The Current by Tim Johnston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The Current is about a “closed” investigation and a current one. They both involve at least 1 woman dying in a river under suspicious circumstances. There are cops, lovers, and family dynamics interspersed amongst the slow march towards a resolution. It starts off with a college road trip back to Minnesota with Caroline and Audrey, who I would say is the main character. This trip felt relatable as I have made many college road trips before. A strong supporting character is Gordon, a father, who is just getting by day by day. A majority of the story takes place in Minnesota, which is where I am from, or Iowa. It was cool to have that relation to a major location and I could connect when the sights and smells of the state were described. There are several tangents that are explored but the investigation takes a backseat to the description of the characters’ lives.
I would not say that this is a heart-pounding thriller or even a regular thriller. It is not a murder mystery or cop procedural. I am not sure how I would classify this book. Tim Johnston is the author and one thing I think he is good at is painting a vivid and unique picture of what is going on. On the road trip, he describes moving “out of cotton country into wheat and then into corn”, which one can trace on a map in their mind. Or describing someone as smelling of “the outdoors, but an outdoors that was much later in the day and colder”. He had some beautiful language and could be quite eloquent but there were many things that annoyed me about this book. One set of grievances was the way it was written. There were plenty of run-on sentences and missing punctuation, mostly when relaying conversations. It could be a technique that he utilized but it didn’t work for me. There was a high percentage of chapters that took me several paragraphs to understand what was happening, who was being talked about, or even when it was taking place. The author used generic pronouns and set no signposts to help guide the reader. He seemed to be obfuscating on purpose. There are many words that I would use to describe his writing style including murky, convoluted, and elusive, to name a few. Another grievance was the lack of urgency or excitement at any point. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was boring, but I was thinking, just get on with it a lot of the time. In general, it was a lot of work to read this book. You had to read every single sentence closely and this just wasn’t something I was expecting or looking for at this time. I was disappointed. To use another analogy, it was like wading through molasses. The first spike of intrigue was over halfway through and then 4o pages from the end I felt a smidgen of tension but even then, it was like wading through warmed up molasses. It also is not wrapped up in a clearly defined bow. Read Reykjavik: A Crime Story or even reread Stieg Larsson instead.
Affiliate Link For Reykjavik:
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Tag: slow
Bored To Death and Other Queer, Geeky Ways To Die
Board to Death by C.J. Connor
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is about 30-year-old guy who chooses to come back to Utah and help run a board game shop for his father as his father was diagnosed with a medical issue. He is gay and recently divorced. A shop owner neighbor comes into his life as a murder takes place on his doorstep. The murder seems to revolve around an original game that predates Monopoly. There is a small amount of romance and an even smaller amount of mystery. I am not sure how to classify this one. I cannot find a genre to place it in. The book dips it’s toe into a few different classification pools but never takes the plunge. The main character, Ben, annoyed me slightly. I am not a fan of the meek, easily scared, or pitiful literary trope and unfortunately Ben fits this mold. Granted, it is not as strong with him as other characters, but it still applies. There were two quotes that I did enjoy though. “I loved attempting to read Dune. It was so much easier to accomplish than actually finishing it.” I relate as I have attempted several times to get more than 50 pages into that novel. The other I thought was funny and unique was “I’d had a bowl of Thin Mints doused in milk for breakfast, for goodness sakes. You can’t ethically expose the world to yourself when you are in that state of mind.” Sadly, two good quotes do not a good novel make. Ben was not a good sleuth (he just started giving all his own information away at one point) and it felt that he had no impact on moving the story along. I can’t recall of anything he did by himself. It was bland but a very easy read. I did like that it had queer elements though. You can skip Board to Death and play Solitaire instead.
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