Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Caught Inside,’ by Jeff Shelby

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I hadn’t realized that Jeff Shelby was still putting out Noah Braddock novels. I like these books. Noah, a laid-back California surfer and private eye, mostly works when he feels like it, though he’s growing more responsible. There are shades of Travis McGee here – Noah is less contemplative than the Florida salvage expert, but his character (unlike Trav’s) changes and grows.

I seem to have missed a novel in the series sequence – I’ll have to look for the missing one – but as Caught Inside begins, we find Noah in a not-unfamiliar place. He’s decided to move into the house on Catalina Island that was left to him by Liz, his murdered girlfriend. He’s also reached the point where he wants to ask his longsuffering new girlfriend, Shannon, to move in with him (I suppose it would be too much to hope for marriage). Home ownership means house repairs, and Noah needs to get work to pay for them. His bodybuilder friend Carter has a suggestion… but he won’t like it.

The prospective client is Charisma Lugo, head of a feared female(!) street gang. She doesn’t want him to do anything illegal, she assures him. Her younger brother Xavier, whom she had sent off to a fancy private prep school, has disappeared. She just wants Noah to locate him.

When the boy turns up murdered, she then wants Noah to find out who killed him. (I was never quite clear why he agreed to stay on the job at this point, knowing what Charisma must certainly do to the killers.) Suspects include Xavier’s former friends from the streets, the snooty parents of his WASP girlfriend, and some mysterious tough guys who show up to deliver a good, professional beating. Noah, of course, is not about to be scared off.

Caught Inside was a pretty good novel. Noah Braddock is an ingratiating character. Well worth the price of admission.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Pale Gray for Guilt,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.

Ah, the joys of settling down with another Travis McGee novel. Even when author John D. MacDonald’s philosophy rings a little tinny, and the predictions have proven wrong in hindsight, Travis himself remains the best of friends – not only highly entertaining but reliable. Pale Gray for Guilt came out in 1968 and is one of the best in the series.

Tush Bannon is one of Travis McGee’s best old friends from his football days. He’s a big, cheerful, uncomplicated fellow, running a small business, raising a nice family. He has everything Trav can never have unless he alters his lifestyle, and Trav knows it. Then somebody decides to take Tush’s business away, and they take his life along with it. Travis is guilty that he wasn’t there to help. So he makes up his mind to get something back for the widow and the kids. And if a bad guy happens to get in the way of justice, he won’t hesitate to extract some blood too.

With the help of his economist friend Meyer, Trav sets up a neat and appealing con. The author of the book had a business degree from Harvard, and this sting, involving inflating a stock and getting out ahead of the pigeon before it crashes, was a little complex, but convincing. Along the way, McGee and Meyer have ample opportunity to look into the Abyss themselves, and glimpse it looking back at them.

Pale Gray for Guilt has the added element, in retrospect, of setting up a poignant plot element that will only bear fruit years later, in the last book of the series, The Lonely Silver Rain.

An outstanding entry in a classic series, Pale Gray for Guilt gets this reader’s highest recommendation. Cautions for adult situations, somewhat racy for the quaint old days of the 1960s.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Whisper,’ by Andrew Mayne

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by Andrew Mayne before. I can testify, after reading his novel Mr. Whisper, that he knows how to tell a story. Fascinating premise, engaging characters, well-paced action.

Sloan McPherson, a (female) Florida investigator, tracks down the Marsh Man, a local swamp legend, a sort of Florida Bigfoot. She discovers not a monster, but a confused adult man. It turns out he disappeared as a teenager, many years ago in Oregon, but has no memory of his past life. Where has he been all this time, and how did he get to Florida?

Jessica Blackwood used to be an FBI agent; now she’s a reality TV star on a popular true crime program. Her partner (professional and romantic) is Theo Cray, a brilliant scientist on the high-functioning end of the autism scale. They note that one of this lost boy’s female schoolmates disappeared around the same time, but nobody ever linked the two cases. The two young people had little in common, but they both appear to have been fascinated by the same Jack London novel.

And now a boy in Washington state, who almost committed a mass shooting in his school, presents the same pattern.

If these cases are connected, it means someone has devoted massive resources to some kind of huge, clandestine mind-control experiment. Who could that be? And what will it take to stop them?

I was very impressed with Mr. Whisper. As I said, the book was highly enjoyable and professionally written (though I thought the climax a little forced).

Personally, I had some quibbles. For instance, a historically ignorant dig was taken at the Catholic Church. But what annoyed me most (though mildly) was the ratio of sexes. The main, active characters in this story are mostly female. The action roles which would have gone to men in the Good Old Days are now given to women (though Theo finally gets a chance to show his stuff at the end). I’m inclined to think the author had a movie or miniseries in mind, and was catering to the known preferences of today’s producers.

