If you’re looking for a Christmas entertainment in the same vein as A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, you could do much worse than picking up a copy of The Santa Shop, by Tim Greaton (if you’ve got a Kindle, it’s a free download as of the time of this posting).

The main character, Skip Ralstat, is a homeless man on the streets of Albany, New York. When he’s invited into a church by a kindly priest on a cold night, he refuses all suggestions as to how he might regain a normal life. He doesn’t want a normal life. He blames himself for the death in a fire of his wife and baby son, and he embraces social ostracism and suffering as his deserved penance.

But when he meets a strange homeless man who wears a dirty Santa wig, he hears of the town of Gray, Vermont, where there’s a bridge called Christmas Leap. Every year one homeless man leaps to his death from that bridge on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is the anniversary of Skip’s family’s deaths. It just seems right to him that he should go up there himself and pay the ultimate price at last.

He doesn’t understand the forces at work around him, though. There’s a conspiracy—a good conspiracy—of caring people who will force him to face the truth of his life and to understand the real value of what he’s lost and what he’s trying to throw away.

I found flaws in The Santa Shop (you guessed I would, didn’t you?). The book seemed to me overwritten in places, and sometimes the diction could be imprecise. But I was nevertheless wholly engaged in it, and I’d be lying if I denied that my eyes were damp when the story closed up (I should note that it’s a novella. A sample of the follow-up book takes up nearly half of the Kindle version file). The story is notable for having the feel of a supernatural story when in fact the only magic is the magic of God-inspired human love and kindness (exaggerated, I would say, but moving).

I think most Brandywine Books readers will enjoy The Santa Shop.

John Sandford is a darned good mystery/thriller writer, and more than a one-note performer. While the Lucas Davenport “Prey” novels that made his fortune continue to draw readers, he’s added a second, related series character, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers, who looks like a surfer boy, practices journalism as a sideline, and is pretty successful with the ladies (which explains the obscene nickname his colleagues use on him, which I won’t share here).

The Flowers books have a different flavor from the “Prey” books. They’re mostly set in rural Minnesota, and as you’d expect the crimes are generally more conventional, with less sociopathy and sadism.

I have to commend Sandford particularly for the way he handles politics in these books. If I were a lefty or a greenie, I might consider him a sellout (my spider sense tells me he’s a lefty in real life), but he passes by all kinds of opportunities to treat conservatives as idiots or monsters. In Shock Wave, his characters are well-rounded, credible, and generally sympathetic. Even Willard Pye, founder and CEO of “PyeMart” (obviously a stand in for Walmart), is not a caricature but a believable guy who has his own story.

The first crime is a bombing in the board room of PyeMart’s headquarters in Michigan, but when a second fatal bombing occurs at a building site for a new store in Butternut Falls, Minnesota, Virgil Flowers is called in to coordinate with the ATF and local police. The investigators figure there are two possible motives—environmental radicalism, or fear for their livelihood by local businessmen. Virgil and his allies set to work examining evidence and assembling lists of suspects (at one point by a radically novel method), and before long it looks like they must be getting close, because Virgil himself becomes a target.

Shock Wave is exciting, engaging, well-crafted, and politically even-handed. Setting aside the usual foul language and sexual themes, I recommend it pretty highly.

One of the benefits of the e-book revolution for authors is the opportunity it gives them to bring out-of-print books to the public again, and wring a little new income (and attention) out of works the publishers have abandoned, sometimes for fairly shortsighted reasons.

That seems to be the case with Richard LaPlante’s 1993 novel, Mantis, which launched a series starring Philadelphia police detective Bill Fogarty and forensic scientist (and martial arts expert) Josef Tanaka.

