Sometimes a novel can be fairly ordinary in itself, but will reveal intriguing possibilities. That was my reaction to Lines of Duty, by Mark Hazard, first installment in the Deputy Corus series.
“Corus” is the only name of the main character; he has no first name (This is the second book I’ve read recently with a one-name character. Can you even do that in the modern world?). His personal background is mysterious, but the book begins with his last day on Special Forces duty in Afghanistan. He is a brave and decorated soldier. Shortly after his return to the States, he and his wife establish themselves in Seattle, where he has enrolled in a special, elite police training program.
Corus is the best shot in his class. Another classmate, Albert Chu, is the best academically. They fall into an odd, symbiotic friendship as they deal with the considerable pressures of the program. One day, while they are doing grunt work with unclaimed evidence, Corus discovers some diamonds that were never reclaimed by their owner. That, along with other strange points about the evidence, leads him and Chu to poke into the old case. This will have them investigating rodeo people, drug dealers, and an eccentric old lady with an amazing heart.
The author, Mark Hazard, is – judging by this book – good at characterization, but middling on dialogue. His characters sometimes talk like books. But I still liked the characters, and there’s an attitude of positivity here that I can’t help liking. I’m reading the second book now.
I’ve become a fan of Harlan Coben’s novels, especially since he moved out of sports-based mysteries to more domestic stories, in which responsible husbands and fathers go to extraordinary lengths to rescue family members.
The hero of The Boy from the Woods is a man known only as Wilde. Wilde comes equipped with a fairly implausible back story. As a boy, he was found living in the New Jersey woods, apparently a feral child – although he could speak and read English. No family ever stepped forward to claim him. He entered the military, and then briefly became a private investigator. He still lives in the woods.
The closest thing he has to a family is that of Hester Crimstein (a continuing character who often shows up in Corben’s novels), a tiny but relentless celebrity criminal lawyer. He was particularly close to her youngest son, who died in an auto accident. Now he’s kind of a mentor to her grandson Matthew, who’s in high school.
One day Matthew contacts Wilde and asks for his help. A girl in his class, Naomi Pine, has disappeared. Naomi had been the victim of universal bullying in their school. Matthew is concerned she may have done herself harm.
Wilde’s investigation will lead to unexpected connections with the campaign of a popular presidential candidate, one whom Hester dislikes and fears. This man (a sort of cross between Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh, by way of Nietzsche and Mussolini) has secrets he will go to any length to cover up. However, even when the truth comes out at great cost, it will prove to be not quite the truth.
The Boy from the Woods kept my interest all the way through. However, some aspects of the story never worked for me. The “feral child” thing struck me as unlikely. (From what I’ve read, such children have been found from time to time in the real world, but they were pitiful physical specimens, nothing like the hunk Wilde has grown into). The mystery of his origins is clearly meant to be an ongoing thread in future books (this is obviously the beginning of a series), but it didn’t convince me.
Also – for no reason I can think of, except to score points with feminists – a group of security people consisting entirely of women (except for one transgender) is introduced. And when Wilde merely hints that their boss (a friend of his) might want to find a less dangerous job, since she’s the mother of four small kids, he gets shot down hard for sexism.
Also, the resolution of the story is unsatisfying in multiple ways.
So my final verdict is that The Boy from the Woods is an interesting, engaging (though ultimately frustrating) story, I don’t think I’ll follow the series any further.
He asked whether language was returning, and I said yes but slowly. Seeing my frustration, he said if a person were to lose any grammar then let it be adjectives. You could get by minus adjectives. In fact you appeared more decisive without them. He asked politely after my nouns, which were mostly intact, then declared with sudden intensity it was verbs you must truly not lose. Without verbs nothing gets done.
With the great novelists, like Leif Enger and me, you sometimes have to wait a while between books. In the case of Enger’s latest, Virgil Wander, it’s been ten years. It’s tempting to compare it to his previous novels, Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young and Handsome, but this one’s so eccentric that seems kind of pointless. It’s pretty wonderful, though.
Virgil Wander, the titular narrator, owns a crumbling movie theater in the moribund town of Greenstone, Minnesota. Once it was a mining town, but that ended long ago and nothing has replaced it.
Virgil is recovering from injuries sustained when he went over a cliff and into Lake Superior in his car. He was rescued by a chance passerby, and is now dealing with minor, probably temporary, brain damage. This damage has changed some of his behavior, not always negatively.
