Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series has often been recommended to me, but I’ve resisted. Not sure why. After reading Crooked Man, I still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about it, but I liked the book better at the end than in the early stages.
Tubby Dubonnet, for those of you who (as I was) are unaware of him, is a divorced criminal lawyer in New Orleans. That in itself suggests he’s no moral paragon, but he does maintain two rules of ethics in his practice – never screw a client, and never lie to a judge. By the standards of the place, that makes him pretty upright.
He has a colorful cast of clients. Right now he’s negotiating a malpractice settlement for a transvestite stripper who got a bad skin-darkening treatment from a doctor, and trying to coax payment for divorce work from a buxom blonde who may be available for a different kind of transaction. But when Darryl Alvarez, a nightclub manager, asks him to keep a locked sports bag in his safe for a couple days (he swears there’s nothing illegal in it), Tubby goes against his own better judgment and accepts it. This soon puts him in an awkward ethical position, not to mention a dangerous one. Tubby is a clever man, and he’ll need all his cleverness to stay alive.
I prefer my heroes a little more principled than Tubby Dubonnet, but by the end of Crooked Man – which was a lighter concoction than I expected – I was enjoying the story. I bought a whole set of the novels, so I’ll be reviewing more.
Professor Joseph McRae Mellichamp of the University of Alabama, speaking at conference at Yale University to an audience that contained the Novel Price winner Sir John Eccles, famous for his discovery of the synapse, together with a number of the pioneers of AI, said: “It seems to me that lot of needless debate could be avoided if AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence — differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research.” In other words, to cite the succinct title of Mellichamp’s talks, “‘the artificial’ in artificial intelligence is real.”
What was the last thing you heard about artificial intelligence? Maybe it was about ChatGPT, an open AI web app that invites people to ask the computer to write anything they can think of.
Chris Hutchinson on Twitter asked it to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of the psychedelic funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The AI said it would be disrespectful to rewrite such a historic speech in this style. Then he asked for a rewrite of the speech as a haiku, and the AI complied. Later, another user was able to get the speech in the style of Sly and the Family Stone by wording the request differently (and possibly by his preceding requests). Maybe ChatGPT had a change of heart after refusing the first request.
Educators have been worried that this program (and others produced in its wake) will allow students to task their computers with writing papers for them with minimal chance of detection, but educators are prove to worrying and are probably assuming too much AI language proficiency at this point. Writers worry this program threatens their jobs, and those who work for any of the click-bait sites on pop culture, movies, and games should worry. The garbage prose ChatGPT spits out is totally on par with their daily posts.
You won’t find this in Lennox’s book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. It was published in 2020. Developments in this field will be fast and fierce (no, frenetic. Wait, it’s fast and feverish, right? Fulminous?) Lennox couldn’t deal with the very latest news, but he does deal with the ideas and claims many in the field of artificial intelligence are making.
Current advances in AI have sparked hopes and fears similar to George Orwell’s 1984, but instead of INGSOC controlling our society, it would be supercomputers that had developed themselves beyond their creators’ imagination. If it came to reality by 2084, supporters ask, wouldn’t it be poetic?
Lennox explains some of the benefits of current machine learning and some of the changes we see coming as robots take over select jobs. For example, the freight industry could be transformed by trucks that drove themselves. (How would they refuel? Could criminals take advantage of them?) He also explains some of the dangers we can already see in AI’s current uses. China’s surveillance state already looks resembles an episode of Black Mirror in which approved behavior and social media influence controls a society of people constantly monitored by unseeing eyes. Facial recognition programs may violate privacy by design and are only as good as they are accurate. False matches have already gotten a few people in trouble.
I get the feeling, as I read David Crosby’s Will Harper series, that the author wants to pay homage to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Will, after all, lives on a boat in a marina in Florida. Instead of “taking his retirement in installments,” he lives the good life on an inheritance. Frankly, except for the sentiment of the thing, I almost wish he wouldn’t. Will Harper is a very different character from McGee.
In the previous installment, journalist Will saved his neighbors from being fleeced by land developers exploiting eminent domain. His girlfriend Sandy, about whom he was getting serious, rewarded him by sailing away to a new life in the Caribbean.
