Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘If She Wakes,’ by Michael Koryta

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Abby had been on the fringes of the PI game only a few months, but already she understood what sustained the profession: people lied, and people were stupid.

I am, and have never concealed it, an unreconstructed male chauvinist. For this reason I avoid action novels with female protagonists – I don’t like to see women put in harm’s way.

In spite of that, I bought Michael Koryta’s If She Wakes, just because he’s such a fine writer, and I seem to have run through all his male protagonists for the present. And I can report that it’s a superior, intensely gripping novel.

Tara Beckley is a student at a New England college. She’s assigned to drive a visiting dignitary to his lecture, but he unaccountably insists on taking a detour. Then an auto accident happens. When Tara next awakens, she’s in a hospital, coming out of a coma. She sees, hears, and understands everything going on around her. But no one can tell, because she cannot move any part of her body. She’s “locked in.” To her horror, as she listens, her family discusses turning off her life support. Suddenly, her only hope is in her protective, gratifyingly stubborn older sister.

Abby Kaplan is a former race driver who transitioned to Hollywood stunt work. Life was great until one driving mistake left her movie star boyfriend dead. Now she’s phobic about driving. A friend got her a job as an insurance adjustor, and she’s assigned to examine Tara’s accident scene. But something’s wrong there. The driver’s account doesn’t match the evidence. She does not know that her assessment is very important to a particular group of people, people who will spare neither money nor human lives to get hold of a particular object, an object whose location only the paralyzed Tara Beckley knows.

If She Wakes was an extremely good thriller, full of twists and surprises; the kind of story where we fear for the protagonists even as we root for them to overcome their obstacles and grow as human beings. Well worth reading, with cautions for the usual things.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mystery Explosion,’ by Ed Benjamin

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The mundane title should have tipped me off. Mystery Explosion is actually a novella, the first installment in a series of four books (to date), entitled Bulverde Beat, after the Texas community where the stories are set.

The main characters are Harry Miles, a private investigator, and Luke Remington, police detective, who sometimes hires Harry as a consultant.

A female county prosecutor is killed in a heater explosion in her home. Harry is immediately suspicious – the “accident” was suspiciously timed, and he suspects the victim’s husband from the get-go.

But the story proceeds (commendably) in proper procedural fashion, as Harry and Luke question various witnesses and suspects, gradually eliminating false assumptions.

I didn’t mind the story as such – I like the procedural approach, and this narrative seemed (to this amateur) relatively realistic.

My problem was with the writing. The author isn’t a bad wordsmith, but he needs to learn to cut text. He talks too much – throws verbiage at an idea rather than selecting the exact words he wants. He runs up long lists of redundancies in some places.

Also, he hasn’t learned how to use quotation marks. Tip: When a character’s speech goes on for several paragraphs, you omit the closing quotation marks at the ends of the interior paragraphs. This tips off your reader to the fact that the character has not stopped talking yet. It saves a whole lot of confusion.

A further sin is that the characters are almost never physically described.

Mystery Explosion wasn’t awful, and it had the virtue of being pretty short. But I can’t recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Eddie’s Boy,’ by Thomas Perry

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He had lived a life without being aware of species loyalty, partly because at no time after he was fifteen had he been confident of living for long.

The hero of Eddie’s Boy by Thomas Perry calls himself Michael Schaeffer, but that’s not his real name. As a teenager, he was adopted by a man named Eddie, a butcher. It turned out Eddie was a butcher in more ways than one – he carried on a profitable sideline as a professional killer for organized crime. Eddie began teaching Michael that trade, discovering that the boy had a natural gift for it. He’s a born fighter and marksman. After Eddie was gone, Michael did well as a freelancer, killing bad men for the highest bidder, until one gangster double-crossed him. Michael matter-of-factly set that wise guy up for a murder rap, then left the country. Now he’s happily married to a British noblewoman.

Except that, from time to time, somebody recognizes his face. The word gets back to the U.S., and somebody comes to kill Michael. Then he has to take care of business.

In this fourth installment in the Butcher’s Boy series, men have shown up at Michael’s English home, to kill him and his wife. He handles them, but his wife persuades him to try disappearing instead of retaliating, just this once. He tries getting lost in Australia, but that doesn’t work out. He’ll have to go back to the states, find out who wants him dead, and neutralize them as usual. He has a simple, straightforward method of investigation – he kills men, then studies the reactions of others.

