All posts by Lars Walker

Fiction, Reviews

‘Suspect,’ by Robert Crais

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I generally don’t read books featuring dogs (except for Dean Koontz books, where you can’t avoid them), for the same reason I don’t own a dog. It’s because I love dogs dearly, and firmly believe that no master (certainly including me) has ever been worthy of his canine pet. I’m not sure I can bear the purity of a dog’s love.

Which made Robert Crais’ novel Suspect difficult in places. That’s not to say I didn’t like it. But if you aren’t an actual dog hater, this one will break your heart – in a good way.

Scott James is a Los Angeles cop who’s gotten derailed on his career path to SWAT. He was shot and severely injured in an ambush where his female partner was killed. After months of recovery and rehab, he’s ready to return to work – pretending he’s in better shape than he is. He’s not fit enough for SWAT anymore, so he’s switching to the K-9 squad.

At the end of his training he meets Maggie, a German Shepherd who was formerly a bomb sniffing dog in Afghanistan. She lost her partner and was wounded too, and is hostile to anyone who’s not “pack.” But something in her touches Scott, and he gets permission to try her as his partner. They’re both on probation, they both have PTSD, and they’re not entirely ready for service.

Scott starts digging into the ambush where his partner was killed, and begins to suspect police involvement and a cover-up. Keeping his head down while trying to camouflage his own (and his dog’s) physical shortcomings, he walks a dangerous path. But the man has a Best Friend.

Exciting, gripping, and deeply moving, Suspect is a tremendously entertaining read. Crais has taken a risk in writing a stand-alone not related to his Cole and Pike novels, but he succeeds completely. Highly recommended, with the usual cautions for adult themes and language.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Pirates Laffite,” by William C. Davis

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I love history because I love romance (by which I mean, not novels by Barbara Cartland, but romantic adventure – swashbuckling and gunplay in long-lost times and distant places). I picked up The Brothers Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, by William C. Davis, to get some of the facts behind the legend of Jean Laffite and his brother Pierre. I knew what I was getting into, and was already aware of their sordid side, so I read it with interest.

Most of us know the Laffites as “the pirates who helped Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.” And they did that, though they weren’t quite as noble as the movies make it seem. They were operating a smuggling operation out of Barataria Island, taking advantage of political instability and the difficulties the US government had enforcing its laws in the newly extended territories of the Louisiana Purchase. When the British fleet sailed in, they seem to have tried to play both sides against the middle (a recurring theme in their story), but the Americans got their hands on them first, so they helped them.

Like most criminals, they never actually got very rich, although they tried to live like it. They seem to have been rather courtly with their (white) prisoners, but at bottom their reality was pretty ignoble. They violated America’s ban on importing slaves through a clever manipulation of the law, first importing the miserable captives illegally, then turning them in as contraband and collecting the reward (Jim Bowie partnered with them in this scam). They were also “filibusters,” a term which originally referred to adventurers, mostly Americans, who set up bogus “revolutionary republics” in Spanish America and then issued letters of marque giving their acts of piracy a cloak of legality. But the Laffites added a characteristic twist of their own – they informed on their fellow filibusters to the Spanish, for pay.

There’s little heroism to find in this story, but what it does offer is a fascinating look into a formative but little-known era of American history. The book is very long, but half of it is footnotes.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Lying With Memes,’ by Ori Pomerantz

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Ori Pomerantz is a personal friend of mine, and of this blog. So my endorsement of his new e-book, Lying With Memes: Quick, Concise, and Wrong, might be a little suspect (I got a free review copy, by the way, so you can factor that in). But I thought it was a valuable and entertaining little book.

Memes, those short messages pasted on art, like digital posters or vertical bumper stickers, are part of my life, and probably of yours too, if you’re reading this blog. If you use a service like Facebook, you’ve probably laughed or done an arm pump on seeing some, and promptly shared them. Sometimes you learn later that they’re false or misleading, and feel embarrassed. You’ve probably also been angered by some memes, and they may have even sparked arguments and lost you friends.

Ori’s short book is an explanation of how memes are constructed (with how-to instructions), and also a plea for more rational, decent memes. He provides a simple short course in logic (something much needed in our time) and admits that the information he gives may be used or misused. “I hope you will use this knowledge for good,” he writes, “to identify when people try to cheat you, rather than for evil, to cheat people yourself.”

A quick read and not expensive. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert

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If Chesterton’s Father Brown had been a Protestant, and in better shape, and a man of action, he might have been something like Pastor Jonah Borden, hero of three enjoyable novels (to date) by Tom Hilpert.

Pastor Borden serves the parish of Harbor Lutheran Church in Grand Lake (a stand-in, I assume, for Grand Marais), Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He is a widower, a gourmet cook, a coffee addict, and a martial artist. He once killed a man in self-defense. He holds court a couple evenings a week at a local tavern, where he listens to people’s problems while sipping soft drinks.

In the first book in the series, Superior Justice, one of Jonah’s parishioners is arrested for the murder of the child molester who killed his daughter. Under the seal of the confessional, the accused man gives Jonah a rock-solid alibi, but it’s an alibi he wants to keep secret. In order to clear him, Jonah has to identify the real killer. Along the way he begins a romance with Leyla Bennett, a beautiful TV news reporter. Continue reading The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert →

Bookselling

“Price point”

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I’ve heard people use the term “price point,” and I’m pretty sure they only meant “price,” but thought “price point” sounded professional or something.

