Thrillers as a genre are different from mysteries, but there tends to be a lot of overlap. Thrillers concentrate on building tension and unease in the reader, but a mystery element adds to that tension. Me, I’m more of a mystery person than a thriller person, and Rollover, by James Raven, kept me reading, but took me far beyond my comfort zone. Which will have been, of course the point.
Danny Cain is a journalist, partner in a struggling
independent news agency in Southampton, England, with his friend Vince. One evening
he gets a call from Vince – he has to come right over. Vince has won the
national lottery! Their troubles are over!
But when he gets there, Danny finds Vince dead, bludgeoned
to death on the floor. Before he can telephone the police, he gets a call from
his wife’s mobile phone – a strange man’s voice says to get out of there and
wait for further instructions. They have kidnapped Danny’s wife and 6-year-old
daughter; if he doesn’t follow instructions, they will die.
Then begins Danny’s ordeal – once of those situations where
things start impossible and then get worse. He has no resources to call on, and
his enemies seem organized, omniscient, and remorseless. Doing what he’s told might
be impossible, and even if he can, chances of survival are low.
Meanwhile, Hampshire Detective Jeff Temple is called to the
crime scene. Danny Cain looks like the obvious culprit, but Jeff isn’t sure.
Things don’t add up, but he has no idea what awful revelations will come to
light before it’s all over.
Taunt, tense, and remorseless, Rollover is a masterful thriller. It worked so well that I’m scared to continue on with the sequel.
Sometimes, as I said when I reviewed the series, “Yancy Derringer” a while back, you can watch a beloved childhood show and be pleasantly surprised. And sometimes the show is just as dumb as you expect. Such is the case with “The Adventures of Jim Bowie,” a two-season series that ran from 1956 to 1958. I streamed it on Amazon Plus.
Simplified and sanitized for a half-hour time period and a
kids’ audience, “The Adventures of Jim Bowie” is sort of Bizarro-Jim. A lot of
what happens is based on actual events – but they’re usually portrayed the
wrong way around.
The very first episode, for instance, explains how Jim designs his knife and gets it made by a blacksmith. His kid-friendly reason for this is given as a need to protect himself from bears. (Wilderness survival tip – this does not work.) In real life, Jim acquired his knife because he’d been in a life-and-death fight with a man and his pistol misfired. Stories vary as to who designed the knife – it may have been his smarter brother Rezin – but it probably wasn’t Jim himself.
Aside from his efforts in the Texan War of Independence, which are genuinely impressive, Jim Bowie’s main accomplishments mostly consisted of criminal activity. He and his friend, the pirate Jean Lafitte (who appears in several episodes), conspired to exploit a loophole in the laws forbidding the importation of slaves. This allowed them to effectively “launder” their human merchandise, and then sell it at a premium. (Look up the details if you’re interested; it’s complicated.) In this series, the issue of the slave trade is generally avoided, except for one episode where Jim risks his life to rescue a slave he has freed from being sold again.
Jim’s biggest scam, though, involved forging old Spanish land grants, which the US government had agreed to honor. Jim created a large number of fake grants (not very skillfully), and managed to tie up quite a lot of land titles for a long time. He eventually lost all his claims in court, but not before many innocent people lost a lot of money. In my memory, there was one episode of the show that dealt with false land grants, but in which Bowie uncovers rather than perpetrates the fraud. However, that must be the one episode that Amazon Prime skips in its rotation, because I didn’t see it here.
The knife that bore the Bowie name, his great trademark, gets flashed a lot in the show, but doesn’t actually get used much for its proper purpose. He throws it often, frequently to disarm other men. But only one opponent gets stabbed as far as I can recall, and that’s pretty much by accident.
A number of historical characters show up – John James
Audubon, Andrew Jackson (whom Bowie didn’t support, contrary to the show), Sam
Houston, Johnny Appleseed, Jefferson Davis. They are often portrayed in fairly
authentic ways (they take particular pains to make Davy Crockett look right.
The Walt Disney series was a recent memory then). You could actually learn some
fair basic history by watching this show, if you discount the main character
himself.
Beyond that, the writing is simple and the plots dumb. This
is a garden variety TV western aimed at kids, but without revolving pistols. It’s
OK for mindless entertainment, but your life won’t be impoverished much if you
give it a miss.
A note on the star: Scott Forbes was an English actor who
learned his southern accent from a female voice coach whom he went on to marry.
He plays the party pretty broadly. According to one source, he walked off the
set just before the last episode was filmed, on hearing that the show had been
cancelled. They covered by hiring another actor (not a famous one) to play an
outlaw who gets a pardon for going on a mission to Texas in Bowie’s place.
A woman is strangled in an out-of-the way spot in Edinburgh. Detective Inspector Jack Knox is surprised to learn that the case has been taken over by a “more sophisticated” police team from western Scotland. Their leader, however, turns out to be a decent and sensible fellow. He puts Jack in operational command and makes his people available to reinforce the local cops, who know the territory.
Crime scene investigation, witness reports, and CCTV suggest that the killer drove a delivery van, so the team begins a systematic investigation of delivery companies and their drivers. Slowly the noose tightens, but surprises are in store.
That’s how Robert McNeill’s Murder at Flood Tide goes. It’s not a thriller, but a fairly realistic police procedural, like the previous volume in the series, The Innocent and the Dead, which I’ve already reviewed. The drama is mostly low-key, but along with the threat of the serial killer, there is an insubordinate team member to be dealt with.
I like the realistic approach of this series, but I can’t
pretend I find these books compelling. They are entertainment with a moderate
level of dramatic tension; nothing to keep you awake at night.
I used to be a beanpole, just below six foot of skin, muscle and bone, but now, when I showered in the morning, it was like navigating the Yorkshire Dales.
It is a melancholy thing to come to the end of a book series you’re enjoying a lot. I don’t know if Stan Jackson intends to write any more Perry Webster novels – he’s kind of running out of hair colors. Peroxide? Titian? Dishwater?
Anyway, Redhead is the fourth in the series, and perhaps the best, depending on your preferences. Author Jackson gets better as he goes.
At the risk of spoiling it for people who haven’t finished the previous book, I have to tell you that Perry is married now, to Julia Emburey, the headmistress of a prep school. Julia thinks she has no relations, but is startled to learn she has a cousin – in France. Perry and Julia travel to the home of this woman, Gabrielle Dupont (originally Gale Emburey) who is very rich. Julia had known of Gabrielle’s father, her uncle, who was accused of murdering his wife and disappeared with his baby daughter. Now she learns that he went to France, where he changed his identity and had considerable business success.
Gabrielle says that her late father was innocent of the
murder. She would like Perry to investigate the cold case. If he can vindicate
her father, Gabrielle will make a major (and much needed) contribution to Julia’s
school.
Both of them dislike Gabrielle from the start, but the money
is tempting, and what harm could there be in righting an old injustice?
There was another suspect in the case, the “redhead” of the title – a French au pair who also disappeared at the time of the murder. But she had no apparent motive. Perry begins questioning friends and associates from those days, asking questions that most of them find puzzling, but that one of them finds absolutely threatening…
I enjoyed Redhead, as I have enjoyed the whole series. The writing has always been good, and the plotting has improved from book to book.
I’m happy that Perry has found a satisfying marriage, though
I’m not entirely sold on Julia. She’s great most of the time, but occasionally
she exhibits a prickly, feminist humorlessness that puts me off. No doubt
female readers will react differently.
There’s an odd element in this one related to religion. Perry
visits a sort of modern hippie commune, where they teach what seems to be a
rationalized Christianity. “Grace” is their watchword, but without all that
supernatural stuff. No doubt that seems positive to the contemporary English; I
don’t think it holds up in practice. You’ve got to deal with original sin – a
topic which, ironically, gets mentioned in passing.
I should note that at one point author Jackson uses the
phrase “begging the question” correctly. Full marks for that! A rare pleasure
in contemporary books.
Also, there’s a chilling anticlimax.
Good book, and recommended. I’ll read the next, if there is one. Mousy? Bald?
Like the raising of the Mary Rose, Suzie’s words, and now Cyl’s, had brought it to the surface and like the Mary Rose, the thought emerged covered in stuff I didn’t want to delve into.
I’ve been calling this series of mysteries by Stan Jackson the “Ste Webster” series, because that’s what everyone’s been calling the character up to now in the books. But in the present volume, Raven, “Ste” and his friends have started referring to him as Perry. Which is also what the series is called on the Amazon pages, so I guess that’s what I ought to be calling him now.
Ste, or Perry, Webster is, as you may recall, a professor of philosophy at the University of York. His fiancée was murdered in the first volume, Blonde, and he managed to identify the killer. This has given him a reputation as a detective, and occasionally people ask him to solve other crimes.
