Another negative review for you today. I’ve found a reason in my old age to finish books I dislike. The pain of reading them is balanced (at least somewhat) by the pleasure of insulting the authors, at a safe distance. The petty vengeance of the failed novelist.

Proof Positive is a legal thriller written from viewpoint of the defense side.

It led this reader to root for prosecutors even more than a Robert K. Tanenbaum novel could.

It’s one in a series of novels starring a young female defense attorney in Portland, Oregon named Amanda Jaffe. She’s the daughter of a prominent criminal lawyer.

The story starts with the execution of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. His lawyer, Doug Weaver, observes the death of his gentle, not-too-bright client, consoling himself that the man must have been guilty, because a forensic expert found his fingerprint on the murder weapon.

Later, mobster Art Prochaska is arrested for the murder of a drug dealer. Amanda, whose father has often represented Prochaska’s boss, is retained to represent him.

There’s damning forensic evidence against Prochaska, but by now the author has revealed to us that the forensic investigator who documented the evidence is in fact in the practice of planting manufactured clues.

At the same time, Doug Weaver is retained to defend a psychotic young man accused of murder, also the victim of falsified forensics.

As the attorneys seek the truth, the crooked CSI begins to commit murders of his own, in order to protect himself.

If this synopsis seems a little dry, it’s because I DIDN’T CARE FOR ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS FOR ONE SINGLE MOMENT!

That’s an exaggeration. I found two human scenes in the book. One was where the young psychotic meets with his parents in the jail, and they finally make a connection after many years. The other involved a moment of sexual banter between two lovers.

Other than that, author Margolin took apparent pains to keep us eternally at an emotional distance from his characters. One of his irritating techniques was to always convey his characters’ thoughts at a remove, saying (for example), “He thought that he made a mistake…” rather than, “He thought, ‘I made a mistake.’”

And all the characters do this tedious thinking in the same way. Men and women. Cops and civilians. Professional criminals and solid citizens. There was nothing to distinguish them in their characterizations. They all thought and reacted (at least to my perception) in precisely identical ways.

This was especially annoying in regard to the gangsters in the book. Margolin didn’t seem to care at all that these were very bad guys who make their livelihoods off human suffering. They were targets of the rogue CSI, so they were treated as charming and slightly amusing tough guys.

Margolin obviously wants us to realize that police power can be abused, and that even forensic evidence isn’t always solid. True enough. There have been cases like this, where the system has been abused.

But he undercuts his argument by whitewashing the crooks and (especially) by BORING ME WITH A DULL NARRATIVE.

Margolin is apparently a very successful novelist. I have no idea why, on the basis of this book.

I enjoyed trashing Steve Thayer’s novel, The Wheat Field, so much last night that I thought I’d kick it a little more tonight.

One thing I started wondering as I re-read my review was, “How come Thayer didn’t finish the job?” There was one obvious conservative stereotype he could have included, but for some reason he left it out. Hard to understand, when he used all the others.

I can imagine him having lunch with his publisher. In between the salad and the entrée, the publisher says, “Look, Steve. We need to talk about the obvious omission in this manuscript.”

“Omission? What did I leave out?”

“The C.M.E.P., of course.”

“C.M.E.P.?”

“Yes. The Child-Molesting Evangelical Pastor. Every other novel set in the Midwest that we’ve published this year has included a C.M.E.P. Our readers expect a C.M.E.P. They’re going to be pretty disappointed if you don’t give them a C.M.E.P.”

“Well, gee. I’m not sure how I could make it germane to the plot…”

“Germane, shmermane. You threw in that subplot about the recluse couple. That didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the story.”

“Well, I felt like I needed to include at least two characters with a drop of recognizable humanity in them.”

“Recognizable humanity? What are you talking about? You’re writing about the Midwest. There’s no recognizable humanity in the Midwest. All those two-parent homes, people going to church. Gives me the willies. You’ve got to put something in there to show how oppressive traditional families are.”

“On top of the C.M.E.P.?”

“Put ‘em together. Make the abusive father a preacher. Our readers’ll eat it up.”

“You want a second irrelevant subplot? Isn’t the plot enough of a mess already?”

“OK. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll let it go for this book, but in the next one you’ve got to give us at least two C.M.E.P.s. Think you can do that?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I can do that.”

“Put Bush in too. Figure out a way to blame it all on Bush.”



