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Fiction, Reviews

‘Gutshot Straight,’ by Lou Berney

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Shake wondered how long before they opened a Vegas-themed hotel and casino that was an exact replica of the city around it, including a replica of the Vegas-themed hotel itself, and so on down to microscopic infinity.

Impressed as I was by Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone, which I reviewed a few inches below, I wondered how much I’d like Gutshot Straight, his first novel, which was advertised as a comic crime story.

I liked it enough to laugh out loud more than once while reading it – in a restaurant – something that hasn’t happened to me in years.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, the main character of the novels, is just finishing up a prison stretch for Grand Theft auto when we first meet him. He’s an accomplished “wheel man,” a getaway driver. But he’s decided he’s getting too old for that sort of thing. It’s a sucker’s game. He wants to go straight. Open a restaurant, if he can.

But when an old friend, the beautiful head of the Los Angeles Armenian mob, asks him to do an “easy” job for her, he figures what can it hurt? He can use the money. All he has to do is drive a car to a particular address in Las Vegas, and deliver a briefcase to the man who’ll meet him there.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it turns out a lot more complicated than that. Shake finds himself in a situation where he has the choice of looking the other way, or saving a life. He saves the life, and then the fun begins.

The action centers around a bogus religious relic (I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is), which is no less precious, thanks to its mere age, for being a fraud (I assumed author Berney had invented it, but apparently it actually exists, or did exist). All kinds of bad people are hunting for it, and they covet it enough to torture and kill to get it.

Doesn’t sound like a comic novel? Well, it’s all in the presentation. Years ago people recommended the author Elmore Leonard to me, based largely on his sharp dialogue. But I never warmed to Leonard. He’s a cold-blooded writer (or so I perceive him). I don’t care about his characters.

Gutshot Straight is kind of like Elmore Leonard by way of P. G. Wodehouse. I don’t mean the inimitable Wodehouse diction, which wouldn’t work here, but the Wodehouse kind of story. Where some dim young man is pressured or blackmailed into kidnapping a pig or stealing a silver cow creamer, and only manages to carry the job through because he’s surrounded by idiots and lunatics, running around like characters in a French farce. The chief female character and love interest in this book is right out of Wodehouse – a spunky, fearless, utterly amoral female dynamo who knocks Shake for a loop. And one character in the second book, Whiplash River (which I’m still enjoying reading), “Harry” the retired Cold War spook, is essentially Uncle Fred with a gun.

And the presentation is in no way cold-blooded. Berney excels at treating characters, even sociopathic ones, in three-dimensional ways.

I never wanted this book to end. The publisher charges too much for it, even in the Kindle edition, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long and Faraway Gone,’ by Lou Berney

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The past had power. The past was a riptide. That’s why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn’t go in the water.

Ring the steeple bells! Festoon the festal bunting! Declare a bank holiday! Lars has discovered a new favorite author!

I’d never head of Lou Berney before. I think I downloaded The Long and Faraway Gone because they offered a deal for the Kindle version. But you can now list me among this guy’s faithful fans. I wish he had more published novels to date.

At first glance, The Long and Faraway Gone is simply a superior example of a subgenre that appeals to me (though frequently disappointing), what I might call the “personal cold case” story, where someone investigates a crime that touched them long ago, discovering the ways in which memory (and people, including oneself) mislead and lie.

But author Berney takes a fresh approach from the beginning – this is a two-strand story, concerning two separate murders connected only by general location and date. The two narratives run parallel through the course of the book, only brushing against each other in passing.

One strand centers on Las Vegas private detective Wyatt Rivers. He agrees to do a favor for a friend – fly to Omaha for one day to help a friend who runs a music club, who’s been plagued by acts of vandalism. Only – oh, wait – it’s not Omaha. It’s Oklahoma City. Wyatt, who has already agreed to the favor, is dismayed. Oklahoma City is the one place in the world he doesn’t want to go. Because years back, when he was a teenager and had a different name, he was one of a group of employees herded into the projection room of a small movie theater. The robbers shot them all to death – except for Wyatt. Ever since that night, he’s been living with survivor’s guilt, the memory of the girlfriend who was killed, and the obsessive question – “Why me? Why did they spare my life?”

