Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Close Your Eyes,’ by Thomas Fincham

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Here we have a novel with an interesting premise, but in this reviewer’s opinion it was not well written.

Close Your Eyes has a plot consisting of two threads, which of course come together in the end.

One thread involves the lonely hero, Martin Rhodes. He’s a former cop who shot a criminal. He’d do it again, but he understands why he had to go to prison for it. He served his time, and now he’s out, walking the streets of the fictional city of Bridgeton, sleeping at a homeless shelter, trying to figure out what he’s going to do for a living. Idly looking at a display of police notices, he meets a man who recognizes him, knows who he is. The man says his son was murdered by a drug dealer. He would be willing to pay a large sum of money if Martin could find the murderer. On the strength of a decent advance on the reward, Martin agrees to look into it. Along the way he acquires a strange sidekick, a teenaged girl whom he rescues from an abuser.

Meanwhile, in the other plot thread, FBI agent Jo Pullinger is hunting a man who’s been murdering people and leaving them in subway cars. She has a secret she’s not sharing with anyone – she has a potentially fatal heart condition.

On the sidelines, a TV reporter without principles is trying to play the murderer off against the police.

The story in Close Your Eyes was okay, and the characters were interesting in principle. The problem for me was the writing. There are two approaches to the challenge of conveying one’s meaning to the reader. They are generally known as the rifle approach and the shotgun approach. The rifle approach goes for a few words, well aimed. The shotgun approach involves throwing a lot of words at the reader, hoping a few of them will hit properly and say what you want.

The rifle approach is how professionals do it. Author Thomas Fincham is a shotgun writer. This annoys me. At least a quarter of the verbiage could have been cut without loss. So I didn’t enjoy Close Your Eyes, and had trouble finishing it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where Is Janice Gantry?’ by John D. MacDonald

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“…You’ve never decided what you are, Sam. You want to be all meat and muscle and reflexes. You want to deny how bright and intuitive and sensitive you are. You’re a complex animal, Sam. You try not to think, and so you think too much. You couldn’t just plain love, Sam. You thought us to death. You like to talk ignorant and act ignorant. It’s some kind of crazy protective coloration. Maybe you think it’s manly. I don’t know. You seem to have to diminish yourself. But people sense that good mind, and it makes them uncomfortable because you are being something you’re not.”

Sam Brice is a former pro football player who left the sport under a cloud, losing his trophy wife in the process. He genuinely loved her, and has never gotten over it. Now he works as an insurance adjuster on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He used to date Janice Gantry, who works in the same office. She grew frustrated with his lack of ambition, and they broke up. But they remain friends. She’s thinking of getting married to someone else now, and Sam wishes her well.

As Where Is Janice Gantry? begins, Sam is awakened by someone scratching at his screen porch. It’s Charlie, a young local man who has escaped from prison. All Charlie wants is a place to sleep a few hours and a short ride. With some misgivings, Sam helps him; he always thought there was something off about the story of his crime. It’s still dark when he drives Charlie to a phone. Then, on impulse, he watches from concealment to see what happens next. Charlie makes a call, and soon Janice Gantry appears. She drives Charlie to the office where she and Sam work. Sam spies through a window as she makes a phone call. Then a suspicious sheriff’s deputy on patrol attacks him and arrests him for prowling. Sam is finally released by the sheriff, who knows him but doesn’t like him. The sheriff warns him to keep his nose clean.

The next morning Janice does not arrive at work, and soon she’s officially a missing person. The sheriff thinks Charlie must have murdered her, or she ran off with him. Sam can’t tell him what he knows, and wouldn’t be believed anyway. He talks to a friend, a local gossip, who directs his attention to the house of a reclusive millionaire who lives on a nearby Key. This is the man whose safe Charlie was originally convicted of robbing. Sam makes a plan to meet the millionaire’s lonely wife, but instead meets her sister, a lovely woman who happens to be visiting. She too senses something is wrong in the house…

Where Is Janice Gantry? is one of those John D. MacDonald non-McGee books that left a particular impression on my memory. Sam Brice is a little like McGee (who wouldn’t be created for about three years at that point), but he has the advantage of the non-serial character in that he’s allowed to grow. Sam is sympathetic, but secretly bitter and openly gun-shy about relationships and life in general. The extreme exertions and dangers he’ll face in this book will change his life.

There’s a lot of sex in this book. Sam’s beautiful new lover spends a fair part of the story pretty much naked, as was suitable for the paperback market at that time in history. Even though the sexual revolution was fairly new at the time, it’s already assumed that lovers will sleep together before marriage. So morality cautions are in order. One character may be meant to be homosexual, but it’s not explicitly stated.

