Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Knock at the Door,’ by Peter Rowlands

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I’ve had a conflicted relationship with Peter Rowlands’ novels. I like his prose, and I very much like his characters. But I find his plotting a touch weak. In writing A Knock at the Door, he set himself a daunting plotting task. It was – mostly – successful.

Rory Cavenham is a web designer, temporarily out of work. He’s staying at a friend’s large house in England’s Cotswolds when on a rainy night a woman knocks on the door. She’s young and attractive, and soaked to the skin. He’s reluctant to let her in, but she seems to have no one else to help her, so he does. To his astonishment, she claims to believe the year to be 1972. Her name, she tells him, is Rebecca. She is adamant that she doesn’t want to go to a hospital or talk to the police.

Rory turns to the internet (something Rebecca doesn’t understand), and soon learns that there was indeed a girl named Rebecca who disappeared in 1972 – a convicted murderer who escaped from a psychiatric facility. But how could she turn up fifty years later, little older than when she vanished? He also discovers another missing woman who could be her, who supposedly died in a fire a couple years back. But, oddly enough, that woman was a documentary researcher who’d been researching the original Rebecca’s story…

And when uniformed thugs show up to try to kidnap Rebecca, the whole thing starts spinning out of control,

I was often reminded of my own novel, Death’s Doors, as I read A Knock at the Door. The author navigated the same kind of plot situations, where a time-traveling newcomer has to be guided – and to some extent protected – through and from culture shock. The mystery of Rebecca’s identity was a compelling one, and kept me reading with fascination.

Rory, our hero, is a good character, but artistically weak in that he commits the sin of acting naively, in exactly the same way, on more than one occasion.

The final resolution – really a series of resolutions – didn’t, in my opinion, quite live up to expectations. It was emotionally satisfying, but less so in dramatic terms. In short, it fizzled a bit – not entirely, but the bang wasn’t quite what I hoped for. Also, I did see it coming, at least to some extent.

Rebecca’s culture shock was handled reasonably well, but in her surprise at how the world has changed, she fails to mention something that would surely have been remarked on by a true time traveler – the major demographic changes in England since 1972. I can understand why an author would feel it necessary to skip that part, but it weakened plausibility a little.

Still, all in all, A Knock at the Door was an enjoyable story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fabled Falcon,’ by Neil Howarth

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As I work my way through the backlog of free books I’ve been acquiring through online deals, I found that I’d arrived at two books in a row about art experts. The last one was Aaron Elkins’ A Glancing Light (review a few inches down), which I liked quite a lot. I liked Neil Howarth’s The Fabled Falcon too, at the beginning, but my enjoyment faded as the story proceeded.

Darius Fletcher (known as “Fletch,” not to be confused with Gregory McDonald’s American “Fletch” character) is a former soldier and a former convict. Now he’s a professor of art at the (fictional) Canterbury University in England. His college is funded by the slightly shady Bancroft Foundation. Fletch is a little shady himself, providing occasional help to an art forger friend, but he genuinely loves art in itself.

One day while he’s lecturing, he looks out at his audience and sees a man there who is not a student. That man turns out to be dead. Fletch recognizes him, though – he’s Francis, a young man with whom he recently worked on an archaeological dig on Malta. Francis had confided to him that he’d discovered something fantastic – a signed painting by the master Caravaggio, who only signed one other known work.

Though Fletch is briefly detained by the police, the Bancroft Foundation quickly secures his release, and sends him off to Malta to find out what’s happened to Francis’ discovery. What he doesn’t yet know – but will soon discover – is that this treasure is being sought by competing sinister, ruthless, and deep-pocketed interests. Teaming up with a beautiful Russian Interpol agent, Fletch does his best to stay one step ahead of them, following cryptic clues to uncover ancient secrets.

If all this suggests to you parallels with Dan Brown and Indiana Jones, you’re not wrong. For this reader, the book steadily lost credibility as mystical and supernatural elements began to intrude – implicitly, at least. I probably would be okay with it if those supernatural elements were Christian, but here the flavor is explicitly Gnostic.

On top of that, there was a definite Hollywood approach, not only in the Fighting Girl Boss character of the Interpol agent, but also in the hero’s tendency to quickly heal from injuries and come back battle-ready.

So all in all, I was disappointed with The Fabled Falcon. It was heretical and implausible (but I repeat myself).

Authors, Fiction, Reviews

My invaluable opinion on a Nobel-prize winning book

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I’ve written a review of Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s Nobel-prize winning novel, Septology. It was posted today by Ad Fontes here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Glancing Light,’ by Aaron Elkins

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In the last few decades the field of art thievery had developed well beyond the crude old days when paintings had usually been stolen and then held for ransom. Now, with the prodigious rewards offered by insurance companies, nasty ransom demands had become unnecessary. You could be more decorous. You merely stole the piece of art, waited awhile, and then turned it in for the insurance reward. All you had to do was come up with some reproachless way of “finding” the object in question and getting the word to the insurance company.

I have read at least one novel by Aaron Elkins before, and I reviewed it favorably. Nevertheless, his name is one of those that remains vaguely familiar in my mind, but I can’t quite place it. Maybe A Glancing Light will help me remember in the future.

The hero of A Glancing Light (this is the second book in a series) is Chris Norgren (extra points for the Scandinavian name!) a curator for a Seattle art museum. Chris is preparing for a trip to Bologna, Italy to arrange for an upcoming exhibition. He gets a request to evaluate a couple paintings that showed up unexpectedly in a shipment for a low-rent art importer. One of the paintings he dismisses as a fake. The other turns out to be one of a group of paintings stolen in a recent major art heist.

Arriving in Italy, Chris is treated to a welcome dinner by a group of friends. Afterward, he sees one of them being attacked by thugs. Chris rushes to help him. He escapes serious injury himself, but his friend is permanently crippled. Chris is certain this has something to do with the aforementioned art heist, but when he goes to see Bologna’s chief artistic crime cop, he’s not impressed with the man – and the feeling is mutual. The information he has to share is dismissed, and he is ordered to stay out of the whole business.

As you can guess, he will not follow that advice. Before he’s done, he’ll have cause to regret the.

The tone of A Glancing Light is (appropriately) fairly light. Chris is not one of those omnipotent amateur detectives who’s always one step ahead of the police, which makes him all the more believable. And the book is educational too.

I very much enjoyed A Glancing Light.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Three Minute Hero,’ by Craig Terlson

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I’d been away long enough that I struggled to connect the word home with this landscape. My body still felt it. My heart did, too, but that organ was buried in so much scar tissue it was hard to get a solid reading from it.

Sometimes a novel will astonish you with its high quality. Such is the case with Three Minute Hero by Craig Terlson, who – so far as I can tell – is an author who should have written a lot more novels, and ought to be much more famous than he is.

Luke Fischer, our hero and narrator, is a native of the Manitoba plains. But he fled the small town where he grew up, finally drifting to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he works now in an informal way – favor for favor – for Benno, a crime boss. Now Benno wants him to drive a car up to Canada, to look for a fellow employee Luke calls “Mostly Harold.” Mostly Harold is a professional hit man, a huge guy who wears cowboy boots and is devoted to the music of Burt Bacharach. He set out for Canada himself recently, in pursuit of a girlfriend who dumped him. And Benno suspects she had something to do with the recent murder of his own nephew.

Luke hasn’t been back to the Canadian plains for a long time, and he doesn’t find the folks especially friendly. Particularly as he’s following a string of dead and wounded tough guys, left behind by Mostly Harold’s juggernaut. But he’ll still find some time to confront his own past along the way.

The most obvious quality of Three Minute Hero, for the fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, is the obvious inspiration of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, another mystery centering on a big thug in search of a dangerous dame. But (with all due respect to Chandler) Mostly Harold is a far more complex and interesting character than Moose Malloy.

The prose is also very much in Chandler’s league. I don’t think I’ve read such a well-written hard-boiled story in a long time. Finely-crafted lines abound, like, “Worn-out tables were filled with circle fossils as memories of beers gone past.”

