I’m probably too much of a snob to properly appreciate young adult novels, even ones by the great Andrew Klavan. But to the extent that I can imagine what a book like MindWar (and its two sequels – they’re a trilogy) would mean to its audience (young gamer males, I imagine) I would say the book is excellent value for money.
Rick Dial used to be a high school football hero. But then came a terrible year, when his father left him, his mother, and his brother behind to run off with his old girlfriend, and Rick himself was crippled in a car accident. Now he spends his time alone in his room, playing video games. He’s living without hope, but he’s become very good at the games.
And that gets noticed. Suddenly he’s abducted by government agents, who tell him a maniacal scientist has constructed a digital world called the Realm. Using the power of the Realm, this man has the ability to begin a campaign to undermine and destroy the one entity he hates most in the world – the United States.
They have the technology to inject Rick into the Realm – a place where his body is whole and strong again. They need him to use his gaming skills to destroy the Realm and save America.
Nothing here we haven’t seen before, in books like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One. But Andrew Klavan applies his seasoned storytelling skills to ramp the stakes up and raise the tension to almost excruciating levels. The main lesson, as with all Klavan’s young adult books, is to persevere, to never despair.
And that’s a pretty good lesson.
Recommended, mostly for members of the Gamer demographic.
The hope is not that suffering will go away, for with Lincoln it did not ever go away. The hope is that suffering, plainly acknowledged and endured, can fit us for the surprising challenges that await.
I grew up on a farm, as I may have mentioned before. And I often got into trouble because I preferred reading books to doing my chores. When I read about a great president who grew up on a farm and also got into trouble for reading when he should have been working, I felt an immediately bond. That president, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
Later I learned that Lincoln suffered from “melancholy” (the 19th Century term for chronic depression) all his life. This also led me to feel close to him.
I’ve learned more recently that a collateral ancestor of mine, my great-great grandfather’s half-brother, a Norwegian pioneer in Illinois, knew Lincoln through Republican Party activities. This ancestor does not appear in the book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenk (I didn’t expect him to), but I enjoyed imagining him as one of the extras in the background.
Lincoln’s Melancholy is a fascinating book for the history buff and the Lincoln fan. There are plenty of Lincoln haters out there too, and I imagine they can find fuel for their position here too, but for this reader the story was one I can empathize with. And it had a surprisingly faith-friendly conclusion.
It’s common for chronic depression to run in families, and author Shenk documents how the limited information we have on this fairly obscure clan indicates that not only depression, but plain insanity was common among the Lincolns. Young Abraham suffered the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age, but seems to have been a fairly cheerful person until his 30s, when he had two suicidal “breakdowns” in a row in 1840 and 1841. (One of these may or may not have been related to the death of the fabled Ann Rutledge.) After that he withdrew into himself; his closest friends – and certainly his wife – never felt that he entirely opened up to them. But they all agreed that he suffered from long spells of melancholy. Then he would shake himself, so to speak, and start telling jokes. Or go to work. He had found a way to manage his depression; to use it as a spur to achievement. Having given up on personal happiness, he aimed for significance. He came to believe that God had destined him for some great purpose; his challenge in life was to make himself worthy of that purpose.
Which brings us to his religious beliefs. I’ve heard more than one atheist quote Lincoln triumphantly, as a patron saint of their un-faith. But as Shenk documents, it’s more complicated than that. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone sect (unusually condemnatory even among Calvinists), Lincoln abandoned Christianity as he understood it. But years later, after his breakdowns, he went to Louisville to visit the family of his friend Joshua Speed. There Speed’s mother (a Unitarian) placed a Bible in his hands and told him gently that he’d find comfort there if he read it correctly. And by all accounts he did just that. He became a regular reader of the Bible, and it seemed to help him with his depression, though It’s impossible to know exactly what his theological beliefs were:
The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church—which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which Lincoln repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.
I found Lincoln’s Melancholy fascinating, moving, and helpful in my personal situation. I recommend it highly.
But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgment upon me ahead of the grave.
It’s not often I encounter a book that’s not only different from what I expected it to be, but wonderfully different. I expected Peter May’s Runaway to be yet another Baby Boomer paeon to the “glories” of the Swinging 60s. It is no such thing. Far from it.
Jack Mackay is a resident of Edinburgh, a man dwindling into old age. He has been edged out of his house by his daughter’s family and installed in a nursing home. He’s consumed with regrets over an unsuccessful life, over sins committed, dreams unfulfilled, and opportunities thrown away.
Then he’s summoned by an old friend, Maurice Cohen, who was lead singer of the band they were in together in their teens. In 1965, aged 17, they “ran away” to London, to be rock stars like the Beatles. Instead they experienced violence, victimization, and a peripheral connection with a famous celebrity murder.
