Here’s a very good, very professional, very engaging first novel, a police procedural, from a promising writer. I enjoyed reading it, and wish the author well, but I won’t be following his work any further, for petty ideological reasons.

Tyler Dilts’s A King of Infinite Space tells the story of Danny Beckett, a Long Beach police detective. He and his partner, a Japanese-American woman who predictably has a black belt and can beat up any man, are called to a high school to view a crime scene where a pretty, popular teacher has been viciously murdered with a knife, her left hand taken as a trophy. The woman seems to have had no enemies, so suspicion immediately falls on a man she dated recently, although Danny doesn’t “like him” for the crime.

As the investigation goes on we learn about Danny’s personal demons (I love detectives with personal demons), and he and his partner dance around a growing sexual attraction, something that seems a poor idea from a professional point of view. The final reveal seemed a little predictable to me.

Although I liked the writing and was intrigued by the characters, Dilts managed to alienate me through frequent political comments. I’ll grant that Danny is supposed to be cynical and bitter, but his utter contempt for the military, for evangelical Christians, and for business sent what seemed to me a clear message about what the author thought of me, personally. So, regretfully, I won’t be stopping at his shop again.

Otherwise, a great cop story. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Here’s a book I got for free from the publisher, for reviewing purposes. They’ll probably be sorry they asked me. I didn’t hate it, but I find at the end that I don’t have a lot of good things to say about it, though I have several bad things.

Asgard Park, by Ronald Simonar, is a novel about Intelligent Design, but not the kind you’re thinking of. In the imagination of the author, there is some kind of intelligence guiding the universe and human life, but it’s not the God of the Bible. To the limited extent that it involves itself in human affairs, it does so through various Chosen Ones, born with special inherited genetic traits, and through the world-wide organization these Chosen Ones lead, the Midgard Group. Kind of like the Illuminati, but in a good way. The Norse god Heimdallr, the guardian of the gods who can hear grass grow, has had his most recent avatar up until now (now being 1991, the year when the novel is set) in a psychologist named Dr. Karl Leamus, who runs Asgard Park, an insane asylum in upstate New York. But Leamus is getting older, and the god has chosen a new vessel, a young Swedish neurologist named Birger Wallenberg who is, more or less, the hero of the book.

Dr. Wallenberg is not happy about having his brain inhabited by a heathen god (a sentiment with which I highly concur), and much of the story centers on his gradual acquiescence in the possession. It also involves an American spy and a beautiful Albanian widow who gets into big trouble with the corrupt government of her up-till-recently-Communist country. Most of the reader’s sympathy will center on her.

There’s also the rather nasty plot element of the widow’s friend, an underage prostitute with whom both the male heroes sleep (though Dr. Wallenberg, to be fair, does it unwittingly, thinking it’s someone else).

Aside from my objections to the theology of the story, and the creepy prostitute angle, I can also complain about the author’s style. Ronald Simonar is an Icelander, but he seems to have a pretty good grasp of English. Unfortunately, it’s not up to the challenge of writing a novel. He has trouble with his diction, confuses English and American slang, and sometimes doesn’t seem to know how to use a contraction. He also misses a big opportunity in his presentation of the whole back story of the Midgard Group and the business of Intelligent Design. It’s all just summarized as something Dr. Wallenberg reads about in a scholarly paper. A more dramatic reveal would have been possible, and would have improved the story.

So, although it could have been worse, I can’t really recommend Asgard Park.

But I was angry. For seven years, I had been angry. Ever since my daughter disappeared, anger was the only real emotion I carried with me and the only way that I got rid of it was through violence. I would hold it in for as long as possible, but when I found an outlet, I let it go. I’d been in more types of fights than I could count and I couldn’t recall losing one. I had yet to meet anyone who carried the kind of anger I did.

What a pleasure it is to discover a new writer who truly delivers the goods! It doesn’t happen very often. Barring unpleasant surprises when I check out his other work, I am for the moment an enthusiastic fan of Jeff Shelby, author of Thread of Hope.

Aside from writing a pretty good mystery, Shelby provides that rare pleasure, a new hero who’s entirely original, complex, human, and sympathetic.

Joe Tyler makes his living searching for lost children. In the seven years he’s been at it, he has never failed to find a child, except for one—his own daughter. She was snatched from his family’s front lawn just before Christmas, virtually under his and his wife’s noses.

