Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Names of the Dead,’ by Kevin Wignall

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Not only was he less sure now of the difference between their crimes, but there was also this other side to it, the love these people here in Lisbon felt for a man who the world viewed, with good reason, as a monster. Who would speak for Wes in such a way? One person, maybe, and she had died for it.

I’ve become a fan of Kevin Wignall’s novels, but I’ve never liked one of them as much as I like his latest, The Names of the Dead. Other readers are likely to have different opinions, but this one worked for me.

James “Wes” Wesley is a former CIA agent, abandoned by the agency and now languishing in a French prison for war criminals. He’s not quite innocent, but not as guilty as the world thinks. His best friend is Patrice, an African and former commander of God’s Own Army, a very real and vicious (ostensibly Christian) terrorist group. Patrice is repentant, and spends much of his time studying the Bible. He shares his wisdom with Wes, but Wes remains skeptical.

Then news comes that Wes’s ex-wife has been murdered. Also, their son (whom Wes didn’t know about) has gone missing. Wes gets compassionate early release. His former CIA colleagues try to kill him, but he manages to escape. Then he’s rescued, more or less, by a young woman. She is Mia, the granddaughter of one of Wes’s fellow prisoners, recently deceased, a Croatian war criminal. Mia is on the autism spectrum and doesn’t care to be touched, so there’s no question of romance. But she has nowhere to go and likes to drive (stopping frequently to visit cathedrals), so they form an unlikely team as they travel across Spain, Portugal, France, and on into the Balkans.

Wes’s plan is simple and limited – he will find the men who framed him, and kill them. Then he will find his son.

But on the way, guided by the Bible Patrice gave him as a going-away present, Wes will learn to see himself in new ways. And in the end he will make the hardest decision of his life – and the most right.

I have no knowledge of author Wignall’s faith or lack of it, and it would be wrong to call The Names of the Dead a Christian novel. But it’s a book that takes Scripture seriously, and in a positive way. The questions Wes struggles with – about human connections, personal choices, and moral good – resonated for this reader. I recommend The Names of the Dead highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mountain Divide,’ by Frank H. Spearman

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I’ve read and appreciated a couple of Frank H. Spearman’s classic westerns (he wrote Whispering Smith, most famously), and thought I’d try another. The Mountain Divide is somewhat different from my previous choices. It has the feel of a boy’s book, a genre which was big at one time. That’s mainly because the main character is a 17-year-old boy, and due to the lack of a romantic element in the plot. The book is also different from the others in not being set in the author’s contemporary time, but several decades back in history. It’s about the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, just after the Civil War.

We first meet Bucks, our hero, as a newly hired telegrapher in the track town of Medicine Bend. Faced with a mob of angry customers, he handles himself with coolness and good sense, gaining the favor of his bosses and senior employees. Important among them is Bob Scott, the action hero of the book, who – interestingly enough – is a “half-breed.”

The story proceeds with Bucks advancing in his career, and clashing again and again with the outlaw element that accompanies the progress of the track laying. In the end it will come to open war between the railroad men and the lawless elements. Hostile Indians are also a constant threat. Bucks and Bob Scott will nearly lose their lives before their final triumph.

I should probably mention that, to the best of my knowledge, author Spearman gives a false impression of the legal situation. The recent miniseries Hell On Wheels, which I gave up watching, more realistically portrayed the arrangement – the saloons and gambling dens and houses of ill fame went west with the construction, and were tolerated – or facilitated – by the railroad companies. In this story, the two groups are mortal enemies.

As you’d expect for a book written around the turn of the 20th Century and aimed at boys, The Mountain Divide is a pretty straightforward adventure story, easily enjoyed. I consider Spearman a superior stylist to most of his contemporaries, and I liked this book.

Fiction, Reviews

The Green Ember, by S.D. Smith

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Artwork from cover of The Green Ember

“How many weapons do I have?” Helmer asked. Picket took a quick inventory, though he thought Helmer might be concealing some.

