Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightshade,’ by Michael Connelly

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Catalina Island must be a nice place. Mystery writers seem to like to set stories there, and it sounds like a beautiful, laid-back community, where people tool around in golf carts and the weather is almost always nice.

Michael Connelly has created a new detective character and set him down on Catalina in his latest novel, Nightshade. “Stilwell” (no first name given) works for Los Angeles County, and used to operate in LA itself. But a beef with another detective ended with Stilwell drawing the short straw and getting exiled to the island. Only he was surprised to discover that he quite likes it there. He’s starting to feel at home, and has a new girlfriend.

Then one morning a yacht maintenance man reports what seems to be a body in a garbage bag on the harbor bottom, weighed down with an anchor. Stilwell dives down to check it personally, and finds it to be a woman – with a distinctive purple streak in her dark hair.

The woman proves to have been a server at an elite local fishing club, one who has a reputation as a gold digger. No matter – for Stilwell (as for Harry Bosch), a murder is a murder. Everybody matters, or nobody matters.

The trail will lead to the highest levels of California society, and to the lowest depths of civic corruption. It will bring him into conflict with his colleagues and superiors. Before he’s done, Stilwell will risk losing, not only his career, but the life of someone close to him.

I must admit I didn’t like Nightshade as much as I had hoped I would. Stilwell is no Harry Bosch. To me, he was kind of one-dimensional, with only three clear character traits – he is passionate about solving murders, he cares about his girlfriend, and he thinks he’s always right. This last trait seems most prominent – when Stilwell gets orders that are inconsistent with his detective instincts, he just ignores them. In the world of the story, he’s usually justified – but in the real world, there are usually reasons for the rules. And cops who make their own rules tend to go very wrong.

But the book was all right. It moved right along, and the writing was good, as you’d expect from Connelly. The usual cautions for language and mature themes apply.

Reviews

Film review: ‘The Accountant 2,’ plus some whining

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I saw The Accountant 2, on Amazon Prime, and my purposes tonight is to write about that.

But first, a little about my aches and pains. Because I’m old, dadgummit, and I find the spectacle of my personal deterioration endlessly fascinating.

And since I’m such a transcendent wordsmith, it must surely fascinate you, too.

What I mean to say is, yesterday I was moving around in considerable pain. The pain was in my lower back. I felt like I’d fallen and bruised it (I hadn’t), or I’d strained a muscle (not to my knowledge), or I’d overworked myself lifting and carrying heavy things (ha ha ha).

I had done none of those. Sunday was a quiet day for me, and I’d spent it mostly reclining on my couch or (for a touch of variety) on my bed.

The point is, I did nothing.

And the following day I felt like Sisyphus on one of his bad mornings.

To put it another way – I am now at a point in my life where I can hurt myself by doing nothing at all.

And behold, a great fear came upon me, yesterday. “This affliction befell me for no reason, in the manner made popular by Job the patriarch. So if it came from nothing, maybe there’s no way to get rid of it, either. Maybe this is my new normal. I’m old. Anything can happen!”

But I’m better today. Stiff, but I can walk sort of normally, and I went to the gym. Which is a great relief to me, as well as to all my legions of admirers.

Just needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, The Accountant 2.

I liked the first Accountant movie very much. I seem to respond well to any story about autistic characters, which leads me to suspect I’m probably on the spectrum myself.

But not like Christian Wolff, our hero (Ben Affleck) is. Christian can do the most complex math in his head. He lives a strictly regimented life, dwelling in a surgically clean and neat Airstream trailer (though he’s fabulously rich), eating precisely the same foods every day, wearing precisely the same clothing. He craves order and peace, but happens to be a deadly martial artist. (Just another way of ordering chaos.)

He makes his living doing the books for various illegal enterprises – criminal gangs, drug smugglers. He seems to have no conscience about such matters, but does feel strong bonds of loyalty to old friends, and to his brother Braxton – though he never calls him and does not miss him in his absence.

As the movie starts, an old friend of Christian’s is murdered, in an incident involving a mysterious female assassin, Anaïs. He is called in by Marybeth Medina, director of the FBI division FinCEN, to help her find the murderers. Christian in his turn calls on his brother Braxton, who’s a professional assassin. We get to observe a lot of amusing sibling dynamics as these two strange men revert to childhood patterns. Braxton, who is relatively “normal” (for a killer), is frustrated by his brother, but also protective of him.

