Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Yesterday is Dead,’ by Jack Lynch

Leave a comment

I like the late Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series of hard-boileds, starring Pete Bragg, better and better. Yesterday is Dead was right up my alley.

Pete Bragg, you may recall, is a private eye in the San Francisco area. But his origins are in Seattle, where he grew up and was a newspaper man for a while. He doesn’t have a lot of fond memories, though. Somehow, he says, nothing ever worked out for him there.

So it’s been a while since he’s been in touch with his best old friend up there, Benny Bartlett. Benny is freelance journalist, and a really nice guy. He works on human interest and feature stories. Woodward and Bernstein he’s not.

So why is somebody threatening him over the phone? There have been a couple strange incidents, too, which may have been attacks. But Benny’s not sure. The police aren’t impressed. But Benny’s worried about his family. Would Pete come up and look into things?

Of course Pete will. About the time he shows up in town, the danger to Benny becomes undeniable. But even more disconcerting is that Pete runs into his ex-wife, Lorna. Their relationship was complicated, and when she left him, it hurt. Now she seems interested again. Can Pete take another chance on her? Or should he be faithful to his California girlfriend?

Yesterday is Dead is classic hard-boiled, even down to Pete getting taken for a ride and given a professional beating. My only real complaint is a lingering one with this series – Pete’s judgment and ethics in dealing with women are pretty bad (and they’ve got to be bad when I can tell). But I guess that’s part of his character.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Targeted,’ by Stephen Hunter

2 Comments

The shooting stopped not out of mercy or rationality, but out of ammo depletion. Each automatic and semiautomatic weapon came up dry at almost the same second. Anyone whose eardrums had not been shattered by the ruckus would have heard an anvil chorus of clicks, snaps, slams, curses, and chunks as, momentarily drained of IQ, the troopers decided that if they pulled real hard the guns would start shooting again.

I always wonder (with anticipation) what stunt Stephen Hunter will pull to squeeze one more story out of the Bob Lee Swagger franchise. When you’re writing an action character who ages in real time, and you’ve gotten him up to his mid-seventies, generating drama turns into a real challenge. Generating plausible drama would seem nearly impossible.

And yet Hunter pulls it off again in Targeted. I won’t say the story is quite plausible, but it’s carried off with such style and verve that it works, in the grand tradition.

In our last story, old Bob Lee saved the country from a major terrorist plot with a near-impossible rifle shot. In the grand tradition of American politics, the reward he earns is a congressional investigation, led by a predatory old congresswoman who may, or may not, be based on a living person. Oh, we have nothing but respect for you personally, the investigators say (they are lying), but we need to seriously consider the procedures and protocols that led to your action. Were anyone’s civil rights violated? Did systemic racism inform the operation in any way?

Just when things look very bad for the old sniper, the whole thing gets turned upside down by the arrival by a group of mysterious convicts who take everybody hostage. Bob, plastic-cuffed to a wheelchair, is in a poor position to save the day, but a surprising ally will appear.

Lots of action, a good dollop of political satire, and one of the most dependable action heroes out there. I got a kick out of Targeted, and recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sierra Six,’ by Mark Greaney

Leave a comment

Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, about Courtland Gentry, renegade former CIA assassin, continues with Sierra Six, which combines a contemporary story with flashbacks to his first assignment, twelve years ago, as part of a CIA kill team. The two threads intertwine, more and more tightly as the story goes on, coming finally to a crashing double point.

We start with the flashback, where young Court’s talents as a fighting man are recognized, and the CIA decides to add him to an action team. He’ll be the “Six,” the point man, replacing a string of other sixes who’ve been killed on recent missions. Court is not a team player by nature – it’s hard for him to coordinate with others. Even harder for him to trust others. In training, he keeps messing up. In early missions, he makes costly mistakes. But his sheer talent persuades his superiors to keep him on the team – though his team members don’t like him one bit.

In the present, working as a freelance, he gets hired for an operation in Algiers. In the course of the action he glimpses the face of a man he thought was dead – a terrorist he came up against on that old, first mission. Court has a personal score to settle with that man. And, incidentally, that man is going to murder millions of people if he isn’t stopped.

Sierra Six was a tight, taut thriller that never let up. The action was pretty cinematic – a little implausible, but compelling. I don’t have the tolerance for such stories that I used to have, but I can’t deny it was well done. And I do keep reading the books.

Recommended, for those who like this kind of story. Cautions for what you’d expect.

Reviews

‘Riders of the Whistling Pines’

Leave a comment

It was a relatively quiet day. Warmer than yesterday and clear outside. I had to do some shoveling again. Not much.

Hey, it’s almost March. In March, you can start hoping for spring. You’ll be bitterly disappointed, but you can hope. At least the sunlight comes in larger packages now, which is nice in a time of inflation.

As I’ve mentioned, I like to have the TV on while I’m doing translation. Especially old B-westerns. I very much enjoy B-westerns. They’re cheaply done and obviously so, but they fill the silence demand little of the viewer. They were a comfort in my childhood, and they still make me feel good. Especially when they’ve aged badly.

