[Penforhire]

I had such a raging success here with Iain Banks' The Quarry (sarcasm, lol) maybe I'll do better with a recent one from Charlie Huston I don't see a thread on.

Charlie Huston is one of my (many) favorite authors. He has a lean mean writing style that mostly gets out of the way of the story he wants to tell.

I'd say he missed the bullseye here but it was still enjoyable, if a bit more work to read than his usual. I really liked his primary idea, about how Skinner was raised and the extraordinary nuance Huston puts into so few flashback words. "Skinner's Maxim" is pure gold. The master coordinator and talent scout, Terrence, plays such a huge role for a character that gets so little screen time. And Jae was another fully fleshed out bizarre-talent person. Wonderful!

And then he weaves in a secondary plot, really more a theme, about "contraction" (this is not a spoiler, without any context) and military contractors.

Huston has a masterful touch with his minor supporting characters. Maker Smith, for example. I so appreciate how smoothly Huston sketches these sort of oddballs, again using relatively so few words.

I started to enjoy Skinner's foil, Haven, but I felt the plot was robbed. There had to be more scenes between those two. Perhaps they fell to the editing knife (X-Acto #28, lol)? And the resolution between them, without spoiling it, was a lame joke compared to what I anticipated. It was fully intentional and I suspect it was Huston 'taking the piss' with us. Doesn't matter much as it was only a blemish on a maybe 4-out-of-5 star (to me) canvas.

My harshest complaint is the dialog. Huston's style is naturally sparse but too many characters' speech patterns were telegraphic. I can show what I mean by the following exchange between two characters (not an actual quote but darn close in some places) --

"Hello."
"Did you?"
"You know."
"Of course."
"So there we are."

It makes perfect sense for some characters, like Jae and Skinner, but it got annoying when it is everyone. It is too skeletal, too much of an affectation. This felt like some laziness on Huston's part, or where his ego and track record beat down some editor's suggestions.

I imagine Huston editing his dialog in places and trying to drop out as many words as he can without losing us entirely.

Then there were places where pacing dragged. Very unusual for Huston. And it took extra effort to get into the story at the start, introducing the characters and how they relate to each other.

One last pet peeve. And I think Huston knows better than this one also. He interchangeably uses the words "magazine" and "clip" for the magazine of a pistol or rifle. Magazine is the one and only correct term. "Clip" belongs to the holding-a-gun-sideways and watching too many action movies aesthetic. I got the feeling Charlie made an intentional dig at pedantics like me because he uses "magazine" once or twice and then it goes all clippy.

This story is dated strongly by some of the pop culture and world event references that we now recognize. It plays very well today but it might weaken this book for readers twenty years from now. Very minor nitpick.

He certainly doesn't spare us from some political ranting. Whether you enjoy these rants or not probably depends on how closely you agree with him. I felt neutral and they didn't factor much one way or the other in how I like the book.

I think if Huston repaired some dialog, didn't screw us with Haven's resolution, and fixed some pacing issues I might rate this book higher. But it doesn't have the "small crime" feel of his usual eccentric noir. I can't guarantee that if you like his other works you'll like this one.

So who else has some thoughts about this book? C'mon, some of you must read Huston!