Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Twisted Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I liked the first Marc Kadella novel that I read, Cult Justice (by Dennis Carstens), even though there were some problems with the prose, because it had solidly conservative content and the story was pretty good. Reminiscent of a John Sandford book, but with a legal setting. The second one, Maddy’s Justice, I liked less, because it was all You-Go-Girl feminism (as I perceived it). So I figured I’d give Kadella one more shot with Twisted Justice. I have to say, he knocked it out of the park. For this reader.

Minneapolis lawyer Marc Kadella, along with his impossibly hot girlfriend, Maddy Rivers, attends a Christmas season party in a box at U.S. Bank Stadium. They were invited by Parker Crane, a friend who’s done well in financial services. During the party, Parker asks Marc about what a divorce would cost him, as his marriage is on the rocks. When he hears the answer, Parker comments that he’d be better off killing her. Then he takes it back.

Not long after, Parker’s wife Diana is stabbed to death in the parking garage of her lover’s apartment building. When the police check Parker’s cell phone records, they put him in that exact spot at the time of the murder.

Parker maintains that his phone was stolen, and he’s being framed. He retains Marc to defend him. As a defense attorney, Marc, of course, has no need to prove Parker innocent. He just needs to raise reasonable doubt. His obvious tactic is to construct a SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) defense.

To do this, he looks into Diana’s personal history – and finds a wealth of alternative murderers. Because it turns out Diana, a former Minnesota Vikings cheerleader, had a nice little side gig going as a high-end call girl. And some of her clients were among the most powerful men in Minnesota, men with plenty of things to hide…

This book was a little more courtroom-centric than the previous book, with fewer shootouts and gunfights. That was fine with me. The courtroom scenes seemed authentic, and thus educational. As usual with this series, I found the character banter amusing, but not convincing. The problem with misplaced modifiers in the text, so evident in Cult Justice, was not noticeable here. I did note one badly cast sentence that should have been re-written, but in general the writing was okay. The final “surprise twist” didn’t surprise me, but was dramatically appropriate.

What I really loved about Twisted Justice was that it poked a well-deserved finger in the eye of the Minnesota power structure. That was genuinely sweet.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bright Orange for the Shroud,’ by John D. MacDonald

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After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue.

Whenever I see a deal on one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books in e-book form, I grab it. So it was with Bright Orange for the Shroud, a fairly early – but memorable – entry in the series. If I remember correctly, now and then in later books, when he’s recalling his personal nightmares, McGee mentions Boo Waxwell.

Travis McGee isn’t a private eye. He calls himself a salvage specialist. When people are robbed of large amounts of money or valuable possessions, he goes and gets them back, then keeps half the value. This enables him to live his chosen lifestyle – “taking his retirement in installments.”

He plans to make this particular summer one of his lazy ones. He’ll do some maintenance on his big houseboat, the Busted Flush, cruise a bit, do some fishing. He’s earned a rest.

Until Arthur Wilkinson shows up on the dock, incoherent and emaciated. Arthur was part of their beachside community for a while, a low-key, diffident man who’d made money in the family business. Then he met tiny, gorgeous Wilma Ferrer, married her, and moved away.

But it turned out Wilma was a con woman. With her little group of confidence friends, she picked Arthur clean. Money wasn’t enough for her, though. Together with the muscle of the group, big Boo Maxwell, she made sure Arthur had been destroyed as a man.

McGee can help people recover stuff, but recovering a lost soul is outside his skill set. So he goes to Chookie McCall, a professional dancer who dated Arthur for a while, before hooking up with a wrong guy, now in prison. Though she’s reluctant at first, one look at Arthur arouses all Chookie’s maternal instincts.

McGee comes up with a plan to con the cons and get some of Arthur’s money back. It’s a good plan. His mistake is underestimating Boo Waxwell as an opponent. Though he comes off as an ignorant, overgrown cracker, Boo is no fool at all. Someone suggests that Boo is McGee’s alter ego, what he might have been if something had been missing in his make-up. (In many ways, Boo anticipates Max Cady, the brutal villain of MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice under the title, Cape Fear.)

There’s not a wasted line in this book. It’s tough and hard-boiled and tender and sympathetic. There’s a lot of sexual content. Some of it reads really great from my traditional, sexist point of view, and some of it reflects the mores of the sexual revolution and hasn’t aged well.