So as Guilty Money begins, he’s rebuilding his life (along with his boat, which got shot up in the action). He’s also acquired a new girlfriend, a girl who wants no commitment and likes to hang around the boat naked (a curiously 1970s plot element in a 21st Century book). But then a friend asks his help in getting someone out of the jail in nearby (fictional) Grove County. There the sheriff’s department, under financial pressure and tempted by plain greed, is milking the jail system for cash – particularly through failing to notify defendants of court dates, then pocketing the forfeited bail. Also they skimp on prisoners’ food, and brutalize them on top of it. There are one or two deaths, which get covered up.
With the help of a friendly (and attractive) ACLU attorney (she brags about how the ACLU defends people of all political beliefs, another dated element in the story), he plans a campaign to expose the corruption. It will get ugly – and fortunately a new ally appears, a young man who knows how to fight. A much needed addition to this cast.
At least in these early books in the series, author Crosby hasn’t yet mastered his instrument, in my opinion. His prose could use some pruning. And the politics lean left (as you no doubt guessed from this review). The theme of the story is the over-incarceration of criminals — something I’m pretty sure isn’t a problem anymore.
But there’s only one more book in the collection of three that I got for free, so I imagine I’ll read it. Guilty Money wasn’t bad.
I stood and shoved my hands back into my pockets but left my coat open. The cold worked its way inside and nipped at the lightly covered areas of my body. I didn’t pull the long coat closed, though. I wanted to feel something other than the hurt inside.
I enjoy a good thriller. Writers like Hurwitz, Klavan, and Hunter stand among my favorites. And yet, for preference, I personally can do without all the fights and explosions. I like the mystery itself, and the interplay of characters. Some people enjoy being scared; they’re probably braver than I.
My point is that a novel that emphasizes mystery and character over action suits me just fine. And that’s what The Long Cold Winter by Colin Conway has to offer.
Dallas Nash is a police detective in Tacoma, Washington. It’s early winter, and his mood is as bleak as the weather. He’s mourning his wife Bobbie, who died just before Thanksgiving in a single-car accident. The hopelessness and futility of it all has unmanned him. He visits her grave every day, and lately he’s been waking up with old songs in his head. Some of them are his favorites, some Bobbie’s favorites. Some he can’t even place. He’s begun to wonder if they’ve been sent as messages from Bobbie. He’s begun to wonder if he’s losing his mind.
He goes back to work, not because he feels ready, but because he can’t handle the inactivity anymore. When he gets to the office, he finds a cold case file on his desk. The brass have decided that’s a good way to ease him back into the job.
The case is the murder of a high school student, Jennifer Williams, back in 1987. This sparks a memory in Dallas. He saw Jennifer on the day she died. He was cruising the main street with some highs chool friends, and a friend of a friend pointed to her and said she was his girlfriend. Oddly, that guy is not mentioned in the police reports.
Here’s a fresh angle on the case. In intervals from investigating another, fresher, murder that also occurs, Dallas will have to reconnect with old acquaintances to locate the guy, whose name he’s forgotten. He’ll make mistakes, and there will be more deaths. But the truth will come out.
I expect some people won’t care for Detective Nash’s depression, and some would prefer more action on-stage (the deaths here generally happen out of sight. Dallas tends to get his confessions through quiet conversation). But I enjoyed A Long Cold Winter very much, and I recommend it.
Cautions for adult themes and language. There’s a priest in the book, and he’s treated positively.
Brophy shot him a compassionate look. He had light-brown eyes that floated like bubbles in a carpenter’s level.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a lot of free books lately, e-books I get through online offers. You may also have noticed that I’ve panned a lot of these. It’s the dark side of the self-publishing boom. They’re books written, essentially, by amateurs.
But I’d pre-ordered Jonathan Kellerman’s newest book, Unnatural History, and Kellerman is in no way an amateur. What struck me most as I read was how easy the reading was. I didn’t have to wrestle with the text or try to figure out what the author meant. This was like an easy flight with an experienced pilot. I could just relax and enjoy.
