Series reviews…
Reviewers rarely write them. Amazon promotes series (if only saying what the next book in the series is when you finish a book), but they want reviews for the individual books, which they just treat like other “products.” Smashwords lists series but never promotes them as such—in fact, they basically ignore evergreen books (older books that are as current as the day the author published them), so only the latest books in a series are promoted. And bookstores and libraries also ignore series for the most part.
Like Amazon, most retailers, online or otherwise, now treat books like products and ignore series and other literary aspects associated with books, so none of this should come as a surprise. But hardly anyone writes series reviews either, so I thought I’d write a few here, especially because I’ve binged on some recently (they’re excellent for doing just that).
The order in the following is ugly, bad, and good, so play Morricone’s score backwards (the leit motif still sounds good).
The ugly: The Kate Redman series. I started bingeing on this, but ran into a bit of a roadblock. Celina Grace or her publisher became sloppy. When I tried to download yet another book in the series (it met my $6 threshold, but many don’t), I found a corrupted file residing on my Kindle. Returning to Amazon, I saw it announced there that the book has a “quality control” problem. I thought I’d lost my money, and everyone knows Amazon’s return policy sucks. But the next day the file seemed okay. Did Amazon magically change it? Scary if true. Still, fair warning.
That said, let’s talk about Grace’s Kate Redman character. Compared to the principals of the other series listed here, she’s the most conflicted, a thirty-year-old with a lot of baggage who can’t deny the attraction she has for her boss or get past it. Frankly, there’s too much focus on Kate’s hang-ups. I like complex characters, but those hang-ups become tiresome the farther I go into the series. I’ll keep reading, though, at least the ebooks under my $6 limit (for the book that was initially corrupted, even $5.99 is too much for 262 equivalent pages). Stay tuned.
The bad: A, B, C, etc. is for whatever. Okay, I’ve never binged on this series—Big Five prices are exorbitant—but let me consider this long crime trek through the alphabet by Sue Grafton and say why it’s bad (in that, it has a lot in common with other over-extended American crime series). I haven’t read many of these books, thank goodness, so it’s only fair to say why they turn me off.
Grafton’s is a “good” series to illustrate what an author should not do: Don’t keep a series going even when new books in the series are formulaic and uninteresting and simple variations on what has come before. Authors should know when to stop. (I suppose readers should know when to stop reading such series too. I did.)
I mostly blame the Big Five for all these flawed series. Those publishing conglomerates continue to publish them because they’re moneymakers—an uncritical fandom continues to buy the books, unwilling to try something new, just like the author of this series. I hate to criticize dead artists, but she only stopped because she passed away in 2017. I pass belated condolences on to her family, friends, and fans. She was an interesting person and into my preferred hard-boiled style of mystery and crime writing, but I just grew tired of the series.
More on similar series later.
Top o’ the good: The Kirby/Langdon series. In contrast, author Daniella Bernett has a winner here—books with original twists on traditional crime stories I found extremely entertaining. No old-style PIs or forensics experts here as main characters. Instead, they are Kirby, an investigative reporter, and Longdon, a jewel thief. A British inspector (his name really belongs in the series’ name) firmly places these books firmly into the category of Brit-style mysteries even though the author is American. The villain(s) vary from novel to novel as the author fills in background material and develops the main characters, including Kirby and Longdon’s on-again, off-again romance (Kirby often mentally beats herself up for having fallen for that rascal rogue Longdon). The mostly European settings vary from novel to novel too, and the plots are intriguing and entertaining. (Note: Daniella was my most recent interviewee to grace this blog and is December’s featured author on the Black Opal Books home page.)
Second place among the good: The rural mysteries series. Author Diana J. Febry takes the reader into the English countryside where her principal characters often find a murder to solve in spite of the peaceful setting. (You have to wonder how, like Cabot Cove, so many murders occur there, but I learned to not question that too much because the plots are fine.) Fiona can’t decide whether to make a play for her boss Peter, but, at the end of the series (so far), he’s divorced, so we might see a bit more romance in future books. Again, each book in this series is well plotted, and each novel tells us more about the main characters. Another winning series readers might not know about…and it might just satisfy readers’ appetites for cozies, although there’s nothing cozy about the crimes considered.
A tie for second among the good: The Yorkshire murder mysteries. Author J. R. Ellis has also created some highly entertaining stories also in a rural setting for the most part, namely the Yorkshire area, where old mills once clothed the English public and mineral spas pampered English aristocrats (as if they needed more pampering, poor devils). I find DCI Oldroyd more interesting than Rankin’s Rebus and James’s Dalgliesh. More interesting than most crime fighters, in fact.
There’s one novel with the subplot that a valuable violin is stolen, a variation on the theme of stolen artworks that I’m partial to. While all books in this series are well written and entertaining, I especially liked #4. Readers and writers, particularly the latter, will enjoy this mystery. While #3 ends in a Christie-like denouement engineered by Oldroyd—a bit farfetched, but a nod to Christie’s mysterious disappearance to that area of merry old England—#4 is the murder case of an obnoxious crime author that occurs at a book fair, of all places…and several participants who are also writers become suspects. It’s an interesting psychological analysis of persons like those we real writers experience all the time. (I even had one of my own story ideas plagiarized, as did many of the suspects in this novel.) In any professional community, there is a wide spectrum of human behavior, and the writing community is no exception.
You can’t go wrong with any of these series except for the second one—plotting, characterization, dialogue, and other elements of mystery and crime writing are superb. I read all the last three and many books in the first (at least, what’s now available) and enjoyed every minute of the experience. Grafton’s turned me off. But none of them commit the deadly sin of leaving the reader with cliffhangers either, although issues are left unresolved in some, tempting the reader. All mystery writers should avoid those. Even if the book is in a series, a reader should be able to read it independently of the others—each book should be a self-contained story.
The little glitch with Celina Grace’s book might be due to her publisher (hmm, that’s her!). I also don’t want to berate Sue Grafton’s oeuvre too much or her fandom either, but there is a lot positive to be said for the British crime story tradition. Child’s Jack Reacher series, Preston and Child’s Pendergast series, Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme series, and Patterson’s Alex Cross series just can’t compare and also have all become boring and formulaic, but Ian Rankin’s Rebus series is also getting a bit long in the tooth too, although he continues with that exotic Edinburgh setting with its dark underbelly of intrigue I fancy (London and the British boonies have that too, of course).
I suspect that the Big Five have just become quite successful in turning new voices into boring formulaic ones, not wanting to give up on their moneymakers or even tell them to write something new. Some readers don’t mind formulaic. I do. Writers shouldn’t become formulaic, and they can easily avoid that by knowing when to stop writing a series before that happens.
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Comments are always welcome.
More crime stories. I have two series in the mystery and crime genre, although I often add in thriller elements—most mysteries do. The “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco Series” features two NYPD detectives, and their cases in the Big Apple often expand into national and international ones. Three books in the series, Aristocrats and Assassins, The Collector, and Gaia and the Goliaths introduce the two main characters of the “Esther Brookstone Aret Detective Series,” Esther and her boyfriend Bastiann van Coevorden, whom wags at Scotland Yard have nicknamed Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I wouldn’t call books in the first series Brit-style mysteries, but the books in the second series, Rembrandt’s Angel and Son of Thunder, have a bit of that wonderful tea-and-scones flavor.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
