Friday, April 15, 2011

WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE by Walter Mosley ****

I wasn't sure at first I was going to like this because the cryptic messages just trip over themselves one after another. I like the basic story, I like some of the internal stuff but it does grow old before the end of the book. Here's a sample: I was also a predator that lived on the invisible ether of personal information. (whatever that means) Not digital bullshit, I stalked people's souls, took from them their most precious possessions, their secrets...blahblahblah. He does a lot of that self admiration/self congratulatory/philosophy all thru the book. Everyone in the world lies- is his major philosophical outlook. Everyone lies all day long to everyone and ourselves. We never ever ever tell the truth. HUH?

What does "he could see funeral lights going up behind his eyes" mean? Funeral lights? And there's a magic wheel goes round and you always come back to where you started. HUH? So cryptic-weird like that.

It's about a private detective from either Harlem or someplace similar. A woman pays him a lot of money (when she really could have ran away and hid for a year) to protect her or her sister. I'm still not clear on that nor why she was murdered.

The protagonist thinks he's King Stud Muffin. He's married and screws (or wants to) everything moving towards him. He's also such a wonderful person to everyone, doing nice everywhere he goes to almost everyone he meets unless an enemy natch. His wife is also screwing around but sheesh he doesn't consider HIMSELF the problem. Or HIS screwing around. Lotta self delusion going on. He stuffs a woman he just screwed into the home of another he regularly screws and everyone is just hunky dory with that. Right.

The killer is someone not really a major player and for all the fake outs I was disappointed. Basically I did want to continue reading it, it flowed along well but very slowly, I would recommend you borrow it at the library. It's sort of different, not run of the mill at least.

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