The opening of Unnatural History is standard for the series. Alex Delaware, Los Angeles child psychologist, gets a call from his best friend, the gay shlub-detective Milo Sturgis. Milo is at a murder scene that shows signs of psychological weirdness. Would Alex come and consult?
Alex joins him at the home of the victim, Donny Klement, a young professional photographer who clearly had money but lived in minimalist style. He’s been shot to death in his bed. His distraught assistant (once Alex has helped her calm down) tells them that Donny had recently been working on a project where he photographed homeless people. He took them into his home, dressed them in “aspirational” costumes, and took their pictures. Then he paid them – generously.
Alex and Milo agree that letting the homeless into your home and showing them where you keep large sums of money is rather poor security practice. Clearly, they need to hunt for a murderer among the street people.
Until they learn that Donny happens to be the son of one of the world’s richest men, a notorious recluse who has fathered several children (each with a different wife), provided them with money, and otherwise neglected them. Could one of these half-siblings, who barely knew Donny, have killed him for a bigger piece of the estate?
They’ll need to walk the mean streets and visit the halls of wealth before they can finally unravel the mystery.
I was particularly impressed with the characterization in Unnatural History. Kellerman does characters exceptionally well (and sympathetically). Two of my favorite characters were a gun-loving supermodel and a self-aware, bipolar homeless woman (the best homeless character I’ve ever come across in a book).
I wouldn’t say Unnatural History is better than the general run of Alex Delaware novels. It’s consistent with the usual high standard. It was a little shorter than most of them, which is too bad.
Cautions for disturbing themes and language. Highly recommended anyway.
David Brunelle is a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office in Seattle. He is, we are given to understand, intelligent and experienced.
You wouldn’t guess that from his conduct in the novel, Corpus Delicti. Even to me, whose legal expertise is mostly gleaned from novels and TV shows, he seemed like kind of a moron.
David is hard-working – too hard-working. He recently broke up with his girlfriend, under circumstances that did him no credit. Now even his best friend, police detective Larry Chen, is keeping his distance. But that doesn’t stop Chen from calling David in when he interviews a witness with an unusual story to tell.
Linda is a prostitute and a drug addict. But she’s worried about her friend Amy, another prostitute. Amy disappeared, after her pimp had publicly threatened her. Linda thinks Amy is dead – but she says she won’t testify to anything.
After David goes to visit Amy’s parents and learns that she hasn’t been back in some time to visit her little girl, who lives with them, David makes up his mind. Amy is dead, and her murder must be prosecuted just like anyone else’s.
His problem is that he has almost no corpus delicti.
“Corpus delicti,” the author explains, is not what most people think. We think it means the body of a murder victim (which does happen to be missing here), and that’s how it’s popularly used. But legally the term means the whole “body” of the evidence – all the verifiable facts that make up the prosecution’s case. And David’s got diddly in that regard. But that doesn’t stop him from proceeding.
He will have to deal with a series of preliminary judges of varying degrees of intelligence and competence. A very smart and savvy defense attorney. And sketchy witnesses who have little to say, and don’t want to say that.
Reading Corpus Delicti was frustrating for me. Again and again, David took actions that seemed to me obviously boneheaded, and they generally were. He even got somebody killed. One can argue that this is all good character development – David is feeling guilty and isolated, and is working too hard. But he’s still doing dumb legal work and it’s hard to sympathize with that.
The moment a prosecutor says, “This guy is really evil, and I’m going to get him convicted, with or without evidence,” he’s crossing a vital line. Sure, this guy is a scumbag. But what if the next guy’s innocent; just somebody a prosecutor doesn’t like? Abuse of power is a seductive thing, and corrosive to society and the law.
Also, it’s unrealistic. District prosecutors have budgets; their superiors won’t let them waste money on quixotic fishing expeditions.
I will admit that David pulls a smart trick at the end. I appreciated that. But all in all, I wasn’t impressed with him as a legal hero.
Another gripe: Almost nobody is physically described in this book. It’s the second novel like that I’ve read recently. Is this the new thing? Some way to avoid accusations of racism in the age of Woke?
