Last book read = Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber. This book is badly in need of an editor. It is apparently supposed to be a mystery, but the jacket flap tells you whodunnit, and the entire book is about tracking the guy down. I suppose this makes it a thriller, which isn't exactly my favourite genre.

At any rate, the book is four hundred something pages long, and it takes until page three hundred something to get as far into the plot as the blurb on the jacket flap takes you, so most of it isn't exactly compelling, although it picks up at the end.

I should also warn that this book contains passing mentions of just about everything that anyone might consider icky. It isn't overly graphic, but it isn't exactly understated either. I could read it while eating, but I wouldn't read it if I was sitting home with the stomach flu, or if I had had a panic attack recently. Admittedly, the vast majority of the ickiness is important to the plot, and if it wasn't there the book would come across as overly sanitized. But it should carry a warning label that pregnant women shouldn't read this book.

However, there are a few things that are very well done. The many many deus ex machinas (I'm sorry, I don't have the Latin to pluralize that phrase) fit in well enough - you don't find yourself rolling your eyes or feeling cheated, and they're easy enough to believe if you want to. The author gives us an opportunity for some lovely schadenfreude about an unsympathetic protagonist, which makes him decidedly easier to swallow. But overall, this book, and the blurb on the jacket flap, both badly need to be brutally edited so that we aren't 75% of the way through before we come upon new plot information, and so that about a third of the exposition in the beginning isn't totally unnecessary.