Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Firewater Blues,’ by Caimh McDonnell

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As for the flat itself, whatever had gone on here, it was highly unlikely that the weapon used was a cat, as there was nowhere near enough room to swing one.

Caimh McDonnell’s series of comic mysteries featuring bibulous police detective Bunny McGarry can well be called ground-breaking, if only for its extension of the category “trilogy” to include a series that’s up to six books now (not to mention the “Bunny in America” side-series). The latest is Firewater Blues, and it’s as inventive and hilarious as all the others.

Nevertheless, I’m done with them. Reasons at the end of this review.

Firewater Blues is a sort of prequel, occurring before A Man With One of Those Faces, the first in the series. Bunny is still with the police force at this point, though on a “sabbatical.” He’s grown disillusioned with the force, and is considering a change.

Then he encounters Rosie Flint, a young woman he once helped out. Rosie is a computer genius and very obviously somewhere on the Autistic scale. Which means she absolutely refuses to have anything to do with the regular police, due to the way they treated her the last time around. But she trusts Bunny… sort of. She has a boyfriend now, and he’s disappeared. On top of that, she’s convinced somebody has been following her. Already agoraphic, she’s terrified of a world of dangers.

Bunny agrees to help, and begins uncovering disturbing clues. Something very big is going on, and poor Rosie is in the middle of it. Bunny will approach the case with his usual blunt object methodology, and many heads will get knocked together before – with the help of a pack of renegade nuns and a twelve-year-old truant – he finds the answers. Not all of them comforting.

Author McDonnell is a genius, and Firewater Blues combines slapstick, crude jokes, and clever wordsmithing with moments of genuine poignancy. This is an excellent, funny book, if you can handle the language.

However (at least for this reader) this is where the author finally came out so plainly with his politics that that element overcame the entertainment. There’s never been any question where Caimh McDonnell stood on the political spectrum, but (it seemed to me) he came out swinging this time. He even went so far as to trot out the old chestnut that “political correctness is just another name for politeness.” (Yeah, pull the other one. What could be more polite than calling everybody you disagree with Hitler?) I’m sure author McDonnell doesn’t want my conservative, fascist money anyway.

In any case, it’s stopped being fun and I’m done with it. But you may be more tolerant than I am. I can recommend it as a really funny, well-written book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Preacher Finds a Corpse,’ by Gerald Everett Jones

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This is a book I mistook for a promising novel by a Christian writer. Having finished it, I still consider it a promising novel (the author has gone on to write several and seems to be doing well). I’m not so sure about the Christianity. Though Preacher Finds a Corpse (awful title) is not exactly anti-Christian either.

Evan Wycliff grew up in Apple Center, Missouri, and then went away to Harvard to study theology. Then he studied astrophysics. Then, after a personal tragedy, he went home again, where he now works as a bill collector for a car dealer and now and then preaches in local congregations. Hence his nickname, “Preacher.”

His return allowed him to reconnect with his boyhood best friend Bob, though they haven’t actually spent much time together. Nevertheless, Evan is shocked when, one morning when he’s on his way to join some buddies on a turkey hunt, he finds Bob’s dead body waiting on the path. Bob has apparently shot himself to death with a pistol.

Evan is not a serious suspect in the case. In fact, the sheriff quickly closes the case, but confides to Evan in private that he wouldn’t mind having someone look a little closer at it. Bob’s financial affairs had been in disarray. A farm he’d been renting to a friend was about to be taken over by the government, and Bob had told the friend not to worry – he’d prevent that from happening. Only now he can’t. And Bob’s beautiful wife, who’s set to inherit all his property, seems less than devastated. And what is it with the property, anyway? Why is there no clear title? Why is an area there fenced off by the military?

Evan will poke around in his low-key way, digging up some history, and some people will feel threatened. Physical attack and involuntary commitment to an institution are just some of the challenges Evan will face. But in the end the truth will out.

I found Preacher Finds a Corpse a promising book in terms of narrative. Evan is a layered character, and the other characters are complex too. I thought the prose a little weak – the author needed to move the story along faster. He’s probably figured out how to do that by now.

The plotting was weak, I thought, in the sense that everything turns out to be less than the reader expects. The conclusion was kind of flat. Another problem was that one surreal plot element – Evan having conversations with the imagined spirit of his dead fiancée – doesn’t start happening until half-way through the book. If you’re going to add that kind of mystical element, you need to establish it earlier in the story.

But my main problem was theological. Evan is supposed to be a popular supply preacher in the small-town churches around Apple City. But, judging by the topics he preaches on, he’s only marginally orthodox (or not orthodox at all). He tells the people in the pews that “God is all there is” (pantheism). He questions whether human souls in Heaven possess personality. I have trouble believing small town preachers would put up with that sort of thing. However, I suspect the author means well. I think he wants us to like these people because they’re open to “original” ideas.

