Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mind Games, by Dan Willis

1 Comment

Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby series of urban fantasy/mysteries grows more intriguing as one reads on. The fourth installment is Mind Games, in which many puzzles are solved and puzzlier ones appear.

Alex operates as a runewright/private eye in a 1930s New York where magic is the main technology. In Mind Games, a rich couple ask him to find their daughter, who has gone missing. Alex uses a finding rune to locate her in a nightclub, but the owner says she’s with him and they’re going to be married. The girl agrees that’s true, so Alex leaves them alone. But the next day she calls the police for rescue.

There’s also a young man who asks Alex to prove his wife didn’t murder her lover. In fact, he says, his wife didn’t even know the man she was arrested for shooting to death. Alex assumes he’s just in denial, but in fact there’s no evidence she even knew the guy. So why would she kill him?

Meanwhile, a number of the lower-level runewrights who operate from street carts have started working for a company that’s mass-producing runes in a way Alex had always assumed impossible. And homeless people are disappearing altogether.

And then there’s the little problem that Alex gave up the majority of his life force while saving the city, a few adventures back. His energy clock is running down, and his friend and mentor Iggy is working feverishly to create a life-extension rune for him.

As Alex Lockerby’s world develops over the course of the books, it grows increasingly interesting. I especially like the chemistry between Alex and Sorsha Kincaid, New York’s foremost sorceress. She’s beautiful, rich, highly dangerous, and a denizen of the highest society, while Alex is a lowly P.I. But there are sparks between them, and she’s learning to respect him. You can’t help wondering what comes next.

The prose is pretty ordinary, but the storytelling and world-building are excellent. And the characters aren’t bad. I’m enjoying the ongoing series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Clean Kill,’ by C. E. Nelson

Leave a comment

The second of the Trask Brothers murder mysteries, set in Minnesota, is Clean Kill. The first book centered more on David Trask, sheriff of Lake County in northern MN. This time we spend a bit more time with his twin brother Don, a big shot with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

A band on tour borrows a tour bus, only to notice a foul smell coming from one of the luggage compartments. Inside they find a ripe corpse, which has – oddly – been cleaned with bleach, and had its finger- and toenails removed. Soon similar bodies, all of drug addicts, start showing up around Two Harbors, where David lives, and so the cop brothers will have to join forces. Meanwhile, Don is growing curious about a prominent, highly connected man who seems to be connected to all this, and his bosses are telling him to back off. Which only makes him more suspicious.

Since John Sandford has taken Lucas Davenport national, there seems to be an opening for a new fictional Minnesota super-cop. Or cops. I’m not sure the Trask brothers quite fill that vacancy yet, but they’re not bad. My main complaints were that the author seemed ignorant of Chinese buffets (he seems to think you pay after eating), and the addition of a new homosexual character, one assumes in order to fill some quota. But the character isn’t all that annoying, and isn’t on stage too much, so I’ll put up with it for now.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Chain,’ by Dan Willis

Leave a comment

In an alternate-universe New York City, where they mostly have magic instead of science, Alex Lockerby is a runewright/private detective. In an earlier adventure, Alex saved the city by transporting the floating castle of Sorsha Kincaid, one its foremost sorceresses, into the Atlantic. This succeeded, but left him with snow-white hair and only a few months left to live. Thanks to a restorative potion he takes several times a day, he’s able to still function as a runewright, but he’s well aware of time running out.

In The Long Chain, Number 3 in the series, a Nobel-prize winning chemist disappears, and his daughter hires Alex to find him. He does, but the old man has been injured and has lost his memory. Meanwhile a number of prominent alchemists have disappeared, and Alex is concerned for the safety of one of those remaining, the mother of his new girlfriend. However, Sorsha the Sorceress wants Alex to use his “finding rune” to identify the source of a mysterious, unnatural fog that has blanketed the city for weeks and seems to be growing worse day by day.

