See Jack Die
was an awesomely fun read. A few months back, I got a bit of
Twitter spam from Nicholas
Black (@NicholasBlack60)...
author of See
Jack Die. I followed him (a rare thing for me to
do.) Black tweeted an offer for a PDF review copy of the
book. I took him up on it. It took me a month to
find the right eReader to read it on (a Kindle DX), then I was off to
the races.
I has just finished David Balducci's Simple Genius.
It was a less than satisfying book... which seems to be the
case for most of Balducci's books... but somehow I can't seem to stop
reading them. Balducci's characters are barely one
dimensional. The dialog is stilted and the plots are
plotless... yet (and this is probably my personality defect), but I
can't stop reading them once I've started.
So, I get Black's book, See
Jack Die, and I start to read it. It's fun.
It's funny. It's a little confusing at first... the
main character, Jack, has amnesia and as a reader, I feel his amnesia.
During the first part of the book, I really feel like I'm
exploring Jack's new-found world with him and trying to make sense of
it. Black really drew me in.
Okay... I'm going to take a break and complain a little:
- Black needs some Twitter lessons. Yeah, he sucked
me in by following me, but his tweets are generally pointless,
repetitive and come 3 an hour, 24x7. I stopped following him
after 2 days. I'd be interested in Black's tweets about
actual writing (e.g., "Put Jack in a bad place... how am I going to get
him out?" "Ricky, Ricky, Ricky... I don't think dad's dollars
are going to help you with that." "Can't write today... gotta get some
transfat into my body.")
- The book needs a couple of more editing passes. I
found a fair number of type-os. Now, I'm not one to throw too
many stones about type-os and grammar checking (just look at some of
the reviews of Beginning Scala),
but I think Black needs to enlist the community to help him with
editing.
- Ricky (Jack's best friend) seems to morph over the course
of the book to deliver whatever was needed as plot devices... either
that or Black has a deeper plan for why Ricky seems to pull so many
rabbits out of his hat.
So, those are my complaints about the book. On the
good side:
- The dialog is really good. It's not quite Robert
Parker (the old stuff, not the newer stuff) good, but it's Sanford good.
- Bonding over transfat is just plain funny. I
can't stop thinking about tard-farmers.
- Black kills characters better than anyone else.
In fact, he's got a dark, twisted and darned funny way of
dealing with death... which is a big part of the book.
- The research is really good. It's Jeffrey Deaver
good. Lots of interesting facts that Black clearly
understands and is able to weave into the plot a lot better than
Balducci does with quantum computing (the subject of Simple Genius.)
So, I strongly recommend See
Jack Die. Black is right up there with authors
like PJ Tracy. He's new. He's got interesting and
original ideas. He can write a book that hangs together very
well and is very entertaining. I highly recommend that you
buy a PDF copy of See Jack Die
at Scribd or buy the dead tree version from Amazon. I wish
Black a lot of luck and look forward to reading more of his books and
more of the See Jack ...
series.
