I Don't Like Where this Is Going by John Dufresne
Friday, May 6, 2016 at 9:03AM 
Published by W. W. Norton & Company on April 11, 2016
I didn’t like where this book was going (it didn’t seem to be going anywhere) until about the last third, when it finally hit its stride. By the end, however, I wondered whether the author had a plan in mind when he sat down to write. The plot makes a certain convoluted sense but it is interrupted by events that come across as filler. Some of the events are interesting but too many are not.
The early pages of I Don’t Like Where This Is Going provide what I assume to be an update on events that occurred in the first novel in the series. Not having read it, I felt a bit lost until the current story began to move in the direction of a plot. That takes place after Wylie "Coyote" Melville and his friend Bay watch a woman plunge to her death at a Vegas casino, where they have gone to chill out until it is safe to return to their usual Florida residence. In the story that follows, Wylie and Bay try to get to the bottom of the woman’s death.
Wylie is a therapist, although his wanderings make it difficult for him to serve an established clientele. He passes the time by volunteering at a crisis center when he’s not solving murders or avoiding his own murder. Wylie is a good guy who likes to help people, a point that is emphasized by contrasting his goodness to the sleaze of Vegas. That struck me as a bit obvious and superficial. In general, characters in the novel tend to preach about society’s evils, repeating stories that are (mostly) urban legends in an apparent effort to highlight social problems that are (mostly) overblown.
There are some clever sentences in I Don’t Like Where This Is Going, some amusing observations of Vegas (admittedly an easy target), and a few action scenes in the novel’s second half that generate excitement. Unfortunately, those positive attributes are balanced against extended chunks of the novel that seem purposeless.
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