Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mean Business On North Ganson Street,’ by S. Craig Zahler

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Someone suggested I read an S. Craig Zahler novel, just to see what I thought of it.

So I went and bought Mean Business On North Ganson Street.

There are many good things I could say about this book. First of all, it’s well written. Author Zahler is a very good stylist. He turns out punchy, neo-hardboiled prose, with a razor edge: “The silver luxury car rolled past a street that was blocked off by an overturned pickup truck, which had been torn open like a zebra on the plain.” “The windshield wipers shoved powder across the glass, and through the opening, Bettinger saw Victory. Covered with snow and viewed from a distance, the city resembled a mildewed autopsy.”

Also, the characters are vivid and the plotting propulsive. This is very good writing.

But the reading experience provided? That’s a whole other thing.

Jules Bettinger is a police detective in Arizona. His record is good, but his customer service attitude isn’t, and he gets himself fired. His only option to stay on the job is a transfer to the city of Victory, Missouri, notorious for having the worst crime rate in the country.

When he gets there, he finds his fellow detectives brutal and probably corrupt. He observes clear violations of suspects’ rights. Then he learns more, and discovers why the cops are acting the way they are – in Victory, the situation has gone far beyond law enforcement. It’s now total war. When his own family gets pulled into the violence, Jules takes the gloves off and enters fully into the battle.

And that battle will lead from the better parts of Victory, which are merely blighted, to the worst parts, which are post-apocalyptic.

It’s a descent into Hell.

Reading Mean Business On North Ganson Street was an uncomfortable experience. Shocking, offensive, full of disillusionment. This is Nietzche’s world; the cops are just patrolling it.

I can’t really recommend the book, unless you have a taste for scenarios out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

I also thought the sex scenes were unnecessarily explicit.

I fear I am not going to be a S. Craig Zahler fan.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Prophet,’ by Michael Koryta

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There is no God.

You walk alone in the darkness.

To prove this, to imprint it in the mind so deeply that no alternative can so much as flicker, is the goal. This is power, pure as it comes….

The prophet’s goal is simple. When the final scream in the night comes, whoever issues it will be certain of one thing.

No one hears.

Reading fiction is an activity entailing many pleasures; among them is the constant possibility of discovering a truly wonderful book. I had that pleasure – in a big way – in reading Michael Koryta’s The Prophet. It’s a book that has a lot to do with football, and it hit me with the impact of a linebacker.

In 1989, brothers Adam and Kent Austin of Chalmers, Ohio were both on a winning high school football team in that football-obsessed part of the country. But Adam made a mistake on the night of their greatest victory, a mistake that destroyed their family. Today, Adam is a bail bondsman, still living in Chalmers, in the old family house. His brother Kent is the local football coach, a much-respected figure. He’s a devout Christian, and regularly leads Bible studies in a nearby prison.

The brothers almost never speak to one another.

When Adam now makes a second mistake, resulting in a young girl’s death, he is overwhelmed with guilt. He makes a promise to the girl’s mother – he will find the murderer, and he will not turn him over to the police. He will kill him.

Adam has no intention of letting this ugly business slop over into his brother’s life – but it does. It turns out that Kent was part of the plan from the beginning – innocently and unintentionally, but he and his family will be drawn inexorably into a drama scripted by the killer.

In a separate plot thread, we follow the progress of Kent’s high school football team, as they surmount one obstacle after another (not least survivor’s grief) to pursue a championship they’ve never won before. This theme provides a sort of harmonic counterpoint to the main plot, revealing character and illuminating the narrative.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a novel that impressed me as The Prophet did. (And I’m not even interested in football). In addition, the book surprised me though describing the struggles of a sincere, decent Christian – not in an evangelistic way, but honestly and with sympathy. This is something you don’t see often in mainstream literature.

I could go on and on. Drop whatever you’re doing and buy The Prophet. You’ll thank me.

Cautions for adult stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hard Count,’ by David Chill

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I’ve read and reviewed a few of David Chill’s Burnside (he’s one of those fictional detectives who apparently has no first name) novels in the past. I liked them okay, but had a few quibbles. Hard Count comes several volumes along in the series from the ones I’ve read before, and I thought the writing was better this time, so kudos to the author for learning his craft.

Burnside, our hero, is a former pro football prospect and a former cop, now a Los Angeles private eye. His private life has improved to the point where he has a live-in partner, who has a young son on whom he dotes. Gail, his partner, works in the City Attorney’s office and is running for the top job. Burnside’s not-entirely-shining past is not helping her campaign, so he’s trying to be on his best behavior.