Whenever I watch a Gene Autrey movie, I wonder, “How did this guy get to be a movie star?” He was not tall, not particularly handsome, and a little tubby. The answer, of course, is his singing. He started as a singer, and moved into the movies. Little boys loved him. Because, what do little boys know?

Today I watched Riders of the Whistling Pines, which I found notable for several reasons. It’s actually a more serious movie than Gene’s usual line – no comic sidekick, and some rather tragic themes. Gene plays a guy trying to establish a forest camp in an area where there’s an infestation of tree-killing moths. The local logger is rooting for the moths, because if the trees die, he can legally harvest them all. Gene is involved with trying to get the forest sprayed with – wait for it – DDT. The nasty logging baron spreads false rumors about the dangers of DDT to wildlife and human life, and deliberately causes some poisoning.

Yessiree, we’ve got a pro-DDT movie here. It was 1949, long before Rachel Carson. Trust the science!

Actually, I personally think DDT needs to come back, under controls, so I’m cool with it. Your mileage, as I persist in saying, may vary.

A second surprise was that I recognized one of the evil henchmen – by his voice. It was Clayton Moore, who in a few years would become immortal as the Lone Ranger. (I know a guy who knew him, when he lived in these parts.) In this film, he doesn’t even get a cool cowboy hat.

And finally, on a couple occasions one of the characters, a struggling alcoholic, fishes out a photo of his wife, who died while he was away in the war. She’s pretty. She’s a blonde.

She’s Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn was an unknown contract player for Columbia at the time, and this was a Columbia production, so they just picked her picture off a pile as an example of a girl a guy might pine for.

For all I know, it was her big break.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Wanderer, by Michael Ridpath

Leave a comment

From time to time I run across a mystery related to the Vikings or the sagas. Usually I am disappointed. The research tends to be cursory, and I find many historical nits to pick.

Michael Ridpath’s The Wanderer was different. I have a few criticisms, but they don’t fall on the research side.

The book is part of a series about an Icelandic-American detective named Magnus (one of the things you need to get used to – accurately – is the general use of first names where we’d use last names. This is due to Icelandic patronymic naming conventions. Our hero’s full name is Magnus Jonson, but the Jonson part is rarely used. Magnus was born in Iceland but raised in the US, where he was a policeman in Boston for some years. But now he’s home in Iceland and is a police detective there. He doesn’t really feel at home in either place.

There’s a young female historian named Eyglo, who made an international name for herself with a documentary about Viking women. Now she’s working with a British crew on a documentary about Gudrid the Far-Traveled, Erik the Red’s daughter-in-law who made it both to America and to Rome during her lifetime. They’re particularly excited about a couple new discoveries they’ll be highlighting. One is a letter from Columbus himself, recently discovered in the Vatican library, that details a trip to Iceland where he acquired sailing directions for a land to the west. The other is a string of wampum – shells used by Native Americans for money – found in an archaeological dig at Gudrid’s farm in Iceland. The shells have been sourced to Nantucket, which indicates that Nantucket must have been the site of a Viking settlement.

Then a young Italian woman, also an archaeologist, is murdered near Gudrid’s farm. Murder is rare in Iceland, and Magnus is assigned to this important case. He will learn that archaeologists don’t just dig things up – sometimes they bury them.

First of all, The Wanderer was well-written. The dialogue was good; the story moved right along. My main quibble was a flavor of political correctness, which is not surprising in our time. It wasn’t preachy, just present in the background. Some of the characters’ actions, it seemed to me, were only plausible on the basis of pop gender dogma.

I wouldn’t call this book Scandinavian Noir. It lacked that suicidal, Kierkegaardian tang. Which is all to the good, in my opinion.

All in all, I found The Wanderer surprisingly good, and I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of the Dead,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

Leave a comment

At this point in time, one doesn’t go to Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels for novelty. A pile of them have been published over the years, and in a non-fictional world both the main characters would be long retired.

But there are other reading pleasures in the world than novelty. Psychologist Alex Delaware and his L.A. police lieutenant friend Milo Sturgis are old buddies to fans, and you don’t need a new experience every time you get together with old buddies. So we have City of the Dead, the latest in the series.

This time out, Milo asks Alex to accompany him to view a body in an exclusive neighborhood. A naked man has been hit by a moving van. The cop on the scene notices a blood trail leading to a nearby house. Inside he found a woman murdered. When Alex views that corpse, he realizes he knows her.

She is a sometime model, now an “internet influencer.” She poses as a psychological counselor, which is how Alex encountered her, pretending to a doctorate she doesn’t possess. She seems to have been a charlatan, but she didn’t deserve to have her throat cut.

A deep dive into her background, and that of the male victim, leads into sad stories of family dysfunction and personal “reinvention.” But it’s harder to find anyone who had reason or opportunity to kill them. The true solution will be far more bizarre than anyone imagined.

I found the plot of City of the Dead a bit disappointing, to be honest. The solution depended on a coincidence rather than detective work.

