I watched Amazon Prime’s The Tomorrow War, starring Christ Pratt and Yvonne Strahovski. Everybody’s talking about it, and the praise has been about equal to the derision among my friends on Basefook.
I liked it fine. I’m not in a position to review it properly, because I had it on mainly as background noise while working on the new Erling book. I keep hearing about plot holes, and plot holes are a congenital problem in time travel stories. I have to admit I didn’t catch the holes. The story worked pretty well for me, and there was a satisfying resolution.
My problem with the movie was the same thing that keeps coming up in action movies (and books) everywhere nowadays – the equal participation of women in violence. I confess to my great, patriarchal sin – I hate seeing women slaughtered.
Now logically, in a situation like that in this movie, where the women are going to die horribly anyway if they lose, so they might as well fight, it makes logical sense.
But for me, it’s not entertainment. And I think it’s intended to desensitize us to violence against women, for political purposes.
So that was my problem with the story. Otherwise, I enjoyed it. Even teared up a little (in a manly way) at the end.
J. K. Simmons, as usual, was great.
Meanwhile, I came up with a new scene for the Erling book that pleased me quite a lot, in concept. Based on material in Flatey Book, mostly unknown to Heimskringla readers. Only I couldn’t figure out how to finish the scene, how to bring it home.
This morning, in the process of waking up, the resolution became clear to me.
And it rested on a point of theology I’d been contemplating the other day.
Returning to the church, Gareth made his way back inside, through the paneled porch, and was aware immediately of the smell of the building, the tang of cold stone mixing with the sweet scent of varnished wood, of candles and books and history. He breathed deep, secretly hoping to take in some of the ancient peace that he always sensed buildings like this contained, as though they somehow saved up humanity’s prayers, acting as great spiritual batteries where people could go to be recharged somewhere.
In the previous five books of David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm series, we have seen how Inspector Grimm transferred from Bristol to the idyllic Wensleydale area of Yorkshire. A hulking, facially scarred veteran paratrooper, Harry was prepared to experience (and exploit) the natural fear he inspires in most people. But the easygoing crew in the town of Hawes resolutely refused to be intimidated by him. They welcomed him into their circle and their community, and he’s beginning to enjoy the life – and even the food. Death’s Requiem picks up the story during the worst snowstorm in years.
The nearby town of Askrig is the home of an internationally famous pop singer, Gareth Jones, who recorded “that Christmas song – you remember.” Following the death of his wife and a scandal that marred his clean public image, he has chosen to launch his new album with a concert in the church, where he used to be a choir boy. All his old friends gather for the concert, as well as a standing-room-only crowd of other locals. The concert is disrupted at one point by intruders dressed as Satanists, but they are soon gotten rid of. Otherwise, the concert is a triumph.
But the next morning, the female vicar finds a body hanging from a bell rope in the tower, surrounded by Satanic graffiti on the walls. Inspector Grimm and his team will need to untangle old relationships and long-buried secrets to solve the case and avert further murders.
The Grimm books are reliably enjoyable, and Death’s Requiem was no exception. My only problem with it was that it raised a familiar issue – it seems as if every form of entertainment is required to supply a minimum quota of homosexual characters today. In most cases, the creators choose to make them lesbians, because lesbians are less icky to many readers. That is the case in this book – and it’s mixed up with the issue of homosexuals in the church.
But I suppose I should be grateful anytime the church gets any positive mention at all.
The Marine, whose name was Peter, looked like he was made mostly of ax handles and shovelheads, bound together with thick rigger’s rope at the joints.
The enjoyable saga of Peter Ash, Nick Petrie’s itinerant, fresh-air hero, continues with Light It Up, a tale of legalized pot gone very wrong in Denver and its environs.