As you’ve probably noted, the plot of The Long Chain is a complicated one, but I was impressed with the way author Dan Willis tied it all together. And one of the mysteries ended in a resolution that was at once surprising and poignant.

The writing could be better, but I’m enjoying the storytelling in this Arcane series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Color of Blood,’ by Keith Yocum

Leave a comment

For a while there, I thought I’d found a new series to follow passionately. I liked the first half of Keith Yocum’s The Color of Blood very much. But it faded in the stretch for this reader.

Dennis Cunningham is an investigator for the CIA. He’s not an agent; he investigates crimes committed against, or by, Agency operatives. His strength is interrogation, his chief method bullying. He offends people, gets them angry, and they lower their defenses and unload the truth. He has a high clearance rate, but very few friends, at Langley or anywhere else.

He’s just back from compassionate leave, after a breakdown following the death of his wife. To ease him back into the job, he’s assigned to look into the disappearance of an agent in Australia. Basically he’s just supposed to check somebody else’s work; no big deal.

But when he gets to Australia, (where he’s required by law to be accompanied by a local police officer, who turns out to be a woman who hates him on sight), he begins to suspect that the missing agent is not dead at all. He also grows curious about what that agent had been investigating. And that leads him down paths of inquiry leading to danger, both from bad guys and the unforgiving Australian outback. Along the way, he and his Australian cop escort will begin to see each other in a new way.

For reasons that won’t be hard to guess, I generally like stories about “difficult” male heroes, your Monk/House/Holmes types. I like them even better, for even more obvious reasons, when they get paired up with attractive women. So this story gratified me very much for about the first half.

But then it got out of hand (from my perspective). Dennis’s obsessive risk-taking abruptly ended my identification with him. Unsurprising perils led to not unexpected rescues. Also, there was what I perceived (I could be wrong) as a political message that seemed to me extreme.

So I won’t be continuing with this series. It was fun for a while, though. You might like it better.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Other Emily,’ by Dean Koontz

Leave a comment

She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies.

One storytelling element I like very much is the book that opens with an impossibility. Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Other Emily, is such a book. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with all of it, but it led me a merry chase up to the end.

David Thorne is a bestselling author, and very wealthy. But he lives a distanced life, ever since the loss of his girlfriend Emily. She disappeared on a California highway one rainy night ten years ago, when her car broke down. She is assumed to be one of the victims of a serial killer active at the time. David actually pays the man to visit him periodically in prison, in the hope of gleaning a clue to Emily’s fate. He’s grieving, of course, but also racked with guilt, because he should have been with her that night.

Then one evening, in a bar in Newport Beach, he spies a woman who looks exactly like Emily. Not similar to her, but precisely like her in every detail. She even talks like Emily, and seems to know things only she would know. Except that she’s the age Emily was when she disappeared, not the age she’d be today.

David plunges into a passionate affair with this mysterious woman, meanwhile embarking on an obsessive investigation to discover who she really is, where she comes from, and what she’s here for. The secret, when he learns it, will be almost unbelievable and very likely deadly.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of The Other Emily. I thought it contrived and implausible, even on science fiction/horror terms. However, the process of reading the book provided a persistent sense of dread all along its length, and I found that very stimulating.

Cautions for language and disturbing subject matter.

Fiction, Reading, Religion, Reviews

Dune: Cynical and Yet Pro-Life

1 Comment

[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 4: A couple observations on what I’ve read so far.

Paul Atriedes and Lady Jessica, son and mother, are both highly trained in the Bene Gesserit order. Jessica was a nun (if that’s the right word for her position) before being sold to Duke Leto as a concubine. You can see in that statement why nun doesn’t seem like the precise word for her. Others call her a witch and call the Eastern mystical quality of Bene Gesserit ways witchcraft. But what they do doesn’t look like magic at all. It looks like highly accurate intuition, mental processing power, and even kung fu.