Some of Chandler’s weaknesses are also emulated. The plot is extremely complex and confusing. It was hard to keep track of the players. And there are some rookie factual errors, probably derived from TV and movies – pistols seem to have infinite ammunition supplies, a bullet wound to the shoulder is dismissed as minor, and automobiles get undue credit for their bullet-stopping properties.

Three Minute Hero is clearly set sometime before the turn of the 21st Century – there are no cell phones or internet. I don’t know when the book was actually written – the data on Amazon.com gives no clue. The author, Craig Terlson, is apparently a successful graphic artist as well as a novelist. I wish he’d written more than he has. This is good stuff.

Cautions for language and lots of violence. Highly recommended for hard-boiled fans.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Home,’ by Bruce Beckham

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The air is still and smells of mulch and fungal spores, and woodland sounds resonate – the harsh porcine screeching of jays and the fine ticking of robins.

The snippet above is just a sample of the deft natural descriptions that give Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels their unique tactile qualities. I’m not a great fan of outdoor stories, and I prefer my detectives more cerebral than instinctive. Which makes these novels entirely wrong for me, but I like them very much anyway.

In Murder at Home, book 22 in the series, our hero is out fishing on Bassenthwaite Lake, his favorite haunt, when he notices an old man on the shore in a wheelchair. The old man greets him as if he knows him, and talks to him about fishing. When a nurse comes to collect the old man, she tells Skelgill that he’s an indigent, dumped in a hospital and on the minimal welfare plan. They call him William, but aren’t sure that’s his name. He suffers from dementia.

Skelgill feels an affinity with the old man and decides to look more closely into the situation. This is not entirely outside his duties, as he and the attractive Detective Sergeant Jones are investigating welfare fraud.

Their other cohort, DS Leyton, is working undercover as a welfare worker. A flirtatious co-worker gives him a tip that the scam he ought to be looking at is one where people create false identities and then “double-dip” under their own and their assumed names. That will lead to a mother and son who are living the high life, not only on double benefits, but on murder.

I was a little ambivalent about Murder at Home at the beginning, purely for emotional reasons. But it grew on me, and having finished it I consider it one of the best entries in a stellar series. Highly recommended. The mature material is subdued enough to qualify the book as a Cozy, but the tone is a little tougher than a Cozy.

Oh, I might mention that all these books are written in the present tense. I object to that on principle, but in actual practice I always grow inured a few pages in.

Reviews, Uncategorized

Musings on ‘The Admirable Crichton,’ by a former Crichton

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Tonight, it is your very great misfortune to be subjected to my reminiscences on one of the plays I did, back in my theater days. I found the movie version on Tubi last night, and watched it out of curiosity. As it has some historical/literary significance, I think I can be excused for rambling about it here, comparing it to my own experience.

“The Admirable Crichton” is a play first produced in 1902, by J. M. Barrie, who also wrote “Peter Pan” (like that play, it indulges his fetish for girls in boys’ clothing). The main character is the eponymous Crichton, a paragon among butlers, unquestionably the literary father to both Jeeves and Mervyn Bunter (“mere” valets though they were). He manages the stately home of his master, Lord Loam, with supreme exactitude. His master, a liberal, has vague ideas about social equality, of which Crichton strenuously disapproves. (“If my master were to be equal to me,” he explains at one point, “then I would be equal to the footman.” Or words to that effect.)

Then the family (Lord Loam and his three daughters, plus two suitors, a young gentleman and a clergyman included purely to keep things respectable), decide to take a cruise in the South Seas. Crichton, condescending to serve for the duration as Lord Loam’s valet, accompanies them, along with “Tweenie,” a housemaid.

When their ship is wrecked on a desert island, Nature begins asserting herself. It soon becomes plain that, as far as survival is concerned, Crichton is the only one among them qualified to either do practical things or to exercise leadership. Before long the social order is inverted. Crichton becomes the “Guv’nor,” and Lord Loam is his devoted personal servant. Crichton is a benign dictator to them all, admired and beloved. All the ladies long to be chosen as his wife. (The gentlemen, on the other hand, are vying for Tweenie’s attention.)