“Two. Your knife and the sword,” Picket said.

Helmer responded with an immediate attack. He hit Picket, kicked him, took off his jacket and struck him with it over and over, then threw rocks at him. Picket scrambled around, trying to dodge rocks, block blows, and escape the whirlwind of whipping coat. . . .

“Lesson. Number. One,” Helmer said evenly. “Everything is a weapon.”

The Green Ember is the first of several fantasies by S.D. Smith, in which brave rabbits with swords and bows fight the hoard of wolves and raptors that has overwhelmed their land. Youngsters Heather and Pickett begin the novel playing in the fields near their country home. They have loving parents, a baby brother, and a happy, innocent life.

But this isn’t Little House on the Prairie.

Soon, enemies they hadn’t known are charging at them with torches, bows, and spears. They escape by the skin of their teeth with a bit of help, but Pickett won’t take up living to fight another. His mistakes and lack of strength during their escape weigh him to the ground. Plus, some hero rabbit, who looked about as old as Pickett, displays incredible skill, strength, and general swagger in their escape, all of which Pickett hates. He has no reason to be jealous of him, so, of course, he is.

The Green Ember is written for young readers, not very young, but this isn’t YA either. Smith assumes his readers will need a little help to understand. When characters use sarcasm, the narrator explains it clearly. It’s a fun adventure, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of them. My kids have loved them for years, and my youngest just reread all of the books in anticipation of the fourth one, Ember’s End, coming in March.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder Board,’ by Brian Shea

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A better than average novel by an author new to me. Always nice to find. Tonight’s book is Murder Board, by Brian Shea.

For Michael Kelly, Boston police detective, family comes before everything. For the Rakowskis, a Polish-American crime family, the same rule goes. But they mean very different things by it.

Michael Kelly is a Boston Homicide cop. He’s the rookie on the squad, though he’s been a cop for years. Trouble has followed him, causing him to restart his career more than once. But he thinks he’s where he belongs now.

When a 13-year-old girl’s body is discovered in a shallow grave in a blighted neighborhood, Michael takes a personal interest. He grew up in this neighborhood himself, and still has friends here, on both sides of the law. But the dead girl came from an upscale suburb. How did she end up here? Who killed her, and why?

Searching for answers, Michael, assisted by a (beautiful, of course) female detective from the Sexual Crimes squad, begins a dangerous investigation into the human trafficking industry. Gangsters will threaten them, and politicians will pressure them. But Michael Kelly does not let go.

I found Murder Board an exciting and compelling read. The writing is a little under the top rank – author Shea has a problem with word choice sometimes – but the story itself grabbed me. I’d describe Shea as somewhere between Michael Connelly and Joseph Wambaugh in themes and tone.

Recommended. Cautions for disturbing scenes, but I didn’t notice any obscene language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bleak Harbor,’ by Bryan Gruley

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The Peters family is more dysfunctional in sum than any of its individual member knows.

Carley Bleak Peters, the central character in Bleak Harbor, is a descendant of the man who founded the upscale town of Bleak Harbor, Michigan. She is estranged, however, from her widowed mother, and has been cut out of her will. She was working in Chicago before her husband moved them back to Bleak Harbor, and she does not like commuting. It limits her time with her beloved son Danny, born of a fling with a drug dealer 15 years ago. But she has a plan. She will use documents she’s stolen to blackmail her boss, who pressured her into sex. This will allow her to flee Bleak Harbor with Danny.

Her husband, Danny’s stepfather, Pete Peters, is a nice guy, but not one of life’s winners. Formerly a successful commodities trader in Chicago, his career languished when he had to switch to online trading. Fired from his job, he moved to Bleak Harbor to open a medical marijuana shop – a sure-fire goldmine, he thought. Only he’s found that the only way to compete wtih the illicit market is to buy his stock from very bad people.

