My adjustment to the world of the Kindle e-reader has brought about some changes in my reading habits. You may have noticed that I’ve been doing more negative reviews than I used to. This is because the availability of very cheap—or free—e-books has seduced me into downloading a number of books by authors I’ve never heard of. And, as Theodore Sturgeon (I think it was Sturgeon) said, more or less, “90% of everything is crap.” I’ll admit to being kinder to authors who approach me personally to review a book (sometimes I’m so kind I say nothing at all), but generally if I read dreck I call it dreck.

Wrongful Death by Andrew Price is not dreck. It has numerous flaws, but it was a book I enjoyed, and I want to encourage the author to carry on (though I suggest finding a better proofreader).

The hero of Wrongful Death is Scott Blakely, an attorney in the town of Greenfield, Pennsylvania, a dying community in the Rust Belt. He barely squeaks by financially. This isn’t helped by the fact that he has a high sense of both morality and ethics (they’re not the same thing), though he shares a practice with one lawyer who’s a sexual adventurer and another who’s an ambulance chaser with no visible principles at all.

Scott is hired by Madeline Tashard, the widow of a local psychiatrist who died under a doctor’s care in the town’s hospital. It’s a pretty clear-cut case of malpractice. But Madeline is an oddly unsympathetic widow. She suffers from partial paralysis, but bridles when anyone offers her any assistance. She treats her young daughter with noticeable coldness.

As the story unfolds, we’re able to observe Scott’s highminded (but strategically brilliant) conduct in the case, as well as a portion of the tactics and strategies of his opponents. Not only the principles, but the town itself, face disaster if some of the parties get their way. There are surprises in store, and the final resolution will be shocking but satisfying (at least it was to me).

Wrongful Death isn’t a legal thriller, in the sense of lots of violence and action. It’s more cerebral, something I appreciated. The characters were well-drawn and believable.

The writing needs some work. Author Price is under the delusion that incredulity can be indicated by pairing a question mark with an exclamation point at the end of a sentence, and that expressions of doubt, even when framed as statements, should be indicated by question marks. He needs an editor.

But he’s able to tell an exciting, compelling story without gunfights or car chases. Kudos to him.

Cautions for adult themes and language.

This one didn’t work for me. Joseph Badal’s Evil Deeds is supposed to be “based on true events.” Those true events must be the kind that are stranger than fiction, because the story failed to convince in my case.

The hero is Bob Danforth, who starts the story in 1971 as a young, married U.S. Army officer in Athens. One day while he’s at work, his little boy Michael is kidnapped by a gang of gypsies, in the pay of a communist government. This begins a long-standing (and fairly unconvincing) conflict between the Danforths and the kidnappers. They’re all thrown together again in the wake of a second kidnapping years later, the middle-aged Danforth now being a CIA operative.

The major problem with this book was too many coincidences. Instead of setting up credible plot points, author Badal just does whatever he likes to up the stakes, ignoring logic or probability. The many reversals seemed arbitrary to me, and I felt manipulated as a reader.

Badal has also not mastered his English. He uses words wrong (“hoard” for “horde,” for instance), and at one point describes the same character two different ways (I suspect he just forgot he’d used the name already).

Also, the book was too long.

I don’t give Evil Deeds high marks. Your mileage may vary. Cautions for language, violence, and sexual situations.

This will have to be a mixed review. Gary Neece’s Cold Blue is a pretty good story, taken as a story. It’s weak, however, in two areas that matter to me. One is simple writing skills—the author’s use of language. The other is a moral problem.

Cold Blue concerns a Tulsa police detective, Jonathan Thorpe, whose wife and daughter were murdered. The crime remains unsolved. Now he’s involved in the investigation of the murders of a string of gang members and drug dealers. A female FBI investigator (gorgeous, of course) comes in to take over the investigation, and suspicion soon turns to Jonathan himself. Not without reason. It’s not a spoiler (since the synopsis on Amazon.com tells you as much) that Jonathan himself is systematically taking revenge on the people responsible for the murder of his family. And his revenge soon extends to members of the police department itself.

