Page turners with a brain

Dump "The Da Vinci Code" and break the "Rule of Four" -- our reading list for a hot season ventures from 1945 Barcelona to an English ghost story to a haunted Texas bureaucracy, all without insulting your intelligence.

By Salon's critics

May 29, 2004 | Readers of America, you have a choice. Although you wouldn't know it to look at many of the titles jostling for slots on the bestseller lists, there's no law dictating that if you want a book with an irresistible, crackerjack plot you also have to put up with crappy writing and tissue-paper-thin characters. Sure, millions of people proved themselves willing to choke down Dan Brown's clunky prose in order to crack "The Da Vinci Code" (proof positive that everyone loves a good conspiracy theory), but why suffer if you don't have to?

Page turners can be smart, as in really smart, and not just the pseudo-intelligence of the reviewers' current darling, "The Rule of Four," by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. With that novel, we were promised Donna Tartt meets Umberto Eco, and instead we got way too much turgid maundering on undergraduate life at Princeton and way too little of the fascinating real-life Renaissance book supposedly at the story's center. Nowhere is it written that smart books must also be overwritten and difficult to follow, either. The hardest thing, after all, is to make it go down easy.

Determined to find unputdownable novels that didn't make us wince or groan on every page, we plowed through publishers' recent and forthcoming offerings for books guaranteed to shorten a long flight and make a sunbathing session even more pleasant. Some of these titles you may have already read about, others will be hitting the stores in a month or so. (They can also be ordered or pre-ordered from Powells.com.) All of them belong on the shopping list of readers who aren't turning off their brains just because it's June, but who don't see a beach blanket as quite the right place to tackle a history of the Soviet gulags. We hope at least one of them makes your summer a little sunnier.

"The Narrows"
By Michael Connelly
405 pages
Little, Brown
Order from Powells.com

All the flaws of Michael Connelly's writing are on display in "The Narrows": the humorlessness, the sentimentality disguised as masculine stoicism, the moralistic attitude toward any vaguely disreputable pleasure. In other words, "The Narrows" is, for good and bad, representative of the current state of mainstream hard-boiled fiction in America.

But also on display are Connelly's considerable talents as a plotter. Even that attribute is not without flaws. He has a tendency to go for one twist too many, pushing his stories over the line from ingenious to "Oh, come on." Nowhere was that more evident than in "The Poet," a genuinely creepy serial-killer thriller (as opposed to the showy Grand Guignol of the Thomas Harris school) and a brilliant piece of plotting -- until Connelly went for that final twist that nearly made the entire book fall apart.

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