Realizing he needs someone to prevent him absentmindedly burning down his home, he looks around for a roommate (he’s a bachelor). He invites a new acquaintance, Rune Eliassen, a visitor from Norway, to move in with him. Rune came to town to learn about his son, a local sports hero, whose existence he had never guessed until recently. Unfortunately, the son disappeared a few years back, lost flying a plane over the lake or absconded – no one knows for sure.
Rune has a remarkable gift – he makes amazing kites, which he likes to fly over the lake. The kites don’t even look like kites – shapes of dogs and houses and cars and bicycles – but they are wonderful to fly, and Virgil feels strangely alive whenever he gets the chance to fly one.
Rune’s lost son has left behind a beautiful wife (whom Virgil loves from afar) and a troubled son. Other characters include the hard-luck Pea family, whose little boy is obsessed with catching a legendary big fish. And an alcoholic handyman trying to win his wife back. The wife, however, has gotten involved with a celebrity son of the community, a one-hit auteur who shocked the world with his single movie, and now has moved back, claiming he wants to settle down and help the community. He even agrees to appear at the upcoming local festival – “Hard Luck Days” – which might just live up to its name all too well.
Meanwhile, Virgil has recurring visions of a man walking on the lake – and it’s not Jesus.
Most novels (and there’s nothing wrong with this) are experiences where you read along to find out what happens next. This book (it’s a little like Wodehouse in that way) is one where you savor each line and paragraph for its own sake, because the writing itself is a pleasure.
If we hadn’t been looking we’d never have seen it. I wondered then and still wonder what giants we miss by not looking.
Virgil Wander is a delightful book. I luxuriated in it. I recommend it highly. There’s Christian content here, by the way – but it’s parabolic, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear.
I mentioned a few days ago that I was reading a series called New Avengers, and when I began considering what I could say that would be worth reading (a barrier to entry that you might say hasn’t stopped me before) I remembered some gaping plot points. A war is started and then shrugged off. A major cosmic villain appears and is suddenly neutralized behind the scenes. What am I missing?
I am missing another entire series that fills in the story. Why isn’t there a note at the end of one issue that the story continues in another series’, because when you finish issue 6 and pick up issue 7, you tend to expect the story to pick up with you.
I’m reading the 2014 New Avengers series by Jonathan Hickman, a four volume set. This is the first cover, showing Steve Epting’s excellent artwork. Each volume has a different lead illustrator; all of them impressive. In Everything Dies, seven heroes who aren’t necessarily Avengers, if that term means something, gather as the secret rulers of the known universe, the Illuminati (which is the only name that can be given to that sort of group, even if no one ever uses it).
They meet because Black Panther witnesses a woman, calling herself a black swan, jump to our planet from another one that hung perilously above. She then detonates the first one, and swoosh, all returns to normal. She claims there’s a natural order to the multiverse (infinite parallel universes, infinite parallel realities), and while everything will eventually die, something happened on an Earth in a universe somewhere that caused it to come to an untimely end. That weakened the walls between universes apparently, because it led to two universes touching each other at their point of Earth. As you’ve likely seen in the news, when two universes reject social distancing guidelines, they eliminate each other.
When universes are eliminated, it bothers people, particularly those who wear the same form-fitting suit to work everyday.
The other Earth that the black swan dropped from was an Earth in its own universe. Soon another one will appear in the sky, and if one of the two planets is not destroyed quickly, both universes will perish. The heroes begin work on an early warning system, hoping to give themselves eight hours to save one or both universes. And then someone remembers he has an old infinity gauntlet in his car trunk, and since they have all the infinity gems already, why not try using it?
I’ve been reading Pete Brassett’s Inspector Munro mysteries for a while. I’m not sure I’m entirely on board with the new turn the series has taken, though. Our former hero, heretofore a paragon of physical fitness (mountain running was one of his favorite sports) has suddenly grown old. He’s had a heart attack and is retired – though he’s happy to assist his former subordinates on his own time.
So now the central character is Inspector “Charlie” West, a woman from London who overcame alcoholism after moving north to Scotland. She’s not a bad character, but it seems like everybody’s doing female detectives these days, and it annoys me.
Anyway, the latest book in the series, Hubris, involves a beached fishing boat which a farmer discovers on the shoreline of his property. Looking inside, he finds a man in the hold, gutted like a fish. Forensic evidence indicates the presence of drugs.
Meanwhile, that same farmer’s daughter has gone missing. Why did the family wait to alert the police?
