Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes,’ by David Handler

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“Patrick swore to me that he didn’t, but I assumed he was lying to me.”

“Why did you assume that?”

“Because everyone lies to me. It’s what they do. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

For a long time, The Man Who Loved Women to Death, the last book I reviewed in the Stewart Hoag series, was indeed the last book in the series. According to his Afterword, author David Handler had decided that today’s cutthroat celebrity culture left no space for Hoagy to ghost memoirs and solve mysteries. But he was persuaded to bring the character back in some flashback books. So The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes takes place somewhere after the first mystery, when Hoagy is established as a celebrity ghost-writer, but has not yet reconciled with Merilee Nash, his actress ex-wife/domestic partner.

Hoagy’s agent sets him up to write a memoir for TV host Monette Aintree (sort of a Martha Stewart character). The spark for the project is a letter Monette has received from her father, Richard Aintree, who wrote a critically acclaimed bestseller, then disappeared entirely following his wife’s suicide. Hoagy also has a personal interest, as Monette’s sister, Reggie, was his first love, a long time ago.

Against his better judgment he heads to Los Angeles to take up residence on Monette’s estate. Immediately the drama begins, stirred up by Monette’s ex-husband, a TV star and steroid freak, and his new girlfriend, a pregnant teenaged sex symbol. Then there’s a murder (of course), and Reggie shows up to support her sister and settle unfinished business with Hoagy.

It was nice to spend time with Hoagy and his basset hound, Lulu, again. I wouldn’t say this was the best in the series (I thought the characterizations weren’t the best, and I found the resolution kind of problematic.) But it was entertaining and amusing, as expected.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Loved Women to Death,’ by David Handler

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“I’ve worked with seriously disturbed individuals a number of times. We just don’t call them disturbed, we call them celebrities.”

The saga of Stewart Hoag continues with The Man Who Loved Women to Death, an outstanding entry in the series, in my opinion. The usual template for a Stewart Hoag story is for him to take a job ghost-writing a memoir for some fictional celebrity. Then a murder happens, and he helps the police solve it, with the assistance of his cartoon-worthy basset hound, Lulu.

But this one is different. He gets a letter from an unknown (and anonymous) writer, asking him to take a look at the first chapter of his murder novel-in-progress. Hoagy is impressed with the promise of the work – but his reaction turns to horror when a young woman is found murdered the next day – killed in exactly the same manner, and with exactly the name, as in the story.

What makes it worse is that certain hints in the manuscript – including the typewriter used, a familiar one to Hoagy – point to the writer being an old friend of his. Tuttle Cash was once a famous athlete, an Ivy League hero who qualified for the major leagues. Now he’s a drug-addicted empty suit, greeting customers at a bar named after him (but not owned by him). With years and failure he has grown bitter and very mean. Nevertheless, Hoagy can’t bring himself to name him to the police, because Tuttle saved his life once.

Author David Handler performs a very nice trick with his Stewart Hoag books. On the surface they’re light mysteries, starring a supercilious modern gentleman hero with a fedora full of opinions on fashion, food, music, and entertainment. Supported by a too-cute doggie companion.

But underneath all that, we discover perceptive stories about very human, very flawed characters, described with considerable sympathy. I was particularly moved in this book by one of them, a beautiful, fragile, abused woman who broke my heart. But there are lots of others.

Recommended. Cautions, as usual, for language and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Corpse Road,’ by David J. Gatward

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There are three books so far in David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm police detective series. Corpse Road is the most recent. In this book we see Harry, battle-scarred former paratrooper and current Yorkshire police detective, come up against a world he knows nothing about – online culture.

When a woman, celebrating her divorce by camping on the Wensleydale moors, is found stabbed to death, the obvious suspect is her ex-husband. But the man suddenly disappears, and gradually Harry’s team begins to realize they’re dealing with a serial killer. Not the sort of thing they’re used to in Wensleydale. And when one of their own team disappears, it will be a race against time.

I am very much enjoying this series – the characters are interesting and amusing (the author makes excellent use of a puppy as a social lubricant here), and the setting is beautiful and well-described. However, this is the second book in a row in this series in which I’ve figured out whodunnit before I was supposed to. What’s worse, I figured it out based on a point of online culture of which I, an old fart, was aware while (apparently) Harry’s young team members were not.

