Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Traitors Gate,’ by Jeffrey Archer

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I got a deal offer on Jeffrey Archer’s latest novel, Traitors Gate. I figured that since I’d never read any of his books, I might as well give one a chance.

Verdict: I can understand why Archer is a popular author. But Traitors Gate never really gripped me.

William Warwick is a high-ranking officer with the London police force. Among his duties is serving as part of the security detail that transports the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London to Buckingham Palace on state occasions. Another member of the detail is Ross Hogan, his best friend. A further thing they share is a common enemy – a high society con man named Miles Faulkner. Warwick and Hogan have stopped Faulkner’s schemes before, and early in this story they foil him in an attempted art theft. Faulkner vows revenge and hits on a plan to steal the Crown Jewels – not to sell them, but simply to publicly humiliate Warwick and Hogan, and ruin their careers.

Traitors Gate was technically impeccable. It delivered the kind of thriller excitement advertised on the cover. But for this reader, it all seemed pretty superficial. I didn’t really believe in the characters, and it all seemed kind of overprocessed, like white bread.

This book is part of an ongoing series. One challenge series authors always face is whether to describe characters who’ve been described in previous volumes. It’s always been my practice to assume the reader has started with this book, and provide new descriptions. It doesn’t take long, and it’s not hard to make it natural. But Archer doesn’t bother with that. Only new characters get descriptions, and even attributes like racial identity – not entirely irrelevant to this story – may be withheld until half-way through the book.

So, I’d say all in all Traitors Gate is a good airport book, one that will keep you entertained and not bother you at all with any deeper themes or moral challenges.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead In the Dark,’ by Stephen Booth

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I got a deal on Dead In the Dark, which proved to be the 17th volume of an 18-book police series by Stephen Booth. The series, as best I can discern, centers on the relationship between Inspector Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, but at this point she’s been reassigned to a sort of major crimes unit in a different area (they both live and work in Devonshire, England). There seems to be some friction between them at this stage.

Ten years ago, a man named Reece Bower was accused of murdering his wife, who had disappeared without a trace. The police were ready to arrest him on circumstantial evidence when a plausible witness reported seeing the victim alive. The case went no further, but public opinion condemned Bower. Now he too has disappeared, equally inexplicably.

Meanwhile, DS Fry is part of a team investigating the murder of a Polish immigrant, found dead in his flat after being stabbed in an alley. Suspicions naturally turn to nationalist groups resentful of immigrants.

I think my unfamiliarity with the series left me at a disadvantage in reading Dead In the Dark. The characters seemed somewhat unfocused in my mind. The story seemed kind of wide-ranging and scattered, and the ultimate solution of Bower’s disappearance struck me as implausible.

There were political elements too. I think author Booth made some effort to be evenhanded, but in the usual English style he tends to equate the right wing with racism.

Still, the writing was good. Dead In the Dark wasn’t a bad novel, but it might be better to start reading the series closer to the beginning.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fire Pit,’ by Chris OUld

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In the Faroes you’re overshadowed by mountains wherever you go, and now – in their absence – I realized I’d got used to their overbearing presence, like a stern father, always looking on disapprovingly.

I’ve raved about the previous two novels in Chris Ould’s Faroes series, and I’m happy to report that The Fire Pit is just as good. Maybe better. It is unclear whether the series is intended to go on from here, as most of the unresolved plot threads from the previous books get tied up here. But I hope there will be more.

Suspended English detective Jan Reyna is still in the Faroes when The Fire Pit begins, but he’s preparing to leave. He needs to go home and settle his problems on the job, one way or the other. But first he’s stopping off in Denmark, to see the place where his mother committed suicide when he was 5 years old, and see if he can spark any memories. While he’s there, his autistic Danish researcher will discover that his mother worked at a secretive mental institution, which she fled suddenly just before her death.

Meanwhile, his Faroese detective friend Hjalti Hentze must investigate the apparent suicide of a reclusive man. Then he’s called to the site of an abandoned hippie commune from the 1970s. There two skeletons have been discovered in secret graves – an adult woman and a female child. This is the same commune where Jan’s mother lived for a while – and before long Hjalti will be joining Jan in Denmark, their mysteries having merged.

The Fire Pit (and all the Faroes mysteries) are exactly the kind of detective novels I like best. Although there is action and suspense, the emphasis is on character and motive. There’s even a moment of Christian wisdom (though provided, sadly, by a woman pastor).

