My adjustment to the world of the Kindle e-reader has brought about some changes in my reading habits. You may have noticed that I’ve been doing more negative reviews than I used to. This is because the availability of very cheap—or free—e-books has seduced me into downloading a number of books by authors I’ve never heard of. And, as Theodore Sturgeon (I think it was Sturgeon) said, more or less, “90% of everything is crap.” I’ll admit to being kinder to authors who approach me personally to review a book (sometimes I’m so kind I say nothing at all), but generally if I read dreck I call it dreck.

Wrongful Death by Andrew Price is not dreck. It has numerous flaws, but it was a book I enjoyed, and I want to encourage the author to carry on (though I suggest finding a better proofreader).

The hero of Wrongful Death is Scott Blakely, an attorney in the town of Greenfield, Pennsylvania, a dying community in the Rust Belt. He barely squeaks by financially. This isn’t helped by the fact that he has a high sense of both morality and ethics (they’re not the same thing), though he shares a practice with one lawyer who’s a sexual adventurer and another who’s an ambulance chaser with no visible principles at all.

Scott is hired by Madeline Tashard, the widow of a local psychiatrist who died under a doctor’s care in the town’s hospital. It’s a pretty clear-cut case of malpractice. But Madeline is an oddly unsympathetic widow. She suffers from partial paralysis, but bridles when anyone offers her any assistance. She treats her young daughter with noticeable coldness.

As the story unfolds, we’re able to observe Scott’s highminded (but strategically brilliant) conduct in the case, as well as a portion of the tactics and strategies of his opponents. Not only the principles, but the town itself, face disaster if some of the parties get their way. There are surprises in store, and the final resolution will be shocking but satisfying (at least it was to me).

Wrongful Death isn’t a legal thriller, in the sense of lots of violence and action. It’s more cerebral, something I appreciated. The characters were well-drawn and believable.

The writing needs some work. Author Price is under the delusion that incredulity can be indicated by pairing a question mark with an exclamation point at the end of a sentence, and that expressions of doubt, even when framed as statements, should be indicated by question marks. He needs an editor.

But he’s able to tell an exciting, compelling story without gunfights or car chases. Kudos to him.

Cautions for adult themes and language.

This one didn’t work for me. Joseph Badal’s Evil Deeds is supposed to be “based on true events.” Those true events must be the kind that are stranger than fiction, because the story failed to convince in my case.

The hero is Bob Danforth, who starts the story in 1971 as a young, married U.S. Army officer in Athens. One day while he’s at work, his little boy Michael is kidnapped by a gang of gypsies, in the pay of a communist government. This begins a long-standing (and fairly unconvincing) conflict between the Danforths and the kidnappers. They’re all thrown together again in the wake of a second kidnapping years later, the middle-aged Danforth now being a CIA operative.

The major problem with this book was too many coincidences. Instead of setting up credible plot points, author Badal just does whatever he likes to up the stakes, ignoring logic or probability. The many reversals seemed arbitrary to me, and I felt manipulated as a reader.

Badal has also not mastered his English. He uses words wrong (“hoard” for “horde,” for instance), and at one point describes the same character two different ways (I suspect he just forgot he’d used the name already).

Also, the book was too long.

I don’t give Evil Deeds high marks. Your mileage may vary. Cautions for language, violence, and sexual situations.

This will have to be a mixed review. Gary Neece’s Cold Blue is a pretty good story, taken as a story. It’s weak, however, in two areas that matter to me. One is simple writing skills—the author’s use of language. The other is a moral problem.

Cold Blue concerns a Tulsa police detective, Jonathan Thorpe, whose wife and daughter were murdered. The crime remains unsolved. Now he’s involved in the investigation of the murders of a string of gang members and drug dealers. A female FBI investigator (gorgeous, of course) comes in to take over the investigation, and suspicion soon turns to Jonathan himself. Not without reason. It’s not a spoiler (since the synopsis on Amazon.com tells you as much) that Jonathan himself is systematically taking revenge on the people responsible for the murder of his family. And his revenge soon extends to members of the police department itself.

The story moved right along, and kept my interest (the ending was pretty satisfying, with some surprises). I had to stop, though, from time to time to shake my head over amateurish infelicities of language. Subject and object confusion, as in, “Having reached a clearing, the barn loomed before him.” Homonym confusion, as in, “Thorpe identified an even smaller click of five [people].” Misuse of words, especially when falling into clichés, as in, “At the conclusion of these chases officers aren’t able to just switch off these ‘fight or flight’ chemicals; they [the policemen] are literally drug-induced.”

These are things a good editor could fix. In spite of my being part of the e-publishing world now, I miss copy editors. Continue reading Cold Blue, by Gary Neece →