(If I understand author Mayne’s backlist, he did a previous series starring Theo Cray, though. I probably ought to check that out.)

To sum it up, Mr. Whisper is a very enjoyable, well-written thriller, edging into Sci-Fi. It didn’t make me a fan, but that’s due to my personal prejudices.

Only mild cautions for language and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The Last True Bard

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This week Daily Wire released the finale of the great 7-episode fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin. I believe wondered in a previous post how they could wrap up a series that won’t tell the whole story. We knew from the start this was the story of Merlin’s ascension, not the reign of King Arthur, so how could they end the series without a massive cliffhanger?

The answer is to end it exactly the way they did. The final scene has been foreshadowed, and now that we have it in full, it closes this first run neatly. I hope we can get at least two more seasons, and maybe 8-10 episodes in each to give the stories the extra few minutes to round them out. Let’s see more of the lives of Aurelius, Uther, Arthur, Gawain, Gwenevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and Morgian too.

In episode six, we left Merlin in the past as he ran from the terrifying fury of his battle rage. That’s where we pick up in the finale to color in what remained of Merlin’s return. I enjoyed these moments. Merlin is stoic and grave in the present day; this return to his greatest horror is like hearing stories from a veteran’s war days.

Then we go to Aurelius’s war camp where things have barely improved. He does have Gorlas’s loyalty, but he needs the loyalty of every man and at least three times as many added to them. The Saxons have 10,000-15,000. At a moment when one of the kings would surely have lost his fool life, reinforcements arrive from the north with Merlin. I’d forgotten they were coming, so this interruption was welcome.

Later, the warlords make a plan, which Gorlas deems not good but no worse than anything else they could do, and the men prepare for battle the next day. That night, Merlin sings to them, having concluded his role is like his father’s, to be a bard to the Britons. This song is similar to those Taliesin sings, with a chorus that’s easily singable. I thought the men would join in as has been the pattern, but they sat or stood in silence that night. The next day on the battlefield, they took up the song to rally themselves to the fight. It was moving.

Do you remember how Ilúvatar and the Ainur sang the world into existence or how Finrod Felagund “strove with Sauron in songs of power” in The Silmarillion? The bards’ songs in Rise of the Merlin have an echo of Tolkien’s magical music. Merlin’s song on the night before the battle for the soul of Britain has a historic pattern, starting with history and moving to charge. Here’s the charge part of it.

Children of Ynys Prydain now
From every hill and glen
Abandoned by our fathers’ gods
And scorned by mournful men
We’ve seen our homes destroyed
Now from hill and glen alight
United now, we rise
Up like dragons in the night
Ooh, ah, ooh ah . . .

Seize your sword and join the fray
Our hallowed ground we’ll free
Rebuke the Saecsen gods
Drive their war host to the sea
Never again our homes destroyed
Our names will live in song
When the hero’s cup is raised
Let our victory wine be strong
Ooh, ah, ooh ah . . .

Kudos to the writers and actors and all of production for this series. It’s a strong work. You could even say it’s a great British work. I hope you will be able to buy it on DVD or rent it in the future. Of course, you can watch it now on DailyWire+.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortunate Harbor,’ by Davis Bunn

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Davis Bunn is, I believe, a Christian novelist, though his novel Fortunate Harbor is not explicitly evangelical. What it is, is a clean mystery/romance. It’s actually pretty good, but this reader is not its intended audience.

Rae Alden grew up in the town of Fortunate Harbor, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She loves the place and wants to live nowhere else, which is why, after graduating law school, she turned down generous offers from big firms to set up office back home. She loves the life, but the work is not usually very interesting.

That changes when Curtis Gage comes back to town. He and Rae were sweethearts as teenagers, but his family moved away and they lost touch. Now he works as a manager and troubleshooter for an international corporation based in India. The corporation has just acquired a failed local hotel project which has garnered considerable public opposition. Curtis wants Rae to help him turn the project around, show good faith, and gain community support.

As part of their project, Curtis acquires a large house in a desirable location, wrecked by the last hurricane. Rae represented the old owner, but he disappeared years ago and the money has long run out. But why are federal agents nosing around the property?

Also, can the spark between Rae and Curtis be rekindled? Or will he marry his beautiful boss?

There was nothing wrong with Fortunate Harbor. It’s a well-written romantic mystery about appealing characters. But it’s clearly written for the female market – the emphasis is on romance. This is a wise business move on Bunn’s part – women buy a lot more books than men do.

It just wasn’t my kind of story.

So you might want to check it out, especially if you’re a woman.

[One question troubled me: There’s a scene where Rae, and Curtis’s beautiful boss, having just met, and both being attracted (Rae reluctantly) to Curtis, suddenly find a common chord and become fast friends. My impression (and Heaven knows I know nothing about women) is that women just don’t do that sort of thing.]

