Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

The Jack Stratton novels, by Christopher Greyson

2 Comments

It’s a rare treat to discover an author and a series of books I enjoy very much, and which I can recommend to our readers almost without reservation. But that’s the case with Christopher Greyson and his Jack Stratton novels.

Jack Stratton, the hero of the series, is a cop in a South Carolina town. He’s a good man, but wound tight. As a boy he was abandoned by his prostitute mother, but found refuge in a loving mixed race foster home before being adopted by a good family. As a young man he served in Iraq beside one of his foster brothers, Chandler. He saw Chandler die, and because of survivor’s guilt he hasn’t contacted his foster family since.

That’s until Replacement invades his life. “Replacement” is the nickname of a young woman who grew up in his old foster home, though after his time there. She shows up in his apartment and tells him Michelle, a foster sister to whom he was always close, has disappeared. She’d been studying in a local college, but supposedly transferred to a California school. Only she hasn’t gotten in touch with her family, and she wouldn’t do that.

With Replacement as his uninvited assistant, he starts looking into Michelle’s life, and discovers troubling things. Continue reading The Jack Stratton novels, by Christopher Greyson →

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Bright Star to Guide Them,’ by John C. Wright

Leave a comment

“Innocence and faith are the weapons children bring to bear against open evils; wisdom is required to deal with evils better disguised.”

You might be tempted, on the basis of its description, to think John C. Wright’s novella, One Bright Star to Guide Them, is simple Narnia fanfic. A story of four adults, who were once children who entered a magical land peopled by magicians and talking animals.

But it’s more than that. This story is a transposition of Narnia. Author Wright moves the whole concept onto a different level. It’s a meditation on the most terrible line in all the Narnia books – “Susan is no longer a friend of Narnia.” Thomas, the protagonist, is summoned to take up a new fight against a revived evil. But when he contacts his childhood companions, he finds that – for one reason or another – they are not willing to join him. So he has to test his faith alone, except for the help of their old guide, a mystical kitten called Tybalt.

One Bright Star to Guide Them is a quick read, but entirely worthy of the material that inspired it. Beautiful in places. Highly recommended.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Unbelievable, True-to-Life Hollywood Mystery

1 Comment

When director William Desmond Taylor was murdered, no one in 1922 Los Angeles knew who did it. William Mann spins all the details into a wild noir that “seems far too cinematic to be credible. Yet every word of it is true,” writes Stefan Kanfer.

… the author spins a terrific yarn, though he frequently goes into overdrive, with staccato, machine gun-style sentences, as if to keep his readers’ attention from wandering: “Three long blond hairs. Clearly not Taylor’s. With a tweezers, the detective removed the hairs and placed them in an envelope. Now he just needed to match them to someone’s head.”

(via Prufrock)

Fiction, Reviews

The Jimmy “Soldier” Riley mysteries, by Michael Lister

Leave a comment

For a little while, while I was reading the first Jimmy “Soldier” Riley mystery, I thought I’d found something wonderful to recommend to you. Alas, the execution did not live up to the promise.

Jimmy Riley’s nickname is “Soldier,” which embarrasses him a little. World War II is raging, but he never actually served in it. He’s missing his right arm, but he lost that in a gun fight in his capacity as a cop. Now he’s a private detective in Panama City, Florida.

But his mind isn’t on his work these days. He’s desperately in love – with the wife of a rich banker. He thought she felt the same way about him, but she broke their affair off one day, without explanation. Now he’s mooning around the office, and his partner is worried about him.

But one day Lauren, the Woman He Loves, comes to his office to ask if he’s been following her (he hasn’t). She refuses to hire him to investigate, but he starts looking on his own initiatve.

