Every couple of months, Nick Hay, one of the RTE reviewers, turns up on my doorstep to liberate his next batch of review books. After we've had a pleasant lunch and caught up on each other's news, I settle down to enjoy the free floor show as Nick takes his life in his hands and sorts through the latest books.
Nick's a long-suffering and very tolerant reviewer, but it's virtually impossible to keep a straight face watching him read the blurbs on the backs of books. Oh look, here's a mad monk running around mittel Europe in search of a religious icon. And there's another, with added Freemasons at no extra cost. Yes, and there's yet another, with a beautiful woman to help our intrepid hero track down said mad monk. If the writer's feeling particularly radical, there'll be a mysterious library in there somewhere.
After Nick has employed a bargepole to avoid that little lot, he then encounters our next batch, which are willy-waving thrillers where the former military hero charges around America and, if we're very unlucky, mittel Europe as well for extra air miles, to save the world in 45 minutes. Most of the time our chap will be a loner; sometimes, heavens to Betsy, he has a family to protect.
And speaking of which, that's our third category that gets piled in a corner by the poor, beleaguered Mr Hay. Mr Average lives a quiet life in a small American town (no mittel Europe this time). But he has to turn into the Terminator when his idyllic family life is threatened in some way…
I'd say that a good half of the books Nick sorted through belonged to one of these three categories. Yes, we know publishers like trends and bandwagons. But hell's bells, the same books re-packaged get old ever so quickly and reviewers start to edge away and mutter excuses as to why they'll be busy until at least next Easter.
I haven't been quite so lucky as Nick. I've got two books on the go at the moment – the new Dan Brown, and a debut novel by Andrew Grant. We'll gloss over Mr Brown, but all you need to know about the latter is that he's the brother of Lee Child and that Even features a former Royal Navy loner in a race against time. I am assuming the Child clan have a sister hidden away somewhere who'll soon present us with an anti-social Royal Air Force chap who's going to save the world …
The only consolation is that
there's nothing in Mount To Be Read that fits category three. But that's only
because I saw off the latest Linwood Barclay not so long ago…
