Author Stephen J. Cannell explains, in his Acknowledgments at the beginning of At First Sight, that he came up with the idea for the book while reading Andrew Klavan’s interesting and risk-taking novel, Man and Wife. He decided he needed to take some risks of his own in novel-writing, and so sat down to write a book different from his usual output. The result is nothing like Man and Wife, but it’s entertaining (and valuable, I think) in its own way.

The main character and primary narrator is Chick Best, a California dot com millionaire. He has a beautiful home, expensive cars, a beautiful wife and daughter. At first he seems a decent, amusing guy, too, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But gradually the picture darkens. His business is on the downslide, and he blames everyone but himself. He’s sick of his wife, and his daughter is a disaster waiting to happen (he never wonders why). He’s living far beyond his means, desperately trying to sustain the exterior trappings and the envy of others that, he imagines, are all that make life worthwhile.

While on a vacation in Hawaii, he and his wife meet Paige Ellis and her husband, and Chick is bowled over. Paige is naturally beautiful and sweet, in a way that his wife, for all her expensive physical training, can’t match. After they return to their separate homes, Chick can’t stop obsessing about Paige. Continue reading At First Sight, by Stephen J. Cannell →

If there was ever an author whose work I ought not to enjoy, it would be the late Stieg Larsson. A Swedish journalist whose field of concentration was right-wing and “hate” groups, he was (as far as I can determine from net research) a lifelong, devoted Communist.

And yet I loved his first mystery, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I snapped up The Girl Who Played With Fire as soon as it came out in paperback, zipping through its 724 pages in a couple days.

I think it’s a case of “the enemy of my enemy.” Both I and the author view contemporary Sweden as an unsatisfactory country, but from opposite viewpoints.

The central character of this book, even more than of the first in the series, is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliantly realized character. Lisbeth is a tiny young woman, often mistaken for a teenager, multipally tattooed and pierced (though we’re told she’s removed one tattoo now, and stopped wearing most of her studs and rings). She’s an off-the-charts genius who works on Fermat’s Last Theorem in pencil, in a notebook, in her spare time. She’s also a world-class computer hacker, skilled in self-defense, socially inept, and slightly crazy, having been the victim of horrendous betrayal and abuse as a child—a history that forms an important element of the plot of this book. Continue reading The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson →