Matt Payne is back, attracting bullets and bad guys and the failed sons and daughters of old Philadelphian society, and WEB Griffin is in fine form in the digital age, as romantic and jolly as always. But instead of showing us into the salons and bedrooms and backbenches of a secret world, he tells us about a city disfigured by Mexican cruelty, flooded by illegal Hispanic labourers and monetized by Meth and underaged vaguely Central American sex slaves. Instead of histories lived out among captains and sailors and adventurers he reads the plaques of unread public monuments, walking through a live city but seeing a museum. WEB Griffin’s huge heroes are missing, as are his lovely, laughing women, and his young apprentices and hearty institutional bosses. I miss them all.
The Traffickers by W.E.B. Griffin read by Scott Brick
April 20th, 2010
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Steig Larson read by Simon Vance
September 14th, 2009
Quiet, patient, relentless intelligence spills over the pages of this story about a girl geek, a journalist, a news magazine devoted to the critique of corrupt Swedish institutions, and an odd assemblage of Stockholm’s thugs, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and cops. None are verbose. Men and women think. Thinking happens without talk, without sounds, without annunciation. It is sometimes signaled by cigarettes. Sometimes by a walk. Much goes unsaid, and unshared.
All the good guys use Macs. Some of them smoke. The geek uses a powerbook, the journalist a Mac ibook, the magazine editor an Airbook. The geekgirl (Salander) is skinny, occasionally violent, abnormally intelligent, obsessively private. She does not emote; she enjoys: mathematics, sex, hacking. She has lesbian girlfriends, bank accounts in the Canary Islands, lawyers in Gibraltar, and a local accountant. She buys a 2.5 million kroner flat with a view and decorates it in one day of shopping in Ikea, for a total of 97,000 kroner.