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Fiction, Reviews

‘Lethal Prey, by John Sandford

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I’ve enjoyed John Sandford’s Prey novels, featuring millionaire Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport, for many, many years. The books have changed with time, and Davenport, once a borderline psychopath local cop, is now a US Marshal and a settled family man who stays in law enforcement because, by his own admission, he likes shooting bad guys.

Lucas works all over the country now, but in Lethal Prey he’s called back home to Minnesota (which pleased me) due to a law enforcement crisis. Lara Grandfelt, a wealthy Minneapolis woman, has decided she wants to get her sister’s case solved. Twenty years ago, her sister Doris, an employee at an accounting firm, was stabbed to death. Her body was found in a suburban park, and examination showed that she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The investigators got the DNA, but no match was found. For years Lara has been bothering the police about the case, but now she’s decided to go public. She promises a 5 million dollar reward to anyone providing evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction.

Lucas gets teamed up again with his old friend Virgil Flowers, and, looking at all the work that will be necessary in running down old, faint leads, they decide to go public in a different way. There are a lot of true crime bloggers out there, and they’re keen to get in on the reward money. Lucas and Virgil put the word out that any private researcher who helps substantially in solving the crime will get a share of the reward. Such amateur participation will create problems of its own, but the added manpower will prove invaluable – if they can ride herd on their helpers.

They have no idea – though the reader does – who their adversary is, and it’s a formidable adversary indeed, one of the most formidable and memorable in the Prey series, I think.

Author John Sandford knows his business as few writers do, and Lethal Prey is entertaining all through. I liked that it featured no kick-butt female cops this time out, and the story didn’t involve the high level of perverse sexual cruelty many of the previous books have featured. But I was troubled by the fact that the reader is left with a sort of cliff-hanger at the end. Sandford doesn’t usually do that. Perhaps things will be explained in the next book.

Cautions for language and adult themes. Fun for grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Perfect Lawyer,’ by Gregg Bell

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Icarus “Ike” Thompson, hero of The Perfect Lawyer, used to be a legal superstar in Chicago. He defended high-profile criminal defendants and usually won. Then he ran up against Ursula Rush, a hard-driving prosecutor who not only beat him but humiliated him in a case in which he was personally invested. Overwhelmed and shamed, he retreated to a leafy suburb, where he now practices property law. When he interviews Abby Blum, an attractive young lawyer from Colorado, as a new partner, and she brings up criminal law, he shuts her down and almost rejects her application. But she persists, and he takes her on.

Then “Father K.” shows up. He’s a Catholic priest and a well-known social crusader. He wants Ike to defend Mia Hendrickson. a media sensation, a mother accused of setting her house on fire and burning her two children to death. She’s already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Ike wants nothing to do with the case, but we just know Father K. will get through to him in the end.

Then follows a tale of increasing drama as Ike and Abby take on what looks like a hopeless case, only gradually realizing what kind of power and corruption they’re facing. And at the prosecutor’s table, once again, will be none other than Ursula Rush.

If I were teaching a novel writing class, and a student had submitted A Perfect Lawyer as a final project, I would give them an A. The book is well-plotted, generally well written, and gripping. The prose could have been better – occasionally an overwritten line shows up: “He was burning with their insolent intimidation.” But overall the writing is good, and way better than a lot I see these days. The dialogue is sometimes kind of bookish, and could use some polishing. But I’d tell the author he showed great promise and had produced a publishable work.

I was a little disappointed that some plot threads were left loose at the end, but no doubt the next volume in the series will pick them up. I almost mistook this book for Christian fiction, because I noticed no profanity (kudos for that).

All in all, The Perfect Lawyer, though less than perfect, is pretty good.

Reading, Reviews

Profoundly flattered

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Tonight, I brag. In a modest, spiritual way, of course.

The latest issue of my church body’s magazine, The Lutheran Ambassador, contains a review of my novel Hailstone Mountain. The writer of the review compares it to biblical narratives, saying:

He manages to make the characters both likable and realistic, simultaneously saint and sinner, wrestling against evil around them and wrestling within themselves. Their lives are raw, sometimes offensively so, but also fully human. Like the Bible, the books are not rated G, but I would rate them five stars because somehow Walker manages to make God the hero and Savior rather than the human characters.

