Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Purple Place for Dying,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down—twenty years ago—or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted.

I’d almost forgotten about A Purple Place for Dying, another in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Even though it contains one of the great set pieces in the saga.

Travis is far from his Fort Lauderdale home in this one. He’s out west, where Mona Yeoman, the big, young, beautiful wife of a very rich man, has summoned him to a secret meeting in a lonely mountain cabin. She’s fallen in love with a man her own age, she says, and wants to get free of her husband. She wants Travis to help her work that out.

Travis isn’t much interested, until Mona is suddenly dead, pierced by a high-powered rifle bullet fired from a distance. And when he makes his way down the mountain to report the murder, nobody believes him. By the time the sheriff’s men get to the site, her body is gone. For all anyone can tell, Mona succeeded in running off with her lover, and McGee is just covering for them. Which means he’ll have to figure out what’s really going on.

He’ll meet Mona’s husband, a hard man but not a bad man; a man Travis respects. He’ll meet Mona’s lover’s sister, a lonely, damaged woman who’ll probably be alone forever unless she finds some real man with a gentle touch to heal her spirit (and you can guess where that will lead).

All in all, I don’t think Travis McGee is at his best too far from his house boat, especially when he leaves his economist friend Meyer behind. On the other hand, A Purple Place for Dying features one of his most imaginative fights – the defense, without a gun, of a desert mesa against two armed men. That was pretty cool.

Not the best McGee, but still better than most of the stuff you’ll see nowadays. Extra points awarded for patriarchal sexism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Clockmaker’s Secret,’ by Jack Benton

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In theory, this was almost an ideal book for me. It’s fairly low on violence (how did I become the kind of reader who relishes a lack of violence in a book?), but it’s too dark to be called a Cozy. The Clockmaker’s Secret by Jack Benton is very British, I dare say, in the sense that eccentricity is often considered a British trait.

This is the second book in a series, and having finished it I see that I reviewed its prequel, The Man by the Sea. I did not like that book at all. I found the characters improbable and the action implausible. I liked The Clockmaker’s Secret a little better, but not enough to endorse it with a full heart.

Our hero is Slim Hardy, a former British commando and current recovering alcoholic, who has decided to become a private eye (without great success) and is spending a holiday in Cornwall to clear his mind.

One day while hiking on Bodmin Moor, he stumbles over an object wrapped in plastic, protruding from the heather. He digs it up and discovers that it’s an unfinished cuckoo clock. He takes it back to the guest house where he’s staying and asks around. It turns out to be the work of Amos Birch, a renowned local craftsman who disappeared more than 20 years ago, leaving behind a crippled wife and a bereaved daughter.

For his own reasons, Slim becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Amos’ disappearance. He encounters the mulish secrecy of suspicious locals, and meets Amos’ attractive daughter, who seems to know more than she’s saying.

But in the end all Slim’s suppositions will be proved wrong. And he’ll fall off the wagon too.

The Clockmaker’s Secret was one of those books (for this reader) that ends with no clear sense of accomplishment. Some secrets were dug up, but nothing really changed. The characters acted a little more sensibly here than they did in the previous book, but I wasn’t really caught up in the thing. And I don’t like Slim a whole lot.

I don’t generally award stars, but if I did, I guess I’d give The Clockmaker’s Secret three out of five.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Lavender Look,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.

It was around 45 years ago, in Missouri, that I picked up my first Travis McGee novel, The Long Lavender Look, from a rack in a grocery store or a drug store or something. The story proved to be quite a sordid tale of theft and prostitution and murder in a small town. It was the way it was told that grabbed me.

Travis McGee, freelance “salvage specialist,” is barreling south one night on a rural Florida road in Miss Agnes, his blue Rolls Royce pickup conversion, his friend, the economist Meyer, beside him. They’re headed home from a wedding celebration. Suddenly a near-naked girl runs across the  road in front of them, close enough to make McGee hit the brakes, putting Miss Agnes in a skid that lands them in a canal. Meyer pulls Travis from the water, saving his life, but a few minutes later Travis returns the favor when a passing motorist stops and shoots at them, shouting a message that makes no sense to them.

