Obedient and Dominated...

I've been reading like crazy these last few days. I blame the necessity for subway books - I never used to read thrillers before, and for sure not in the way thrillers are supposed to be read - in huge gulps and with heart pounding until the last page brings the resolution and the blessed exhaustion. I disliked the idea of thrillers. After all, how can one absorb a book properly if by its own nature that book is to be read very, very fast - as if one was running for dear life? Proper - and worthy - literature is the one that can be pondered at leisure and dwelled on at length. Isn't it? Isn't it?

Somehow since I finished listening to Greg Iles's Mortal Fear, I've been on a thriller binge. In the last three days, aside from other readings, I actually finished two books that had me sitting on the edge of my chair, or armchair, or a sofa, trying to stop my eyes from jumping ahead.

To save my face - both books were written by a former English professor and obviously a man of letters, and that can be seen both in the choice of subject matter and the execution. Also in the characters and the setting - as both books are set in academia, often in a classroom, and the characters are students, professors and other academic personnel.

In Obedience, Will Lavender sets up a mystery for the students of a Logic and Reasoning class at a small college. It's a logic puzzle presented to them by their mysterious professor Leonard Williams - he tells them a girl by the name of Polly was abducted and in 6 weeks she will be dead unless they figure out who kidnapped her and why. As the students try to unravel the plot, the events of the puzzle seep into their lives until they lose track of what's game and what's real. The book was impossible to put down. Impossible.

As soon as I was done, I moved on to his second novel, Dominance. The setting here is very similar - again we have a class of select students and a strange professor at the helm, Richard Aldiss. That professor is actually in prison for murder, and he's conducting the class through a satellite link - Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Here we also have a puzzle - a literary one this time. Through reading of the only two novels of a recluse writer Paul Fallows, the students are to uncover Fallows's true identity. And one of them is singled out to prove Aldiss's innocence while she's at it... Dominance has two time frames: the 1994 time frame when the Aldiss's class took place and the identity of Fallows was discovered, and 15 years later when the students who took the class gather for a memorial of one of their colleague who was brutally murdered. His murder is strangely similar to the two killings their professor was originally convicted for. The students have to figure out what they got wrong last time and how to stay alive - as a literary game called the Procedure unfolds all around them.

I finished Dominance about 30 minutes ago and I'm still breathless. Give me a book about books and set in academia and I'll eat it up - but this one also had an amazing pace and was written with great economy. Sometimes it was hard to follow the switches in time frames as in 15 years the leading character Alex didn't really change enough to have a completely different voice. The author helps us by dividing the chapters clearly and marking each part either "The Class" or "Alex" but I must say that in my rush to turn the pages I wasn't really paying attention to those. But I got over that confusion very easily.

Both books have many similarities. We have the same setting, both books have strong male lead of a professor - a bit strange and mysterious. In both there is a strong female lead of a gifted and pretty student, with a sidekick of a male student. There are old men in each book - elderly professors who turn out to hold the key to a lot of what's happening. The persons in the close vicinity of those elderly professors are important engineers of the whole mischief. For a moment I'm afraid that Will Lavender may go the same route as the one that's been so good for Dan Brown - who's been populating his books and surrounding his man Robert Langdon with the same set of stock characters all along. I must say though that this fear is not enough to stop me from picking up Lavender's new novel when it comes out. And I'm pretty sure it won't last me more than 2 days.