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Books Related to Cripple Creek James Sallis - ISBN: 1842432346
Slow, lacking substance - Rated
I had read favourable reviews of James Sallis's other books and bought this one, but was disappointed.
It's like James Lee Burke-lite, with an artfully folksy writing style, chock full of colourful backwoods characters and their colourful backwoods ways and idiom, plus the obligatory gutsy, fiesty women-in-a-man's-world outshining their male fellow-cops etc., and of course finding the hero soo attractive..
Naturally, the hero - Turner - has a tragic past that he manfully labours under, and of course he abhors the violence in his past (Vietnam, prison etc.), and regretfully picks up his gun again - but turns out to be an ace killer, dealing out deadly snap shots, and tricksy wound-to-kills with ease. And luckily, the killer who crept up behind him and was about to garrote him comments scornfully on Turner's musical taste, allowing our hero to despatch him without breaking a sweat. I had called it James Lee Burke-lite, maybe it should be.. "Bond, James Lee Bond..."
But it's not all action - if only... the crime element of the so-called plot takes a vacation from c. page 79 for about a hundred pages - during which time we meander about, hearing of various character's reading likes and dislikes, getting more bites of eccentric folksiness - but I have now given up on the book.
At one point Turner says of a - disappointing - book he is reading : "Novels tend to be short these days. Probably most of them should be even shorter" - if you cut the filler 100 pages from this 223 pages book you couldn't get much shorter. But even if you did, life's too short to read unsatisfying books.
