Oh, I do book recommendations too...

...and book disses.  As much as I'd like to just talk about awesome gear I own, I don't own so much stuff that I can drive frequent blog postings.  At some point in the not too distant future, I'll be reduced to extolling the certain merits of my brand of Chapstick (It's Burt's Bees if you must know).  But today, middlebrow book reviews.

Don't I appear enthralled

Ted Bell's Phantom seemed like something that would be exactly my kind of escapist fun.  A mean, it says right on the back, "Bond, Eat your heart out... There's a new spy in town."  Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat less thrilling.  It's trivial, sort of boring, and filled with weird inconsistencies.  Here's an example.

"Pablo strode into the room, and brushed the dust of the trail with his hat.  Esmarelda's eyes met his and her spine tingled as she looked at him.  She licked her lips as .... Wait.  That's totally the wrong book.

My bad. The Book: Phantom, by Ted Bell.  The Setting: Palo Alto California.   "A trail snaked through the redwoods that led to an overlook where you could see the Pacific on a clear night.  It wasn't clear..."

Where are the damn redwoods.

Here is a picture of El Camino Real in Palo Alto.  Now, you can say, that I'm picking nits, but the fact of the matter, he set his scene in suburbia, and Then turned it into Mt. Mckinley.  Beyond that, the protagonists main ally is uber-mensch and all around bear slayer Vladimir Putin.  In other words, it's pretty much like later books by Tom Clancy without the detailed research.  I hated it so much I bought two more by the same author.  DoH.!

Now, on the other hand, There is Jack Reacher.  These are great escapist novels, written by Lee Child.  They are all fast reads.  There is a whole mess of them.  I truly don't want to spoil the pleasure, but I'll link to amazon here, and let you get started.  I've seen them listed in chronological order, or in the order that they were published.  I don't think it matters a lot.

To be fair, the later ones are a faded product, but just slightly, and there are 17 of them.  And frankly, I enjoyed them a lot more than even the Clive Cussler books I enjoyed so much in my child hood. Basically, the guy is a brilliant investigator, who also happens to be 6'4 230, so on the rare occasion he can't sleuth it out, he beats the truth out of ya.  And he drinks lots of black coffee.  Classic.

It's a recommendation, not a review.  The link to Amazon has a ton of reviews.  I hope you enjoy it.

Morrison Luke Smith