So, recommended for entertainment, with points deducted for plotting.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Light from Distant Stars,’ by Shawn Smucker

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“Fathers and sons, I don’t think they ever know how to be with one another. My own dad is over there in that room, dying, maybe dead by now, and for the last week I couldn’t even figure out what I’d say to him if he came back for one minute. It’s been a long time since we’ve known how to speak to each other. We never fought, or rarely anyway, not like your dad and grandpa, but . . . I don’t know, I wonder if fathers and sons ever know how to be to each other.”

If you like Christian urban fantasy, and good writing, you don’t have a lot of options out there (aside from some of my own books, of course). But I can highly recommend Shawn Smucker’s’ Light from Distant Stars.

Cohen Marah (whose name, unusual for a Christian, is Hebrew for “priest bitter”) is a haunted man, literally in some respects. Long ago, his father was the pastor of a thriving evangelical church. But a moral failing and scandal lost him that post, as well as his wife and daughter, so that he was left alone with Cohen. That was the end of Cohen’s happiness in life, not least because he himself contributed to the tragedy. They left their idyllic small town for Philadelphia, where his father became an undertaker and they lived in an apartment over the mortuary. His father sank into alcoholism, Cohen into depression.

When Cohen finds his father on the mortuary floor one morning in a pool of blood, he fears he’ll be blamed for killing him, as they were overheard arguing the night before. When he learns that his father is not yet dead, but dying in a hospital, and that the accident is being investigated by a detective who happens to be a girl who was his youthful friend, he’s wracked with guilt. Through flashbacks and his confessions to his Episcopal priest, we learn the story of his past, his sins, his resentments, and his shame. Including the time he went questing with ghosts and killed a man.

Light from Distant Stars is a rococo book, fecund with detail that animates the narrative. It’s moving and lovely. (Though I’m unsure how to understand the fantasy subplot.) It’s a book I’d have been proud to write myself. I look forward to more superior work from Shawn Smucker.

Cautions for mature content.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Best Served Cold,’ by David J. Gatward

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Book Two in David J. Gatward’s Harry Grimm series is Best Served Cold, a story which (as I’m sure you’ve guessed, because you’re smart) is about revenge.

Harry Grimm, scar-faced former police detective from Bristol, is settling in (at least tentatively) in his “temporary” secondment in Wensleydale, Yorkshire. It’s beautiful country, where the people are genuine and honest, the air is fresh, and Harry – in spite of himself – is beginning to enjoy himself. Except for the inexplicable local mania for eating fruitcake with cheese.

When a foul-natured and unpopular local farmer is found crushed under the wheels of one of his own wagons, it looks like an accident at first. But investigators quickly realize that the set-up is impossible. This was murder, and of a cruel sort. Not long after, another farmer – one of the first victim’s few friends – is found drowned to death in a slurry pit. Eagle feathers are discovered in the mouths of each.

The fact that nobody misses the victims much doesn’t mean the police can relax. There has to be some incident in the past that accounts for such terrible revenge. Harry hunts through the records and talks to old schoolmates of the victims, gradually piecing together the story of a horrible cruelty long forgotten by most.

I am enjoying these books for their setting, characters, and mood. I have to admit, though, that I figured out whodunnit before I was supposed to. Fairly obvious, I thought. Maybe I’m just really smart, but I think author Gatward needs to work on his plotting.

Still, recommended. Only minor cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Grimm UP North,’ by David J. Gatward

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‘It’s a secondment. Think of it like an exchange programme if you want. We’re sending you there in exchange for, well, for you not being here, if I’m honest.’

A new English police series with a fairly original hero. I’m up for that.

Harry Grimm, the hero of Grimm Up North, looks kind of like Frankenstein’s monster, due to scarring from an IUD explosion during his service as a paratrooper. Now he’s a detective in Bristol. He’s pretty good at it too (his face actually helps), but his superiors don’t like him, partly because of his hostile attitude, and most particularly because he never lets up on his personal search for the man who killed his mother and destroyed his family – his own father.

So his boss sends him off on a “temporary” secondment to Wensleydale in Yorkshire, an area made famous by All Creatures Great and Small. It’s a whole other world – clean air, friendly people, tiny towns, an agricultural economic base. Not much crime, to be honest, and certainly very little serious crime.