This time out, Perry is approached by a former student, Laura “Raven” Wellbourne. She tells him that as a girl she attended St Barnabas School, a prestigious nearby institution, comparable to an American prep school. During her time there, she tells him, she was blackmailed and serially abused in secret by the headmaster, Dr MacDonald. As an adult, now with an academic degree, she changed her identity and appearance and returned to the school, getting a job as an instructor. Her plan was to somehow find evidence of MacDonald’s true character, and expose him.
But now Dr MacDonald has been murdered, found floating in
the school swimming pool with his head smashed. Raven is the police’s chief
suspect, but she swears she didn’t do it. Since she’s been relieved of duties,
someone is needed to cover her classes. Could Perry fill in for her, on a pretext,
and try to find the real killer?
Perry is so appalled by what she’s been through that he agrees to do it. Before long an audit reveals that Dr MacDonald has been involved in massive misappropriation of school funds, to the extent that its future is jeopardized. This is of great concern to the acting interim headmistress, Julia Emburey, a very attractive woman who has raised an interest in Perry that he hasn’t felt since his fiancée died. But is MacDonald’s embezzlement the motive for the murder?
I’m enjoying this series of novels immensely. Sometimes you
just “hit it off” with a series or a character. I like Perry Webster, and enjoy
spending time in his company. Also, author Jackson has fixed some of the
writing problems I’ve identified in earlier books.
So I recommend Raven, along with the whole series. Mild cautions for adult themes.
On a country road near Dublin, a wealthy property developer is found dead in a crashed car. It wasn’t the crash that killed him.
Not far away, in a shed in the woods, a young man is found
naked and stabbed to death.
Detectives Aidan Burke and Fiona Moore are on the case. The
books at the older victim’s office look fishy, and his company’s labor force
seems dodgy. But his family situation was odd as well. No lack of motives here,
but lots and lots of secrets.
That’s the premise of David Pearson’sA Fatal Liaison, second in his Burke and Moore mystery series. I’ve reviewed the previous volume before, and this one completes the series to date. No doubt there will be more, because these books work pretty well.
As a Typical Male ™, I assumed at first that Aidan Burke,
the senior detective, was the main character. But he’s really not. Aidan is
smart enough and knows his job, but he has a drinking problem and has lost a
step or two. He doesn’t treat Fiona badly, according to his somewhat Neanderthal
lights, but his younger sergeant is actually smarter than he is. More than once
she suggests a line of inquiry that he barely notices, which turns out vital
once she’s followed it up.
A Fatal Liaison is a solid entry in a solid series. It’s not one of my personal favorites, but I have no cause to complain. Cautions for language and mature subject matter. Also implied criticism of traditional Christian morality.
Stan Jackson’s Ste Webster mystery series continues with its second hair color title, Brunette. Once again Ste, a professor at the University of York, has a murder to solve… for reasons of his own.
Mackenzie West was, despite her brown hair, a golden girl at
the University. Beautiful and popular, she was a good student and a star
athlete, a prospect for the British Olympic fencing team. Until one morning she
plunged down a stairwell to her death.
It could have been an accident, or suicide, but the police
suspect murder, and Inspector Allen would like nothing better than to pin it on
Ste Webster. Failing that, there’s another faculty member he has his eye on,
Matt Harper, head of the Philosophy Department. Matt’s a friend, and Ste doesn’t
believe he did it. When both Mackenzie’s parents and Matt ask him to look into
the matter, he hesitates but agrees, partly to appease his personal demons. He’ll
have to keep out of Inspector Allen’s way, but he’ll try.
It soon appears that Mackenzie had dark secrets no one guessed.
Ste finds not one but several people who had plausible reasons for killing her.
Which gives them reasons for silencing Ste as well…
As with Blonde, the previous book in the series, I enjoyed Brunette quite a lot, but had reservations. The prose is very good, and I like Ste and his supporting cast. As an added bonus, both Chesterton and C. S. Lewis get quoted (though Ste is not religious).
On the down side, I’m still annoyed by Ste’s tendency to walk
into danger without protection, and the author’s tendency to rescue him through
sheer luck. That’s a plot strategy that can’t be sustained forever. Also, the
conclusion of the book was a little bit ambivalent in moral terms.
Still, I’m going on to the next book. The pleasures outweigh my reservations. Minor cautions are in order for language and subject matter.
The occupant of the final ensemble, the only one of the three sitting, combined wrinkles with lack of hair like a pug slightly ironed.