Fifteen-year-old Danny Peters is “on the autism scale.” He is handsome and intelligent, but does not relate well to people. His passions are dragonflies, perch (the fish), and one particular poem by Wallace Stevens. Neither of his parents is sure how much he understands about their situation.

When Danny is kidnapped, and cryptic text messages come to his parents demanding an odd ransom amount, Carley and Pete each believe it has to do with their own sins coming home to roost. They will be pushed to their personal limits, sometimes cooperating with the police and sometimes going behind their backs, to satisfy the demands of a bizarre kidnapper who seems determined to bring some of the Bleak family’s old skeletons to light.

Bleak Harbor was a departure for me, a different kind of thriller. I think it will be surprising to a lot of readers. The plot seems to me (I may just be uninformed) a pretty original one. I did guess the kidnapper’s identity a little ahead of schedule, but it was pretty surprising, and the surprise was well set up.

I’m not entirely sure what the theme of Bleak Harbor was, to be honest, but it kept my interest and kept me turning pages. Recommended, with minor cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Deadly Still,’ by Keith Moray

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West Uist, the fictional Hebrides island that provides the setting for Keith Moray’s Torquil McKinnon mysteries, suffers from Midsommer Syndrome. It’s a remote and bucolic place, filled with a population divided among the inoffensive and the eccentric, and yet it keeps throwing up murders. The latest involves the age-old tradition of illegal whisky distillation on the island.

As Deadly Still begins, Police Sergeant Morag Driscoll is off for a morning jog when she discovers a local teenager wandering blind in the heather. She and two friends had been celebrating completing their final tests with peatreek (the Scottish equivalent of moonshine) in an abandoned World War II bunker. Now she can’t see, one of her friends is unresponsive, and the other has disappeared entirely.

At about the same time, a local businessman is found dead. It looks like the result of a drunken fall, but laboratory analysis will show that he’s been imbibing the bad peatreek as well.

Except that the level of methyl alcohol in this stuff is way higher than is probable in ordinary home distilling. Someone has a grudge and an agenda, and Inspector Torquil McKinnon (who already had his hands full with his wedding plans) will need to stop that person before anyone else dies. And what happened to the missing girl?

I always come back to the Torquil McKinnon books with pleasure. I like the setting, I like the characters. I don’t rank Deadly Still as the best in the series – I had trouble keeping the characters straight in this one, but maybe that’s just because I’m getting old.

Recommended, like the whole series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Saboteur,’ by Andrew Gross

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In 1965, an English/American film called The Heroes of Telemark was released. It starred Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris as Norwegian saboteurs attacking the German “heavy water” (deuterium oxide) production facility at Rjukan in Telemark during World War II. Heavy water was a necessary buffering agent in the German program to split the atom, presumably to produce an atomic bomb.

The film took a highly cinematic approach to the story, compressing all the action into a couple weeks and replacing the actual participants with fictionalized and combined characters. It found a mixed response in Norway, where people who’d been through the war complained that it took Kirk Douglas two weeks to do by himself what it took a whole team two years to accomplish in real life.

I kept thinking of that film as I read The Saboteur, Andrew Gross’s similarly (though not so thoroughly) fictionalized account of the same clandestine operations.

Kurt Nordstrum is a Norwegian engineer who leaves his career to join the Resistance – with tragic consequences in his personal life. When an engineer at the Norsk Hydro facility in Rjukan tells him and a comrade that they need to get some microfilm to the English immediately, they hijack a coastal steamer and – just barely – manage to escape to Scotland. Then he and his friend join Company Linge, the Norwegian commando unit, and are eventually airdropped back in Norway. Their mission, from which they do not expect to return alive, is to destroy the Heavy Water production facility. Kurt’s father used to tell him, “A true man goes on until he can go no further… and then he goes twice as far.” And that’s precisely what he and his team will be called on to do before it’s over.

