Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Desperate Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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Dennis Carstens is not a very good prose stylist. His diction can be awkward, even confusing, and his punctuation is best described as whimsical. But I like his characters, he poses very challenging moral problems to the reader, and he’s not politically doctrinaire.

At the beginning of Desperate Justice, Minneapolis attorney Marc Kadella is enjoying an upswing in his business fortunes. His success in his last big case has brought in needed clients. But when a prominent local defense attorney asks him to come on to defend his client’s co-defendant in a linked case, Marc is suspicious. Still, he takes the job, and soon regrets it. He and his client have been set up to take a fall, and Judge Gordon Prentiss – whom we remember with distaste from the last book – does not hesitate to take his personal rancor out on Marc’s client, who goes to prison.

So Marc is astonished when Judge Prentiss is himself charged with murder, and asks for Marc to defend him. Marc has no objection to representing a guilty man (and Prentiss looks guilty as sin), but he considers him a complete sleazeball. Which, the reader soon learns, is entirely correct. Perhaps the man ought to go to prison on general principles.

Desperate Justice is a kind of a diffuse story, which heads off in several directions before bringing it all together in the end. But I very much enjoyed the ethical dilemmas raised. What does “presumption of innocence” really mean? How do you defend a man you despise? How do you respond when even the good guys lie to you?

Stories of moral ambivalence can be corrosive and depressing, if they’re done nihilistically. But the Marc Kadella books never fall into nihilism. They ask honest questions, leaving the reader to draw judgments.

The politics seem pretty moderate to me, but the very fact that Democrats in Minnesota get criticized at all (Republicans come in for it too) is a breath of fresh air.

Cautions for language, sexual situations, and themes of extreme perversion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ranching in Colorado,’ by J. L. Curtis

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I enjoyed the first book in my friend J. L. Curtis’ The Bell Chronicles, Showdown on the River, so I picked up book number two, Ranching in Colorado. The title’s a little generic, but the story was excellent.

Rio Bell, gunslinging Texas rancher’s son, survived the dangers of a trail drive and a range war, and now he has his reward. He’s married and owner of a large spread in Colorado. He wasn’t entirely prepared for mountain life or for northern winters, and when his wife gets pregnant he really feels out of his depth.

But he has some his hands with him, along with the crew of old mountain men who helped so much in his earlier adventures. He’ll learn the business, survive a stampede, and face back-shooting rustlers before he’s done.

I don’t know why I don’t read more westerns. I have an infinite taste for cowboy stories. This book was a little less bombastic than the first one; not much gunplay until the last third of the book or so.

I have quibbles, of course. Wedding dresses were not, as a rule, white in the 1870s. A woman we’re told is Scandinavian uses German words like “mit” (with) and “danke,” rather than “med” and “takk.” Some of the English diction is distractingly modern, like, “this baby is an affirmation of our commitment.”

But those are small things. Enjoy the story. Recommended.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Untold Story of the New Testament Church,’ by Frank Viola

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In our degenerate times, claiming that you’ve read the Bible multiple times through sounds like bragging (it wouldn’t have been as much of a big deal when I was starting out). That said, I’ll make so bold as to say that I’ve read the Bible, Old and New Testaments, multiple times. I’m pretty familiar with the narrative.

But I was intrigued by the premise of Frank Viola’s The Untold Story of the New Testament Church. The idea is to straighten out the chronological problems. The Old Testament isn’t laid out in order of events, but the historical books are generally chronological, which is helpful to the reader. But the New Testament is arranged by genre and book length. I won’t say that causes confusion, but it makes the message less coherent than it might be.

What author Viola has done here is to tell the story on a timeline, explaining the historical context (this is very valuable) and then inserting the various books (or rather, descriptions plus reading prompts) in their proper order, based on critical opinion and (sometimes) the author’s personal choices.

It’s a little humbling to admit that the book helped me understand New Testament history better, but it did. Some of the author’s choices are subjective and could be disputed, but all in all I thought the thing as a whole very helpful.

And I learned stuff. I was not aware that Titus was (arguably) Luke’s brother. Or that Gallio, the governor of Corinth, was brother to the philosopher Seneca.

The prose was occasionally a little awkward, and there’s a lamentable tendency to employ exclamation marks. But still, I recommend The Untold Story of the New Testament Church. I think it would be a great project for a Bible study group to work through this book, reading the scriptural books as they come up.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Bowmen of England,’ by Donald Featherstone

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These commanders who made such good use of archery as a national tactic had no real conception of the fact that in terminating the ascendency in war of the mailed horseman they were putting an end to the feudal regime and all that it entailed.

