Some books I finished recently:

Suicide Squeeze by Victor Gischler.  I've been reading Gischler since back when he published "X's for Eyes" in Plots with Guns and maintained a blog on some site that doesn't exist anymore (I think it was called Themestream).  I liked his first novel, Gun Monkeys, which was based on another of his short stories called "Headless Rollo."  Suicide Squeeze didn't disappoint me.  It's about a down-on-his-luck repo man who gets embroiled in a race to find a rare baseball card.  Funny, fast-paced, and all around entertaining.  My only major gripe: if you haven't already figured out where the baseball card is hidden several chapters before any of the characters do, you've never read a mystery before.  I thought the weirdo therapist was a little over the top — in one scene he offers advice involving a cucumber that comes completely out of left field — but I have to admit he made me laugh.  Small complaints about an otherwise fun book.  If you like Elmore Leonard, there's a good chance you'll like Gischler.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.  This book is as funny as I'd heard. Ignatius Reilly is a character you wouldn't want sitting next to you on a bus, let alone engaging you in conversation, but he's a lot of fun to follow around New Orleans for a few hundred pages.  Toole had a great way with dialogue.

Port Tropique by Barry Gifford.  I had never heard of this book and picked it up on a whim.  I'm glad I did.  It follows a drifter named Franz while he smuggles ivory in a Central American country on the brink of revolution.  Brooding and fascinating.  Gifford writes in short chapters, most of them only a page or two long, and each with its own keen reflection on some aspect of Franz's life and the world around him.  His style is sparse, not in the choppy and simply structured manner of James Ellroy, but more like he's employing a poet's economy of words.

I just started See How They Run by James Patterson.  Nothing much to say about it so far, except for one passage that stuck out like a sore thumb:

"This reminds me of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief," David whispered to Heather as they crossed the upstairs hallway.

"Or two of the little Japanese people in Godzilla Meets King Kong," Heather said, suggesting another cinema image.  [emphasis mine]

Jeez, Jimmy.  Thanks for explaining what she was doing there.  Otherwise I might have thought she was just tacking random words together.