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Goofing, Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Best. State. Ever.’ by Dave Barry

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When you enter Gatorland, the first wildlife you see is—Spoiler Alert—alligators. A buttload of alligators, dozens and dozens of them on wooden platforms surrounded by water. They are sprawled haphazardly, often on top of each other, as if they’re having a wild reptile orgy, except that they are not moving. Some of them look like they have not moved since the Reagan administration. It’s like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but with alligators.

I spent 11 years of my own life in Florida, so I feel a certain ownership in the place. Thus I share with Dave Barry the slight pang that comes when I read yet another story about “Florida Man,” the archetypal doofus who does something magnificently stupid and self-destructive in the sun. In his book, Best. State. Ever., Barry provides both an apologia for, and an appreciation of, the state where he’s made his home. And, oh yes, it’s also very funny.

Most of the “Florida Men” you read about, Barry notes, actually come from someplace else, and it’s Florida’s misfortune that having water on three sides makes it difficult for them to find their way out. But that doesn’t alter the fact that strange things do go on in Florida. He proceeds to provide “A Brief History of Florida” and then to report on personal visits to a series of tourist sites that I, though I lived there a while, never got around to myself:

  • The Skunk Ape [Research Center]
  • Weeki Wachee and Spongeorama
  • Cassadaga
  • The Villages
  • Gatorland
  • Lock & Load Miami
  • LIV (a Miami nightclub that was hot at the time), and
  • Key West.

The book is, as mentioned, very funny, featuring Barry’s signature style of strategic exaggeration. It might have been funnier if it were crueler, but Barry seems to genuinely like the people he meets, and he has no intention of humiliating them.

The most striking part of the book, for this reader, was the description of The Villages, a group of large, planned communities for the elderly. All the houses look alike, and all the people seem to be alike too – they live for golf and early bird specials, and they dance – a lot – like nobody’s watching. It almost comes out sounding like a pleasant gulag, where dying people go to deny their mortality.

Kind of the perfect finale for Baby Boomers, when you think about it.

Best. State. Ever. is a very funny book. Cautions for language, drugs and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

What Would You Do If You Could Become Invisible?

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Heist movies have many examples of criminals slipping into a crowd and becoming essentially invisible. Either there are too many similarly looking people to spot the ones the cops want or there are too many people period. Without an identifier of some kind, the criminals have gotten away without consequences, at least for the moment.

In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a gifted chemist works out his theory for making things invisible. Recklessly, he applies his experiment to his own body and becomes an inhuman and invisible man.

His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.

“Measure for Measure” Act 2, scene 2

When the invisible man tells his own story, you see his arrogance runs deep. He attempts to live without any social obligations, taking food or clothing for himself without payment, assuming these things would simply disappear like he has. He quickly learns it won’t work that way, because he isn’t an incorporeal ghost; he’s a naked man that no one can see. If he weren’t such a hot-tempered fool, he might have worked more methodically and converted a set of clothes into invisibility before converting himself.

After a few months of experimental living as an invisible man, the chemist wants to terrorize people. He wants to pursue his scientific interests without having to earn anyone’s favor or deal with normal social pressures. He probably blames his father, his old boss, and all of his research colleagues for his jaded view of the world, but I think Wells may intend these people to represent everyone. There are no contrasting noble characters in this story. Even the chemist’s closest friend may have been just as self-seeking as everyone else.

Wells provokes readers to ask what anyone would do if he or she could be invisible, or to put it another way, what would you do if there were no consequences to pay? Would you plagiarize? Steal someone’s research? Slander someone’s character to get rid of them?

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortuitous Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I continue to follow Dennis Carstens’ Minneapolis-located Marc Kadella series of legal mysteries. I also continue a kind of love/hate relationship with the books. The writing doesn’t impress me a lot, but the storytelling is good, and I generally like the characters.

