The Collectors (Book Review)
As an avid reader it should be no surprise that I plough through my fair share of novels and it should be equally as clear that I tend not to put reviews of novels onto this website. Mainly because I reserve comment on novels only for those which I feel were compelling and engaging beyond a general labour… which is a nice way of saying there are a lot of ordinary to mediocre novels being produced even by well respected authors. However, that’s a social comment rather than a part of this review.
As the second installment of The Camel Club (which hit my radar on the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club some time ago), I found The Collectors by David Baldacci to be one of those compelling reads that distinguish a real novel from the contemporary crowd. It was meaty, engaging, compelling and intelligently written. In fact, I could not think of any part of The Collectors where I had that ho-hum feeling so it delivered in spades.
The Camel Club are a group of misfits and a triple six retired government assassin who happen into the circumstance to solve crimes. In The Collectors, Jonathon DeHaven who is head of the rare books division at the Library of Congress comes to a mysterious end. His heart stops. The Camel Club are intrigued by their friend’s strange death and they dig ever further into a twisting tale about spies and corruption with a side-story about con-men and casinos (a tale probably worth its own day in the sun under the cover of a whole new novel). Without spoiling the story, The Collectors comes together in a way that doesn’t quite tie up all of the loose ends and lets the reader write those last lines…
Let me put it this way… many novels fail because you get the sense that they’re fluffing the words to fill the pages. They fail because they spend too long telling the story of the scenery such as where the lamp is located in a room and the ambient green on a wall or irrelevant social paraphenalia that litters every character’s (and real person’s) life. Baldacci has a great knack of telling the story and leaving you to follow along figuring things out as you go. That’s intelligent writing for intelligent readership and to do so should be the aim of any storyteller.
So all I can really tell you about this one is that real lovers of the novel will curl up for the weekend on the sunroom futon with brief interludes for coffee and light snacks feeling compelled to reopen and continue the story. Its one of those pick up and don’t put down end-to-end experiences. If you get a chance to read this second installment of The Camel Club you won’t be disappointed. Everything I expect and hope for from a lazy weekend on the futon.
Bring on further installments in the Camel Club series. Please.