Preacher Finds a Corpse wasn’t awful. But I didn’t like it enough to go on to the sequels.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Complete Midshipman Bolitho,’ by Alexander Kent

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As you may or may not recall (why should you?) I have a fondness for tales of the sea. The great age of sail warfare, the age of Nelson, has inspired several excellent series of novels. The original, great one is C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. He may (possibly) have been surpassed by Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey and Maturin. Another contender, not to be scorned, is Alexander Kent’s (a pseudonym; Douglas Reeman was his real name) Richard Bolitho.

The Complete Midshipman Bolitho is a collection of three novellas describing Dick Bolitho’s service from 1772 through 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution. We find him, a sixteen-year-old with experience on a previous vessel, assigned to HMS Gorgon, a 74-gun warship. Richard is the son of a rear admiral, but all midshipmen (at least in theory) are treated the same – and the discipline is hard. His immediate superior, in fact, makes it clear to him that he’ll get no special treatment – rather the opposite.

In the each of these three stories, the young midshipman finds himself facing impossible challenges and pulling victory from the jaws of defeat through unwavering courage, original thinking, and an unusual empathy with the men he leads.

The Complete Midshipman Bolitho was an excellent (and educational) read, by and large. This reader personally had trouble with some of the action scenes. They reminded him of the quick-cut editing in modern action movies – characters seemed to suddenly appear in places without an adequate explanation of how they got there. But it’s possible I was just distracted and missed the clues.

Minimal bad language. Suitable for older teens and all adults. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Witnesses,’ by Robert Whitlow

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It’s generally a mistake to look for excellence in contemporary Christian fiction (or any other kind of fiction, to be fair). When excellence does appear, it’s a wonderful gift. One to savor. It behooves a grumpy old reviewer like me to be thankful when a Christian novel is okay.

The Witnesses, by Robert Whitlow, is okay.

Parker House is a young attorney in New Bern, North Carolina. He’s working for a small firm, and his bosses work him pretty hard. But he’s proving a valuable asset (though his bosses won’t admit it yet) because of his remarkable talent for making good guesses.

Parker has a grandfather, Frank, who immigrated from Switzerland after World War II. But he’s mysterious about his origins. He is not, in fact, Swiss, but German. And during the war he was valued by his Nazi superiors as someone able to intuit enemy positions and intentions. And, incidentally, places where treasure might be concealed. Frank deserted at last, but he still bears a weight of guilt.

When a man Frank doesn’t remember, who tells him he saved his life once, shows up at his door, Frank is troubled. He only wants to put the past behind him. Frank’s intuition tells him more is going on than the old acquaintance told him.

Meanwhile, young Parker is being headhunted by a famous trial lawyer, who seems to have sensed his hidden gifts. The lawyer has a beautiful daughter whom Parker falls for, but that turns out to be a complication, as she’s bitterly estranged from her father. She gives Parker an ultimatum: You can work for my dad, or you can date me.

The Witnesses kept my interest all through, though I found the writing fairly flat. The Christian elements approached the awkward sometimes (for me, but I’m sensitive). However, the final spiritual climax was quite moving.

I have problems with the idea of anything like “extrasensory perception” as a gift of the Holy Spirit. The author seems to identify it with the gift of prophecy, but I’m wary of such things. So – at least from the point of view of my church – I’d call The Witnesses iffy on the orthodoxy side.

Your beliefs may vary. Nothing objectionable in the content. I think many of our readers may enjoy The Witnesses.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder Must Advertise,’ by Dorothy L. Sayers

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…the most convincing copy  was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity’s worth producing—for some reason—poverty and flatness of style….

All in all, among the delights of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series, Murder Must Advertise may be the most perfect specimen. Which is rather odd, to my mind, as it takes Lord Peter generally out of his natural environment (his priceless valet, Bunter, only makes a brief appearance). In Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter goes undercover as an advertising copywriter, and finds to his surprise that he’s rather good at it. (Author Sayers herself spent some time in that very career – she is credited with coining the phrase, “It pays to advertise!”)

Victor Dean, a young copywriter at Pym’s Publicity, fell down an iron spiral staircase in the offices one day, breaking his neck. A letter to his employer was found among his effects, and that letter said that something illicit was going on among the staff. For that reason, Mr. Pym engages Lord Peter Wimsey to investigate. Lord Peter substitutes horn-rimmed glasses for his usual monocle and shows up for work, easily sliding into the circle of copywriters. He calls himself Death Bredon (these being his two actual middle names). Meanwhile, at night, Death Bredon becomes a habitue of wild parties hosted by a notorious young heiress. Drugs are being distributed at these parties, and somehow the drug network is connected to Pym’s Publicity. Death Bredon charms some people, insults others, and generally stirs things up to see what will happen. What happens is murder.

