Cross / Stalemate

I haven't written about books for a while on this blog but that doesn't mean I've given up on reading. I have been reading as much as before (guess I can still carry on a conversation if I ever meet Kumari :-) and did read many books (Tess Gerritsen's The Mephisto Club and Tami Hoag's Prior Bad Acts, to name a couple). But they were pretty disappointing in both plot and pace and since, unlike writing about movies, I write only about books I liked atleast a little bit, I skipped writing about them. But here are 2 books that stirred enough interest to make me write about them.

Books in a series usually have a hook or a loose end that keeps you coming back to them. The issue is always in the background in the books and we start reading each book in the hope that the issue gets some kind of closure. Two protagonists whose books I've been reading for some time now, Alex Cross and Eve Duncan, both have such difficult emotional issues that were touched upon but never closed in almost all their books so far. Coincidentally, both their latest books deal with the open issues in a big way but they achieve closure at different levels.

Alex Cross, the main character in one of James Patterson's many series, has never been able to find the killer of his first wife, who was shot dead many years ago. In his new book Cross, he goes after a serial rapist, who he learns later, may have been his wife's killer too. Eve Duncan's situation is even sadder. She is a forensic sculptor - someone who reconstructs a dead person's face from his/her skull. Her daughter Bonnie was kidnapped and killed many years ago but she has never learned who the killer was nor has she found Bonnie's body. In her latest book Stalemate, she is recruited by a South American master criminal who promises to help her find her daughter's killer if she helps him identify a skull.

Cross reminded me why I became a Patterson fan in the first place. The book moves at a rapid pace as Cross pursues the villain, digging into his past and slowly uncovering clues about his whereabouts. A parallel track that details the villain's movements portrays a really cold-blooded, scary guy who, at many places, manages to be a step ahead of Cross. Cross does get some kind of closure with respect to his wife's death but it was anticlimactic.

In Iris Johansen's Stalemate, Eve travels to South America fully aware of the dangers her latest job entails. She is caught in the middle in the war between two equally dangerous warlords and only the hope of learning about her daughter's killer keeps her going. The warlord who employs her is an interesting, well-developed character but it is a little disappointing when he turns out to be essentially good since it removes the moral ambiguity from Eve's task. Eve's conflicting feelings towards him are nicely captured though. True to the location of the story, the book is high on action and the sequences are well-written. There is only 1 twist but that one is too predictable and cliched to be of any surprise.

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If you share my tastes in reading, the next few months should bring you a lot of joy. David Baldacci's Simple Genius releases April 24. James Patterson has 6th Target, the 6th book in his Woman's Murder Club series, coming out on May 8. The Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini's second novel A Thousand Simple Suns is coming out May 22. Jeffery Deaver's Sleeping Doll, with Kathryn Dancer, a character he introduced in Cold Moon, will hit stores on June 5. And ofcourse, as a fitting grand finale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will be out on July 21. Happy reading!