That’s the promising set-up of The Big Goodbye, the first book in a trilogy. Unfortunately, the following books, The Big Beyond and The Big Hello, don’t live up to expectations. Continue reading The Jimmy “Soldier” Riley mysteries, by Michael Lister →

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reviews

Veith likes ‘Death’s Doors’

2 Comments

Our friend Prof. Gene Edward Veith of Patrick Henry College gives my latest novel the thumbs up:

But although there are a lot of big ideas in this book and a lot of rich theologizing, Death’s Doors is just fun to read. It’s suspenseful, exciting, and wildly imaginative, both in the author’s story telling and in the way it stimulates the reader’s imagination. And I’m realizing that all good novels–including Christian novels, classics, and other works that are Good for You–need to have those qualities. And this one does.

Read it all here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Suspect,’ by Robert Crais

2 Comments

I generally don’t read books featuring dogs (except for Dean Koontz books, where you can’t avoid them), for the same reason I don’t own a dog. It’s because I love dogs dearly, and firmly believe that no master (certainly including me) has ever been worthy of his canine pet. I’m not sure I can bear the purity of a dog’s love.

Which made Robert Crais’ novel Suspect difficult in places. That’s not to say I didn’t like it. But if you aren’t an actual dog hater, this one will break your heart – in a good way.

Scott James is a Los Angeles cop who’s gotten derailed on his career path to SWAT. He was shot and severely injured in an ambush where his female partner was killed. After months of recovery and rehab, he’s ready to return to work – pretending he’s in better shape than he is. He’s not fit enough for SWAT anymore, so he’s switching to the K-9 squad.

At the end of his training he meets Maggie, a German Shepherd who was formerly a bomb sniffing dog in Afghanistan. She lost her partner and was wounded too, and is hostile to anyone who’s not “pack.” But something in her touches Scott, and he gets permission to try her as his partner. They’re both on probation, they both have PTSD, and they’re not entirely ready for service.

Scott starts digging into the ambush where his partner was killed, and begins to suspect police involvement and a cover-up. Keeping his head down while trying to camouflage his own (and his dog’s) physical shortcomings, he walks a dangerous path. But the man has a Best Friend.

Exciting, gripping, and deeply moving, Suspect is a tremendously entertaining read. Crais has taken a risk in writing a stand-alone not related to his Cole and Pike novels, but he succeeds completely. Highly recommended, with the usual cautions for adult themes and language.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Pirates Laffite,” by William C. Davis

3 Comments

I love history because I love romance (by which I mean, not novels by Barbara Cartland, but romantic adventure – swashbuckling and gunplay in long-lost times and distant places). I picked up The Brothers Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, by William C. Davis, to get some of the facts behind the legend of Jean Laffite and his brother Pierre. I knew what I was getting into, and was already aware of their sordid side, so I read it with interest.

Most of us know the Laffites as “the pirates who helped Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.” And they did that, though they weren’t quite as noble as the movies make it seem. They were operating a smuggling operation out of Barataria Island, taking advantage of political instability and the difficulties the US government had enforcing its laws in the newly extended territories of the Louisiana Purchase. When the British fleet sailed in, they seem to have tried to play both sides against the middle (a recurring theme in their story), but the Americans got their hands on them first, so they helped them.

Like most criminals, they never actually got very rich, although they tried to live like it. They seem to have been rather courtly with their (white) prisoners, but at bottom their reality was pretty ignoble. They violated America’s ban on importing slaves through a clever manipulation of the law, first importing the miserable captives illegally, then turning them in as contraband and collecting the reward (Jim Bowie partnered with them in this scam). They were also “filibusters,” a term which originally referred to adventurers, mostly Americans, who set up bogus “revolutionary republics” in Spanish America and then issued letters of marque giving their acts of piracy a cloak of legality. But the Laffites added a characteristic twist of their own – they informed on their fellow filibusters to the Spanish, for pay.

There’s little heroism to find in this story, but what it does offer is a fascinating look into a formative but little-known era of American history. The book is very long, but half of it is footnotes.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Lying With Memes,’ by Ori Pomerantz

1 Comment

Ori Pomerantz is a personal friend of mine, and of this blog. So my endorsement of his new e-book, Lying With Memes: Quick, Concise, and Wrong, might be a little suspect (I got a free review copy, by the way, so you can factor that in). But I thought it was a valuable and entertaining little book.

