I picked up Vengeance at a used book store, thinking that it was one of the few Lew Fonesca novels I haven’t read yet. Turns out I’d done this one already, but I read it again anyway, just because Lew is a guy I like to hang out with.

Lew Fonesca is a Florida detective, but (aside from courage and personal integrity) that’s about all he has in common with Travis McGee or Doc Ford. Lew came to Florida a couple years back, ending up on the seedy side of Sarasota because that’s where his car broke down when he drove south after the death of his wife. He’s not technically a private detective. He makes a marginal living as a process server. He lives in one half of his two-room office next to a Dairy Queen. He doesn’t own a car anymore, and usually travels by bicycle. He’s short and skinny and bald, and has a large nose. People frequently comment that he “looks sad.”

But sometimes a problem comes up, and he looks into it for someone. More than once he puts himself into insanely dangerous situations, and he isn’t sure why, though his psychiatrist has theories.

In this first book in the series, Lew is approached by a woman from Kansas who has come looking for her fourteen-year-old daughter, who ran away to join her father in Sarasota. There’s good reason to think the father has been molesting the daughter. Lew agrees to look into it for a small retainer.

Immediately afterward he meets with a very different client, a big-time real estate developer, an aging man whose beautiful young wife has disappeared. He can’t live without her, he says. He’s confident she still loves him, and doesn’t know why she went away. He wants Lew to just deliver a message, to ask her to talk to him. Lew agrees to search for her too.

The investigations very quickly put him in danger, and he has to call on his friend Ames McKinney for help. Ames is a tall Texan who was once a millionaire and now makes his living sweeping out a bar (you may recall my theory of the Psycho Killer Friend™ in mystery fiction. Ames isn’t really a psycho, but he fulfills the function). Ames is a good man to have along in a tight place, but Lew doesn’t always call on him when he needs him. Lew also meets a compassionate female social worker with whom he begins a tentative, cautious relationship. In the end the two mysteries intertwine in a heartbreaking fashion.

The plot seemed to me far-fetched at times, but contained such believable proportions of tragedy and hope that it never lost my sympathy. I suppose you could call the Lew Fonesca books “soft-boiled mysteries.” Kaminsky writes with his characteristic concern for basic right and wrong, and compassion for the human condition. He’s one of my favorite writers and I enjoyed this book almost as much on the second reading.

Sorry about my silence last night. Wednesday is the day one of my assistants comes in to work at noon, so I took that opportunity to drag myself home and lie down in bed. Later on, for a change of pace, I lay down on the sofa. It seemed such a good program that I chose not to mess it up with blogging or Christmas card writing.

I think I’m a little better today, sort of. Perhaps. I seemed to have more steam to get me through the afternoon, but I think I’ve been spewing toxic aerosol more today than yesterday. Still, I think I’m making my way toward the end of Kubler-Ross’s Seven Stages of the Cold:

1. Tickle.

2. A little sore, but it was probably that hot soup I ate.

3. Oh man, this is serious. What’s in the medicine cabinet?

4. I really feel like staying home from work. Am I sick enough to take a day off?

5. I’m not well enough to go to work, but I’m well enough to drive to the drug store for Sudafed and Ibuprofen. And chocolate, of course (got to keep my strength up).

6. I could go back to work, but I’d be spreading germs to all my co-workers.

7. How come there’s nothing in the fridge?

I read another Swagger book from Stephen Hunter—Hot Springs. It’s a doozy. This is another Earl Swagger story (I think there are actually more Earl books than Bob Lee books, though I’m too lazy to tally them up). It begins in the aftermath of World War II, with Earl getting the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Truman, and then heading home with his new wife. In spite of his hero status, all that awaits him is a job in a sawmill (where, we are informed, everybody loses a hand or an arm eventually). He can’t understand why he’s so miserable, hitting the bottle so hard, but it becomes clear that in his deepest heart he misses the war. The war was his drug. He never expected, or intended, to come home at all.

Then he’s approached by two men. One is an ambitious politician, the newly elected District Attorney in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The other is a legendary former FBI agent, generally considered the greatest pistol shot in the country. They have a job offer for Earl, one more interesting than saw mill work.

The district attorney wants to clean up Hot Springs, which (we learn) is in that time what Las Vegas will be later on. In fact Bugsy Siegel, who will later establish the casino industry in Vegas, is in Hot Springs just at this time, checking out the possibilities.

The plan is to form a flying squad of young men, kind of like Eliot Ness’ Untouchables, but trained the Marine way by Earl Swagger. They will be turned into hard, keen fighting men, experts in all kinds of firearms. Using military tactics, they will shut down vice in the city.

In spite of his wife’s fears, Earl takes the job. What follows is a story of courage and betrayal, and a trip into Earl’s darkest heart.

Because he knows Hot Springs, though he won’t admit it to anyone. He knows Hot Springs because his father, a feared lawman, respected Baptist churchman and brutal, child-beating hypocrite (fortunately, Hunter provides a couple decent Christian characters for balance, so I wasn’t offended), had business in Hot Springs of his own, on a regular basis, before his death.

I hardly need say that in the end Earl Swagger does what has to be done, by thunder, and does it so nobly you just want to build a statue to him.

One of Hunter’s best, I think.

I’d read one J. A. Jance novel before, I think, and hadn’t been terribly impressed (I thought I’d reviewed it, but can’t find it in the archives, so I guess I didn’t). If I remember correctly, it had a male protagonist and, like so many female authors (in my opinion) she didn’t write a guy very well. No doubt we male writers have the same trouble with female characters.

But Web of Evil is one of Jance’s Ali Reynolds books, stories about a woman amateur detective, and I found it a lot of fun.

