Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lost Man’s Lane,’ by Scott Carson

Leave a comment

“Sure,” Noah said. “But to be any good, it takes time and it’s humbling. Anything worth doing in life meets that criteria. Detective work has one essential requirement: a willingness to admit that you might be wrong. Being observant and quick on your feet is nice, but self-doubt is mandatory.”

What an exceedingly fine book this was.

I didn’t actually realize what I was buying when I got Scott Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane on a discount offer. I assumed I was getting an ordinary, mundane missing person mystery. But this book is more like my Epsom novels – two parts urban fantasy and one part horror. Just enough horror to spice the mixture, but not enough to put off a wuss like this reader.

The story takes place in Bloomington, Indiana in the late 1990s. Marshal Miller is a teenager, the son of a single mother. The very day he gets his learner’s permit to drive, he’s pulled over by a policeman, a hostile man who speaks threateningly to him and writes him a ticket. Through his rear view mirror, Marshall sees a young woman in the back seat of the cruiser, wearing a tee-shirt from a local ice cream shop and crying.

No court summons arrives, so Marshall turns his attention to other things – until someone shows him a missing person’s flyer being posted around town. It shows a picture of the very young woman Marshall saw in the police car. He contacts the private investigator whose contact information is on the flyer, a genial local man who passes the information on to the police and takes him under his wing as an apprentice P.I.

Marshall is suddenly a local celebrity – but that turns sour when he makes another police report that appears to be false. Now Marshall is a laughingstock, accused of inventing hoaxes, bringing false hope to the missing girls’ family

It’s a hard time for Marshall, but he weathers the storm with the help of his mother, the girl he loves (who is unfortunately dating somebody else), the private investigator, and a couple good friends. He will be tempered in fire as he comes of age at the turn of the millennium.

Scott Carson (actually bestselling author Michael Koryta) is simply a top-notch fictioneer. If you asked me to find a flaw in Lost Man’s Lane, I couldn’t think of one. The characters are vivid and faceted. The dialogue is fast and crisp. The prose sings. And the plotting – the plot is an intricate web of threads, all of which tie up elegantly at the end. Reading this book was a delight from beginning to end.

The supernatural elements in Lost Man’s Lane bear no marks of Christian theology. The approach seems to be similar to that of Manly Wade Wellman (whose Silver John stories are referenced at one point). The book’s sexual morality doesn’t follow Christian ethics, so don’t look for that sort of story.

But overall I find no fault in Lost Man’s Lane. Wish I’d written it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Handful of Dust,’ by Evelyn Waugh

1 Comment

Tony Last, who is sort of the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, is a landed Englishman, barely managing to maintain his ancestral estate in the 1930s. His ancestral home, we are informed, has been defaced in hideous Victorian Gothic style, but he loves it. He also loves his wife Brenda and his little son John.

Over the course of this book he will lose all three of those, in various ways, and will be last seen on a feckless exploratory expedition, in search of a lost city, in the Amazon region of South America.

A Handful of Dust has a high reputation as a satirical novel. I found it a very wry book, but funny only in a mordant way. The humor is subtle (much went over my head, I’m certain) and exceedingly dark.

Perhaps later history was too much in my mind as I read. This book was written before World War II, before the British Empire dissolved, and before the Anglosphere fell into the hands of people committed to its erasure. Tony Last, the hero of A Handful of Dust, is an idealist and a romantic, which is his tragedy.

It is also the tragedy of everyone who ever loved England, if only from afar.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Kingdom of Cain,’ by Andrew Klavan

Leave a comment

The legacy of Cain is murder. It is the attempt to kill the accusing image of God within us and re-create the world in the image of the desires we mistake for ourselves.

The novelist Andrew Klavan has morphed himself (in between writing marvelous mystery stories) into a philosopher of art in recent years. His book The Truth and Beauty examined the English Romantic poets, linking their artistic strivings to the search for God. I loved that book, but had trouble understanding its ultimate point. This led me to do some theorizing of my own (I’ve posted some of my thoughts on this blog). Klavan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Cain, suggests to me that I’ve been generally on the right track.

Andrew Klavan has often mentioned wryly that one of his great fears, when he became a Christian, was that he’d become a Christian writer – the kind of writer who tells stories about a little girl who prays that God will help her find her bunny rabbit, and God obliges. Instead, he has made his uneasy way working at his proper craft, writing the kind of stories he cares about and suffering the criticism of those readers who want bunny stories.

So this book begins as a sort of apologia for realistic (even earthy) Christian fiction – an issue that matters to me as well, in my humble way. Can depictions of the darkness of life – the ugly things that evil, twisted men do to each other and to the innocent – serve to glorify God?

Klavan thinks they can.

He starts out with the ancient, original murder – that of Cain upon Abel. He describes how the spirit of Cain has passed down through history to find full expression in post-Christian thinkers and psychologists – men like Nietzsche and Freud – and de Sade. How Dostoevsky pondered such ideas, found them wanting, and brought forth brilliant, moral works of art – Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. He describes the crimes of a nondescript Wisconsin psychopath named Ed Gien, whose hideous career inspired “Psycho,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” and a score of inferior knock-offs.

Then he ponders the mysteries of creation, the fall of Man, and redemption. The book ends in a vision of what the author considers possibly the greatest work of human art – Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” an achievement that contemplates what Christians consider the greatest crime of all time – the greatest crime possible – and transforms it into sublime beauty.

Here, he suggests, is an answer to the mystery of Theodicy, the question how a good God could permit evil. The answer, Klavan suggests, cannot be parsed in logic or spoken in words. Only Beauty, a gleam of light from Heaven received by the soul, can provide answers for those who have eyes to see.

But read The Kingdom of Cain for yourself. I’m certainly going to read it again. I experienced genuine physical thrills as I followed its line of thought.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sayulita Sucker,’ by Craig Terlson

Leave a comment

Ahead, I saw the tall concrete wall painted the color of Meyer
lemons. Terminal de Autobuses was emblazoned in thick black letters. Behind the station a hill rose, half covered in foliage, with orange-roofed buildings poking their heads up like school children. The sky was painted the perfect blue, a light breeze cooled my sweaty neck, and the events of the last couple of hours faded with the distant cries of gulls.

My friend Craig Terlson was kind enough to send me an advance copy his next novel Sayulita Sucker, now available for pre-order. It’s a shorter book (a short story is appended for good measure), but features Terlson’s usual excellent neo-hardboiled prose.

Luke Fischer, our continuing hero, is a Canadian expatriate, living as a beach bum near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He subsists on the hospitality of his patron, Benno, a genial crime boss. From time to time Benno takes advantage of Luke’s size, strength, and fighting skills to help him out with various small problems.

Benno is out of town as Sayulita Sucker begins, and Luke is approached by a man who claims to be a friend of his. He has a daughter, he says, who has always been a little wild. Now she’s disappeared, and he fears she might have fallen into the hands of traffickers. He has an idea she’s being held in a town a little way north up the coast. Luke agrees to go and look, and takes a bus up. Clues lead him to another town called Sayulita, and violence ensues.

Luke is a laconic character, and his ability to handle himself in a fight always surprises me a little. He strikes me as sort of a cross between Travis McGee and Jeff Lebowski. His investigative technique mostly involves sitting in bars and hotel lounges until somebody takes offense at one of his questions and tries to kill him. The whole story had, for this reader, a kind of dream-like quality.

Quite an enjoyable story, adorned by the author’s excellent prose and dialogue. Recommended. Cautions for language.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Rage Against God,’ by Peter Hitchens

Leave a comment

If atheists or anti-theists have the good fortune to live in a society still governed by religious belief, or even its afterglow, they may feel free from absolute moral bonds, while those around them are not. This is a tremendous liberation for anyone who is even slightly selfish. And what clever person is not imaginatively and cunningly selfish?

The Hitchens brothers, Peter and (the late) Christopher, both famed journalists, were divided not only by temperament (Peter says they’d never actually been close), but by their attitudes to God. Their childhood home practiced no religion at all, and both brothers enthusiastically embraced atheism. But Peter changed his mind and joined the Church of England as an adult, a decision Christopher found inconceivable. Christopher wrote a bestselling book called God Is Not Great, arguing that religion was the root of most of the world’s evil, and Peter responded with the book I’m reviewing now – The Rage Against God.

There’s an element of spiritual pilgrimage narrative in this book, in the tradition of St. Augustine’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Then it proceeds to a well-informed critique (offered from the perspective of a former fellow traveler) of the whole modern social construct of the West, based on the ruins of Communism, which stand on the ruins of Christendom.

Peter Hitchens tells us that his first boyhood faith was British patriotism, swelled by pride in his country’s clean victory over the evil Germans in World War II. In time he would learn that that victory was not as clean as he’d been taught, and that faith died.

Then he embraced Communism. But a few years in Moscow as a journalist, observing the actual workings of that tottering monument to arrogant incompetence, disillusioned him with prejudice.

And so, with time, he came to reexamine the religious faith he’d rejected, pro forma, without a hearing. He noted that, in contrast to his brother’s rejection of the greatness of God, our present culture is based on an even less plausible premise – that Man is great. If there’s little evidence for the first, there’s no evidence at all for the second. He surveys the wrecks that surrounds us, and offers some melancholy hope, or at least a call to courage.

He also spends considerable time refuting Christopher’s argument that the Russian Soviet failure was not a failure of atheism, because Russian Communism was essentially a religion.

I can hardly deny that I found The Rage Against God a congenial read, confirming opinions I already held dear – though the author’s criticisms of the neo-cons and their nation-building wars stung a little in my own case.

To be fair, I suppose I ought to read Christopher’s book too, but I expect I won’t. It’s not as if the arguments against God are unfamiliar or hard to find – while a book like this offers – I think – fresh ideas for the majority of our contemporaries.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Lonely Heiress,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

Leave a comment

When all else fails, a Perry Mason novel is always reliable. Erle Stanley Gardner was an old pulp man who knew his craft and understood what the reader wanted. The Case of the Lonely Heiress delivers the goods, complete with a nude female corpse for cover art opportunities.

Perry Mason’s new client is the proprietor of a sleazy lonely hearts magazine, which thrives on ads (some of them even legitimate) from people looking for romance (that’s what they used to do before Tinder).

The man tells them that one of his recent ads has been getting a lot of response. The woman who bought the ad claims to be an heiress, and is looking for a young man who comes from the farm. He wants to find this woman, who is obviously a fraud. Perry agrees to put his detective Paul Drake on the case, and soon the woman is located.

Oddly enough, she turns out to be completely legitimate. And before long Perry’s working for her, and then things get complicated, and then somebody gets killed.

And it all comes down to a neat criminal plot, unraveled in the nick of time in the classic Perry Mason style.

Those of us who know Perry Mason mostly from TV don’t really know the early Mason. That Perry Mason was forever young, while actor Raymond Burr aged (and put on weight). He lacked the judge-like gravity of Burr’s interpretation. He was light-hearted, physically active, and not always strictly ethical. In this story (published in 1948) he sails pretty close to the wind in terms of his handling of evidence.

Good entertainment, The Case of the Lonely Heiress is an amusing book for occupying your time while waiting in a train station.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lethal Prey, by John Sandford

Leave a comment

I’ve enjoyed John Sandford’s Prey novels, featuring millionaire Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport, for many, many years. The books have changed with time, and Davenport, once a borderline psychopath local cop, is now a US Marshal and a settled family man who stays in law enforcement because, by his own admission, he likes shooting bad guys.

Lucas works all over the country now, but in Lethal Prey he’s called back home to Minnesota (which pleased me) due to a law enforcement crisis. Lara Grandfelt, a wealthy Minneapolis woman, has decided she wants to get her sister’s case solved. Twenty years ago, her sister Doris, an employee at an accounting firm, was stabbed to death. Her body was found in a suburban park, and examination showed that she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The investigators got the DNA, but no match was found. For years Lara has been bothering the police about the case, but now she’s decided to go public. She promises a 5 million dollar reward to anyone providing evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction.

Lucas gets teamed up again with his old friend Virgil Flowers, and, looking at all the work that will be necessary in running down old, faint leads, they decide to go public in a different way. There are a lot of true crime bloggers out there, and they’re keen to get in on the reward money. Lucas and Virgil put the word out that any private researcher who helps substantially in solving the crime will get a share of the reward. Such amateur participation will create problems of its own, but the added manpower will prove invaluable – if they can ride herd on their helpers.

They have no idea – though the reader does – who their adversary is, and it’s a formidable adversary indeed, one of the most formidable and memorable in the Prey series, I think.

Author John Sandford knows his business as few writers do, and Lethal Prey is entertaining all through. I liked that it featured no kick-butt female cops this time out, and the story didn’t involve the high level of perverse sexual cruelty many of the previous books have featured. But I was troubled by the fact that the reader is left with a sort of cliff-hanger at the end. Sandford doesn’t usually do that. Perhaps things will be explained in the next book.

Cautions for language and adult themes. Fun for grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Perfect Lawyer,’ by Gregg Bell

Leave a comment

Icarus “Ike” Thompson, hero of The Perfect Lawyer, used to be a legal superstar in Chicago. He defended high-profile criminal defendants and usually won. Then he ran up against Ursula Rush, a hard-driving prosecutor who not only beat him but humiliated him in a case in which he was personally invested. Overwhelmed and shamed, he retreated to a leafy suburb, where he now practices property law. When he interviews Abby Blum, an attractive young lawyer from Colorado, as a new partner, and she brings up criminal law, he shuts her down and almost rejects her application. But she persists, and he takes her on.

Then “Father K.” shows up. He’s a Catholic priest and a well-known social crusader. He wants Ike to defend Mia Hendrickson. a media sensation, a mother accused of setting her house on fire and burning her two children to death. She’s already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Ike wants nothing to do with the case, but we just know Father K. will get through to him in the end.

Then follows a tale of increasing drama as Ike and Abby take on what looks like a hopeless case, only gradually realizing what kind of power and corruption they’re facing. And at the prosecutor’s table, once again, will be none other than Ursula Rush.

If I were teaching a novel writing class, and a student had submitted A Perfect Lawyer as a final project, I would give them an A. The book is well-plotted, generally well written, and gripping. The prose could have been better – occasionally an overwritten line shows up: “He was burning with their insolent intimidation.” But overall the writing is good, and way better than a lot I see these days. The dialogue is sometimes kind of bookish, and could use some polishing. But I’d tell the author he showed great promise and had produced a publishable work.

I was a little disappointed that some plot threads were left loose at the end, but no doubt the next volume in the series will pick them up. I almost mistook this book for Christian fiction, because I noticed no profanity (kudos for that).

All in all, The Perfect Lawyer, though less than perfect, is pretty good.

Reading, Reviews

Profoundly flattered

3 Comments

Tonight, I brag. In a modest, spiritual way, of course.

The latest issue of my church body’s magazine, The Lutheran Ambassador, contains a review of my novel Hailstone Mountain. The writer of the review compares it to biblical narratives, saying:

He manages to make the characters both likable and realistic, simultaneously saint and sinner, wrestling against evil around them and wrestling within themselves. Their lives are raw, sometimes offensively so, but also fully human. Like the Bible, the books are not rated G, but I would rate them five stars because somehow Walker manages to make God the hero and Savior rather than the human characters.

I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that it never occurred to me before that God is the hero of the Erling books. But having that said is about the highest accolade I can think of for them.

It should be mentioned, in full disclosure, that the author of the review, Pastor Brian Lunn of Upsala, Minnesota, is a friend of mine.

But still.

[Addendum: Dave Lull informs me (to my astonishment) that this review can actually be seen online, here: Lutheran Ambassador May 2025 by Lutheran Ambassador – Issuu ]

Fiction, Reviews

‘Drowning My Sorrows,’ by Martyn Goodger

Leave a comment

The other day I reviewed Biding My Time, the first novel of Martyn Goodger’s Alan Gadd series. I was highly impressed by the originality of the concept and the quality of the prose.

Having now finished the second book (I don’t think there will be more), I fear I have to dampen my praise a little. Drowning My Sorrows was certainly an original book, but it left me baffled as to the purpose of the whole exercise.

To recap, Alan Gadd is an English lawyer. In the previous book he was working for a large Cambridge law firm. His legal expertise was top-flight, but his utter lack of social skills made him much disliked among his colleagues. His suspicious nature enabled him to detect the fact that a co-worker’s death, apparently a suicide, was in fact murder, and he was nearly killed himself in uncovering the truth. But his methods were so underhanded and cowardly that he got no credit.

As Drowning My Sorrows begins, Alan has lost that job, and is now working in the legal department of a not-very-prestigious university in Cambridgeshire. Once again he regards his colleagues and superiors as inferior to himself. He obsesses over their sexual lives, while feigning moral superiority even as he lusts after a female assistant who’s not interested in him. Once again he is universally disliked by his co-workers.

But part of his job is reviewing university business contracts, and in those he detects some genuine problems. A university-held patent is being sold off to a private corporation at what seems to him an absurdly low price. A superior appears to have granted contracts to personal cronies. Alan’s characteristic response is to set one of his underlings to asking questions, while he himself stalks people and sends anonymous e-mails to get his enemies into trouble. All the while congratulating himself on his ethical superiority.

Then someone gets killed, and once again Alan will find himself facing death.

One weakness of Biding My Time, which I neglected to mention in my review of that book, was a slow start. Author Goodger delights in setting the stage and giving us time to get to know our narrator (I won’t say hero). In this book that problem is even worse – we’re half-way through the story before the murder happens. Frankly, it doesn’t take nearly that long to get one’s fill of Alan Gadd’s company. There were many points when I was ready to drop the book in frustration, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other readers won’t be as patient as I was.

I frequently wondered, as I read, exactly how I was supposed to take the Alan Gadd stories. Sometimes I thought I was taking them too seriously – that they were meant as dark comedies and I was supposed to be laughing as Alan, again and again, falls into pits he has dug for himself through his gormless manipulations. But the ending of this book – admittedly an unexpected one – convinced me that probably wasn’t the purpose. There were moments of sympathy for Alan – we learn that he was bullied as a child and that he had concerned parents who didn’t know how to help him – but he was impossible to like, and difficult to care about.

So, taken all in all, I can’t recommend these books very highly. The author has considerable talent, but I wish he’d put his hand to something more sympathetic.