Eddie’s Boy was a well-written book. It kept me fascinated, and moved right along. But I was uneasy with it. When I was younger, I got a lot of vicarious pleasure out of stories about remorseless killers. In my old age, I’ve grown more scrupulous. And I’ve come to believe that no one except a sociopath (see last night’s review) can kill a human without suffering some kind of trauma. So the character of Michael Schaeffer seems a little unrealistic to me.

But the story’s great. Cautions for mature content.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Sociopath Next Door,’ by Martha Stout, Ph.D.

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The prevalence rate for anorexic eating disorders is estimated at 3.43 percent, deemed to be nearly epidemic, and yet this figure is a fraction lower than the rate for antisocial personality.

I’m thinking of incorporating a sociopathy (how do you pronounce that word, anyway? Emphasis on the third or fourth syllables?) theme in my next novel. So I bought a book on the topic. I read The Sociopath Next Door, by Martha Stout, Ph.D., during my Minot sojourn.

It was not comforting reading.

According to psychologists, about four out of every 100 people around us are entirely without conscience. Possess no empathy. They walk among us, they look an act no differently (or not very differently) from anyone else. And yet there’s something important missing there.

Fortunately, they’re not all Charles Mansons or Hannibal Lectors. Most of them are just annoying – they may be the overbearing neighbor who’s always calling the homeowners’ association on you, or the cellar dwelling son who just sponges off his parents, never looking for work. Many of them are extremely charming, having mastered techniques for manipulating others to get what they want. They may be serial seducers or con men or politicians. Several fictional case studies are offered in illustration here.

The bad news is that sociopaths are hard to identify. Author Stout devotes a chapter to methods of recognizing them, but – sadly – the process takes time. They need to be observed in action for a while before the telltale signs can be discerned.

I was pleased by some positive quotations from the church fathers early in the book, but less pleased by the chapter at the end discussing religious concepts, which favors eastern religions because of their emphasis on shared spiritual connections. Still, it’s interesting that contemplation of the sociopathic condition – which occasionally expresses itself in acts that can only be described as evil – leads even scientists inevitably to a consideration of the soul.

The big problem for Christians, I think, is that it seems as if the sociopaths around us are incapable of grace. They cannot repent, because they are utterly blind to sin. They would appear to be children of the devil from birth. I don’t really have a category in my theology for this.

The Sociopath Next Door was a fascinating read, and well written. But troubling.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Damned,’ by John D. MacDonald

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But the girl’s fine eyes were on his, in helplessness and in appeal. And his father had said, many times, “When you have to do something right, boy, don’t stop to count how much money you got in your pants.”

Sometimes the great John D. MacDonald just liked to play plotting games, dumping an assortment of characters down in some location together, shaking them up, seeing what happened. That’s how his early (1952) novel, The Damned, works. This book reveals interesting strata of art – on the surface, it’s a fairly standard, sexy men’s novel of the time – some tough guys, some pretty women, some discreet sex, and a fair amount of violence. But even at this early point in his career, MacDonald is mining his material for high grade ore.

On the Rio Concho in northern Mexico, a ferry gets blocked. So a string of cars headed back to the U.S., most of them driven by Americans, is left waiting in the hot sun, their occupants impatient and uncomfortable to various degrees.

There’s the businessman coming back from the first infidelity of his married life, his heart full of guilt and his floozy by his side.

There’s the pair of newlyweds, accompanied by his mother (!). The bride is beginning to realize that the guy she’s married isn’t a grownup man, and probably never will be.

A tough petty criminal, wanted for murder, uncomfortably aware that the police are on his tail.

The small-time nightclub comedian, with two country girls he’s trained as strippers. He’s beginning to suspect, uneasily, that the girls are smarter than he is.

And an expatriate American rancher, comfortable in his skin and in the sun, the only one among them who understands – or cares to understand – the Mexican people all around.

We’ll see some fighting, and some death. People will be confronted with hard truth, about themselves and others.

Oddly, the story is left kind of open-ended. The author leaves it to the reader to ponder where these people will end up down the road, once the ferry is running again. And the narrative is framed by the simple life of a local man, as different from that of the Americans as a space alien’s would be – but a valuable life, good in its own way.

There was a remarkable moment in The Damned that moved me a great deal. A rare moment in a MacDonald book, as he rarely deals with issues of faith (except for one novel which I’ve avoided). A couple of the characters – ones you’d never expect – break out into singing the old hymn, “I Love to Tell the Story.” The reactions of the listeners are instructive.