Murder Must Advertise is about as close as Miss Sayers ever came to full-blown hard-boiled fiction. Lord Peter is very different from Philip Marlowe, but there’s some of the same atmosphere here of mean streets and ruthless criminals. I like it quite a lot, it goes without saying.

Cautions, American readers, for a lengthy chapter involving a cricket game. Most of you will be as at sea in that environment as I am.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fatal Sisters,’ by W. Glenn Duncan

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Speaking in general terms, hard-boiled mysteries written before the turn of the millennium tend to be a good bet for me. A little more modern than the classics (which I also like), but before the explosion of Wokeness that has fatally infected so much recent literature. Jack Lynch’s Bragg books are a good example.

So I tried out W. Glenn Duncan’s Fatal Sisters, part of his Rafferty series. The intention seems to have been to produce something reminiscent of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels.

Sadly, it didn’t quite work for me. But read on. You might like it better.

Rafferty is a private eye in Dallas. Like Nick Charles and Spenser, he has a steady girlfriend (though because of the time of writing, the author didn’t feel it necessary to make the girlfriend a two-fisted martial artist. And that’s always nice). Rafferty operates alone, but has a dangerous friend called “Cowboy” who backs him up when things get hairy.

In Fatal Sisters (I haven’t figured out yet what the title means. Probably missed a clue), Rafferty gets a call from Patty Akkister, a fairly ordinary young wife. She says her husband Sherm is missing. But it’s all hush-hush, because, she says, Sherm is actually a spy, off on one of his secret assignments. He’s been gone so long, though…

Rafferty has run into situations like this before. Clearly, old Sherm is having an affair, and using the spy story to explain his absences. Rafferty takes the case, in the hope of catching Sherm and talking him into going back to Patty.

Unfortunately, Rafferty’s wrong. Sherm’s no spy, but he is involved in some very dangerous business. And before he’s done, Rafferty will find himself dodging bullets and protecting people – including Patty – from serious mayhem and murder.

I’m not entirely sure why Fatal Sisters didn’t work for me. Rafferty was an okay character, though he never really came alive in my mind. He’s a wisecracking PI, which is a great tradition, but it seemed to me his dialogue never quite hit the target. The book was interesting enough, in a “something to read while waiting for a plane” sort of way. And there was a pretty good surprise at the climax.

On the language side, the profanity quotient was much lower than we get in our decade. So it had that going for it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Yesterday is Dead,’ by Jack Lynch

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I like the late Jack Lynch’s Pete Bragg series of hard-boileds, starring Pete Bragg, better and better. Yesterday is Dead was right up my alley.

Pete Bragg, you may recall, is a private eye in the San Francisco area. But his origins are in Seattle, where he grew up and was a newspaper man for a while. He doesn’t have a lot of fond memories, though. Somehow, he says, nothing ever worked out for him there.

So it’s been a while since he’s been in touch with his best old friend up there, Benny Bartlett. Benny is freelance journalist, and a really nice guy. He works on human interest and feature stories. Woodward and Bernstein he’s not.

So why is somebody threatening him over the phone? There have been a couple strange incidents, too, which may have been attacks. But Benny’s not sure. The police aren’t impressed. But Benny’s worried about his family. Would Pete come up and look into things?

Of course Pete will. About the time he shows up in town, the danger to Benny becomes undeniable. But even more disconcerting is that Pete runs into his ex-wife, Lorna. Their relationship was complicated, and when she left him, it hurt. Now she seems interested again. Can Pete take another chance on her? Or should he be faithful to his California girlfriend?

Yesterday is Dead is classic hard-boiled, even down to Pete getting taken for a ride and given a professional beating. My only real complaint is a lingering one with this series – Pete’s judgment and ethics in dealing with women are pretty bad (and they’ve got to be bad when I can tell). But I guess that’s part of his character.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Targeted,’ by Stephen Hunter

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The shooting stopped not out of mercy or rationality, but out of ammo depletion. Each automatic and semiautomatic weapon came up dry at almost the same second. Anyone whose eardrums had not been shattered by the ruckus would have heard an anvil chorus of clicks, snaps, slams, curses, and chunks as, momentarily drained of IQ, the troopers decided that if they pulled real hard the guns would start shooting again.

I always wonder (with anticipation) what stunt Stephen Hunter will pull to squeeze one more story out of the Bob Lee Swagger franchise. When you’re writing an action character who ages in real time, and you’ve gotten him up to his mid-seventies, generating drama turns into a real challenge. Generating plausible drama would seem nearly impossible.