Finally they reach a small town by foot, but they’re soon arrested by sheriff’s deputies. Apparently the guy who shot at them was tortured to death that same night, and Travis and Meyer look like the most likely suspects. Under questioning, one of the deputies brutalizes Meyer, giving him injuries requiring hospitalization. Travis contacts a lawyer who gets them released, but not before warning the sheriff that he’s going to ruin him.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets a lot more complicated than that. As it turns out, the sheriff is a decent cop – though not without blind spots. Travis will stay around to get his own questions answered, and the death count will not be small.

The Long Lavender Look is a tough story, with a lot of collateral damage involved. But the author’s humane and poignant narration makes it all touching and memorable in the end. This is one of my favorite McGee books, and not just because it was my first.

Not politically correct (though there’s plenty of environmental concern), but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Secret Weapon,’ by Bradley Wright

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Maybe it started with Jason Bourne – I mean the movie Jason Bourne, not the one in the novel, which is much more cerebral than the film(s). There’s the can’t-miss formula – create a bigger-than-life main character, give him near superhuman fighting skills, put him in impossible situations, and keep the car chases, gun fights, and explosions coming. If the plot’s tissue thin, never mind. The audience didn’t come for plot anyway.

Alexander King, the hero of The Secret Weapon, first book in a series, is a former CIA agent. His status now is equivocal. Officially, he’s dead. Only the CIA director and couple of his trusted friends know he’s still alive. Currently he’s living secretly in London.

One day he looks out his apartment window and observes the attempted murder of a young woman. King rushes to her rescue, and soon finds himself on the run with her. Then he learns that she is being hunted by a family of terrorists headquartered in Greece. King does his best to get her safe, but when she disappears, that’s only the first of many surprises.

I didn’t hate The Secret Weapon. It delivered everything the blurb promised – the plot is fast and full of twists, and the characters have something approaching personalities. Plausibility is far back in the rear-view window, but nobody came for that.

My main complaint was the writing, as in the use of words. I’d guess the first draft of the book was dictated; it has that feel. The author doesn’t know when to use “as” instead of “like.” As in, “…especially when such a high-value target like Husaam Hammoud was taken out….” There are lots of awkward line constructions like, “The fire was on its last legs.” Or, “He stared at the stubble on his iron jaw.” (An iron jaw refers to resistance to impact, not appearance).

Also, the hero’s relationship with his best friend, a beautiful, butt-kicking female agent older than he is, seemed odd to me. It’s described as brother-sister, but didn’t feel right.

However, if popcorn reading is what you’re after, The Secret Weapon isn’t bad. Patriotism is treated positively here, which isn’t always the case these days.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Defending Innocence,’ by Peter Kirkland

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Occasionally a publisher will get the idea to package a series of novels. Apparently that’s what Relay Publishing did in putting a couple ghost writers together, naming their collaboration “Peter Kirkland,” and setting them to writing a series of legal thrillers called “Small Town Lawyer.” The real writers, whoever they are, are clearly competent.

The hero of Defending Innocence is Leland Monroe, who used to be a big city prosecuting attorney. But he destroyed his career when he covered up the missteps of his wife, who was an alcoholic. That lost him his job; he lost his wife to an auto accident. Now he’s moved back to his home town, Basking Rock. He’s trying to establish himself as a personal lawyer, but finding it hard to build a practice. He’s also trying to reestablish his relationship with his teenaged son, crippled in the accident that killed his mother.

Then the son’s best friend is arrested for murdering his abusive father. And Leland can’t resist volunteering to defend the boy (though he can’t afford the pro bono), both for his son’s sake and because the boy’s mother was his high school girlfriend. As in any crime story set in a small town, it soon becomes apparent that there’s considerable corruption under public façades of respectability.

I must say, although there were few surprises here, that the small town hypocrites were a little more nuanced than the usual run of such characters in novels. I thought the writing in Defending Innocence pretty good, and the characters well-developed. Opportunities to lampoon small-town Christians were not exploited much.

I did think, though, that the final showdown was kind of abrupt and too quickly resolved.