(Thayer mutters to himself) “Maybe I can blame Bush for my whole writing career.”

I require a rare, peculiar combination of factors in order to be able write a negative review. The book can’t be just bad. If it’s just bad, I’ll dump it in the re-sell bag or return it to the library. It’s got to be good enough to keep me wanting to read it, with the same sort of fascination that prevents a person from turning his eyes away from a train wreck.

The Wheat Field finds that sweet spot. It was fairly well written (though not as well, I think, as the review blurbs suggested). I opted not to give up on it even when it offended me, not because I was compelled by the narrative, but because I wanted to see whether the author was actually going to take the story where I figured it was going, and actually say what I figured he would say.

Well, it did and he said it.

The narrator and main character is Deputy Pennington (I don’t think we’re ever told his first name), a law officer in Kickapoo Falls, Wisconsin, in the beautiful Dells country, a location the author uses effectively in some action scenes. Pennington, speaking in the present as an old man reminiscing on his law enforcement career back in 1960, tells how he was called one beautiful summer’s day to a farmer’s wheat field, where two naked people, murdered with a shotgun, had been found in a flattened crop circle

I think Thayer means us to like Detective Pennington. I think we’re supposed to like him because he’s so honest (he admits to being a voyeur, and murdering more than one criminal he couldn’t touch through legal means. In his first scene he takes pleasure in threatening the farmer who discovered the bodies because a) he’s short, b) he didn’t serve in the war, and c) he’s a Republican).

Oh yes, Pennington is a Democrat in a Republican county, as well as a Catholic in a Protestant community. I think we’re supposed to like him for that too. Especially when he reminds us how really evil the Republicans are.

There’s nothing so horrendous, you see, that the Republicans won’t do it. While hypocritically talking about morality, the Republicans practice group sex, make pornographic films (even a snuff film), and they’re planning to assassinate presidential candidate John Kennedy. (It’s never entirely clear why they want to kill Kennedy. Maybe it’s that he wants to lower taxes. Or beef up the military. Or get rid of Castro. Or “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend democracy.)

One of the murder victims is identified as Maggie Butler, a woman Pennington grew up with and has been in love with all his life. Her husband, the other victim, was a leader in the local Republican power structure, centered at “The Kickapoo Gunn [sic] Club,” and as Pennington pokes into that den of vipers he faces not only the locked-arm opposition of the party structure, but the suspicion of his own fellow officers. Eventually he is framed for the murder, but gets freed by another policeman (I’m still not sure why), after which he sets off on a trip to Nantucket, Massachusetts, to find the real murderer. At this point the plot rapidly sheds all pretense of plausibility and descends into pure Gothic melodrama.

I saw the big surprise ending a mile away, too.

The writing was good in places, but I thought the dialogue wooden. In one place a young boy, describing a local recluse, calls him “a hideous monster.” Has any American kid used the adjective “hideous” spontaneously since 1919?

Thayer’s earlier books earned glowing reviews from the New York Times (which put him on the bestseller list) and Stephen King, so I think of this book much the same as I think of the recent spate of lame anti-war movies, which anti-war news outlets feel compelled to praise to the skies, just because they push the right lessons. This wasn’t really a very good novel.

No doubt the movie is already in the works.

I’m going to write a piece one of these days about The Static Problem of the Series Hero. The problem is this—the heart of any story is to produce some change in the main character. In its classic form, a story is a drama in which a character employs a series of strategems to overcome a problem, failing time after time until he succeeds at last. The reason he has to go through so many failures and disappointments is because a good story needs to tell how that character learns something and grows. And the solution that involves learning and growing is usually the solution each of us leaves for last.

But series characters make that method difficult or impossible. How many life-changing, existential choices can one character believably make, in one book after another?

The mystery format helps solve (or at least cover over) that problem. Mysteries are generally not stories about transformation through personal change. They’re stories about solving puzzles external to the main character’s personal life. So Sherlock Holmes, for instance, can go on for story after story (long after his author is tired of him), changing little if at all. The faithful reader looks on the detective as a dear old friend. He doesn’t even want him to change. If someone needs to learn something in the story, let it be a secondary character. (Conan Doyle had Dr. Watson fall in love and marry in “The Sign of the Four.” But Watson’s marriage became such a nuisance from a storytelling point of view that Doyle killed her off, in so negligent and confusing a manner that fans argue to this day about how many wives the doctor actually had.)