The experience changed Joe forever. He left his wife, who still loves him. He left his career as a cop on Coronado Island, near San Diego, California. He looks for lost children, and has no other life. He has no relationships, and does not communicate with old friends. In many ways, he’s a jerk. He cares nothing for tact. He asks the questions that need to be asked, regardless of the feelings of the people he’s talking to. Because it’s not about human relations. It’s about finding the kids.

But when he gets a call telling him that his oldest and best friend back on Coronado has been attacked and left in a coma, and that before the attack the friend was accused of beating up a teenage girl, he sucks it up and goes home. Everything he sees and all the old acquaintances he meets open the wounds for him, but he owes this guy—and before long there’s a kid missing.

I loved this book. Every line was deeply felt. Joe Tyler is a compelling character, tragic and aggravating, yet sympathetic. The other characters are rounded too—many of them prove to be something other than they appear at first glance, always a good thing in a novel.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language and mature material.

I downloaded Steve Robinson’s In the Blood because the Kindle edition was cheap, and because I’ve always been intrigued by the kind of story where a modern investigator digs out an old mystery, through documents and (sometimes) the memories of the old.

I found In the Blood, generally, a satisfying read. It’s not in the first rank, and I have some complaints, but for a first novel it’s promising.

The hero is Jefferson Tayte, an American genealogist. There’s an irony in his career choice that he’s very conscious of—he himself is an orphan, and has no idea who his parents were. But he’s become one of America’s most successful genealogists, and when a wealthy client demands he travel to England and Cornwall to clear up a blank spot in a family tree, he does it, in spite of his terror of flying.

Once in Cornwall, he discovers the reason why information has been lacking. A lot of it doesn’t seem to exist, and he can’t locate even the graves of the highborn people he’s searching for. A noble family who should be able to help him stonewalls him. Then he starts getting beaten up, and then there’s a murder and a kidnapping, and the whole thing gets out of hand.

Parts of the book didn’t work for me. Jefferson is described as tall but a little fat, and he doesn’t give any impression of physical courage. Yet he chooses to keep dangerous facts he learns to himself rather than going to the police, for reasons that seem inadequate to me (hey, I know how cowards think!). And his final act of heroism seems contrived, far-fetched, and too lucky by half.

Also the back-story, the account of the original crime that created the mystery, presented both in the form of old documents and in scenes narrated from the omniscient point of view, struck me as both too neat and too messy. Too neat in the sense that everything is solved by what I call “a Castle Aaaargh document” (hat tip to Monty Python and the Holy Grail), in which someone takes time in the midst of a moment of deathly danger to leave a written record for later investigators to discover. Too messy in that it involves several deaths of innocent children, with more detail than I care to be given.

There was also a moment when Tayte meditated on the causes of good and evil, and confidently ascribed them mostly to genetics. I find that jejune, but others may disagree.

Still, I think Mr. Robinson is a promising novelist, and if this kind of story appeals to you, I recommend it moderately.

I thought I’d take another run (savage or not) at C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels. I didn’t dislike Open Season, the first book in the series, but I wasn’t bowled over by it either. My response to Savage Run is about the same. Entertaining enough, but it never caught me completely. I think there are two reasons. One is the main character, Joe Pickett. Joe is such a nice, easygoing guy that I just hate seeing put through the wringer as these stories do. I generally like my heroes with bigger teeth.

The second reason, I suspect, is just because they’re outdoor books. As you know if you’ve followed this blog, I’m no outdoorsman. I just don’t identify with people who know how to handle themselves in a forest.

Both these objections—if objections they are—are entirely irrelevant, I think. These very elements are probably among the ones that animate Box’s many fans. Very likely you’re one of them.

Anyway, in this story a radical environmentalist, Stewey Woods, is the victim of a booby-trapped cow, which he encounters in a national forest while he’s out on a tree-spiking expedition. Although everyone assumes Woods was the victim of his own clumsiness while sabotaging a private herd grazing on federal land (one of his eco-causes), game warden Joe Pickett is puzzled by the evidence at the scene. Digging deeper, he crosses a powerful local rancher, and finally comes under the gun of a very dangerous man, a “stock detective” in the mold of the legendary Tom Horn.

Author Box squares the circle pretty neatly in this book. There’s a definite critique of environmental extremism here, but while one of the main Green characters is stereotypically vapid and otherworldly, another comes off as rather admirable. The main bad guy is a big rancher, although I don’t think he’s meant to be typical of that class either.