I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it never occurred to me before that God is the hero of the Erling books. But having that said is about the highest accolade I can think of for them.

It should be mentioned, in full disclosure, that the author of the review, Pastor Brian Lunn of Upsala, Minnesota, is a friend of mine.

But still.

[Addendum: Dave Lull informs me (to my astonishment) that this review can actually be seen online, here: Lutheran Ambassador May 2025 by Lutheran Ambassador – Issuu ]

Fiction, Reviews

‘Drowning My Sorrows,’ by Martyn Goodger

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The other day I reviewed Biding My Time, the first novel of Martyn Goodger’s Alan Gadd series. I was highly impressed by the originality of the concept and the quality of the prose.

Having now finished the second book (I don’t think there will be more), I fear I have to dampen my praise a little. Drowning My Sorrows was certainly an original book, but it left me baffled as to the purpose of the whole exercise.

To recap, Alan Gadd is an English lawyer. In the previous book he was working for a large Cambridge law firm. His legal expertise was top-flight, but his utter lack of social skills made him much disliked among his colleagues. His suspicious nature enabled him to detect the fact that a co-worker’s death, apparently a suicide, was in fact murder, and he was nearly killed himself in uncovering the truth. But his methods were so underhanded and cowardly that he got no credit.

As Drowning My Sorrows begins, Alan has lost that job, and is now working in the legal department of a not-very-prestigious university in Cambridgeshire. Once again he regards his colleagues and superiors as inferior to himself. He obsesses over their sexual lives, while feigning moral superiority even as he lusts after a female assistant who’s not interested in him. Once again he is universally disliked by his co-workers.

But part of his job is reviewing university business contracts, and in those he detects some genuine problems. A university-held patent is being sold off to a private corporation at what seems to him an absurdly low price. A superior appears to have granted contracts to personal cronies. Alan’s characteristic response is to set one of his underlings to asking questions, while he himself stalks people and sends anonymous e-mails to get his enemies into trouble. All the while congratulating himself on his ethical superiority.

Then someone gets killed, and once again Alan will find himself facing death.

One weakness of Biding My Time, which I neglected to mention in my review of that book, was a slow start. Author Goodger delights in setting the stage and giving us time to get to know our narrator (I won’t say hero). In this book that problem is even worse – we’re half-way through the story before the murder happens. Frankly, it doesn’t take nearly that long to get one’s fill of Alan Gadd’s company. There were many points when I was ready to drop the book in frustration, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other readers won’t be as patient as I was.

I frequently wondered, as I read, exactly how I was supposed to take the Alan Gadd stories. Sometimes I thought I was taking them too seriously – that they were meant as dark comedies and I was supposed to be laughing as Alan, again and again, falls into pits he has dug for himself through his gormless manipulations. But the ending of this book – admittedly an unexpected one – convinced me that probably wasn’t the purpose. There were moments of sympathy for Alan – we learn that he was bullied as a child and that he had concerned parents who didn’t know how to help him – but he was impossible to like, and difficult to care about.

So, taken all in all, I can’t recommend these books very highly. The author has considerable talent, but I wish he’d put his hand to something more sympathetic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Biding My Time,’ by Martyn Goodger

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Occasionally, one runs across the dramatic device of the “unreliable narrator” in a mystery book. It’s an intriguing strategy for fooling readers, and a challenging one for a writer. The device of the unlikeable narrator is even less common, and a difficult one to pull off. First-time author Martyn Goodger has fulfilled that challenge in style in his mystery, Biding My Time, I am happy to report.

Alan Gadd is a commercial lawyer in a large firm in Cambridge, England. He is intelligent, meticulous and hard-working. He hopes to get a partnership on the basis of his legal expertise. However, there are other expectations in the job – one is supposed to get along with one’s colleagues and to fish for new clients outside work hours. Alan faces challenges in those areas.

Because the fact is, Alan is a jerk. He is arrogant, fiercely competitive, suspicious, vindictive, and a sneak. Other people barely exist for him – he only thinks of them in terms of how they affect his own interests. I suspect he may be on the autism scale, but the author doesn’t say that – quite correctly, because Alan is the narrator, and he possesses zero self-awareness.