And yet Hunter pulls it off again in Targeted. I won’t say the story is quite plausible, but it’s carried off with such style and verve that it works, in the grand tradition.

In our last story, old Bob Lee saved the country from a major terrorist plot with a near-impossible rifle shot. In the grand tradition of American politics, the reward he earns is a congressional investigation, led by a predatory old congresswoman who may, or may not, be based on a living person. Oh, we have nothing but respect for you personally, the investigators say (they are lying), but we need to seriously consider the procedures and protocols that led to your action. Were anyone’s civil rights violated? Did systemic racism inform the operation in any way?

Just when things look very bad for the old sniper, the whole thing gets turned upside down by the arrival by a group of mysterious convicts who take everybody hostage. Bob, plastic-cuffed to a wheelchair, is in a poor position to save the day, but a surprising ally will appear.

Lots of action, a good dollop of political satire, and one of the most dependable action heroes out there. I got a kick out of Targeted, and recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sierra Six,’ by Mark Greaney

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Mark Greaney’s Gray Man series, about Courtland Gentry, renegade former CIA assassin, continues with Sierra Six, which combines a contemporary story with flashbacks to his first assignment, twelve years ago, as part of a CIA kill team. The two threads intertwine, more and more tightly as the story goes on, coming finally to a crashing double point.

We start with the flashback, where young Court’s talents as a fighting man are recognized, and the CIA decides to add him to an action team. He’ll be the “Six,” the point man, replacing a string of other sixes who’ve been killed on recent missions. Court is not a team player by nature – it’s hard for him to coordinate with others. Even harder for him to trust others. In training, he keeps messing up. In early missions, he makes costly mistakes. But his sheer talent persuades his superiors to keep him on the team – though his team members don’t like him one bit.

In the present, working as a freelance, he gets hired for an operation in Algiers. In the course of the action he glimpses the face of a man he thought was dead – a terrorist he came up against on that old, first mission. Court has a personal score to settle with that man. And, incidentally, that man is going to murder millions of people if he isn’t stopped.

Sierra Six was a tight, taut thriller that never let up. The action was pretty cinematic – a little implausible, but compelling. I don’t have the tolerance for such stories that I used to have, but I can’t deny it was well done. And I do keep reading the books.

Recommended, for those who like this kind of story. Cautions for what you’d expect.

Reviews

‘Riders of the Whistling Pines’

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It was a relatively quiet day. Warmer than yesterday and clear outside. I had to do some shoveling again. Not much.

Hey, it’s almost March. In March, you can start hoping for spring. You’ll be bitterly disappointed, but you can hope. At least the sunlight comes in larger packages now, which is nice in a time of inflation.

As I’ve mentioned, I like to have the TV on while I’m doing translation. Especially old B-westerns. I very much enjoy B-westerns. They’re cheaply done and obviously so, but they fill the silence demand little of the viewer. They were a comfort in my childhood, and they still make me feel good. Especially when they’ve aged badly.

Whenever I watch a Gene Autrey movie, I wonder, “How did this guy get to be a movie star?” He was not tall, not particularly handsome, and a little tubby. The answer, of course, is his singing. He started as a singer, and moved into the movies. Little boys loved him. Because, what do little boys know?

Today I watched Riders of the Whistling Pines, which I found notable for several reasons. It’s actually a more serious movie than Gene’s usual line – no comic sidekick, and some rather tragic themes. Gene plays a guy trying to establish a forest camp in an area where there’s an infestation of tree-killing moths. The local logger is rooting for the moths, because if the trees die, he can legally harvest them all. Gene is involved with trying to get the forest sprayed with – wait for it – DDT. The nasty logging baron spreads false rumors about the dangers of DDT to wildlife and human life, and deliberately causes some poisoning.

Yessiree, we’ve got a pro-DDT movie here. It was 1949, long before Rachel Carson. Trust the science!

Actually, I personally think DDT needs to come back, under controls, so I’m cool with it. Your mileage, as I persist in saying, may vary.

A second surprise was that I recognized one of the evil henchmen – by his voice. It was Clayton Moore, who in a few years would become immortal as the Lone Ranger. (I know a guy who knew him, when he lived in these parts.) In this film, he doesn’t even get a cool cowboy hat.

And finally, on a couple occasions one of the characters, a struggling alcoholic, fishes out a photo of his wife, who died while he was away in the war. She’s pretty. She’s a blonde.

She’s Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn was an unknown contract player for Columbia at the time, and this was a Columbia production, so they just picked her picture off a pile as an example of a girl a guy might pine for.

For all I know, it was her big break.