The partnership with Marybeth has to be ill-fated – being a good Fed, she has lines she won’t cross in an investigation. Christian isn’t even aware of such lines. They then proceed on separate paths, until they reconverge in a confrontation with vicious human traffickers and the mysterious Anaïs, who carries a dangerous secret.

I enjoyed The Accountant 2 fully as much as the first film. (Ben Affleck was born to play an autistic character.) But I have ambivalent feelings about the story, from a moral point of view. Here we have a character who seems to possess no moral sense – only a personal sense of order. And we pair him with another character (his brother) who’s almost equally deadly and has suppressed his conscience. Yet both are intensely sympathetic and relatable – I suspect we’re all growing a little autistic in the modern world, which is what makes these movies so compelling.

Interestingly, there’s a scene in The Accountant 2 that mirrors one of the most memorable scenes in Gregg Hurwitz’s latest Orphan X novel, Nemesis. Both scenes involve an autistic person getting into Country line dancing, and finding themselves unexpectedly in happy synch with other humans. Both scenes work very well, though they come out differently.

So, in conclusion, I’m not sure what to make of The Accountant 2 in moral terms, but I sure had a good time with it. Especially recommended for the socially awkward. Cautions, needless to say, for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Small Favor,’ by Jim Butcher

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I kept wondering, as I read Jim Butcher’s Small Favor, the 10th volume in his Harry Dresden urban fantasy series, why I don’t like these books more. I’d read one before, and wasn’t over the moon about it. But I watched the short-lived cable series loosely based on the books, and found that amusing, so when a deal came up, I figured I’d try another one. Alas, no joy. It just didn’t work for me. And yet everything’s there – good writing, vivid characters, plenty of action, and even a palpable penumbra of Christianity (fairly explicit in this book).

In Small Favor, Chicago wizard Harry Dresden gets a call from his female cop friend Murphy, who asks him to consult on yet another bizarre crime. This time the front has been knocked off a downtown building, presumably by supernatural means. Harry soon realizes that the building had contained a magical safe room – a place for a wizard to hide from spells and powers – yet some unimaginable force has pried the safe room open. Its occupant, Chicago gangster and magical hanger-on “Gentleman” Johnnie Marcone, has vanished.

This constitutes a crisis worthy of a meeting of the Wizard’s Council, of which Harry is a member. Action must be taken. The Enemy here is sinister enough that Harry is called on to rescue Marcone. For help he turns to his friend Michael, a member of the Knights of the Cross.

As an added complication, Harry has offended some powerful Faeries, who send a weird iteration of the Three Billygoats Gruff after him – no laughing matter.

There’s nothing wrong with the Harry Dresden books. I recognized, even as I read, that I was dealing with quality material. And yet, somehow, I couldn’t get into it.

First of all, I guess wizardry just doesn’t appeal to me. Gandalf’s all right, because he’s essentially an angel and does most of his wonders through his words alone. But more than that, pentagrams and sigils and spells, those things just creep me out.

Also, the level of action was Tom Cruise movie high. Harry caromed from one deadly peril to another, each more dire than the last, with only a few pages in between for rest and character development.

That kind of story just wears this old man out. I like a more sedate pace.

But your mileage is very likely to vary. These books are highly popular, and if you like this sort of thing I think you’ll like Small Favors a lot.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Muus vs. Muus,’ by Bodil Stenseth

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It must have been the biggest news story to ever come out of the community where I grew up. Perhaps it says something about our spirit of reconciliation that I never heard about it until I was an adult.

A group of my surviving high school class members gathered for an informal reunion back in (I think) 2010. We were at the home of one of my classmates, in the township of Holden, just north of town. I was standing in the yard, looking over at the church a little to the east, and a friend came up beside me and said, “You know there was a big scandal with the pastor in that church, back in pioneer days.”

“B. J. Muus?” I asked. I knew that Pastor Muus, the founder of St. Olaf College, had been the original pastor there.

“Yeah,” he said. “Something about his wife suing him for divorce.”

Later on, I was told that the house where we were meeting that evening had been the home of the local doctor, who’d been accused of having an affair with Mrs. Muus.

After that, I started reading up on the story, which turned out to have been a big deal back in 1880. But I didn’t have the full story until I read Muus vs. Muus: The Scandal That Shook Norwegian America, by Bodil Stenseth. I had had the impression that adultery was at the center of the scandal, but the real bone of contention turned out to be the one that remains the most common cause of marriage breakups today – money.

Bernt Julius Muus (pronounced “Moose”) and Oline Pind were not your average Norwegian immigrants. They did not come to America because of hard economic necessity; they came from privileged families. He felt called to minister to Norwegian Americans in the new country, and Oline felt called to be his helpmate.

