Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bail Out,’ by Jeff Shelby

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I recently discovered that the Noah Braddock detective series by Jeff Shelby is still a going concern. So I had a couple books to catch up with. Bail Out comes ahead of the last one I reviewed, in sequence. But that’s not a problem; they stand alone pretty well.

Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer-cum-private eye, needs money to get repairs done on the house on Catalina he inherited from his murdered girlfriend. His massive friend Carter, who is smarter than he looks, says he has a prospective client, but he knows Noah won’t like it.

The prospective client is Darren Van Welker, an old schoolmate who was Noah’s greatest enemy in his youth. Now he’s a successful businessman with a not entirely savory reputation. Darren is getting married (for the third time), and he wants his adult son Aaron to be there, only he’s in Las Vegas and won’t return his father’s calls. He wants Noah and Carter to go to Sin City and drag the young man back.

Noah doesn’t like Darren any more now than he did in the old days, but he takes the job – making it clear that he’s not going to kidnap Aaron if he doesn’t want to go. In Vegas, they get a line on Aaron’s girlfriend. Going to her apartment, they run into a group of not very impressive gangsters, who are looking for her for their boss. Noah and Carter find themselves helping the two young people escape a serious and dangerous problem related to unpaid gambling debts.

The story is essentially pretty fun, almost a comedy. The Noah Braddock books are not comic as a rule, but author Shelby had fun with this one. The gangsters are somewhat laughable, and Carter alone is such a force of nature that nobody ever seems in great danger.

I enjoyed Bail Out immensely. Jeff Shelby is an entertaining storyteller, whether he goes dark or light. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Johnny Careless,’ by Kevin Wade

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She scanned the room and landed on Johnny and just stayed pinned on him, like waiting for the heat from her stare to set his shirt on fire and get his attention.

This one surprised me pleasantly. When I got to reading and realized that Kevin Wade’s Johnny Careless was a story about a middle-class boy moving among the privileged kids of Long Island’s North Shore, I prepared myself for an homage to The Great Gatsby, with maybe a little Marxism mixed in. But it wasn’t like that. Or not mostly like that.

“Jeep” Mullane is the chief of police, the son of a policeman, but the circumstances of his childhood threw him together with the wealthy Johnny Chambliss and his girlfriend (later wife and ex-wife) Niven, so he began to live in two worlds. Johnny had all the irresponsibility of his class, but was aware of it, and kept Jeep close – in part – to ground himself. He could be a jerk, but was always a good friend.

Now Johnny is dead, washed up on the beach with what appear to be contact wounds from a marine engine prop on his body. But what was he doing in the water at that time of night, in that place? Johnny’s powerful father wants it explained, and Jeep wants to understand too.

There’s also pressure from the mayor for the police to stop a string of thefts of high-end automobiles in their supposedly crime-free community.

Jeep will learn – to his shock – that the thefts have a connection to a secret out of the late Johnny’s past.

The writing in Johnny Careless was very good (though author Wade, who’s been a writer for the TV show “Bluebloods,” uses “flaunt” when he means “flout” at one point). An interesting narrative device was employed – the whole story is told from Jeep’s point of view, but events in the present are given in the third person, while flashbacks are in the first person. The characters were interesting and layered. The mystery intrigued me. And it all worked out entirely differently than I expected.

Jeep is an admirable character, though (no surprise here) his morality is not quite Christian as far as sex is concerned. I recommend Johnny Careless, with only the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fate of Our Years,’ by Colin Conway

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I was reading Colin Conway’s 509 series, about policing in eastern Washington state, for some time, and enjoying the books. I’m not sure why I lost track of the series – maybe because the books feature revolving main characters and I had trouble keeping track of them. But I need to get back to them. They’re really good. I liked The Fate of Our Years a lot.

Dallas Nash is a detective. He lost his wife a while back, and is mourning hard. He talks to her (when no one’s listening) and avoids music generally, because so many songs remind him of her. But this doesn’t interfere with his work – in fact, he works obsessively, because it’s the only thing that keeps his mind off his grief. Nevertheless, he’s afraid the other cops will learn that he’s seeing a psychologist – it marks you as weak and unreliable.

In The Fate of Our Years, he has to investigate the stabbing death of an old man who was once accused of rape, and the beating death of a homeless man. Neither of these cases are the work of super-criminals. We’re dealing with plain, unromantic police work here, the grinding away until something comes loose.