Peter, a combat-hardened Marine veteran, suffers from persistent claustrophobia caused by PTSD. In the last book he fell in love with a fiery woman named June, who has given him a year to readjust to indoor living. Then a friend, Henry Nygaard (Norwegian name; he’s from Minnesota) asks him to help him out with a problem in Denver. Henry’s daughter and her husband are running a business providing security for marijuana merchants – pot is legal in Colorado, but federal regulations force them to deal solely in cash, an irresistible magnet for crime. But the last cash delivery they were guarding disappeared entirely, along with Henry’s son-in-law. Peter shows up to help guard the next trip, and it goes very bad, very fast. Peter is left with a sense of obligation to find the criminals and bring them to justice, one way or another. But he has no idea the kind of power he’s up against.
The Peter Ash novels remind me a little of Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger books, except that Peter is younger and his forte is hand-to-hand combat, not sharpshooting. But there is the same kind of honorable hero, slightly-over-the-top action, and slightly improbable endurance and triumph. Lots of fun. I’m not a fan of legalized pot, but I’m happy to report that the cannabis business doesn’t come out looking very admirable here.
Questions about the church and homosexuality show up, but no conclusions are drawn. All in all, great series, great book.
The kitchen trash can was one of those with the electronic sensor which opened when he waved his hand over it. What had taken them so long to invent such a wonderful contraption? You could open a trash can without having to touch it? They had the ones you could open with your foot, of course, but then you had to change your socks every time you used it, and that meant you also had to wash your feet.
I don’t think I’ve every written a review like this one before. I am going to praise this book, while stating that I have no plans to continue with the series. I shall explain my reasons, anon.
Dan Mitchell, the protagonist of Savannah 1.0: The Quest for Love, is the quintessential IT nerd. He knows his job and science fiction, and pretty much nothing else. He suffers from extreme OCD, has few friends, and no hope of a girlfriend. So when the science of robotics advances (the year is 2028) to the point where robots look and act entirely human, he mortgages his house to finance the purchase of a “companion bot.”
When Savannah arrives, she’s all he hoped for and more. Beautiful, caring, sexy, eager to learn about the world. There is one small glitch, though – she doesn’t know she’s not supposed to run into the back yard naked. This gives the neighbors a show, and also gets both of them arrested. Also, it gets Dan fired from his job.
However, the robot manufacturer comes to his rescue, offering free legal representation and a new (though somewhat sleazy) job, at twice his previous salary. He begins a new stage of his life, as showing Savannah the world (and sometimes protecting the world from her) gradually draws him out of his shell.
If you ever saw the film, “Lars and the Real Girl,” there are some similarities here – except that the movie showed the main character gradually getting past his “doll” girlfriend stage to connect with a genuine woman. I’m not sure that something like that isn’t the ultimate goal here, though. There are suggestions in that direction. But this is only the first volume, and so far the depiction of human/robot relationships seems pretty rosy.
Which is where I have trouble with it. I saw this book advertised on Instapundit, but I don’t see much conservative or libertarian about it (though it’s admittedly early days). Republicans and conservative Christians are painted as a bigoted lot – because of their knee-jerk opposition to machine love.
But my big problem with the book was that I found it too personally appealing. I’m not that different from Dan, and I found the fantasy pretty seductive. I think the experience was bad for me. It comforts facets of my personality that shouldn’t be encouraged.
So I won’t continue with the series. But it’s well-written and appealing, and may even turn out fairly healthy in the end. The sex is not explicit.
Skinner was pale with rage, a peculiar glitter in his eye…. Again Peter felt that powerful urge to do him permanent damage. There was something primitive about it, like the urge to kill a snake. Snakes had a certain wrongness to them, the flickering tongue, that sinuous slither. Skinner had a different kind of wrongness. An emptiness in the eyes. An utter lack of regard for anyone other than himself. In ordinary moments he could hide it, could put on his charming act. But not now.
