Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Paper Tigers,’ by Lou Aguilar

Leave a comment

“To understand that, you’d have to be one of us. Every day, we’re told how wonderful we are by wannabees and never-weres clinging to our ladder of success. But in our gut, we know that there but for the grace of God – if we believed in God – go we. The more insecure we get, the more virtue signaling we do.”

It’s always a pleasure to read a story that turns out to be conservative. Not that I was surprised by that discovery, as author Lou Aguilar is a well-known conservative journalist. Paper Tigers is a fun book, though I’m not sure it’s entirely successful as a story.

Nick Jarrett is a studly young aspiring newspaperman from Wyoming – a conservative and a Christian. Somehow (and this is the first great improbability in this book), he has snagged an entry-level job at no less a paper than the Washington Post. (This is at the beginning of Pres. Trump’s first term. That’s not stated specifically, but the clues are obvious.) The first day in the mail room, he meets the other newbies, one of whom is Laura London, a surpassingly beautiful young woman with whom he immediately strikes romantic sparks. Unfortunately, Laura is not only a committed liberal, but already in a relationship.

But Nick is blessed with a quantity of self-confidence most of us can only dream of. He manages, not only to make time with Laura, but to ferret out more than one big Washington story. Before the book is over, he’ll be faced with a choice between losing Laura or breaking the story of a major (and shameful) political scandal.

Paper Tigers was fun to read, and the writing was pretty good. I just had trouble with what I saw as a lot of wishful thinking. Conservative guy comes to Washington, like Mr. Smith but more cynical, manages to romance the beautiful girl and successfully score off the liberals, foiling their devious plans. I wish the world were like that.

On the other hand, I have no idea what it’s like to have great confidence, or to understand how to attract women. Maybe the story is more plausible than I think.

Cautions for adult situations (Nick may be a Christian, but he doesn’t hesitate to have sex before marriage). I don’t recall much offensive language.

I suspect most of our readers will enjoy Paper Tigers. Some probably more than I did, and I had quite a good time.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Romeo’s World,’ by James Scott Bell

Leave a comment

First of all, I would like to note (with considerable pride) that there are a few review blurbs printed at the beginning of James Scott Bell’s Romeo’s World, the latest in his long-running Mike Romeo mystery series. And the very first one they use is one of mine, from this very blog, where I say that Mike Romeo is who I want to be when I get younger. This is most gratifying.

Oh, the book? You want to hear about the book too? Fine. Have it your way.

This time out, Mike is down at the beach with his new wife, Sophie, when they see a small plane crash into the ocean a little distance from shore. Mike sets out swimming and just manages to pull a young woman out of the wreckage before the plane sinks. He manages to get her to shore, and she’s in hysterics. She doesn’t want to be seen, she says. He and Sophie get her up to their house, and call a doctor for her. After the woman is cleared for health, she asks Mike to drive her to a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, then gets out and walks away.

Shortly after that, Mike is informed that the woman is dead, that she committed suicide. This makes him mad. The man who died in the plane crash was a successful real estate developer, an older man to whom she had been engaged to be married. Mike starts poking into his business, and finds plenty of secrets to be suspicious about. It goes on from there.

Mike Romeo is always fun – he’s a literate cage fighter, a seeker of beauty and virtue as well as justice. His employer and mentor, wheelchair-bound lawyer Ira Rosen, is especially fun to spend time with. I have to report that I saw the big plot twist coming, but still I fully enjoyed Romeo’s World and devoured it quickly.

Recommended, of course.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Frontiersmen: A Narrative,’ by Allan W. Eckert

Leave a comment

“We have given you a fine land, Brother, but you will find it under a cloud and a dark and bloody ground.”

When I was a little boy, my greatest hero was Davy Crockett. Still, I occasionally read a book about Daniel Boone. And in the Boone stories, I noticed they sometimes mentioned a man named Simon Kenton. Kenton was generally spoken of in the same breath with Boone, as a man greatly respected on the frontier, a skillful hunter and tracker, and a leader.

But, oddly, I never saw a story about Simon Kenton.

A couple weeks ago I caught a YouTube clip from an interview with Mel Gibson. He mentioned that he was reading a book called The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, by Allan W. Eckert, and that it was about Simon Kenton. “Ah ha!” I thought. “At last I can learn the story of this mysterious man.”

And golly – what a story it is.

