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Title: Too Sketchy, It Never Quite Comes Together
Review: While "Men in Black" has its moments, its overall feel is more of a sketch or an outline for a story than a fully-developed one. Spencer's prose style is excellent and it does draw you in, but too many story strands are left dangling. Sub-plots, in particular one about his runaway son's adventure, are begun and then effectively dropped. That one and two other important ones are resolved "off-stage", their results told to the protagonist toward the end of the book. Characters, like Sam's father and his wife's sister, are brought into the story and dropped immediately, wasting page space. This novel is about average in length, just as I like, but I actually think it could have benefitted from about fifty more pages to better flesh out its intertwined plot. While its random events are life-like, they don't make for a very satisfying story. Here's hoping that in the future Spencer can develop a solid story to benefit from his great prose ability.
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