I’ve already reviewed one of Nick Petrie’s Peter Ash novels, but this one, The Drifter, is the first in the series. Peter Ash is a Marine, a veteran of Middle East action. He came home physically intact, but with a bad case of PTSD. It manifests itself as galloping claustrophobia. He’s spent a year mostly hiking and camping when he gets news that a good Marine buddy, Jimmy Johnson, has killed himself. Peter feels guilty – he should have gone to see him like he’d promised. So he goes to Milwaukee and finds Jimmy’s wife and two little boys struggling. He volunteers to rebuild their sagging front porch for them.
Under the porch he finds two sinister things – a large, angry dog and a suitcase filled with money and plastic explosives. What was Jimmy involved in? It turns out somebody’s been watching the house, and following Jimmy’s wife around. There’s a big plan in the works, and that suitcase is an important part of it. Very dangerous men will stop at nothing to get their hands on it.
I like this series very much, so far. Peter Ash is a great character – an Achilles with a vulnerable heel, formidable but relatable in his one vulnerability. The supporting characters are good too, and the plot is well crafted. The plight of the combat veteran is a continuing theme. Also, Peter strays onto the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, my (virtual) graduate alma mater. That doesn’t happen often in any form of entertainment.
Steve Conroy’s world went to pieces 25 years ago, when he was five. A man broke into his home and kidnapped his older brother. Believing the kidnapper’s threats, Steve didn’t alert anyone until morning. Some time later, his brother’s body was found in the ashes of a burned house, along with that of the kidnapper. Since then he’s lived with the guilty knowledge that he might have saved his brother if he’d called for help sooner.
He married, went to law school, and took a job with the district attorney’s office. But he developed a cocaine habit and lost everything. As James Scott Bell’s Long Lost begins, he’s trying to set up a practice on his own, living in an apartment in a sketchy neighborhood, threatened with eviction from his office. It looks as if he’s about to crash and burn again.
Then he has a remarkable day. First, an attractive young female law student shows up on his doorstep, eager to be his assistant. And a soon-to-released prisoner wants to retain him as his counsel, offering a large cash advance on his fees. Even better, the new client seems to be a genuinely positive guy, keen to turn his life around.
How is he to know that he’s soon to be targeted for murder, arrested, and faced with revelations that will re-write his own past and destroy – or resurrect – all his dreams?
I like James Scott Bell very much. He does a superior job of something I aspire to in my own books (with what success it’s not for me to say), writing Christian stories for a secular audience. Long Lost is actually a re-issue (only slightly edited) of one of his earlier books. This is visible in a somewhat less practiced hand in the writing. The Christian content is more awkward than in his later work, it seems to me. On the other hand, his greatest strength as an author – strong plotting – is very much apparent, and there are some really neat surprises along the way.
Marshall’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly without producing any words. It happened enough times that you could have stuck a light in there and used him to send Morse code messages to passing ships.
There are few pleasures in my reading life to match the appearance of a new Bunny McGarry novel. Caimh McDonnell’s comic mysteries started out hilarious, and they just seem to get better. The latest, Dead Man’s Sins, is officially Number 5 in the Dublin Trilogy, though it is in fact a sequel to the first prequel. But who’s counting? Certainly not the author.
Bunny McGarry is still a Dublin police detective at this point, but is taking a sabbatical from his job. He gets a call from the widow of his late partner, who depends on him for constant help and never shows any gratitude. Two tough guys have shown up at her house, claiming that their boss, Cooper Hannity (a prominent Dublin bookie), now owns the place. Bunny “sorts them out,” but soon learns the guys were legally in the right.
Hannity’s wife is Angelina, a former ballerina and model who was once a kid Bunny mentored on the mean city streets. But she’s no help in this matter, having no control over her overbearing, possessive husband. And when murder happens, Bunny finds himself in the middle of a very neat frame that not only threatens his own freedom, but some secrets he’s been keeping for other people.
What’s wonderful about this book – aside from the hilarious writing – is that McDonnell makes the most of his characters. They keep showing us surprising facets, and those facets make the whole story more profound. Yes, I said it – profound. There are moments of genuine depth here, and glimpses of moral vision.