Alan had a romantic relationship with Helen, one of his colleagues, until 10 weeks ago when she broke it off. He still obsesses over her, of course, and hates the other partner she’s dating now. This impels him to pay close attention to what she’s doing and who she sees – which will become important when she is suddenly the center of a police inquiry.

Mostly in order to try to catch out co-workers he resents, Alan sets himself to investigating the crime. Which will lead him, by sideways steps, to a truth that will put his life in danger.

Biding My Time was both fascinating and horrifying for this reader. It was fascinating to read such a well-conceived, well-written, and original story. And it was horrifying to identify as strongly as I did with a narrator whom I did not like one bit.

I don’t recall ever reading a book quite like Biding My Time, and I recommend it highly. Cautions for some sexual themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Sleep,’ by Raymond Chandler

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Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.

Recently I watched an old interview with Andrew Klavan in which he cited The Big Sleep, the first Philip Marlowe novel (1939), which he admires very much. He mentioned how he adopted Marlowe as a literary hero when he read the first scene of this book, where the detective enters the palatial Sternwood mansion. Above the door he sees a stained glass window depicting a knight attempting to free a maiden tied to a tree. Marlowe doesn’t think the knight is trying as hard as he could, and thinks that if he lived there he’d have to climb up himself and help out.

That, Klavan says (and I agree), is the key to Philip Marlowe’s character. He’s a knight out of romance, plunked down in the 20th Century where he has no place. His adventures involve him in many compromises, but he strives to keep some honor.

Even when the fair maidens don’t really deserve rescuing, as is the case in The Big Sleep. Old General Sternwood, confined to a wheelchair, has summoned Marlowe because he has received blackmail demands related to his daughter Carmen. Carmen is flighty, promiscuous, and not very bright. He also mentions a man named Rusty Regan, ex-husband to his other daughter Vivian. The general liked Rusty, but the man has disappeared. He hopes he’s all right. Marlowe intuits (correctly) that the general isn’t really much concerned over the blackmail; he’s trying to work up to asking Marlowe to locate Rusty.

Soon Marlowe will be a near-witness to a murder, with Carmen Sternwood present (high on drugs). Then the body will disappear. And Marlowe will find himself looking for Rusty Regan after all – not because he cares about the Sternwood daughters, but for the old man’s sake.

The Big Sleep is an intriguing book. Plot-wise it’s confusing and not neatly tied up. The author himself, famously, wasn’t sure who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. And there’s one scene where Marlowe is captured by a notorious murderer, who then conveniently goes away, leaving him to be watched by a suggestible woman whom Marlowe persuades to free him. (A very weak plot device, you can’t deny.)

And yet this book is treasured by readers and critics alike. I treasure it myself. The prose is masterful, the characters are fascinating, the atmosphere draws you in, and the conclusion has been a model for all but the most cynical of hard-boiled writers ever since.

On this reading I was particularly struck by a minor character, the purest hero of this story. His name is Harry Jones. He’s a short, unprepossessing man, a two-bit gambler. Yet he makes the ultimate sacrifice for a woman who doesn’t deserve him. Marlowe pays him the greatest respect – he’s the man Marlowe would like to be, but pure knights of that sort do not survive in our world.

Taken all in all, The Big Sleep is a great novel. If you haven’t read it and like hard-boileds, you should. Cautions for drugs and sexual situations – pretty racy stuff for 1939.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Goodbye,’ by Raymond Chandler

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She had an iron smile and eyes that could count the money in your hip wallet.

Recently I was poking around Amazon Prime for a movie to watch, and I hit on the old 1973 film adaptation of The Long Goodbye. I hadn’t seen it in many years, and watched it again just to see if I liked it any better than I did in my youth. I found I did not. It’s a Robert Altman vehicle, meaning Raymond Chandler’s story is mostly subsumed in Altman’s improvisations, and Elliott Gould is not Philip Marlowe by any stretch of the imagination. (I must confess the movie did the story no harm by simplifying the plot, though.)

Anyway, I figured I might as well re-read the book (first published 1953) and see how it compared. As I expected, I liked it a whole lot better than the movie, though it’s not without flaws.

Terry Lennox is sporadically one of Philip Marlowe’s few friends. He’s a wounded war veteran with interesting facial scars, and Marlowe encounters him sometimes in evening clothes with rich women on his arm, and sometimes drunk in the gutter. Terry has been married to an heiress named Sylvia, been divorced by her, and then remarried again. Now and then he and Marlowe get together for a drink.