But it’s difficult. An insurance company hires him to check out a murder attempt on one of their high-end clients, a former pro football star, now a restaurateur. Somebody took some potshots at the man in his back yard, while he was in his hot tub with his trophy wife. But the investigation gets pulled inevitably toward the insured guy’s son, a college football player who’s a hot prospect for the NFL draft, and who’s already living the celebrity life.

I found Hard Count a competently written PI story, mostly in the classical tradition. The modern shamus, of course, is more feminist and sensitive than Philip Marlowe was. Though politics were involved in this book, and we’re told that Burnside’s partner is a Democrat, there’s no real political slant here (indeed, it seemed as if they were living in another decade, when prosecutors in LA still believed in arresting people).

In the past I noted certain stylistic and grammar weaknesses in the Burnside books, but I do not see them now. Hard Count didn’t stand out from the crowd of competing detective series, but it made the cut.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Winter After This Summer,’ by Stanley Ellin

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I’ve become fond of the mid-20th Century mystery writer Stanley Ellin. I already recognized that he was an essentially good writer, not just a clever creator of smart mysteries. Still, I wasn’t prepared for what I found in his novel The Winter After This Summer, which qualifies as a mystery, I guess, but is more of a literary novel.

We first meet our hero, Dan Egan, as he is being expelled from his college. The fraternity house where he lived burned down the previous night, killing his best friend and roommate, the football hero Ben Genarro. Everyone blames Dan for failing to save Ben – and Dan himself is not entirely sure what happened.

Dan is the child of a somewhat tense marriage alliance between new money and old money, uniting two wealthy families in awkward coexistence. Refusing relatives’ offers of easy jobs, Dan instead goes to work in a shipyard, learning the mysteries of that dying craft. He tells us about his life, especially his disappointed love for Mia, Ben Genarro’s sister, who rejected him to marry into the American elite.

We also meet Barbara Jean Avery, a stunningly beautiful young woman who has escaped poverty in the Florida Keys, dreaming of James Dean and Hollywood. Mentally, she is an entirely ordinary girl, but Dan seizes on her beauty, dreaming of making her into a better version of Mia. Unfortunately, Barbara Jean has a husband, who is older and a religious madman. Their inevitable collision will bring the story to its climax

The Winter After This Summer qualifies technically as a mystery, I suppose, because it begins with an unexplained death – but that death is never actually explained. It’s more about Dan struggling with his personal background and trying to find his authentic self. The book could almost be described as Christian (Ellin in fact converted to Quakerism later in life), though the best Christian character in the book has fairly iffy theology. Readers should be cautioned about rough, realistic language and fairly frank sexual scenes.

I think my final take on The Winter After This Summer is that it’s one of those works that’s too smart for me. In the end, I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to take away from it. But it was a rewarding reading experience.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Very Good, Jeeves,’ by P. G. Wodehouse

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He was fat then, and day by day in every way has been getting fatter ever since, till now tailors measure him just for the sake of the exercise.

It’s kind of a waste of time to review a P. G. Wodehouse book. The intelligent consumer knows the quality of the product. But it’s possible some reader (for some incomprehensible reason) has resisted the delights of “Plum’s” work to date, so here goes.

Very Good, Jeeves!, a story collection, is obviously a Jeeves and Wooster book, so there’s no mystery about what we’re getting. Idle London clubman Bertie Wooster – or one of his equally dimwitted friends – gets into some kind of ridiculous trouble. In the end, they turn to Bertie’s valet (not butler), Jeeves, of whom Bertie testifies: “There are no limits to Jeeves’s brain-power. He virtually lives on fish.”

The basic scenario is consistent (we’d be disappointed if it weren’t) but there are minor variations from story to story – sometimes Bertie turns to Jeeves at the very beginning, but unforeseen complications stretch the problem out. Sometimes Bertie delays resorting to Jeeves because some coldness has arisen between the two of them, over a disagreement about socks or golf attire or something. Once Jeeves is absent on holiday, and on another occasion Bertie’s imperious Aunt Agatha refuses to ask help from a mere servant.

But in the end Jeeves comes through, and the sun shines once again on the Edenic world of Wodehouse.