Maurie is in the terminal stages of cancer now; not much time left. He shows Jack a newspaper story, telling how the man accused of the celebrity murder, who disappeared at the time, has now been found murdered. Maurie says the man was not guilty. He himself knows who did it, and they have an obligation to go to London and set things right.
It sounds insane, but Maurie doesn’t have much time left, and Jack feels a personal debt. They collect Dave, one of the other surviving band members, and dragoon Jack’s couch potato grandson, Ricky, into driving them. They set off on a ridiculous, ill-planned pilgrimage, retracing the route of their ridiculous, ill-planned “escape” 50 years before. Along the way we follow two parallel accounts – Jack’s own first-person memoir of the original trip, and a third-person account of their present 2015 journey. We will learn the source of Jack’s guilt, and the secret Maurie has been hoarding all these years, leading up to an explosive conclusion.
I have no idea what Peter May believes. I suspect that, like most sensible modern people, he probably wouldn’t care much for my beliefs. But I have to say that I have rarely encountered a better description of sin and guilt – from the human point of view – than I found in Runaway. It amazed and moved me.
This is no CBA novel. Cautions for very adult themes. But I highly recommend Runaway to adult readers.
I could tell just by looking at their faces that they were awed by the genius of my writing. At least, I could tell they were pretending to be awed by the genius of my writing – and really, this was Hollywood, so what was the difference? In this town, to be admired and to be in a position where people had to pretend to admire you were pretty much the same thing. In fact, the latter might’ve been a little tastier than the former, when you came right down to it.
I’d been waiting for the third and final volume of Andrew Klavan’s Another World fantasy series, but somehow I missed its release. I have remedied that omission now.
The Emperor’s Sword opens on a world in some ways far weirder than the fantasy world to and from which its hero has been shuttling. That weird world is Hollywood. Austin Lively has made it to the big time. He’s sold a screenplay to a major studio, he goes to the best parties, and he’s being hailed as an “important new talent.” He has an expensive car, an expensive home, and his pick of eager starlets to share his bed. However, like Hamlet, he has dreams, dreams that remind him of places and adventures he just can’t remember and doesn’t want to believe in.
But when his neglected girlfriend Jane is framed for murder, the memories come back in a storm. He has an unfinished job to do in the Other Kingdom, and he can’t save Jane unless he completes that job. He returns to the Other Kingdom, only to find it’s too late. The Emperor to whom he was to bring a message is dead. And Austin now needs to fight a duel he can’t win to save innocent people from death.
Fortunately, in the Other Kingdom, death sometimes works differently than it does here.
Nobody, but nobody, knows how to build plot tension like Andrew Klavan. The Emperor’s Sword puts you on a roller coaster like those old movie serials tried to, but failed. The roller coaster works here. The reader accompanies the hero from the depths of despair to the peaks of triumph and back, with barely a moment to catch his breath.
There’s also a lot of (no doubt semi-autobiographical) realism about Hollywood, and how truly evil and soul-destroying the industry and its culture can be. I do not recommend this book for younger readers, because there’s some very sordid stuff going on here. It pleases me, on the other hand, that top-grade fantasy is being written for an adult audience.
I’m a harsh critic of fantasy – I compare everything to a) Tolkien, or b) the things I imagine my own work to be. In terms of fantastic imagination, I wouldn’t say this book climbs the heights. Some of it seems kind of boiler-plate medieval to me. But in terms of storytelling and plotting – mixed in an uplifting way with brutal spiritual honesty – it would be hard to do better. Highly recommended for adults.
The template of the English police procedural novel seems to be fairly well established. There’s an experienced senior officer – perhaps a bit crusty – and a diverse team of younger detectives with more or less to learn. In my experience, one can usually expect good team rapport and friendly teasing. That pattern gets varied a little in A Poison Tree, first in a series about DCI Will Blake, who commands a squad in England’s Wirral district (outside Liverpool).
Blake (don’t mention the poet William Blake to him) has recently returned to work after upheaval in his family and the loss of his wife. (Right now one of his major concerns is his mother’s cat, which he has inherited and which seems to hate him.) His investigative team has not yet gelled; there’s tension between them and they’re not entirely confident about their boss yet. One particular problem is the obligatory homosexual on the team – much is made of the subtle hazing he receives – but on the other hand, there’s a suggestion he’s a bit of a prat for being so touchy about the matter.
When a beautiful teenaged girl is found murdered in a park, the major clue seems to be that someone took away the shoes she was wearing, vintage shoes she found at a charity shop. Then it turns out the shoes have a history – they belonged to a young girl who was similarly murdered decades ago – the shoes first disappeared at that time. Clues lead back to the story of a local celebrity, a rich girl who operated as a sort of Nancy Drew, “helping” the police to solve crimes.
The plot of A Poison Tree is complex and convoluted. I must admit I lost track of the characters, contemporary and historical, who figured in the story. The final solution was tragic, almost in the Greek sense, and possibly a little over the top.
