Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Dog,’ by Alex Smith

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“Can you describe the two people for me?” Kett asked. “The man and the woman.”

“She was, like, a woman,” he said, concentrating so hard it looked like his head might pop clean off his shoulders. “He was more like, I don’t know, a fella.”

When I reviewed Alex Smith’s first DCI Robert Kett novel, Paper Girls, a few days back, I remarked that while many mystery writers these days go “extreme” with their stories in terms of action and the physical suffering of the protagonists, this book went extreme with the hero’s emotional suffering. Sent to Norfolk for a country break in the wake of the unsolved kidnapping of his wife, Robbie Kett gets involved in a local case. He’s supposed to be decompressing emotionally and spending time with his three little daughters, but he ends up helping to solve the kidnappings of three local girls.

I couldn’t describe the suffering in the second book, Bad Dog, as primarily emotional, though there’s plenty of that. This time out, Kett is still recovering from wounds received in the Paper Girls case, and he goes on to multiple further injuries in this one, enduring with increasingly implausible stoicism (which is not to say that he isn’t suffering inside too, because he definitely is).

A young couple are out walking in the forest when they are attacked by – something. The woman’s body (her husband disappears completely) has been torn up as if by a dog attack – but the teeth marks are human. The locals immediately attribute the killing to “Black Shuck,” a legendary monster said to be a ghostly black hound, kind of like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Kett’s suspicions incline more to some neighbors who seems to be running a dog-fighting ring. But the real solution will be more bizarre than anyone ever dreamed.

Which was kind of my problem with the book. Not only was extreme physical suffering added to Kett’s emotional challenges, but the crime itself kind of pushed the limits of plausibility for me – though maybe I’m just naïve.

However, the author threw in a tantalizing cliffhanger at the end, so I’ll have to get the next book.

I didn’t like Bad Dog as much as Paper Girls. But the characters are still good, and there are very funny moments. And some fair values. Cautions for language and grotesque violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A False Mirror,’ by Charles Todd

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It’s 1920. Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard is dispatched to the town of Hampton Regis, to investigate the beating of Matthew Hamilton, a prominent local citizen, a diplomat who has retired to the seaside. Suspicion immediately falls on a young man named Stephen Mallory. Mallory was engaged to Hamilton’s young wife before the war, from which he returned with shell shock. He thinks he’s been discreet about keeping a watch on the Hamilton house, to spy on the woman he still loves, but you can’t keep secrets like that in a small town.

Inspector Rutledge is inclined to suspect Mallory too. He knew him personally in the war, and considered him a coward. But he knows – better than most – that such prejudices can disrupt your judgment. He has battle fatigue himself, manifested in the form of Hamish MacLeod, his best friend, who did not survive the war – due to Rutledge’s own actions – and who constitutes a continuous presence at his shoulder now, commenting on everything that goes on when he’s not accusing Rutledge.

When Mallory barricades himself in the Hamilton house, holding Mrs. Hamilton and her maid hostage, things look black for him. But Rutledge thinks there’s more to this business than is apparent, especially when Hamilton inexplicably disappears from his bed in the doctor’s house.

There was much to like in Charles Todd’s novel, False Mirror, but I have to confess I found it hard going. It seemed to me to move slowly, but what bothered me most was the downbeat atmosphere. The book was depressing. Especially for me, as I know something about accusatory voices from the past (don’t ask).

On the other hand, Christianity comes out looking very good in this book. Remarkably good by the standards of our time.

A look at Amazon reviews told me that this is in fact a flashback book, an origin story, in a very popular series, and other readers say this book’s atmosphere is not representative of the series. So I may try another Ian Rutledge book. I did like the Christian elements.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Paper Girls,’ by Alex Smith

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It’s common to find “extreme” thrillers on bookshelves today. Usually that means extreme in terms of action – improbably indestructible heroes taking damage that would permanently cripple lesser men, ripping drip lines out of their arms and escaping hospitals, and dominating climactic showdowns against impossible odds amid large explosions.

Alex Smith’s Paper Girls is extreme in a different way. It’s extreme on the interior level, driving its hero to the limits of his emotional resources (before he nearly gets killed in a fight).

Detective Chief Inspector Robert Kett is a London policeman on compassionate leave; he’s moved temporarily to Norwich to decompress and spend time with his three daughters, one of them a baby. Famed for his skill as a finder off missing persons, he’s tormented by the fact that he couldn’t locate his own wife, who has been kidnapped.

His down time is interrupted, though, when his boss calls and asks him for a favor. The local police in Norwich need help with a pair of kidnappings. Two eleven-year-old girls, who made money delivering newspapers, have been snatched. Everyone knows that after the first few hours, chances of discovering the victims alive sink to almost zero.

