Interesting that out of all of Duane Swierczynski's books, I read his first one last. And it was a fun read, a mash-up of private eye noir, metaphysical rationalism, and revenge-killing thriller.
Looking forward to the author's new books! ( )

Duane Swierczynski is one of my favorite authors. That being said, this novel (his first) was hard to get through with its convoluted plot. Probably fun to write, not fun to read. The only reason I was able to finish the book was because Swiercznski is such a capable wordsmith. ( )

The back cover explains it more succinctly than I ever could: "Del Farmer isn't your ordinary hardboiled private eye. Instead of collecting fingerprints and clues, he collects souls of the recently dead." Which he uses to track down and destroy an evil entity he has dubbed "The Organization". Only things aren't so simple. :-)

This is sort of hard-boiled science fiction, a little in the vein of Jonathan Lethem's GUN, WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC, but a lot more bloody and even more inventive, as you would expect from Swierczynski. The narrative grows more complicated as the book goes along, and there are times it looks like it will spin completely out of control, but somehow the author manages to keep it on the road--although I do believe I saw a couple of doors fly off.

The book manages to be funny, amazingly original, and gripping all at the same time. I don't want to live in the Brain Hotel, but it is quite a creation, and I'm glad I got to visit. A book like this can give you a whole new way of looking at reality, but then, Swierczynski's work usually does. He has few equals. ( )

This is one strange book. Del Farmer is a private investigator who collects souls of dead people. Comes in handy when solving some cases, but they are all starting to clutter up in the “hotel” he has built in his mind to house them all. Another case comes up, and the case and another assignment and some of the people in his hotel all start getting mixed up. As things get more convoluted, people die and get thrown in other bodies, Farmer winds up in different bodies, there is a battle for supremacy in his own mind, and things just get generally weird.

If not evident from the preceding paragraph, this will not be a book to everyone’s tastes. However, for those of us who like this kind of thing, it was a lot of fun. Yeah, it got pretty confusing toward the end, but no one said reading should be easy (no matter how “easy” Swierczynski’s style might seem – that’s a compliment.) There’s some real questions buried in this short novel, and the author (only gonna type that name once) does try to tackle them.

But the real grab of this novel is the way a simple premise (if you can call collecting dead souls in your mind “simple”) gets built into this intricate web. And all within 200 pages. That means it’s a fast ride that is worth the trip. ( )

Very good but not great. It reads like a first novel and well, it is. I may be extra critical of this novel because I read Set This House in Order a few months back, both dealing in their own ways with basically multiple personalities. STHIO being the masterpiece of this particular sub, sub, sub genre. Each character could have used its own "voice". But all in all I really enjoyed this book. ( )