shmoolie Wrote:My first one was CrissCross a couple months ago. I was shopping at Barnes and Noble and came across it and decided it looked like a good read. It was and I found a couple others in the series and read them too. After that I went online and bought the remaining ones and read them in order. I'm still trying to find an inexpensive copy of The Tomb.
Now maybe what I'm going to say may not sit well with long time RepairmanJack series fans but I feel that the protagonist is losing his edginess and becoming too much of a wimp and a new age guy. There's so much time spent on his relationships with his family and with his girlfriend that the crucial parts of the stories for me - Jacks career as a fix it guy - is being neglected. Crisscross actually held me spellbound precisely because there was so much focus on the capers he was involved in - the "church" and the nun being blackmailed. There was practically no external family forces pushing him.
The last novel I read - Infernal (which was the final one of all the Jack novels I read) - actually bored me and also got me thinking about how Jack's character in this novel did things that he never would have done before. He went off on a boat trip out of the country with no ID and knowing his brother was being investigated. I really found that hard to believe. This is a guy who could barely use the airport to visit his ill father in Florida.
And some of the dialog in Infernal was downright corny. Jacks attempts to make the dying Muslim believe that Jack was sent by Ayatollah Khmomeni. Ouch. That was simply painful for me to read. And what about the fact that he knew that the spell could only be transferred twice? It was plain as can be that was a fact but he spent the last few hours of his life trying to get someone else to take it? Not believable. Lastly, the almost impossible to believe coincidence that the book was still there in the cellar of a burned out cabin - one that the Feebs would have gone through with a fine tooth comb - was the icing on what was a poorly conceived cake.
OK, I'll stop harping on this for now. I'm hoping that maybe the author will go back to the style of the first half dozen or so Jack novels now that his whole family has been killed off. After all, a spear has no branches, right? Or are Gia, Vicki, and the newborn to be more branches?
Welcome to the board, shmoolie.
Hmm.....you couldn't get into "Infernal"? Well,then, you should read next RJ book, "Harbingers". Very shocking but that's first style. You'll get Jack's excellent fix-it job, ultimate terror(almost gory), Adversary vs. Ally, etc etc...