Julianna Rosales’ life changed that same summer, at the Oklahoma State Fair, when she was only six years old. Her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, had left her alone “for just fifteen minutes” while she went to try to score some cocaine, and vanished from the face of the earth. Since then Julianna has lived without close relationships, or any purpose other than discovering the truth about Genevieve. An old photo posted on Facebook leads her to a string of new clues, and into great danger.

We follow these two wounded people as they turn over the stones of their pasts and learn that memory is fallible, and people are not always what you think they are – for better and for worse.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. The writing was flawless, the dialogue and characterization sharp and textured and layered, the plot resolutions believable. There’s great humanity, and great human compassion, in Lou Berney’s writing.

I think you could even make an argument for a kind of Christian subtext. The self-identified Christians who occasionally show up in the story can be silly, but are generally well-meaning, though the chief Christian character, for some reason, uses the “f” word a lot.

Some rough language, as you’ve already guessed from the paragraph above, and “adult” themes. But on its merits I recommend this book highly. One of the very best I’ve read recently.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mercy of the Night,’ by David Corbett

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Simply because it provided me with a novel reading experience, I need to review David Corbett’s The Mercy of the Night. You may or may not want to read it yourself, but if you do, I think you’ll remember it.

Whether that’s a good thing or not, you’ll have to decide for yourself.

The story, set in a bankrupt, economically distressed small city in northern California, focuses on two troubled souls.

One is Jacqui Garza, a young prostitute, recently escaped from a court-ordered halfway house program. Ten years ago, Jacqui was a celebrity. She had been kidnapped by a sexual predator, but managed to get free. Yet in a sense she never got away at all. Now she’s a witness in a murder, sought by the police and the killers both.

The other is Phelan Tierney, a widower and suspended lawyer working as an investigator. He volunteers as a tutor at the halfway house, and is desperately trying to find Jacqui. Among all the girls he tutored, she showed the greatest promise, but also seemed the most lost. He’s become obsessed with her, to the point where it threatens his relationship with his girlfriend.

Though there are those who wish to harm Jacqui, her greatest enemy is herself, her conviction that she deserves nothing good, and will never get anything good.

The Mercy of the Night is a very well-written book, with excellent characters and dialogue (the climax, I think, was a little rote, but not excessively so). But what struck me most in my reading was that I found the book impossible to enjoy. The miasma of failure and doom that hangs over the gray town is palpable in every line. I was certain as I read that this whole thing could only turn out badly.

In fact (small spoiler here), it didn’t end up quite as badly as I feared. But I’m not sure the author intended the book to be as hard to read as it is, from an emotional point of view. I nearly put it down more than once, out of simple dread. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.)

But it’s a well-constructed and well-realized novel. Cautions for violence, moderately explicit sex scenes, and lots of profanity. There seems to be a theological subtext, but it’s postmodernist.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Black,’ and ‘Black is Back,’ by Russell Blake

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When I started reading the first book in Russell Blake’s detective series, Black, I was frankly not much impressed. The main character and his situation seemed hackneyed and glib. But I gave it a chance, and soon decided that there’s a whole lot more going on with these books than was initially apparent, and now I’m a fan.

Artemus Black (he tries to avoid his first name) is a low rent PI in the stereotypical shabby Los Angeles office. He has an office assistant, Roxie, a hot goth chick with superior research and hacking skills, who is reliably insolent to him. He also has an obese, rescued “office cat,” who hates him. He’s seeing a psychologist to help him work through his anger issues – anger at his hippie parents who, although stoned most of the time, keep turning their arts and crafts into wildly profitable businesses, and at his ex-wife who, back when he was a rock musician, recorded an album of songs he wrote and then left him to become an international star, taking all the song rights with her. He drives a classic Cadillac El Dorado convertible, and wears 1940s suits and fedoras. He drinks too much and is trying to quit smoking.