The story moved right along, and kept my interest (the ending was pretty satisfying, with some surprises). I had to stop, though, from time to time to shake my head over amateurish infelicities of language. Subject and object confusion, as in, “Having reached a clearing, the barn loomed before him.” Homonym confusion, as in, “Thorpe identified an even smaller click of five [people].” Misuse of words, especially when falling into clichés, as in, “At the conclusion of these chases officers aren’t able to just switch off these ‘fight or flight’ chemicals; they [the policemen] are literally drug-induced.”

These are things a good editor could fix. In spite of my being part of the e-publishing world now, I miss copy editors. Continue reading Cold Blue, by Gary Neece →

Not long ago I heaped high praise on Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s police novel, Don’t Look Back. I’m sorry to say that the book I read as a follow-up, The Water’s Edge, did not live up to my expectations.

In this book, Inspector Sejer, a police detective in a town in the Oslo area, along with his assistant, Skarre, investigate the rape and murder of a small boy, found dead in a wooded area near a lake.

What makes this novel bad (in my view), and bad in a particularly Norwegian way, is what I might call the author’s considerateness. She’s considerate of everyone—victims, grieving parents, pedophiles, and policemen. She goes into everyone’s thoughts and lets them make their own cases. I approve of this to an extent—I like a villain to be three-dimensional—as long as the author remembers which side he or she is on. Fossum is willing to condemn murder, of course, but when a pedophile character complains that society just hasn’t advanced enough to embrace his particular philia, as it is now embracing homosexuality, no really strong counterargument is given. (Or so it seemed to me.) This injects a genuine creepiness into the whole enterprise.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that Fossum seems to have lost control of her characters. Sejer and Skarre, who came off as well-realized personalities in Don’t Look Back, have gotten all muddled. In their conversations, they seem to switch attitudes toward the legal system back and forth for no discernible reason.

And over all stands the fact (in which the policemen seem to take some pride) that Norway isn’t barbaric like the United States, and compassionately puts all criminals, even child murderers, back on the streets after a maximum of 21 years.

The point of it all would appear to be that we’re all equally guilty, but some of us have better luck than others. I accept that theologically (to an extent; I believe in degrees of guilt and sanctification), but in terms of the law it frankly offends me.

So consider my endorsement of Karin Fossum’s work withdrawn for the time being.

“It’s a legend, a story from the old days. If you’re out rowing and hear a splashing sound behind your boat, that’s the sea serpent rising up from the depths. You should never look back, just be careful to keep on rowing. If you pretend to ignore it and leave it in peace, everything will be fine, but if you look back into its eyes, it will pull you down into the great darkness. According to legend, it has red eyes.”

As you’re all aware, I’m very old and very wise, and therefore rarely surprised. If you’ve been following my reviews, you’ll know that although I’ve sampled several Scandinavian mystery writers (the genre has suddenly taken off in the backwash of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy), I’ve mostly not been overwhelmed with them. Too polite, too depressing, too politically correct, and usually not well translated. But when Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s Don’t Look Back showed up cheap for Kindle one day, I took a chance.

I was surprised.

This is a very good book (and the translation is one of the best I’ve seen). In my experience, female authors generally have trouble writing good male characters, but for my money Fossum nailed this one.

She grabs the reader by the short hairs from the very beginning. The novel starts with one of those police situations which anyone with a touch of human feeling has to follow with fascination and a cold clutch of fear at his heart. I won’t tell you how that turns out, but it actually leads into the real central mystery of the novel, the discovery of a dead, fourteen-year-old girl, lying naked and almost unmarked next to a mountain tarn, an isolated body of water which, according to legend, is home to a sea serpent.

Fossum’s hero is Inspector Konrad Sejer (his last name is Norwegian for “Victor”), an aging, empathetic city police detective who lives alone with his dog and mourns his late wife. As he gets to know the victim’s parents, her friends and their families, and her boyfriend, he uncovers one secret after another. There are plenty of motives and plenty of suspects, and plenty of unhappiness to go around in the small mountain town that is the story’s scene. The dead girl will not be the last person to get hurt.

Although religious questions aren’t central (Sejer is agnostic, as is almost everyone in the story—which accurately reflects Norwegian life) it’s interesting that Fossum makes Sejer’s partner, Jakob Skarre, a believer of some kind. His gentle explanation of his faith to his superior, dropped in passing, seemed kind of wishy-washy to me theologically, but (in my opinion) added depth to the whole story.

I’ve already purchased another Inspector Sejer book. Highly recommended, with cautions for language and adult themes.