Be careful with the Patterson, though. There are some execrable ones that have come out in the last five years. Easy enough to spot, since they feature winged children.

Robert W. Chambers wrote some fairly well-received romances about fien de siecle Paris and the artists's community there in addition to his better known horror works. In fact, the second half of The King in Yellow is actually those sort of stories rather than the creepy fantastic stuff.

I don't think I've read one since The Midnight Club, at which I became really annoyed by what I saw as the author lying to me for the sake of a plot twist.

But Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls are good stuff. Oh! William Diehl's Primal Fear and Reign in Hell are good too. I think there might have been a third one too, but I forget the title.

I don't think I've read one since The Midnight Club, at which I became really annoyed by what I saw as the author lying to me for the sake of a plot twist.

Yes! Not that I remember the lie or the twist, but it was cheap and shoddy and plain rude. I had that same feeling.

Midnight Club, IIRC is a novel he wrote ages ago, and I'm guessing got printed on the strength of his not-sucky stuff.

Yes! Not that I remember the lie or the twist, but it was cheap and shoddy and plain rude. I had that same feeling.

Basically, there's a scene where he describes one of the characters coming out of a plane, someone who's supposed to be dead or something. He uses his name and everything. And because he's writing in third-person omniscient (he can't be in subjective because the main character's not around), that description is assumed to be true. In the end, though, we find out that it was some guy dressed up as him or cloned as him or using fancy technological masks or something and it pissed me off. You could argue that it wasn't meant to be taken as truth, but merely the observations of a bystander, but that's not the way it felt, given the style of the writing.

Early Frederick Forsyth - Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs Of War - are about as good as that Clancy genre gets.

Espionage? Leonard, Le Carre Crime fiction/ mystery Lehane , Pelecanos(And not just cause he likes carrots)

That smells like the bullshit I remember, P-C. I'm okay with unreliable narrators, but you can't do that with third person omniscient and not anger me.

I know I need to try Dorothy Dunnett again--I tried the first Lymond book once and didn't get very far

This apparently happens to everyone. Put your head down and bull through to the end; if you haven't been grabbed by then you can probably walk away.

Historical... I don't read a lot, really. I'm very fond of Mary Renault, but I know some people bounce off of her prose.

paperback action adventure/thrillers

I ended up reading a bunch of these on my trip (because romance goes by too quickly, and sci-fi not often found on the free trade bookshelves in hostels). One I ended up enjoying was Lee Child--he's got a whole series with one character, some of which are rather better than others. I recommend the "hired to assassinate the VP" one as one of the better ones, but the others aren't terrible, as the genre goes.