Marc Kadella, as you may recall, is a Minneapolis attorney. He is now engaged to Maddy Rivers, the uber-hot private detective. In Fortuitous Justice, we pick up several plot threads, which had appeared to be tied up, from the previous book, Twisted Justice. That book involved a group of former Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders who’d formed a prostitution ring, and who found themselves way out of their depth when they became a security risk to some of the richest – and most ruthless – movers and shakers in Minnesota politics (which means, in case you’re not familiar with my state, Democrats. It’s not stated in so many words in the book, but that’s the way it is).

At the end of Twisted Justice, Burt Chayson, a local political fixer who knew too much, was reported dead, an apparent suicide. But now the police say murder, and they have their eyes on one of the Housewife Hookers, Hope Slade, the last person seen with him. Hope had enough on her plate already with prostitution charges and public humiliation. Her husband has left her. Now she’s facing Murder One. She goes to Marc Kadella for defense.

The investigation will be complicated, really scary hired guns will come to town to shut people’s mouths, and the final resolution will be a surprise.

As a mystery, I thought Fortuitous Justice was pretty good. I was annoyed by too many typos (a common problem these days, alas), and by Carstens’ habit of inserting paragraph breaks at unexpected places in the midst of chunks of dialogue, leaving the reader wondering who’s talking now.

I was also peeved when one unpleasant character was identified as a member of the “far right religious bunch.” That peeve turned to utter confusion as the character was later identified as a Democrat. (Insert image of Leonard Nimoy here, with one eyebrow cocked: “Highly illogical.”) Honestly, I think the author just lost track.

Not a great book, Fortuitous Justice was entertaining and fun. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Those Who Remain,’ by Chris Culver

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Good writing. Fully rounded characters. Love, pathos, and moral horror. Chris Culver’s Those Who Remain is a fascinating and disturbing book. I can’t say I loved it, because it left me troubled. But it’s darn good.

Homer Watson is a sheriff’s detective in St. Louis County, Missouri. He’s a family man, and happy in his life. But there are pressures. One of his small sons is autistic, and doing poorly in school. He and his wife would love to put the boy in a special school, but their salaries just won’t stretch that far.

One day he’s called to the site of a possible suicide. He recognizes the victim. It’s Hailey Bowman, a young woman who killed a policeman a year ago. She claimed he’d tried to rape her and was found not guilty. There are a lot of cops who’d have liked to see her dead.

But Homer’s a straight arrow. When the death proves to be murder, he looks to his fellow cops for suspects. That doesn’t pan out, but he gets a tip that Hailey has been living as the kept girlfriend of her defense lawyer, a man Homer has personal reasons to despise.

And when Homer gets an offer of a good-paying job from someone he cleared as a suspect, and he accepts it for his son’s sake, all his colleagues suspect the worst about him.

But the reader knows from the very beginning that Homer’s on the wrong track. The person really responsible is Pilar Garcia, a loving grandmother. Pilar runs an ostensibly legitimate cleaning business, but her main work force is composed of illegal aliens. She brings these people in and pays them below minimum wage to maximize profits. On the other hand, she makes sure they’re well fed, healthy, and housed, and helps them get established once their indentures are over. She is full of good will, and cares about her family above all things. She cares so much for her family that she’s willing to kill innocent outsiders to protect them – or to keep them in line.

Pilar is a masterfully painted portrait of how even a human’s best natural instincts can lead to appalling evil. I don’t know what the author intended, but one can’t help thinking of the doctrine of Original Sin.

Those Who Remain was well-written, compelling, and horrifying. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to read the next Homer Watson book. But I can recommend this one highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Hunting Rabbits, by Mark Gilleo

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Here in the Midwest (which is actually the North Central US, but why be pedantic?), when we encounter something that’s unlike anything we’ve seen before, but still doesn’t impress us much, we damn it with faint praise by saying, “Well, that’s different.”

I’d describe Mark Gilleo’s Hunting Rabbits as “different.” I can honestly say I haven’t ever read anything quite like it before.

Charlie Gates is chief of police in Williamsburg, Virginia, home of Colonial Williamsburg. One day there’s a holdup at a local drug store, and the culprit is thwarted, getting his arm broken by a bystander who knows how to handle himself. The bystander then disappears.