Unsuspected connections will tie the two cases together, and old secrets will resurface to devastate lives. But the detectives are on it, and Inspector Munro will be on hand to provide guidance as well.
Hubris is a good, workmanlike police procedural, with only minimal objectionable content. The series is worth following.
“I understand you think that,” Evan said. “And your track record has given you good reason to believe that you’re scary. You’ve got the look down. The manicured tough-guy beard. The handiwork carved into your skin. But I want you to do something. Look at me. Look at me closely. And ask yourself: Do I look scared?”
First of all: I. Loved. This. Book.
You may have seen my earlier reviews of Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels. Orphan X is Evan Smoak, formerly part of a top secret, very elite group of special agents for the US government. Recruited from orphanages and given new identities, trained for stealth and secrecy and lethality, they were the ultimate deniable weapons. But Evan managed to get free of the program, and now he lives a secret life. He lives in a secure penthouse in Los Angeles, but officially does not exist. As a kind of personal penance, he rescues people from impossible problems. When a job is done, he gives each rescuee a secret phone number. They are to find one – only one – other person who needs similar help, and give them the number. But now Evan feels he’s ready to start a new chapter. His next rescue will be his last.
It will also be the toughest he’s ever faced.
Max Merriweather, the client in Into the Fire, seems like an unlikely character to be involved in anything important. He’s a broken man, living a marginal life as a manual laborer. Once he had a marriage and hopes for the future, but it all fell apart on him.
Even his own family ignores him, leaves him out of things. So he was surprised when his cousin Grant, the golden boy of the family, entrusted him with an envelope. In the event of his death, Grant said, Max is to deliver that envelope to a certain reporter.
But events have made that impossible now.
So Max slips into a café to think about his problem. And there a young man sits down across from him and says he’s noticed he’s upset. And if he is, if he has an impossible problem, he knows someone who could help. So Max calls The Number, and Evan answers.
Ever have one of those days when you do one job, and it uncovers a bigger job that also needs doing, and that one reveals an even bigger one, and so on? This case is like that, only each problem involves bigger, more powerful criminals and greater dangers. And along the way, Evan somehow suffers a concussion, and so has to operate in such a way as not to hit his head again. Sleep would help, if he had any time for sleep.
Other readers may not respond to Into the Fire the way I did. This book seemed calculated to push all my personal buttons and elicit profoundly personal responses. I was terrified at some points, and my spirit soared at others. This book isn’t just about uncovering crime, it’s about people overcoming trauma, moving out of their comfort zones, and opening their hearts to risk-taking.
I give Into the Fire my highest recommendation. You should be aware of obscene language and intense, violent situations.
I think a moment about my own actions, then say, “I’ve learned something in my years doing what I do. If you don’t feel guilt, then you can’t change. Guilt can be a driving force for good, for doing what’s right. Or it can be a limiting force. Something that causes you to throw away right and wrong, to justify yourself. That’s the weak way to deal with your conscience. The determining factor in whether guilt locks you into evil or spurs you on towards good is your own inner strength. Your own good moral compass.”
The greatest trope of the thriller genre is perhaps its most improbable – the man of violence who somehow keeps his moral center, who is not corrupted by his bloody work.
No thriller hero exemplifies this principle more than Court Gentry, hero of Mark Greaney’s “Gray Man” series. Court is a former CIA asset, trained and employed for many years as a dark ops assassin. He managed to escape from that life and now operates on his own. Except that he ended up having to call on his old handlers for assistance, and now he owes them favors. So he works for them occasionally again – off the books.
But he has one supreme rule: he only kills bad guys.
It’s a freelance job he’s on as One Minute Out opens. He’s in Croatia, assassinating a former war criminal. Simple job, easy in, easy out. Only he discovers what his target is doing – he’s guarding a group of young women who are being trafficked as sex slaves. He wants to liberate them all, but they refuse. If they run away, their families will be punished, they tell him. And now they themselves will be punished, just because he was here and caused trouble.
Court ought to just go home and forget it, but he can’t. Once he’s seen this evil, he has to do something about it. Along the way he will meet a remarkable woman, sister of one of the captives, on her own crusade against human traffickers. But they have no idea what kind of power and influence they’re up against.
One Minute Out is a fascinating story, but (like most thrillers, but here more than usual) the story suffered (for me) through its sheer improbability. It’s a smart fictional technique to stack the odds against the hero to seemingly impossible heights. But here the challenges pass the limits of the plausible (for this reader). I have limits in my suspension of disbelief, and this book came pretty close to them. Still, I’ll probably read the next one.