When you and I think of the medieval English bowman, we (unless you’re very weird) always think first of Robin Hood, in whatever cinematic or literary incarnation we know him. And there’s good reason for that. Robin Hood became an English national legend because he symbolized an important – and uniquely English – historical phenomenon. The English yeomanry enjoyed a very special status in Europe because they provided the manpower for English military archery, which made their country almost invincible on the battlefield for several centuries. Donald Featherstone’s Bowmen of England probably qualifies as a “classic” treatment of the subject, as it was first published 1968. No doubt some of the facts he cites represent scholarship that has since been revised or debunked. But as far as I can tell, the book remains a valuable introduction to the subject.

It opens with a fictional, dramatized scene of classic longbow tactics in battle. This part, I must admit, is rather badly written, and made me wonder what I was getting into as a reader. However, the author hits his stride when he moves on to plain exposition.

The longbow (traditionally, but not always, made of yew, usually imported) was first developed by the Welsh. But King Edward I (one can’t help thinking of Braveheart, but Edward is an admired figure here) recognized its value and adopted it for his own armies. He instituted universal archery practice for all common men, legislation that continued in force in various forms up into the Renaissance period.

Most of the book consists of a historical survey, especially of the Hundred Years’ War, in which the author describes the chief battles in which the longbow was decisive. The pattern is repetitive, and almost comic in a dark way. Again and again the English bowmen slaughtered massed French cavalry, at tremendous cost in lives, equipment and fighting expertise. And yet the French never learned. Every time they were certain that, given enough chivalry and valor, they’d whip the English this time.

Along the way we learn a fair amount about the construction of bows and the training of bowmen. We learn only a little about the military tactics of the time, but that’s only because they barely existed. There are also a lot of casualty figures, which are kind of depressing. It’s saddening to think how many lives were wasted in war in those days. (Sadder still to know that the situation hasn’t improved with time.)

There’s been a fashion in recent decades for publishing books about “The [fill in the blank] that changed the world.” If it had been written later, that title could have been applied to Bowmen of England. The longbow killed chivalry, altered the social order, and laid the groundwork for tactics in the Age of Gunpowder.

The book shows its age through its unabashed patriotism, but that’s just refreshing nowadays.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Key to Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I’ve been reading the later books in the Marc Kadella series of legal thrillers (set in Minneapolis), and enjoying them with some reservations. So when I got a deal on a package of the first three books, I bought it. Not sure what I was getting. I had the idea the first books might be a little clumsy. Instead I found that The Key to Justice, the opening novel, was remarkably good and wickedly entertaining.

The book opens with Jake Waschke, an honest, respected Minneapolis police detective. He’s half-brother to the governor’s chief aide, a troubled young man whom he has protected all his life. Now he faces a horrific problem. A knife-wielding serial killer is raping and murdering young women in the Twin Cities (including the governor’s daughter), and Jake knows his brother is doing it. So he selects Carl Fornich, a scumbag with a past rape conviction, and fakes evidence to get him prosecuted.

Carl’s brother comes to Marc Kadella for a defense. Marc is a struggling, small-time lawyer. He needs all the business he can get, especially because he’s involved in countersuing the US government in a tax case and it’s taking forever. Though the prospects of collecting a lot from Carl’s family seem small. But when Marc meets Carl, he’s convinced he’s innocent. If he is, that means the police are framing him. Which makes Marc mad.

In his Introduction, author Dennis Carstens informs us that one of his main motivations for writing the story was to dramatize the un-glamorous side of the practice of law. The long hours, the tedium, the difficulties in getting paid, the official arrogance that has to be swallowed. And that element was in fact one of the things I’ve liked about the books all along.

But to be frank, the later books have gotten a little formulaic. This first one is genuinely original. Lots of surprises and twists, and very dark irony. Carstens isn’t a great prose stylist (and he has a real problem with punctuation), but he can tell a heck of a story.

Also, thanks to his stinginess with character description, I’ve never known what the beautiful Maddy (Marc’s investigator, later his girlfriend) looks like . Now I know she’s tall, brunette, and blue-eyed. Good to know.

Recommended, with the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Man of Affairs,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

John D. MacDonald wrote paperback novels for Fawcett Gold Medal, whose stock in trade was cowboys, private eyes and soldiers of fortune. It’s a tribute to his skill that he could write a saleable (and engaging) story for that market about business. (He had a business degree from Harvard.) A Man of Affairs isn’t one of his top novels, I think, but it’s a pretty good read.

Sam Glidden is a top manager for a small manufacturing  company, the Harrison Corporation, in a fictional town. He rose from the work floor partly with the assistance of the company’s late owner, who was energetic but improvident. Since his death, Sam and the other managers have been trying to rebuild an out-of-date operation, which has prevented them from paying dividends to stockholders. This results in discontent, particularly with the late owner’s two adult children, one of whom, Louise, Sam has carried a torch for since high school.