But the real interest is in the characters. I particularly like it when characters surprise you with unexpected character facets – there are a couple such instances in The Fate of Our Years.

Also, it featured a born-again Christian character who is presented in an entirely positive way. There’s no incentive to do that in today’s publishing world, so I was grateful.

Recommended, with cautions for mature material.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Coyote Hills,’ by Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman

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Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels are books I enjoy and make a point of reading and reviewing. He also collaborates on novels with his son Jesse. I reviewed one of Jesse’s solo books here before, but didn’t recommend it highly. I thought it was well-written, but morally kind of empty. However, I figured I’d see how he works with his father, so I bought Coyote Hills, book 6 of his Clay Edison series.

Clay Edison used to be an investigator for the Alameda County, California Coroner’s Office. He left that job for reasons which are doubtless explained in earlier installments. Now he’s a private eye, specializing – by preference – in boring desk work.

But there’s another PI named Regina Klein, who prefers more colorful and dangerous work, and she asks Clay to collaborate on a new case. There’s a very wealthy couple whose adult son was found drowned on a beach. The police judged the death accidental, but they are sure he was murdered. Clay uses his police contacts to learn all he can, then goes on to fresh lines of inquiry, including an expensive computer-generated map of coastal currents. But the final truth he uncovers will reveal darker currents yet – the murky ones within the human heart.

I thought (echoing my response to my previous reading of Jesse Kellerman) that Coyote Hills was well-written. The characters were rounded, the dialogue good. Sometimes it was funny.

But I can’t recommend the book to our audience at Brandywine Books. It comes out of another moral world. It’s not only a matter of the casual acceptance of homosexuality, which is pretty much a given nowadays. This book goes deeply into the realm of sexual kink. It made me uncomfortable. You may, of course, respond differently, if you’re more broad-minded than I am.

Also, the authors make it clear that Regina Klein is a very attractive woman, yet Clay’s wife shows no sign of jealousy or concern about their collaboration. I’m the most ignorant man in the world when it comes to marriage issues, but I found this kind of implausible. It read to me like a story from some alternate universe where men and women have slightly different natures.

I have praise but no recommendation for Coyote Hills.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Caught Inside,’ by Jeff Shelby

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I hadn’t realized that Jeff Shelby was still putting out Noah Braddock novels. I like these books. Noah, a laid-back California surfer and private eye, mostly works when he feels like it, though he’s growing more responsible. There are shades of Travis McGee here – Noah is less contemplative than the Florida salvage expert, but his character (unlike Trav’s) changes and grows.

I seem to have missed a novel in the series sequence – I’ll have to look for the missing one – but as Caught Inside begins, we find Noah in a not-unfamiliar place. He’s decided to move into the house on Catalina Island that was left to him by Liz, his murdered girlfriend. He’s also reached the point where he wants to ask his longsuffering new girlfriend, Shannon, to move in with him (I suppose it would be too much to hope for marriage). Home ownership means house repairs, and Noah needs to get work to pay for them. His bodybuilder friend Carter has a suggestion… but he won’t like it.

The prospective client is Charisma Lugo, head of a feared female(!) street gang. She doesn’t want him to do anything illegal, she assures him. Her younger brother Xavier, whom she had sent off to a fancy private prep school, has disappeared. She just wants Noah to locate him.

When the boy turns up murdered, she then wants Noah to find out who killed him. (I was never quite clear why he agreed to stay on the job at this point, knowing what Charisma must certainly do to the killers.) Suspects include Xavier’s former friends from the streets, the snooty parents of his WASP girlfriend, and some mysterious tough guys who show up to deliver a good, professional beating. Noah, of course, is not about to be scared off.

Caught Inside was a pretty good novel. Noah Braddock is an ingratiating character. Well worth the price of admission.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Pale Gray for Guilt,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The shape of larceny is, in time, written clearly enough on a man’s face so that it can be read. Constant greed and sharp little deals and steals had left the sign on Preston LaFrance. There is the old saying that God and your folks give you the face you’re born with, but you earn the one you die with.

Ah, the joys of settling down with another Travis McGee novel. Even when author John D. MacDonald’s philosophy rings a little tinny, and the predictions have proven wrong in hindsight, Travis himself remains the best of friends – not only highly entertaining but reliable. Pale Gray for Guilt came out in 1968 and is one of the best in the series.