In between a lot of brawling and cursing and slapstick, of course.
Though, to be fair, I must admit I figured out the culprit.
Nonetheless, I really loved Dead Man’s Sins. Highly recommended, with cautions (mostly) for language.
It has been my experience, as a Viking enthusiast, that historical biographies of great Vikings tend to be disappointing. A particularly sore memory is a biography of Canute the Great, some years back, that reduced a life of battle, intrigue, and conquest to the statistical analysis of personal names in old charters. The problem is sources, which in the Early Medieval Period (we used to call it The Dark Ages, precisely because of the scanty written record) tend to be spare even in relatively well-organized countries like France and England. For famous Scandinavians, the most accessible sources are the Icelandic sagas, which historians usually reject wholesale (in spite of the groundbreaking work of Torgrim Titlestad, available in a marvelously translated book called Viking Legacy).
In the case of Norway’s King Harald Hardrada, subject of Harald Hardrada: The Warrior’s Way by John Marsden, the situation is a little better. King Harald Sigurdsson lived his legendary life at the very end of the Viking Age, when things were getting a little better organized. On top of that, he had a wide-ranging career and often left discernable, discoverable tracks in local records.
I’ve often said that if there was ever a real-life Conan the Barbarian, it was Harald Sigurdsson, the tall and mighty half-brother of King Olaf Haraldsson, patron Saint of Norway. Carried wounded from the battlefield of Stiklestad, where Olaf died (Harald was 15 years old), he fled to Russia, where he served Prince Jaroslav as a mercenary. Then on to Constantinople, to join the fabled Varangian Guard, the emperor’s personal corps and bodyguard. After fighting all around the Mediterranean, he was imprisoned and escaped, participated in a rebellion, and personally blinded the deposed emperor. Then, having illegally sent treasure back to Russia for safekeeping for years, he fled the capitol and sailed back to Jaroslav. He married Jaroslav’s daughter, then returned to Norway, where he traded half his treasure to his nephew, Magnus the Good, for half the kingdom. Magnus’s death a few years thereafter left him as sole king. He spent most of his reign fighting wars with Denmark, until in 1066 he turned his eyes to England. In September of that year, he and his army were slaughtered by King Harold Godwinson at Stamford Bridge, after which the weakened English army went on to be beaten by William the Conqueror at Hastings a few weeks later.
That’s some life. It would be hard to make it dull, but there are historians who could do it.
Thankfully, John Marsden is not one of those.
I had trouble putting Harald Hardrada down. I knew the story well, of course, but Marsden does an excellent job of presenting it as a series of puzzles – he assumes the sagas unreliable, but he doesn’t dismiss them out of hand, especially when buttressed by contemporary skaldic poems. Sometimes he actually defends the saga writers against more skeptical historians. The narrative that emerges is worthy of the epic subject.
To top it all off, he even tells the story of Harald’s famous banner, “Land-ravager,” relating a legend I’ve already described on this blog, some time back, that an ancient scrap of silk on the Isle of Skye, known as “The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan,” belonging to the Clan McLeod, may plausibly be “Land-ravager” – there’s even scientific evidence. It’s that kind of touch that makes Marsden’s Harald Hardrada a treat for the Viking buff.
She ticked off each item on her fingers. “You climbed a three-hundred-foot redwood. Got shot at, twice. Totaled my car. Saved my life, at least twice. Fractured your leg, cracked some ribs.” She paused for a moment, and Peter wondered how far she’d get into this. She took a breath. “You also killed at least one man, maybe more, depending on how you see things. You got stuck in the hospital, which made your post-traumatic stress flare up. And now we’re on the run in the middle of the night from whoever is hunting me.”
This one was really good.
Burning Bright, by Nick Petrie, is the second in a series about Peter Ash, a Marine war veteran who came home with PTSD that manifests itself as claustrophobia. He’s basically unable to spend any time indoors, so he’s been living under the sky for months, hiking and camping. In the redwoods of northern California he gets chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. There he unexpectedly encounters a climbing rope, which he follows up into a majestic, old-growth tree. Eventually he finds a platform in the upper branches, where he meets a beautiful young woman, pointing a bow and arrow at him.