Simon Kenton was born in 1755 in Virginia, the son of a poor Irish immigrant father. He was the kind of boy who skipped both farm chores and school to spend time in the woods. A tall and strong boy, he fled “to the territories” at the age of 16, believing he had beaten a romantic rival to death. To evade the law, he adopted the pseudonym “Butler,” under which he lived for many years – until he ran into someone from his home town, who informed him that not only had he not killed his opponent, but he himself was assumed dead.

Gradually his natural gifts for wilderness living made him a renowned hunter. He once rescued Daniel Boone from Indian captivity, and he was himself captured on another occasion – tortured, made to run the gauntlet several times, and finally adopted into the tribe. When he got the chance, he returned to the white settlements, where he claimed a lot of land (most of which he eventually lost) tried to run businesses (which all failed), and participated in the wars for Kentucky and Ohio – where he became a legend.

But The Frontiersmen is a plural title, and there’s a second major thread in this book. That thread follows the life of a truly remarkable man on the other side – the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. Tecumseh’s story rises to the level of true tragedy – he was, by all accounts, a man of great intelligence, decency, and leadership talent. Born into a happier situation, he might have become the founder of a nation – he came close to welding together Native American tribes from all over the continent, in an effort to drive the White Man back. It was likely a hopeless dream, but the extent of his success, even so, was astonishing.

I need to warn you that this story about the “dark and bloody ground” is indeed a dark and bloody story. Some of the cruelties described on both sides may keep you up at night (though one can’t escape the fact that it was the White Man who was the aggressor).

The Frontiersmen is written in novelistic form – the author uses imagined dialogue (always based, he says, on reliable reports – though I have trouble figuring out how he knows what a chief said to his wife in bed). The writing is generally good, not great – I caught some grammatical slips. Also there are a number of OCR misreadings in the e-book text.

Christianity is treated with great respect, which I appreciated. (Kenton, we are told, was gloriously saved in a Methodist church service as a middle-aged man.)

There’s a marvelous epic sweep to The Frontiersmen. I found it compulsive reading, and it moved me – often almost to tears. I highly recommend this book. Cautions for sexual situations and (especially) for scenes of appalling cruelty.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Blood,’ by Blake Banner

Leave a comment

Over the years I’ve picked up Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer books from time to time. I neither love nor hate them, but they are entertaining. So, I purchased Bad Blood. It filled the time.

Harry Bauer is one of many highly similar heroes starring in action series these days. Think of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man books. Harry, though an American, used to be part of the British SAS, and is now associated by (yet another) secretive, extra-governmental antiterrorist unit.

As the story begins, he has decided to follow his superiors’ advice and take some down time. He decides to go to Victoria Island, off Mauritania in North Africa. He’s been told it’s a peaceful earthly paradise.

So of course, his first evening there, he witnesses a gang shooting in which a young girl is caught in the crossfire and killed. Holding her hand as she bleeds to death, he swears vengeance. It turns out that the closure of the US border has caused drug cartels to change their supply routes, and now they’re running drugs and women through Victoria Island.

Harry then acquires some weaponry and gets to work setting one gang against the other, in the tradition of “A Fistful of Dollars” or “Yojimbo” (he acknowledges the resemblance). Having wiped out the gangsters on the island, he then proceeds to Mauritania in the style of James Bond, to destroy the secret headquarters of the criminal mastermind.

The book is full of action and entertaining. I was annoyed that the only professed Christian in the story was a major idiot, and another more positive character promoted Buddhism. I suppose I should object more to the violence than to that, but this is an action thriller. I knew what I was signing up for.

Bad Blood was pretty much like every other book in its genre. My verdict is… so-so.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Scarlet Ruse,’ by John D. MacDonald

Leave a comment

She said, “It’s funny. You know? They’ve all said so many things so many ways, there’s nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny.”

I first read John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse back in the 1970s, when it was new. Back in those days you could look forward to a new McGee every year, and everything has gone downhill since that ended, as far as I’m concerned.

In The Scarlet Ruse, McGee, lanky, houseboat-dwelling Fort Lauderdale salvage expert, agrees to help a stamp dealer, as a favor to his economist friend, Meyer. Hersh Fedderman is an honest man with a small but lucrative business, selling stamps to collectors. But not all of his clients are necessarily honest. One in particular he suspects of being a gangster. For this man he has assembled a very valuable collection of rarities, steadily appreciating in value. He keeps the collection in a bank safe deposit box, which can only be accessed by both of them together. Yet somehow, he has discovered, the stamps have been switched out, low-value items substituted. It’s one of those impossible, locked room mysteries. Clearly someone stole the stamps, but the only people with access are the client, Hirsh himself, and his assistant Mary Alice, a long-time employee he trusts implicitly.

