W00t! More Garret P.I. ebooks to enjoy.
Glen Cook is one of my favorite authors. His Black Company series is an outstanding take on the entire fantasy genre with interesting characters, savage magic, and weird settings all melded together with common sounding names that no one would ever use for locations or people. Yet it works wonderfully.
His second series is a fantasy spin on the entire hard-boiled detective novels that involve an odd partnership solving the mystery posed in the story. In this case, like the housebound Nero Wolfe and his gumshoe partner Archie Goodwin, we have the Dead Man, an alien who has died and yet refuses to leave his body, and Garrett, the walking magnet for hardcases to beat on.
By chance I did a search and found not one, but two new Garrett books. How I missed seeing them before I have no idea, but I downloaded them as quick as I could and settled in to devour their contents. They included the latest in the series:
Things move remarkable fast and dreadfully slow in both books. In relationships Garrett finally gets a bit of a handle on Tinnie, his eternal on-again, off-again girlfriend, then becomes involved with a Furious Tide of Light, a hill magician of immense power and charm. There are just so many characters now populating the series and Cook seems to feel that he has to employ every damn one of them in each book. It makes for some messy plots with lots of side-drama and attitude that once was fun to read when the groups were manageable, but now threaten to topple the story into a series of side plots and distracting complications.
Likewise the number of story lines Cook juggles to keep everything moving along. I don’t need to get updates on every long-term story previously explored in a book. A brief mention would do me fine. Cook seems to feel he needs to extend them in each subsequent book and with so many its just plain confusing sometimes.
Still, the Dead Man was used a bit, so things aren’t all bad, I just wish he would narrow the focus a bit, bring in the off stage characters as necessary and not just have them appear because someone somewhere likes to know they’re still around.
I’m crossing my fingers that the next one can return a bit to a simpler story dealing with one main issue and let some of the others simmer until they can be dealt with in future books.