At the same time, Jessica frequently criticizes signs of manipulative indoctrination she finds on the desert planet. There’s no indication of universal truths or God Almighty who calls people on every planet to himself. They never speak of faith, only of training. It seems somewhat, but not entirely, secularized.

Contrasted with this is faith of the Fremen, which Jessica would say has been delivered to them by emissaries of the Missionaria Protectiva. This part of the Bene Gesserit order is defined in the glossary as being “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation.” Paul looks at the honest faith of the Fremen as a seedbed for jihad.

If the Atriedes would speak of universal moral truths or spiritual realities just once, it could remove the cynical smear of every other characterization of faith. But I don’t think they will.

Despite their jaded religious training, they take a remarkably pro-life stance on Jessica’s unborn child. Several times Jessica’s pregnancy has come up, never in the bizarrely clinical way some people talk today, and at a point when she feels compelled to risk her life for the greater good, Jessica asks herself if she has the right to risk the life of her child as well. In 2021 A.D. America, that’s an incredible statement!

I’m a little worried matriarchs of the Bene Gesserit order will emerge to play the part of Big Organized Religion Bent on Evil. Maybe they won’t in this book.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blood River,’ by C. E. Nelson

Leave a comment

When I run across a Minnesota mystery writer, I generally give him a shot. Usually they turn out too progressive for my taste. But C. E. Nelson’s Blood River generally avoided politics, and the writing wasn’t bad.

David Trask, our hero, is a former cop from Maple Grove, Minnesota (not far from where I live). A while back, tired of the pressures of Twin Cities policing, he moved up to Lake County Minnesota, an extensive, forested resort region. Then he ran for sheriff, and – to his surprise – won. Still, what’s the worst that could happen in resort country?

What happens is serial murder. When two fishermen are found with their throats slashed, it’s only the start of a string of brutal murders. Soon the small resort owners are clashing with the big owners, and the fishing guides are clashing with everybody, and Dave knows he’s stretched beyond his limited resources. He calls on his twin brother Don, an investigator for Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Before everything’s done, they will face a formidable killer together.

The writing in Blood River wasn’t stellar, but it was serviceable. I liked Dave and Don as characters, and the story kept my interest. The plotting was the weak point – the author comes pretty close to a deus ex machina save at a critical juncture, and the action isn’t always plausible.

But it wasn’t bad. I might read the next in the series.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

‘People Overact, Take it Too Far’

1 Comment

[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 3: I recently read the scene in which Paul sees one of the giant worms rise from the sand before him. They have this scene in the trailer for the upcoming film. Remembering that got me wondering if they had the same scene in the 1984 movie.

I know I said I didn’t want to see any more of that movie, but I don’t think the worms were the bad part. I found a WatchMojo video of ten reasons people hate Dune (1984), and now I really have seen as much as I need to see of it. Yeah, there are spoilers, but this movie doesn’t stick close to the book, so it’s matters less. And no worm rising from the sand–maybe that was the good part.

One main complaint is overacting. I remember catching an old sci-fi flick Solar Crisis somewhere in the middle. I think I started watching when Charlton Heston was on screen. After a few minutes, I thought, “Heston is the only good actor in this movie.” At least, he was the only believable figure walking around. Cut to a scene in a spaceship, and I wondered if these were the people who had been looking for clerical and janitorial work when all the real astronauts were deciding who would draw the short straws.

That’s something I’ve appreciated in what I’ve read of Dune so far. The characters, at least the good ones, aren’t peevish and bratty. Actually, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is not only evil, he’s full of bile. He probably wakes up every morning with a leer, but he gets little lime light in Book One, so he doesn’t weigh it down. Duke Leto, the Sean Bean character in this part of the story, has flaws, which Paul notes, but is predominately an admirable man. One of the native politicians feels pressed to like the Duke against his better judgement because he naturally commands loyalty. He inspires fidelity with his passion and generosity.