It’s a head-scratcher. As he ponders the problem, Trav gets close to Mary Alice, who is exactly the kind of woman he likes – big, beautiful, healthy, and cheerful. Trav is in love – but what about the crime? How was it performed?

Finding the answer to that question will nearly get him killed.

It goes without saying that I enjoyed The Scarlet Ruse. It hasn’t aged well in some ways – particularly in McGee’s musings, which are always engaging but heavily influenced here by his friend Meyer, who seems to be pretty Malthusian in his economics. (Meyer calls his houseboat the John Maynard Keynes, for heaven’s sake.) Also, Travis talks about being won over to the anti-handgun cause – even as he prepares a pistol or two of his own, which he’ll need pretty desperately before he’s done.

But you take McGee as a package, and mostly it’s a top quality package. Recommended, with cautions for violence and mature scenes and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Washington Trail,’ by Lou Aguilar

Leave a comment

Lou Aguilar, like me, writes for the American Spectator (he does it at a rather higher level, though). When he mentioned in an article that he wrote detective thrillers, I thought I’d try one. (Turns out there’s only one thriller so far.) The Washington Trail was a lot of fun. Proust it ain’t, but fun it decidedly is.

Our heroes are Mark Tristan, a former Army Ranger, and Neil Cork, a former FBI analyst, now Washington DC private investigators. Cork is a family man, but Tristan is a bachelor with a pretty flippant attitude to life. He has a car, but he likes to zip around town on a bicycle. He’s a passionate fan of old Western movies, and quotes them constantly.

A beautiful young woman comes to their office and asks them to follow her artist boyfriend and find out why he dumped her. They try to put her off, but she’s insistent. When Tristan starts shadowing the young man, he quickly discovers his secret life, which will not delight their client. But hardly has he delivered the bad news than the young man gets involved in a shooting incident, and suddenly Tristan and Cork are plunged into a three-way conflict involving secretive groups they call (of course) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

The prose in The Washington Trail is passable, but not memorable. The plot and action are, frankly, highly implausible. It’s the characters that lift this book above the level of the herd. Tristan, in particular, is brash and funny and brave, but also relatable (he’s a male fantasy figure, as so many great characters are).

There’s a twist at the end that I saw coming, but it was only one of several.

Author Aguilar is brave, but perhaps foolhardy in making The Washington Trail blatantly political. His conservatism is quite open here – though Trump and Biden are never named as such, references to “the last president” and “the current president” are made in contexts that render it impossible not to figure it out. Most authors would try to be a little more oblique, simply for the sake of potential sales. But Aguilar flies his colors proudly.

So if you’re a liberal, you probably won’t care much for The Washington Trail. But if you’re a conservative looking for a really fun action story, you’ll probably get as big a hoot out of it as I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Enemies Among Us,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

Leave a comment

A while back I read a novel by Jeffrey S. Stephens which I found entertaining and well-written. Since then I’ve read two more of Stephens’ books to see how they’d be. Enemies Among Us is part of a series starring a continuing hero named Nick Reagan.

Nick Reagan is a high-level CIA operative. One of his old enemies is an Islamist terrorist mastermind called the Handler. In Enemies Among Us, Reagan gets a chance to capture the Handler, but is ordered by his superiors to stand down. Reagan ignores those orders and manages to catch him anyway, then delivers him up in a neat package. But the Handler himself has warned him that there are traitors in the US government, and they’ll both kill him and Reagan to keep their secrets covered. For the rest of the book, Reagan fights and strategizes to stay alive, to protect his friends, and to save the country.

Was Enemies Among Us any good? I didn’t think so.

I found the prose ponderous, and the story moved (for me) very slowly. I often complain about thrillers that never give you a chance to breathe, where the protagonist shrugs off more physical damage than real humans could survive. But in this story, I felt that the action scenes were separated by endless stretches of clumsy writing. The author told us too much, and not very artfully. (He also has a tendency to misplace modifiers.)

I’m sorry to say all that, because Enemies Among Us is very explicitly conservative and pro-American. I appreciated the intention, but I was bored.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Fairytale,’ by Alan Lee

Leave a comment

Beaches feel lonely when it’s cold. The ocean is too icy to enjoy, and the breeze makes the loveliness of nature remote and hard. Beautiful but sad, like missing someone you loved.