I finished the book, but I’m not sure I can recommend it wholeheartedly. It was kind of hard to follow. I did like Blake, though.
As far as pure entertainment goes, you can hardly do better than Nick Petrie’s bombastic Peter Ash thriller series. These books are extreme in every way. Nevertheless, speaking for myself, I’m growing a teeny bit uncomfortable with them.
Peter Ash is, if you remember, a Marine combat veteran who came home with a peculiar form of PTSD. He is claustrophobic, and mostly stays out of doors. Over the course of his adventures he’s acquired a fortune in “found” money, a faithful friend who is a former Milwaukee gangster, and a feisty journalist girlfriend. Tear It Down finds him trying to settle down with the girlfriend, June. He’s exerting himself to make it work, but June can tell it takes an effort. So when her friend Wanda calls from Memphis, saying people are harassing her, she tells Peter to scoot – go help Wanda. Work it out of his system.
Wanda is a photographer who suffers from PTSD of her own. She’s been photographing war zones, and is now taking pictures of urban gangs. She doesn’t know why somebody drove a pickup truck through the front wall of her house, though. It seems both extreme, and an odd way to make a statement, when they could just shoot her.
Peter has barely arrived when he’s confronted by a kid with a gun, who wants to hijack his camper truck. Peter could take the gun away, but he instinctively likes the boy, and gives the truck up rather than hurt him. Later he learns that the boy is a gifted musician in big trouble – Peter would like to help him, if he could only find him. And he’d also like his truck back.
Solving these problems will involve bringing in his dangerous friend Lewis from Milwaukee, and chasing down a couple of desperate rednecks with their sights on a historical treasure. These guys are crazy, and not above turning a machine gun on innocent bystanders.
It speaks well of author Petrie that he wants to do good as well as entertain with Tear It Down. He tries to confront issues of race and social oppression in a positive (and hopeful) way. And that was part of my problem. I found his solutions a little glib, and not much more plausible than the book’s over-the-top plot.
Also, I’m getting a little tired of Peter’s girlfriend, June. She seems to be a good person, and is good for Peter. But we are informed that a foul mouth is one of her “virtues.” I’ve gotten accustomed to profanity in books, but treating it as a positive good is kind of extreme for this small-town boy.
I don’t know. I may go back to the Peter Ash books after a while. They’re engaging and entertaining. But I’m going to cool it on them for now.
If you’re looking for big thrills, Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill mysteries are generally not for you. These stories take the cozy route, most of the time, and the plot of Murder In Our Midst is pretty much right out of Agatha Christie.
The school clique that centered around beautiful Daisy Mills decades ago has gathered again at a lodge in the English Lakes District, to support her after the death (by poisoning) of her third husband. For fun, they bring out a Ouija board, and the planchet spells out something about murder. The next morning, Daisy is found drowned in a pool near a waterfall.
When the police call goes out, Inspector Skelgill and DS Jones are in a boat on a nearby lake. He’s trying to teach her fly fishing. They answer the call and start interviewing witnesses. Evidence indicates murder, so it becomes a question of evaluating alibis. In some ways, we never really get out of high school; old loves and hatreds still endure…
I enjoy the Skelgill series, and the quiet nature of the stories has something to do with it. These books are almost as much about appreciation of the charms of the scenery as about murders and characters. Murder In Our Midst was not one of my favorites. It was the kind of story where you have to keep track of a lot of characters, some of whom aren’t all that memorable, along with various time lines.
But it was kind of like time with old friends, so I won’t pan the book.
I’ll say this – I hope this is a series where characters age slower than in real time. Because if DS Jones is waiting for Skelgill to make a romantic move on her, I fear she’s going to be waiting a while.
I had an on and off relationship with this book, as a reader. Ted Taylor’s Fatal Decision is the first of a series about a former English police detective enticed out of retirement to lead a cold case unit in the city of Devizes. At the beginning I found it kind of slow; then I warmed to it; but in the end the author lost me.
Gus Freeman is our hero. He retired from the force three years ago, but lost his wife six months later. Since then he’s been kind of rudderless, spending a lot of time on his “allotment” (a patch of ground leased for public gardening).
Then his former superior gives him a call. They want to set up a new cold case unit. Modern police science is quite good at identifying criminals, but their thinking is that, in cases where criminals have sidestepped forensics and computers, good, old-fashioned cop experience and instinct might turn up new clues.
Gus agrees, on a test basis, not convinced he has anything to offer an up-to-date force. He is introduced to his (calculatedly diverse) team of young detectives, and they start by looking into the murder of Daphne Tolliver in 2008. Daphne was a retired postal worker, much liked in her community, whose head was bashed in while she was walking her dog. Gus finds his new team bright and eager, and they soon start learning things earlier detectives missed. It will all end in a major scandal.