At last, after two years, Crichton realizes they’re not likely either to escape or be rescued. He announces that he will marry Lady Mary, the eldest daughter, who has become a sort of Diana, a wild huntress.

Then (spoiler alert), a ship appears on the horizon. Crichton, due to his profound sense of honor, lights the signal fire himself, summoning a boat to their rescue. He makes the decision to return to his servant’s status. Back in England, when he realizes his presence is an embarrassment to the family, he retires to run a pub, taking Tweenie as his wife. Lady Mary, who still loves him, is heartbroken.

Surely one of the finest productions ever done of Crichton must have been the one staged in March, 1993 by the Melbourne Civic Theater in Melbourne, Florida. (The fact that I played the lead role is purely coincidental to my mentioning it, of course. The local critic praised my performance: “It is said that acting is a series of choices, and Walker proves this saying with elegance.”) Having done several performances, I think I remember the play pretty well, and I was interested to watch the 1957 production, starring Gerald More (who was good, but no Walker).

The movie follows the play’s plot quite faithfully, but the dialogue is greatly altered. I guess this should be no surprise, as more than fifty years had passed since the play’s first opening. Times had changed. Still, I was surprised that Crichton’s initial moment of supreme self-abnegation, when he condescends to step down from the heights of butlerhood to serve as a mere valet (if only temporarily), was reduced to a couple lines and no serious struggle . And the play’s biggest boffo moment – a sight gag that always had the theater audience roaring with laughter (it involves a bucket), was completely omitted. There was also the business of a characteristic hand-washing gesture Crichton always performs as butler. He drops it entirely once he’s the Guv’nor, and the moment when he resumes servant status is marked by a resumption of the handwashing. This is also missing from the movie.

Nonetheless, the film worked pretty well on its own terms. Barrie was playing with some fairly radical social ideas here. The play could have been revolutionary (he pondered allowing Crichton to marry Lady Mary). But in the end he chose to give his audience an ending that preserved the status quo in action, while leaving them with a certain uneasiness of conscience. A sound business decision, no doubt.

After all these years, “The Admirable Crichton” remains an intriguing story, one that can be taken in more than one way.

Fiction, Reviews

Omni’s Fall by Tom Reynolds (Series #4)

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Book cover of Omni's Fall

I understand when a cast of characters is in high school, the plot usually entails going to class, but I remember the third novel, Rise of the Circle, ending on big decisions and cosmic revelations. This novel, Omni’s Fall, begins with our hero struggling through math class.

I guess that means it’s just another Monday.

Teenaged metahuman Connor Connolly feels compelled to act, even when he doesn’t know what to do. That gets him into big trouble and threatens to end his heroic career. The authorities over him keep telling him to stand down and not draw attention to himself, while at the same his Batman-like mentor is calling him out to missions. After each feat of heroism, his metabands, the technology that makes him a superhero, look more damaged than before. Should he keep using them? As soon as he decides to rest a while, another threat or opportunity arises.

The plot and structure of the book are fun and maybe hold together, but they aren’t strong. I liked the villain and the new developments to the world. I still like the characters. But everything together didn’t work as well as I wanted it to.

It’s one thing for the hero to press on when everything is telling him to play it safe. Maybe he can’t stop, because the threat will run him down or the bad guys will get away. Maybe he’s the only one with all the facts to bring justice. It’s another thing for the hero to keep risking his life because “somebody’s got to do something.” No one throws himself in front of a runaway train because somebody has to do something to stop it. Of course, when you open the possibility of being able to stop the train with your super strength, how big does that possibility have to be for you to make the jump?

With the threat of his metabands failing, Connor must confront the possibility that he may no longer be able to fight bad guys as Omni, but when that argument comes up, he gets defensive and denies all of his worries like a man denying he has colon cancer. He isn’t mature enough to have the power he has, and he isn’t mature enough to recognize his immaturity. The fear of having your power taken from you is a good theme, but this story doesn’t go deep enough to make it compelling.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Florida Firefight,’ by Randy Wayne White

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I read several of Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford mysteries about a decade ago, and liked them, but I stopped because I found myself less and less comfortable with the worldview. But a deal showed up recently for one of White’s earlier books, Florida Firefight. This was written under the pseudonym Carl Ramm, and was the first volume in a series about a freelance commando named Hawker.