Tush Bannon is one of Travis McGee’s best old friends from his football days. He’s a big, cheerful, uncomplicated fellow, running a small business, raising a nice family. He has everything Trav can never have unless he alters his lifestyle, and Trav knows it. Then somebody decides to take Tush’s business away, and they take his life along with it. Travis is guilty that he wasn’t there to help. So he makes up his mind to get something back for the widow and the kids. And if a bad guy happens to get in the way of justice, he won’t hesitate to extract some blood too.

With the help of his economist friend Meyer, Trav sets up a neat and appealing con. The author of the book had a business degree from Harvard, and this sting, involving inflating a stock and getting out ahead of the pigeon before it crashes, was a little complex, but convincing. Along the way, McGee and Meyer have ample opportunity to look into the Abyss themselves, and glimpse it looking back at them.

Pale Gray for Guilt has the added element, in retrospect, of setting up a poignant plot element that will only bear fruit years later, in the last book of the series, The Lonely Silver Rain.

An outstanding entry in a classic series, Pale Gray for Guilt gets this reader’s highest recommendation. Cautions for adult situations, somewhat racy for the quaint old days of the 1960s.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mr. Whisper,’ by Andrew Mayne

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I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by Andrew Mayne before. I can testify, after reading his novel Mr. Whisper, that he knows how to tell a story. Fascinating premise, engaging characters, well-paced action.

Sloan McPherson, a (female) Florida investigator, tracks down the Marsh Man, a local swamp legend, a sort of Florida Bigfoot. She discovers not a monster, but a confused adult man. It turns out he disappeared as a teenager, many years ago in Oregon, but has no memory of his past life. Where has he been all this time, and how did he get to Florida?

Jessica Blackwood used to be an FBI agent; now she’s a reality TV star on a popular true crime program. Her partner (professional and romantic) is Theo Cray, a brilliant scientist on the high-functioning end of the autism scale. They note that one of this lost boy’s female schoolmates disappeared around the same time, but nobody ever linked the two cases. The two young people had little in common, but they both appear to have been fascinated by the same Jack London novel.

And now a boy in Washington state, who almost committed a mass shooting in his school, presents the same pattern.

If these cases are connected, it means someone has devoted massive resources to some kind of huge, clandestine mind-control experiment. Who could that be? And what will it take to stop them?

I was very impressed with Mr. Whisper. As I said, the book was highly enjoyable and professionally written (though I thought the climax a little forced).

Personally, I had some quibbles. For instance, a historically ignorant dig was taken at the Catholic Church. But what annoyed me most (though mildly) was the ratio of sexes. The main, active characters in this story are mostly female. The action roles which would have gone to men in the Good Old Days are now given to women (though Theo finally gets a chance to show his stuff at the end). I’m inclined to think the author had a movie or miniseries in mind, and was catering to the known preferences of today’s producers.

(If I understand author Mayne’s backlist, he did a previous series starring Theo Cray, though. I probably ought to check that out.)

To sum it up, Mr. Whisper is a very enjoyable, well-written thriller, edging into Sci-Fi. It didn’t make me a fan, but that’s due to my personal prejudices.

Only mild cautions for language and themes.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The Last True Bard

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This week Daily Wire released the finale of the great 7-episode fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin. I believe wondered in a previous post how they could wrap up a series that won’t tell the whole story. We knew from the start this was the story of Merlin’s ascension, not the reign of King Arthur, so how could they end the series without a massive cliffhanger?

The answer is to end it exactly the way they did. The final scene has been foreshadowed, and now that we have it in full, it closes this first run neatly. I hope we can get at least two more seasons, and maybe 8-10 episodes in each to give the stories the extra few minutes to round them out. Let’s see more of the lives of Aurelius, Uther, Arthur, Gawain, Gwenevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and Morgian too.

In episode six, we left Merlin in the past as he ran from the terrifying fury of his battle rage. That’s where we pick up in the finale to color in what remained of Merlin’s return. I enjoyed these moments. Merlin is stoic and grave in the present day; this return to his greatest horror is like hearing stories from a veteran’s war days.

Then we go to Aurelius’s war camp where things have barely improved. He does have Gorlas’s loyalty, but he needs the loyalty of every man and at least three times as many added to them. The Saxons have 10,000-15,000. At a moment when one of the kings would surely have lost his fool life, reinforcements arrive from the north with Merlin. I’d forgotten they were coming, so this interruption was welcome.