I was also pleased that Horsens, Denmark, where my Danish ancestors hailed from, gets a couple mentions.

I highly recommend The Fire Pit along with its predecessors. Top-notch Scandinavian Noir, unmarred by nihilism.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘A Short History of Nearly Everything,’ by Bill Bryson

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There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

Back in the 1970s, one of the most fascinating programs on television was broadcast (in the US) on PBS – a short English series called “Connections,” hosted by James Burke. Burke, a somewhat odd-looking fellow in a sort of leisure suit, took the viewer on a journey through time, tracing how some remote phenomenon in history, like a variety of medieval cargo ship, led through various permutations to the invention of plastics. What made the show work was that Burke kept it down-to-earth (often funny) and related his science to intriguing personalities, events, and places.

I thought of “Connections” often as I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I’d been meaning to read, but hadn’t gotten around to until its 20th anniversary of publication (I got a deal on it; it pays to be patient). The book is a history of science, very, very long, but fascinating from front to back.

Author Bryson alternates his chapters between descriptions of the universe and its laws as we understand them, and the pageant of how humans discovered those laws. What makes the book work is, first of all, his knack for helping the non-scientist think about counterintuitive concepts and massive numbers (“you can get some idea of the proportions if you bear in mind that one atom is to the width of a millimeter line as the thickness of a sheet of paper is to the height of the Empire State Building”), along with no reluctance at all to showcase the eccentric or petty sides of revered scientists (to his credit, he also likes doing justice to researchers who’ve been elbowed aside by the spotlight-seekers).

The overall goal seems to be to wow the reader with how amazing and complex our universe is (and to admit how much we still don’t know about it). The book is full of Wow! moments. Bryson clearly loves his material, and he’s eager as a kid to share his delight. 400 pages worth.

Being me, I found some things in his narrative that he probably didn’t intend. The incredible complexity of life and its structures seems to me to suggest intelligent design (though Bryson carefully avoids that subject, seeming to pooh-pooh any idea of a Creator. But that approach leaves a lot of questions unanswered – surely as many questions as faith leaves unanswered).

The big problem with A Short History of Nearly Everything – for this reader – was sheer input overload. The information provided includes a lot of doomsday talk – we’re told how likely it is that we’ll collide with an asteroid, or suffer another extinction-level pandemic. When he tried to raise our enthusiasm for environmental causes, I felt more inclined to sit back and say, “Yeah, well, you just told me the Yellowstone Caldera is long overdue to erupt and kill us all; it hardly seems worth the effort.”

Nevertheless, A Short History of Nearly Everything is a tremendous book and well deserving of its classic status (even if some of its science is outdated now). I recommend it highly. You’ll find a lot of arguments for Intelligent Design here, even if that wasn’t the intention.

Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘The Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-Beak’

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13th Century illustration of the Battle of Stamford Bridge from Matthew Paris. It looked nothing like this.

I’m still slogging through a Very Long Book (a good book, but comprehensive), so tonight I’ll report on another tale from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders. This is the last story in Volume I, which means I’ll be coming to longer sagas again in the next one. I’m not sure what I’ll do to vamp while I’m reading future long books.

To my delight, this tale turned out have considerable personal interest. It involves Erling Skjalgsson’s grandson, Eystein Orre (son of Erling’s daughter Ragnhild and Thorberg Arnesson – you may remember the story of Thorberg’s courtship from King of Rogaland). Eystein had a sister named Thora who would, in time, become concubine (or wife, sources differ) to King Harald Hardrada, and would die with him following a legendary charge at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England.

Our tale is the Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-Beak. Thorvard is a wealthy Icelandic merchant. He sails to Norway where he speaks to King Harald, inviting him to come down to his ship and accept the gift of a sail. (According to this article from the Viking Herald, the manufacture of one sail for a Viking ship could take as long as fifty years [!] Perhaps they mean 50 years in man-hours).

I’ve mentioned previously that King Harald appears uncharacteristically genial in most of these saga tales. But in this one we see him in his usual temper. He tells Thorvard, curtly, that he got an Icelandic sail once before, and it tore apart under wind pressure. So he’s not interested in another such gift.

However, Thorvard then offers the sail to Eystein Orre, the king’s best friend, and Eystein, on examining it, recognizes it as an excellent specimen. He accepts it with thanks and invites Thorvard to stop and see him at his own home when he sails back to Iceland. When Thorvard does so, Eystein gives him generous gifts.