Also, cautions for language. The prose wasn’t bad in general, though.
I’m not a huge fan of the Roper and Hooley autism/police procedural series, written by Michael Leese. I find the whole concept of autism fascinating (being on the spectrum myself, I strongly suspect). But I find Jonathan Roper, the autistic English detective in this series, somewhat annoying to read about (which is probably just authorial verisimilitude). Still, the writing isn’t bad, and I bought a set of four books, so I carry on.
Shortly after The Case of the Missing Faces opens with a horrific murder, London detective Brian Hooley is reunited with his partner Jonathan Roper. Roper has been reassigned to a high security national intelligence facility. It’s a center of geekery, full of young geniuses and computer experts, most of them on the autism spectrum themselves, so it was assumed Roper would fit right in. And he did at first, becoming something of a star for his unorthodox but fruitful logical processes. Only lately he’s been having trouble. The official opinion is that maybe he needs the influence of Hooley, with whom he’s comfortable, and with whom he’s worked successfully in the past. So Hooley gets reassigned, and for a change he’s the one who doesn’t fit in.
For a while Roper stays stuck in spite of Hooley’s arrival. He’s certain there’s something important happening that he just can’t see. Something sinister.
Meanwhile, back in London, their colleagues are investigating the deaths of a couple computer experts found murdered in bizarre circumstances, their faces flayed off.
Once Roper realizes that these crimes have to do with national security, he’ll begin to see what’s really going on. But can he figure it all out before he himself falls victim to a brilliant but increasingly unstable serial killer?
I’m not in love with this series, but The Case of the Missing Faces kept me reading. There’s a twist at the end I saw coming pretty far off. There were some conventional references to the dangers of extreme right-wing groups in the US, but (spoiler alert) they came to nothing, so the book wasn’t very political in the end.
It’s a general, but not inflexible, rule of mine not to read action novels written by women, even if the hero is a male. Somehow I made the choice to download Run For Your Life, by C. M. Sutter, who turns out to be a female writer (the fact that the book was free probably had something to do with this). As is often the case with woman writers, Sutter doesn’t really get male characters right. For one thing they’re too verbal here, gabbing about relationships rather than ball games or weather. And our hero kisses his pet dog on the head. Has any straight guy ever done this? But that weakness ended up not being my biggest complaint.
Mitch Cannon is a Savannah, Georgia police detective. He’s obsessive about his work, and doesn’t date much. But he recently met a woman who’s attractive and just a little crazy, and he’s looking forward to her invitation to participate in some kind of secret “raffle” for the benefit of police.
Then Mitch’s sister is kidnapped, and he has to change his plans. His partner Devon agrees to fill in for him at the raffle. Mitch is nearly insane with fear for his sister’s safety, and it gets worse when Devon and his girlfriend also fail to appear the following day.
And the whole thing ambles along to the showdown and ultimate revelations. I figured out the big final twist quite early on, and other aspects of the story disappointed me too. The dialogue was clunky and unnatural in many spots. At one point Mitch briefs his superiors on events we readers have just observed, and the author rehashes his briefing. This could have been covered by just having him say, “I told them about what I’d been doing.” Less boredom for the reader.
Another annoying element was that almost nobody in this book is described in any way, except to say how attractive one girl is, and that Devon is a little overweight.
There were also fact and logic problems. One character runs from captivity after being restrained in a kneeling position for more than a day. Would a person even be able to walk without a recovery period, after that much cramped immobility? And somebody says that nobody spends just two years in jail for murder – what country are they living in?
I must mention, in the author’s defense, though, that she has her characters pray quite often. I appreciated that.
But overall I wasn’t much impressed with Run For Your Life.
Good news. Translation work has shown up. I dare not hope it means the drought is over; it’s the same project that I worked on a month ago. But we live in hope. So what shall I write about tonight, children, in haste as I am?
As I told you, I’ve been watching a lot of old black and white mysteries. I find myself – to my surprise – somewhat fascinated by the Charlie Chan series. It has its objectionable sides – most particularly in its racial portrayals (though Mantan Moreland was a genius). And sometimes they’re pure B-movie cheese. But occasionally they display some qualities of style and intelligence.