You probably know by now that I’m in the tank for Alan Lee. His Mackenzie August and Manny Ramirez books are great fun, and what I’ve called Christian-adjacent.

Dark Fairytale, book 16 of the Mackenzie August series, springs from an earlier installment, in which Mack,  a private eye in Roanoke, Virginia, was coerced into participating in a secret, to-the-death mixed martial arts tournament in Italy (he won, of course, because he’s still alive). In the course of that adventure, his fiancée Veronica (“Ronnie”) killed a very evil woman, in Mack’s defense. Still, she’s not a killer type. It still bothers her, years later. She asks Mack to locate that woman’s family and see if there’s some way she can make amends by helping them.

Mack is happy to do it, of course, but it proves a difficult job. The woman and her husband led secretive lives and have left few traces behind. When Mack starts asking questions, he gets pushback and a gang of furries (I kid you not) try to kill him and Manny. That doesn’t stop him, of course. When he and Ronnie finally go on the road to find the family, the trail takes them to Amish country in Ohio, and on to northern Virginia. They encounter a desperately dysfunctional family, and are faced with a Solomonic choice as to whether they should help them, and how. I thought I figured out the trick author Lee had up his sleeve, but I was delighted to find that a couple deeper tricks were concealed inside it.

The prose and dialogue in the Mack August books are excellent, but I think it’s the characterization that’s best. You’ll really love this cast of characters. Mack and Manny are a hoot to spend time with, as they motivate each other through mock-macho cross-talk. There’s real (fictional) love here, and real community and real eternal values.

Dark Fairytale is highly recommended. Cautions for adult situations and rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lady in the Lake,’ by Raymond Chandler

2 Comments

The Gillerlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I think most mystery fans wish Raymond Chandler had written more Philip Marlowe books. He burned hot, like the alcohol that consumed him, but pretty briefly as an artist. The Lady in the Lake is considered neither his best nor his worst novel. It also suffers from the movie they made out of it, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth’s father). Montgomery chose to go all artsy with it, shooting the whole thing from Marlowe’s point of view, so that we only saw his face occasionally in a mirror. It’s awkward, and it doesn’t work very well. The novel deserves better than that.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman who wants him to find his wife, who has disappeared. She apparently went to their mountain lake cabin, and then traveled with a lover to Mexico, then back to Los Angeles. Then nothing. He knows she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore, but he’s concerned about her anyway.

Marlowe travels up to the mountain cabin, where he happens to witness the recovery of the body of another woman, the wife of a local, who drowned in the lake. Then the missing woman’s lover is murdered. And Marlowe realizes somebody has been lying to him.

The Lady in the Lake’s plot is a little complex (though not as confusing as some of Chandler’s other scenarios), and I thought it ended somewhat abruptly. But the prose is classic Chandler:

This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

The book also features one of my favorite Marlowe side characters, the laconic Constable Jim Patton.

The Lady in the Lake is not the best Chandler, but definitely entertaining.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Be Still My Soul,’ by S.D. Thames

Leave a comment

First things first: WHAT HAPPENED TO S. D. THAMES?

This Christian author produces a string of extremely good mystery novels, and then he just disappears. Sometime around 2018, as far as I can judge. Maybe he was a victim of Covid. Maybe he decided novel writing was too time-consuming a hobby. Maybe he’s left his legal career and become a missionary. All I know is that a web search tells me he doesn’t seem to have died.

It’s kind of like a mystery story where a detective is trying to locate a missing person, goes to his home town, and everybody denies ever knowing him.

But that’s not important to this review (except to warn you that another installment in this very good series doesn’t look to be forthcoming).

Okay, now that that’s off my chest, I’ll review Be Still My Soul, a prequel novella to the Milo Porter mysteries. It tells how our hero first got into the private eye business.

Milo is a veteran of the War on Terror, in which he enlisted to avenge his father, a victim of 9/11. He came home suffering from PTSD. He’s seeing a counselor and taking medications, but sometimes he still has hallucinations. He’s gotten a job as a process server, which brings him to a rundown, stinking house in rural Florida, where an old woman knocks him unconscious with a frying pan.

His situation gets worse when people who should know inform him that the woman who hit him does not even exist, and he must have hallucinated her. On the other hand, he meets a girl and falls in love at first sight.

The story only gets weirder after that.

I greatly enjoyed Be Still My Soul, and wish it had been a full novel. I wish there were more Milo Porter books too, or just anything from S. D. Thames.