The next part of the story confused me a little. Williamsburg isn’t a big town, as far as I know. But the police resources that are now devoted to this non-lethal crime struck me as implausible in any police department these days. Charlie is even able to secure the assistance of a big-city homicide detective, Luis “Quags” Millares, who becomes his trusty right-hand man.

Studying surveillance camera footage, they learn that the crime-stopping bystander soon left the area on a bus, along with a couple other drug store customers. A little inquiry reveals that this bus is one of a private fleet whose sole purpose is to transport CIA trainees to and from “The Farm,” the nearby, high-security federal training facility.

Even more intriguing, a fingerprint on the robber’s gun, touched by the crime-stopper, matches a print from the scene of an old murder – that of Charlie’s own sister, one of the victims of a still-unidentified serial killer decades ago.

What confronts them then is what I’d describe as a “black box” investigation. Because of security regulations, the cops find themselves unable to interrogate either their suspect or any witnesses. What they end up doing is to present various threats of bad publicity to the Farm authorities, and then watch as they themselves clean up their own mess — not always getting it right, either.

I found the story unsatisfactory in several ways. The decisive stuff in the narrative happens mostly offstage. Our heroes are just spectators, sometimes unsatisfied spectators.

Also I thought the characterization was clumsy, especially at the beginning, where characters commit the common literary sin of telling people too much at their first meetings. And there were some homophone spelling problems.

The book wasn’t bad, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Peak,’ by Adam J. Wright

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A good psychological thriller can be great entertainment, if the psychology is plausible. How does Dark Peak, by Adam J. Wright, stack up?

Mitch Walker is an English landscaper, a hard-working divorced father. Thirty years ago, his sister was abducted and murdered by a serial killer in Derbyshire, where his family lived at the time. His mother was so traumatized that she took him and fled away, and he never had contact with his father again.

Now he receives notice that his father has died, leaving him the Gothic-style mansion where they lived at the time, plus a fortune. Mitch doesn’t mind the money, but he doesn’t look forward to going back to the mansion. He still has nightmares about the place.

Elly Cooper is also divorced. She’s a former journalist who wrote a bestselling book about a serial killer and has been living off the royalties for some time. But book sales have fallen off, and her agent offers her a deal to do a new book, about a series of unsolved murders in Derbyshire, one of which is the murder of Mitch’s sister.

They will arrive around the same time, and their arrival will stir up old memories and old evil. It soon becomes apparent that the murders have not stopped – and someone in Mitch’s own family may be responsible.

The great weakness in Dark Peak was characterization – which ought to be the first thing you need to get right in a book of this type. If you don’t understand your own characters, how are we to believe you about psychopaths? The characters in Dark Peak commit the common fictional character error of keeping secrets from the police for reasons that advance the plot but seem unnatural in the real world. They also tell each other too much – real people rarely spill their guts to each other like these people do. It provides an excuse for information dumps, but again it rings hollow.

Also, for this reader, the murderer’s motivation, when finally revealed, didn’t seem very plausible.

The book is free for Kindle as of this review, so you might want to check it out, but I was rather disappointed. Cautions for disturbing content.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Twisted Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I liked the first Marc Kadella novel that I read, Cult Justice (by Dennis Carstens), even though there were some problems with the prose, because it had solidly conservative content and the story was pretty good. Reminiscent of a John Sandford book, but with a legal setting. The second one, Maddy’s Justice, I liked less, because it was all You-Go-Girl feminism (as I perceived it). So I figured I’d give Kadella one more shot with Twisted Justice. I have to say, he knocked it out of the park. For this reader.

Minneapolis lawyer Marc Kadella, along with his impossibly hot girlfriend, Maddy Rivers, attends a Christmas season party in a box at U.S. Bank Stadium. They were invited by Parker Crane, a friend who’s done well in financial services. During the party, Parker asks Marc about what a divorce would cost him, as his marriage is on the rocks. When he hears the answer, Parker comments that he’d be better off killing her. Then he takes it back.

