Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

’21 Hours,’ by Dustin Stevens

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Felix “O” O’Connor, hero of Dustin Steven’s novel, 21 Hours, is an ex-con, now a cowboy in Wyoming. He rarely gets back to Columbus, his home town, but keeps in touch with “Lex,” his twin sister. He doesn’t much care for her husband, but he adores their daughter Annie, his niece.

He gets a call from Lex one day, asking for help. She and her husband were attacked, and Annie was abducted. There’s been no ransom demand, and they don’t have a lot of money anyway.

O gets into his car and drives straight to Columbus. If it’s not a ransom kidnapping, it must be human traffickers. Investigating that will mean going to bad places and dealing with very bad people. O can handle himself, and he won’t let anything stand in his way.

Essentially, this is “Taken,” with an uncle instead of a father, and the locations changed.

21 Hours is another example of the recent phenomenon I guess I’d call the “made for the movies thriller.” It involves the sort of action we usually accept in the rushed context of a movie, but (at least for me) doesn’t work as well on the printed page. Our hero suffers excruciating, repeated physical trauma over the course of his adventure, but just keeps on coming, killing multiple enemies who are fresher and in better health than he is.

I suppose that’s all that’s left for the male hero these days. We’ve decided, as a culture, that women can fight men on equal terms, that there is no male strength advantage. All that’s left to a man is his ability to take punishment. So he gets punished beyond all plausibility.

One other quibble I have with this book is that on two occasions the hero opens padlocks by shooting them with a pistol. I’ve never tried the experiment myself, but I have it on good authority that you can’t actually do that.

But other than that, the writing was good. 21 Hours is an entertaining book, if you’re into this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cost of Arrogance,’ by H. Mitchell Caldwell

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Cases are seldom won on cross but rather are more likely to suffer serious setbacks. Most seasoned trial lawyers will admit that a successful cross is one that did not assist the other side. A good cross, like a good plane landing, is one you can walk away from.

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of negative reviews recently. This is because, due to circumstances I won’t discuss in detail, I’ve been reading a lot of books I get free for my Kindle through promotional offers. The bulk of these books is from independent authors, and (I must confess, though I’m now one of the club), independent authors tend to be amateurs. People who haven’t paid their dues and learned the craft.

So it’s a pleasure to happen on a book that’s published by a genuine publisher, and eminently worthy of that publication. I’m delighted to recommend Cost of Arrogance, first in a coming series starring California attorney Jake Clearwater.

Jake Clearwater used to be a prosecutor in a county (fictional, I believe) north of Los Angeles. He left after a new district attorney proved more interested in chalking up convictions than in seeing justice done. Now he teaches trial law at a small university. It’s a good life, but lately he’s noticed he misses the excitement, the cut-and-thrust of courtroom work.

He’s not enthusiastic at first when he’s approached by representatives of an organization committed to filing appeals for convicts on death row. As an old prosecutor, Jake rarely loses much sleep over condemned murderers. And the convict they want him to help, Duane Durgeon, is no poster boy. He’s a hulking career felon and open racist who actually asked for the death penalty during his trial. Nobody wants his case. That, the activists tell Jake, is precisely why he needs an advocate.

A classroom discussion touches Jake’s legal conscience, and he agrees to hold his nose and go to work on Duane’s case. He little suspects that he’ll soon earn the hatred of an entire grieving town, or that he’ll suffer assault and attempted murder before he’s done. But he’ll also regain his moral center and get his appetite for life back. With a beautiful new girlfriend to top it off.

A book like Cost of Arrogance could have easily been preachy and predictable. Author H. Mitchell Caldwell avoids those pitfalls by writing it right. His characters are not caricatures, but many-faceted humans who often surprise us with their depth. We sympathize with them, even when we disagree (and you can disagree in different ways; there’s scope here for a range of opinions). The writing is clear and workmanlike, the dialogue realistic. The author’s experience as a lawyer and law professor is readily apparent in the obvious authenticity of the courtroom scenes. The plotting is excellent, too. The story kept me fascinated from beginning to end.

The love story was also good – maybe too good to be true. Jake meets a gorgeous woman who is fearful of commitment and needs a sensitive, decent man to teach her to trust again. I can speak authoritatively when I say this is an archetypal male fantasy. But it added to the fun of the story, so I’m not complaining.