Memes, those short messages pasted on art, like digital posters or vertical bumper stickers, are part of my life, and probably of yours too, if you’re reading this blog. If you use a service like Facebook, you’ve probably laughed or done an arm pump on seeing some, and promptly shared them. Sometimes you learn later that they’re false or misleading, and feel embarrassed. You’ve probably also been angered by some memes, and they may have even sparked arguments and lost you friends.

Ori’s short book is an explanation of how memes are constructed (with how-to instructions), and also a plea for more rational, decent memes. He provides a simple short course in logic (something much needed in our time) and admits that the information he gives may be used or misused. “I hope you will use this knowledge for good,” he writes, “to identify when people try to cheat you, rather than for evil, to cheat people yourself.”

A quick read and not expensive. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert

Leave a comment

If Chesterton’s Father Brown had been a Protestant, and in better shape, and a man of action, he might have been something like Pastor Jonah Borden, hero of three enjoyable novels (to date) by Tom Hilpert.

Pastor Borden serves the parish of Harbor Lutheran Church in Grand Lake (a stand-in, I assume, for Grand Marais), Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. He is a widower, a gourmet cook, a coffee addict, and a martial artist. He once killed a man in self-defense. He holds court a couple evenings a week at a local tavern, where he listens to people’s problems while sipping soft drinks.

In the first book in the series, Superior Justice, one of Jonah’s parishioners is arrested for the murder of the child molester who killed his daughter. Under the seal of the confessional, the accused man gives Jonah a rock-solid alibi, but it’s an alibi he wants to keep secret. In order to clear him, Jonah has to identify the real killer. Along the way he begins a romance with Leyla Bennett, a beautiful TV news reporter. Continue reading The Lake Superior Mysteries, by Tom Hilpert →

Fiction, Reviews

“Don’t Forget Me, Bro,” by John Michael Cummings

2 Comments

78|365 - The Suburbs“The word ‘home’ raised a smile in us all three,

And one repeated it, smiling just so

That all knew what he meant and none would say.” – Edward Thomas

Did everyone actually know what he meant, or could it be everyone thought they knew and didn’t want to articulate it? Trying to say what you think you know is a good way of learning whether you really know it. Can we ever return home once we’ve left? Is home a reality that can be returned to? I remember talking to a woman about the conflict she risked in her native country. She was glad to be away from it all, but she also longed to return there. That’s where her home was.

Home is where we fit in, but some of us are so dogged by internal or external pain that we don’t actually fit in anywhere with a clean snap. We just hold our place well enough; we appear to flow with the rest of the pattern. Is home where our family is? If so, who is our family? That’s as big a question as the definition of home. Both are subjects in John Michael Cummings’ new dramatic novel, Don’t Forget Me, Bro (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, Dec. 2014).

The story is told by Mark Barr, who returns to his Alma, West Virginia, home after receiving the call that his eldest brother, Steve, has died. Steve was declared mentally ill many years ago, and no one in the family seems to know how to deal with him. He died at age 45. At one point, he was a runner with aspirations of living a long, creative life.

“Forty-five was for car accident victims and the terminally ill,” Mark says. “Steve would be so ashamed. I was glad he wasn’t alive to know he was dead.”

But Mark hadn’t talked to his brother for years before they spoke on the phone last week, and he hasn’t kept up with his other brother or their parents. It has been 11 years since he last visited, and he felt the same today as he did back then—he wanted to get out. Alma and the surrounding mountains were haunted with ugly memories of choices Mark had made and experiences he’d suffered. If this was the place where he fit in, he hated the picture it made.

“All around me,” Mark drones, “mountains were streaked brown like stained commodes, and skeleton-shell barns flashed by, as if retreating. In that moment, I felt that this land had never stopped waiting for me to return, that like an enemy, it had me for life.”

Cummings sustains a good tension throughout this family drama. Continue reading “Don’t Forget Me, Bro,” by John Michael Cummings →