Personally, I don’t think I’d have put up with the guff Kett takes when he shows up to help. His temporary boss, rather than being grateful, is openly insulting and uses him as a scapegoat when things go wrong (though he’s a layered character; I like that in a book). And Kett has more than enough on his hands trying to care for his traumatized girls. But he doesn’t quit because he cares deeply; he can’t help himself thinking about what the victims are suffering. He can’t help believing that if he can find these girls, maybe he can find his wife too.

The detective work was pretty plausible. The characters were very good. Paper Girls was almost too intense for me – I have a hard time dealing with kidnapping stories in general. But I stayed with it and was glad I did. There was a cliff-hanger at the end, but the author played fair.

Male readers will enjoy the suspense and the action. Female readers will enjoy seeing a man find out what women have to do all day. I highly recommend Paper Girls. Cautions for language and mature subject matter.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Viking Heart,’ by Arthur Herman

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In short, a clear thread may connect the Viking sokemen of the Danelaw to the intellectual ferment that produced the Petition of Right of the English Parliament in 1628 and, ultimately, the Bill of Rights in America.

There seems to be something essentially un-Scandinavian about blowing one’s own horn. One hears of – and is often amused by – the Irish braggart or the German braggart. But we rarely hear of Scandinavian braggarts. Not due to any ethnic superiority, but because of our ingrained cultural habits.

The makes Arthur Herman’s The Viking Heart a slightly awkward book to read, at least for fellow Scandinavians. (Herman explains that after he wrote the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a Norwegian uncle asked why he’d ignored that side of the family, so there seem to be exceptions.)

I’d heard the author interviewed on the radio, and got the impression that this was mainly a book about the Vikings. But it’s not. Though the Vikings get much of the page count, the author goes on to describe Scandinavian history (at home and overseas) up to modern times. We read about the Normans, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Swedish pioneers in colonial Delaware and New York, Charles Lindbergh and Norman Borlaug. The executives of both Ford and Chevrolet who engineered US industrial mobilization in World War II were both Scandinavian-Americans. Gutzon Borglum and Carl Sandberg. The list is quite long.

The ongoing theme is the titular Viking heart (sometimes also the Viking Legacy, a title already taken. Herman might have consulted that book profitably). The Viking heart seems to be a pretty amorphous concept, but in the end he identifies it as physical courage, commitment to cultural identity, “the instinct of craftsmanship” (a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, who grew up about 10 miles from my childhood home), Christianity (after the conversion, of course), “the Lutheran work ethic,” the power of individual freedom, and “a constant willingness to strive toward unknown frontiers in order to find a place for oneself and one’s family.”

I’m not sure how different that makes the Viking heart from a lot of other ethnic groups’ hearts – the Scots-Irish, for instance, could claim a lot of those traits, and they carried them off with more flair.

As always, when it comes to a subject about which I know quite a lot, I have nitpicks. There are a lot of minor errors in the chapters on the Vikings. The author doesn’t go as far as some historians in rejecting the evidence of the sagas, but he tends to find things credible that I doubt, and doubt things I consider pretty plausible (such as the existence of King Harald Finehair of Norway).

On the plus side, he is far more positive about Christianity and its cultural influences than many current historians.

He judges it a failing of the Scandinavian countries that they never fully adopted feudalism. That’s something we Norwegians have always been pretty proud of, in point of fact.

The book is quite long. I did learn things from it, when the story moved outside my wheelhouse. I appreciated it, but I’m not entirely sure the whole exercise was necessary.

That’s probably just my Norwegian diffidence talking.

Recommended, for those interested in the subject.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man by the Sea,’ by Jack Benton

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First, an update on my car. The part arrived. They tried to put it in. It turned out to be defective. They’ll order another. Estimated time window: about a month.

You probably won’t be surprised by now to know that I wasn’t surprised at all by this. I was expecting it to be the wrong part, but otherwise this was the scenario I fully anticipated.

Anyway, on to my book review. The Man By the Sea by Jack Benton.

John “Slim” Hardy is a private eye in Lancashire, England. He is a failed soldier and a serious alcoholic. He’s been hired by a woman to follow her husband, whom she suspects of having an affair.

He’s not having an affair. Slim has discovered that the man is going once a week to a secluded cove known for dangerous rip tides, where he stands reading out loud from a book. What he’s reading, Slim discovers (I forget how), is a Latin incantation to the dead.

Instead of reporting the good news to the wife and closing the case, Slim gets obsessed with the husband’s reasons for this behavior, and starts looking into his past, and into local history. Not neglecting to turn the situation fully ironic by having an affair with the wife.

If this summary sounds improbable, the rest of the book is even less plausible.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel so detached from genuine human motivations and behavior. At every juncture, the characters fail to do what a normal person would do, but instead act in some hysterical way. They respond operatically, or perhaps more aptly, soap-operatically.