Years back, I read a mystery called By Frequent Anguish, by S.F.X. Dean. It was the story of an academic whose girlfriend is murdered. It moved me deeply, for personal reasons. The sequel, however, left me cold, and I didn’t read any more in the series.
Blonde, by Stan Jackson, had much the same effect on me, and shares a similar premise. Perry “Ste” Webster, who teaches philosophy at a fictional campus of the University of York in England, was in love with Anna, a local barmaid. Though her social status displeased Ste’s upper-class parents, she was beautiful and smart and full of life – until Ste found her stabbed to death in her apartment one night. The police, of course, fixed on him as their primary suspect, but he has an alibi and powerful friends.
Soon he discovers an important clue – Anna’s diary. But reading it, he finds that she wrote in it about a personal secret he confided to her. He doesn’t want the police to see that secret. So, in spite of his grief, he takes it upon himself to investigate Anna’s personal connections. Some of the people she worked with were involved in a disastrous investment scheme, and owed a lot of money. Ste uncovers some dark secrets and angers some dangerous people, but the final solution to the mystery will be a complete shock.
I enjoyed Blonde very much. Not only was the mystery fascinating and the characters appealing, but the writing sometimes rose to a very high level (though the author has a lamentable tendency to overuse exclamations marks). And though no particular deference is paid to Christianity, Ste Webster as a philosopher and reader seems to me to be mostly on the right lines.
On the other hand, Ste can be an annoying detective. His approach to dangerous situations is generally to just walk in and trust that some deus ex machina will save his bacon. That weak plot device was used a little too much in this book, imho.
However, I have proceeded to the next book in the series. Recommended.
David Pearson, an established Irish mystery writer, kicks off a new police procedural series set in Dublin with A Deadly Dividend.
In the classic model of the Anglo-Irish police story, you’ve got your grizzled male Detective Inspector, supported by a younger female detective. What makes this series somewhat different is that the older male detective is not always on top of his game, and his assistant (who does not look like a model) has to save him from himself from time to time.
In A Deadly Dividend, a young banker is stabbed to death in an alleyway. When Detectives Aidan Burke and DS Fiona Moore inquire at his bank, it becomes apparent that the victim has been fiddling with his international accounts. It turns out he has had a clandestine dealings with shady interests. When another murder follows, they need to move fast – if Fiona can keep Aidan sober long enough to get the job done.
I quite enjoyed A Deadly Dividend. It definitely leaned more to the mystery than the thriller side, and dealt realistically with the plain drudgery that police work involves. And the fact that Aidan has a drinking problem and makes serious job mistakes – which Fiona must cover for – makes them an unusual fictional team. I also liked occasional suggestions of non-PC opinions.
There’s only one more book in the series to date, but I’m
planning to read it.
The earth is rented from its surface down to its most central mines; — the fire, and the means of feeding it, are currently bought and sold; — the wretches that sweep the boisterous ocean with their nets, pay ransom for the privilege of being drowned in it. What title has the air to be exempted from the universal course of traffic?
In early 1725, a pirate named John Gow (or Goff) returned to his birthplace of Orkney, passing himself off as a prosperous merchant. He even courted a local girl. However, he was recognized and denounced by a genuine merchant. He and his men stormed a mansion and hid there for a while, but finally fled by ship. They were captured when their vessel ran aground. Goff was tried at Newgate in London, and hanged in the customary style.
Nearly 100 years later, Sir Walter Scott took that basic story and added romantic elements, along with lore and local color he’d collected on a visit to the Northern Isles some years before, and produced the novel, The Pirate. It is this novel I’ve been reading for about a week, and have finished at length.
Most of the story is set in the Shetlands (here called Zetland). There are two main characters. The first is a handsome young man named Mordaunt Mertoun (seriously, that’s his name). He’s a “stranger” on Zetland, in the sense that his father came from England, and is not of the old Norwegian stock. Nevertheless, he’s popular with the islanders, and a favorite at the home of the island chieftain, Magnus Troil, known as the “Udaller.” Magnus has two beautiful daughters, Minna and Brenda, and people speculate as to which of them Mordaunt will choose to marry.