The first book is simply called Black, and involves Black being hired by an aging action movie star with a particular hatred for the paparazzi. Now paparazzi are getting murdered wherever the star goes, and suspicion is being directed at him.

The second book, Black is Back, deals with murder in the rap music scene.

What’s best about the Black books is the characters and the dialogue. Black’s arguments with Roxie are masterpieces of emotional manipulation and veiled sexual tension. His dialogues with his cop friend, Stan Colt, are just hilarious guy talk – cross-chat that’s never been done better in print.

There are some surprisingly beautiful descriptive passages. Russell Blake is an excellent writer. Also some moments when Black exhibits some pretty solid moral sense.

Highly recommended. Cautions for violence, language, and adult stuff, but not really very heavy.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Buried,’ by Brett Battles

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Among my recently read books is Brett Battles latest Jonathan Quinn novel, The Buried.

I’ve been enjoying this series through the previous eight books, and this one was just as good, or better, than its predecessors.

As I’ve explained before, Jonathan Quinn, the hero, is a “cleaner.” He works for a private contractor that works with intelligence agencies, removing bodies and cleaning up sites where somebody has been liquidated. He’s not supposed to get into the action himself, but of course he often does, or there’d be no novels.

In The Buried, he comes to remove a body from a suburban American home, but about the time he shows up, the government assassin he’s supposed to clean up for discovers a secret chamber underneath the late target’s house. In the chamber they find cells containing four women, one of them dead.

Calling his boss for instructions, Quinn is instructed to call the police and leave, but to take one of the prisoners with him. It turns out this woman possesses a very important secret, and ruthless agents from around the world are competing to find her and extract that secret, by any means necessary. The rest of the story is strong on chases, one way and the other.

The Buried is great fun, especially because of a sort of running joke in the plot. Quinn’s partner (and wife) Orlando is extremely pregnant during this story, but can’t resist trying to participate in the action as if she were not. It’s her nature, as regular readers will recognize. Her continuing denial is not only funny, but contributes to the rising plot tension.

Recommended. Not too much objectionable stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

Re:raptured, Better Have Clean Underwear On

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Ted Kluck has written and collaborated on a number of books, but his name isn’t on the book I heard him recommend last month and consequently purchased. That book comes from Ted’s media empire, Gut Check Press. It’s re:raptured by Committee (link updated with new edition). Exactly who wrote it is being withheld, no doubt pending Congressional subpoena, but I think Ted had a hand in it. Maybe even a foot.

The story begins with a young Episcopal priest getting his lights dashed by Tim Van Shrimpy, “Bible Scholar.” The reason Van Shrimpy is rampaging around beating up people is still unclear to me, but realism was sold out when this tale was typed up. Ted Strongbow is a football superstar with few real skills (wait, is this part straight-up parody of actual people?). Rev. Lewis Ironsides has written the book Exactly How to Look and Exactly What to Say If You Want to Marry My Daughter Carol-Anne, which, he says, isn’t exactly arranging her marriage, but it’s a hot item among controlling homeschool moms with eligible sons.

It takes place in a world that has The Honorable Philip Yancey Hospital housed within the Dynex/Lifeway/Excellence in Christian Publishing Kilometer High Stadium, home to the Denver Values football team (Strongbow’s team). The story takes up a whole handful of characters in short, often choppy, scenes that flow together just like the end-times thrillers it intends to skewer. What is bringing all these people together? Their loyalty of dispensational end-times teaching and the belief that they need to be in place before the rapture occurs. But are they mobilizing to be in place to usher in or ward off the rapture?

Continue reading Re:raptured, Better Have Clean Underwear On →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Monster Hunter International,’ by Larry Correia

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I hadn’t noticed until tonight, but our friend Loren Eaton reviewed Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International over at I Saw Lightning Fall, just the other day.