The plot includes, in my opinion, one too many lucky breaks for the good guys. But all in all, Bright Orange for the Shroud works splendidly. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder on “B” Deck,’ by Vincent Starrett

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The name Vincent Starrett was familiar to me. He was a well-known writer of the Golden Age of Mystery, but is best known for his book, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which I read long ago and enjoyed. (I believe he was the one who suggested that Nero Wolfe was Holmes’ son by Irene Adler.)

So, in my ongoing effort to find more classic mystery writers to read, as a break from the Woke Age of Mystery, I bought Murder on “B” Deck, first in Starrett’s series of three 1920s novels starring amateur detective Walter Ghost.

We meet Ghost first through the eyes of his friend Dunstan Mollock, a mystery writer. Dunstan is on board a steam ship about to embark for France, to see his sister and her husband off on their honeymoon. Dunstan is delighted to find his friend Walter Ghost on the ship, also headed for Europe. Walter is described as a tall, ugly, amiable man who is a former Army intelligence agent, a scientist, and an explorer. And somehow he has acquired a reputation as a solver of mysteries.

Dunstan, through a boneheaded mistake, finds himself stuck on board after embarkation, and decides to just buy a ticket make the trip. Not long after, one of the passengers, a beautiful woman who calls herself the Countess Fogartini, is murdered in her stateroom. Shortly thereafter another passenger, a young English nobleman, is lost overboard under suspicious circumstances.

So the captain asks Walter Ghost to investigate. Ghost starts cautiously interrogating the other passengers. I’d like to tell you the drama builds and the tension grows excruciating – but that’s not what happens. The whole thing proceeds at a pretty leisurely pace.

I suppose my tastes have been coarsened by modern fiction, but I found Murder on “B” Deck slow, and the prose flabby. Also the culprit’s behavior, when he is at last unmasked, struck me as more suitable for melodrama than the real world. Ideas of social class that just don’t fly anymore were also on display.

If you’re looking for a low key book that won’t offend you (much), you might enjoy Murder on “B” Deck as a change of pace. But I can’t really praise it much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Maddy’s Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I reviewed Dennis Carstens’ legal thriller Cult Justice a little while back. I didn’t think the writing was the best, but the characters and dialogue were interesting. Also, the book had a genuinely conservative theme.

So I bought the next book, Maddy’s Justice. And now I’m kind of confused. There was no visible conservatism in this story, except for a hatred of pure evil that pretty much anyone could share. The name change of Minneapolis’ former Lake Calhoun to the unpronounceable Bde Maka Ska is mentioned with unreserved approval. And the plot here is right out of the feminist playbook, aside from some of the jokes.

Attorney Marc Kadella and his boss, Connie, are retained to defend some real scumbags from a sexual harassment complaint. Marc and Connie are used to defending dirtballs, but these guys are worse than they appear. They’re a high-powered, politically juiced law firm with astoundingly predatory policies toward their female employees. It’s generally understood that promotion depends on delivering sexual favors, and even so, few women last long with the firm.

But that’s just on the surface. They are closely connected to an operation in the Caribbean that’s reminiscent of Epstein Island.

But wait, it gets worse…

In order to prepare his defense, Marc has to investigate his own clients, because he knows the plaintiffs’ lawyers will do that, and his clients aren’t cooperative. He turns his private eye friend Tony Carvelli, and his partner Maddy Rivers (who is Marc’s fiancée) loose on them. And the closer they look, the uglier it gets. And the more danger they’re in.

I had a couple problems with this book. The first is that Maddy is a genuine Mary Sue, a woman so beautiful, we’re told, that she once posed for Playboy, but also so lethal that she chews hulking thugs up and spits them out.

Also, the law office banter (similar to, though not quite at the level of, John Sandford’s cop banter) struck me as unrealistic. I say this having no actual experience of law office banter. But I have trouble believing that men and women working together in the business world today make easy jokes about sex with one another and take it lightly. I suspect that a large number of female employees are constantly on the hunt for microaggressions. And the men walk on eggshells.

The author’s besetting sin of misplaced metaphors was less on display in this book than in the last one (though it did show up), but comma placement was almost random all through the text.

So I didn’t like Maddy’s Justice as much as I liked Cult Justice. I don’t know if I’m going to go on with the series or not. But they’re one and one with me, so maybe I’ll give them one more chance.