And to cap it we are told that, on a later occasion, Eystein’s ship outsails the king’s. And when the king asks where he got this fine sail, Eystein tells him it’s one he had turned down. A nice final note for the storyteller – it could even be true.

I was surprised to see “Eystein Orre” translated as “Eystein Grouse” here. Orre does mean grouse, even in modern Norwegian, but I’m sure I read somewhere that Eystein got his nickname from Orre farm in Jaeder. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the farm’s name. If Eystein lived there, it would likely have been due to inheritance from Erling.

The Tale of Thorvard Crow’s-beak is one of the more plausible stories in the collection, just trivial enough to believe.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Killing Bay,’ by Chris Ould

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Heljarayga was a small, natural cove no more than a hundred yards wide at its midpoint. Beyond that I couldn’t see much. The mist hung like a damp dust-sheet over the headlands and above the almost mirror-smooth water it appeared to ebb and flow slightly, gossamer fine. The stillness made you want to hold your breath. Nothing and nobody moved.

I knew a few things about the Faeroes before I started reading Chris Ould’s mystery novels. One of my Norwegian cousins (gone now) was married to a Faeroese woman (still around). The hymn, Tiðin rennur, which Sissel sings so beautifully, comes from there…

And they still hold an annual whale hunt in the old Norse tradition. The old Norse tradition was to herd whales into a bay or inlet and beach them in the shallows, then kill them there. It was an important element of survival in a subsistence economy. (My own ancestral home in Norway is a farm called Kvalavåg, which means “whale bay” or “whale inlet.”) But the custom has been abandoned in most places. In the Faeroes it still continues, stubbornly maintained as a central element of local culture. This has not entirely escaped the notice of anti-whaling organizations, and that fact generates the central conflict of The Killing Bay, second of Ould’s Faeroes mysteries.

Our hero, Jan Reyna, is still in the Faeroes. He’s an English police detective (born in the Faeroes but raised in England) currently on suspension, not sure if he even wants to go home. He rather likes the Faeroes, and most of the relations he’s met there, but he doesn’t really feel at home.

The female cousin who’s hosting him brings him along to witness the grindadráp, the whale hunt. He’s not enthusiastic about the thing, but doesn’t feel qualified to judge. While there he meets Erla Sivertsen, a female Faeroese native who’s working as a photographer for an environmental protest group, documenting the kill. While there Erla clashes with Finn Sólsker, a local fisherman, but violence is averted.

Not long after, Erla is discovered murdered, and the local investigators, led by Jan’s new friend Hjalti Hentze, have it as their first job to check whether Finn has an alibi. (This is awkward because Finn happens to be his son-in-law.) When Erla’s coat and hat are discovered hidden in Finn’s fishing hut, Hjalti is forced to arrest him, but he’s not convinced of his guilt. In addition, why is he getting pressure from his superiors to close the case before he’s examined all possible leads?

The mystery in The Killing Bay was well-constructed and solid, but it was the setting that really riveted me, as it did with the previous book, The Blood Strand. Author Ould does a masterful job of evoking the setting and atmosphere of the islands. I felt like I’d been there.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature themes. Environmental politics are treated with an even hand.

Fiction, Reviews

‘You’ll Get Yours,’ by Gerald Hansen

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Good characters do a lot to make a book work. But now that I’ve finished You’ll Get Yours, by Gerald Hansen, I think it’s possible to overdo it.

In the city of Derry, Ireland, a middle-aged woman’s body is found, dressed only in sexy underwear, on top of a cannon on the old city wall, her thumb superglued inside her mouth. As Detective Inspector Liam McLaughlin begins investigating, they find the woman hard to identify. No one seems to have known her. And when she finally is identified, as a woman who worked as a stocker at a nearby supermarket, it turns out she’s still a bit of a mystery. She seems to have no family, and there’s no record of her existence prior to four years ago.

In time it’s revealed that she’s been living under a false identity. She was once – briefly – famous, as a member of a Spice Girls-type girl band that had a few hits in the ‘90s. None of the other old group members are living in hiding, though, so what was she afraid of?

And the cops’ work won’t be made any easier by the almost universal hatred for the police that lingers in Derry, a residue from “the Troubles” of the old IRA years. In the end the solution will take them back to an old crime that time can’t bury and no one could possibly guess.

