>  ST> to it. I think Fidonet has some holes in it!!!
 >
 >
 > It's always had holes.  However traffic in this echo is
 > near zero without allowing for that.  It's dropped all over;
 > the echos that had low volume to start with are now near
 > zero.
 
Just wanted to report in as our echo feed seems to have been cut off for a 
few days.
 
Not much mystery reading lately, except for a few stories in CRIME THROUGH 
TIME, a collection of historical mysteries edited by Miriam Grace Monfedo and 
Sharan Newman, and the newest William Monk novel in paperback from Anne 
Perry, WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE.  I was disappointed in the Monk, and have 
finally figured out that I am going to be disappointed every time, because 
the way she structures the books is inherently not to my liking.
 
Basically, person X is in trouble, and Our Heroes scramble like mad to solve 
the mystery in order to save person X in the nick of time. 
 Some critical piece of evidence is always brought out at the last 
minute, which is not always forseeable, rather like Perry Mason.
 
So the reader can't have the satisfaction of solving the mystery in advance, 
except by guessing -- and if the reader does guess, that can render the book 
unsatisfactory (as it did a couple of books ago, when I said to myself "I 
hope she isn't going to do Y" on page 5 and it turned out I was right).
 
And of course she only advances the meta-story (the relationship between 
Hester Latterly, Monk, and Oliver Rathbone; and Monk's regaining of his lost 
memory) by inches each time.
 
At any rate, since I much prefer the Dorothy Sayers / Mary Stewart method of 
abiding by the fair play rule, but doing masterful misdirection so that the 
reader doesn't notice the important clues, then Perry's storytelling style is 
always going to drive me crazy.
 
She can write her books any way she likes, of course.  If that's the way she 
chooses to tell her story, so be it.  But it's frustrating because I've 
gotten rather fond of the characters and want to know what happens to them, 
and Perry doesn't seem to care about them much at all -- they're just people 
pushed around on stage in a mechanical way to make the plot go.
 
Feh.
--- Opus-CBCS 1.73a
---------------