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3.4 AVERAGE
3.4 AVERAGE
This was a good collection for the most part. I likeed just over half of the short stories and Jeffery Deaver's was my favorite. The others were just ok with predictable endings and others were just dry reads.
This paperback has 3 of the novellas from the longer anthology, Transgressions. This is a pretty diverse set of stories, which really have nothing to do with one another. The Westlake is a Dortmunder story about stealing newly printed money from a New York printer who prints foreign currency. It's fun, but without all the tappings of a Dortmunder story, so it's ultimately forgettable. In the Mosely story a journalism student is hired by an 'anarchist' who has some pretty strange dealings in a shadow world of power behind power. The Hunter story is a procedural around some apparently Jewish murders of Muslim cab drivers. Only the Mosley story is really engaging, and it could have used some more work.
A nice collection of novellas, a form that, as McBain points out, is sadly neglected.
The Westlake entry was a good Dortmunder story, which is to say, a comic heist piece. I like those, and I like the style, so that was fun.
I hadn't read either Mosley or McBain himself before, so those were useful as introductions to their styles. The Mosley story was about a young man caught up in intrigue, led by a shadowy man he both admired and feared. I wouldn't call it especially realistic, but it was entertaining. I'd read more of him.
The McBain entry was probably the weakest, though it wasn't bad. It was an entry in his 87th Precinct series, which had never seemed particularly appealing to me, and now I think I was right (not bad, just not for me). So, again, it was useful, though perhaps not in the way the editor/author intended.
The Westlake entry was a good Dortmunder story, which is to say, a comic heist piece. I like those, and I like the style, so that was fun.
I hadn't read either Mosley or McBain himself before, so those were useful as introductions to their styles. The Mosley story was about a young man caught up in intrigue, led by a shadowy man he both admired and feared. I wouldn't call it especially realistic, but it was entertaining. I'd read more of him.
The McBain entry was probably the weakest, though it wasn't bad. It was an entry in his 87th Precinct series, which had never seemed particularly appealing to me, and now I think I was right (not bad, just not for me). So, again, it was useful, though perhaps not in the way the editor/author intended.