Not long after, Parker’s wife Diana is stabbed to death in the parking garage of her lover’s apartment building. When the police check Parker’s cell phone records, they put him in that exact spot at the time of the murder.

Parker maintains that his phone was stolen, and he’s being framed. He retains Marc to defend him. As a defense attorney, Marc, of course, has no need to prove Parker innocent. He just needs to raise reasonable doubt. His obvious tactic is to construct a SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) defense.

To do this, he looks into Diana’s personal history – and finds a wealth of alternative murderers. Because it turns out Diana, a former Minnesota Vikings cheerleader, had a nice little side gig going as a high-end call girl. And some of her clients were among the most powerful men in Minnesota, men with plenty of things to hide…

This book was a little more courtroom-centric than the previous book, with fewer shootouts and gunfights. That was fine with me. The courtroom scenes seemed authentic, and thus educational. As usual with this series, I found the character banter amusing, but not convincing. The problem with misplaced modifiers in the text, so evident in Cult Justice, was not noticeable here. I did note one badly cast sentence that should have been re-written, but in general the writing was okay. The final “surprise twist” didn’t surprise me, but was dramatically appropriate.

What I really loved about Twisted Justice was that it poked a well-deserved finger in the eye of the Minnesota power structure. That was genuinely sweet.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bright Orange for the Shroud,’ by John D. MacDonald

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After the minimum waiting time, they were married late one afternoon at the court house, and left in a new white Pontiac convertible, the back seat stacked with her matched luggage, her smile as brilliant as a brand new vermin trap ordered from Herter’s catalogue.

Whenever I see a deal on one of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books in e-book form, I grab it. So it was with Bright Orange for the Shroud, a fairly early – but memorable – entry in the series. If I remember correctly, now and then in later books, when he’s recalling his personal nightmares, McGee mentions Boo Waxwell.

Travis McGee isn’t a private eye. He calls himself a salvage specialist. When people are robbed of large amounts of money or valuable possessions, he goes and gets them back, then keeps half the value. This enables him to live his chosen lifestyle – “taking his retirement in installments.”

He plans to make this particular summer one of his lazy ones. He’ll do some maintenance on his big houseboat, the Busted Flush, cruise a bit, do some fishing. He’s earned a rest.

Until Arthur Wilkinson shows up on the dock, incoherent and emaciated. Arthur was part of their beachside community for a while, a low-key, diffident man who’d made money in the family business. Then he met tiny, gorgeous Wilma Ferrer, married her, and moved away.

But it turned out Wilma was a con woman. With her little group of confidence friends, she picked Arthur clean. Money wasn’t enough for her, though. Together with the muscle of the group, big Boo Maxwell, she made sure Arthur had been destroyed as a man.

McGee can help people recover stuff, but recovering a lost soul is outside his skill set. So he goes to Chookie McCall, a professional dancer who dated Arthur for a while, before hooking up with a wrong guy, now in prison. Though she’s reluctant at first, one look at Arthur arouses all Chookie’s maternal instincts.

McGee comes up with a plan to con the cons and get some of Arthur’s money back. It’s a good plan. His mistake is underestimating Boo Waxwell as an opponent. Though he comes off as an ignorant, overgrown cracker, Boo is no fool at all. Someone suggests that Boo is McGee’s alter ego, what he might have been if something had been missing in his make-up. (In many ways, Boo anticipates Max Cady, the brutal villain of MacDonald’s novel The Executioners, which was filmed twice under the title, Cape Fear.)

There’s not a wasted line in this book. It’s tough and hard-boiled and tender and sympathetic. There’s a lot of sexual content. Some of it reads really great from my traditional, sexist point of view, and some of it reflects the mores of the sexual revolution and hasn’t aged well.

The plot includes, in my opinion, one too many lucky breaks for the good guys. But all in all, Bright Orange for the Shroud works splendidly. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder on “B” Deck,’ by Vincent Starrett

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The name Vincent Starrett was familiar to me. He was a well-known writer of the Golden Age of Mystery, but is best known for his book, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which I read long ago and enjoyed. (I believe he was the one who suggested that Nero Wolfe was Holmes’ son by Irene Adler.)

