Dirty Martini (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Series #4) Book

A paint-by-numbers yarn can be a literary book, or an escapist one. A run of the mill book can supersede its unambitious strain by alternating verisimilitude and the unlikely. This duet of prerequisites was fulfilled to my approval. Things happen in this series. Even if some of the changes snapped back to square one, the good was done, because the real bummer is staying motionless. There are changes and consequences. The pacing of this story is achieved through the sheer single minded aim of the writer to muscle his way into making the next chapter logistically removed from the last one.



I was looking forward to be reunited with the kind of humor that I enjoyed in book one. This was not to be. There are jokes written into the book, but they are either connotative or physical. The physical humor is almost entirely the dominion of one Harry McGlade, creep extraordinaire with a heart of gold. Thinking back, I have to admit that the best line here, got out from the mouth of a new, and inconsequential character, is :"Sorry, I don't date women younger than the scotch I drink." There was some new info about police work, such as a subtle way to get fingerprints, and a device to turn red lights green. But there are a few negatives to take from my reading. Such as the prolongation of character development for the minor characters, which felt contrived. The chubby and unremarkable partner of Daniels is said to bleed homicide if you cut him. I thought that was arrant nonsense. Quite a few things were said, not shown. Jack herself seemed most helpless and literally had no clue as to how to catch the villain du jour, the somewhat mutedly named 'The Chemist'.



I've given Dirty Martini 4 stars. The strong initiative chapters and the irreproachable finale won me over. There will be better books to be consumed soon, but it's important to read authors who can make up flawed characters because they themselves are flawed as humans and as writers. It's not a stretch to say that the impersonal authorship of J.A Konrath takes on an auteur-like sheen. This is because, simply, well, if a writer does not know what makes his main cast tick, there is something independently going on in the said writer's mind. New ideas popping out of nowhere in a mind is a very distant, abstract, and elegant phenomenon. The resulting main character, Jack Daniels, is almost the opposite of these qualities. But she is the living proof of what I've told you.