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CUBA LIBRE, by Elmore Leonard. Delacorte, 343 pp., $23.95.
FEAR NOTHING, by Dean Koontz. Bantam, 391 pp., 26.95.
COUNTERPARTS, by Gonzalo Lira. Putnam, 343 pp., $24.95.
NUMBERED ACCOUNT, by Christopher Reich. Delacorte, 483 pp., $24.95.
SKULL SESSION, by Daniel Hecht. Viking, 418 pp., $23.95.
PAGE-TURNERS are great, sure. It's fun when you feel like devouring a book. But sometimes you race through simply to find something, anything, that grabs you. What makes a great popular novel is a little more complicated, something about how much it means, how much it surprises, how much of your mind it engages. Maybe: Enjoyment = (Perceptiveness/Surprise) x (Reader absorption/Reader effort). Here are five books with promise - three novels from first-time writers, two from old favorites - described here in order of increasing values of E:
It's terribly disappointing that Elmore Leonard's new book, "Cuba Libre," is at the bottom of the list. Leonard, one of the all-time great crime novelists and a damn fine novelist in general, single-handedly revived and rehabilitated the crime genre with his brilliant low-life characters and tricky plots. But this isn't one of those books. This is a cowboy novel, the genre in which Leonard wrote, to much less acclaim, at the beginning of his career.
Leonard's cowboy books are generally simpler than the crime novels, with shallower characters and more predictable plots. Like this one. It's the end of the 19th Century. Cuban insurrectionists are fighting the Spanish colonialists, while the United States wonders whether to get involved. Then the battleship Maine gets blown up, President McKinley sees a good excuse for the United States to grab Cuba, and soon there's a Spanish-American War. The hero is a righteous ex-con cowboy who has agreed to help smuggle guns into Havana. There's the bad guy in expensive clothes, the good guy in tatters, and a beautiful woman - all so ho-hum that even Leonard's quick and funny dialogue sounds stale. Read his "Bandits" instead.
If Leonard is popular, Dean Koontz, author of 12 best-sellers, is prom queen and football captain combined. Specializing in slightly supernatural stories with brave, innocent heroes, Koontz has always struck me as Stephen King's more earnest, less talented, hopelessly uncool younger brother. Granted, King has been coasting for years now,...