All the Flowers Are Dying by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Scudder 16 out of 17 but maybe it should be 15.5. In my review of 15, Hope to Die, I said that it wasn’t a Matthew Scudder novel as much as it was about the bad guy. What I didn’t mention was that the bad guy is not brought to justice. This novel, All the Flowers are Dying, has the same bad guy therefor, and I’m still not going to tell you if he’s brought to justice at the end.
But you read A Ticket to the Boneyard, right? Well, you also read A Long Line of Dead Men, I bet. So that should keep you guessing.
I don’t know much what else to say about Flowers that I didn’t say about Hope. Honestly, they could have been bound into a single tome. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the hard-core, up-to-date Scudder fan who finished Hope when it came out in 2001 and then had to wait four year before Flowers hit the bookstore and finished the story. Then again, such fans maybe even started way back in 1976 with the first novel, and patience isn’t a problem for them.
Ironically, in this novel, it’s not just Scudder who coasts on his descriptions from previous books, but the bad guy too. What I mean is, in as much as the bad guy’s crimes were hard to swallow in Hope, they’re back story for Flowers. So this is a true sequel. A true sequel, and 16th in a series… Block sure does know how to wring a good creation for all it’s worth, doesn’t he.