I'm not a fan of thrillers though I can enjoy an occasional mystery/thriller. I thought this was one of those. As far as I can tell it is not. I did not finish it but I didn't discover an interesting mystery to keep me engaged and didn't "connect" with the character so I gave up. There are plent...
Pretty good. I am a fan of the Shane Scully series and really enjoyed this one as it had the usual elements (police procedures, Shane's unique take on things, action). But it did not have a common problem with other Shane Scully novels--a decent plot which in the third act becomes way too compl...
My least favorite part of this book was the title. Seriously. The Plan? How gay is that? Fortunately, it wasn't my first Cannell to read - even though it was his first to write. I read King Con firstly, and found I liked the author quite a bit. Other than the title, this book wasn't half ba...
Cannell, Stephen J. COLD HIT. (2005). ***. Billed as a Shane Scully novel, this escapade follows Detective Scully of the LAPD as he tries to bring to justice the perpetrator of the “fingertip murders.” Bodies have been turning up in the LA River (You know, the one all paved over.) shot to de...
This story was of illegal Chinese immigrants coming to America - called Riding the Snake - and the rise in power of one man to take a major political office in Honk Kong. The characters are unlikely, as always in Cannell's books, but that's what makes his stories work. The research he put into ...
Reading this many books in a row by a single author has advantages and disadvantages. The good is that I really get in touch with (and stay close to) the continuing characters. The downside is that you also get really in touch with the author's little hitches. His overuse of the same clichés a...
WHITE SISTER by Stephen J. Cannell…..Cannell doesn’t write literary fiction. But then again, neither do I. What he does, and does best, is produce pure Hollywood pulp. WHITE SISTER was copyrighted in 2006 with a contemporary setting. But it could just as easily been a hardboiled story from the 19...
This novel is one of my favorites by this author so far. You could tell he really did his research about train lines and hobos and their intricate system of communicating through symbols on bridges and whatnot. It poses a very interesting look into the life of a hobo riding the rails for a livi...
I had some ups & downs with this. Overall, it was a pretty thrilling, well done suspense novel & well read, too. The story started with a bang & there were plenty of interesting twists & turns all the way through. While there was some hyperbole, nothing too far out of bounds. The characters we...
This was entertaining, though full of silliness too. It's about a con man getting revenge by setting up a situation like in the movie "the Sting". What I liked best was that this writer has some kind of real research source. He has to be talking to a person who travels around ripping people off. ...
Cannell writes a good story, that's for sure. He doesn't write it well. He writes it good. His need to use cliché and lingo and parlance sometimes gets a little tiresome. He also somehow feels the need to tell me exactly how to get to the locations in his story. "So they took a left on Cedar...
She blew on her signature to dry the ink, then handed it to Jack. "For three days' work, your airline tickets, lunch, and an hour of parking." "I'm getting a nice little collection of these," he said suspiciously. It was 6:00 p.m. and they were seated on the patio of a Newport Beach f...