Then Harrison Corporation comes into the sights of Mike Dean, a famous investor who’d be described as a “corporate raider” today. Dean talks a good talk about rebuilding the company, but Sam knows how this guy operates. He’ll pump the stock up, unload it, and leave the other shareholders in possession of the smoking ruins of a gutted operation. When Dean invites Louise and her brother and their spouses to his compound in the Bahamas, Sam manages to get himself invited too, in hopes he can counter Mike Dean’s persuasions.

What he finds is a house party with a creepy but seductive vibe. Millionaires, publicity people, entertainment people, hangers-on. Greedy, bored, kinky. Sam finds that Mike Dean’s charm and psychological strategy have him on the point of selling out. Then people start dying…

It’s a tribute to MacDonald’s narrative skill that he could transform a story about business into a life-and-death thriller and make it work. There’s sex in A Man of Affairs – fairly shocking by the standards of the time though tame nowadays (it’s all straight sex). The violence is a little far-fetched, but that goes with the territory.

The heart of the story, however, is a pretty solid examination of personal and business integrity. I think it holds up well on that level.

Recommended for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Color of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett

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“He talks pretty big for a gutter wizard,” he muttered.

“You don’t understand at all,” said the wizard wearily. “I’m so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it’s just that I’m suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I’ve got over that then I’ll have time to be decently frightened of you.”

Terry Pratchett’s first book in his long-running Discworld series, The Color of Magic, has an explosive start with the city of Anhk-Morpork (doubtless based on Dallas-Fort Worth) in flames and main characters Rincewind the wizard and Twoflower the tourist dragging themselves away from it. Both the wizard and the twin city, “of which all the other cities of time and space are, as it were, mere reflections,” found themselves completely unprepared for the arrival of a new type of visitor, a tourist. Here they have a man who doesn’t speak any of the languages, has plenty of money to spend, and hopes to see some of the legendary, fantastical people and events he has read about in his homeland far across the sea. Heroes, bar fights, dragons, magic–how fun it would be to see some of that!

Twoflower the tourist is guided into a tavern that happens to be tolerating the presence of Rincewind, who isn’t really a wizard because he was kicked out of magic school, but he can converse in many languages and consequently approaches the tourist as he attempts to talk to the innkeeper via a phrase book. The two can understand each other, and Rincewind is hired as a tour guide, a challenge he may not be able to rise to.

More than that problem, however, is the problem of helping his patron survive the night, because not only does he overpay in pure gold coins (not like any coins you’d find on the streets of Morpork), but his luggage is made of rare, very expensive wood and follows him around on its own tiny legs like a faithful, aggressive dog. Even without eyes, it leers maliciously at perceived threats. Rincewind immediately discerns there’s no telling what that thing could do when cornered or its master harmed.

Because Twoflower doesn’t understand the natural, human yearnings of the Morpork heart, he is instrumental in burning it to the ground, which can’t be a spoiler because you can see the flames on page one. But that story only takes you to page 87. There are more stories as the two travelers ride to the next city–all of it zany, funny, and ridiculous. The last story in this book is quite beautiful.

The humor isn’t particularly chaste, but it never gets bawdy. I wonder if that holds throughout the series. Once I thought it sounded just like The Princess Bride, and a couple times I noted turns of phrase that echoed Wodehouse.

I’ve read you can pick up the series at any point, because there isn’t a grand narrative to follow. The second published book, The Light Fantastic, does appear to be a direct sequel to The Color of Magic, so there’s some sense of order to some of them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Showdown on the River,’ by J. L. Curtis

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Rio Bell is 22 years old, the son of a Texas rancher. In spite of his youth, he already has an impressive reputation as a gunfighter. But he doesn’t expect to need that skill a lot on his present job – leading his first cattle drive, up the Goodnight-Loving Trail to Colorado. He’s got some older friends to back him up, but the decisions will be his, and he feels the responsibility.

The first part of the novel Showdown on the River, by J. L. Curtis (who happens to be a friend of mine, I need to confess) is pretty standard Western fare – the hard days of riding, the boredom and the danger involved in a cattle drive. I didn’t mind that at all. I can read that stuff all day long, if it’s done well, and it is here (Red River is one of my favorite Westerns).

Once the drovers reach Colorado, they encounter challenges they didn’t expect. Rio was planning to visit his hermit uncle in the mountains, but discovers the old man is dead. The people living on his old place are a father with two daughters, one of whom is away at school. But another rancher has moved in on the other side of the valley, with a plan to take over the whole area, at any cost in human lives. With the help of some old mountain men, friends of his cook, Rio and his cowboys will risk their lives to save his new friends – one of whom is a very attractive young woman.