The Damned is 1950s pulp literature that rises above its genre. Recommended, with cautions for adult themes.

Non-fiction, Reviews

A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady

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The publisher’s presentation of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, treats it as an account of the remarkable rescue of the majority of Denmark’s Jewish population in World War II. That’s slightly misleading. This book is in fact a brief history of the whole Danish resistance.

As occupied nations went, it must be admitted that Denmark enjoyed a relatively easy war. The first western European country to fall to German assault, it was prevented by both unpreparedness and geography from making an effective defense. The Nazis steamrolled Denmark.

In consequence, the conquerors took the opportunity to pretend that their occupation was a friendly one, a kindly older sibling protecting his Aryan brother from the evil British.

So the German occupation operated with a somewhat lighter hand there than in other countries. Denmark was allowed to mostly police itself… for the present. Its Jews were left alone… for the present.

This situation provided opportunities for anti-Nazi Danes to organize a resistance network and carry out some limited sabotage. This underground network would prove crucial in 1943, when the Germans, increasingly desperate and “doubling down on stupid” as the war went against them, began to suppress Danish freedoms and demand cooperation in solving “the Jewish problem.”

Without going into too many details, it’s worth noting that 95% of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews were safely spirited away to neutral Sweden (which deserves credit as well for its willingness to receive them).

Things “got real” at that point. The occupation became genuine, brutal oppression. The resistance and the reprisals quickly got serious, bloody, and tragic.

If the Danes are sometimes chided for their quick surrender, and for their “easy” wartime experience, they also deserve credit for saving a larger proportion of their Jewish population than any other occupied country. No one can take that honor away from them.

I recommend A Light in the Northern Sea. The writing had a few glitches, but all in all it’s readable and highly interesting.

I was also pleased that the town of Horsens in Jutland, from where my own Danish ancestors hailed, occupies a prominent place in the story of the resistance.

Fiction, Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien Translated Beowulf? Of Course, He Did

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New YouTuber Gavin the Medievalist breaks down what he found in Tolkien’s translation and commentary of the Old English epic Beowulf and whether you should be reading it in 2025.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Foreclosure,’ by S. D. Thames

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She wiped her eyes, smudging more grime around her eyes. “I remember when you started here out of law school. You seemed different than the others.”

“I take that as a compliment.”

“But you’ve changed, David.”

“I’ve grown up.”

She shook her head. “You’re really just like them now. And they’ll own you soon. Once you make partner, they’ll own you.”

Browsing through my old reviews, I found one of my posts on the novels of S. D. Thames, all of which I had enjoyed quite a lot. I realized I hadn’t read any of his books in a while, so I did a search on Amazon. Turned out he hasn’t put out any more of his Milo Porter novels, but there was a stand-alone I hadn’t read, from way back in 2015 – Foreclosure. I read the book and it impressed me. Think John Grisham, but darker and grittier.

David Friedman is a tough, scrappy Jersey boy, fighting to make partner as a real estate lawyer with a big South Florida firm. As the book begins, he’s furious at being denied a promised partnership. It’s the bad economy, his bosses say.

But one of them offers him a deal – acquire real estate developer Frank O’Reilly as a client. O’Reilly is facing big litigation over a condominium foreclosure, and if David can bring him in and win the case by the end of the year (2007), he’ll get his partnership.

Of course, Frank O’Reilly is the slimiest developer in all of Florida (which is saying a lot), crude and corrupt and cruel-minded. But David knows he can deal with that. If he has to make some ethical compromises, tell a few lies, even ruin a few lives, that’s all part of the game.

But he has no idea what this case will cost him, nor how close it’ll bring him to losing not only his career, but his very life. Not to mention his soul.

Foreclosure is a Christian novel, but of the better sort – better than my novels in the sense that the Christian message is implied, not baldly spelled out. It is, sadly, the kind of book that often fails to please the Christian audience, due to frank language and dark topics. The kind of book Andrew Klavan is writing today, with greater success.

I assume that Foreclosure didn’t sell well, because author S. D. Thames seems to have switched to the light Milo Porter series, and doesn’t seem to have done any publishing at all since before 2020.

I hope he’s all right.

In any case, Foreclosure is an excellent legal thriller for the mature reader. There are occasional rough spots in the writing, but overall I liked it a lot, and recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘So Cold the River,’ by Michael Koryta

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Artifacts of their ambition. Only through study of those things could you truly understand people long departed…. The reality of someone’s heart lay in the objects of their desires. Whether those things were achieved did not matter nearly so much as what they had been.

