Money Hungry

Okay so Money Hungry, first in the Salt Mine series! I kinda don't even wanna review it since it's indie authors and I'm not gonna be all positive although there are good things also.

Let's start positive:

I have been wanting to run a Blowback + Illuminati crossover game and this is reminiscent of that. The two main agents are great and the prose is cartoonishly and gibsonesquely rich in detail, description, brand names, car models, magical artifacts, code names, flight details, dates and time stamps in a way that if you are in the mood for that kind of thing is very fun to read and I absolutely was and am. Sometimes you want a sparse Hemingway river but other times you want chrome and this delivers that in an otherwise economic, clear, well-edited, restrained prose that trusts in its characters and situations and doesn't leave killable darlings and groaners in. After Marionetterna's convoluted and strained sentences it's nice to see something that's (on the sentence level) well written like this book is. A+.

What's not as fun to read (especially since I finished Marionetterna the same day I started this) is a copagandish justification of how CIA agents lie "for a good cause". I'm really not into that after learning about real CIA "demintern" propaganda campaigns like CCF or the British IRD. X-Files has scrappy agents out of the loop, Dresden Files has a PI, but this is full on GURPS Black Ops backed and funded by the US Government with a fully stocked Warehouse 23. Now, it's not this books fault that a genre I was super into suddenly feels gauche and joyless because I coincidentally happened to refresh my memory about how utterly messed up the real-life CIA is just hours before opening this one that I've had lying around since mid March this year. It's not. But that's how it is.

And that's only the second biggest poroblem. This is a supernatural mystery. Now, that can work, like Tordyveln flyger i skymmningen which I read earlier this fall, which had a supernatural setting and featured supernatural events but for the mystery served up fair clues and fair red herrings. This isn't that. It's "weird stuff happens, agents show up, use weird gadgets, find out supernatural and unforeshadowed hat-pulled explanation". It feels lol random and incoherent. Yeah yeah, the occult stuff sticks to canon, which I always appreciate over things like Preacher that goes different for different's sake, so you'd think that'd ameliorate the problem but in this case in't doesn't at all. It's not a howcatchem either, like Rostskogen which I also reviewed recently, it's just a "it's a mystery what has happened! Oh and here is what has happened: something completely supernatural and diavolos ex machina!" It doesn't work! Not into it! (There's a specific detail I don't wanna spoil that makes it even dumber.) Too gory for a cozy and too arbitrary for a thriller. It's a little bit fun to see the agents think-on-the-spot and use disguises and ask questions and travel and get to know all the suspects but then that brings us back to the previous problem of how gross it is that CIA actually did (still do?) that IRL.

Now, I already paid for seventeen more volumes of this and maybe I'll read some more! It's fun to get to hang out with Wilson and Martinez. And other books might be better although the good part (the author duo's unembellished and straight-forward command of the English language and love for milieu and props) is already good and the bad parts are both kinda inherent to the premise.