Highly recommended. Cost of Arrogance is honestly one of the best legal thrillers I’ve ever read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder For the Bride,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The temporary relief of the rain hadn’t lasted long. The thick heavy heat had spread itself over the city again, like a fat woman face down on a mudbank.

Another non-McGee MacDonald, an early one. I think Murder For the Bride is one of John D.’s less celebrated books, but I liked it fine.

Our hero, Dillon Bryant, is an oil engineer. When Murder For the Bride opens, he’s in South America on a job, thinking every minute about Laura Rentane, the beautiful woman he married just before he left the country. It was a whirlwind courtship, but she was the girl of his dreams. More than one friend expressed doubts about her character, but Dill wouldn’t hear of it.

Then a letter comes. Dill had better come home to New Orleans. Laura is in big trouble. When he arrives, he finds a police detective outside their apartment door. Laura is dead, he is told. Strangled with a length of wire.

Dill has to do something about it. He starts asking questions. The more questions he asks, the more he’s forced to realize that Laura lied to him. Her name wasn’t Rentane. She was older than she looked. Her background wasn’t what she claimed. When the FBI takes over her case, the cops toss Dill some clues, just to spite them. They think they know what Dill is likely to do, but they’re not prepared for how far he’s willing to go.

As in any John D. MacDonald book, the prose in Murder For the Bride is crisp and compelling. There’s just enough sex to satisfy the original paperback audience, which is pretty tame by today’s standards. And beneath it all, a story of integrity and coming of age.

As an added bonus, Commie spies are involved, and there’s no moral ambiguity in their depiction. This is anticommunism at its best, circa 1951.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Death Hampton,’ by Walter Marks

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Detective Jericho (first name never given) used to be a cop in Harlem, but ended up with PTSD. Not coincidentally, his marriage fell apart, and his wife moved with their daughter to East Hampton on Long Island. Jericho joined the force there to be close to them.

The novel Death Hampton begins with Susannah Cascaddan, the beautiful, abused wife of a property developer in East Hampton. She’s contemplating leaving her husband when, in defending herself against an attack, she knocks the man out with a wine bottle. In desperation she drags him from their beachside home to the ocean and drowns him.

When Jericho comes to question her, there are immediate romantic sparks. But there are secrets which neither of them knows that will put both their lives in danger before it’s all over.

When I started reading Death Hampton, I marked the book down as a competent story written by a less than professional writer. The writing wasn’t awful, but it was very, very pedestrian.

However, that changed when it got to the sex scenes. The sex scenes in this book are needlessly explicit and remarkably clumsy: “The spark of connection that had flashed between them over the past few weeks burst into an engulfing flame” isn’t even the worst of it.

Also the gun stuff was badly researched. Two of the characters carry .50 Glocks (a huge pistol, if it existed), with silencers (handguns can only be suppressed, not silenced, and that works best with small calibers).

Not recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Exploding Shop,’ by Michael Leese

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I have reached the fourth and final volume of the set of Hooley and Roper mysteries I acquired. I’ve got no major complaints to make about The Case of the Exploding Shop, but I can’t praise it very highly either.

Just to remind you, Brian Hooley and Jonathan Roper are London police detectives. The gimmick of the series is that Roper is on the autism spectrum. He’s brilliant at analysis, but other cops resent his tactlessness. Hooley is an easygoing sort who manages to get along with him, profiting from his investigative insights. Their current friction rises from the fact that Roper has noticed (correctly) signs of incipient heart disease in Hooley, and is nagging him to eat better and get more exercise.

During a single morning, a world-famous computer mogul is severely burned by a bomb detonated while he’s making a presentation on a new product. Then an Italian politician visiting London is murdered with a shotgun. And a bomb kills a number of shoppers at a fashionable Sloan Square boutique.

Hooley and Roper go to work, assisted now by a new female team member.

I guess, when I pick up a story about an autistic detective, I’m always looking for something along the lines of Monk on TV. Hooley and Roper are just not as much fun (at least to me). Roper’s value is now pretty well acknowledged on the Force, so there’s not a lot of office opposition. Roper, we are told, has been working on his social skills as well. I’m happy for him, but it makes the story less interesting.

Another thing that didn’t work well for me is Roper’s “rainbow spectrum,” a mental filing and classification system he uses to organize his thinking on complex problems. It’s a useful fictional device, I guess, but it’s also a sort of a black box – the reader can’t follow the logical process. That, I think, sacrifices intrigue.

