I think this graphic is going to be way bigger than my others, but it's so much cooler when you can really see it, that I think I'll leave it. Plus, if I start fiddling with it, I'll be here for hours.
The first Rick Riordan book I read was The Lightning Thief, book one in the young adult series Percy Jackson and the Olmypians. (A slightly annoying title because I can't spell lightning or thief without looking them up.) Anyway, I put The Lightning Thief on our seventh grade summer reading list, and the results were electric. Boys who didn't like to read anything were begging their moms to buy them the second and third books. (Now there are four.) So I was interested to learn Riordan had started with an adult action/adventure/mystery series way before he got into young adult fantasy.
The series concerns Jackson Navarre III, who goes by Tres. Cool, huh? Tres Navarre? It's practically worth reading just so you can hang out with someone who has such a cool name. I like action/adventure and have read a decent sampling of it, and this is a pretty adequate representation of the type. Tres is typical of the tough guy/reluctant knight errant, a la Travis McGhee and Spenser. I liked the setting of San Antonio, which I know almost nothing about.
It was engaging, the mystery pretty much held up, no one really did anything terribly out of character just to push the plot along. I'm not going to rush out and get book number two, because my "books to read" list is way too long as it is, but if I found it in a beach house I was renting, I'd happily pick it up.
One note. . . Tres has a cat named Robert Johnson (after the Delta blues singer--I looked it up). Now, maybe I was being dense or a poor reader, but I don't think he immediately made it clear Robert Johnson was a cat. Clearly he's some sort of animal, but Riordan had him in a "cage" not a "cat carrier." So I was imagining him being a lemur or something really cool. I was pretty disappointed that he was a cat, especially since I'm not a cat person (achoo). Plus then I felt stupid.
Anyway, entertaining, light summer reading. You could do worse.
(R rating: sex, violence)