Nevertheless, Where Is Janice Gantry? is a well-written, gripping mystery/thriller by a master of the genre. Recommended for grownups.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Republican Party Reptile,’ by P. J. O’Rourke

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Is that any way to have fun? How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing this? She’d cry. She really would. And that’s how you know it’s fun. Anything that makes your mother cry is fun. Sigmund Freud wrote all about this. It’s a well-known fact.

I am feeling a little grim about the world these days, so I thought I’d read something funny. Were I a better man I’d probably have read some Wodehouse, but I listened to the little guy on my left shoulder and bought the cheapest P. J. O’Rourke I could find.

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily represent those of the reviewer, this blog, or of real persons, living or dead.

When you read the late P. J. O’Rourke, you are guaranteed two things – hilarity, and offense. Republican Party Reptile is probably one of the extreme cases in his oeuvre, because this is National Lampoon-era O’Rourke, young and iconoclastic and frequently stoned on something. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is immune to a joke, including lots of things we (rightly) no longer consider funny. This is how it was in the ‘80s. Deal with it.

In this series of essays, written for various publications, O’Rourke writes about a wide variety of subjects. A condensed history of the world. A user report on the drug Ecstasy. A cruise through Soviet Russia with an earnest group of American lefties. A hostage situation in Beirut. A trans-continental road trip in a Ferrari. Sex acts in moving cars (this one deserves a special content warning). Men’s hats (I particularly liked that one). And finally, an epic history of the author’s own life, recast as a medieval war chronicle. For some reason.

Some of these essays have aged better than others. Some are frankly offensive and could never be published today. (Evangelical Christians come in for a single insult. I believe O’Rourke softened his views later in life.) One detects the subtle influence of various chemical stimulants, legal and illegal, from time to time.

But it was funny. Republican Party Reptile made me laugh. Most of the subjects of ridicule had it coming. Lots of cautions are in order for language and subject matter.

Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring.

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of Beads,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tubby went into his own bedroom and checked the drawer in the little table by the bed to see if his own pistol was still there. It was, and he picked it up. It was an old and heavy gun, a Smith & Wesson .38. When you ordered shells for it at the gun store it was like ordering a double bourbon at a bar. People gave you respect because you were old.

The second Tubby DuBonnet book in Tony Dunbar’s well-known series is City of Beads. The city, of course, is Tubby’s New Orleans home, where he practices law in a fairly desultory manner.

Tubby is settling into the routine of practicing law on his own, after his partner betrayed him in the last book. He’s upset to learn that an old friend, a man who made money exporting peanut oil for foreign aid programs, has been found dead in the hold of one of his own barges. But he didn’t drown in the oil – it was murder. It’s hard to figure out why anyone would kill the man, and Tubby promises the widow he’ll poke around.

At the same time, he’s been retained by a local casino. The money’s excellent, though they don’t seem to have much real work for him to do. But he’s enjoying the company of the beautiful blonde they appointed as his liaison.

There’s another woman too, though – an attractive black woman who just happens to have committed a revenge killing.

In addition, one of Tubby’s adult daughters is involved with an environmentalist group, investigating river pollution. Some people don’t like the questions she and her friends are raising, and Tubby agrees to help out just to keep an eye on her.

I’m still not sure what to make of the Tubby DuBonnet books. At the end of the last one I decided I should approach them as dark comedy, but I didn’t find City of Beads all that funny. And the hero, though he’s supposed to be pretty street smart, seems to me to survive as much on luck as on intelligence.

I wonder if I’d appreciate the books better if I’d ever been to New Orleans….

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Purple Place for Dying,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down—twenty years ago—or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted.

I’d almost forgotten about A Purple Place for Dying, another in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Even though it contains one of the great set pieces in the saga.

Travis is far from his Fort Lauderdale home in this one. He’s out west, where Mona Yeoman, the big, young, beautiful wife of a very rich man, has summoned him to a secret meeting in a lonely mountain cabin. She’s fallen in love with a man her own age, she says, and wants to get free of her husband. She wants Travis to help her work that out.

Travis isn’t much interested, until Mona is suddenly dead, pierced by a high-powered rifle bullet fired from a distance. And when he makes his way down the mountain to report the murder, nobody believes him. By the time the sheriff’s men get to the site, her body is gone. For all anyone can tell, Mona succeeded in running off with her lover, and McGee is just covering for them. Which means he’ll have to figure out what’s really going on.

