Here's a few I just couldn't be bothered to write about in depth... or even get all the way through. Life is too short.
Child 44 was a gripping classic.
The Secret Speech was a disappointing, though still entertaining, sequel.
It's a good job Agent 6 was the final book in the series because I wouldn't have bought any more. I skim-read this one and still found it over-written, rambling and self-indulgent. Tom Rob Smith has let the research take over, desperate to shoehorn his hero into every significant moment in 20th Century Russian history, somehow forgetting how to plot an exciting thriller along the way.
I was a huge fan of David Guterson's previous books, Snow Falling On Cedars, Our Lady Of The Forest and East Of The Mountain... but this one left me cold. The plot itself was intriguing and the relationship between the central characters had potential. But, just like Tom Rob Smith above, Guterson kept getting off the point until I lost all interest in finding out why the narrator's old schoolmate had gone off to live in the woods (a la Thoreau) before dying and leaving our hero a fortune in his will.
Excellent character writing but a series of very loosely connected vignettes does not a novel make. I'd much rather have read the continuing adventures of Sasha, the first chapter's kleptomaniac heroine, than any of the smug, privileged bores who follow her. If Sasha returned later in the novel, I stopped caring by the time the safari went bad.
Of course, I could be wrong about any of the above. Perhaps you read them and found them far more entertaining? Feel free to disagree.
