I think this was the first (and only) in the Fletch series with an A and a B plot going on simultaneously. There wasn’t as much mystery or whodunnit as past books despite the number of suspects in something like Fletch’s Fortune. The ending was relatively interesting and certainly unexpected. I wouldn’t say it was very satisfying.
I’d rank this one toward the bottom of the series overall.
This one immediately follows Son of Fletch, literally by few hours. It didn’t start out with the same type of bang that most of the Fletch series has, instead it was about 20% into the story before we knew quite what ride we were on. Now that’s it’s going, it’s as interesting as most Fletch tales.
Who could want more?! I want to experiment a bit with it, play with multiple configurations, and then document parts before rolling out–particularly as it wasn’t necessarily intended for this use case, but I’ll have some more details shortly.
Oh, if only more of my cookbooks had fantastic sentences like this one:
Now the flow of a liquid in a canal varies as the fourth power of the diameter.
Then there’s this lovely statement, which is as applicable to jellies and consommés as it is to our political leaders:
Today, as heirs to the (political) ancien regime, we all want jellies, like bouillons and consommés, to be transparent.
I’ll note that chapter 4 has some interesting recipes as well as one or two long-term experiments which may be interesting to try.
We’re sorry, but due to heavy load on our database we are no longer able to offer an export function. Our engineers are working on this and we will restore it as soon as possible.
Hopefully they get things working properly so I can export them one of these days without resorting to more arcane methods to get the data back.
This is where things begin to go sideways! Here comes the third act… Much of what I anticipated was going to happen has; the question now is how will he manage to extract himself (and his friends/family)?
We’re starting to go somewhere, but I can sadly already almost predict the ending. In particular, there was a ham-handed mention of a car that gave the whole thing away for me.
Of all of the Fletch books, so far this one seems to be the biggest influencer for the creation of portions of the movie Fletch Lives, which was otherwise made out of whole cloth based on the character.
“I suspect it’s not every man’s dream to discover his son is a cop-killing, escaped convict, racist, hate-group organizer.”
Added on Tuesday, November 29, 2016 1:46:53 AM
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We’re off like a shot. Somehow it doesn’t seem terrifically believable that the escape convicts so easily take Fletch’s advice on where to hide, but he does a fantastic job of coralling them in the opeining.
Some of the overt “Southernness” feels overdone to me, but perhaps it was the effect of Mcdonald’s many years living in Tennessee which had a tarnishing effect.
Fletch has a son. He’s a convict and he’s on the run after a prison break. Will Fletch help him out?
There’s some great stuff in the last half of the book about Wheeler’s platform that is eerily prescient of the situation we now find ourselves in with regard to a heavily internet connected world and who owns it. It’s also an odd feeling reading this after experiencing what’s recently happened in the 2016 presidential election and it’s ensuing results.
Usually Fletch is the one with all the sharp, ascerbic statements, but in this installment I’m noticing that he’s the tame one and everyone else is somehow playing the part he usually does.