The taste of the cheeseburger lingered in my mouth. Not the ketchup or the onion or even the “world famous” curly fries of the Elizabethtown Diner, just the red meat. I’d asked for it well done; it came rare—but I never send food back. It’s bad form, as far as I’m concerned. Fate delivered a rare cheeseburger, so I downed it. Now, as the car was coasting, and as my foot was dangling, I was glad for the taste of rare meat in my mouth. It tasted of open spaces and grazing herds.

I should mention at the outset that author Mark Goldblatt is a Facebook friend of mine. However, I can honestly say that I didn’t receive a free review copy of The Unrequited. So make your own judgment as to whether or not this enthusiastic review is impartial.

Calvin Hooker, the narrator of the story, is a reporter for a supermarket tabloid headquartered in New York City. He’s not proud of the work, but he does it as well as he can, not agonizing over what the editors and headline writers do with it afterwards. He hasn’t been in a relationship for a year and a half, and sometimes gets weepy thinking about his ex-girlfriend’s cats, to which he just lost visitation rights.

In other words, Hooker is not an alpha male. Certainly a beta, maybe a gamma. A central clue to the meaning of this book is that pretty much all the guys here are betas. The one actually forceful man in the story (aside from one who’s just crazy) is the character Hooker is sent up to Elizabethtown, NY to interview. Daniel Lockett has just completed a prison term for rape and the accidental murder of a baby. The great irony is that Daniel actually emasculated himself with an improvised knife while incarcerated. Continue reading The Unrequited, by Mark Goldblatt →

I finished this book before I left for Minot, but a review of The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay didn’t fit my schedule at the time. As a result my memories of details are a little faded. But I’ll give you my general reactions, which remain vivid.

G. K. Chesterton wrote somewhere that there are two meanings of the word “good.” If a man could shoot his grandmother with a rifle at 500 yards, he would call him a good shot, but he wouldn’t necessarily call him a good man.

In the same way, The Unburied Dead is an excellent book in terms of technical achievement. It provides a grim and gritty picture of police life in Glasgow, where Detective Sergeant Thomas Hutton gets involved in a hunt for a serial killer. Thomas is a relatively honest cop, in an indifferently honest department where the police aren’t above “stitching up” a suspect if they know he’s guilty. But some cops have gone over that fuzzy line, and it only serves to muddy the investigational waters. Thomas himself is contemplating a reconciliation with one of his ex-wives, the mother of his daughters, but he can’t resist a dalliance with his sexy boss.

In short, this book is extremely short on sympathetic characters. The violence is horrifying, the language filthy. The Unburied Dead was a masterful piece of contemporary noir, which I was delighted to be done with when I finished it.

Is there a category called a popcorn novel? Because that’s what I’d call 48 Hours by J. Jackson Bentley. An interesting plot, engaging characters, and the occasional hint of conservatism. Can’t complain about that. If the technicalities aren’t always perfect, I can hardly grouse. I was satisfactorily entertained.

Josh Hammond is an insurance adjustor in the City of London. He’s not a magnate of any kind, but he’s managed to put away money almost no one knows about. So he’s surprised in more ways than one when he gets a text message from a blackmailer (the book keeps calling it blackmail, but in this case it looks more like extortion to me) telling him to pay up pretty close to all he’s worth, or he’ll be murdered.

Josh goes to his boss for advice, and his boss retains a security company to protect him. This involves a bodyguard, who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Dee, well-suited for Josh to fall in love with. The police are called in. The blackmailer is smarter than they are, and then they are smarter than the blackmailer, and it goes back in forth in a well-matched battle of wits with the occasional spice of a fist- or gunfight.

I was particularly pleased with the social attitudes of this book. Although sex outside of marriage is taken for granted, pretty much a given in our time, I guess, businessmen are treated sympathetically, and the villain is both a Labor politician and a former trade unionist.

There are weaknesses in the writing, but I’ve seen a lot worse. The author doesn’t know what “enormity” means (of course no one else does these days either), and messes up on the choice between “I” and “me” at one point. There’s the occasional redundancy (we don’t need to be informed twice of the heroine’s height). In an odd orthography choice, quotations are set in the American style (single quotation marks inside double quotation marks) but the marks are left off the beginnings of new paragraphs inside speeches.

But 48 Hours was fun. And it’s free for Kindle, at least at the time of this review. Recommended.

I just finished a free ebook version (functional formatting and scattered erroneous letters) of P.G. Wodehouse’s trans-Atlantic rom-com Jill the Reckless. It was published in 1921 in the United Kingdom after a couple serializations, under the name, The Little Warrior, in American and Canadian magazines the year before. To cut to the chase, I enjoyed it overall, but I can’t say I lapped it up.

Jill, a delightful young lady with far more impetuous bravado than ladies usually indulge at her age, is the focus on Sir Derek Underhill’s affections and anxiety. He loves her, but he’s worried his mother will not accept her. Derek’s close friend and life-long admirer, Freddie Rooke, understands the unyielding terror that Derek’s mother is and hopes to rally round his friend to support him against this maternal fiend. No, it doesn’t go well. Well is precisely how it doesn’t go, but that isn’t the event that turns Lady Underhill against Jill. That event occurs later that evening when a theatre burns to the ground and Jill, becoming separated from the Underhills, ends up dining with another man a couple tables away from her finance.

That’s the first half of act one, so there’s a lot more to love. In acts two and three, Wodehouse draws us into the world of musical theater, where most managers are human and no one expects to be treated fairly. Wodehouse worked in this world with some famous names, so I can’t help thinking he is revealing some of his personal experiences. His description of the office boy species sounds informed by an explorer’s chronicle.

I say I didn’t lap it all up, because this work doesn’t carry the light-hearted air consistently throughout. At a couple points, it gets rather serious. I can’t say I have any favorite scenes, though Bill the Parrot’s Big Adventure comes to mind. Still it’s as charming reading as I’m sure Jill is herself. If you don’t mind paying for it, I recommend the print version for ease of use.