Book Review: McGrave by Lee Goldberg

When Lee Goldberg sent this out, I stopped reading the novel currently sitting at the forefront of my kindle, transferred the file over, and dived right in.  Goldberg wants McGrave to be the sort of fast-paced, delicious junk food action story that guys like me read on our lunch breaks or while we're sitting glumly at 8 AM on the subway or commuter rail.

I started reading this zany cop action smorgasbord over lunch, with a big greasy burrito and a bottle of cheap beer, and found myself a good fifteen minutes late back to work because I couldn't put them damn thing down.  McGrave is that perfect blend of action, humor, gratuitous violence and ludicrous hyperbole that fueled so much of my adolescent reading materi...oh, who am I kidding?  It's still the bread and butter of the printed pages I read.

Goldberg mentions at the end of the book that McGrave was originally a script for a television pilot, and you can absolutely see that.  It is intentionally written in a "televised" style, focusing almost exclusively on what the mind's eye sees and hears as you read through the story.  No deep introspection, no long discussion of the finer points of human nature.  This book is the literary equivalent of buffalo wings and boilermakers. 

So, if you like cop action thrillers where the good guys punch first and ask questions later, where every time the good guy walks back into the police station the Captain's blood pressure shoots through the roof, and every time he walks back out the city's civic repairs budget takes another big hit, McGrave is your new favorite ebook.