The set-up is interesting. Fogarty and Tanaka, though different in ages and cultural heritages, have many similarities. Fogarty is burdened with guilt over the deaths of his wife and daughter in an auto accident when he was driving—an accident which left him with burn scars on his face. Tanaka is haunted by the memory of permanently paralyzing his older brother, whom he idolized, in a tournament competition. They are drawn together in the hunt for a serial killer—a deeply twisted martial arts expert who believes himself to be guided by the spirit of the praying mantis.

The writing is good, the characters strong. Author LaPlante seems to be attempting to do the Hannibal Lector thing here, creating a villain at once evil and sympathetic. Frankly, that part didn’t really work for me. I felt sorry for what I read of the killer’s childhood sufferings, but his cruelty was so perverse, his inhumanity so profound, that I lost interest in him.

There was also an element rare in conventional thrillers—a supernatural, psychic side to the story. I’m old-fashioned enough about my mystery stories to generally resent the introduction of the supernatural. If I want magic, I’ll go to the fantasy aisle.

On the other hand, the story has a fairly strong moral center. It is made clear that both Fogarty and Tanaka go wrong when they allow their passions to push them over the line of legality in their investigation. Though that line gets crossed again, come to think of it, in the story’s climax.

To wrap it up, I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I hoped to, and wished it over well before the end. I wouldn’t call it a waste of your money at the price, but I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly. Cautions for language, sex, and deep perversion.

I’ve always been a sucker—I’m not entirely sure why—for the “cold case” story, the mystery that goes back a generation or two, where old letters and the dim memories of the elderly are the chief sources of information. English writer Peter Robinson’s In a Dry Season is an excellent example of this type.

The hero is Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, a Yorkshire policeman currently in “career Siberia” due to conflicts with his superior. When that superior sends Banks to investigate the discovery of a skeleton found in a shallow grave in the ruins of a small town, drowned by a reservoir for decades but now uncovered in a severe drought, it’s because he considers it a nothing case.

But forensics reveal that the skeleton belonged to a young woman, and she died from strangulation and stabbing. Clearly murder. With the help of an attractive female detective (with whom he predictably strikes sparks), Banks sets about learning what life was like in the town of Hobbs End during World War II, and about a beautiful young woman who came to town as a “land girl” (a substitute agricultural worker) and married the handsomest boy in town. Who had a motive to kill her, and why is everyone who remembers her certain she left town alive?

As a parallel to the investigation narrative, the author switches periodically to an old manuscript, an account of the whole business written by someone who was very close to it all.

Author Robinson does some serious literary work here. The investigation, and its setting, take on metaphorical significance as he examines the nature of memory, and of love and guilt. Alan Banks is a very good protagonist, seriously flawed, especially in his relationships, but generally decent—motivated, we are told, by a hatred of bullies. Although the few political comments tend to the liberal side, there’s a refreshing contempt for draconian smoking laws, and even a suggestion that not having a gun in the house can be a dangerous thing. Also, Robinson seems less certain than the average Englishman that the death penalty is a bad thing.

I liked In a Dry Season very much, taken all in all. Cautions for language and adult themes.

Speaking Loren Eaton (see last post), a while back he was kind enough to send me an e-book, called Splinters of Silver and Glass, from a flash fiction friend, Nathaniel Lee. I’ve dabbled in it every now and then, since it’s the kind of book one dabbles in, being filled with 100 short short stories plus two longer ones. For the price, I can definitely recommend it for a mixed bag of story bites skewing heavy into fantasy and horror. All of them can be found on Lee’s blog, Mirrorshards, and he continues to write them, which means you can get them in your RSS feed this very day. This one, “Girl Stuff,” is one of my favorites. Here’s another that’s much more crazy.

Some of the stories have an eery sound to them, and when they come after a few humorous ones, they deflate me a bit. But the quirky and humorous ones come around soon enough. Naturally, if every story had perfect pitch, it would be easy to rave, even if I could only say that you had to read it to know what it’s like. It’s possible short short stories simply don’t reach deeply enough to stir our hearts. Perhaps they can’t, being only 100 words. I like to think they can, even though they are just snatches of stories.