Cautions for language, adult situations, and some really, really disturbing themes involving violence against children.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘The Gray Man’

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Well, I watched The Gray Man, the film adaptation of Mark Greaney’s novel, reviewed here. It was a book tailor-made for a movie, and the Hollywood geniuses have movie-ized it even more.

Ryan Gosling (who’s actually a pretty good choice for the part, since it’s easy to see him as the kind of guy who could move around unnoticed), plays “Sierra Six,” a super-covert agent for the CIA. We meet him in Bangkok, where he’s been sent to assassinate a target.

In order to avoid collateral casualties, he disobeys orders and confronts the target in person. As he’s dying, the target tells him he’s another member of the Sierra program. He tells Six he’ll be next, and places a mysterious amulet in his hands.

Six’s bosses send killers after Six to retrieve the amulet, and he’s soon on the run. Along the way he finds himself thrown in with agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), who has grown mistrustful of her bosses.

At this point, the film pretty much goes into mental dormancy mode. It becomes (with some breaks for actual drama) a roller coaster of improbable chases, gunfights, escapes, explosions, wholesale slaughter, and heroics. The whole thing culminating with Six facing off with his evil nemesis, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans as Psycho Freddie Mercury) in an extended showdown.

I frankly don’t remember the original book well enough to say a lot about how the plot was changed for film, but I’m pretty sure that Ana de Armas’ character didn’t play such a large – or active – role in the book. In fact, she generally upstages Gosling, at least in terms of lethality. Hollywood has so distanced itself from the tradition of the hero saving the fair maiden, that now the hero gets saved multiple times by the maiden. She descends to the level of deus ex machina. A triumph for feminism, I suppose.

It annoyed me.

The Gray Man was an amusing way to pass time, but I didn’t think it was a great movie. Certainly not a great adaptation. Cautions for language and lots of violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Intercept,’ by Andrews & Wilson

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I mentioned just the other day that I’m prejudiced against Christian fiction. Not because I’m against it, I hasten to add, but because I hate seeing it done badly. Which it usually is, in my experience.

So I approached Dark Intercept, by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, with a certain amount of caution. However, these guys are established, bestselling authors. I thought I’d take a chance.

My response is… complicated.

Jedediah Johnson is a Navy SEAL going through the difficult adjustments of retirement. When he gets a call from his old boyhood friend in Nashville, David Yarnell, he doesn’t really want to talk to him. They parted on bitter terms, and David married Rachel, who’d been Jed’s girl. He has neither forgiven nor forgotten.

But David explains that their daughter Sara Beth has been kidnapped. That’s a different matter.

What Jed doesn’t know is that Sara Beth is a very special girl, and not just in her parents’ hearts. She has a psychic (or spiritual) gift. She can communicate telepathically and read people’s minds. She was being recruited by a Christian group with a mysterious, clandestine mission. But there are others aware of her powers, and they’re the ones who snatched her. They have dark plans for her, unless somebody is able to locate her and rescue her.

Which just happens to be something Jed is good at.

I kind of seesawed in my estimation of Dark Intercept. At first I was delighted by the sheer quality of the writing. The book is professionally and effectively written. I thought the dialogue was a little weak – everybody tended to talk the same way. But all in all, very good on literary style. Which is a rare treat in faith-based literature.

However, other elements of the story began bothering me increasingly.

One element was the idea of a Christian military group, which is an important part of the story. I have no problem with the idea of the Christian solder (or warrior), obviously. But I view military service as part of a Christian’s civil obligations. I very much distrust the idea of a “Christian” army, fighting holy wars. (Though the enemy here certainly merits a holy war response. But this is fantasy. I don’t want to give people ideas in the real world.)

Another element was the fact that the spirituality in this book is pretty generic. Lots of talk about God and faith. Very little about Jesus Christ and his death, resurrection and atonement. It seemed to be a sort of Touched By an Angel spirituality, adapted for the mass market. Tyndale House is the publisher, but I think they’re aiming at a wider audience.

Also, there’s a woman pastor. You probably know what I think about that.

In sum, I’m not sold. I appreciated the authors’ professionalism. But I found the story theologically problematic.

You might easily react differently.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Dark Sky,’ by Dean Koontz

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For as long as Ophelia had been wise enough to see the world as it really was, she’d been aware that it was shifting away from truth and light, sliding farther every year. But she would never give up and slide with it. Truth mattered, always striving for the light. As long as there were people like Colson, there was light in the world, a chance that the slide could be halted, even reversed.