One day a ship is wrecked at Sumberg Head, and Mordaunt rescues (against his neighbors’ advice, see my blog post further below) the lone survivor, with the help of a local character called Norna of the Fitful Head. She is an old woman believed to have powers of prophecy and weather control. The survivor calls himself Captain Cleveland. Captain Cleveland is rich, handsome, and refined, and soon becomes a new favorite with the Udaller. Mordaunt can’t help noting that his own welcome at the Troil home grows cold after Cleveland’s arrival. Nevertheless, he attends a big house party there. There he clashes with Cleveland, there is a fight, and both men mysteriously disappear.
The action comes to a crisis somewhat later at the annual
fair at Kirkwall in Orkney, where Cleveland has to balance his chance of escape
against his desire to see his beloved, Minna, one last time. The conclusion of
the story is romantic, semi-tragic, and implausible.
I like to pose as someone who can appreciate older literature better than the average modern, but I have to admit The Pirate was a bit of a slog. The language is ornate and dense, a problem not improved by this Kindle edition, produced with OCR technology and not vetted for word mistakes. Also, footnotes are frequently not recognized as such, and so get stuck, confusingly, in the middle of sentences.
Modern writers know they’re competing with television and
movies, and make it a point to grab the reader from the first sentence and run,
to avoid distractions. Authors in Scott’s time had more latitude. They staged
their novels like salons, introducing you to each character in a leisurely way,
and leaving you with them to get acquainted, even if they’re bores. Sometimes
especially if they’re bores – bores are considered good for a laugh.
For me, the glimpses into “Zetland” lore and legend (there’s magic here, but it’s rationalized) was intriguing, and made it worth my time. You might not find it as rewarding. Even among the field of Scott’s novels, I don’t think The Pirate is in the first rank. And boy, was it long.
Websites store cookies to enhance functionality and personalise your experience. You can manage your preferences, but blocking some cookies may impact site performance and services.
Essential cookies enable basic functions and are necessary for the proper function of the website.
Name
Description
Duration
Cookie Preferences
This cookie is used to store the user's cookie consent preferences.
30 days
These cookies are needed for adding comments on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
comment_author
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_email
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
comment_author_url
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
Session
These cookies are used for managing login functionality on this website.
Name
Description
Duration
wordpress_logged_in
Used to store logged-in users.
Persistent
wordpress_sec
Used to track the user across multiple sessions.
15 days
wordpress_test_cookie
Used to determine if cookies are enabled.
Session
Statistics cookies collect information anonymously. This information helps us understand how visitors use our website.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes website traffic for informed marketing decisions.
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests
10 minutes
__utmb
Used to distinguish new sessions and visits. This cookie is set when the GA.js javascript library is loaded and there is no existing __utmb cookie. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
30 minutes after last activity
__utmc
Used only with old Urchin versions of Google Analytics and not with GA.js. Was used to distinguish between new sessions and visits at the end of a session.
End of session (browser)
__utmz
Contains information about the traffic source or campaign that directed user to the website. The cookie is set when the GA.js javascript is loaded and updated when data is sent to the Google Anaytics server
6 months after last activity
__utmv
Contains custom information set by the web developer via the _setCustomVar method in Google Analytics. This cookie is updated every time new data is sent to the Google Analytics server.
2 years after last activity
__utmx
Used to determine whether a user is included in an A / B or Multivariate test.
18 months
_ga
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gali
Used by Google Analytics to determine which links on a page are being clicked
30 seconds
_ga_
ID used to identify users
2 years
_gid
ID used to identify users for 24 hours after last activity
24 hours
_gat
Used to monitor number of Google Analytics server requests when using Google Tag Manager
1 minute
_gac_
Contains information related to marketing campaigns of the user. These are shared with Google AdWords / Google Ads when the Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts are linked together.
90 days
Marketing cookies are used to follow visitors to websites. The intention is to show ads that are relevant and engaging to the individual user.
A video-sharing platform for users to upload, view, and share videos across various genres and topics.
Registers a unique ID on mobile devices to enable tracking based on geographical GPS location.
1 day
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
Tries to estimate the users' bandwidth on pages with integrated YouTube videos. Also used for marketing
179 days
PREF
This cookie stores your preferences and other information, in particular preferred language, how many search results you wish to be shown on your page, and whether or not you wish to have Google’s SafeSearch filter turned on.
10 years from set/ update
YSC
Registers a unique ID to keep statistics of what videos from YouTube the user has seen.
Session
DEVICE_INFO
Used to detect if the visitor has accepted the marketing category in the cookie banner. This cookie is necessary for GDPR-compliance of the website.
179 days
LOGIN_INFO
This cookie is used to play YouTube videos embedded on the website.