Honestly, I found this a hard book to read, but I’m not sure it’s the book’s fault. I knew this story pretty well already, and so was preparing myself emotionally for the unpleasant parts. Author Gross anticipates those expectations to an extent by making small changes in the story. Kurt Nordstrum (who is essentially standing in for real saboteur Knut Haukelid but has a very different back story), is enabled by his imaginary status to do stuff, and get into dilemmas, that Haukelid never did. I found some of those stuff and dilemmas somewhat implausible, but I can’t deny I was moved by the entirely imaginary heroics at the end.

I was bothered all through by the fictional changes, especially the handling of the characters. Several of the saboteurs here are real people, others are fictional (including an entirely imaginary Norwegian-American). I understand the narrative freedom that gave the author (as mentioned above), but it kind of nagged at me.

I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much about the spelling of Norwegian names and places. It’s pretty hit and miss, but I probably should be thankful for the effort.

What it comes down to, I guess, is that I can recommend The Saboteur to those who aren’t already familiar with the Heavy Water mission. But after you read it, you’ll want to read Neal Bascomb’s The Winter Fortress or something like that to get the actual facts.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at the Meet,’ by Bruce Beckham

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‘We did a project on it when I was at primary school. The Vicious Vikings. Although most of the settlements’ names are quite innocuous. Applethwaite, Brackenthwaite, Crosthwaite – quite often you can work it out.’

DS Leyton looks rather bemused.

‘So, what – did they speak English?’

DS Jones giggles as though she thinks he must be joking. But then she responds. ‘No – we speak Old Norse.’

It’s one of the charms of Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels (for me) that there are occasional allusions to the history of the Cumberland region where Skelgill operates. In the passage above, our detectives, Skelgill, DS Jones (female) and DS Leyton (male) are talking about local farm names, which often contain the element “thwaite,” which is related to the Norwegian word “tvedt.” Both mean “field.”

But that’s not what Murder at the Meet, the latest Skelgill novel, is mainly about. More than 20 years ago, a young wife and mother named Mary Wilson disappeared during the annual Shepherd’s Meet. As it happens, that was the same year a teenager named Dan Skelgill won the Fell Runners’ race, setting a long-standing record. At the time, the police employed brand-new technology, DNA testing, matching it to the one discovered piece of evidence, to try to identify her attacker or abductor (assuming she didn’t just run off). But without success.

Now Mary’s bones have been found, by archaeologists in a local cave. Skelgill and his team start interviewing surviving witnesses and family members, and discover – as you would expect – a number of old secrets and personal grudges. And all the while Skelgill does his own eccentric thing – applying his knowledge of local geography, biology and weather, along with the sensibilities of a fisherman.

It’s all enjoyable and familiar for the Skelgill fan. I did think this effort was a little unfair to the reader, as we were denied the information that finally unlocks the puzzle until after the climax – and so we didn’t know what all the urgency was about. That reduced the suspense for me.

But that aside, Murder at the Meet was an enjoyable read, and is recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Truth About Murder,’ by Chris Collett

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There’s a lot of good to be said about Christ Collett’s new stand-alone mystery, The Truth About Murder. But I also found it somewhat aggravating.

First of all, full marks for originality in giving us a new kind of investigative hero – Stefan Greaves is a lawyer in the (fictional, I presume) middle English town of Charnford. From the beginning, it’s clear that Stefan suffers from some kind of disability, but author Collett (annoyingly, in my view) puts off naming it until nearly half-way through the book. I’ll risk spoiling it by telling you that he has cerebral palsy. To reduce associated muscle tension, he smokes pot regularly. Because social interactions are difficult (he has trouble being understood when he talks) he sees an “escort” regularly.

Stefan gets a visit from a local nurse, who is concerned about mortality rates in the neonatal ward where she works. Not long afterward she disappears, and when her body is found in the river, the verdict is suicide – though her daughter insists she was a Catholic and would never do that.