I’m sure there’s a proper way to use “price point,” but I’m not sure what it is.

In any case, the price point for my self-published novels has been adjusted to $2.99. This does not affect the price points for my Baen or Nordskog novels.

Try Death’s Doors, here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Casablanca Tango,’ by James Lileks

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City Hall is a full block of rough stone with a thick finger pointing up at God. It’s like something that was left standing after wind and water wore away the weaker stone. Used to be purple, but it wears a coat of coal dust like most of the buildings downtown. A thing of glory when it went up, but forty years of cops and politicians will rub the polish off the nicest cuspidor.

That’s Minneapolis City Hall. I know it well – I used to work about two blocks away, but about 25 years after 1947, the time of this novel.

James Lileks, who’s rather popular in these parts (speaking both culturally and geographically) is producing a series of mystery novels set in Minneapolis over a period of decades. They’re not coming out in chronological order, for reasons which will doubtless be made clear in the fullness of time. The first book, Graveyard Special, which I reviewed here, was amusing but perhaps not entirely successful. The new one is Casablanca Tango, and I think it’s even better, though not perfect.

The Casablanca, to which the title alludes, is a bar across the street from the Citizen-Herald, the newspaper where the narrator works. The narrator is John Crosley, a photographer, who plays Watson to the Holmes of Harold Holman, ace reporter. They’re both veterans recently back from WWII. They’re the first on the scene when several men and a girl are murdered in the Casablanca one day. Three lines have been drawn with blood on the girl’s forehead. Soon after, another girl is murdered, with four red lines drawn on her body, and soon the police are on the hunt for a serial killer. But Harold and John are curious about mob ties and a political plan to raze the Gateway District, a run-down downtown neighborhood.

The greatest pleasure of The Casablanca Tango is the immense amount of research Mr. Lileks has put in to recreating a city only barely recognizable today (the clearing of the Gateway District here was just the start). Even if you don’t know Minneapolis, you’ll feel like you visited it. He mentions more than one restaurant I ate in myself, decades later but before the concrete wave of redevelopment obliterated them.

The writing and dialogue are good, and there’s an authentic hard-boiled flavor to them (“I’ve seen flies land on eyes that had more life than hers”). Unfortunately the author seems to lose sight of the forest for the trees sometimes – he has a disconcerting way of losing track of his characters’ hair color, for instance (he describes one woman in a single sentence as being a blonde with black hair). He introduces a peripheral character named “Cecil,” who is obviously standing in for Cedric Adams, a newspaper columnist and broadcaster who pretty much owned the town in those days (I remember him). Then, about half-way through the book he drops the pseudonym and Cecil openly becomes Cedric. He also identifies Hawthorne as the poet of the “Song of Hiawatha.” He really needed an editor, or at least a better one.

I’ll say this though — the culprit was not who I expected, and not who most writers would have fingered.

On balance I give The Casablanca Tango four stars. It’s as good a voyage through time as you’re going to get for $3.99

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death’s Doors’ reviewed at ‘I Saw Lightning Fall’

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Our friend Loren Eaton, at I Saw Lightning Fall,reviews Death’s Doors:

Imagine a blender. Chuck in Atwood’s aforementioned novel, Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Walker’s own West Oversea. Add a generous pinch of profanity, a scoop of Christian church history, and several comment sections plucked at random from various Huffington Post articles. Now pulse for two or three seconds. Voila! That’s Death’s Doors. Yes, it’s just as lumpy as it sounds. But it’s also works.

Non-fiction, Publishing

No, the Vikings weren’t gender-neutral

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Had to post about this, before there’s further confusion.

This article from Tor. com has been making the rounds.

Researchers at the University of Western Australia decided to revamp the way they studied Viking remains. Previously, researchers had misidentified skeletons as male simply because they were buried with their swords and shields. (Female remains were identified by their oval brooches, and not much else.) By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons

It didn’t take long for a rebuttal to come from what looks like a somewhat more credible source, Stuff You Missed in History.

But, this paper essentially uses the presence of six female migrants and seven male as evidence that women and children most likely accompanied the Norse armies with the intent of settling the land once it was conquered, rather than migrating in a second wave once the fighting was over. It is, sadly, not at all about female Viking warriors, and not some Earth-shattering evidence that Norse armies were evenly split among women and men.

They’ll still have to prove to me that there were any female Viking warriors at all, but the point is made. The Tor article drew unwarranted and exaggerated conclusions from a study that examined a mere 13 graves.

Hey, Tor Books rejected my novel Wolf Time (soon to be re-released in e-book form) with disparaging comments, about 30 years ago. That should tell you all you need to know about them.

Bookselling

Rite of fall

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It just occurred to me that Autumn/Fall is the only season with two names. Perhaps because it’s so depressing they figured they’d divide it up into two bundles to make it easier to carry.

Oh yes, buy my book: Death’s Doors.

So. Fall. This means that my blog posting, never regular even during summer break, will diminish materially. It’s back-to-school time. I’m in my second year of graduate school already. How time does fly!

No it doesn’t. I feel like I’ve been at this for a decade, and have about 30 years left to go.

I had a gratifying moment on Saturday. It’s my ancient custom to go out for lunch somewhere on Saturday noon, and then go to the local Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar.

As I approached the window, the manager said, “I always like to see you coming. You remind me of better times.” Continue reading Rite of fall →