I just don't have time to write this review. I need to get my hands on Volume 2 of Michael Marshall's Straw Men Trilogy, I'm looking forward to the summer 2019 release of the second novel by my new favorite guilty pleasure, Michael Rutger, AND my bedside table TBR pile is groaning with cult novels by distinguished SF novelist Michael Marshall Smith ...
Hahahaha! Gotcha! Because -- just in case that final name wasn't a bit of a giveaway -- all three Michaels are the same person!!
Actually, learning that all three Michaels are one and the same guy has restored my fragile faith in my own sanity: I spend a good deal of my time reading "The Straw Men" struggling was a frustrating sense of deja vu. You know that feeling?
"Have I read this before? It all feels very familiar. There's something about this ... I think I've read this before ..."
But nothing would coalesce into remembering a specific character or event or realizing, ten pages from the end, "Of COURSE, it's Colonel Mustard, in the Orangery, with the lead pipe! I've read this before." (That is NOT a spoiler, btw.)
What I was "remembering" in The Straw Men was the sharp, snarky dialogue, and and nicely turned phrases that I had liked so well in the Michael2 novel I read recently, the light-as-fluff, "For Fans of Dan Brown" horror-adventure "The Anomaly," in which Indiana Jones meets HP Lovecraft. Like his alter ego, Michael1 can not only write sharp dialogue, but construct working relationships between characters that you can actually believe in. AND he can sustain a complicated narrative, alternating between two intriguing investigations which seem to have nothing to do with each other. Except that we -- the Clever Reader and all the Michaels -- know better, and it all comes together with a pretty satisfying bang at the end, and sets us up for volumes 2 and 3.
If the Michaels share strengths like good characters, articulate style, and page-turning command of the narrative, they also share one weakness -- let's call it the "For Fans of Dan Brown Effect." Both novels I have read so far by this talented author have enormous plausibility holes. Even if you have willingly suspended every fibre of disbelief in your body, accepting the Big Picture, at the end you have to ask (deliberately vague, to avoid spoilers) whether the "events" at the end of each novel would go unnoticed, and uncommented upon. Just sayin'.
BUT, hey, don't listen to me! There's Volume 2 of the Straw Men, and the next volume of the Anomaly adventures, AND those cult SF novels ... you have some catching up to do! There may be another Michael along any minute now ....
Hahahaha! Gotcha! Because -- just in case that final name wasn't a bit of a giveaway -- all three Michaels are the same person!!
Actually, learning that all three Michaels are one and the same guy has restored my fragile faith in my own sanity: I spend a good deal of my time reading "The Straw Men" struggling was a frustrating sense of deja vu. You know that feeling?
"Have I read this before? It all feels very familiar. There's something about this ... I think I've read this before ..."
But nothing would coalesce into remembering a specific character or event or realizing, ten pages from the end, "Of COURSE, it's Colonel Mustard, in the Orangery, with the lead pipe! I've read this before." (That is NOT a spoiler, btw.)
What I was "remembering" in The Straw Men was the sharp, snarky dialogue, and and nicely turned phrases that I had liked so well in the Michael2 novel I read recently, the light-as-fluff, "For Fans of Dan Brown" horror-adventure "The Anomaly," in which Indiana Jones meets HP Lovecraft. Like his alter ego, Michael1 can not only write sharp dialogue, but construct working relationships between characters that you can actually believe in. AND he can sustain a complicated narrative, alternating between two intriguing investigations which seem to have nothing to do with each other. Except that we -- the Clever Reader and all the Michaels -- know better, and it all comes together with a pretty satisfying bang at the end, and sets us up for volumes 2 and 3.
If the Michaels share strengths like good characters, articulate style, and page-turning command of the narrative, they also share one weakness -- let's call it the "For Fans of Dan Brown Effect." Both novels I have read so far by this talented author have enormous plausibility holes. Even if you have willingly suspended every fibre of disbelief in your body, accepting the Big Picture, at the end you have to ask (deliberately vague, to avoid spoilers) whether the "events" at the end of each novel would go unnoticed, and uncommented upon. Just sayin'.
BUT, hey, don't listen to me! There's Volume 2 of the Straw Men, and the next volume of the Anomaly adventures, AND those cult SF novels ... you have some catching up to do! There may be another Michael along any minute now ....
