The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more

Book Review: Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie

Book #177 of 2022:

Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie

This standalone spy thriller, also published under the name So Many Steps to Death, is not necessarily playing to author Agatha Christie’s strengths, and there’s a definite vein of anti-Asian and anti-Black racism (including an instance of blackface) running through the affair. It nevertheless carries a certain ludicrous joy in its James Bond-esque plot, in which prominent scientists from around the world are disappearing, either by defecting or being kidnapped by an unnamed group with unclear intentions. One such figure has vanished without his wife, whom the authorities suspect is in on the plan and merely awaiting her own opportunity to follow. So when she dies unexpectedly and an agent trailing her notices a nearby woman of the same description on the brink of suicide, he recruits the latter to take up the former’s identity and infiltrate the syndicate or die trying, since that was her original intent anyway.

It’s all a bit goofy, but it’s a marked improvement over the Poirot story The Big Four of a quarter-century earlier, which utilized a similar premise. While not a mystery per se, the narrative here contains a few twist reveals and accompanying red-herring fakeouts, deployed with the writer’s usual skill. As with the frequently bigoted framing and comments throughout the text, the Cold War concerns may not have aged well since 1954 — perhaps explaining why this title is one of only four Christie novels that remain unadapted for television or film — but it’s a solid lightweight caper overall.

★★★☆☆

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Book Review: The Boy in the Red Dress by Kristin Lambert

Book #176 of 2022:

The Boy in the Red Dress by Kristin Lambert

I appreciate the representation in this title — bisexual heroine, trying to clear the name of her gay runaway best friend who performs in drag at the speakeasy run by her lesbian aunt and has now been accused of killing someone from his past — but it’s a bit chaotic throughout, with just too many clashing tones. The story generally feels as though it’s aiming for a queer take on classic noir, but it’s furthermore a work of historical fiction set in 1920s New Orleans as well as a YA novel starring mostly teenagers. (The movie Brick is of course evidence that high school noir can succeed, but the genre mashup of murder investigation and cheesy love triangle is a difficult balance to strike, especially with so many other elements here.) I still like this book overall, but unfortunately its disparate pieces don’t ever cohere together into something stronger for me.

[Content warning for gun violence, homophobia including institutionalization, domestic abuse, and racism.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Book #175 of 2022:

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske (The Last Binding #2)

3.5 stars, rounded up. I don’t like this queer adult fantasy sequel nearly as much as its predecessor, but it’s an engaging story that mostly earns the reader’s forbearance over the switch in protagonists. Whereas the first volume in this series followed Robin and his new magician friend as they roamed across Edwardian England growing closer whilst seeking to foil a devious plot, this one instead focuses on his sister Maud and her new magical same-sex love interest, who get wrapped up in a murder mystery and its fallout aboard an ocean liner together. Their ensuing romance probably isn’t any more graphic than the lads’, but it’s a lot less of a slow burn, which makes it feel rather hormonal, abrupt, and generally unnecessary. (Am I pleased that the shyer heroine is learning what/who she wants and how to ask for her needs to be met? Sure! But those scenes distract us from the ongoing investigation, while the corresponding moments in her brother’s narrative seemed to function more as rewarding payoff for built-up character arcs.)

The two women are not in bed for the entirety of the novel, however, and I’ve enjoyed how author Freya Marske has crafted this tale within the limited space — both temporal and physical — of a three-day sea voyage. The choreography is almost farcical at times to arrange all the players accordingly, and they bounce off one another nicely as the plot unfolds, with everyone trying to simultaneously track down the latest wizardly macguffin, unmask one or more killers, and keep their unenlightened fellow passengers from discovering the existence of magic. I still think I would have preferred to stick with the original pair of heroes regardless, but this spinoff does ultimately prove an entertaining diversion in its own right.

[Content warning for gun violence, homophobia, racism, torture, and gore.]

★★★★☆

Book Review: The Measure by Nikki Erlick

Book #174 of 2022:

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

The high-concept premise here is certainly intriguing: everyone in the world wakes up to find a box containing a string whose length correlates to their exact lifespan. The shorter your string, the sooner you’ll die, and like any story about attempting to cheat death, some of these turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecies — people inadvertently bringing on their own demises by the actions they take after learning they don’t have long left, in addition to straight-up suicides. While some folks leave their boxes closed, most choose to check, resulting in a wave of discrimination against the so-called ‘short-stringers.’

