The Bones

After finding some entertainment in The Angry Buddhist, I tried another Seth Greenland book, but I was less impressed with this one. It’s an LA story of parasitic and opportunistic relationships of people who are seeking wealth and fame. There was no strong ethical male figure as is found in so many of the MRB blog. Frank Bones is an aging comedian, one who has been making a living but has never really made it big. Frank knows that he deserves to be a star. When he was still in New York, Frank ran into Lloyd Melnick, a not-too-talented writer. Unlike Frank, Lloyd has hit it really big by happening to be in the right place at the right time. Lloyd knows that he has been very lucky and does not deserve the fortune he has made. Both men are romantically involved with social mountaineering women. Some of the dialogue was fun. There was one scene between Frank and his girlfriend, Honey Call (really), an aspiring but untalented actress. They are having a morning together. Nearly naked, she microwaves mac and cheese for the two of them for breakfast. The author reveals that her pubic hair is shaved in the shape of a heart, but then, she insists they say a prayer before beginning the meal. That was enough absurdity to keep me reading for a while. Alas, halfway through the book, no crime had yet occurred. Given that this is mostly a crime-genre blog, the biggest crime may be that I bought the book. I put the book down, couldn’t stand it any more. It does not get my recommendation, and I don’t have plans to spend more time with Mr. Greenland.

The Angry Buddhist

This is Greenland’s third novel, and after reading this one, I’ll take on one of his others. The Angry Buddhist is a story about three brothers with a case of very intense sibling rivalry. The oldest brother is running for re-election to Congress in Palm Springs – funny that his name is Randall Duke, which sounds like Randy Duke Cunningham, the disgraced and imprisoned former congressman from my own congressional district. In this story, the fictional Randall was even dirtier than the real Randy. 

Jimmy is the middle kid, the angry Buddhist, who got kicked off the Palm Springs Police Department for making a threat against the Chief, Harding (Hard) Marvin, who is backing the politician running against Randall, the beautiful and vivacious Mary Swain, a former flight attendant who is now married to a very wealthy man who is bankrolling her run for Congress. Jimmy is trying to turn to Buddhism as a way of managing his anger problem, although anger is a strong trait in all of the brothers. The youngest brother is Dale, a paraplegic who Randall managed to spring from prison just a little early so he would look good in family photos that could be used for the campaign. Dale went to prison to take a drug rap that was rightly Randall’s. Dale doesn’t play by the same rules as anyone else, and he has some really bad ass friends from his recent days in prison. Meanwhile, there’s a mysterious blogger who attacks nearly everyone in the political process and seems to have inside information about both the Duke and Swain campaigns. No one is able to figure out who the blogger is, and Greenland skillfully hides that info until the very end of the book – I didn’t figure that one out. There’s also Maxon Brae, Randall’s sociopathic campaign manager, and Nadine Never, the former touring tennis pro, now a local tennis teacher, whose bisexual activities intertwine among the principal players in this story. She becomes the victim of murder around which the story swings. Greenland fills out the tale with some other interesting characters. 

The story is mostly a tongue-in-cheek look at the shenanigans that go on behind the political scene. It was a fun read with good humor and the dark moments were always too obviously contrived to do anything but laugh at the cleverness of it. At times, the writing was poetic. Take the opening lines: “In the desert the sun is an anarchist. Molecules madly dance beneath the relentless glare. Unit gives way to chaos. And every day, people lose their minds.” The character development was good, and the dialogue was sometimes intentionally cheesy. It was entertaining, an “airplane book.”