Ali Reynolds is a former Los Angeles news anchor. Today she lives in a double-wide mobile home (though a nice one) in Sedona, Arizona, where her parents run a diner. She’s in the midst of a bitter divorce from her husband, Paul, a network executive, and also an unfair dismissal suit against her old TV station (the two facts are not unrelated).

One day she gets in her car to drive to L.A., where she’s going to sign her final divorce papers. But there will be no signing. Her husband turns up dead, locked in the trunk of a car which was then left on the railroad tracks to wait for the next train.

As it happened, the murder occurred near the highway Ali was driving, just about the time that, by her own account, she was passing through the area. Suddenly the police are looking very closely at her movements and personal affairs.

This mystery was one of the most tech-savvy I’ve read. Ali is a blogger, and her blog, as well as her cell phone, are important parts of the plot.

I especially liked Ali’s parents, who bear the fine Scandinavian name of Larson. They are decent, caring people and unabashedly conservative (how often do you see that in a novel these days?).

Ali herself is a classic female detective. She’s smart, beautiful and spunky. Like all amateur detectives, she goes where the police say she shouldn’t go, and does what the police say she shouldn’t do, and yet doesn’t get locked up long enough to keep her out of the action. When you sit down to analyze the plot, the whole thing is a little far-fetched, and Ali’s close involvement with the investigation improbable, but Jance keeps the story moving so skillfully that you don’t notice. She kept me turning the pages, and I found it a very entertaining read.

Not great literature, but a lot of fun. Worth the price.

Thanksgiving went just fine. My turkey was once again a success, and nobody got food poisoning (or if they did, they’re thoughtfully keeping the fact from me).

At the end of the day my brother Baal and I found ourselves alone here, and we decided to see a movie. So we went to see “No Country For Old Men.”

Brilliant writing, brilliant dialog, brilliant acting. And an ending designed to make ordinary people want their money back, while critics at Cannes applaud their manicures loose.

My one-line review goes like this: “No Country For Old Men” is an elegant, three-hour shaggy dog story.

And do you think Tommy Lee Jones will ever get tired of being the Texan Steppin Fetchitt? I’m sure there’s a lot of money in being the go-to guy whenever Hollywood wants to show how bigoted, hateful or irrelevant (irrelevant in this case) white Texan males are (Billy Green Bush made a good living in the same gig back in the 70s. Maybe you’re required to have three names to get the job), but do you think he ever feels a little embarrassed about it?

If you want to read a good Viking novel, your choices are pretty few. There’s me, of course, but I’m out of print. Bernard Cornwell is doing a series about Vikings and Saxons in Alfred’s England (I’m avoiding them, though, because, from what I read, he’s trashing Christianity again. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I really like Cornwell otherwise). There’s Tim Severin’s new series, which I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, mea culpa. You can sometimes find a copy of the English translation of Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Long Ships here or there.

But the field is pretty sparse. Which is why I’m delighted to welcome Judson Roberts to our small but elite club.



Viking Warrior is a Young Adult novel which will be enjoyed by older readers as well. It begins the story of Halfdan, who, as the story opens, is a young slave on a large farm in Denmark. He is actually the natural son of the chieftain who owns the farm, but his mother is a slave from Ireland. So all his life he has known only hard work and bitterness.

Everything changes when his master and the master’s son return from an abortive raid in England. His master is dying. On his deathbed, he makes a bargain with Halfdan’s mother—he will acknowledge Halfdan, free him, and make him an heir. But in return Halfdan’s mother must make a terrible sacrifice. She does this willingly, in a deeply moving but troubling segment of the story.

Suddenly Halfdan’s life is changed out of recognition. Harald, his master’s freeborn son and chief heir, befriends him and begins to teach Halfdan the skills of a warrior. Harald is extremely likeable, and Halfdan grows in character as he learns to set aside old angers, even as he is learning a whole new way of living.

One thing Harald does not need to teach Halfdan is the use of the bow. Halfdan has been learning the arts of the bowyer and the fletcher for years, and has been hunting in secret. His skill with a bow is already formidable, and it’s a skill he’ll come to need very much, very soon.

Because there is an enemy out there—a vicious and ruthless enemy who wants the whole family dead; one who cares nothing for honor or fair dealing, nor for how many murders it takes to achieve his goal.

I can hardly think of a way this book could have been better. If I’d written it, I’d have taken pains to anglicize the speech a little more—to avoid words with Latin roots, but that’s my own bugbear, and probably means little to the average reader. The prose was tight, the characters well-rounded, the emotions rang true, and the plot was compelling. I wished it were longer—but fortunately there’s a sequel for me to order.

References to Christianity were generally negative, but that was appropriate to the story. Although Halfdan’s mother is a Christian, she doesn’t seem to have conveyed much of it to her son, so Halfdan’s opinions are those of the average Scandinavian heathen of the time. There is a ceremonial matter toward the beginning of the story that was extremely conflicting for me to read, but it was in no way unreasonable in the time and place.

The only false note (in my opinion) was a scene later in the book, where Halfdan, having killed his first man, is troubled not to feel any guilt about it. I think that’s a projection of modern and Christian values. I don’t believe a Norse pagan in the 9th Century would have been bothered by that at all. I think he would have been pleased.

But that’s the sort of thing it’s almost impossible to avoid, when moderns write about the past. I’m sure I’ve done the same in my own books.

I strongly recommend Viking Warrior. Cautions for violence and sexual references (but no explicit sex scenes). It would make a much-valued Christmas gift for that Viking aficionado on your gift list (and who doesn’t have one of those?).