One night Terry shows up asking Marlowe to drive him across the border to Mexico. Marlowe does this, with some misgivings. Once back, he learns the news – Terry’s wife has been murdered, and the police are looking for him. Marlowe gets arrested and subjected to some third degree… and then the whole business is dropped. Word is that Terry has killed himself in Mexico. Shortly afterward, Marlowe gets a letter from Terry, apparently posted just before his death. Tucked in the envelope is a $5,000 bill, which Marlowe puts away in his office safe because he’s uncomfortable about how he earned it.

Through his connection with Terry, Marlowe gets an inquiry from the publisher of Roger Wade, a bestselling author of historical thrillers. Roger has a serious drinking problem and writer’s block. The publisher has the idea that Marlowe might be the man to nursemaid Wade, dry him out and keep him working. Marlowe is not interested, even after a personal appeal from Wade’s stunningly beautiful wife, Eileen. But that doesn’t stop her appealing to him to find Wade after he disappears on a bender. Marlowe tracks him down at a seedy health spa and drags him home. He forms a prickly friendship with the man, while still refusing the babysitting job.

That’s enough to explain how things start out. The plot progresses in what seems to me a somewhat uneven, lurching fashion, as if Chandler was describing his own difficulties writing it through the creative travails of Roger Wade. The final conclusion is (to my mind) a little unsatisfying – but not as weird as the climax they gave us in the movie.

Critics, I understand, are divided concerning The Long Goodbye. Some consider it Chandler’s best work. Others judge it one of the weakest in the series. I myself enjoyed reading it, but found it a little claustrophobic. The story was, after all, somewhat crowded with author’s surrogates. Both Terry Lennox, the shell-shocked, psychologically broken war veteran, and Roger Wade, the bibulous, self-loathing author, are expressions of Chandler’s own self-image. And almost all narrator characters – including Philip Marlowe – are alter egos of their creators.

Also, the book features a series of “solutions,” each replacing the other as if the author couldn’t make up his mind.

But it’s worth reading. I enjoyed it all in all. Also, there’s references to the war in Norway.

The Kindle link I’m using here is for the edition I read, which is the only ebook edition I can find that’s not part of an omnibus. If you can find a different edition, I advise you to buy that, because this one (published in Ukraine) is laden with OCR errors. The “illustrations” advertised are just old paperback cover art, unrelated to the story.

I find, on searching our archives, that I’ve already reviewed this book here once. I need to review more Philip Marlowe novels, and have set about reading another.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Time to Die,’ by Alex Robert

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In the beautiful city of York, England, a man hangs himself in his apartment. Once he was a high-flying financier, but he helped to engineer a massive Ponzi scheme and went to prison for several years. Inspector Jack Husker, just back on the job after suffering a major injury, is dispatched to dot the bureaucratic i’s and cross the t’s. But the crime scene officer has his doubts about the death, and soon Jack is thinking murder.

When one of his partners in the scheme dies in a fall from his balcony soon after, all doubt is removed.

Jack Husker, hero of Time to Die, has a reputation on the force. He’s the cop the brass send in when they want a battering ram and are willing to overlook a little excessive force. But Jack, teamed with his colleague Lisa Ramsey, with whom he is carrying on a tentative flirtation, will be walking a little softer on this case.

Jack will extend his inquiries to the city of Leeds, where he’ll meet another female detective who makes a strong play for his attention – a distraction he doesn’t need. He’ll find connections to international crime and dangerous gangsters. The final showdown, when it comes, will be (for this reader) a bit of an anticlimax.

I was amused when, in one scene, Lisa has a meeting with a confidential source at the Jorvik Viking Centre (a place I’ve always wanted to visit).

I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of this book. It’s part of an ongoing series, and although I didn’t feel that the author shortchanged me at all (except for a frustrating refusal to describe his characters physically), I have an idea I would have followed along better if I’d started at the beginning. Jack’s tactics seemed kind of scattershot to me, and he went into the climactic confrontation without any plan at all, being rescued only by a sort of deus ex machina.