So, in my ongoing effort to find more classic mystery writers to read, as a break from the Woke Age of Mystery, I bought Murder on “B” Deck, first in Starrett’s series of three 1920s novels starring amateur detective Walter Ghost.

We meet Ghost first through the eyes of his friend Dunstan Mollock, a mystery writer. Dunstan is on board a steam ship about to embark for France, to see his sister and her husband off on their honeymoon. Dunstan is delighted to find his friend Walter Ghost on the ship, also headed for Europe. Walter is described as a tall, ugly, amiable man who is a former Army intelligence agent, a scientist, and an explorer. And somehow he has acquired a reputation as a solver of mysteries.

Dunstan, through a boneheaded mistake, finds himself stuck on board after embarkation, and decides to just buy a ticket make the trip. Not long after, one of the passengers, a beautiful woman who calls herself the Countess Fogartini, is murdered in her stateroom. Shortly thereafter another passenger, a young English nobleman, is lost overboard under suspicious circumstances.

So the captain asks Walter Ghost to investigate. Ghost starts cautiously interrogating the other passengers. I’d like to tell you the drama builds and the tension grows excruciating – but that’s not what happens. The whole thing proceeds at a pretty leisurely pace.

I suppose my tastes have been coarsened by modern fiction, but I found Murder on “B” Deck slow, and the prose flabby. Also the culprit’s behavior, when he is at last unmasked, struck me as more suitable for melodrama than the real world. Ideas of social class that just don’t fly anymore were also on display.

If you’re looking for a low key book that won’t offend you (much), you might enjoy Murder on “B” Deck as a change of pace. But I can’t really praise it much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Maddy’s Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I reviewed Dennis Carstens’ legal thriller Cult Justice a little while back. I didn’t think the writing was the best, but the characters and dialogue were interesting. Also, the book had a genuinely conservative theme.

So I bought the next book, Maddy’s Justice. And now I’m kind of confused. There was no visible conservatism in this story, except for a hatred of pure evil that pretty much anyone could share. The name change of Minneapolis’ former Lake Calhoun to the unpronounceable Bde Maka Ska is mentioned with unreserved approval. And the plot here is right out of the feminist playbook, aside from some of the jokes.

Attorney Marc Kadella and his boss, Connie, are retained to defend some real scumbags from a sexual harassment complaint. Marc and Connie are used to defending dirtballs, but these guys are worse than they appear. They’re a high-powered, politically juiced law firm with astoundingly predatory policies toward their female employees. It’s generally understood that promotion depends on delivering sexual favors, and even so, few women last long with the firm.

But that’s just on the surface. They are closely connected to an operation in the Caribbean that’s reminiscent of Epstein Island.

But wait, it gets worse…

In order to prepare his defense, Marc has to investigate his own clients, because he knows the plaintiffs’ lawyers will do that, and his clients aren’t cooperative. He turns his private eye friend Tony Carvelli, and his partner Maddy Rivers (who is Marc’s fiancée) loose on them. And the closer they look, the uglier it gets. And the more danger they’re in.

I had a couple problems with this book. The first is that Maddy is a genuine Mary Sue, a woman so beautiful, we’re told, that she once posed for Playboy, but also so lethal that she chews hulking thugs up and spits them out.

Also, the law office banter (similar to, though not quite at the level of, John Sandford’s cop banter) struck me as unrealistic. I say this having no actual experience of law office banter. But I have trouble believing that men and women working together in the business world today make easy jokes about sex with one another and take it lightly. I suspect that a large number of female employees are constantly on the hunt for microaggressions. And the men walk on eggshells.

The author’s besetting sin of misplaced metaphors was less on display in this book than in the last one (though it did show up), but comma placement was almost random all through the text.

So I didn’t like Maddy’s Justice as much as I liked Cult Justice. I don’t know if I’m going to go on with the series or not. But they’re one and one with me, so maybe I’ll give them one more chance.

Cautions for language, adult situations, and some really, really disturbing themes involving violence against children.