Iain > Recent Status Updates

Been away a long time, but it's time to wrap this story up.

Getting a little frustrating. Various people died in improbably coincidental ways. It seems like they have a shared cause. That cause is central to the mystery at hand, yet the more clues we get the more it points to what this seemed to be about in the opening chapters. Like, spoiler, how many times do we need it emphasized that the rocks encountered are heavy? The rocks that came from the uranium mine guy?

Wondering where things are going with Mary... because she's consistently a kind of unappealing character, defined by selfishness, hostility, and mockery.

Picking up quickly now.

Starting to pick up some momentum and get interesting on a character level.

First read of the new year... need to finally finish this book, before I lose it again.

This is heading into unsettling hitman with mommy issues and incongruous habits territory... which probably felt fresh in 1980, but the lingering introduction to the villain here is leaving me worried we're heading into boring cliché territory. I wonder how much this is going to be a problem with any popular crime fiction from past decades, that we've just been exposed to too much crime procedure since then.

This story isn't bad, and it's a quick read, but I'm surprised how padded it feels, how much it lingers and doubles back on dialogue and ideas, and how much it feels like cutting it down for the revised edition was maybe a good and necessary idea. It's coming up on 100 years old, yet it feels "second screen optimized" with how it repeats basic info.

Nice to see an old friend again.

I'm enjoying meeting Chee. What Hillerman himself said about him led me to expect he might annoy and frustrate me, but so far he seems nearly as appealing as Leaphorn, just younger and less aware of the outside world.

Did this break the convention of the first chapter personally introducing someone doomed? It had the usual setup of presenting the crime to kick things off, but it seems like we only saw the victim from afar.

Haven't had time to read lately but glad to be back to this. Still, we're almost through it and it doesn't have quite the magic and personality of the previous two.

Getting intense now, but still has a feeling of having not come very far for how close to the end we're getting.