Currently reading
McGlue
Knife Fight and Other Struggles
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
The Good Lord Bird
Ancillary Justice
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (New Edition)
Dissident Gardens
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Complete Novels
Hunt is not doing anything dazzling with his prose or plots, not reshaping the genre, maybe not even as perfectly distilling the lean crime thriller as one might hope. Yet. Give him time. This is a strong, smart, fast thriller: two cops killed in chapter one, in a seemingly-professional style. The rest of the novel is following the actions that led up to and ripple out from that event. It follows Leonard's lead in giving every character--even the stray lowlife popping up on a barstool for one short chapter--a thickly-realized personality, giving us a sense of deep history in a few economical paragraphs and a couple lines of dialogue. It's got some wit and edge, laying out what happens and laying off the exposition.
I don't think this'll win any converts, but for those of us in the choir, it's manna. (He writes, beating the bad metaphor senseless.)