Also, I’d like to see Hooley have more of a life off the job. Give him a girlfriend or something.

I didn’t hate The Case of the Exploding Shop, but it didn’t raise my pulse rate either. No major cautions for language or subject matter are called for.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Return to Evil, by John Carson

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I’d read one of John Carson’s Harry McNeil mysteries before. I reviewed it as being a decent police story, but I thought the cop banter was inexpertly done.

In Return to Evil, Edinburgh Detective McNeil, fresh off Professional Standards (what we’d call Internal Affairs in the US), has been assigned to Cold Cases. The officers he works with there are not happy – it’s considered a squad where careers go to die. They’re looking at the murder of a girl in a cemetery, some years ago. She was 15 years old and pregnant, and someone tipped a gravestone onto her. It happened during the shooting of a science fiction movie, now considered a classic.

And now the movie is being remade on the same location, and  another girl is found dead in the same way. The cold case becomes a hot one.

My main problem with this book is one I’ve complained about in other books recently – most of the characters aren’t described. I had trouble keeping them straight. The cop banter didn’t annoy me as much this time out, but I still thought the male and female characters were excessively interchangeable.

Not bad, but I can’t recommend Return to Evil highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Close Your Eyes,’ by Thomas Fincham

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Here we have a novel with an interesting premise, but in this reviewer’s opinion it was not well written.

Close Your Eyes has a plot consisting of two threads, which of course come together in the end.

One thread involves the lonely hero, Martin Rhodes. He’s a former cop who shot a criminal. He’d do it again, but he understands why he had to go to prison for it. He served his time, and now he’s out, walking the streets of the fictional city of Bridgeton, sleeping at a homeless shelter, trying to figure out what he’s going to do for a living. Idly looking at a display of police notices, he meets a man who recognizes him, knows who he is. The man says his son was murdered by a drug dealer. He would be willing to pay a large sum of money if Martin could find the murderer. On the strength of a decent advance on the reward, Martin agrees to look into it. Along the way he acquires a strange sidekick, a teenaged girl whom he rescues from an abuser.

Meanwhile, in the other plot thread, FBI agent Jo Pullinger is hunting a man who’s been murdering people and leaving them in subway cars. She has a secret she’s not sharing with anyone – she has a potentially fatal heart condition.

On the sidelines, a TV reporter without principles is trying to play the murderer off against the police.

The story in Close Your Eyes was okay, and the characters were interesting in principle. The problem for me was the writing. There are two approaches to the challenge of conveying one’s meaning to the reader. They are generally known as the rifle approach and the shotgun approach. The rifle approach goes for a few words, well aimed. The shotgun approach involves throwing a lot of words at the reader, hoping a few of them will hit properly and say what you want.

The rifle approach is how professionals do it. Author Thomas Fincham is a shotgun writer. This annoys me. At least a quarter of the verbiage could have been cut without loss. So I didn’t enjoy Close Your Eyes, and had trouble finishing it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where Is Janice Gantry?’ by John D. MacDonald

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“…You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”

Sam Brice is a former pro football player who left the sport under a cloud, losing his trophy wife in the process. He genuinely loved her, and has never gotten over it. Now he works as an insurance adjuster on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He used to date Janice Gantry, who works in the same office. She grew frustrated with his lack of ambition, and they broke up. But they remain friends. She’s thinking of getting married to someone else now, and Sam wishes her well.

As Where Is Janice Gantry? begins, Sam is awakened by someone scratching at his screen porch. It’s Charlie, a young local man who has escaped from prison. All Charlie wants is a place to sleep a few hours and a short ride. With some misgivings, Sam helps him; he always thought there was something off about the story of his crime. It’s still dark when he drives Charlie to a phone. Then, on impulse, he watches from concealment to see what happens next. Charlie makes a call, and soon Janice Gantry appears. She drives Charlie to the office where she and Sam work. Sam spies through a window as she makes a phone call. Then a suspicious sheriff’s deputy on patrol attacks him and arrests him for prowling. Sam is finally released by the sheriff, who knows him but doesn’t like him. The sheriff warns him to keep his nose clean.