Taken purely as a story, I thought Showdown on the River worked pretty well. I felt the last scenes were a little rushed, and could have been fleshed out. But reading the book was a lot of fun, and that’s the main thing we ask for in these parts.

I have a couple historical quibbles – which may be unfounded. The author likely knows more about these things than I do.

One is the availability of dynamite. Dynamite is overused in Western stories, especially ones set as early as this (1871 by my calculations). The stuff did exist at the time, but I have the idea that finding some just lying around stretches probability a little (could be wrong).

The other is the issue of violence against women. There’s the famous incident of the killing of Dora Hand, Dodge City dance hall singer (involving Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp). Though the killer escaped the gallows, the immediate reaction demonstrates the kind of outrage that the denizens of the American West were capable of when encountering violence of any kind against a (white) woman. They were rare out west in those days, and the culture was romantic and Victorian. In this book, women get threatened with rape and murder. There is negative reaction, I’ll admit, but some of the “bad guys” show an indifference that seems to me improbable. Even the bad guys wouldn’t stoop that far in that time and place. I’m not familiar with any historical exceptions.

In spite of this, I thoroughly enjoyed Showdown on the River, and recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Divided Loyalty,’ by Charles Todd

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Charles Todd, author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, is actually a mother-son writing team (our commenter Paul informed me of this). I found the first book in the series (the first I I read; we’re actually pretty far along in the series here) a little depressing, but I liked the positive attitude displayed toward Christians and the church. So I figured I’d try another, when a cheap download became available. Thus did I purchase A Divided Loyalty.

Inspector Ian Rutledge is an isolated man. He’s unpopular at Scotland Yard because he’s a victim of shell shock, considered a moral coward by other officers. He hangs onto his job only because they’re short of manpower, due to the losses of World War I. His shell shock takes a particularly painful form – persistent hallucination. His friend Hamish MacLeod, a wartime subordinate whom he was forced to order shot on the front lines, is forever at his shoulder, commenting on events. These comments are mostly – but not always – negative.

Avebury in Wiltshire is a famous place in England. It’s a double stone circle, not far from Stonehenge, less complete but larger. The village of Avebury nestles inside it.

A young woman was found stabbed to death in the ditch that surrounds the stones. Inspector Leslie, an older, respected officer, was the first to investigate, but he found no clues. Rutledge recently solved a similar mystery in another town, so his superior (who despises him) sends him to see if he can do any better. His real motive, Rutledge believes, is a desire to see him fail.

No clue to the woman’s identity has been found. She doesn’t “look English,” but she might have come from anywhere in the world. And what brought her here? How was she lured to the murder site?

Rutledge goes to work systematically, asking questions in a widening circle, investigating routes by which the woman might have come. Gradually a few facts – or probabilities – appear. And he begins finding indications of the culprit – indications that lead somewhere he does not want to go. However, the final twist will astonish even him.

I liked A Divided Loyalty better than I liked A False Mirror, the first book I read. It was by no means cheery, but it was less a downer than that one. And I liked Inspector Rutledge’s relentless professionalism in the face of depression and manifold obstacles.

I don’t recall any particular concerns in terms of language or themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Low Tide,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells.

Early (1953) John D. MacDonald. That promises a great story, set back when men were men and women were women. Dead Low Tide does not disappoint in any way.

Andy McClintock lives in a small, cheap Florida cabin in a court originally built for tourists. It’s all he can afford on his current salary. His boss, land developer “Big” John Long, lured him to the state on promises of promotion and good money, but neither has appeared. (Rapacious land development was a continuing theme in MacDonald’s books, and it’s interesting to note his criticisms even at this early date.)

Then John’s wife, the small, intense Mary Eleanor, asks Andy for help. John has been acting strangely, she says, and she’s concerned what’s troubling him. Andy agrees to talk to him. He goes to see John on a building site, and concludes that the man is hiding a problem – likely a health scare. Andy also confronts John about his job, asking for more responsibility and money. To his surprise, John hands him a contract the next day, and the deal involves a partnership.

Then John is found dead, apparently having committed suicide with a speargun that belonged to Andy. He does not identify it for the police. Mary Eleanor asks Andy for another favor – there’s an envelope in John’s desk, she says, that belongs to her. Don’t open it. Just bring it to me. Andy doesn’t agree, but he does search the desk.

The next thing he knows, he’s been arrested for John’s murder. The cops know the speargun was his, and the new contract is motive. But that’s only the beginning of his troubles. Something far, far more valuable than his freedom is about to be taken from him…

Outstanding prose. A tight, gripping plot. Vivid characters who surprise you. A shocking twist toward the end. Dead Low Tide had everything. I highly recommend it.

Minor cautions for mature themes.