Review: The "B" Girls

The "B" Girls by Thomas N. Tomm
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Good find that has me looking for more books by Tomm. At the sentence level this is some of the best writing I've read in a sleazer. Literary quality. Structurally, though, pretty dang strange. The mystery is introduced with thirty pages to go and then is quickly solved. It does look backward and explain some of the events from earlier in the novel, but totally missed the opportunity to have the protagonist chasing the mystery from the start. Same with the murder, which comes at the halfway mark; should have happened much earlier in the book. Instead we get a lot of character development and a mild adventure and plenty of sex scenes in the first 80 pages without knowing where things are going or why. The writing is good, though, so who cares? Then we have the murder and our protagonist is on the run for fifty or so pages, before finally waking up and realizing he has to solve the mystery we didn't know existed. It's actually quite complex but is dusted off in 15 or so pages after 10 pages of setup. Enjoyed this one a lot, but it definitely could have been a more rip-roaring crime novel with a different structure.

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