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Truth Will Out,’ by Steve Higgs

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Steve Higgs’s cold case trilogy featuring Inspector Tony Heaton concludes with The Truth Will Out. The trilogy seems to have sold quite well, and it pleased a lot of readers. I myself didn’t hate the books, but I was less than delighted with them.

To recap: Tony Heaton is a police detective in the English county of Kent, placidly approaching retirement in a fairly quiet part of the country. Then he is assigned to assist a hotshot young detective in examining old “cold” cases.

That ought to be fairly low-drama work, though it hasn’t proven so in the previous two books, and it doesn’t in this one. People involved in the crimes are still alive, and some of them will go to extremes to keep the dead past dead.

But more than that, Tony has his own secrets to protect. His partner is itching to look into a particular crime that Tony very much wants left alone. He’s beginning to think he might have to kill the young man.

This reader has trouble sympathizing with a main character who’s making that kind of plan.

And the final resolution left me (personally) unsatisfied.

But plenty of readers enjoyed it, so maybe I’m tone-deaf. The suspense certainly ran high. Author Higgs writes pretty well, but there are occasional typos in the text. And he has an annoying problem with misplacing modifiers.

There was no especially objectionable material in this trilogy that I recall. I recommend it moderately.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Avalon,’ by Anya Seton

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Anya Seton (1904-1990) is famous as the author of several historical novels, some of which are still considered classics. Avalon, published in 1965, is not among that group. It is pretty readable, but this reader found it rather far-fetched, in two different senses – it has a very wide stage of action, and the plot is a tad implausible.

The story starts with Prince Rumon, a 10th Century Provencal prince related to the English royal family, getting shipwrecked on the Cornish coast on his way to see King Edgar. There he comes upon a dying woman, who places her daughter Merewyn his care and asks him to convey her to her aunt, a nun. Rumon is somewhat annoyed at the obligation, but he’s given his word. He does not tell Merewyn the secret her mother confided – that she is not, as she has been told, the daughter of a Cornish nobleman, a descendant of King Arthur. She is in fact the issue of rape by a Viking raider.

Merewyn promptly falls in love with the handsome Rumon, but he does not reciprocate. His mind is not on women, but on his dream of finding the mysterious, legendary Isle of Avalon. After unloading Merewyn with her aunt in the convent, he goes on to the king’s court, where he falls under the spell of Alfrida, Queen of England. Under that manipulative woman’s spell, Rumon makes some disastrous decisions, even as he and Merewyn, whenever they encounter one another, carry on a ping-pong affair of the heart, each one hot when the other is cold. The story then goes on to concentrate on Merewyn, whose path takes her as far as Iceland and Greenland.

Avalon almost works as a great story, I think, but not quite. It starts out seeming to center on Rumon’s search for Avalon, and on his and Merewyn’s convulsive love affair. But although those themes are never entirely forgotten, other concerns upstage them. The book’s conclusion attempts to bring it all together, in a Sigrid Undset-like scene of confession and reconciliation, but it left this reader feeling a bit let down. (Actually, it was too much like real life, as opposed to romance, I suppose.)

Anya Seton was admired for her research, and I was generally impressed in that regard – although she gave Vikings horned helmets (!). I know historians knew better by 1965, so there’s really no excuse for that. Her portrayal of King Ethelred the Unready is (it seems to me) a little unjust. She treats him as cowardly, not very bright, and sexually ambiguous. I believe he was a fairly capable king (he had a very long reign, something hard for fools to carry out in those days) in an impossible situation. The only character in this book who also appears in one of my books (Queen Emma, wife of Ethelred) is very different from the way I portrayed her – though I can’t claim any scholarly authority on the issue.

Avalon is a very long novel, and worth reading for those who (like me) are interested in the period. But it’s not a great epic romance. The Christian elements were handled pretty well, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Hidden Treasure of Glaston,’ by Eleanore M. Jewett

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I was a teenager when I read The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. I remember enjoying it quite a lot. I re-read it now as part of my research for my Haakon book, and am delighted to report that it holds up pretty well.

The book is set in England in the 12th Century. The hero is a teenaged boy named Hugh, son of a disgraced nobleman. On his way into exile, Hugh’s father leaves him with the monks at Glastonbury Abbey, as the boy was born lame and can never hope to be a knight.

Hugh is bereft at first, but soon finds that the monks are kindly – especially Brother John, the librarian, who begins teaching him the work of a scribe, for which he proves to have an aptitude. He also finds a friend, Dickon, an oblate (a boy given to the monastery by his parents), who swears him to blood brotherhood and shows him his secrets – the hidden passages under the monastery that he has found, and his “treasures,” ecclesiastical items left behind in the passages when they were being used for shelter and escape from Viking attacks in the old days.

