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I wasted today reading In Extremis the new CSI novel by Kenneth Goddard. Goddard is a former CSI, and it shows. More than half the book is spent detailing evidence collection and examination techniques, and while that might be fascinating reading to a tech in training, it's exceedingly dull to fans accustomed to a more action/suspense-oriented approach. No Brass interrogating suspects, no snappy dialogue, just pages and pages of tedium and minutiae.
Goddard also proselytizes about "the good ole days", when accident reconstruction was done with trigonometry and a slide rule. Whee. The tortured wailing readers hear as they turn the page is the grinding of Goddard's cherished axe of obsolescence. Back in his day, forensic scientists knew what they were doing with their coal dust and flint tools and trusty abacus. Young CSIs are just numb cogs in the machine, following procedure and lulled into stupefaction by the green glow of the machines. After a book full of such sentiments, I started to wonder if Goddard kept his abacus in his bedside table, right next to the lube and Viagra.
The climax was a painfully contrived infodump. Archie the lab tech knows an Army colonel from the gun range? OooK. Does Goddard even watch the show?
Stupid book written in the Dull, Thudding Tract style, and I'm sorry I wasted eight dollars on it, particularly since it was only two hundred and seventy-five pages. Books are shrinking along with the human attention span, I tell you. When I was a teenager, novels clocked in at four hundred easy, with King clocking in at seven hundred more often than not. Now I'm thirty and paying eight dollars for work that wouldn't have qualified as a badly-written novella ten years ago. Ah, progress.
Those scientist bewailing the incremental but steady erosion of human intelligence over the past thirty years might be on to something. I'd say Goddard was a prime example of the ADD generation, but he keeps his teeth in glass beside his house keys and wallet.
C-
Goddard also proselytizes about "the good ole days", when accident reconstruction was done with trigonometry and a slide rule. Whee. The tortured wailing readers hear as they turn the page is the grinding of Goddard's cherished axe of obsolescence. Back in his day, forensic scientists knew what they were doing with their coal dust and flint tools and trusty abacus. Young CSIs are just numb cogs in the machine, following procedure and lulled into stupefaction by the green glow of the machines. After a book full of such sentiments, I started to wonder if Goddard kept his abacus in his bedside table, right next to the lube and Viagra.
The climax was a painfully contrived infodump. Archie the lab tech knows an Army colonel from the gun range? OooK. Does Goddard even watch the show?
Stupid book written in the Dull, Thudding Tract style, and I'm sorry I wasted eight dollars on it, particularly since it was only two hundred and seventy-five pages. Books are shrinking along with the human attention span, I tell you. When I was a teenager, novels clocked in at four hundred easy, with King clocking in at seven hundred more often than not. Now I'm thirty and paying eight dollars for work that wouldn't have qualified as a badly-written novella ten years ago. Ah, progress.
Those scientist bewailing the incremental but steady erosion of human intelligence over the past thirty years might be on to something. I'd say Goddard was a prime example of the ADD generation, but he keeps his teeth in glass beside his house keys and wallet.
C-
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