Fri 26 Jun 2015
Reviewed by Barry Gardner: WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Tight Lines.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[2] Comments
WILLIAM G. TAPPLY – Tight Lines. Brady Coyne #11. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1992. Dell, paperback, 1993.
I like the Brady Coyne books. This isn’t bis best, but it isn’t bad, either. One of Coyne’s wealthy clients (for those of you not familiar with the series, he’s a lawyer whose specialty is ministering the needs of the very wealthy) is dying of cancer, and hires him to find her estranged daughter.
She hasn’t seen or heard from her in a decade or more (for reasons she doesn’t understand) and wants both to be reconciled, if possible, and to take care of some complicated estate matters. Coy Coyne tries to avoid the chore, but eventually acquiesces.
He locates her residence, but she is not there. The girl is a card-carrying neurotic, Coyne discovers, with several past and present older lovers to her credit, plus a psychiatrist. Shortly thereafter her body is discovered in a New Hampshire pond under ambiguous circumstances. The rest is a fairly standard excursion into her past and charader, with the identity of the doer of the deed eventually discovered, and justice sort of served.
As usual Coyne is likeable and Tapply does a good job of pacing the story. I think he’s a very competent writer, but for some reason I wasn’t able to get involved with this set of players; perhaps my mood, perhaps not. I saw the ending coming, and thought it weak and not well enough set up, but so-so. Tapply is still worth reading. Recommended, though not strongly.
June 27th, 2015 at 1:50 pm
This was #11 of a quite remarkable output of 24 standalone Brady Coyne novels from Tapply, plus three more adventures co-starring Philip Craig’s J. W. Jackson. It’s no wonder there are some weaker ones in the series, if we go along with Barry’s comments on this one.
Mostly, though, I never found Coyne’s adventures all that exciting. I think that may be why some readers loved them. His cases were slow, relaxed and in a lot of ways, predictable.
June 27th, 2015 at 6:53 pm
“… for some reason I can’t get involved with his set of characters …”
That nails it. Try as I might I just couldn’t get drawn in. For whatever reason peculiar to me I just didn’t care. It was a bit like the literary equivalent of MATLOCK or MURDER SHE WROTE — nothing much happened in a laid back way to people I didn’t much care about at a pace to slow to keep me turning pages and relaxed enough to put me in a coma.
Not bad or badly written, just a series that didn’t have enough oomph to keep me from one title to the next, or even through most of the ones I tried to read. I always felt I needed an IV of Spillane or Richard Stark after reading one of these to reawaken my tired blood and thunder response.