The emphasis in You’ll Get Yours is vivid characterization, and frankly I thought it was a little overdone. DI McLaughlin is a slob who’s always getting interrupted in the middle of eating a sandwich. His subordinates include a feminist detective with OCD, a fashion-plate womanizer, an over-eager rookie detective, and a female computer nerd. I think I was supposed to be amused by their interactions and frictions, but I found it all a little overdone and unconvincing.

The book wasn’t really that bad, plot-wise, and the solution was horrific and moving. But I couldn’t help being annoying by the comic book characterizations.

I should note, however, that references to religion were mostly respectful, and the author took trouble to avoid cursing.

You might enjoy it.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘The Pale Blue Eye’

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I don’t watch a lot of movies anymore, even on home streaming. (A miniseries I worked on, by the way, Gangs of Oslo, is now on Netflix. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet.) But for some reason I was flipping through the offerings on that same provider a few days ago, and I came on a film I’d never heard of, The Pale Blue Eye, based on a novel by Louis Bayard. In spite of its title, it’s not a Travis McGee story, but a period piece set at West Point in 1830, featuring Edgar Allan Poe. I was intrigued.

Retired detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is summoned to meet the commandant of West Point Military Academy, to investigate the death of a cadet. The young man was found hanged to death, but – bizarrely – his heart was cut out of his body. As Landor begins asking questions, he’s approached by a cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), who has unique insights and soon proves himself an invaluable assistant. Landor’s suspicions begin to focus on the family of Dr. Marquis, who did the initial autopsy, as Poe begins falling in love with the doctor’s lovely daughter, who is subject to seizures.

The internet tells me that response to this film has been mixed, but I must say I found it fascinating and effective. It’s beautifully photographed, and the costumes look very authentic to my eye (I’d have to check with my costume historian friend Kelsey to know for sure). Christian Bale does his usual superior work as an alcoholic investigator with a secret sorrow. Harry Melling is absolutely splendid as Poe. First of all, he looks like the guy in the photos. I have no way of knowing if the real Poe had the same kind of nervous tics in real life, but Melling sells it – I believed him entirely.

Robert Duvall also appears, and I didn’t recognize him at all (which is praise for an actor).

Also, witchcraft is treated as a negative thing, which is both historically accurate and gratifying. The ending, with its twist in an epilogue, is a bit confusing, but I’ll buy it.

I recommend The Pale Blue Eye, for grownups. Cautions for mature situations.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

Are We or Will We Ever Be Free at Last?

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Time has vindicated Dr. King. Ultimately it is not Black versus White. It is justice versus injustice, haves versus have-nots. As long as Dr. King talked only about African-Americans he was relatively safe, but when he began to pull poor Whites and poor Blacks together he became a threat to the power and wealth elite. If he had been allowed to live, he might have even been able to articulate the frustrations of today’s shrinking middle class. Thus Brother Martin could have been a prophet of a sizable slice of America. This would have been a formidable challenge, but it was never allowed to materialize.

One of Jesus’s points in the Sermon on the Mount was to seek the kingdom of God first and allow all other worries and legitimate concerns to follow it. Such a kingdom-focus doesn’t sit well with us. We would rather have seeking the kingdom as a consumer spending habit or path to political goals. We would rather settle on being in the best church, denomination, or path (Me against the World) in contrast to others of the same type, even if our path is the one constantly thumping how everyone should just get along. A Christianized humanism may be more comfortable to us than the gospel of Christ’s kingdom.

That’s where this book, Free at Last? The Gospel in the African American Experience, stands. It’s too biblical, too focused on Christ’s kingdom to light the torches of those looking to build a kingdom of their own.

In 1983, Dr. Carl Ellis wrote a book for an African American audience on the state of the church, the history of various Black movements, and how we can move forward. He revised and republished it in 1996 and it was republished as a special edition classic in 2020, which is the edition I read.

Ellis spends most of the book on overviews of different movements and cultural arguments Black leaders have made, both within and without the church, to recognize and defend the honor of African Americans. It offers a high-level framework for understanding decades of history. He gives the most attention to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who disagreed on how to raise the dignity of Black families in a country that wants to either melt away their distinctions or marginalize them.

