Nothing Lasts Forever

As I mentioned on this post, tis the season to be reading, so I this post is plugging a book for your Christmas reads. If you have plenty of time to give to it during the holidays, I suggest you spend one day to read it through, in one sitting or almost. The novel is Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. I do not have the luxury of time, so I am "only" nearly halfway through it. I am making it last, so to speak, hopefully until Christmas day. In short, the story is about a private investigator, Joe Leland, stuck in a corporate building on Christmas eve as terrorists took over the place.

If it sounds very much like the plot of Die Hard, it is because it IS the plot of Die Hard. Or rather, Die Hard took the plot of the novel and adapted it to well, an 80s action flick (as you probably knew as it says it right on the front cover at your right). It gave birth to a very successful (if often dumb) movie franchise and a whole action movie sub-genre with countless clones. I always enjoyed Die Hard, I loved the premise, but I never found the movie as brilliant as people seems to believe it is. Too much of a conservative libertarian fantasy for my taste. Joe Leland very different from his movie equivalent: he is a bitter, divorced and widower, a father and grandfather, so he is no longer in his prime. He is also a sobered alcoholic, haunted by many, many demons. It is not his family he is visiting, but his estranged daughter. The movie was a fantasy, the novel is a gritty, violent, uncompromising piece of crime fiction. I mentioned before that there is a darker side to Christmas. Well, if you do enjoy this dark side, do read Nothing Lasts Forever.