He’ll meet Mona’s husband, a hard man but not a bad man; a man Travis respects. He’ll meet Mona’s lover’s sister, a lonely, damaged woman who’ll probably be alone forever unless she finds some real man with a gentle touch to heal her spirit (and you can guess where that will lead).

All in all, I don’t think Travis McGee is at his best too far from his house boat, especially when he leaves his economist friend Meyer behind. On the other hand, A Purple Place for Dying features one of his most imaginative fights – the defense, without a gun, of a desert mesa against two armed men. That was pretty cool.

Not the best McGee, but still better than most of the stuff you’ll see nowadays. Extra points awarded for patriarchal sexism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Clockmaker’s Secret,’ by Jack Benton

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In theory, this was almost an ideal book for me. It’s fairly low on violence (how did I become the kind of reader who relishes a lack of violence in a book?), but it’s too dark to be called a Cozy. The Clockmaker’s Secret by Jack Benton is very British, I dare say, in the sense that eccentricity is often considered a British trait.

This is the second book in a series, and having finished it I see that I reviewed its prequel, The Man by the Sea. I did not like that book at all. I found the characters improbable and the action implausible. I liked The Clockmaker’s Secret a little better, but not enough to endorse it with a full heart.

Our hero is Slim Hardy, a former British commando and current recovering alcoholic, who has decided to become a private eye (without great success) and is spending a holiday in Cornwall to clear his mind.

One day while hiking on Bodmin Moor, he stumbles over an object wrapped in plastic, protruding from the heather. He digs it up and discovers that it’s an unfinished cuckoo clock. He takes it back to the guest house where he’s staying and asks around. It turns out to be the work of Amos Birch, a renowned local craftsman who disappeared more than 20 years ago, leaving behind a crippled wife and a bereaved daughter.

For his own reasons, Slim becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of Amos’ disappearance. He encounters the mulish secrecy of suspicious locals, and meets Amos’ attractive daughter, who seems to know more than she’s saying.

But in the end all Slim’s suppositions will be proved wrong. And he’ll fall off the wagon too.

The Clockmaker’s Secret was one of those books (for this reader) that ends with no clear sense of accomplishment. Some secrets were dug up, but nothing really changed. The characters acted a little more sensibly here than they did in the previous book, but I wasn’t really caught up in the thing. And I don’t like Slim a whole lot.

I don’t generally award stars, but if I did, I guess I’d give The Clockmaker’s Secret three out of five.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Lavender Look,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse.

It was around 45 years ago, in Missouri, that I picked up my first Travis McGee novel, The Long Lavender Look, from a rack in a grocery store or a drug store or something. The story proved to be quite a sordid tale of theft and prostitution and murder in a small town. It was the way it was told that grabbed me.

Travis McGee, freelance “salvage specialist,” is barreling south one night on a rural Florida road in Miss Agnes, his blue Rolls Royce pickup conversion, his friend, the economist Meyer, beside him. They’re headed home from a wedding celebration. Suddenly a near-naked girl runs across the  road in front of them, close enough to make McGee hit the brakes, putting Miss Agnes in a skid that lands them in a canal. Meyer pulls Travis from the water, saving his life, but a few minutes later Travis returns the favor when a passing motorist stops and shoots at them, shouting a message that makes no sense to them.

Finally they reach a small town by foot, but they’re soon arrested by sheriff’s deputies. Apparently the guy who shot at them was tortured to death that same night, and Travis and Meyer look like the most likely suspects. Under questioning, one of the deputies brutalizes Meyer, giving him injuries requiring hospitalization. Travis contacts a lawyer who gets them released, but not before warning the sheriff that he’s going to ruin him.

But that’s just the beginning. It gets a lot more complicated than that. As it turns out, the sheriff is a decent cop – though not without blind spots. Travis will stay around to get his own questions answered, and the death count will not be small.

The Long Lavender Look is a tough story, with a lot of collateral damage involved. But the author’s humane and poignant narration makes it all touching and memorable in the end. This is one of my favorite McGee books, and not just because it was my first.

Not politically correct (though there’s plenty of environmental concern), but that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Secret Weapon,’ by Bradley Wright

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Maybe it started with Jason Bourne – I mean the movie Jason Bourne, not the one in the novel, which is much more cerebral than the film(s). There’s the can’t-miss formula – create a bigger-than-life main character, give him near superhuman fighting skills, put him in impossible situations, and keep the car chases, gun fights, and explosions coming. If the plot’s tissue thin, never mind. The audience didn’t come for plot anyway.

Alexander King, the hero of The Secret Weapon, first book in a series, is a former CIA agent. His status now is equivocal. Officially, he’s dead. Only the CIA director and couple of his trusted friends know he’s still alive. Currently he’s living secretly in London.