No one escape Ellis’s criticism because mistakes and bad actors have cropped up on all sides. Some Black leaders have painted Christianity as a White man’s religion, but Ellis separates civil religion and White-centered humanism from the biblical faith and traces these sinful influences through to today. White humanism he defines as a belief that White people and standards are the ultimate references for truth and values, White people being generally unaffected by sin. Many African Americans have adapted this view into a Black humanism, which again, for the churched and unchurched, is not Christianity.

Anything can become an idol, even, perhaps especially, good things. “Afrocentrism is truly magnificent, but it is not magnificent as an absolute. As an absolute, it will infect us with the kind of bigotry we’ve struggled against in others for centuries.”

Ellis notes a point in history when the solution to gaining dignity in American life was the melting pot, everyone blending into the surrounding culture, but the dominant culture rejected African Americans subtly and overtly. If they were to blend in, they would have to be subservient to Whites. That actually didn’t sit well with anyone but the abusers. America isn’t a country that can tolerate a permanent servant class for long. We tell ourselves we are the land of the free and the brave, created equal by the Almighty. Americans of any color won’t be content to stand in the alleyways and watch others parade by.

There are many ideas holding us back. In one chapter, Ellis describes “four prisons of paganism” found in many corners of the world:

  1. Suicidal religion, which attempts to deny reality or numb ourselves to it through various means (sometimes with a “militant shallowness”);
  2. God-bribing religion, which is any manner of attempting to curry favor with the Almighty;
  3. Peekaboo religion, which hides God behind other people or things so our allegiance and obedience can be focused on the other thing and not the Almighty;
  4. Theicidal religion, which includes all attempts to reject God’s existence.

Ellis states Peekaboo religion is a dangerous trend in the Black church for its tendency to revere the pastor (and his wife) more than they should. I’d say many independent White churches do the same thing, but the percentage would be smaller.

To rise above these errors, Ellis calls for creative preaching and church practices. He calls it being a jazz theologian, one who improvises on melodies in performing the truth for contemporary congregations and find new ways to reach our increasingly secular neighbors. His call might have more resonance if he pointed to a new application of truth and history that is working, but he may have wanted to avoid that specifically because he isn’t trying to start a new thing for others to copy. He wants us to know the Lord and His Word and look for ways the people in our area will hear them.

It’s not in the book, but I know Ellis is the head of The Makazi Institute in Virginia, a type of L’Abri fellowship for cultural understanding and engagement. That would be his take as a jazz theologian, not something just anyone could do.

One value of Free at Last? is a 60-page glossary covering many topics referred to in the book as well as many contextual topics not mentioned. I wrote a post about content from this section before.

Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blood Strand,’ by Chris Ould

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I spent the day balancing the pains in my ribs, shoulder and head with painkillers and doing a passable impression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the sofa.

I knew nothing of Chris Ould or his Faeroes mystery series before I bought The Blood Strand. But I got a deal on it, and it was set in the Faeroes, a Nordic community I’d never visited fictionally (or in real life) before. I’m used to being depressed by Scandinavian Noir stories, but this one turned out to be a pleasant surprise.

Jan Reyna is an English police detective. He was born in the Faeroes, but his mother divorced his father and took him away when he was very young. Then she died, leaving him to be raised by relatives in England. He only met his father once, and then they got into a fistfight. But now the old man is hospitalized in the Faeroes following an accident and a stroke, and Jan succumbs to his aunt’s pressure to go and see his father while he’s still alive.

Arriving in the Faeroes, whose language he’s entirely forgotten, he finds his father (who turns out to be rich) unable to communicate. He meets his two half-brothers, one openly hostile, the other friendly. He also meets a local detective, Hjalte Hentze, who’s trying to figure out why Jan’s father was found in his car with a shotgun in the footwell, blood on the door, and a briefcase full of money in the trunk. That curiosity only increases when a young man’s body is found washed up on the shore with shotgun wounds. When he asks Jan to help out, Jan has nothing better to do… except for trying to find out why his mother left his father all those years ago.

I liked Jan Reyna and the other characters in The Blood Strand. The descriptions of Faeroese culture and scenery were interesting, and the unfolding mystery kept me fascinated. Though set in a historically Scandinavian setting, this book was not actually written by a Scandinavian, which may explain why it didn’t try to depress me to death. I had a good time reading it, and I look forward to the sequels.

Recommended. Not much offensive content either. References to Christianity (the Faeroese seem to be pretty religious) were mostly respectful.