In an attempt to have actual content, I’ve decided to do the occasional book review.  The books are whatever I’ve read recently, likely from the public library.  The first installment is David Dodge’s alleged thriller The Last Match.  Dodge is best known for his novel To Catch a Thief, which became a rather successful film by Alfred Hitchcock (you may have heard of him).  Set in the late 1950s, written in the early 1970s, and published in 2006, the story is as diverse geographically as it is chronologically.  Unfortunately for the reader, the plot also lacks cohesion.

Quoth Dodge’s daughter in the afterword:

…he wrote The Last Match out of his head, skimming through the memories of a lifetime, combining fact and fiction, real-life personalities and invented characters, landscapes and lovers and lifestyles to his heart’s content.

It is not clear to me if Dodge intended this work to be published, or not, but it does seem to be written for his own sake, as his daughter’s words suggest.  The individual sections of the plot are often quite disconnected from each other, to the point where they could have been re-written with little effort as independent short stories.  Indeed, one of my biggest problems with this book is the fact that I spent the first two-thirds distracted by the wait for the plot to become apparent.  It might have been a more enjoyable read had I known from the beginning to expect the chapters to be only loosely bound.

The library categorizes this story as a mystery, but there is little mystery involved. The cover lead my wife to immediately identify it as a romance novel, but it lacks the thinly-veiled sexual descriptions common to that genre.  The amount of crime and pursuit certainly qualify it as a thriller, although I found it to be not-so-thrilling.  I selected the book somewhat arbitrarily from the shelf at the library, and will willingly admit that I probably did not wind up with the best possible book.  I’m certainly open to reading another David Dodge novel, but I cannot recommend The Last Match.