However, all in all, Defending Innocence was a decent novel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Camera Man,’ by Peter Grainger

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‘The shoreline is the perfect metaphor. It shifts moment by moment, wave by wave, grain by grain. People used to ask why I was always photographing the same places but I never was. Living here, I’ve seen more sunrises than most people do in their whole lives but I’ve never seen two the same.’

D. C. Smith, retired detective from the police force in the fictional city of Kings Lake, Norfolk, is enjoying his quiet retirement on the coast, living with his partner Jo, a true crime writer, and their dog. But he’s allowed himself to be recruited by the private investigation firm of Diver and Diver. However, he’s in a position to turn down most of the cases they offer. Now, though, in The Camera Man, they’ve got something that piques his interest.

Gerald Fitch had been the owner of a struggling marine equipment business. One day five years ago he disappeared, leaving an estranged daughter and his second wife, generally believed to be a gold digger. Now the gold digger wants him declared dead so she can liquidate his property. But an insurance company underwrote a large policy on Gerald’s life, and they want Diver and Diver to look for proof of death – or life – before they pay out.

Smith agrees to look into it, and encounters a rather sad story about a man not really cut out for business who tried his best to be responsible but got out of his depth. Did he kill himself? Did he run away to a new life? Or – and this looks increasingly likely when Smith learns who the wife’s family is (they are “well known to the police” as they say over there) – was he murdered?

The D.C. Smith books are low-key, atmospheric and cerebral. Character is always at the heart of the story, and it’s Smith’s broad and humane sympathy that serves him as his best investigative tool. It’s a challenge poking into people’s lives without the authority of the law at his back, but that just makes it more interesting.

I profoundly enjoy all the D. C. Smith mysteries. Author Peter Grainger has branched out with other books about the younger detectives Smith trained as they carry on at Kings Lake, but there’s nobody like Smith for this reader. The Camera Man is a fine, rewarding book and I recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

Semi-review: ‘True Conviction,’ by James P. Sumner

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I’ve got translation work today (loud cheers from the gallery!), so I’m going to just drop this semi-review of True Conviction, a book I didn’t complete. I quit reading before the end because it annoyed me in a number of ways, and I figure I ought to warn you against it. But I won’t post the cover because I don’t want to rub it in. The thing is, trashing a book I didn’t like can be an exercise in self-righteousness (even when the author’s way more successful than I am).

Here’s the setup – Adrian Hell (that’s his name) is a professional hit man and (we are told) a legend in the field. He is (he claims) an ethical assassin. He’ll only kill bad guys.

And yet, the first job he takes at the beginning of True Conviction is to kill a businessman who backed out on a land deal with a Nevada mob boss – the guy may be corrupt, but does that deserve death? Then Adrian gets in a fight with his employer and ends up on the run, and he meets an attractive female assassin, and… I lost interest.

First of all, I didn’t believe the Adrian Hell character. He’s always talking about how tough he is. That’s a sure sign – in literature, anyway – that he’s not as tough as he wants you to think. (In real life, I suspect it may be quite common for really tough guys to be loudmouths, but in literature we’ve learned that it’s cool reserve that earns the reader’s respect.)

Secondly, the book was overwritten. The author doesn’t trust the reader to figure out what he’s saying, so he explains EVERYTHING. Including his little jokes – which might work as little jokes if he didn’t inflate them to the bursting point.

Maybe you’d like True Conviction better than I did. Apparently they sell a lot of copies.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Dirty Bomb,’ by Michael Leese

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I’ll say at the outset that I do not love the Roper-Hooley detective series, set in London. I don’t hate the books; I just have no problem putting them down. But I bought a set of four (got them for free, actually), they are readable, and times are tough, so I’m reading them.

In The Case of the Dirty Bomb, brilliant autistic detective Jonathan Roper is back at headquarters, having completed his time with a national security agency. But his partner Brian Hooley is concerned about him. He seems to have lost his way; he’s having trouble analyzing information and is worried he’s “losing it.”

With Hooley’s help, he changes his approach and soon realizes the reason he’s been having trouble. They’re facing an unprecedented problem. Someone is gathering fissionable nuclear material cached in secret locations across Europe and smuggling it into England to set up the extortion scheme to end all extortion schemes.