I still have my copies of Story quarterly from the mid-90s. They ran short short stories competitions which had to be kept under 1,500 words. Brady Udall’s piece, “The Wig,” from the Summer 1994 issues, has always stuck with me as a beautiful, human moment. The first line goes, “My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage Dumpster this morning.” Story‘s editor, Lois Rosenthal, said, “In three hundred words, Udall’s deft tale of an enormous loss swiftly reduced most of our contest judges to tears.” I think I cried too. At least, I felt the loss he described. (The story is available with others in Udall’s anthology, Letting Loose the Hounds.)

When I’ve posted 100 word stories here, “The Wig” has been in my ear as the pitch I’m hoping to sustain. It’s hard to tell if I have.

Oh, speaking of Loren Eaton, he has another delightful 200-word tale here: “Silver Sea, Salmon Sky.”

“Fast-paced,” “action-packed,” and “breathlessly exciting” are adjectival terms you expect to use when describing a good spy thriller. They all apply to Tim Stevens’ debut novel, Ratcatcher. I discover, however, that it’s possible to take those virtues too far.

The term “Ratcatchers,” we are told, is what English spies call a top-secret, independent group that works to apprehend and eliminate secret agents who’ve gone bad. The hero of the book, John Purkiss, was an English agent until the murder of his beloved fiancée, a fellow agent named Claire. Claire was killed by yet another agent named Fallon, who was convicted of her murder. Then Purkiss left the service and was recruited as a Ratcatcher.

As the story opens Purkiss learns that Fallon has been given early release from prison, and has now been reported in Estonia. Purkiss is sent there to investigate, and soon discovers evidence of a conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism during an upcoming visit by the Russian president.

I can’t deny that Ratcatcher is an exciting book. My problem with it is that it reads more like a Sylvester Stallone movie than a novel. Because of the very nature of cinema, an audience will swallow a lot of improbabilities that the more contemplative environment of reading makes it harder to accept. Just as in a movie, the principal characters here suffer severe, repeated physical trauma without much loss of effective physical function. They mostly get shot at by bad shots. And their own guns never seem to run out of bullets.

I must admit, though, that there were a couple very neat plot twists at the end. And the prose itself, both dialogue and exposition, was professional.

Ratcatcher is worth reading, purely for entertainment. Cautions for language and violence. The sexual content was fairly mild.

The Western mystery story is not as rare a phenomenon as you might think. The conventions of the mystery transfer pretty well to the Wild West, and many famous mystery writers cranked out westerns as well, back in the days when you could make a living writing for the pulps.

Contemporary author James D. Best carries on this tradition with his Steve Dancy stories. Steve is a former gun shop owner from New York City, transferred to the west where, although his primary concern is business, he has made a reputation as a gunman. I thought this approach added freshness to the whole enterprise. We often forget that cowboys shared a country and a time with men like Thomas Edison and Cornelius Vanderbilt, but Steve Dancy straddles both worlds.

Murder at Thumb Butte starts in Carson City, Nevada, where Steve and his friend Jeff Sharp are arguing about where to go next. Steve wants badly to go to Prescott, Arizona. There’s a man in Prescott who has some stock certificates, worthless in themselves, which could cause difficulty for Steve in a project he’s contemplating—using Tom Edison’s electric light to illuminate mines. Unfortunately, Jeff already knows this man, who once slandered him in the vilest way possible. When they get to Prescott, Jeff loses little time in punching his old enemy and telling him he’ll kill him next time he sees him. When the man is found murdered the next morning out near Thumb Butte, with Jeff’s own rifle lying next to the body, he’s arrested for the murder by Constable Virgil Earp, and Steve has to set his mind to clearing his friend. With the help of another friend, Pinkerton agent Joseph McAllen, who comes to town with his daughter Maggie and a married couple who are also operatives, he sets about that project. Continue reading Murder at Thumb Butte, by James D. Best →