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Title: Gilded Latten Bones
Series: Garrett, PI #13
Author: Glen Cook
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 348
Words: 101K

Synopsis:

Garrett's taking a stab at domestic bliss with the fiery Tinnie Tate, who tells him just how high to jump. He's even sworn off his investigations, causing the criminal element no end of joy. Then he waylays a pair of home intruders in the middle of the night and learns they've been paid to kidnap Tinnie. But even they are not quite sure who hired them.

Not many in TunFaire have the brawn -- or lack of brains -- to tangle with the Tate clan., But as Garrett rushes to find out who is suffering from a deadly attack of hubris, he learns he's not the only one with unwanted callers: His best friend, Morley Dotes -- a half elf of stunning good looks and dubious moral fiber -- has been attacked and left for dead. Now Garrett has to track down both malefactors.

Unless they're really one and the same -- in which case Garrett might be next.

Turns out Morley saw the Royal Carriage where he shouldn't, at a completely evil necromancer's place and the King was the customer. With pressure from Tinnie to stay out of it, to a royal decree by Prince Rupert to stay out of it and all of his friends telling him to stay out of it, Garrett stays out of it.

Yeah. He nurses Morley back to health, is the mastermind at the hub of a ring of informants (because the Deadman is pretty much out of commission by a confrontation with the evil necromancers) and defies both Law, King and the Criminal Queen to get to the bottom of it all.

In the end, Tinnie leaves Garrett because she can't stand sharing him with his friends or his job and Garrett wastes no time jumping in bed with one of the Sorceress's from the Hill. Garrett also realizes that he isn't the “beat” detective he used to be and his actions affect a whole slew of people, so no hairing off to get clubbed on the head just for the heck of it.

My Thoughts:

I actually enjoyed this for the most part. Except for 2 parts. First, Garrett is as big a lech as ever and I'm not even referring to the Sorceress, but almost every other lady. Second, Tinnie and Garrett's breakup just rang of Cook wanting to try something new and making each of them behave in ways that simply don't fit with how they've acted previously. Sure, Tinnie is bossie and Garrett has known her all his life, but that's not enough of a reason for them to simply call it quits. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of the last season of the tv show “Frasier”. Frasier, the main character, has been searching for a romantic partner since the beginning of the show and suddenly in the last season, she appears and is shoe-horned into the story. That's how this felt. Not natural but shoe-horned.

Other than those 2 items, this was as confusing as ever :-D I had no idea who the bad guys where, what they wanted, why they were doing what they were or why they even existed. Thankfully, I'm an old hand at this kind of read and simply sat back and let the author reveal things when he thought it was time, even if it was stupid.

Garrett has become a powerful enough entity in Tun Faire that he essentially can tell the Crown Prince to shove it and the Crown Prince can't do much. Garrett is connected with powerful people, on all sides of the legal spectrum and he's not afraid to use those connections.

With only one more book to go, we'll have to see how Cook wraps things up. The Deadman obviously has to leave, Garrett doesn't need him anymore but I don't see where he'll go. Garrett is going to hook up with Miss Sorceress and the money will keep rolling in from his investments managed by the rat girl. Everything is going to get wrapped up, I just hope it's not too quick a wrap up like the change in this book between Garrett and Tinnie.

★★★☆☆ ( )

Gilded Latten Bones is the... I don't know, feels like the 50th book in the Garrett, PI series, but Wikipedia tells me there's only 13. From the feel of the ending, I suspect this is intended to be the last one.

The story starts out in traditional noir mystery fashion, and seems fairly promising. There is a bizarre attack on the place he's now sharing with Tinnie, and it looks like an older, wiser Garrett will be hauled back to his old haunts when someone comes close to killing his old friend Morley.

It does not deliver. Much as I appreciate learning a new vocabulary word, the series has lost its luster for me. While Cook has done a great job evolving his setting over the course of the series, he hasn't done so much for his protagonist, and his attempts to do so in the course of this story strike me as clumsy. Garrett is still Garrett. The "settled down now" veneer is translucently thin, the problems his now-permanent relationship with Tinnie create seem as tired as Garrett himself, their resolution verges on unnatural (for one thing, it requires the Dead Man to like a woman).

The story is encumbered by the weight of all of the characters it has created over the years, all of which now seem like they have to show up in every book, along with a few new ones. The choppy style seems less like an effect and more like laziness. Two-page chapters? Am I reading a Dan Brown novel?

The worst thing? This should have been a great Garrett story. The final adventure, dark deeds at the highest levels of the realm, hideous sorceries lurking in Tun Faire's shadows, a man caught between two women, the case that will require everything he's learned from all of his previous adventures... and instead it falls flat. The pieces never gel, there is never any serious sense of threat. Garrett spends as much time mooning (awkwardly) over his relationships and sorting out minor problems among his friends as he does anything else, gets beat up, sleeps a lot, gets a cold (!), with the result that the actual plot feels like an afterthought. Surrounded by an army of secondary characters, slowed by pointless subplots, the top-heavy story creaks along to a finale in which Garrett has no part to play.

I really, really want to know what his editor thought about this one. ( )

Garrett is back. Mostly. Some new, but not unwelcome directions. He's beginning to come across as something I'm not sure he needed to become, but perhaps necessary for future stories to develop. All the usual ingredients are here, yet the flavor was a bit off. ( )

I enjoyed the book as much as I've enjoyed the rest of the series, but despite Garrett's assertion that he's grown up now, his decision at the end of the book reminded me of Don Draper's decision in the last episode of season 4 of Mad Men. Both characters made decisions that point to a basic immaturity which will come back to bite them. ( )

*****MAJOR SPOILER*****










Five stars because he finally got rid of Tinnie and did it very very well. He explained Garrett's feelings well and gave us a better look at Tinnie herself thru the Dead Man and those who love both Garrett and Tinnie.

I would give it a 5 out of pure relief because she was getting very old very fast and the author saw that. ( )