Except that the very day Harry shows up, a young girl goes missing. And not long after, a murdered body is found beside a lake.

It would be ridiculous to blame this sudden crime wave on Harry, but that doesn’t stop his Yorkshire superior from doing just that. His learning curve will be steep, but in the end he’ll unmask the killer and save a couple lives.

Grimm Up North was an enjoyable fish-out-of-water mystery. The writing was good and the characters were amusing. Cautions for the usual.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl Who Ran Off with Daddy,’ by David Handler

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Think of the big Woody Allen/Soon Yi Previn scandal, where a famous man marries his stepdaughter. Now, instead of Woody Allen, imagine the guy is a legendary macho writer, a cross between Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway. And imagine the wife he abandoned was a famous feminist.

That’s the extreme situation David Handler sets up in The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy, yet another Stewart Hoag mystery. Needless to say, this one involves some pretty cringe-inducing situations – though I think it’s fair for me to tell you the worst parts do get mitigated in the end.

When Hoagy was a young writer, Thor Gibbs was his mentor and inspiration. So when Thor asks him to ghost-write his stepdaughter/girlfriend’s autobiography, giving her side of the story, he doesn’t feel he can say no – creepy though it feels. Hoagy is mostly retired now, living in Connecticut with his ex-wife/current partner, Merilee, and their baby daughter Tracy. His life is fairly idyllic, and he’s not really over the moon about having their farm invaded by an aging Peter Pan with a death wish on a motorcycle, and his seductive 18-year-old lover. Thor Gibbs hates normal living, and none of that is in prospect – until murder occurs.

There’s lots of stuff going on beneath the surface in The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy, and some of it’s actually pretty positive. Especially a subplot involving Hoagy’s father. So if you can get through the initial creeps, you may be glad you read it.

Cautions for language and immature subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blind Vigil,’ by Matt coyle

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Once again, even in the violent whirlwind of my life, I was reminded there was still goodness in the world. Strangers willing to help the injured, the helpless, and the innocent. There’d been times in my life when I’d been all three. Even innocent.

There’s a new installment in Matt Coyle’s hard-boiled Rick Cahill series. I’ve reviewed the previous books about this San Diego private eye, a former cop suspected of his wife’s murder. In previous books he has cleared the memory of his father, unjustly suspended from the police force for corruption, and identified his wife’s real killer. My main complaint with the earlier books was that some were excessively dark, but light has broken in increasingly as the series went on – even now in Blind Vigil, when – ironically – the hero has gone blind, due to a bullet wound at the end of the last book.

It’s been nine months since then, and Rick is well along in his recovery, assisted by his girlfriend Leah and his Black Lab, Midnight. He believes his sight is starting to return, but his doctor thinks it’s only a common illusion, similar to phantom limb syndrome in amputees. But Rick is well enough now to feel the need of some activity.

That need is answered by his former PI partner, Moira MacFarlane, who wants his help with a case. She’s been hired by Rick’s estranged best friend, Turk Muldoon, to surveille his girlfriend, whom he suspects of cheating on him. She’d like Rick to sit in as she meets with Turk, to see if he can tell from his voice whether he’s withholding information. After that, she persuades Rick to keep her company as she watches the girlfriend’s apartment. Next thing they know, the girlfriend has been murdered, and Turk has been arrested. Moira thinks Turk is guilty and washes her hands of him, leaving Rick to investigate the case on his own, without eyesight, backup, or a license.

The idea of the blind detective has been tried before, and I never really bought it. I always felt the author had to stack the deck to provide the specialized circumstances in which a blind detective could triumph. I liked this story better than those others. I thought author Coyle did a pretty good job of keeping the tension high without straining the reader’s credibility too much (at least not more than other detective stories, where heroes routinely survive by the skin of their teeth). What I liked best was that Blind Vigil continues the series’ ongoing story arc, in which an embittered, lonely man gradually reintegrates with humanity.

Cautions for what you’d expect. Recommended, like the whole series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Cancelled HImself,’ by David Handler

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I did believe that. Of course, you must remember that TV and movie people almost always mistake their business friends for real friends. This is partly because they want to believe that everyone they deal with truly loves them. And partly because they have no real friends.