Eric Shaw, hero of Michael Koryta’s So Cold the River, is a failure in life. That’s his view of himself, and he confirms it constantly by self-sabotaging. He was a rising cinematographer in Hollywood, until he lost his temper and made himself radioactive in the industry. Now he’s home in Chicago, subsisting through making memorial films for funerals. He recently succeeded in driving his wife away too.

A wealthy woman, impressed with one of his films, offers him a well-paying project. She’d like him to go down to Indiana to research the early life of her father-in-law’s father, a very rich man who was always secretive about his origins. It’s supposed to be a gift.

Eric goes down to the area of French Lick, Indiana, where he finds two towns, each with surprisingly lavish old hotels, relics of the 1920s, when the area was a popular location for spas. It was famous for its mineral water, which connects to the only artifact Eric’s client was able to offer him as a clue to the old man’s story – a bottle of cloudy water, bottled back in the glory days.

Eric makes one major mistake. As an experiment, he drinks some of the old water to treat a headache. First it makes him deadly sick. Then he starts seeing vivid visions of the past. Before long, Eric realizes the water is addictive – and he only has a limited supply.

Meanwhile, an elderly widow in the area is watching the sky. She’s been a weather tracker for many years, and she can tell a very unusual storm system is approaching.

I feel I’m doing a bad job describing how very well So Cold the River works. It reminded me (if I may be forgiven for the comparison) to my own novel, Wolf Time – though I fear Michael Koryta has done a better job here of constructing an epic urban fantasy/ghost story. (You can even find Christian themes if you like, though I’m not sure they’re intended. I was particularly impressed by the way the story treats one particular, unexpected hero.)

It’s a very cinematic story, and indeed it has been made into a movie – though (surprise, surprise) they gender-swapped most of the main characters.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed So Cold the River very much. I recommend it highly.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Napoleon: A Life,’ by Paul Johnson

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But whereas Bonaparte wore his hat square on, Wellington put the ends fore and aft. Why? Wellington liked to raise his hat, out of courtesy and to return salutes. Bonaparte rarely raised his hat to anyone.

So I had picked up a mystery novel, one of those e-books you can get through free offers. The description called it “a gripping thriller.” (They all say they’re “gripping” these days. The word “gripping” has become a meaningless annex to the article “a.”) The book proved to be as gripping as an empty cotton glove. The hero meandered through his days, having breakfast, lunch, and dinner with his girlfriend (we were helpfully informed exactly what they ate on each occasion), discussing business with his partner, and occasionally seeing reports on TV about the murder which – one assumes – would eventually become interesting. I gave up on that book.

Then I turned to the late Paul Johnson’s Napoleon: A Life (part of the Penguin Lives series), and found there all the drama and excitement I’d missed in the “gripping thriller.”

The Penguin Lives books are short by design, and Paul Johnson’s particular talents as a historian suit the format perfectly. He was a master of the broad brush (and, frankly, the drumhead verdict). Napoleon’s life is one of the most epic in history, and the reader of this book is swept up – and horrified – to observe its progress.

Bonaparte (he rarely used his first name, and Johnson accordingly calls him Bonaparte most of the time) was the scion of impoverished minor nobility on the island of Corsica, ruled in those days by the French. He benefited from being the right man in the right place at the right time, a soldier exquisitely equipped to rise in the chaos that was about to descend on France. Bonaparte had a natural genius for maps and mathematics, enabling him to plan campaigns and strategies with remarkable prescience. His approach to tactics, on the other hand, was simple, based on dividing the enemy, softening them up with artillery, and taking the offense. These qualities worked well for him… until they didn’t anymore.

I personally have never liked Napoleon. Among other matters, I blame him for the British blockade of Norway, which caused untold suffering. Author Johnson and I are entirely compatible on this point – Johnson has little good to say about the man. He caused the loss of “four or five million lives,” left his country more or less as distressed as he found it (though smaller in population), and provided the model for every tyrant of the 20th Century, from Hitler to Mao.

He has his admirers, and many books exist to serve the needs of such readers. But for the person who (like me) has some interest in the period (and prejudice against its subject), but not enough motivation to plow through hundreds of pages of details, Napoleon: A Life offers a vivid and entertaining introduction to a life which, whatever you think of it, was undeniably important.