Iain’s Reviews > A Thief of Time > Status Update

It's picking up, it's getting better, things are happening now at least. Still, I'm more than a third in and it's been a whole lot of Chee and Leaphorn moping, for very little actual advancement of the core plot, and I've just bought the first books of three other detective series: Walt Longmire, Kevin Kerney, and Posadas County. I've loved the Hillerman series, at points, but its grip on me is slipping rapidly.

I commented on being disappointed with the writing quality. This book feels like it was not edited. I noticed a repeated remark earlier that I thought might have been intentional as emphasis of a point, but just noticed a second commentary on a character's expensive boots, coming probably 60 pages after the first. It just feels like he forgot what he'd already included and there was no editor to catch it.

Now things are starting to happen at least, Chee has (maybe stupidly) fallen into some dramatic horrors.

On 15th, during outage: 18% in, little has happened, tired of Leaphorn moping through tragedy, sick of Chee being a complete idiot now Leaphorn’s back. Chee's become a predictable slapstick version of himself. While reading I found myself thinking whether a search for better written alternatives might turn up something interesting. I want to continue, but if this is the quality going forward I might have to abandon.

Still feeling like a slow start, with a lot of the mopeyness of the last one carrying over. Big changes have happened and they're significant, but also that story advanced entirely offstage between books, so it's not a journey we've accompanied Leaphorn on, we're just having to sit with the mopeyness of the aftermath as we're told what happened while we were away. It makes for dull reading.