But there are authors who resist this time-honored mystery formula. One of them (as I’ve said before) is Robert Crais, whose adult adolescent detective Elvis Cole has been growing up before our eyes.

Another is Randy Wayne White, author of the Doc Ford series. As I’ve said before, White manages better than anyone else (anyone I’ve read, at least) to revive the spirit of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.

But Doc Ford is not McGee. Ford has a darker history, a past career as a top-secret commando and assassin. In the early books, this past served to give the character a textured, somewhat guilty background, and to add credibility to his fighting ability when violence became necessary.

But Everglades appears to have been a pivotal entry in the series (I haven’t read them all). White made the decision in this book to force Ford to change his entire attitude to himself and his past, and to handle his present challenges in a different way.

The story begins when Ford comes home to his stilt house at Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Florida, to find Sally Carmel, a former lover, waiting for him outside. She’s worried and scared. She’s been married to a real estate developer, and he’s disappeared. Supposedly he fell off a boat in the night and was lost at sea, but she suspects it was stage-managed. And she believes someone has been breaking into her house, going through her things. She’s certain someone is following her.

Before his death, her husband had gotten involved with a New Age/Hindu cult leader called Bhagwan Shiva. Shiva’s religion has become extremely successful and profitable, and he’s been investing heavily in Florida real estate, with an eye to partnering with a Seminole tribe to build a casino. Shiva’s religion is extremely “advanced” in its sexual practices, and Sally found that part of it highly traumatic. She separated from her husband, and is now active in a Pentecostal church.

She doesn’t know it, but she’s become a pawn in a very big power game, a game planned by a brilliant man with grandiose plans and no conscience.

The issue of religion looms large in Everglades. As always, Doc’s friend Tomlinson is on hand, often high on pot or booze, spouting New Age “wisdom.” Doc, the narrator, is clear in telling us that he believes in none of it, and yet manages to convey the suggestion that Tomlinson and his psychic friends are actually in touch with legitimate spiritual forces.

This is troubling for the Christian reader.

On the other hand, Sally’s Christianity is treated with respect (although her theology appears a little weak). And a Christian character treated respectfully is something to be thankful for in any popular novel nowadays.

The center of the book, though, is Doc’s personal decision about his life. He starts the story in a bad condition. He’s sleeping badly. He’s drinking too much. He forgets appointments. He’s gotten fat.

His problem, he discovers, is that he’s been fighting his essential nature. Trying to live a quiet life as a marine biologist, working and partying and staying out of trouble, he has been denying his true gifts. If it’s not blasphemous to speak of it in Gene Edward Veith’s terms, he’s been neglecting his Vocation.

But a terrible turn of events shows him that he has a job to do in this world, and that he’ll never be satisfied—and others will suffer—if he neglects it.

The book was published in 2003. Which suggests it was written in 2002.

I wonder if the events of September 11, 2001 didn’t have something to do with Doc Ford’s epiphany.

I found the book very satisfying (with reservations for theological issues and some uncomfortable sexual scenes).

Recommended, as long as you heed the warnings.

First of all, I have to thank our reader and occasional commenter Aitchmark. I chat with him on AIM now and then, and the other night he tentatively diagnosed (sight unseen) the malady that’s been bugging me for weeks. I’d been fading in the afternoons, just feeling leaden. He asked me if I’d been breathing anything that might be bad, and it suddenly occurred to me that the moldy old books I’ve been cataloging for the archive might not be the best thing for me. I took an antihistamine, bought some paper breathing masks, and I feel better already.

The title of Robert Crais’ The Two Minute Rule refers to a guideline well known to both policemen and bank robbers—if you want to knock off a bank, you need to be in and out in two minutes, or you’re likely to be caught.

Which was what happened to Max Holman ten years ago. Back then he was an alcoholic and a drug addict, addicted to the thrill of danger. In his time in prison he’s dried out, and he intends to make a genuine effort to live a straight life now that he’s being released. He also wants to make amends to his former girlfriend, and to the son they had together, whom he neglected even before his arrest.

But on the day of his release, he gets bad news. His son (who had become a policeman) has been murdered, along with three other officers.