There’s nothing all that wrong with these books; they simply don’t ring my bells very loudly. The autistic character, Jonathan Roper, is really the most interesting one here. I guess that’s not surprising; he is the “exotic.” But the others could have been made more colorful, in my view. I didn’t find myself caring about them a lot.

Toward the end, the author takes an opportunity to make a dig at anti-Communists, but the political side wasn’t really intrusive. One Russian character’s name was inconsistently spelled. The book was okay, though, though I thought the plot a little far-fetched. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Orphan,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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“This man, he sounds like a force to be reckoned with. And it seems … it seems he got his first taste of wisdom. It can be intoxicating. There’s so much to see that you were blind to before. The problem? He thinks he has it. Wisdom. But no one has it. We just wear it from time to time when we’re lucky.”

I wonder if other people enjoy Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels as much as I do. For this reader, these books are more than well-written. They possess a solidity. A punch. No energy is wasted, just as the hero wastes no energy when he fights: “People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.” It could be that I respond viscerally to the character’s OCD, his feelings of alienation, of being separated from the rest of humanity. Or maybe the powerful prose works the same for everybody. The books certainly sell well enough.

The Last Orphan, the latest entry in the series, begins with our hero, Evan Smoak, in Iceland, where he has traveled for no other reason than to sample a local vodka in a bar on a glacier. Vodka is one of Evan’s few, small indulgences – taken in strictly controlled quantities, and only the best. Iceland recurs as a reference point again and again in The Last Orphan, indicating something pure, refined, cold and remote. Evan Smoak’s personal, unachievable ideal for life.

But life is messy, and even Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, the freelance hero no one can find, can’t keep himself out of its mess. In The Last Orphan, a very carefully planned and executed government operation manages (just barely) to capture him. Confined in restraints, he is offered an assignment by the president of the United States herself (she’s a woman in this alternate universe). She wants him to take out an international wheeler dealer named Luke Devine. Luke Devine has pulled political strings to stall an environmental bill the president wants passed. But he also controls dangerous agents suspected of very bad acts. If Evan can eliminate him, she’ll give him a full pardon.

Evan couldn’t care less about the president’s bill, but he soon learns that Devine’s personal security men have been doing some horrific stuff, and seem to be guilty of at least two unsolved murders. Once Evan (with the help of his teenaged hacker ward, a girl named Joey) understands the kind of surveillance power Devine wields, he’ll have to figure out how to keep an innocent family safe as a side job.

There are echoes of The Great Gatsby in the descriptions of the wild parties (actually orgies) Devine holds at his Long Island estate. We get to see how several of the regular series cast members are doing now, which is gratifying. And Evan Smoak, against his will but with a sense of moral obligation, is forced to move a little further out of his protective shell as he attempts to outthink and outmaneuver the most intelligent – and dangerous – adversary he’s ever faced.

The Last Orphan is a wonderful book, expertly written. Author Hurwitz even includes one of my favorite author’s tricks – one that should only be attempted rarely, and by a master – a one-line chapter.

I loved it. I wish it were twice as long.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crooked Man,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series has often been recommended to me, but I’ve resisted. Not sure why. After reading Crooked Man, I still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about it, but I liked the book better at the end than in the early stages.

Tubby Dubonnet, for those of you who (as I was) are unaware of him, is a divorced criminal lawyer in New Orleans. That in itself suggests he’s no moral paragon, but he does maintain two rules of ethics in his practice – never screw a client, and never lie to a judge. By the standards of the place, that makes him pretty upright.

He has a colorful cast of clients. Right now he’s negotiating a malpractice settlement for a transvestite stripper who got a bad skin-darkening treatment from a doctor, and trying to coax payment for divorce work from a buxom blonde who may be available for a different kind of transaction. But when Darryl Alvarez, a nightclub manager, asks him to keep a locked sports bag in his safe for a couple days (he swears there’s nothing illegal in it), Tubby goes against his own better judgment and accepts it. This soon puts him in an awkward ethical position, not to mention a dangerous one. Tubby is a clever man, and he’ll need all his cleverness to stay alive.

I prefer my heroes a little more principled than Tubby Dubonnet, but by the end of Crooked Man – which was a lighter concoction than I expected – I was enjoying the story. I bought a whole set of the novels, so I’ll be reviewing more.