"The new Dan Brown!" claim excited fans, who love Stieg Larsson's brand of page-turning, investigative excitement, and who relish the sight of the same book being read by so many people.
"The new Dan Brown," sigh the less easily impressed, who recognise something horribly familiar in the sloppily-written, even-more-sloppily-edited prose with a manipulative cliff-hanger shoehorned into the end of every chapter, and who despair of the sight of every single fucker on the bus making this their quarterly read.
Larsson is, to my mind, a couple of notches above Dan Brown. Make of that what you will.
5 comments:
I'm steering well clear of this "girl who kicked the bee in the face" (c. red lemonade) craze, but if you want an excellent series of detective novels try Fred Vargas. She's French, and quite brilliant. She fairly hoovers up crime writing awards too. "The Chalk-Circle Man" is really, really good.
Yes.
http://bookcrossings.blogspot.com/2010/05/girl-with-dragon-tattoo.html
http://bookcrossings.blogspot.com/2010/05/girl-with-swedish-longeurs.html
If we're recommending, I recommend Christopher Brookmyre. He's funny and writes thrillers which are, you know, thrilling. The Sacred Art of Stealing is also dead romantic.
At this point 80% of comments I make are links to New Yorker spoofs, so fuck it, here's another one.
Conor - Heh, I've taken to calling the books that too since kitty cat coined the phrase. Thanks for the tip, I'll look into Vargas.
Annie - I read your posts at the time and really enjoyed them.
My good wife is quite a fan of Brookmyre. so far my experience of him has been limited to one scratched audiobook, but it had me in stitches while driving.
Colm - My apologies if it looked like I had deleted your comment, Blogger's new spam detection thingy is obviously intent on identifying anything with a link as perilously dangerous. I'd read that spoof before, but it's so fucking good that I still read it another two or three times.
I love Dickens, Agatha Christie and Poe. Will this book live up to my expectations in terms of suspense? Thanks in advance.
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