Will I pick up a Joe Pickett novel again? Most likely I will. I enjoyed The Disappeared and recommend giving it a read. Despite my small criticisms, this was a fun, fast read. But I will read Box again with the clear understanding that while Box offers good clean, escapist fun, the formula driven plot will leave limited room for originality. If this turns out to be true, this could lead to quickly burning out the Joe Pickett series long before a majority of the books have been read. That would be unfortunate for a unique writer in the field of thriller mysteries.