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Those 5 books for $20 sales are dangerous things. I am drawn to them like a moth to the proverbial. What happens is that I find 2 or 3 or 4 books I want and then I spend time hunting around to make up 5. There are other exit strategies in this situation but I don't ever avail myself of them. So I either just end up grabbing any old genre title or I step out to try something different. Chances are I don't ever read those extra books - I give many of them away or trade them in at secondhand places. But I do read some. I bought The Tesseract by Alex Garland because I liked the title and because it had a bunch of good reviews I actually read it. Entertaining it was too.

It is a novel with an interesting structure. Take an action event - a shooting and chase. Then loop out to people on the periphery of the event and take in what is happening to then. Then loop out further again and flashback to the past of those characters. Given how thin that leaves the main story it works rather more cohesively that you might expect. It helps that Garland has an entertaining turn of words. Short, clear but clever sentences. The characters are well drawn out of that. The only thing conspicuous by its absence was a sense of place. Set in Manila and surrounds it seemed like the city should manifest as a presence. It isn't obligatory to do that with your setting but I feels like a missed opportunity.