Sir Kieran
Scribe
@Sir Kieran:
Lehane is quite good. You'd probably enjoy a lot of his work. There are some other good detective writers, most notably Michael Connelly and Robert Crais.
I like Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm as well.
I don't remember exactly what it was about Eragon, but I remember I really had to force myself through the first chapter because I thought the writing was so bad. People complain about Meyer, but I thought Paolini made Meyer look like Dostoevsky. But it could just be my own tastes as much as anything. Clearly, Paolini captivated a lot of readers, and that's not a small thing.
The more I read Eragon, the more I realized that there were things that bothered me. For instance, I thought Eragon was a brat. There was one scene in which Roran was so violent I thought he was on the verge of raping innocent women (he bursts into a castle, forces women against the wall). By the middle of Inheritance, I realized that Eragon and Roran were endangering the innocent in order to win the war; this is likely what Paolini intended. I hope he did, because for a while I believed that their whole crusade was wrong.