The Man with the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green

Last week, the SF reading group proposed reading the something by Simon Green. Many of us had never heard of him, so went to the shelves to see what he'd written. The Man with the Golden Torc caught my eye because of the hero's name: Edwin Drood.

The Man with the Golden Torc isn't actually part of the series the group settled on, but everyone else in the group beat me to the library (sensible people), and this is the one I was most curious about anyway.

Overall, I thought it was a decent, entertaining, but not spectacular read.

It is chock full of sentence fragments, and I find that very distracting.

The main character is a fairly stereotypical tough-guy. He blows things up, makes things go splat, drinks, has sex with someone fairly early on in the book so as to ensure us of his essential masculinity, the usual routine. The book relies--a lot--on Really Cool Gadgets, Atmosphere, and Strange Creepy Supernatural Things.

In short, it's not really my style.

But--I actually liked the Tough Guy despite his stereotype qualities. The gadgets really were cool, and I still wanted to know What Happens Next, there were some neat twists, and, when he's not committing sentence fragments, Green has a good grasp of the English language.

It's worth reading once, and I probably will read at least Shadows Fall--a library copy, of course.

Edited to add the words "Book review" to the entry. I hadn't quite grasped search engines when I wrote this (Maybe still haven't, but I'm working on it).