There are plenty of familiar characters in this collection – Bingo Little, Tuppy Glossop, and – most dramatically – Bobbie Wickham, the beautiful, red-haired, walking attractive nuisance.

Also, I noted, with interest, that at one point Bertie describes a portrait of himself as featuring a monocle. Bertie used to be portrayed with monocles in illustrations all the time, but I don’t recall actually finding one in a story before (there are probably others I’ve overlooked, though).

I think several of the stories in Very Good, Jeeves were actually new to me, which was delightful. The ones I’d read before were also delightful, though, so I had a thoroughly good time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Departure 37,’ by Scott Carson

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He didn’t answer. The sun was to the west, across the pond, putting a glint on the face of his father’s watch. The wind stirred crimson leaves, scattered a few to the water like flower petals tossed into a bride’s wake as she passed, honeymoon-bound.

As Scott Carson’s (Michael Koryta’s) Departure 37 begins, on an October morning later this year (2025), the skies over the entire US are empty of air traffic – early this morning, every pilot in the country got an impassioned phone call from his mother, begging him (or her) not to fly today. Some of these mothers are dead, which does not reduce the calls’ effect at all.

On a remote peninsula in Maine, a 16-year-old girl named Charlie Goodwin is dissatisfied with her life. Her widowed father has brought her here from Brooklyn to build a brewery, but she’s bored to death with small town life. Her only amusement is filming an old local named Abe Zimmer, who has a thousand conspiracy theories to share, centered on a famous military bomber crash that happened nearby in 1962. She posts these films online, and is getting considerable attention. She’s less happy about the presence of Abe’s grandson Lawrence, whom she considers a hopeless dork.

On this particular morning, Charlie’s father is away, which leaves the three of them the only human beings on the peninsula, in the area of the old airfield, when the military cordons the area off and a plane that’s been missing for 60 years suddenly appears in the sky over the airstrip.

Departure 37 is actually a complex story, following not only contemporary events but the events and characters that led up to the original 1962 air crash – the true story of which has never been revealed to the public.

The story gets pretty technical, in terms of theoretical and science fiction technology, and I have to admit I had trouble following it sometimes. It seemed to verge on technophobia at points. And I’m not entirely sure how to think about part of the story’s resolution.

But the characters were fascinating, the plotting tight (as always with Carson/Koryta), and the drama level high. This wasn’t really my kind of book, but I’m sure many will like it more than I did – and I liked it pretty well.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Those Who Wish Me Dead,’ by Michael Koryta

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You’ve got to observe the world you’re in to understand what parts of it may save you. At first, it may all seem hostile. The whole environment may seem like an enemy. But it isn’t. There are things hiding in it waiting to save you, and it’s your job to see them.

I keep saying I’m cutting back on reading thrillers, but then I get sucked in by good authors like Michael Koryta. And wowee, what a ride Those Who Wish Me Dead (which has since been made into a film with Angelina Jolie) was.

Jace Wilson did nothing wrong. The boy was in the wrong place in the wrong time, and he witnessed a murder. The two murderers didn’t catch him at the time, but now they know about him, and they want him dead. His parents decided, for his safety, to send him to Montana, to Ethan Serbin, who runs a sort of bootcamp program for troubled boys. The program involves camping up in the mountains, far off the grid. He ought to be safe there.

But no one is safe from men smart enough, and wicked enough, to figure out who to torture and what questions to ask them. Before long Jace will be alone in the wilderness, armed with just a little survival training, the prey in a seemingly hopeless game. Only he’s not quite alone. Outside his awareness, people who care are going to do more than anyone should ever be asked to do, to save his life – and perhaps their own souls.

I might not have read Those Who Wish Me Dead had I been aware that it involved two elements that particularly trouble me in stories – danger to children and danger to women. But I persevered, and got my reward in the end. Koryta is a master plotter, and he pulls all the tricks here – each new level achieved turns into a deadfall; there are traps within traps. Heart in your mouth stuff.

Highly recommended, but intense. Cautions for language, violence, and torture.

Fiction, Reviews

‘It Dies With You,” by Scott Blackburn

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It appears that when we read It Dies With You, by Scott Blackburn, we are dealing with an author’s first novel. That does affect my evaluation – new authors get some slack from me, especially when they show promise. Which is certainly true in this case.

Hudson Miller is a boxer, temporarily suspended from the sport, surviving on bouncer gigs. He hasn’t talked to his father for years, so when he misses a couple of his calls, he doesn’t return them. Not long after, he learns his father has been murdered, shot to death in the office of his auto salvage yard.