Shortly after Chicago policeman James Hawker has been fired for violating department policy by doing the right thing, he gets an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with a reclusive tycoon whose son Hawker had tried to save. The tycoon tells him he knows of a town in Florida called Mahogany Key, where Latin American drug smugglers are moving in. He’s concerned about his friends there and would like Hawker to go down and help. His cover story will be that he’s bought the local marina and wants to get it going profitably again. Intrigued – and having nothing better to do – Hawker decides to take the job.

What he finds is a depressed community, falling into ruin. The local residents had attempted to resist the incoming gangsters, but found themselves outmanned and outgunned, and now they’re beaten. With the assistance of a beautiful environmental biologist, Hawker forms a plan to defeat the narco smugglers and help the locals regain their pride.

There was nothing out of the ordinary about Florida Firefight. It follows the essential thriller formula that has worked so well for so many writers, like Lee Child and Gregg Hurwitz more recently. Lots of action, with a layer of inspiration in there somewhere. But I thought the book well written, except for some awkward information dumping in the first scene. Otherwise, the book was a fast and exciting read.

I found it melancholy, though. It reminded me of a time – not very long ago – when we lived in a very different country. We had a simple, comprehensible chief enemy in the world – Soviet Russia. Americans still had a sense of being one people, of sharing an identity. Remembering those times, under present circumstances, was kind of depressing.

There was one substantial sex scene, more explicit (in my opinion) than strictly necessary.

Florida Firefight was a well-written novel, and very entertaining on its own terms. I should mention that pretty conservative opinions got expressed, somewhat to my surprise.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Revenge at Sea,’ by Brian O’Sullivan

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As you know if you’re a regular here, I have no qualms about trashcanning a book after reading a couple of pages, if it fails to please me. This practice is made easier by the fact that I get a lot of books free or extremely cheap, through Kindle offers. The world is full of shabby, overoptimistic self-published books, and I’d rather not stomp on the author’s dreams by panning their book when I could just keep mum.

But occasionally a slightly more promising book shows up and keeps me reading long enough, before disillusioning me, that I don’t want to lose my sunk time cost without even being able to do a review. So I read that book through, and then I trash it here.

That is the story with Revenge at Sea, by Brian O’Sullivan.

What made me increasingly hate this book, as I slogged through it, was not only that the prose was bloated and bad (it started fair and deteriorated as it went along. This is not unusual. It’s common – and not actually a bad idea – to do a lot of polishing at the start, when you’re trying to hook the reader). It wasn’t just that the dialogue was stilted and not half as clever as it thought itself.

My main complaint was that our hero/narrator was an idiot.

The aforementioned hero/narrator is Quint Adler, a reporter for a minor newspaper in California’s Bay area. Supposedly, he is highly talented (this is dubious based on his prose) but has never gotten his big break. One night, while in a hospital after an injury, he overhears a suspicious conversation between his roommate and a companion. It sounds like they committed a major crime. He snaps a picture of the guy’s information sheet and, after being released from the hospital, goes to check the guy’s home out. He finds the man dead, but does not inform the police. Instead, he sees it as his opportunity. If he can figure out what the guy was involved in, he can write the Big Story that might supercharge his career.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Over the course of the next few weeks, Quint will lie to the cops, get some people killed (gruesomely), be framed for murder, and at last have a showdown with his nemesis on a yacht on the open sea. (The final climax is one of the least plausible I’ve ever encountered in a novel.)

Quint spends time in jail during this story. It doesn’t occur to the author to describe Quint’s feelings about being locked up. There is zero description of the jail experience. He knows people he’s talked to have killed by mobsters, but fails to make the connection that he might be in danger too.

Like I said, an idiot.

The author also misuses words, like “taciturn” when he seems to want “covert.”

This is, in short, a badly written book that I labored to finish.

The author shows signs of talent, but he needs a good editor. At least 1/3 of his verbiage could have been cut, and it would have only improved the experience.

Not recommended.