At first I found Fatal Decision pretty slow reading. We begin with the lead-up to the murder, but then the author moves to a prolonged segment that just describes Gus’s quiet life as a retired cop. He’s likeable enough, but most authors would prefer to get straight to the mystery and fill the background stuff in as they went along. I suspect a lot of readers will lose patience with this part.
Once Gus goes back to work, things pick up. Author Taylor does a good job with characters. His are layered, and capable of surprising us – something I always like. So I grew more interested.
But a point came when we were informed of one of the characters’ politics. And the moment I read that, I knew with moral certainty who the culprit was, and what their motive was. The author had fallen into a plot trope that was fresh quite a long time ago (like when I was young), but has been used so many times – both on the printed page and on screen – that I can’t imagine every other reader won’t figure it out too. In short, I felt insulted – both as a reader and in my beliefs.
Final evaluation – the book had some virtues, but the slow start and the threadbare “surprise” outweigh them in my estimation. Not recommended.
“For a lot of people, the definition seems to change to fit the times and the culture of the moment. My definition doesn’t change. It isn’t about judges, who can be biased. It’s not about courts and laws that can be corrupted. To me, justice is nothing more or less than truth. Justice requires that the truth of Dr. Siphuncle’s actions must be revealed, and that he must suffer the consequences of that truth.”
Dean Koontz, who likes nothing better than changing things up, has given us a second “season” of novellas about his character known only as “Nameless.” But there are differences. In the first series, released back in 2019, we followed Nameless on his strange “assignments.” He is a man with no memory of the past (he suspects this was by his own choice). When he arrives in a town he finds a car waiting, and he has hotel reservations, a weapon, and support resources. He is given instructions about his assignment, which generally involves either exposing or killing some genuinely evil person who thinks himself untouchable. At the end of the first series, Nameless (and the reader) learned his true identity, along with the shattering causes that led him to this mission.
Now he’s back for Season 2, with his amnesia restored, carrying out missions following the same pattern. But things have changed a little. His missions seem less well-planned now. He encounters surprises – sometimes dangerous ones – that weren’t bargained for. And for some reason, arrangements of roses greet him in every hotel room he stays in. But strangest of all, he’s having disturbing premonitions, of a dystopian near-future in which a great popular movement of hatred and authoritarianism transforms America into a ruthless killing ground.
The stories have sufficient continuity that they could have been published as a single novel, albeit an episodic one. But the author and publisher have chosen to release them as novellas, and they work fine in that form. I enjoyed them very much, though be prepared for a few tears at the end.
Author Ian Rankin said his first two Inspector Rebus novels were based somewhat on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Readers, he said, didn’t notice the similarities in Knots and Crosses, released in 1987, so he dropped all subtleties and screamed out parallels in Hide and Seek, released in 1990.
Sections begin with Jekyll-and-Hyde quotations. Character names are borrowed. The plot focuses on someone or something named Hyde. And there’s an anti-drug campaign gearing up in the background. It’s a much darker story than the other two Rankin novels we’ve reviewed here, which may point in the direct of future books. The next one deals with a cannibal–maybe I won’t jump into that one just yet.
In Hide and Seek, the police are called to a dilapidated row house, one of many squats for junkies and other homeless. They find Ronnie dead of an apparent overdose, arranged on the living room floor with a couple candles and a pentagram drawn almost perfectly on a near wall. Could this be the victim of some black coven’s ritual or did his hard life simply catch up to him?
Forensics reveal the drug found by the body were not the same as what was found in the body. This man injected himself with rat poison, so it would be natural to conclude his dealer wanted him dead. Plus the last person likely to have seen Ronnie alive claims he knew someone wanted him dead.
As Rebus is pulled off of all other cases in order to give time to the chief’s new anti-drug campaign, he has the time to ask questions and make requests of DS Brian Holmes for some shoe-leather work.
In one sense there is no case here. Someone unreliable is claiming foul play, and it doesn’t make sense that Ronnie would inject himself with poison. But maybe that’s all that happened and the pentagram is art on the wall. But what does Rebus’s gut tell him? It tells him to keep asking questions.
I’ve enjoyed what Rankin’s writing so far and intend to read more. I think they will improve as they go. He winks at us with his new Detective Sargent Holmes, a young, well-grounded officer who isn’t sure Rebus is trustworthy yet, and Chief Superintendent “Farmer” Watson, who sees the good in everyone he meets and drinks orange juice at a bar.
Rebus spent a little time looking for a new church between this book and the last, possibly having trouble finding one sufficiently gospel-free. Repentance is no good. Cheery optimism isn’t either.
There’s an odd description of a minor character as the most Calvinist-looking man in the room. That’s a Scottish way of saying someone is severe-looking, I think. Perhaps Americans would use “puritan” the same way. There’s also a mild defense of homosexuality, but it seems realistic, not advocative.