Her name is June Cassidy. She’s a journalist, and her scientist mother died recently. Not long after, some men kidnapped her, but she managed to escape them, and now she’s here in a research post a friend built, hiding from the kidnappers, who’ve been trailing her. They are in fact at the bottom of the tree now, setting up a trap for her. Peter offers his considerable skills as a protector, and together they make their way to June’s car, in which they begin a breathless chase headed toward Seattle, and eventually into a confrontation with June’s eccentric father, a kind of a cross between Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs.
The writing in Burning Bright was extremely good. The plotting and the action never let up. What made it even better was that the characters were well-realized, and Peter’s and June’s developing relationship was a lot of fun.
Cautions for language and violence. Possible, hinted leftist opinions may become more apparent in later books (or not). But I highly recommend Burning Bright to anyone who enjoys a good thriller in the Jack Reacher vein.
It’s always awkward reviewing a book in a genre (or sub-genre) you’re not very familiar with. If you criticize something, you don’t know whether it’s a routine feature of the form or not. If someone were to criticize my Erling books because they include magic, for instance, they’d be kind of missing the point.
Christopher Greyson is the author of the Jack Stratton novels, which I like very much, and he was kind enough to provide a free review copy of One Little Lie, which is a departure for him. It’s a women’s thriller.
Now writing women’s thrillers is a shrewd business move. I haven’t seen the statistics, but judging from the titles I see, women’s thrillers are a growth market. Women, after all, are by far the largest reading demographic. And (here I judge by the scripts I see as a translator) women have an insatiable thirst for stories with strong female lead characters, who overcome danger on their own. No rescue by knights in shining armor allowed. A hunky male love interest is acceptable – even desirable – but he has to be taken out of play in some way so the woman can discover her own strength and triumph independently.
That’s the kind of story One Little Lie is.
Kate Gardner has been a doormat all her life. She gave up her career aspirations when she married Scott Gardner, scion of a wealthy family in a small town. Then he dumped her for his high school sweetheart, manipulating her into accepting minimal child support. She is working as a receptionist, a job she hates, and trying to keep up with caring for her two young children. But lately she’s been troubled by depression and memory problems, and the medications she’s been prescribed haven’t been helping. And now Scott wants full custody of the kids.
As a side gig, she got an assignment from a friend to write a review on a new, sophisticated flying drone that can be controlled from her mobile phone. One night at her son’s football game, she tries the drone out, but then gets distracted. When the battery runs down, the drone homes in on her and lands on her head. When people come to help her, they find the drone, with footage on it showing a man stalking her. When the police come, Kate is embarrassed to admit that she was controlling the drone herself. Everyone assumes it belongs to the stalker. Later, Kate’s best friend and her ex-husband both tell her not to admit the omission to the police. If they catch you in “one little lie,” they won’t believe you. This is hard for Kate, a basically honest person, especially because she’s attracted to Ryan, one of the detectives, who seems to return her interest.
From that point, Kate’s life descends into chaos. She loses her job, her best friend disappears, a slut-shaming campaign is launched against her, and she’s physically attacked in her home. All the while, memory lapses have her wondering if she’s losing her mind. Her wealthy mother-in-law, who claims to be on her side, gives her an ultimatum – she has to learn to stand up for herself. But if she fails, she’ll lose everything.
One Little Lie was an engaging read. I did have problems with some elements in the story, but I’m not in a position to know if these are standard tropes or weaknesses in this particular plot. A book of this kind calls necessarily for a final crisis where the woman is forced to discover her strength all on her own. But it seemed to me the resolution here was kind of contrived, depending too much on sheer coincidence.
Aside from that, it was an enjoyable read. Recommended, especially for female readers. Subtle Christian messages.
