I was on a business trip this past week (since Monday), so I've had a lot of reading time on planes, in airports, and in hotel rooms. I've read the following since Monday:
Old Bones, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. This is likely the first in a new series, featuring as the two main characters Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson, the latter a new FBI agent. Both were support characters in previous novels in the Agent Pendergast novels but now they're working together (quite by accident this time around, but likely on purpose in future novels). The main plot is an archaeological dig of the Lost Camp of the Donner Party (the Old West settlers who ended up resorting to cannibalism during a bad winter), which gets tied into a hunt for buried treasure and a series of assaults upon the buried corpses of a particular family line. It was a good read and I'll look forward to more in this particular series, should it expand in such a direction.
The Silent Corner, by Dean Koontz. This is the first book in a new series (and there are apparently at least five novels thus far) about an FBI agent, Jane Hawk, whose ex-Marine husband inexplicably kills himself for no apparent reason. Jane, on a leave of absence from the FBI, discovers there's been a rash of such inexplicable suicides and ends up against a powerful group of people responsible, ending up on the run from the law as she tries to bring the bad guys to justice (and, okay, a fair bit of revenge). It kind of works as a standalone book, but there's obviously more to the overall story; I equate it to his previous series starring Odd Thomas, which if memory serves went for eight novels before coming to a close. I'll be seeking out the rest of the series thus far and look forward to reading the whole story to its eventual conclusion.
Those were the only two I brought with me on my four-day trip, but yesterday I realized I would finish the second book by that evening and have nothing for the return trip today, so I picked up The Outsider by Stephen King, which has apparently already been made into an HBO Plus series. It's been really good - involving a case against a Little League coach and all-around great family man arrested for the horrific killing of an 11-year-old boy - and there's ample proof he did it (eyewitnesses, fingerprints, DNA), as well as an equal amount of proof he didn't do it (three people who were with him in a different town at the time of the killing, fingerprints placing him in that other town, video documentation corroborating his alibi). The problem is, King started out as a horror writer and then went for a while writing straight fiction, and I'm not sure where this one falls just yet. (I started it this morning and am about halfway through it.) There is the possibility of a supernatural creature involved, but so far the only times it's been spotted could easily be the nightmare of a young girl (the accused killer's young daughter) and the near-death hallucinations of a dying man. So we'll see. It's been a great read thus far and I'm eager to see which way it ends up going.
However...none of these books were my Plan A for this business trip. I had fully intended to be reading The Thorn of Emberlain by Scott Lynch, Book Four of the Gentlemen Bastards series, and spent last weekend trying in vain to find it. According to a site I found while doing frantic Google research, apparently the release date has now been bumped from "September 17th, 2020" to just "2021." What a bummer!
Johnathan