They settled on the virgin prairie of Goodhue County, Minnesota, in the tiny settlement of Holden. Bernt, a hard man and a preacher of fiery sermons, worked tirelessly, not only to build his own congregation, but to plant churches all over the upper Midwest. In time he rose to be the first president of the Minnesota District of the conservative Norwegian Synod. Oline worked hard too, keeping the house, raising their children, filling in for her husband in practical matters of the congregation during his frequent absences.

Then, in 1879, she dropped a bombshell. She sued her husband for the money she had inherited from her father, which he had taken into his possession under Norwegian law. But they were in the U.S. now (though both Oline and Bernt remained Norwegian citizens) and she felt she should be able to control her own money as U.S. law permitted.

The matter might not have become a cause célèbre, though, if a document called “the Complaint” hadn’t been appended to the legal text. This document accused Pastor Muus of mental cruelty, neglect, and a stingy refusal to spend money on basic household necessities, to the point of damaging her and their children’s health.

Critics of the Norwegian Synod found this story irresistible. My people, the pietist Haugeans, who considered the Norwegian Synod papist and aristocratic (and were much more open to feminism than the Synod men), saw Bernt Muus as a power-hungry ecclesiastical tyrant. The men of the Lutheran Free Church, whose successors I worked for many years, supported Mrs. Muus after the divorce was finalized. Norwegian-American freethinkers, like Marcus Thrane whose comic opera “Holden” was performed in Chicago, used the case to attack orthodox Christianity itself. And nativist Americans were shocked by the bizarre goings on in an immigrant community which had so far made little effort to assimilate.

I was impressed with Muus vs. Muus. The story was well-told, and the translation very good. I expected a lot of heavy-handed feminist theory, but in fact (though the author’s sympathies are hardly concealed), the book does a pretty good job of being even-handed. I was impressed with the way the Holden congregation – within the strictures of its church rules, which did not allow a woman to address the congregation – went out of its way in many cases to be fair to Mrs. Muus.

I was also interested to see a lot of last names, like Finseth, Langemo, and Huset, that I knew well during my childhood in the area.

The book was marred by a mandatory, hypocritical land acknowledgement embedded in the editor’s afterword. But all in all, I was highly impressed by Muus vs. Muus. I recommend it for that (small, I’ll admit) audience interested in Norwegian-American history, especially church history.

Fiction, Reviews

‘I’ll Keep You Safe,’ by Peter May

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It had an atmosphere all of its own, that place. Sometimes mired in the mist that would drift in off the water on a still morning, or lost in the smirr that dropped down from the moor. I came into the loch once on a boat just as the sun was coming up, and mist like smoke rose up all around the lodge in the early-morning light, moving wraithlike among the trees. The water itself was alive with salmon breaking the still surface as they headed in from the sea on their journey upriver, and otters played around the stone slipway. It was magical.

I had not gotten far into reading Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe before I realized I’d read it before – even though I had just bought it on Amazon for the first time. Perhaps my previous reading was through a free giveaway, or perhaps I bought the paper version; all I know is I’ve reviewed it already, way back in 2018. Still, I’d forgotten how it came out, so I read on. With considerable pleasure.

Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane run a small tweed knitting company on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. It’s not the famous Harris Tweed, but a more refined fabric derived from it. They’ve made it through hard times to become big successes in the fashion world – some of the foremost designers in the business use their product. And they’re still very much in love.

They’re in Paris for an exhibition when Niamh gets an anonymous e-mail telling her Ruairidh is having an affair. She confronts him, and he walks away without explanation. A few minutes later, he’s dead. Niamh is devastated, lost and betrayed. The French police consider her a suspect.

When she’s allowed to take Ruaridh’s remains back home, she faces a hostile world. Both sets of their parents have always opposed their marriage. Lifelong friends turn against her. A French police woman is sent out to investigate her affairs. And she has a sense that someone is stalking her.

I note from my first review that I figured out whodunnit quite early on. Which amuses me, because I didn’t do that on this second reading. The story is told in a complex, non-sequential manner, with varying viewpoint characters, which is just confusing enough to keep the reader intrigued.

As always, one of Peter May’s greatest strengths is his scenic descriptions. One gets a vivid sense of the place – of the geology, the changeable, dangerous weather, the plants and wildlife. I greatly appreciate that quality, very much like taking a brief holiday in the islands.

Cautions are in order for language and some drug use, but I was intrigued to note (on this reading) that the book actually takes some very traditional moral views. That surprised me. Probably unintentional on the author’s part, but appreciated.

