Nick Pirog’s Thomas Prescott novels are worth reading just to watch a writer learning his craft. The first book in the series, Unforeseen, is even admitted by the author, in his introduction, to be a freshman effort. Still (I’m not sure why) he offers the Kindle edition without alteration. And yet… in spite of its faults I liked it enough to read the sequels, which show considerable progress and offer many rewards.

At the start of Unforeseen, Thomas Prescott, former cop, former FBI consultant, and current criminology professor and millionaire, is living in Maine with his sister Lacy, an artist with Multiple Sclerosis, and their narcoleptic pet pug, Baxter. Thomas is recovering, physically and emotionally, from a struggle with a serial killer which ended in a fall off a cliff into the ocean. Everyone thinks the killer is dead except for Thomas. Sure enough, soon identical murders begin to occur, and all the victims are women with whom Thomas has been, or is now, associated.

The story is lively, though there are improbable elements, but the big problems are Pirog’s occasional bad diction (“The building was large, gray, and projected a cadence of death”), and a problem with the main character. Pirog’s trying to write a thriller with comic relief here, but he seems to think the formula for such a work is equal parts dramatic tension and jokes. Too many jokes, especially when innocent people are suffering, just comes off as callousness.

Still, I was intrigued enough to move on to the next book, Gray Matter. Continue reading The Thomas Prescott novels, by Nick Pirog →

This one should have been a winner. Certainly for me. A hard-boiled mystery set in the Viking Age, written by a modern Dane to illuminate King Cnut (or Canute, or Knut) the Great, conqueror of England, a remarkable man mostly forgotten by history. I really wanted to like this book.

Sadly, I was disappointed with The King’s Hounds by Martin Jensen. Not that it was awful. It just didn’t grab me much.

Our detectives in this story are Winston, an English illuminator (he paints pictures in books) and Halfdan, a half-Danish nobleman’s son, recently deprived of his family estates.

They join forces while on their way to the city of Oxford, where King Cnut has called an assembly. A noblewoman has summoned Winston to draw a portrait of the king for her. But when they get there the patroness is gone. Instead they meet the king who (for somewhat unconvincing reasons) decides Winston is just the man to investigate the recent murder of a Saxon nobleman. They have a three day deadline, or the king will Be Displeased, and probably kill them.

So they start wandering around the town and its many visitors’ camps, asking questions. Along the way Winston falls in love, Halfdan kills a couple assassins and saves a pretty girl’s life, and a bewildering number of nobles are forced to reveal their secrets.

It’s hard to say why it all bored me, but it did. The authenticity level wasn’t bad. The royal deadline on the investigation should have raised dramatic tension. But it seemed like just one repetitive scene after another. Characters blurred into one another; even Winston and Halfdan didn’t really come alive for me.

I don’t think I can blame the translator. I was impressed with the absence of the stiffness I generally note in translations from Scandinavian novels. In fact, the prose kind of reminded me of my own – except that I would never put neologisms like, “bugging me,” “debriefed,” and “gold digger” in a story set in the 11th Century.

Didn’t work for me, to my great regret. Your mileage may vary. Only mild cautions for language and mature content.

The scenario is an old standard, and still works just fine. Sam Carlisle used to be a cop in the English Midlands, but after a traumatic loss he climbed into a bottle, quit the job, and moved north. Now he’s out of money and looking for work. A local real estate big shot observes him stopping a purse snatcher and offers him a job as his driver and bodyguard. When Sam asks him why he doesn’t hire one of the established security firms, his answer is evasive.

Still, Sam needs the job and he takes it. And that’s the beginning of A New Dawn Rising by Michael Joseph. Things go all right for Sam until his employer is killed in a fire, and it looks like arson, and the police target Sam as the perpetrator.

I liked A New Dawn Rising, mostly, except for one very large plot problem. There’s supposed to be a big surprise near the end, but it’s one that’s been used a thousand times before. It was obvious even to me, and I’m pretty easy to fool. I felt badly for the author, because all in all the book was a creditable attempt, with interesting, well-drawn characters and good dialogue.

You might enjoy it too, if you’re tolerant of plot chestnuts.

Duncan MacMaster is the proprieter of The Furious D Show, one of the most interesting movie blogs in operation. His focus is not movie art or movie personalities, but movie business. In other words, his focus is a particular brand of insanity. And that’s always entertaining.

He’s also written a novel which isn’t bad at all. Joe Average is a satire in the form of a superhero story.

Ken Burton is pretty much Superman, but less romantic. Overweight and physically unimpressive, he was nevertheless struck by a meteor as a teenager, and acquired incredible strength and the ability to fly (he lacks x-ray vision). The only person who knows his secret is his girlfriend Mina, who happens to be a brilliant scientist. She’s spent her life trying to figure out exactly what gave Ken his powers.

After hiding his light under a bushel for years, Ken as an adult begins to intervene in situations where people need rescuing and bad guys need stopping. Mina happily provides him a suitable costume (no tights, thank you) and a base of operations. Through a misunderstanding, his chosen superhero name, “The Avenger,” ends up as “Joe Average.”

All this does not escape the notice of powerful figures in government, who wish to hitch their political wagons to Joe’s popularity. And if he won’t play their game, they are more than willing to use innocent people to extort his cooperation, and even to attempt to produce their own custom-made superhero to displace him.

I enjoyed Joe Average very much. The sympathetic characters were appealing, and the political satire – at times – delicious. The weakness of the story is that more time is spent with the evil people than with the good guys, resulting in what I think of as That Hideous Strength Syndrome, named after one of my favorite novels, one which many people find hard to read because the time with the villains is so aggravating. Which is one of the points of the story, but it can make it hard going for long stretches.

Cautions for language and adult situations (the young lovers fall into bed as soon as they declare their feelings. Waiting for marriage isn’t something that comes up). All in all, pretty good, though. I liked it.

Benjamin Tucker is a true crime writer living in North Carolina. He’s the divorced father of a teenage daughter, and has recently been remarried, to a woman who is both beautiful and very rich. His new wife and he love each other – though they fight a lot – and he mostly lives in the guest house behind the mansion, just because it’s convenient for his work. He’s fond of his mother-in-law, an elegant alcoholic (sort of a mature Nora Charles, and her name is indeed Nora), and devoted to his goofy dachshund. The key to his personality is the teenage trauma of the murder of his girlfriend, of which he was briefly suspected. He spent some time in a mental hospital, overcoming the shock.

Now a serial killer has started murdering women in Ben’s town. Because Ben writes about these things, he gets involved with the investigation, and it soon becomes clear that the killer has fixated on him and his loved ones. All Ben’s brains and courage will be needed if he’s to protect the women he loves.

That’s the premise of Vengeance is Mine, by Harry James Krebs. It was an enjoyable novel, with engaging characters I learned to care about. Ben isn’t always prudent in his decisions, and I didn’t always approve of his moral choices. But he was relatively believable, and quite likeable.

I hope there will be more novels featuring him.

Cautions for the usual stuff.