I'm a big fan of Rick Riordan and his San Antonio PI Tres Navarre. I've enjoyed Riordan's previous novels, including the non-Tres
Cold Springs, and am ready to declare he's the one novelist whose next work I'm always anxiously awaiting. After reading Southtown, I think I have to say my single favorite sentence in the entire work is the one at the end of the About the Author section: Rick Riordan "lives in San Antonio ... where he is at work on the next novel in the Tres Navarre series."
I'm looking forward to that one because, unfortunately, Southtown didn't quite slake my thirst for another great Tres adventure. In
The Devil Went Down to Austin, the last Tres novel, Riordan introduced the technique of departing from Tres' first-person narrative from time to time to give the reader information Tres himself never saw. Now, in Southtown, about half the story is told in omniscient third-person. Only Tres' own scenes are told in his own voice.
This technique allows Riordan to do the kind of psychological exploration he did in Cold Springs. But it makes for a lot less Tres than many of his fans might like -- especially since this book already struck me as fairly brief relative to the other books in the series (it can't just have been my eagerness to read the story that let me finish the book in just a few hours over two evenings), and perhaps a little hurried. At one point, I found myself wondering whether Riordan is getting bored with Tres Navarre. After all, Conan Doyle came to hate Sherlock Holmes and was eager to push him over Reichenbach Falls so he could move on to writing other things. Riordan seems to be exploring different ways to convey psychological tension and suspense, which is great. But as a fan, I'm hoping Tres isn't getting in his way.
That's not to say this is a bad book. Certainly Tres fans won't want to pass it up. I've mentioned in a review of another Tres Navarre title that it's nice to see him maturing as a person (in his world) and a character (in ours), and both those processes continue in Southtown. Many of the supporting characters from earlier books are back, but Tres' relationships with them have evolved in subtle -- or sometimes less subtle -- ways. And the resolution of this story suggests even bigger changes to come in the future.
Southtown is a fine story and a good entry in a high-quality series. But it fell just a little bit short in paying off the eagerness with which I awaited it. So while I again find myself looking forward to the next Tres Navarre novel, I'm hoping the author isn't feeling compelled to turn them out too quickly. There haven't been any bad (or even so-so) Riordan books yet, but in my opinion the best Navarre books have been *really* good, and that's what I'm hoping to see again.