Cape Disappointment anything but

As I’ve blogged about before, Earl Emerson is my favourite author.

By day, he’s a firefighter in Seattle. By night, he’s the frickin’ Superman of authors. He’s just that good.

He originally started writing novels about a detective (named Thomas Black), before moving on to fictional books involving firefighters. That’s when I came in as a fan. I loved the firefighting books, but I never read any of the books involving Black.

I have a few I picked up at garage sales and what not, but I didn’t know if there was a specific order to read them in, so I was wary about reading them, in case I read them out of order and spoil what happened in other books (as what happened when I read a Jonathan Kellerman book out of order, and read Barry Eisler’s John Rain series out of order).

So although Cape Disappointment is a Thomas Black novel, I decided to read it because a) it was his newest book and b) I haven’t read an Earl Emerson book in 15 months, and I was going through withdrawl.

While I didn’t enjoy the book as much I do the firefighting ones, it was still great. That’s the thing about Emerson. Even when his book isn’t as good as I think, it’s still better than 95% of the books I’ve read in my life.

This book begins with Black the victim of a bombing, weeks after his wife is killed in a airplane crash. It then uses flashbacks to bring the reader up to speed.

While the conspiracy theory in the middle of the book bogged it down a little for me (I’m not a big conspiracy theory guy), the plot still flowed along nicely.

In the end, a great book by my favourite author. So maybe I’ll go back and start reading the rest of the series. And who cares about the order, as long as they’re just as good as this one.