I highly recommend I’ll Keep You Safe – again. Women and men alike will enjoy it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Going Home In the Dark,’ by Dean Koontz

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…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.

A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)

Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.

The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.

When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.

Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.

Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?

In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.

However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.

Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Safe,’ by George Prior

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James had just returned from the crime scene, and he had the extremely tense look that he got when he was far behind in admin tasks—which he would be after spending the day at a scene. Tense but dead still, like ten pounds of springs in a five-pound spring can.

The basic idea of George Prior’s Casey Stafford novels, of which Dead Safe is the second, strikes me as remarkably similar to John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport books – millionaire cop who drives fast cars, dresses well, and fights crime essentially for fun. But I’d say (based on reading this book) that accusations of copycat-ism would be unfair. Casey Stafford, who works in Los Angeles, is a fully realized character in his own right. (For one thing, he’s free to pursue women, which Lucas Davenport gave up when he married some time back.) Also the writing here is very strong, and the story is pretty original.

There’s a private security vault in Beverly Hills where anyone who can afford it can store anything at all, without any fuss about identification. Obviously a business like that will cater to criminals, though it’s technically legal.

A group of young men who run a YouTube channel where they demonstrate “jackass” stunts has fallen on hard times, and needs an infusion of cash. They figure out how to disguise themselves digitally from the security cameras, and they clear out a number of safe deposit boxes, collecting a lot more money than they ever dreamed.

They’re clever and tech-savvy, but they lack the imagination to guess that the kind of man who hides that kind of money is not likely to be either philosophical or forgiving about loss. Before long the young YouTube stars are dying in horrible ways. And our hero Casey Stafford, along with his female partner Banchet Suwan, are several steps behind, following a digitally erased trail after criminals unknown to the police. In the end it will become a three-way game between Casey, the murderer, and the last, resourceful survivor of the YouTube gang.

I was very impressed with the writing in Dead Safe. It was smooth, elegant and expressive. The dialogue snapped and the characters – of which there were many – were well drawn. I particularly liked a gunfight scene where things went wrong in a highly plausible manner. No overt politics came up, though I thought I saw some subtle hints of conservative ideas (could easily be wrong).

My only real objection was that I thought a scene of a home invasion was unnecessarily graphic (I prefer to enter such stories after the violence is over, when the cops are viewing the crime scene). Plenty of cautions are in order for violence, sex and profanity. (The cop banter here is pretty good; perhaps just a notch below John Sandford’s. But I still don’t buy the women cops’ good-humored participation.)

All things considered, Dead Safe was an excellent detective thriller. This reader was impressed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

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The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Digital Barbarism,’ by Mark Helprin

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For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

Back when I was toiling through library school, one of the topics we were supposed to study was Copyright. The material they gave us to read was pretty uniformly partisan – on the side of the Creative Commons and against Copyright (or at least its extension). Much was made of the tyranny of Disney (though Disney generally holds trademarks rather than copyrights, but it’s all Intellectual Property). As a holder of copyrights myself, I found such material a little troubling, but I had no established principles on the topic in general (I hadn’t even known it was a topic), so – as I recall – I accommodated myself to the crowd, and wrote something about how copyright might be necessary for a while, but the free flow of information meant copyrights ought to end as early as reasonably possible.

Meanwhile, Mark Helprin, one of our greatest living authors, wrote (as he tells us) an op-ed for the New York Times. He thought an article about Copyright would be innocuous. He argued for its extension, so that a writer’s heirs can enjoy the fruits of their parent’s work just like the heirs of businessmen. He was astonished to discover that he had unleashed a firestorm of online comments from copyright abolitionists, who understood him to be arguing for everlasting copyright. This roused his fighting spirit, and so he came to write Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto.

The book is quite long. It probably could have been shorter, but Helprin clearly warmed to his topic as he labored. He regards the anti-copyright movement as a branch of Marxism, its general war against property. The world has no lack of people (generally without productive ability of their own) who believe that property is theft, and that if the greedy owners would just fork over, all the world’s problems would be fixed. Creators, it is assumed, will just continue toiling away for the love of creation itself.

As far as I can learn, Helprin’s fears haven’t come true. Copyright continues in force, and its opponents seem to be a small (if loud-voiced) group. He must also be gratified by the current resurgence in the purchase of paper books, something he does not foresee in this work.

Digital Barbarism is full of Helprin’s vivid prose, which is always worth reading. I did weary of the argument somewhat after a while, though.