Judgement Prey
Number 33 in the series?
“Virgil went back to his hotel, which was attached to the Mall of America, walked over to the mall and browsed through the thrillers at the Barnes & Noble store, bought a Mick Herron Slow Horses espionage novel that he hadn’t yet read, got a Cinnabon, went back to the hotel and started digging through the financial records.” Page 120.
Whole paragraph, for educational purposes. Concludes thusly:
“Virgil had written a lot of short outdoor nonfiction and several pieces of crime nonfiction for magazines. He’d learned, in two practice novels and one that was about to be published, that novel writing didn’t work like nonfiction writing. His mother had a sewing machine that had a built-in zigzag stitch, which he thought of as a metaphor for fiction writing. It wasn’t done in a straight line—you constantly went back and forth.
“If something needed to be changed, enhanced, made-up, twisted . . . go back and do it. It’s fiction.” Page 120.
There’s a lot in a short passage, and merely some filler and fluff to some, as it doesn’t directly advance the plot, but it does further the characters, and it also adds another level of “something undefined.”
Lucas Davenport, through his author, John Sanford, introduced me to Mick Herron’s works, and that pushed me back into John Le Carre’s body of fiction. Most of this not my genre, style, or even close to my playground, but as evocative escapism? Sure works well. Plus that Virgil Flowers (character) just offered a brilliant point about the nature of writing.
It’s framed as a murder mystery, and of its two recurring characters, Lucas Davenport who may, or may not, be situationally sociopathic. Interesting theme unto itself.
Each book is new. This is number 33 or 32, something.
Enjoyable as it gallops along with no mid-book bog. Master class in action, procedural fiction.
Bonus for a kick at the very end, and that reminded me: always be willing to experiment with form. Good to the very last sentence.
Judgement Prey
Golden Prey
Prey Series
Masked Prey
Ocean Prey
- Then there’s the character’s daughter: