It’s true enough that John Sandford’s Prey series of mystery/thrillers is getting a little long in the tooth. Anyone who compares the early books with the later ones (like Storm Prey) will immediately notice that the hero, Minnesota state policeman Lucas Davenport, is now a very different man from the younger millionaire-cop who was so good at hunting down psycho killers because he was a borderline psycho himself. Today Lucas is a happy husband and father, generally purged of his personal devils.

But author John Sandford (actually John Camp) knows there are more ways to engage the reader than train-wreck psychological voyeurism. In Storm Prey, Lucas’ wife, surgeon Weather Karkinnen, is involved in the high-risk separation of a pair of Siamese twins when she happens to see a particular Emergency Room doctor in a part of the hospital where he doesn’t properly belong. She thinks nothing of it at the time, but when the drug theft that doctor has plotted goes sour and a hospital worker is murdered, the doctor and his accomplices hire a sociopathic skinhead called Cappy to murder her. Fortunately he fails in the first attempt. But Weather refuses to go into protective custody until the surgery (delayed due to heart problems in one of the twins) is completed. So Davenport and his team set up around the clock protection for her while trying to identify and locate the criminals. By engaging our sympathy for the twins and their family along with our concern for Weather’s safety, Sandford expertly keeps the dramatic tension at a high level. A typically nasty stretch of Minnesota winter weather doesn’t make things any easier either. Continue reading Storm Prey, by John Sandford →

A few years ago, the purveyors of crime, the crimemongers of the world, came face to face with Vancouver’s self-absorbed detective, Joe LaFlam, in the book, Bye Bye Bertie. Joe has returned for another attempt to steer an unsuspecting babe away from her potentially crime-laced life and to get the real bad guys. My Fear Lady picks up where the first novel left off. Joe is unfortunately wealthy, driving a limousine while he pursues pedestrians, and the wicked cabal of soon-to-be world dominators, Spelunkers Global, has kidnapped some innocent young man in order to keep him from his girlfriend. None of that, however, is enough to distract Joe from worrying about being afflicted with celibacy, mentoring his older collegues, and how he can save the world and his family’s fortune.

There are many things going for this story, but there are several things going against it too. It’s funny, and many plot points are well written. The conclusion is perfect, but getting there is a bit of a long. If Joe’s mental ramblings get old too soon, the story will drag. The story pokes fun at many pop Christian ideas as well, so you may have a sacred cow BBQ somewhere here. Overall, I thought the story could use more complication and more straight-forward humor. I appreciate Rick sending me this book, and I wish him the very best.

My review of Hal Colebatch’s Counterstrike is up at The American Spectator Online.

I remember there was a copy of Prester John in the library of my childhood elementary school (something which wouldn’t happen nowadays, for reasons which will appear). Its cover, as I remember it, featured a painting in the style of N. C. Wyeth (perhaps one of Wyeth’s own) of a bound white man being led across the African veldt by a black man on a horse. My tastes in those days didn’t run to African stories, so I gave it a pass. But in the years since then I’ve become a Buchan enthusiast, and when I found it for free in a Kindle version I snapped it up.

John Buchan was one of the inventors of the modern thriller novel, elevating the genre from the level of earlier (and excellent in their own way) writers like H. Rider Haggard to new realism, seriousness, and economy of language. His most famous work is The 39 Steps, adapted out of all recognition by Alfred Hitchcock, but he wrote other excellent novels. I’m particularly fond of the Richard Hannay books.

Prester John is not part of that series. It will never be widely popular again because, fine as it is purely as a story, it strongly promotes attitudes toward race which are (rightly) offensive to the modern mind. Continue reading Prester John, by John Buchan →

I picked up Open Seasonbecause Hugh Hewitt recommends the author, C. J. Box. It was an enjoyable enough read, but I wouldn’t put Box in the first rank of mystery writers. Maybe it’s just because I’m such a tenderfoot, not sharing the author’s love of the great outdoors (though I like Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novels, which have plenty of fresh air, very much).

Joe Pickett, the hero, is a game warden in Wyoming. It’s what he’s always dreamed of doing, but things aren’t going smoothly. The pay is low and he has a wife and two daughters to support (another child on the way). On top of that, he makes a couple “bonehead moves” early on, like ticketing the governor for fishing without a license and (this is how the story starts) allowing a poacher to take his revolver away from him.

Still, he believes he’s getting the hang of things when the same poacher who took his gun away shows up one morning, shot dead on Joe’s wood pile. The only clue to his murder is a cooler containing the scat of unknown animals. Then two other “outfitters” are found murdered in a mountain camp, and Joe and two other officers get into a gun fight with the presumed killer. Continue reading Open Season, by C. J. Box →

This must perforce be the last Flashman book by George MacDonald Fraser, as the author died in 2009. (I wonder if there’s been any talk of another writer taking up the mantle. I wonder if another writer could do it properly. We’ve all been waiting a long time for Flashman’s Civil War adventures, which in terms of pure chronology would almost immediately precede this story.)

When we join Sir Harry Paget Flashman at the beginning of Flashman On the March, he’s desperately attempting to get out of Trieste, where he recently arrived as a refugee following a stint as an officer of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (poor Maximilian!). He runs into an old acquaintance, a British diplomat who is trying to find someone to protect a shipment of silver to Suez, for delivery to Gen. Robert Napier. Napier is buying support from various African tribes against King Theodore of Abyssinia (today known as Ethiopia). Theodore, who Flashman will come to describe as the maddest monarch he ever met—which is saying a great deal–has kidnapped a number of Europeans, and Napier is leading a relief force. Continue reading Flashman On the March, by George MacDonald Fraser →

One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle.

Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (re-released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?)

You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here?

Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and fairly low humor).

The unnamed hero’s initial challenge is to convince a girl he’s never met—a girl he knows only through the television screen—that he’s not insane. A resident of a Manhattan apartment, he’s fallen in love with Holly Servant, a model/exercise instructor on a cable TV show out of California. He writes her erudite, impassioned love letters, not really expecting a response, but desperately hoping she’ll at least read them and bestow on his passion the dignity of her recognition.

When she eventually does reply, he attempts to impress her by assuming the Mark Goldblatt (fictional in two senses) identity.

“But since you’ve inquired, I will confess that I am in fact a journalist. It’s a point of considerable humiliation for me. For what is a journalist except a liar in denial? Truth is the single greatest threat to my livelihood, the sword poised eternally overhead, for if ever the reader asks himself, Should I trust the words? then I am lost.”

Meanwhile, the narrator comes under suspicion in the murder of a male prostitute in his neighborhood, and is questioned by a detective named Lacuna (I kid you not).

And his friend Zezel (their relationship just skirts the edges of homoeroticism, but this may be because the narrator actually is Zezel. Or perhaps he does exist, and the narrator doesn’t. Zezel sometimes sneaks into the narrator’s apartment, turns on his computer, and enters falsehoods [or are they?] into the manuscript, another layer of uncertainty in the narrative) is having an affair, and his spurned wife throws herself at the narrator.

Sloth is a wickedly funny, challenging and brilliantly written novel by an author of rare wit and creativity. Great fun for sophisticated readers (hey, I enjoyed it, so you don’t have to be all that sophisticated). Cautions for language and sexual situations.