And here I am, reviewing it now.

I recently reviewed Correia’s Grimnoir Chronicles books, so I thought I’d try the Monster Hunter series too.

In brief, not bad. But I think it’s not for me.

Owen Z. Pitt is the hero of the series. When we meet him he’s an accountant, albeit a large and vigorous variety of the breed. One night he’s attacked in his office by a werewolf, and manages to throw the monster out of a window to its death. He’s badly injured, though.

During his recovery, he learns that such attacks are more common than the public is permitted to know. A whole government agency is devoted to dealing with the threat – secretly – and there’s a secret government bounty for each monster killed. The agency has competition – the private Monster Hunter International group, which recruits Owen, who realizes his heart wasn’t really in accountancy after all. Fortunately his soldier father raised him with fighting skills and arms proficiency.

Also there’s a beautiful monster hunter, a member of the group’s founding family, with whom Owen falls promptly in love.

What follows is basically a written version of a CGI-intense Hollywood summer movie. With very short hiatuses in between, one monster attack follows another, each one involving more terrible – and numerous – monsters.

And Owen, it seems, is the key to the destruction or salvation of the space-time universe, because of a series of visions he’s been having.

It’s all pretty overwhelming. I can see why the Monster Hunter books have acquired such a large, loyal following. Many of you are probably among them, and many others of you will enjoy the books if you try them.

But it’s frankly too much for me. I’ve decided I like my books a little quieter, a little more introspective.

There are occasional references to religion, and it’s stated as a fact that faith has efficacy against monsters. Any faith will do, however – the faith itself, not its object, is what counts.

Cautions for violence, language, and not very explicit sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Slow Regard of Silent Things,’ by Patrick Rothfuss

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She sat down on the floor again beside her bed. She closed her eyes. She almost stayed there, too, all cut-string and tangle-haired and lonely as a button.

Patrick Rothfuss, author of the Kingkiller Chronicles, consisting so far of The Name of the Wind (which I reviewed here) and The Wise Man’s Fear (which I reviewed here), has us waiting for the third novel in the series. But he’s given us a shorter work to fill in the time, a novella called The Slow Regard of Silent Things, about a minor character in the novels.

The minor character is Auri, a little girl who lives in what she calls “the Underthing,” a complex of crumbling utility tunnels and archaeological ruins buried under the University. The hero of the novels, Kvothe, visits her from time to time, bringing her food. She is tiny and beautiful, shy as a deer, and quite mad.

The Slow Regard of Silent Things takes us through several days in Auri’s life, in which she carries on the routines that are so important to her, continues her explorations of her environment, and prepares for an anticipated visit from “him” (who is, we assume, Kvothe).

This is a strange story, in which nothing of significant happens, except in Auri’s mind. It’s deathly important to her that everything in her world be “right.” Every object must be placed where it “wants to be.” She is strict about how things must be done, even at the cost of great discomfort to herself. She suffers, very obviously, from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but hers is a humble lunacy. There is no trace of selfishness in it. Auri sees herself as a servant to all, small and unnoticeable. It’s terribly, terribly important to her not to be noticed. A hint is given, at one point, about the trauma that made her what she is.

Author Rothfuss makes, both at the beginning and the end of the book, personal “apologies” for the kind of story he has provided. “You might not want to buy this book,” he writes in his foreword. He explains that it contains no action, and only one character, so it’s not everybody’s cup of tea.

What it is, of course, is a literary story within the fantasy genre. And it’s a splendid one. Auri is tragic, glorious, and adorable, and the language is lapidary.