The overacting, what there may be of it, comes across as cutthroat politics. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is quoted as saying, “Politics is like bad cinema — people overact, take it too far. When I speak with politicians, I see this in their facial expressions, their eyes, the way they squint. I look at things like a producer. I would often watch a scene on the monitor, and the director and I would yell, ‘Stop, no more, this is unwatchable! No one will believe this.'”

I hope I don’t get much of it in the rest of Dune. It would ruin the whole experience.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ghost of a Chance,’ by Dan Willis

Leave a comment

Will it surprise anybody if I tell you I’m kind of a snob when it comes to my reading? Probably not. I mean, I don’t read only Russian or French books, but I sometimes pre-judge novels, especially by genre. I think of myself as a high fantasist, both in my reading and writing. Light urban fantasy, I’ll confess, feels a little like slumming to me. But I must confess, I’m enjoying Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby novels. They’re fun.

At the end of the previous novel, Alex, a runewright/private eye in a 1930s New York City where magic works, saved the city from a sorcerous disaster. But there was a price – he drained a lot of his life energy in the process. Now his hair has turned white and his hands shake – which is deadly for his bread-and-butter business, drawing precise runes to help people find lost dogs or spouses.

But he hasn’t been forgotten. In Ghost Of a Chance, when a “ghost killer” starts murdering people in locked rooms, one of the tabloid newspapers starts claiming Alex is showing the police how to solve the crimes. It’s not true, and it only makes the cops more hostile to him than they already were. Meanwhile, a woman whose husband has disappeared hires him to find him, and an eminent sorcerer/industrialist makes a bet with Alex to locate an experimental motor that’s been stolen from him.

Alex can’t draw his runes anymore. Which means that he’s going to have to rely on plain deduction to do the job the old-fashioned way. Is he up to it? Or will he find himself locked up for interfering with the police, as they keep threatening? Or even dead?

The prose in the Alex Lockerby books is not of the very highest quality, but the plots move right along and the characters and colorful and lively. Your entertainment dollar will not be wasted. I wish the author had studied up more on one of his characters, though, one who is supposed to be an actual historical figure. I won’t say who he is, but he seems to have changed a lot of his skills and philosophy in this universe.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Those Who Disappeared,’ by Kevin Wignall

1 Comment

Kevin Wignall is always an interesting novelist, even when I don’t entirely care for some of his plotting choices. His latest is Those Who Disappeared, which had challenging moments, but was a very satisfying reading experience overall.

Foster Treherne is a young artist with a world-wide reputation, very famous and very wealthy. English and American by heritage, he lives mostly in Berlin and keeps a low personal profile. He’s generally disconnected from humanity, except for his staff. His father disappeared before he was born, and his mother committed suicide while he was a baby. His grandparents saw to his physical needs and education, but kept him at arms’ length. His essential view of life is, “People leave.”

Then he gets the news that his father’s body has been found, frozen in a Swiss glacier. With the help of an embassy employee, an attractive woman named Daniela with whom he cautiously begins a relationship, he gets the opportunity to see his own father for the only time in his life – in mummified form. Suddenly he conceives an obsessive desire to learn about this man. He studies his personal journal, found wrapped in plastic with the body, and goes through his old photos and documents. He makes contact with his father’s once-close group of post-graduate student friends, and is puzzled by their reactions. They tell contradictory stories, and lie about one another. They all say the same thing about Foster’s dad – “He was fun to be with, but had a dangerous side.” Are they trying to protect Foster from some harsh truth? Or is one of them actually guilty of murder?

Those Who Disappeared is a splendid example of a story which contains no shootouts or fist fights, but keeps the tension high and the reader fascinated. What’s better (for this reader) is that it’s the story of a man re-integrating with life. I love that kind of story, as it’s an experience I expect I’ll only ever have vicariously.

Anyway, I highly recommend Those Who Disappeared. There’s one problematic plot element for Christians, but it’s not preachy or implausible.