A person can be a good writer and be worth reading without being a great writer. Tony Hillerman, for example. I have been out west quite a bit, gone hiking and so forth, not just driven through. Sometimes I can read a passage by Tony Hillerman which evokes the desert so vividly that I can almost smell the hot, rock-scented air.

However, his women characters seem made of cardboard - mere stick figures put in there to advance the plot.

One day I was reading a novel where a man with a name like McManany might have been the villain. Then a man named Taggert might be the villain. I knew that Taggert was the villain, because no Hillerman villain would have a soft name with a lot of M's and N's in it. At that point I quit reading Hillerman.