Title: Shock Wave
Author: John Sanford
Progress: 77%
Platform: Kindle
Amazon Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)
Book 2 out of 107
Just like I said, right at the 75% mark, Virgil figures out who the bomber is. Spoiler alert...It seems that it is a guy named Wyatt, a Gulf War vet who likes bragging about his kills.
How did he get on top of the Pye Pinnacle, the massive skyscraper built in a cow pasture? He used a paraglider. That dangerous flying hobby is what created the trail of clues that lead Virgil to him. Now the chase is on. Will Virgil catch him before he blows someone else up? We'll see!
A few things I'm seeing in Sanford's writing...
Many of his characters have a way with metaphors...
"She's crookider than a bucket of cottenmouths."
"An ass like a couple of slow pitched soft balls"
There are a few others I can't think of at the moment, but its a noticeable habit and makes all the supporting characters feel oddly similar, like everyone is imbued with a rural Minnesotan smart assness. It's the kind of thing that a writers group full of amateurs would point out and criticize, but Mr. Sanford, not being an amateur, gets a pass.
Another thing he does is he just assumes that the reader has read every Virgil Flowers novel and knows all about his views on god, his taste for worn rock band T-shirts, his left-leaning politics. I wish I had got to know Virgil better in the first few chapters because I would have cared a lot more later on when he fell into danger.
On the other hand, Mr. Sanford goes places that other thriller wirters don't. There is a subtle theme of questioning god, with Virgil offering up prayers every night that are more like self-therapy sessions, and another character saying, "I don't know why anyone with any sense would believe in god." There is almost enough there to hang a literary theory on, almost enough to say Mr. Sanford has more on his mind that telling a fast-paced story where things go boom and our hero saves the day.
But not quite that much. It's more like a dash of literary spice than anything with an artistic intent. Mr. Sanford is writing by the numbers, and getting paid well to do so. Why mess with the formula?
What have we learned? We learned that when you are an active reader reading not for pleasure but to learn how to write within a genre, it becomes a little too easy to predict things. It takes some of the fun out of a story. On the other hand, maybe Mr. Sandford could afford to be a bit more creative with his formula.
Let's see what happen in the last 25%. Maybe he will surprise me.
No comments:
Post a Comment