It did not take me long to buy, read, and finish Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Big Dark Sky, just released. I wouldn’t say it’s one of my Koontz favorites, and the title’s weak, but even an average Koontz is more delightful than most books I read.

Joanna Chase is a successful novelist living in Santa Fe. She has fond memories of her childhood on a ranch called Rustling Willows in Montana, though her time there ended in tragedy.

But now she’s started to get mysterious messages, through her TV and her phone and other devices. A voice calling for help, saying they’re in a dark place. As she finds herself compelled to return to Montana in response, she begins to remember things she’d forgotten. For instance, she’s entirely forgotten her best friend – a mentally disabled boy. How did that happen?

Meanwhile, the new owner of Rustling Willows, a multibillionaire, has hired a private investigator to take a close look at the place. Strange things have been going on there. He doesn’t feel safe bringing his family until they stop.

And nearby, a megalomaniac kidnaps a young woman, as an early step in his grand plan to exterminate the entire human race, which in his view has proven itself unworthy of the planet.

What I liked best about The Big Dark Sky was that, although things got very dark (and Koontz can write dark with the best of them), it’s mainly a book about hope. Exactly the kind of book we need in 2022. Though the last line contains an intriguing grim joke.

As far as religion goes, Koontz’s Catholicism is not very evident here. The Gandalf figure of the story, Ganesh, can be presumed to be Hindu. But the scientific/mystical themes are suitable for most anybody.

Cautions for language and a sex scene.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cult Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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It’s a common complaint among writers, especially new writers, that editors will return a manuscript without reading past the first page or two. The writers feel they haven’t been given a fair trial.

What they don’t understand is that all editors, and many readers, have developed the ability to spot a clunker at a very early stage. Certain common mistakes immediately mark a writer as an amateur, and most editors have no time to give free writing lessons to every stranger who shoots a story over the transom.

I’m an editor in a small way, and I think I’ve been reading long enough to have some of that instinct myself. When I started reading Dennis Carsten’s Cult Justice, I spotted some caution lights, and didn’t think I’d stay with it for the long haul.

But in this case I was wrong. The prose has undeniable weaknesses, but the story grabbed me and turned out more engaging than I expected.

Ben Sokol is a self-hating Jew and committed leftist, a tenured professor at a state university in Minneapolis. He’s convinced his genius is unappreciated, and he envies more famous and wealthier colleagues. But one day he and a student decide that what society needs is more direct action. There’s been enough talk. It’s time to take violent action – by, for instance, robbing banks. For good causes, of course, though Ben will need to keep a percentage for his expenses…

He assembles a team of idealistic students who scout locations and plan carefully. Soon the news is reporting a series of lightning-fast bank raids, efficient, profitable and bloodless.

Until there is blood.

Meanwhile, Marc Kadella, Minneapolis attorney, is involved in the divorce case from purgatory. The couple seems like a pair of normal, prosperous citizens, but he can’t keep them out of each other’s faces, in one way or another. Until the wife is murdered, and the husband, Marc’s client, is arrested for her murder.

Who would think her death is actually related to the rash of bank robberies?

At the beginning of Cult Justice, I was (strange as it may seem) put off by how much I agreed with the politics. I’m so used to seeing second-rate literature from my side of the fence that I’m afraid I’ve grown prejudiced. And in actual fact, author Carstens does have weaknesses as a writer. One of his besetting sins is misplacing the object of a clause (I’m sure there’s a technical term for that, but I’ve forgotten it): “Having grown up on the East Coast, January was still too much for Ben to take.”

But the story was fun, and the characters were fun, in the tradition of legal and police thrillers. One element that intrigued me was the description – or lack thereof – of Marc’s girlfriend Maddy. Unless I missed something, we are never told what she looks like, not even whether she’s blonde, brunette or redhead. All we know is that everybody talks about her as the hottest thing on two legs. I thought that was a very creative way to present a character – until I found out this was the tenth book in the series, and author Carstens probably just assumed we already knew.

I thought the plot could have been tighter. I would have liked (for the sake of balance) to have had at least one sincere, intelligent leftist in the cast, rather than just scoundrels and dupes (it annoys me when leftist writers treat us that way).