But it was an opportunity to spend time with a couple of my favorite literary characters. I’m not complaining.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Horse,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

Leave a comment

Aragón set the glass down, pushed it away. “Maturity is graduating from the belief that the world misunderstands you to the awareness that you misunderstand the world.” He laced his fingers together. “Who I have failed to become is the story of why my daughter suffers. That load of product I burned yesterday? I could have burned it, burned them all, two years ago or three. And then maybe she would be safe. I didn’t need you to tell me to do it. I didn’t need you. But clearly I did.”

The Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz is an amazing set of books that keeps getting better and better. I have a couple personal quibbles, but reading the latest, Dark Horse, was a delight overall.

As you may recall, Orphan X is Evan Smoak (also known as the Nowhere Man). A former super-secret government agent, he managed to get free and now operates as a freelance white knight, rescuing people in bad trouble. He lives in an expensive Los Angeles penthouse apartment. It’s a sterile, minimalist space where he finds comfort in his OCD.

That space was violated in the last novel, and now he’s in the process of rebuilding. But he’s interrupted by a plea for help from someone to whom he ordinarily wouldn’t give two seconds – a drug lord from the Texas border country.

Aragon Urrea tries to operate at a higher level than the cartels. He eschews terrorist tactics, contributes to the welfare of the people in his territory, and has always maintained his family’s home as an island of normal life. He has raised his daughter Anjelina to be a good person. But now she’s been kidnapped by a cartel, from her 18th birthday party.

Evan doesn’t like the idea of working for a drug dealer, but Anjelina is an innocent. He agrees to try to get her out, which involves infiltrating the cartel.

But that’s not Evan’s only problem. He’s having trouble relating to his teenaged ward, the female computer hacker Joey, who wants his permission to go on a solo road trip. Evan has no idea how to deal with adolescent rebellion, but he knows he doesn’t want her running around unprotected in this dangerous world.

And then there’s his almost-girlfriend Mia, who lives in the same building, and is facing a personal crisis beyond Evan’s power to help. Except that she wants him to give support to her son Peter. Another kid needing guidance from a guy who never experienced a real family.

Dark Horse is more than an action thriller. It’s about a damaged, obsessive-compulsive man forced (reluctantly) to engage with the world of human feelings and needs, far outside his comfort zone. He can put a bullet through a human heart with no trouble – but can he comfort a broken heart?

Author Hurwitz has been constantly raising the level of the Orphan X books. They’re becoming (in my opinion) something really wonderful and moving. I highly recommend them. Cautions for language and mayhem.

My only problem was that some PC elements were inserted where they really weren’t necessary. I hope the author gets over that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

Leave a comment

I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Does the Old Man Lose to the Sea?

Leave a comment

I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with friends last month. It was my first time. We found the essential story of catching a prize-worthy fish fairly gripping. I’ll summarize it quickly with spoilers.

Santiago is a poorer-than-most Cuban fisherman whose sail resembles a flag of defeat. The community has decided he is unlucky for catching nothing over the last 84 days at the start of the novella. But what is he going to do–sit on the beach and starve? With the encouragement of a neighbor boy who is as a grandson to him, he goes into the sea again, intending to go farther than all the other fishermen. He does so and hooks a gorgeous and enormous Marlin that takes him the rest of the story to pull in.

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.

Christians will notice the explicit Christ imagery in the story’s second half. Santiago is wounded with stripes on his back and pain like a nail through the hand. In the final pages, he carries his mast on his shoulder toward his hut and stumbles. He lies in his bed, arms outstretched, palms up. What does this mean, because the old man doesn’t redeem himself or anyone else? Perhaps the old man’s suffering and endurance is meant to be the ultimate a man can give.

His suffering is the cost of pursuing something great. He challenges a noble beast, his equal in some respects, and conquers it. He makes mistakes along the way and considers whether some of them are actual sins (though he claims to disbelieve in sin), but he achieves his goal nonetheless.

Continue reading Does the Old Man Lose to the Sea? →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Quicksilver,’ by Dean Koontz

1 Comment

To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Dean Koontz’s umpteenth novel is Quicksilver. I wouldn’t put it on the highest tier of his works, but it’s quality, patented Koontz all the way through, and all the expected pleasures are present.

Quinn Quicksilver is a young man living in Phoenix. He is an orphan, found abandoned as a baby in a basket on a highway median and raised by loving nuns in an orphanage. Now he works as a writer for a small magazine, and is entirely unremarkable – except for a “strange magnetism” that sometimes draws him to locations where he finds valuable things.

So when, one day, he finds a couple of tough guys from a covert government agency sitting on either side of him in a diner, about to abduct him, he manages to escape out the back and successfully get away by car. Following his strange magnetism, he drives to an abandoned farm, where he’s just in time to rescue a kidnapped old man and his granddaughter – the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. They’re grateful but not surprised by his arrival. They’ve been expecting him, they say. On top of that, they inform him that he’s going to marry the granddaughter. If they survive.

But first, they have a mission to complete. There’s a secret compound in the desert where a reclusive billionaire is running a sex cult. Joined by one further team member and a dog, they set their course to find the billionaire and rescue his victims.

Beautiful prose. Goofy humor. Action with a supernatural element. And the occasional moment of transcendence. That’s what we buy Koontz books for, and it’s all there in Quicksilver.

Also a lesson on theodicy and free will, at no extra charge.