For all my quibbles, One Minute Out was a rousing tale, with lots of optimism built in. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.
Virgil had never seen a purely ideological murder, Republicans being too cautious, Democrats generally being bad shots.
I don’t like John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers character as much as I like his more famous detective, Lucas Davenport. But I quite enjoyed Bloody Genius, the latest in the Flowers series. I notice that it’s gotten a lot of poor Amazon reviews, but I had a good time.
Virgil Flowers is a deceptively laid-back agent for Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He dresses like an aging rock musician, and goes fishing on company time, but he closes cases.
This time he’s called to Minneapolis (which he hates; rural Minnesota is his stomping grounds) to investigate the murder of a famous genetic researcher at the university, who was battered to death in his study carrell in the library. No motive is apparent, and the murder weapon is uncertain – though his heavy laptop computer is missing.
Virgil probes the murky waters of academic rivalries, and the victim’s sexual escapades, and his family relationships. But the real culprit and the real motive will be new ones in his experience.
As often happens with these books, they take me to places I’m familiar with, at least to some extent, and I enjoy that. And I like Sandford’s observations of the world, though Flowers’s eyes – quite often they’re politically incorrect.
I was surprised by the observation, at a couple points, that the University of Minnesota’s team colors are red and gold. Even I, the opposite of a sports fan, know they’re maroon and gold.
But I particularly liked Harry, an old guy Virgil meets in a bar. Harry informs Virgil that he can recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “Gunga Din.” As it happens, those were my performance pieces back in the day. Harry might almost be me, except that I don’t hang out in bars.
As always, cautions for lots of foul language and adult themes.
Has it actually been six years we’ve been enjoying Amazon Prime’s outstanding Bosch series? This isn’t exactly the world, or the characters, you’ll find in Michael Connelly’s bestselling crime novels, but it’s true to the spirit of the exercise. And Titus Welliver, as I’ve often said, has the character of Harry Bosch nailed.
This season, like the previous ones, is based on more than one book. So you’ll need to pay attention to keep the multiple story lines straight. Plot lines include the murder of a scientist near the famous Hollywood sign, which at first looks like part of a terrorist act by right-wing extremists. But it’s a lot more complicated than that, and police mistakes lead to serious blowback. There’s also a cold case, one of Harry’s “everybody matters” crusades, in which he tries to find the murderer of a teenaged street prostitute, attempting to give her mother some closure. And Harry’s partner Jerry Edgar is deep in an investigation of Haitian street gangs, which brings up bad memories of his own childhood in Haiti and leads him to contemplate crossing some lines.
It’s all intense, and fascinating, and compelling. A couple of points linger with me. I appreciated the expanded role for the Mutt ‘n Jeff detective team known as “Crate and Barrel,” older guys who started out pretty much as comic relief, but are now being permitted to demonstrate the qualities that earned them their gold shields in the first place.
Also the series took an interesting approach to its Alt-Right extremists. Although they’re clearly in the wrong, they’re given a chance to make their case, and they’re not entirely unsympathetic. Also – very oddly – they’re depicted as a multiracial group. I appreciate that touch, though I don’t find it very plausible (could be wrong).
Anyway, I consider Bosch one of the best series on any entertainment delivery system at the present time. Extreme cautions for language and mature themes.
I’ve been going through Craig A. Hart’s Serenity series, reviewing as I went. I’ve enjoyed them and told you so. What I didn’t mention so much was the books’ weaknesses, which (sadly) are very apparent in the fifth installment of the series, Serenity Engulfed.
Shelby Alexander, former Detroit boxer and semi-legal “fixer,” has moved back to his home town of Serenity in northern Michigan (lower peninsula). His hopes for a peaceful life have been disrupted by appeals from various neighbors to help out with problems requiring a tough pair of fists.
In Serenity Engulfed, Shelby’s daughter Leslie, with whom he has recently reconciled, is kidnapped. The kidnapper is an old enemy, recently released from prison. Meanwhile, a local prostitute asks for his protection from a man who’s been brutalizing her.
Serenity Engulfed, sadly, seems to testify to a failure of creativity on the author’s part. His prose has always been adequate at best, but it looks as if he’s now run out of plot ideas too. This book is all about dealing once again with enemies Shelby has fought before, and replaying plot situations we’ve been through before. And the ending was – in my view – entirely implausible.
I was disappointed with Serenity Engulfed, but I’m a forgiving type. I’ll probably read the next book, to see if the author gets his bearings again.