To his astonishment, Hudson soon learns that the old man left him some rental properties and the salvage yard itself. He figures he might as well learn what he can about the yard before he sells it off, so he travels the short distance to his home town, and moves into one of the rental houses. His guide to the world of auto salvage is Charlie, an old curmudgeon who worked for his father. Hudson is not greatly concerned about his father’s murder, as he seems to have been trafficking illegal guns.

Then Charlie digs up a crushed car, buried behind the shop, and finds a human body in it. The body proves to be that of a young, missing Hispanic man. Soon the young man’s feisty teenaged sister shows up, asking embarrassing questions, determined to find her brother’s murderer, because the cops aren’t doing anything. And Hudson and Charlie are shamed into helping her – in part just to protect her.

I quite liked It Dies With You at the beginning – partly because I’ve become such a timid reader. Author Blackburn provided good writing, interesting characters, and good dialogue, without a lot of dramatic tension, and if the mystery of Hudson’s father’s murder didn’t carry a lot of weight, that suited me fine. But once the teenaged girl appeared, the story (in my opinion) went downhill. She was such a stereotypical “spunky girl,” and so prickly about her ethnicity, that I had trouble liking her, or believing in her. The final scene where the mystery is revealed was theatrical and implausible, and the murderer’s identity no great surprise.

On the other hand, the Christians (except for the Baptist pastor) are treated pretty respectfully.

So, my final judgment is that It Dies With You was, it’s an imperfect book by an author who shows promise. You might enjoy it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tricky Business,’ by Dave Barry

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When I saw a deal for a comedy mystery written by Dave Barry, I figured it was worth a try. Who doesn’t enjoy Dave Barry, in moderation? In my innocence, I imagined something like an updated Wodehouse story, maybe with dirty words.

And I won’t say Tricky Business wasn’t quite funny – in places. But mainly what I found myself reading was a gritty crime story, with plenty of killing and torture, plus a lot of potty jokes.

It’s a little difficult to identify the main character in the complicated plot, but I guess it would be Wally Hartley, an otherwise unemployed guitarist in a gig band, currently living in his mother’s house. His band plays regularly on the Extravaganza of the Seas, a sleazy cruise ship that does the popular three-mile run from Miami into international waters, for legal gambling. Then there are Arnold and Phil, a pair of bickering buddies from a retirement home. They take the short cruise just to ease the boredom of their lives. There’s Fay, a struggling single mother working as a cocktail waitress. And there’s Lou, a mobster who’s on board to oversee the drug smuggling that is the ship’s real reason for operation.

They’re all a little concerned this time out, because a hurricane is blowing up, and the authorities are telling everyone to stay at home. But somebody insists that the Extravaganza has to sail tonight.

I laughed more than once reading Tricky Business, but I was a little embarrassed to do so. I’m extremely uncomfortable with very black humor, where real cruelty is juxtaposed with buffoonery. I read the book all the way through, but honestly I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

It did come out all right in the end; I feel obligated to admit that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Envy the Night,’ by Michael Koryta

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“Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Frank said, “You know what he does. You know what he is. So how the h*ll do you love him so clean?”

“Hon,” she said, “whoever said anything about it being clean?”

Frank Temple III, hero of Envy the Night, by Michael Koryta, is the son of a former hero, a decorated US marshal who disgraced himself and his family when he was revealed to have become a killer-for-hire. He killed himself, leaving his son – who had adored him, and whom he had trained in the martial arts – disillusioned and rootless in the world.

Frank III kept possession of the cabin in the north woods of Wisconsin that held some of his favorite memories of his dad, though he never visits. His father’s old friend Ezra also maintains the nearby island cabin belonging to Devin Matteson, the colleague who corrupted and betrayed Frank’s father. They left Devin alone, but they have an agreement – if Devin ever tries to come back, they’ll kill him.

Now Frank has gotten the word – Devin is on his way. So Frank is headed to Wisconsin, to a showdown with Devin, and with the truth of his father’s life and death, and to his own destiny.

You want to learn how to write mystery thrillers? Read Michael Koryta. Reading Envy the Night, I marveled at the way every story element – prose, characters, dialogue, plot – all worked together to produce a perfect payoff. I find no fault with this book (except for Koryta’s idiosyncratic approach to paragraphing, which seems to be a lost cause).

Highly recommended.