Getting free book offers for my Kindle has expanded my opportunities for writing snarky reviews. Take No More by Seb Kirby is far from being the worst written e-book I’ve read, but I can hardly recommend it.

James Blake, a London radio executive, comes home to his apartment one day and finds his wife dying just inside the door, shot in the head. Not only can he not imagine why anyone would have killed her, but he didn’t even know she was in town. She was supposed to be in Florence, looking for lost art masterpieces.

Naturally he comes under police suspicion, but he manages to flee to Florence where he discovers that his wife has crossed immensely powerful people, and he soon becomes a target himself.

I’d say the problem with Take No More is that the author is an OK storymaker, but an amateur storyteller. He often commits the sin of having his narrator inform us what other people are thinking, something he can’t know for sure. And the prose is… maddeningly pedestrian. There’s plenty of danger and action, but the words don’t serve the story. It occurred to me that the book read like a second-rate translation – all the words are right, but the music is absent. One of the reviewers on Amazon actually said something about it being originally written in another language, but “Kirby” sounds like an English-speaking name to me.

There was one trick employed for losing a tail that did impress me, though.

Cautions for the usual stuff, but nothing radical. If you can get it free like I did, you might care to give it a try if this sort of thing interests you. Otherwise, I’d say pass.

It’s always nice to discover a new hard-boiled detective writer (and character) who’s worth reading. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with Chris Orcutt’s first Dakota Stevens mystery, A Real Piece of Work.

Dakota Stevens, the hero and narrator, is a former FBI agent who’s set himself up as a New York P.I. He mentions appreciating the classic detectives Marlowe and Spenser, which is a good sign. He leans more to the Spenser side, I think, being essentially an optimist. And he has plenty to be optimistic about, having for his partner not some dull John Watson but the sexy Svetlana Krüsh, a long-legged Russian-born chess master.

The plot involves the art world (oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of books involving art forgery lately), Middle Eastern terrorists, and Nazis (who make for pretty old villains by now, but I suppose you can wring a few more plots out of them).

The best thing about the story was the writing. Orcutt is an excellent wordsmith. The dialogue is good, the characters generally believable (except for the unusual percentage of gorgeous women in Dakota’s world, almost every one of whom throws herself into his arms. Perhaps this is an homage to the old days of the sexy paperback detective, like Shell Scott). My main complaint is with the plotting. One major plot point in particular was so obvious they might as well have perched a raven over one character’s door.

Cautions for language and adult situation. There’s lots of sex, but thankfully it’s not as explicit as I’ve seen in other novels recently. All in all a pretty good piece of work.