Wild Card
In comparing reading notes, just shorthand verbal cues, the question within a certain circle of friends, “Read the new one yet?” While that tends to be the question, there’s a gentle guilty pleasure. It’s a well-bound book, good paper, bold artworks, author’s name is gold-embossed on the first editions, a proud product of the publisher’s process. Then, each time, from the first page, there’s a sparse, workman-like prose, with a cast of characters spanning 100s, or so it seems.
Tension and suspense built quicker, usually there are a few pages to get comfortably lulled to a peaceful point. This one jumped in, headfirst.
Wild Card
If we’ve been following, then this picks up where the last novel left off, wherein Stone left the US with a young, attractive female novelist under his wing, for both protection and mutual recreations, according to the text.
Always an adventure. The character has a lot of sex. Must be fiction.
Tends to be an addictive pursuit for some of my close reading friends. Enjoyable, with whip-smart, tautly drawn plot and story. I gave up fighting with — trying to rail against — the brand-name bon-vivant material and got roped into the stories.
Redoubtable bad guys. Characters that are drawn out with a novelist’s eye toward the correct balance of description and exposition.
This one was good the last page, kept me up late, on a school night.