That’s fine as far as it goes, and I think I would’ve enjoyed a short story collection set within this universe (a natural companion piece to the old Machine of Death anthology, whose characters know the manner but not the timing of their ends). But it doesn’t really work for me as a novel, especially since the mysterious origin of the strings is never investigated or revealed. The plot is basically just eight random Americans acclimating to the new reality, and the many coincidental connections among these individuals that build up as the book unfolds feel too cutesy and contrived to me. I don’t like the protagonists very much either, and I’ve found it rather hard to get into their headspace at times. One is agonizing over only having fourteen years remaining to him, for instance, which seems like an absurdly long span compared to some of the patients with real-life terminal conditions who manage to lead quite meaningful existences in the face of their own diagnoses.

The social upheaval is the most interesting element of the text, functioning as a decent metaphor for pandemic disruptions as well as bigotry against various identity groups. But there’s not enough of that on display, and many worldbuilding questions don’t seem to have been adequately thought through. Is life insurance still available, and if not, how does that impact families who’d ordinarily rely on it when a loved one passes? Once strings start being used to impose romantic and professional limitations, what’s preventing simple forgeries and thefts from getting around all that? These issues wouldn’t necessarily matter in a work of shorter fiction like a one-off Twilight Zone episode, but by asking us to dwell in an extended narrative, author Nikki Erlick is making a promise of substance that ultimately isn’t delivered upon.

[Content warning for gun violence.]

★★☆☆☆

TV Review: Happy Endings, season 3

TV #55 of 2022:

Happy Endings, season 3

Overall, I’d have to call this last season of Happy Endings a step down from the preceding one. The comedy is way more hyperactive, sometimes to the extent of substituting volume and repetition for wit, and many episodes build to a big slapstick moment like the program did early on, before it had found a good footing. It also feels like there’s a noticeable uptick in the number of punchlines that take the form, “I can make this joke about Black/Jewish/gay/female people because I have friends in that category” — which already wasn’t okay upon airing in 2012-2013, and is even more egregious today. Dave’s insistence that he has Navajo ancestry likewise gets trotted back out, to the accompaniment of some awful attempted humor about smallpox blankets.

Plotwise, there’s some welcome serialization, but it all tends to end with a shrug and a return to the status quo, rather than lasting and/or affecting the characters in any meaningful way. The biggest of these plot arcs involves Dave and Alex getting back together again as was hinted at in the previous finale, but they prove pretty insufferable as a couple (and she’s a lot less fun / distinctive whenever paired with him for an episodic storyline). The whole cast actually seems crueler and pettier this time around, as often happens on sitcoms, and the balance necessary to keep them still likable doesn’t quite land for me.

Ultimately, this remains an effective sitcom. I truly and deeply love the bit about a dealership called the Car Czar whose slogan is that they know what cars are. But the show has never really lived up to its potential in my opinion, and I’m not disappointed to be moving on from it at this point.

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 3 > 1

Book Review: The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy by Ann Rule

Book #173 of 2022:

The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy by Ann Rule

I sometimes have difficulty rating pieces of nonfiction, but my general principle is to weigh a work against the best possible version of itself, by asking what the author is trying to accomplish and how well I believe they’ve achieved it. In the case of this true-crime title from 1980, I’m not entirely convinced that that benchmark has been met.

The story behind the story remains incredible, even four decades on: writer Ann Rule was already under contract to write a book about a string of unsolved murders when she learned that a friend she’d met as a fellow volunteer on a suicide crisis hotline had been arrested and charged with the crimes. Ted Bundy is now known as a notorious serial killer, pedophile, and rapist, and this account of his awful prolific career preying on young women and girls in the 1970s is appropriately harrowing in its details of how he would kidnap and brutalize his victims. But it doesn’t yield much insight into what it was like for the journalist herself to go through this journey of discovering and confronting the truth of the matter. Although Rule can provide quotes from her personal correspondence with Bundy, her presentation of the facts doesn’t read as too dissimilar from what anybody else could have written on the subject.

Now, as a reader largely unfamiliar with the man beforehand, I am satisfied — well, horrified, but you know — with The Stranger Beside Me. The author ably captures his dangerous charm and his reputation as a folk hero for his multiple prison escapes, as well as his cruelty and of course his terrible body count. It’s all pretty thorough and shudder-inducing, and I expect I’ll feel no particular urge to read anything about Bundy ever again. But if I had come to this volume previously aware of those things, I think I would be disappointed by the lack of personality exhibited in its pages. It’s ultimately not a narrative about the late Ann Rule at all, even though she’s the distinctive element here and one of the two parties referenced in the title. When I consider how much of herself Michelle McNamara poured into I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as merely an obsessive amateur researcher on the Golden State Killer, it’s hard not to feel let down by the relative neutrality of this genre predecessor that could/should have contained so much more firsthand material.