Also, Jack’s relationship with Lisa was kind of hard to understand. Two people strongly attracted to one another who seem determined to mutually sabotage their chances. (But what do I know about relationships?)

I wouldn’t rate Time to Die high on my list of favorites, but it was all right. The prose was good. Cautions for strong language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Operation Echo,’ by Ed Church

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Author Ed Church recently commented on our “About Us” page, and I was reminded of his Brook Deelman books, which I’d much enjoyed but lost track of. I checked and, behold, there is a new volume in the series. I read Operation Echo with great enjoyment.

Brook Deelman, South African-born former London police detective, has now set up a modest private investigation agency with his buddy Jonboy. They have a variety of clients, but they never expected to be approached by Inspector Terry Barnes (retired). Brook has had a strained relationship with the man in the past. But Barnes, having time on his hands now, has decided to try to find the answer to a question that’s been troubling him for many years. There’s a man who belongs to his club, Sir Archibald Gough, a millionaire who made his fortune as a music promoter. Barnes has always felt there’s something… vaguely wrong about Gough. He’s not sure what bothers him about the man, but he’s certain there’s something. He wants Brook and his partner to check the man out.

They do, and are not prepared for where the investigation will take them – back to the Cold War and the year 1963, the year of the Kim Philby scandal and multiple black eyes for British Intelligence. A story of a very secret operation which has left very few traces behind. Punctuated with a knock-down fight or two.

I thought the plot itself was slow getting started, as the original problem, based on a mere ungrounded suspicion, seemed a little implausible. However, the characters – especially Book Deelman, our hero – were so fascinating that I simply enjoyed the ride. And the plot, once it found its legs, ran extremely well.

I highly recommend Operation Echo and all the Brook Deelman books. Cautions for language, but nothing else really.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dain Curse,’ by Dashiell Hammett

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“Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously.”

Recently, in the course of my explorations of old mysteries on YouTube, I watched once again the 1978 CBS TV miniseries adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Dain Curse, starring James Coburn. The dramatization kept to the plot in broad terms, but made a lot of cuts, most of which, it must be admitted, improved the story. For some reason they moved the setting from California to New York state (contrary to the usual custom of that California-based industry). The plot was streamlined in various ways. The casting of Coburn, a famously lean man, as the “Continental Op” (a fat character who is never named in any of his stories), a case of literal streamlining, was justified through turning him into a fictional version of the author himself (who had indeed been a Pinkerton detective), calling him “Hamilton Nash.”

I had watched the original broadcast on TV, and having watched it again now I was curious to re-read the book. It’s not Hammet’s best work, in my opinion.

The story begins with the Continental Op visiting the San Francisco home of Dr. Edgar Leggett, who is involved in chemical experiments involving diamonds. Some of the diamonds he keeps in his laboratory have apparently been stolen in a break-in. The Op finds Leggett’s story fishy, and before long breaks it down into a messy scheme involving false identities and blackmail. At the end of this episode of the story, the Leggetts’ daughter, Gabrielle (who is a morphine addict) has been orphaned, and is left with the conviction that she is a victim of “the Dain Curse” (Dain is her mother’s name) and doomed to cause the death of any person who gets close to her.

But there are two further sections in the book. In the second, the Op is hired to locate Gabrielle and finds her in the temple of a fashionable San Francisco cult, where he barely manages to save her from murder, after which her fiancé whisks her off to a quick wedding and honeymoon in a southern California seaside town. In the third, there is yet another murder, and Gabrielle once again comes under suspicion. After clearing her, the Op takes it on himself to wean her off her drug addiction.

The origins of The Dain Curse as a serial story in Black Mask Magazine are very evident, and don’t always help with readability in a consolidated narrative. Each episode (it was originally a four-parter) involves its own dramatic arc, and each ends with a “solution,” though the actual culprit is kept secret until the very end of the book. Hammett was never in Raymond Chandler’s class as a prose stylist, and the writing here is rarely memorable. The plot of The Dain Curse involves a lot of repetition, and doesn’t reach the levels Hammett achieved in The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, or even in Red Harvest (which is believed, by the way, to have inspired the Samurai film Yojimbo, and by extension A Fistful of Dollars and a score of other copycats).

But it’s worth reading. I must say though that (in my opinion) the cuts the writers made in the TV version were well taken and effective.