The Blonde by Duane Swierczynski

This is a book I’ve been wanting to read for a long, long time now. If memory serves, it was John Scalzi who pimped this book around January ‘07. I made a mental note to track it down sometime and then proceeded to forget everything about it ’till I saw someone praising it to high heavens. Ever since then I’ve just waited for an opportunity to get a hold of it. I guess it must have been the fact that isn’t a fantasy or a science fiction novel that made it slip my mind, cos crime books just aren’t my thing.

But blondes, however, are…

“The Blonde” is a fast paced, high-octane rump of a crime novel that echoes a little of the insanity of Warren Ellis’ “Crooked Little Vein”. The novel kicks off with the blonde girl telling the Chicago journalist, Jack, that: “I poisoned your drink”, and from there on out Duane Swierczynksi (damn that last name!) weaves together several plot strands into what I think many would characterize as a incredibly entertaining novel, containing several exploding heads, a lovesick assassin, and of course the obligatory plot to gain control of a weapon of mass destruction…

And by all means, it was a fun read. It made chuckle several times and the dialog was definitely nicely done. But there isn’t anything special about this book that would make it really good. I especially found the characterization to be wanting. Sure, government assassin who was on a personal quest to kill the entire Cosa Nostra family in Philadelphia (that’s the state where this novel takes place) was quite fun, but they all felt kinda of one-dimensional and tedious on to themselves. I didn’t really care what the f*ck happened to any of them, and that’s always a bad sign.

Being only 226 pages long in hardcover, “The Blonde” is definitely what you’d call a fast read that won’t take much more than a couple of hours to finish (if even that). I don’t regret picking it up; I just think Warren Ellis wrote such a superior book that “The Blonde” seemed drab in comparison. The best thing about the book was actually the reaction I got when people read the title: “Huh! So now you’ve gone from reading fantasy to erotic bondage books! That might just be a new low – even for you!”. I was able to persuade them otherwise regarding it being “erotic”, but sadly, nothing to be done about the “bondage” bit. I can’t lie, can I?

7 /10 (weak)