Still, it was fun to read an engaging, fairly professional mystery written from a conservative point of view. You might like it too. Cautions for language and adult stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Judge Me Not,’ by John D. MacDonald

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“You stay in town long enough, and I’ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you’ll eat grass. I know. You’re telling yourself you’re a big strong guy and you’d die before you’d take orders like that. That’s fairy story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren’t like that. You can break people. You can break anybody in the world, if you know how to go about it. If you want to be smart, just join my team. Dennison doesn’t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She’ll do anything you tell her to do.”

I said of the last old, republished John D. MacDonald novel I reviewed that it felt like a “programmer,” a quick project slapped together to meet a deadline. MacDonald did, after all, work on contract for the pulp paperback trade.

Judge Me Not, the latest one I read, is a very different specimen. Though written for the paperback market, and at a very early point in his career, and though it follows the conventions of the pulp genre, it transcends all that and (in my opinion) achieves the level of serious literature. It belongs up there with Hemingway – or at least with Dashiell Hammet.

Teed Morrow is a sort of professional reformer. He served in the occupation forces in Germany after the war, and then teamed up with his former commander to work for civic reform. They’ve gotten themselves hired as city manager and assistant in the town of Deron, New York. They’re on schedule with their plan to expose and oust the current mayor and the gang that supports him.

But Teed isn’t quite the straight arrow his boss, a widowed father of two daughters, is. Teed’s a bit of a swinger. And right now he’s sleeping with the mayor’s wife. Who could it hurt?

What he and his boss don’t realize is how seriously corrupt and vicious the gang running the town is.

That becomes very clear when Teed wakes up one day to find the mayor’s wife murdered in his lake cabin. He manages to dump the body before the cops show up (heroes disposing of women’s bodies seems to have been one of MacDonald’s go-to tropes at the start of his career; it’s featured in the last three of his novels I’ve read), but that doesn’t prevent his being arrested and beaten within an inch of his life by the cops.

And that’s just the beginning. It will get much, much worse before Teed manages to take the fight back to the enemy.

Judge Me Not’s plot genuinely surprised me. It was troubling and a little shocking. Very bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it, but there’s a moving redemptive element too.

I was highly impressed with Judge Me Not. Cautions for sexual situations (1950s vintage, so they’re not very explicit). Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Woman in the Waves,’ by William J. Cook

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This book grabbed me on the first page, with a well-written description of a walk on the beach.

Unfortunately, it lost me soon after that. But I stayed with it out of an odd sort of train-wreck fascination.

Woman in the Waves by William J. Cook is part of a series, and apparently wraps up business from previous books. But it stands alone all right. I certainly won’t be going back for the preliminaries.

Peter Bristol is a college professor in Driftwood, Oregon, a widower who has regimented his life strictly to regain a sense of control. One day, on his weekly walk on the beach, he sees a woman in a wedding gown walking into a heavy surf. Although he tries to rescue her, she’s gone in a moment.

Then, not long after, he finds a woman’s severed arm on the beach. On one of its fingers is a valuable diamond ring.

Policeman Charley Whitehorse is chief of police in Driftwood. In spite of the coincidence of Peter reporting both incidents, he doesn’t suspect him. His thoughts can’t resist turning to a man he knows to be a killer, who eluded him in a previous case – another college professor with a sexual taste for young coeds.

The story itself was okay, though melodramatic at the end. But the storytelling was highly amateurish. It read very much like a lot of well-meant Christian fiction – and often slipped into theological discussions. But no particular faith was affirmed, and a fair amount of profanity was present. Also there was premarital sex without criticism.

The author’s main problem was over-writing, something I complain about in a lot of my reviews. One of the characters asks at one point, “Is everybody around here becoming a [expletive deleted] philosopher?” A moment of self-awareness by the author, because everybody does philosophize in this book. Which leads to another problem – all the characters think and talk the same way. Gangsters and cops and college professors – you can’t tell them apart by their speech. In general, it’s a good idea to convey information to the reader through thought and dialogue rather than information dumps. But there are limits. Not everybody thinks out everything they’re doing every time they perform habitual acts, but they do in this book. A lot of very unnecessary information gets conveyed.

Also, the characters tend to make theatrical gestures, like leaping up and shaking their fists at the heavens. Scenes like that need to be used judiciously, if at all.

So I did not enjoy Woman in the Waves, and I do not recommend it.