Michael Conner

I can't really call this a good book but it's a page-turner, and I enjoyed the author's determination to throw in as many ideas as possible. It's a spy-fi thriller where a lonely guy with psychic powers, who just wants to hang out with his cat, is recruited by the government to investigate a stage magician who also might have psychic powers (and/or ghost powers?), as part of a mass-mind-control plot to stop California from seceding (because there's already been a civil war and various show more political intrigue that doesn't matter at all), while he also falls in love with the magician's wife, even though he just wants to get home to his cat.

Sometimes Conner seems to be trying to write a hard-boiled adventure with angsty tough guys and a femme fatale, in more of an early-60s style than late-70s; other times he's doing vague world-building for its own sake, or as an excuse to vent some opinions about California culture; other times he's talking about stage magic because I think he just likes it; and there's a weird interlude near the end where he goes on and on about the technical specifications of a device, and then switches the text into a two-column format with numbers from that device on one side, to build suspense, but it doesn't really. Very little of it goes anywhere in particular, and there's a twist at the end that makes absolutely no sense (it reads as if he just forgot some of the stuff he'd written earlier that made it impossible for that twist to be true). But whatever he's doing at any given moment is done with conviction. show less

Mr. Connor's book has Racism, a vampire story, and a good Noirish prose style. I found it fun, but it's not a reread kind of book.