But the film that particularly fascinated me was a 1929 release called Behind That Curtain (based on a novel of the same name by Earl Derr Biggers, though it seems to deviate heavily from that source). The movie is memorable for two or three reasons. The main one is that it’s – technically – the very first Charlie Chan movie. But it’s an awkward fit with the rest of the series.
The thing is, the movie as it turned out isn’t really a Charlie Chan story. He’s mentioned near the beginning, and he shows up near the end, as a secondary character. In this story, he appears more similar to the real Honolulu policeman Chang Apana, whom Biggers credited as the inspiration for the character. (Though the wiry Apana was a far more hardboiled guy than the portly, cerebral Chan of the movies. He was known for using a bullwhip.) In this movie, Chan is a tough cop, a tad trigger happy. No apparent mastermind. He’s played by a roundish Korean actor named E. L. Park.
The story of the film involves a young English woman, Eve Mannering (Lois Moran) who defies her loving guardian to marry the shady Eric Durand. They move to India, where Eric turns out to be a feckless, unfaithful rotter. Eventually the English detective Sir Frederick Bruce shows up to interrogate Eric over an old crime, and Eve, having learned enough about her husband, flees to Honolulu (San Francisco? I forget). There Eric locates her at last, and there’s a decisive showdown at a lecture being given by Eve’s true love, the explorer Col. John Beetham (Warner Baxter).
Aside from the early, clean-shaven and actually Asian Charlie Chan we encounter in this movie, there are other points of interest. One is Col. Beetham’s taciturn Indian servant, who is played by a young Boris Karloff.
The other notable aspect, more literary, is the actress Lois Moran, who plays Eve. She was very pretty, even to modern eyes, and is remembered in real life for being the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who based the character of Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night on her.
That’s a lot of freight for one B movie to carry. The film itself is so-so. Standard early sound stuff, where everything moves really slowly, and everybody overacts.
“My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a mason and an engineer…. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”
I’ve become a great fan of Dean Koontz’s work, but my enthusiasm is not bestowed equally on all the branches of his work. I’m not a fan of horror, and his latest book, The House at the End of the World, is pretty intense horror.
Katie (I’m pretty sure we’re told her last name at some point, but I can’t find it) is an artist. A few years back, following the horrendous deaths, due to crime, of her two daughters and her husband, she withdrew to the island called Jacob’s Ladder. (One assumes it’s on one of the Great Lakes, but that’s not specified.) Here she paints, but not to her own satisfaction. She knows she has enemies who might decide to dispose of her at any time, so she found herself a solid, fortified house and keeps well armed. She has no social contacts. She promised her husband she’d go on living, so that’s what she’s doing, but without happiness.
Then strange things start happening. Odd sounds in the night; an unidentifiable animal pattering across her roof. There’s unusual activity too at Ringrock, a nearby island that houses a government facility. It’s supposed to be something to do with the EPA, but it’s too hush-hush for that. When a couple armed federal agents show up on her island and arrogantly order her around, she bridles. Then a vicious storm comes up and one of the agents reappears, seemingly insane. Katie begins considering leaving the island, but the agents have disabled her boat.
Then a young girl shows up from another neighboring island. She has a horrific story to tell. Her parents, who worked at Ringrock, are dead, and her nurse has been murdered by a monster. Together they will face the challenge of fighting whatever unearthly creature has taken up residence in Katie’s basement, and then take a dangerous boat trip ashore, after which they’ll have to face both aliens and their own government.
Aside from my distaste for horror stories, I also thought The House at the End of the World started rather slowly. A lot of time is spent with Katie alone, establishing her character and back story without a whole lot happening. Once the girl, Libby, shows up, things move faster. The book is exciting, and if you go for bug-eyed monsters, there’s a pretty spooky one here. Then the government proves to be worse (a sign of the times).
Cautions for language. The author has chosen to use a lot of obscene language in this book, even out of the mouth of the teenaged girl.
The House at the End of the World isn’t a bad novel, but it didn’t suit me as a lot of Dean Koontz books do.
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