The next morning Janice does not arrive at work, and soon she’s officially a missing person. The sheriff thinks Charlie must have murdered her, or she ran off with him. Sam can’t tell him what he knows, and wouldn’t be believed anyway. He talks to a friend, a local gossip, who directs his attention to the house of a reclusive millionaire who lives on a nearby Key. This is the man whose safe Charlie was originally convicted of robbing. Sam makes a plan to meet the millionaire’s lonely wife, but instead meets her sister, a lovely woman who happens to be visiting. She too senses something is wrong in the house…

Where Is Janice Gantry? is one of those John D. MacDonald non-McGee books that left a particular impression on my memory. Sam Brice is a little like McGee (who wouldn’t be created for about three years at that point), but he has the advantage of the non-serial character in that he’s allowed to grow. Sam is sympathetic, but secretly bitter and openly gun-shy about relationships and life in general. The extreme exertions and dangers he’ll face in this book will change his life.

There’s a lot of sex in this book. Sam’s beautiful new lover spends a fair part of the story pretty much naked, as was suitable for the paperback market at that time in history. Even though the sexual revolution was fairly new at the time, it’s already assumed that lovers will sleep together before marriage. So morality cautions are in order. One character may be meant to be homosexual, but it’s not explicitly stated.

Nevertheless, Where Is Janice Gantry? is a well-written, gripping mystery/thriller by a master of the genre. Recommended for grownups.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Republican Party Reptile,’ by P. J. O’Rourke

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Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

I am feeling a little grim about the world these days, so I thought I’d read something funny. Were I a better man I’d probably have read some Wodehouse, but I listened to the little guy on my left shoulder and bought the cheapest P. J. O’Rourke I could find.

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the reviewer, this blog, or of real persons, living or dead.

When you read the late P. J. O’Rourke, you are guaranteed two things – hilarity, and offense. Republican Party Reptile is probably one of the extreme cases in his oeuvre, because this is National Lampoon-era O’Rourke, young and iconoclastic and frequently stoned on something. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is immune to a joke, including lots of things we (rightly) no longer consider funny. This is how it was in the ‘80s. Deal with it.

In this series of essays, written for various publications, O’Rourke writes about a wide variety of subjects. A condensed history of the world. A user report on the drug Ecstasy. A cruise through Soviet Russia with an earnest group of American lefties. A hostage situation in Beirut. A trans-continental road trip in a Ferrari. Sex acts in moving cars (this one deserves a special content warning). Men’s hats (I particularly liked that one). And finally, an epic history of the author’s own life, recast as a medieval war chronicle. For some reason.

Some of these essays have aged better than others. Some are frankly offensive and could never be published today. (Evangelical Christians come in for a single insult. I believe O’Rourke softened his views later in life.) One detects the subtle influence of various chemical stimulants, legal and illegal, from time to time.

But it was funny. Republican Party Reptile made me laugh. Most of the subjects of ridicule had it coming. Lots of cautions are in order for language and subject matter.

Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Beads,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tubby went into his own bedroom and checked the drawer in the little table by the bed to see if his own pistol was still there. It was, and he picked it up. It was an old and heavy gun, a Smith & Wesson .38. When you ordered shells for it at the gun store it was like ordering a double bourbon at a bar. People gave you respect because you were old.

The second Tubby DuBonnet book in Tony Dunbar’s well-known series is City of Beads. The city, of course, is Tubby’s New Orleans home, where he practices law in a fairly desultory manner.

Tubby is settling into the routine of practicing law on his own, after his partner betrayed him in the last book. He’s upset to learn that an old friend, a man who made money exporting peanut oil for foreign aid programs, has been found dead in the hold of one of his own barges. But he didn’t drown in the oil – it was murder. It’s hard to figure out why anyone would kill the man, and Tubby promises the widow he’ll poke around.

At the same time, he’s been retained by a local casino. The money’s excellent, though they don’t seem to have much real work for him to do. But he’s enjoying the company of the beautiful blonde they appointed as his liaison.

There’s another woman too, though – an attractive black woman who just happens to have committed a revenge killing.

In addition, one of Tubby’s adult daughters is involved with an environmentalist group, investigating river pollution. Some people don’t like the questions she and her friends are raising, and Tubby agrees to help out just to keep an eye on her.

I’m still not sure what to make of the Tubby DuBonnet books. At the end of the last one I decided I should approach them as dark comedy, but I didn’t find City of Beads all that funny. And the hero, though he’s supposed to be pretty street smart, seems to me to survive as much on luck as on intelligence.

I wonder if I’d appreciate the books better if I’d ever been to New Orleans….