Later, the warlords make a plan, which Gorlas deems not good but no worse than anything else they could do, and the men prepare for battle the next day. That night, Merlin sings to them, having concluded his role is like his father’s, to be a bard to the Britons. This song is similar to those Taliesin sings, with a chorus that’s easily singable. I thought the men would join in as has been the pattern, but they sat or stood in silence that night. The next day on the battlefield, they took up the song to rally themselves to the fight. It was moving.

Do you remember how Ilúvatar and the Ainur sang the world into existence or how Finrod Felagund “strove with Sauron in songs of power” in The Silmarillion? The bards’ songs in Rise of the Merlin have an echo of Tolkien’s magical music. Merlin’s song on the night before the battle for the soul of Britain has a historic pattern, starting with history and moving to charge. Here’s the charge part of it.

Children of Ynys Prydain now
From every hill and glen
Abandoned by our fathers’ gods
And scorned by mournful men
We’ve seen our homes destroyed
Now from hill and glen alight
United now, we rise
Up like dragons in the night
Ooh, ah, ooh ah . . .

Seize your sword and join the fray
Our hallowed ground we’ll free
Rebuke the Saecsen gods
Drive their war host to the sea
Never again our homes destroyed
Our names will live in song
When the hero’s cup is raised
Let our victory wine be strong
Ooh, ah, ooh ah . . .

Kudos to the writers and actors and all of production for this series. It’s a strong work. You could even say it’s a great British work. I hope you will be able to buy it on DVD or rent it in the future. Of course, you can watch it now on DailyWire+.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortunate Harbor,’ by Davis Bunn

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Davis Bunn is, I believe, a Christian novelist, though his novel Fortunate Harbor is not explicitly evangelical. What it is, is a clean mystery/romance. It’s actually pretty good, but this reader is not its intended audience.

Rae Alden grew up in the town of Fortunate Harbor, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. She loves the place and wants to live nowhere else, which is why, after graduating law school, she turned down generous offers from big firms to set up office back home. She loves the life, but the work is not usually very interesting.

That changes when Curtis Gage comes back to town. He and Rae were sweethearts as teenagers, but his family moved away and they lost touch. Now he works as a manager and troubleshooter for an international corporation based in India. The corporation has just acquired a failed local hotel project which has garnered considerable public opposition. Curtis wants Rae to help him turn the project around, show good faith, and gain community support.

As part of their project, Curtis acquires a large house in a desirable location, wrecked by the last hurricane. Rae represented the old owner, but he disappeared years ago and the money has long run out. But why are federal agents nosing around the property?

Also, can the spark between Rae and Curtis be rekindled? Or will he marry his beautiful boss?

There was nothing wrong with Fortunate Harbor. It’s a well-written romantic mystery about appealing characters. But it’s clearly written for the female market – the emphasis is on romance. This is a wise business move on Bunn’s part – women buy a lot more books than men do.

It just wasn’t my kind of story.

So you might want to check it out, especially if you’re a woman.

[One question troubled me: There’s a scene where Rae, and Curtis’s beautiful boss, having just met, and both being attracted (Rae reluctantly) to Curtis, suddenly find a common chord and become fast friends. My impression (and Heaven knows I know nothing about women) is that women just don’t do that sort of thing.]

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Truth Will Out,’ by Steve Higgs

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Steve Higgs’s cold case trilogy featuring Inspector Tony Heaton concludes with The Truth Will Out. The trilogy seems to have sold quite well, and it pleased a lot of readers. I myself didn’t hate the books, but I was less than delighted with them.

To recap: Tony Heaton is a police detective in the English county of Kent, placidly approaching retirement in a fairly quiet part of the country. Then he is assigned to assist a hotshot young detective in examining old “cold” cases.

That ought to be fairly low-drama work, though it hasn’t proven so in the previous two books, and it doesn’t in this one. People involved in the crimes are still alive, and some of them will go to extremes to keep the dead past dead.

But more than that, Tony has his own secrets to protect. His partner is itching to look into a particular crime that Tony very much wants left alone. He’s beginning to think he might have to kill the young man.

This reader has trouble sympathizing with a main character who’s making that kind of plan.

And the final resolution left me (personally) unsatisfied.

But plenty of readers enjoyed it, so maybe I’m tone-deaf. The suspense certainly ran high. Author Higgs writes pretty well, but there are occasional typos in the text. And he has an annoying problem with misplacing modifiers.

There was no especially objectionable material in this trilogy that I recall. I recommend it moderately.