So it’s a pretty good book, though not among my favorites. I’ll probably read another eventually. I’ve heard an interesting supporting character is due to appear somewhere along the line.

Cautions for language and gore.

I think it’s safe to assume that Norwegian author Gunnar Staalesen, author of The Writing On the Wall, has issues with evangelical Christians. Early in this book two characters, a cross-dressing judge who dies in bed with an underage prostitute, and a Bergen organized crime kingpin, are both identified as members of the “Christian People’s Party” (usually translated “The Christian Democratic Party”), the traditional party of conservative Christians in Norway. (Did you know that evangelical Christians control organized crime in Bergen? I didn’t either, but that’s the impression Staalesen leaves.)

I’ll have to admit he fooled me, though. With an opening like that, I took it for granted that the perpetrator of the murder at the center of this story, the death by asphyxiation of a teenaged girl, would be the evangelical crime boss. As it turned out he wasn’t guilty of that, though he was guilty of plenty of other things.

Staalesen’s hero, private detective Varg Veum (the last name’s pronounced VAY-oom), is apparently supposed to be a kind of Norwegian Philip Marlowe, tough and wry and world-weary. I didn’t get that at all, frankly, until a fight finally happened, and Veum turned out to be able to take care of himself, to my surprise. I’d imagined him kind of effete based on his earlier behavior, especially his interest in describing women’s clothing, and home furnishings, in loving detail.

But I may have missed some narrative hints that could be present in the original and lost in translation. The translation here is of that maddening variety that’s technically irreproachable, every phrase literally correct, but tone-deaf in terms of style and nuance, so that the characters speak as no English speaker ever would, mixing formal diction with British slang. All the characters talk the same way, and are equally unconvincing.

Hey, Norwegian publishers! Are you looking for an English translator? I can do better than this guy!

Anyway, it was all fairly unrewarding, especially for evangelical like me. I’m pretty sure Staalesen doesn’t want my business, and he won’t be getting any more of it.

Cautions for language and adult themes.

Dan was laughing. At least that chuckling murmur was near to a laugh. Yet there was no mirth in it. It had that touch of the maniacal in it which freezes the blood. Silent halted in the midst of his rush, with his hands poised for the next blow. His mouth fell agape with an odd expression of horror as Dan stared up at him. That hideous chuckling continued. The sound defied definition. And from the shadow in which Dan was crouched, his brown eyes blazed, changed, and filled with yellow fires.

If the passage above, taken from Max Brand’s novel The Untamed, seems a little turgid to you, I am in agreement. The book was free for Kindle, and I’d never read any Brand, so I thought I’d give him a try. I don’t think I’m going to be a fan. The prose is labored, and dialogue (though the slang is probably authentic, since the author actually worked as a cowboy for a while) clunks like a counterfeit double eagle.

And yet… considering how literary tastes change, I could see how this could have been an extremely popular book in its time. There’s a mythic quality to it, especially toward the climax, where the image of a mysterious rider in the dark, whistling a weird melody as he approaches with death in his hands, evokes a scene that could have inspired Sergio Leone. Continue reading The Untamed, by Max Brand →

I’ve always had a fondness for tales of early Hollywood. It was an amazing time and place in history, in a sense the culmination (as author Loren D. Estleman himself argues in this novel) of the American Wild West. There, in the dusty hills of sleepy Los Angeles, a dysfunctional aggregation of eastern Jewish businessmen, stage actors, vaudevillians, European artistes, and ordinary cowboys improvised like mad to create an art form that had never existed before, and so had no rules or traditions to which to appeal.

Loren D. Estleman is best known as a mystery novelist, but he also writes good westerns, and The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association contains elements of both genres. It’s a fun book, and I enjoyed it quite a lot.

Presented in the form of three long flashbacks, interspersed with vignettes describing the main character’s (and Hollywood’s) later history, TRMMPA tells the story of Dmitri Pulski, who when we meet him in 1913 is working for his father, an ice merchant with an operation in northern California. His father, who has received a huge order for ice from the titular Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association, has grave doubts about the likely solvency of such an enterprise (“Moving pictures are a fad,” he explains, “but people will always need ice.”). So he sends Dmitri south, along with a Russian immigrant co-worker, in a Model T to investigate. Continue reading The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association, by Loren D. Estleman →