Highly recommended though (as Rothfuss tells us) you may have trouble understanding it if you haven’t read the Kingkiller books yet.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trulbert!’ by Mitch Berg

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“Oh, how did a modest little Presbyterian congregation in South Minneapolis turn into a cohesive guerilla force fighting against the Methodists, the Sharks, the Jets and the Speed Racers? …Well, Presbyterian churches – well, not the ones affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA, but the more traditional ones – always keep a cache of firearms, ammo, pipes and drums in a locker in a secret room in the basement. The secret scroll kept under the altar of all Presbyterian Churches says they are kept against the day when Edward Longshanks rises from the dead to oppress the people. We figured this was close enough.”

First of all, full disclosure. Mitch Berg, author of Trulbert! A Comic Novella About the End of the World As We Know It, is an acquaintance of mine. He writes the Shot in the Dark blog, and hosts the Saturday Northern Alliance radio program on a Twin Cities talk station – where I’ve been a guest.

But I paid for my copy.

“Trulbert” is not, as you might think, the name of a character in the book (which is not a novella, in my opinion, but long enough to be considered a full novel), but of a Facebook page – “TRU LBRT NOW” – which one of the characters, an anarcho-Libertarian, sets up at the beginning of the story.

Shortly after that, his fondest dreams come true. Due to an error by a Chinese government broker, US bonds are suddenly devalued to zero, and the dollar becomes instantly worthless. All government in America and around the world collapses (with surprisingly little bureaucratic resistance, but we’re dealing with comedy here), and anarchism reigns. The libertarians are very happy for a while, as people quickly figure out ways to provide their own goods and services, and even set up new forms of currency (even the electricity never goes off, conveniently). It looks like Ayn Rand’s dream has come true.

Until a nebbishy, hen-pecked minor state bureaucrat named Myron Ilktost discovers his inner Mussolini and takes control of a progressive Methodist church in Minneapolis, which he soon turns into the baddest street gang in the metropolitan area. And before long he has made himself the dictator of the city and several suburbs. Our protagonist, Paul Hendrickson, an employee of a medical claims company, becomes a leader of the resistance, which takes shape against the backdrop of Vikings-Packers game that turns into a riot.

Trulbert! is a weird comic opera of a book, heavy with satire (it helps to know Minnesota politics, but it’s not necessary), in which author Berg (who once ran for state office on the Libertarian Party ticket, but grew disillusioned with the party’s naivety about human nature) pokes fun at anarchism, statism, public schools, and professional football among other things. I got some genuine guffaws out of it, and I thought it made some excellent points. Mitch isn’t a polished writer, but he shows good promise.

(My main quibble was with a scene where the story flashes back to 13th Century Norway, and a farmer worries about the potatoes. That’s about 500 years too early for potatoes.)

Recommended. Mild cautions for language. Good fun.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wise Man’s Fear,’ by Patrick Rothfuss

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Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love so light she probably didn’t notice it herself. It wasn’t dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the spark fades almost too fast for you to see. But still, you know it’s there, down where you can’t see it, kindling.

I have already reviewed Patrick Rothfuss’s first novel in the Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind. I liked it very much, especially for the masterful writing, but was worried about where the author might take the story.

My fears (wise man that I am) were validated in The Wise Man’s Fear, the second book in the series. The author went some places I didn’t want him to go. And yet he didn’t drive me away, and I want to read more.

Each book in this trilogy involves a single day in which Kote the Innkeeper tells his life story to a character known as the Chronicler. Kote is in actuality Kvothe the Kingkiller, a figure of legend in his own world and time. A poet, a singer, a warrior, a magician. Now he has retired from the world, but he will tell his story for these three days. No more.

The first book told us how Kvothe, born to a family of traveling performers, lost his parents, survived for a time homeless, and finally found entrance to the place he dreamed of – the great institution known as the University.

In The Wise Man’s Fear we follow him as he struggles with poverty, the regulations of the school, and the enmity of a fellow student who uses magic against him. He hones his powers, slowly mastering magic, but eventually finds himself in a place where taking a hiatus from his studies is a good idea. Continue reading ‘The Wise Man’s Fear,’ by Patrick Rothfuss →