Even the cops treat him with consideration at first, in spite of his ex-con status. But Holman is puzzled by the official story of the ambush that killed his son. The attack happened in the concrete channel of the Los Angeles River. How did anyone sneak up on them in such an open location? And why, when he visits his son’s widow, does he find a police file on a desk, concerning a recent series of robberies by two now-dead felons? What business was that case of a uniformed policeman’s? Was his son a corrupt cop? If so, was that Holman’s own fault?

When he asks more questions, the police become hostile, and finally they threaten him. That’s when Holman turns for help to the only law enforcement figure he knows he can trust.

Katherine Pollard, the FBI agent who put him away ten years ago.

Pollard is out of the agency now, trying to make it as a single mother. She joins Holman in investigating the matter mostly because she’s bored and misses police work. But as the questions get harder, and the violence escalates, she begins to alternate between frustration with the police, anger at Holman, and… other feelings for Holman. She begins to fear that she’s “going Indian”—getting too closely involved with a criminal and his world.



The Two Minute Rule is notable for a remarkable risk (for popular fiction) taken by the author. He doesn’t make his main characters look like movie stars. Holman, we’re told, has put on weight in prison. He’s flabby and pale. Katherine too has put on weight since she left the FBI. She’s always worrying about the size of her bottom. This is a nice touch of realism that (for me) made the whole thing ring much truer.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but it involves a genuine concern for maturity and responsibility that’s been sadly lacking, I believe, in books and movies for a long time. I was very pleased with the ending, and recommend The Two Minute Rule to most readers. The usual cautions about language and violence that generally go with mainstream novels nowadays apply here, it goes without saying.

I like the direction Robert Crais (author of the Elvis Cole books, in which the main character is also maturing) is taking in his novels. Kudos to him.

Perfect fall day today. The rains finally ceased, and Saturday was pretty nice, giving me the chance to do some maintenance jobs outside. Today was crisp and bright, with gumdrop colors in the foliage.

Which makes it all the sadder to hear about the fires in southern California. Our prayers go out to you folks in that area.

Stephen Hunter’s Pale Horse Coming is another thriller so good, so deeply satisfying on so many levels, that it makes me want to just hang up my laptop and give up telling stories. I’ll never be this good.



Pale Horse Coming is set in 1951 and is a story about Earl Swagger, the father of Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of Point of Impact and other novels. Hunter is as canny at triangulating his market as he is at plotting and characterization. For the liberal reader he offers two of their favorite villains, southern racists and McCarthyites. But that’s not what the heart of the book is. The heart of the book is heroism, and endurance, and keeping promises, and knowing how to defend yourself, and the conviction that sometimes you just have to employ violence to deliver the oppressed.

The story begins with Sam Vincent of Blue Eye, Arksansas, Earl’s lawyer friend who will someday be Bob Lee’s mentor, getting an offer from a Chicago law firm to run what seems to be an unusual but innocuous errand. A black man who once worked for one of their clients has been mentioned in a will, but can’t be contacted. Would Sam go to his last known address, Thebes, Mississippi, to see if he can get legal verification of the man’s death? They prefer a southerner to make the trip, they say, because he’ll understand the local culture better.

The money’s good and Sam needs the work, so he makes the trip. What he finds is an insane and frightening situation. A tiny town stuck in the 1850s, almost cut off from the outside world, where the only local industry is a “colored”-only prison, and where the black residents, even outside the prison walls, are entirely dominated by the white guards.

When Sam’s conscience forces him to protest what he sees, he finds himself in big trouble. Without spoiling the rest of it for you, I’ll say that Sam’s big trouble becomes Earl’s big trouble. Then follows a tale of unspeakable cruelty and incredible endurance, capped by Earl’s retribution, which is epic in scope.

A delightful element toward the end is Earl’s assembly of a commando force made up almost entirely of “old-timers”—famous shooters of the 1920s, all of them based on real characters who will be familiar to any gun enthusiast, and some of whom even I could identify behind their fictionalized names. The name “Seven Against Thebes” is employed a couple times.

Could not put the book down. It grabbed me from the beginning, and Hunter timed his plot twists and setbacks expertly to keep me on the hook all the way.

And behind it all, I was never allowed to forget that Earl will not live long. All his resolve to care for his family and raise his boy will come to an untimely end, an end Hunter has already chronicled. So there’s irony and tragedy too as seasoning in the stew.

Hunter lifts the thriller form above the level of popular fiction. I suspect he’ll be read and loved for a long, long time.