Finished: Block's 'Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes' and need a cold shower

It's amazing how much a guy can get accomplished on the weekend with the kid working and the wife away visiting her family. I read an entire Lawrence Block book.

The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes is really good. It's Block latest, published under the Hard Case Crime imprint. He goes back to the dark, sexy, noir genre and hits it hard. There's a little more hard-core sex in here than I was expecting (that's what she said) and a couple times I found myself thinking about the author and going: "Man, this guy's quite the horn-dog for being 78 years old."

Still, while it might have been a little overly explicit in places, it wasn't entirely gratuitous. The scenes were necessary to delve into the psyche of a couple of the characters (that's my story and I'm sticking to it). The plot was good, the twist at the end was good (though I saw it coming just in the nick of time).

I'd like to know why Block chose to write this under his own name, rather than under his Jill Emerson pseudonym of which he wrote Getting Off just four years ago. Seems if you're going to have a name for each genre, it might have been more appropriate there. Still. Very good. 7 out of 10 on the Haugenometer. Goodreaders have it at 3.75 of 5.