Investigating the disappearance and death is Mick Fraser, a local cop. Mick is concerned about his partner, whose time has been monopolized by their commander lately. He’s been secretive, and Mick begins to suspect him of corruption. In fact, it’s far worse than that…

As the plot thickens (rather slowly I thought, and with too much reliance on coincidence) Stefan and Mick are drawn together to uncover a sinister and heinous plot that threatens the whole country.

I never fell in love with The Truth About Murder, or with Stefan Greaves as a character. (He shares, with many fictional detectives, a gift for having attractive women throw themselves at him constantly, in spite of his disability. I complain of this trope often in my reviews, and if you think that means I’m jealous… well, I am.)

However, the book’s themes pleased me greatly. Without spoiling it for the reader, I’ll just say that it involved controversial issues of medical ethics. Author Collett seems to be unaware of (or is avoiding) the fact that the evil in view here is more associated with the Left than the Right in our time. But that may be a strategic choice intended not to alienate readers. I don’t know Collett’s politics, but if he’s conservative I salute his strategy, and if he’s liberal I salute his moral sense.

I can’t give The Truth About Murder my highest recommendation, but it’s worth reading. There’s a suggestion that this might be the start of a new series. I’m not wholly enthusiastic about that prospect.

Reviews, Uncategorized

Retro movie review: ‘5 Card Stud’

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Hard as it might be to believe, I’m still lacking a finished book to review tonight. I’m finding my current read a little slow, I guess – though it’s gaining interest as I proceed. It’ll probably be ready tomorrow.

What else to talk about? Today lacked the pulse-pounding social interactions of yesterday. I watched the last half of a movie I’m fond of last night, though. I can gas about that.

5 Card Stud (1968) is not a great movie, but I find it endlessly entertaining, and generally watch it whenever it shows up. Its attractions are many.

Dean Martin in the lead. Dino was the archetypal Italian-American and seems an odd choice as a western star. But he loved westerns, and excelled in roles where he could play breezy, wisecracking types. By all accounts he was a nice guy too, and faithful to his wife, at least for a long time. Similarly, he joked about drinking a lot, but didn’t actually… until the time came when he did. Here he plays Van Morgan, a gambler who tries to stop fellow card players from lynching a cheater, but fails. Later the participants in the game start being murdered, one by one.

Robert Mitchum plays Rev. Jonathan Rudd, a mysterious preacher who comes to town and starts tweaking the surviving players’ consciences. Mitchum, I was interested to learn a while back, was half Norwegian. His mother was Norwegian.

It’s odd when I think back, but I can recall as a young boy thinking that Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum were the same guy. I guess tall, dark guys like that weren’t very common in my world and they all looked alike to me.

But the big draw in 5 Card Stud is Inger Stevens, who plays a prostitute named Lily Langford. It has been my contention for many years that Inger was the most beautiful woman to show up on the public scene in my lifetime. (My friend Mark Goldblatt calls her the “ultimate shiksa.”) She was a Swedish immigrant, but had assimilated to the extent that she had to re-learn her accent when she got the title role in the TV series, The Farmer’s Daughter. An unhappy woman, they say, a little like Marilyn Monroe in forever searching for fulfillment in a man’s love and never finding it. She would die just two years later, in 1970, probably a suicide.

But what beauty! At once regal and impish.

Sadly, most of the films she did that show up on TV from time to time are ones I don’t want to watch. Not even Hang ‘em High, with Clint Eastwood, which is pretty good for the most part, but includes a multiple hanging scene that I, wimp that I am, just can’t handle.

Anyway, 5 Card Stud is a mystery without much actual mystery, and the acting is sometimes over the top. The dialogue can be weak too, though the script was written by Marguerite Roberts, who would write the great True Grit a few years down the line. (However, it should be noted that True Grit follows Charles Portis’s novel very closely, so not a lot of creativity was required. Anyway, Roberts was a Commie.)

But it’s a treat to watch Martin, Mitchum, and Stevens go through their paces. And Dean sings the title song.