‘It’s an historian’s duty to uncover, not to judge.’ He lit his pipe. ‘Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.’

This snippet of dialogue is delivered by one of the characters in the novel The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø. I’m having trouble deciding exactly what to think about this book, but that passage seems to me about as close to a statement of the author’s world view as I can find (I may, of course, be entirely mistaken). Nesbø seems to believe that moral choices are extremely important, but who’s to say what the right ones are? Continue reading The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo →

I’ve written about the Lew Fonesca books before, perhaps my favorite of the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s detective series. It occurs to me that my personal fondness for Lew may rise in part from the fact that he’s a fellow depressive, and that some readers may be put off by that. Perhaps it should be noted that although the hero of these books is a depressive, the books are not necessarily depressing. There’s a lot of comedy here (some of it pretty black), and wry humor. Lew is sad, but he knows when he’s being ridiculous.

In any case, I want to do what I can to raise Kaminsky’s profile in the world, while some of his books are still in print. They’re worth reading.

Denial begins with Lew locked in the office which is also his home, refusing to speak to any of his friends. Finally his therapist talks her way in, persuading him to tell her what’s kneecapped his spirits even more than usual.

The body of the story is his account of two detective jobs he was hired for (Lew isn’t actually a private investigator. He’s a retired prosecutor’s investigator from Chicago, now eking out a living as a process server in Sarasota, Florida. But people keep bringing problems to him). One job is a serious one, trying to find out who fatally ran down a teenage boy with a car. The other is almost comic—a lady in a nursing home insists she saw someone murdered in one of their rooms, and wants him to prove she’s not senile.

Lew sets about the jobs in his usual quiet, methodical way, with his friend Ames McKinney, a latter-day Gary Cooper from Texas, providing backup and bodyguard service.

Feathers will be ruffled. Secrets will be uncovered.

People will die.

In the end, Lew makes a life-changing resolution. I’m going to order the next book tonight, because I really want to find out how that goes.

Highly recommended.

Author Stephen J. Cannell explains, in his Acknowledgments at the beginning of At First Sight, that he came up with the idea for the book while reading Andrew Klavan’s interesting and risk-taking novel, Man and Wife. He decided he needed to take some risks of his own in novel-writing, and so sat down to write a book different from his usual output. The result is nothing like Man and Wife, but it’s entertaining (and valuable, I think) in its own way.

The main character and primary narrator is Chick Best, a California dot com millionaire. He has a beautiful home, expensive cars, a beautiful wife and daughter. At first he seems a decent, amusing guy, too, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.

But gradually the picture darkens. His business is on the downslide, and he blames everyone but himself. He’s sick of his wife, and his daughter is a disaster waiting to happen (he never wonders why). He’s living far beyond his means, desperately trying to sustain the exterior trappings and the envy of others that, he imagines, are all that make life worthwhile.

While on a vacation in Hawaii, he and his wife meet Paige Ellis and her husband, and Chick is bowled over. Paige is naturally beautiful and sweet, in a way that his wife, for all her expensive physical training, can’t match. After they return to their separate homes, Chick can’t stop obsessing about Paige. Continue reading At First Sight, by Stephen J. Cannell →

If there was ever an author whose work I ought not to enjoy, it would be the late Stieg Larsson. A Swedish journalist whose field of concentration was right-wing and “hate” groups, he was (as far as I can determine from net research) a lifelong, devoted Communist.

And yet I loved his first mystery, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I snapped up The Girl Who Played With Fire as soon as it came out in paperback, zipping through its 724 pages in a couple days.

I think it’s a case of “the enemy of my enemy.” Both I and the author view contemporary Sweden as an unsatisfactory country, but from opposite viewpoints.

The central character of this book, even more than of the first in the series, is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliantly realized character. Lisbeth is a tiny young woman, often mistaken for a teenager, multipally tattooed and pierced (though we’re told she’s removed one tattoo now, and stopped wearing most of her studs and rings). She’s an off-the-charts genius who works on Fermat’s Last Theorem in pencil, in a notebook, in her spare time. She’s also a world-class computer hacker, skilled in self-defense, socially inept, and slightly crazy, having been the victim of horrendous betrayal and abuse as a child—a history that forms an important element of the plot of this book. Continue reading The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson →