I made the mistake of liking one of Michael Connelly’s thrillers. Since then, I’ve picked up one after another, and like a wrong turn that reinforces itself (“Hmm. This street looks familiar. I’ll try turning onto it”), I’ve been disappointed over and over.

My latest airport mistake was to buy The Narrows. It’s a sort-of sequel to Blood Work, a book with an interesting premise, ridiculous plot turns, and crappy writing throughout. The Narrows is far worse.

First, The Narrows suffers from Thomas Harris Syndrome. Harris, author of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, is able to write about a super-smart serial killer because he understands his characters and has the confidence to write lean prose. He even has the confidence to place his baddie into a comedy (Hannibal) and expose him as a parody. But it’s a rare gift, and Harris has inspired more bad imitators than Hemingway. For example, Hannibal Lecter has eaten the brain of Kate Scarpetta.

Second, has Connelly gotten so popular that his publisher has given up on editing him? Holy Mother of Pearl, someone needs to take a buzzsaw to The Narrows! Not only is it bloated — an entire chapter about a character’s relationship with his daughter, written so mawkishly that it drops the character from 2-D to 1.7-D — but Connelly makes first-draft mistakes such as introducing a character twice within a couple of pages, as if he’d forgotten he’d just told us about him. This is a bad, bad book.

In fact, it’s so bad that it got me thinking that it would bring me pleasure to axe out the really bad portions as I read. And if I were reading this on an e-book, I could do exactly that. Then, having removed the embarrassingly bad parts, I’d be delighted to make my edits available to anyone else e-reading it. Think of the giant steps Grade B literature could make if we were allowed to group-edit it!

For my book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, into which I’m now considering introducing a serial killer with the intellect of a genius but who’s covered entirely with fine brown hair, I got a volume of Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon, the topically-arranged companion to his Great Books series. If the expert-based imperialism of the series wasn’t obvious enough, the book physically embodies it: The pages are laid out in two-column format with no room in the margins for scribbling, and the paper is so thin that scribbles would show through the other side.

Physically, this book assumes we are coach potatoes. [Tags: EverythingIsMiscellaneous books MortimerAdler]

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