Pairs of Mysteries All Around

I love a good mystery- and some bad ones too.

The Drop & The Black Box (Harry Bosch #15 & #16) - Michael Connelly: The best thing about Michael Connelly is not that he writes a good detective novel, but that he does it with such speed that no matter when I decide to return to him, he has a new book out there for me!   In The Drop, Bosch finds himself embroiled in a political nightmare when the son of his nemesis, Councilman Irvin Irving's son is found dead and Irving demands Bosch investigate the death.  In The Black Box, Bosch matches the bullet from a current murder to a death nearly 20 years earlier.  In typical Connelly fashion, both books are page-turners with multiple crimes solved (including very cold cases) and internal corruption revealed.

The Girl in the Spider's Web & The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (Milennium #4 & #5) - David Lagercranz: Following the death of Stieg Larsson, Lagercranz continues The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  I read the first novels in the series long enough ago that I can't make a great comparison between the authors, but seemed to me that Lagercranz did a fine job sticking to the basic formula - making the story suspenseful and having the reader pulling for Salander the whole way through.  Like all the others, these involve a little hacking, a little journalism, and a lot of espionage and double crossing. Thoroughly entertaining.

The Girl on the Train & Into the Water: Paula Hawkins: After Gone Girl, I admit I'm a sucker for any book that people tell me is basically like Gone Girl.  And so I picked up The Girl on the Train about Rachel (the girl on the train) who obsesses over the lives of a couple she is able to view from the seat of her commuter train each day.  One day, she believes she sees a crime committed and becomes unhinged in her attempts to prove what she believes she saw.  Rachel turns out to be an unreliable narrator, which I think is not a wholly new phenomenon in literature, but is one that has become more frequently used, and I think can often make a story more fun.  While Rachel becomes more frustrating and unlikeable as the story unfolds, I really enjoyed the twists and turns of this mystery and found it ultimately worth my while (but it's no Gone Girl).  Given my general enjoyment of The Girl on the Train, I was eager to pick up Hawkins's next novel, Into the Water which follows a town following the discovery of a dead woman at the bottom of a river.  I had a very difficult time getting into this book - it may have been that I had too much going on when I read it, but it felt to me that the book itself had too much going on - too many characters, too many narratives, and too much to live up to.  I may try it again in the future, but for now, this one was not for me.