Brain Thief by Alexander Jablokov seems like the type of book I would love. It has a lot of quirky characters and a road trip. But for some reason it never clicked for me. Jablokov took a decade off from writing novels to pursue a career (apparently feeding his kids and family is important to him for some reason) and this was his return venture

Bernal  Haydon-Rumi goes to check on his boss Muriel one day and she’s not there. She leaves him a couple of hints and Bernal is off to discover what happened to his boss. Along the way he runs into a bunch of people, some who help him, some who want to kill him and some who also want to know what happened to Muriel. But the problem with the book is, I never care about Bernal or Muriel. If I don’t care about the missing person, the why should I care that she’s missing. And if I don’t care about the person searching, then I don’t care if he ever finds what he’s looking for.

I wouldn’t say the book was bad, but I just never got into it. Brain Thief is Jablokov’s first novel in over 10 years and it was interesting enough to possibly check out some of his older novels, but this one didn’t grab me.