They also meet Bleheris, an old hermit who tells them stories of the legends of Glastonbury – of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. His great dream is to find the Grail himself.

What Hugh does not tell the old man is that among Dickon’s treasures he has found lost pages from an incomplete history of the Grail that is one of the abbey’s treasures. The boys’ adventures will lead them to the discovery of Arthur’s grave, to the king’s court, through fire, and finally to miracles.

The Hidden Treasure of Glaston was published in 1946. I’m not sure if they knew back then, as they do now, that the name of Joseph of Arimathea was never associated with Glastonbury before the time when this story is set. But if you’re just looking for a fun story, a medieval adventure meant (especially) for boys, uncontaminated by Game of Thrones cynicism and perversion (and with Christian values), The Hidden Treasure of Glaston works pretty well. The view of God is more Catholic than Protestant, but not in a way to put Protestants off greatly.

I liked it a lot, and recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lies We Tell Ourselves,’ by Steve Higgs

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I reviewed Shadow of a Lie,  the first book in Steve Higgs’s Det. Tony Heaton Trilogy, a few days ago. The second book is The Lies We Tell Ourselves.

A little orientation: Tony Heaton is a detective in English Kent. He had intended to just coast as he approached retirement, but was assigned to a new Cold Case squad headed by a hotshot young detective, Ashley Long.

Tony finds his own long-dormant passion for his job reviving as they dig into old puzzles, but that new enthusiasm is tempered by fear – fear that they will investigate one murder about which he has personal knowledge – knowledge he’s been covering up for many years.

In The Lies We Tell Ourselves, they examine a couple more cold murders, which turn out to be connected. The victories are sweet, but Tony’s guilty uneasiness is growing.

I noticed more typos in this book than in the first one. Also, one of the murder victims is a Frenchman named Michelle – except that’s the female spelling. I’m pretty sure it should have been Michel. This isn’t arcane knowledge; somebody should have noticed in the editing process.

These books are fairly well written, but Tony can be an irritating hero/narrator. Especially due to his blatant hypocrisy when he describes his contempt for people who conceal knowledge of murder, while he himself remains guilty of the same thing.

But that’s character complexity. I imagine it’s working up to a big crisis in the third book.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The Darkness Within

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A lot of foreshadowing preceded episode six of Rise of the Merlin. We’ve seen a woman watching Merlin and riding beside him in his imagination, and in the last episode we learned she was King Custennin’s daughter, Ganieda. But what happened to her? Why did Custennin accuse Merlin of refusing to save her?

Now we know the intense story that provoked the legendary mage to run from civilization when we first met him. After leaving his tutelage with the Hill Folk, he meets a woman who’s hunting a boar, follows her to her fortified city, and learns she’s the king’s daughter. He also learns the people are Atlantean whose boats had been separated from King Avallach and thought to be lost. Both groups thought they were the only ones to survive the ruining of Atlantis.

Did I mention Ganieda is adorable? A year later, she and Merlin are married, and they live happily ever after, which is enough to drive any man mad. (I was going to leave it at that to avoid spoiling the story, but I’ll go ahead and say it. Bad things happen, and Ganieda dies. I’ll get to Merlin’s reaction in a minute.)

Ganieda is a figure from the old Welsh stories, but she isn’t described there as Merlin’s wife. She’s his sister or even his twin. In one story, she’s the wife of a Scottish lord who battles and kills Merlin’s patron. In another account, the Scotsman and patron fight together. Either way, the patron dies and Merlin is distraught, while Ganieda is an observer either grieving or reacting to her brother. Lawhead makes this relationship more personal and so the tragedy that pushes Merlin to madness makes more sense.

At the end of episode two, we meet Merlin under a rock in the pouring rain. This was his response not only to losing his wife (who was with child) but also to his reaction to that loss. We see a moment of that reaction in the trailer. We hear about it when he returns to Maridunum the first time. In two different battles, Merlin falls into a battle trace. The first wins him the throne of Maridunum for his defense of the king and the people. The second is his merciless rage over the death of Ganieda, when the barbarian raiders return to the scene of their crime. Dozens of barbarians charge one admittedly intimidating young man and none survive. Even after they realize they’re getting slaughtered and begin to run, Merlin pulls them back to gut them. It’s this and one more outburst that drives him to renounce his life for many years to follow.

With the finale coming in two weeks, viewers have at least one question to consider, and it’s raised by Charis (in episode four, I think). Though Merlin has refused to take up Avallach’s sword for fear of his battle rage, Charis asks whether the salvation of Britain will require it. When the Saxon hoards are crushed, as surely they must be, will it be the people led by High King Aurellius or Merlin on their behalf? And what terror will Morgian accomplish?