One day he looks out his apartment window and observes the attempted murder of a young woman. King rushes to her rescue, and soon finds himself on the run with her. Then he learns that she is being hunted by a family of terrorists headquartered in Greece. King does his best to get her safe, but when she disappears, that’s only the first of many surprises.

I didn’t hate The Secret Weapon. It delivered everything the blurb promised – the plot is fast and full of twists, and the characters have something approaching personalities. Plausibility is far back in the rear-view window, but nobody came for that.

My main complaint was the writing, as in the use of words. I’d guess the first draft of the book was dictated; it has that feel. The author doesn’t know when to use “as” instead of “like.” As in, “…especially when such a high-value target like Husaam Hammoud was taken out….” There are lots of awkward line constructions like, “The fire was on its last legs.” Or, “He stared at the stubble on his iron jaw.” (An iron jaw refers to resistance to impact, not appearance).

Also, the hero’s relationship with his best friend, a beautiful, butt-kicking female agent older than he is, seemed odd to me. It’s described as brother-sister, but didn’t feel right.

However, if popcorn reading is what you’re after, The Secret Weapon isn’t bad. Patriotism is treated positively here, which isn’t always the case these days.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Defending Innocence,’ by Peter Kirkland

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Occasionally a publisher will get the idea to package a series of novels. Apparently that’s what Relay Publishing did in putting a couple ghost writers together, naming their collaboration “Peter Kirkland,” and setting them to writing a series of legal thrillers called “Small Town Lawyer.” The real writers, whoever they are, are clearly competent.

The hero of Defending Innocence is Leland Monroe, who used to be a big city prosecuting attorney. But he destroyed his career when he covered up the missteps of his wife, who was an alcoholic. That lost him his job; he lost his wife to an auto accident. Now he’s moved back to his home town, Basking Rock. He’s trying to establish himself as a personal lawyer, but finding it hard to build a practice. He’s also trying to reestablish his relationship with his teenaged son, crippled in the accident that killed his mother.

Then the son’s best friend is arrested for murdering his abusive father. And Leland can’t resist volunteering to defend the boy (though he can’t afford the pro bono), both for his son’s sake and because the boy’s mother was his high school girlfriend. As in any crime story set in a small town, it soon becomes apparent that there’s considerable corruption under public façades of respectability.

I must say, although there were few surprises here, that the small town hypocrites were a little more nuanced than the usual run of such characters in novels. I thought the writing in Defending Innocence pretty good, and the characters well-developed. Opportunities to lampoon small-town Christians were not exploited much.

I did think, though, that the final showdown was kind of abrupt and too quickly resolved.

However, all in all, Defending Innocence was a decent novel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Camera Man,’ by Peter Grainger

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‘The shoreline is the perfect metaphor. It shifts moment by moment, wave by wave, grain by grain. People used to ask why I was always photographing the same places but I never was. Living here, I’ve seen more sunrises than most people do in their whole lives but I’ve never seen two the same.’

D. C. Smith, retired detective from the police force in the fictional city of Kings Lake, Norfolk, is enjoying his quiet retirement on the coast, living with his partner Jo, a true crime writer, and their dog. But he’s allowed himself to be recruited by the private investigation firm of Diver and Diver. However, he’s in a position to turn down most of the cases they offer. Now, though, in The Camera Man, they’ve got something that piques his interest.

Gerald Fitch had been the owner of a struggling marine equipment business. One day five years ago he disappeared, leaving an estranged daughter and his second wife, generally believed to be a gold digger. Now the gold digger wants him declared dead so she can liquidate his property. But an insurance company underwrote a large policy on Gerald’s life, and they want Diver and Diver to look for proof of death – or life – before they pay out.

Smith agrees to look into it, and encounters a rather sad story about a man not really cut out for business who tried his best to be responsible but got out of his depth. Did he kill himself? Did he run away to a new life? Or – and this looks increasingly likely when Smith learns who the wife’s family is (they are “well known to the police” as they say over there) – was he murdered?

The D.C. Smith books are low-key, atmospheric and cerebral. Character is always at the heart of the story, and it’s Smith’s broad and humane sympathy that serves him as his best investigative tool. It’s a challenge poking into people’s lives without the authority of the law at his back, but that just makes it more interesting.

I profoundly enjoy all the D. C. Smith mysteries. Author Peter Grainger has branched out with other books about the younger detectives Smith trained as they carry on at Kings Lake, but there’s nobody like Smith for this reader. The Camera Man is a fine, rewarding book and I recommend it highly.