[Content warning for ableist slurs.]

★★★☆☆

Book Review: The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly

Book #172 of 2022:

The Law of Innocence by Michael Connelly (Mickey Haller #6)

One thing I appreciate about author Michael Connelly’s ongoing Harry Bosch franchise (1992 – present) is that it has always played fairly with the passage of time. With the exception of a few short stories that revisit prior points in the detective’s career, each installment takes place after the last, with evidence of shifting technologies, background incorporation of real news events, and progressive milestones in the characters’ lives. When Bosch was facing down an age-mandated retirement from the LAPD in The Drop, for example, that introduced a ticking clock that soon culminated in his leaving the force. He’s now a private investigator, his daughter Maddie has graduated college and entered the police academy, and her cousin Hayley is a first-year law student. Other series might fudge or ignore such internal chronology in favor of a static status quo, but these installments are all firmly situated in their particular distinctive moments.

The relevance of all that to this latest novel about Harry’s half-brother the Lincoln Lawyer, published in the fall of 2020 but set earlier that year, is that the encroaching Covid-19 pandemic is suddenly terribly important. Not to bury the lede, but this story starts with Mickey arrested for the murder of a client, and for most of the book when he’s not in court defending himself, he is in a crowded jail with poor ventilation and no appreciable pathogen safety protocols. Writing shortly thereafter, Connelly uses the reader’s knowledge of the dawning crisis to terrific effect, peppering the text with overheard reports out of Wuhan and a gradual increase in the sight of people wearing masks. An already-tense narrative is escalated further by the creeping horror of this element, since continued imprisonment would now be so much more dangerous for the protagonist. To be honest, it’s probably the most effective use of the coronavirus I’ve seen in fiction yet.

Even setting that aside, however, this is a great read. We’ve known Haller for too long to be in any doubt about his innocence, and his team settles on a likely suspect for framing him — an old enemy from The Fifth Witness — pretty quickly. Yet the prosecution’s case seems so strong, and the defense’s so relatively weak, that the result is a page-turning thrill ride simply to see how the hero and his friends can manage to win the day and secure his freedom, while staying just within the bounds of their judicial ethics and avoiding the unknown enemies the attorney appears to have acquired behind bars. Connelly has also grown as a writer over the years, and he’s learned that we don’t need to necessarily see every procedural step in a trial, which streamlines the plot and marks an improvement over some of the previous Mickey Haller volumes. I don’t know that I would recommend jumping into the canon here, but returning ‘Boschiverse’ fans will find plenty to enjoy in the high stakes of this role reversal that gives the lawyer sudden perspective on a different side of the justice system.

[Content warning for gun violence, gore, and addiction.]

★★★★☆

TV Review: Bob’s Burgers, season 10

TV #54 of 2022:

Bob’s Burgers, season 10

A full decade into its span, and I am running out of things to say about Bob’s Burgers. This is the first season I’ve seen in a while that’s actually been new to me — I originally stopped watching after the previous one finished airing in 2019, and then only recently went back and started the show again from the very beginning — but I still can’t say that it feels particularly fresh. This series offers reliable, comfort-food television, but it hasn’t been taking risks or pushing its characters into unfamiliar territory in quite some time now. New additions like Kaylee don’t seem especially distinctive, and when the program does deviate from its usual scope and structure, it’s just to deliver the latest iteration of the old Belcher-kids-telling-elaborate-stories framework. As I’ve remarked before: I’m still laughing at the jokes, but I’m not really being surprised by anything anymore.

As is often the case, the Thanksgiving and Christmas adventures (“Now We’re Not Cooking with Gas” and “Have Yourself a Maily Linda Christmas,” respectively) are relative highlights, and I also rather enjoyed the weird specificity of premise to “Poops!… I Didn’t Do It Again.” There are definitely a few weaker half-hours to balance that out, however, plus the unconscionable oversight of naming an episode after A Fish Called Wanda and then not including a role for the recurring character Mr. Fischoeder who’s voiced by Kevin Kline. A real missed opportunity… which unfortunately seems to characterize a lot of Bob’s Burgers these days.

★★★☆☆

Book Review: Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson

Book #171 of 2022:

Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson (Wax and Wayne #2 / Mistborn #5)

[Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.]