David Handler, author of the Stewart Hoag mysteries, spent some time as a TV sitcom writer. He mines that vein of experience for background material for his mystery, The Man Who Cancelled Himself, in which we once again follow “Hoagy” Hoag, celebrity memoir ghost writer, and his scene-stealing basset hound, Lulu.

The first few Stewart Hoag books seemed to be heavily disguised portraits of actual characters, but as they go on, the author is spreading his net wider. The main character here, Lyle Hednut, is a lot like John Belushi, with some Rosanne Barr and Pee Wee Herman thrown in. He started in improv comedy, and worked his way up to having his own sitcom, playing “Uncle Chubby,” a sort of degenerate Mr. Rogers. The show was leading the ratings until Lyle got arrested under embarrassing circumstances in an adult theater. Now there’s pressure to cancel the show, and the network wants Hoagie to write a book that will give Lyle’s side of things. In order to fit in, he’s added to the series writing staff.

One of the first things Hoagy learns is that Lyle Hudnut is only marginally human. Big, overdramatic, Gargantuan, mercurial, he is a genuine narcissist with manic mood swings, who jumps from woman to woman and terrorizes his co-workers. He tells Hoagy a horrific story of childhood abuse, but Hoagy begins to suspect he’s left important points out. And when someone begins to sabotage the production, real danger presents itself.

This was one of my favorite books in this series, mainly because author Handler does something I never expected – he offers us a pair of characters, husband and wife, who are ordinary middle-class elderly Americans. They are neither well-educated nor stylish. Nevertheless, they are handled with genuine empathy and respect. The character of Hoagy Hoag generally presents himself as something of a snob, a latter-day Lord Peter or Philo Vance. But this was a nice scene. As a middle American, I appreciated it.

There was also an important development in Hoagy’s own life in this story. I was mostly in favor of it, but I thought our hero had been rather badly used. You can judge for yourself.

Pretty good stuff. Cautions for language and some gross mature content.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up,’ by David Handler

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I know how to handle stars. The lunch pail ghosts don’t. They treat them like rational, intelligent human beings. I know better.

The adventures of David Handler’s celebrity ghost writer sleuth, Stewart “Hoagy” Hoag (and his excessively anthropomorphic basset hound, Lulu) continue with The Boy Who Never Grew Up.

In most of these books, you can kind of guess who the central “celebrity” is supposed to be – they’re generally based on one or two real-world characters. In the case of The Boy Who Never Grew Up, it’s harder to tell. Author Handler seems to have several Hollywood characters in mind – a bit of Michael Jackson, a bit of Walt Disney, a bit of Steven Spielberg. And the studio depicted doesn’t really resemble anything that exists in our world anymore.

Matthew Wax is (or has been) the biggest producer in Hollywood. A kind of filmmaker-savant, he has made the most popular films in history, and built his own studio, devoted to turning out wholesome, heartwarming fare portraying an idealized American life. He is, however, essentially a big child. He avoids the real world, and even lives on the set where his most successful, family-oriented movies were filmed. With his mother close at hand, keeping a watch on him.

He was married, to Pennyroyal Brim, the actress he discovered to play the cheerleader girlfriend in his movies. But she is divorcing him now, taking their child with her, and through her shark lawyer she is accusing him of various cruelties and perversions. She’s even writing a book about it. So Matthew’s people bring Hoagy in, to write a book from Matthew’s own point of view.

The celebrity subjects Hoagy has dealt with up to now have generally fit the stereotypes – arrogant, thin-skinned, narcissistic. Matthew is rather different. He really is just a nice kid who had a rough childhood and grew up maladjusted. Hoagy not only becomes his friend (how can you resist a guy who owns the car from “Route 66” and lends it to you?), but he works up the personal concern to help Matthew move out of his comfort zone a little.

The whole thing could be kind of heartwarming, like a Michael Wax movie, if there weren’t a murderer lurking around, and if we didn’t get a very shocking revelation of that murderer’s motives in the end.

Also there’s a big twist in Hoagy’s own life, almost as shocking in its own way.

I’d call The Boy Who Never Grew Up one of the better entries in this entertaining series. Moderate cautions for adult language and themes.