As I mentioned in my review of that previous title, this era of the Mistborn series grew out of a writing exercise that author Brandon Sanderson liked enough to expand into the novel The Alloy of Law. That tale, with its Wild West flair and imaginative new exploits of the setting’s Metallic Arts, turned out to be a whole lot of fun, but it was still intended as a standalone peek at the changing world of Scadriel before the writer would someday return even further into its future for a more sci-fi approach. At some point, however, he decided to first revisit the characters of Wax and Wayne for some additional adventures, thereby expanding their sub-series into a quartet and putting off the later epoch for another day.

This 2015 volume, then, has to function as a direct sequel to a project that wasn’t originally written to set one up, in addition to more purposefully laying the groundwork for what comes next. And it meets those goals, more or less, but the seams are noticeable and somewhat at the expense of the immediate story at hand. The reintroduction of the kandra into human society is a tad awkward, as are the vague grumblings about encroaching modernity that never receive the full thematic consideration it feels like they should. The majority of the storyline finds the heroes perpetually one step behind the current villain, which is not the most satisfying read. There’s not much movement on what’s theoretically the larger plot. And while Sanderson is famous for his twists, the retcon at the end seems needlessly cruel and included only to twist the knife in a protagonist who is already rather angsty and humorless.

That’s probably my biggest critique, that this novel simply isn’t as enjoyable as the one(s) before it. Even the magical combat scenes, which are usually a highlight of the franchise, don’t appear to carry the same spark of creative choreography, let alone any cool new uses of Allomantic or Feruchemical powers. (The antagonist can tap a metalmind to move faster than the eye can see, but that’s pretty similar to Wayne’s time bubbles, and we don’t really get to observe it in action — although there is one neat moment when both abilities are activated at once, resulting in the enemies moving at regular speed to one another’s perspective while everyone else in the room around them is frozen.)

So I have mixed feelings, which I believe was my main takeaway the first time I read the book, too. At the end of the day, it’s a polished installment from a competent enough author that it avoids being a total misfire. It is always nice to check in on the cosmere again — there’s even a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it sighting of the mysterious worldhopper Hoid, reappearing after centuries to prove he’s either a time-traveler or immortal — and the work overall is a reasonably solid fantasy crime thriller. It achieves what it sets out to do, but that’s far from the critical praise I generally have for this writer.

[Content warning for gun violence, body horror, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

TV Review: The Good Fight, season 6

TV #53 of 2022:

The Good Fight, season 6

A relatively strong end to a perpetually-messy series that nevertheless captured a lot of the tension of life in a time of rising American fascism. Did Andre Braugher need to get brought in as the firm’s latest named partner? No, not particularly. Was the season weakened by its repeated treatment of the ongoing riot outside the building as a generic mob with no discernable politics? Definitely in my opinion, with the final episodes feeling sharper once that ambiguous framing was dropped and the racist and antisemitic chanting could be plainly heard. Did Diane have to spend the year blitzed out on whatever her new drug of choice was called? Nah, but at least it eventually connected her with a romantic interest who was served well in the narrative as a foil for Kurt — the old YA standby of a love triangle functioning thematically to represent two opposing paths that a protagonist might choose between.

Eli Gold makes his long-delayed reappearance here, cursing up a storm as it feels like his character should have been doing all along, if only network television were as forgiving as Paramount+ in that regard. He’s not quite the last familiar face from The Good Wife to finally pop up on this spinoff, but he’s one of the biggest, and his return arc both underscores his terrific comic presence and finds new material for a more meaningful sendoff. Otherwise, though, this isn’t really a season that’s terribly concerned with much of what’s gone before it. Both TGW and TGF have shed plenty of cast members across the years, and we get no final appearances from any of the departed Fight originals like Lucca, Maia, or Adrian, let alone any other major players like Alicia or Kalinda from the parent program.

Still, the extremist threat builds nicely over the course of this run, culminating in a genuinely harrowing armed white supremacist assault on the practice. Spoiler alert: everyone thankfully survives that, and their various fates / farewell notes generally feel earned. I’ve never wholly vibed with this show’s more fanciful elements, like the political candidate in the penultimate hour who can heal with a laying-on of hands, but I appreciate how that’s muted at the end in favor of an acknowledgement both weary and uplifting that the fight opposite chaos, terror, and injustice never truly stops. There’s a cyclical, almost Sisyphean nature to these problems and the labors against them, and that’s a note that’s just about powerful enough to look past all the fumbled plot points and absurd developments along the way. It doesn’t reflect the franchise at its “Hitting the Fan” heights, but it’s a stronger (presumed) closing statement than we potentially might have gotten.

[Content warning for gun violence, rape, slavery, police brutality, and gore.]

This season: ★★★☆☆

Overall series: ★★★☆☆

Seasons ranked: 2 > 1 > 6 > 5 > 3 > 4