And our hero is not just a maintenance alcoholic, like your run of the mill literary private eye. Slim Hardy is a full-fledged dipsomaniac, subject to black-outs and car accidents and completely out of control. He needs to be locked up for the protection of himself and others.

The story was sad, the narrative frustrating to read. I do not recommend The Man By the Sea.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Off-Islander.’ by Peter Colt

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Andy Roark, the hero of Peter Colt’s The Off-Islander, is a Boston private eye with a middling business and a drinking problem. He suffers from the after-effects of combat in Vietnam (this story is set in 1982), and from regrets following a break-up with his girlfriend. He grew up in the depressed Southie section of town, and his best childhood friend is Danny Sullivan, now a lawyer who works for the mob, but who dreams of respectability.

Danny hires Andy to do an investigation for a beautiful, rich woman whose husband has political aspirations. Her father disappeared when she was a girl, she tells them, and she’s worried he might have gotten involved in something since that time that would cause a scandal. They’ve already paid the Pinkerton Agency to run down leads on the West Coast, without any luck. They want Andy to check out the East Coast. Andy visits an address the man used in Hyannis, which leads him to a property on Nantucket Island. There the clues he follows will lead him to layers of lies and a violent challenge that will suddenly transform his greatest handicap – his PTSD – into the strength he needs to survive a threat unlike any he’s faced since the war.

I wasn’t sure at first whether I liked Andy Roark as a hero. His first-person narration is intentionally reminiscent of Philip Marlowe in a Chandler novel, though author Colt isn’t as lyrical a writer (and for some reason he often avoids contractions in dialogue). Often Andy seemed self-sabotaging, which was annoying, and there were a couple instances of casual marijuana use, which always annoys me in a character. However, the pot leads to nothing good, and I really appreciated the power of the final, dramatic denouement. The book ended very strong, leaving an extremely good impression on this reader. I think I’m going to read the next book in the series.

Recommended, for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘MindWar,’ by Andrew Klavan

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I’m probably too much of a snob to properly appreciate young adult novels, even ones by the great Andrew Klavan. But to the extent that I can imagine what a book like MindWar (and its two sequels – they’re a trilogy) would mean to its audience (young gamer males, I imagine) I would say the book is excellent value for money.

Rick Dial used to be a high school football hero. But then came a terrible year, when his father left him, his mother, and his brother behind to run off with his old girlfriend, and Rick himself was crippled in a car accident. Now he spends his time alone in his room, playing video games. He’s living without hope, but he’s become very good at the games.

And that gets noticed. Suddenly he’s abducted by government agents, who tell him a maniacal scientist has constructed a digital world called the Realm. Using the power of the Realm, this man has the ability to begin a campaign to undermine and destroy the one entity he hates most in the world – the United States.

They have the technology to inject Rick into the Realm – a place where his body is whole and strong again. They need him to use his gaming skills to destroy the Realm and save America.

Nothing here we haven’t seen before, in books like Ender’s Game and Ready Player One. But Andrew Klavan applies his seasoned storytelling skills to ramp the stakes up and raise the tension to almost excruciating levels. The main lesson, as with all Klavan’s young adult books, is to persevere, to never despair.

And that’s a pretty good lesson.

Recommended, mostly for members of the Gamer demographic.

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘Lincoln’s Melancholy,’ by Joshua Wolf Shenk

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The hope is not that suffering will go away, for with Lincoln it did not ever go away. The hope is that suffering, plainly acknowledged and endured, can fit us for the surprising challenges that await.

I grew up on a farm, as I may have mentioned before. And I often got into trouble because I preferred reading books to doing my chores. When I read about a great president who grew up on a farm and also got into trouble for reading when he should have been working, I felt an immediately bond. That president, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.

Later I learned that Lincoln suffered from “melancholy” (the 19th Century term for chronic depression) all his life. This also led me to feel close to him.

I’ve learned more recently that a collateral ancestor of mine, my great-great grandfather’s half-brother, a Norwegian pioneer in Illinois, knew Lincoln through Republican Party activities. This ancestor does not appear in the book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenk (I didn’t expect him to), but I enjoyed imagining him as one of the extras in the background.

Lincoln’s Melancholy is a fascinating book for the history buff and the Lincoln fan. There are plenty of Lincoln haters out there too, and I imagine they can find fuel for their position here too, but for this reader the story was one I can empathize with. And it had a surprisingly faith-friendly conclusion.

It’s common for chronic depression to run in families, and author Shenk documents how the limited information we have on this fairly obscure clan indicates that not only depression, but plain insanity was common among the Lincolns. Young Abraham suffered the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age, but seems to have been a fairly cheerful person until his 30s, when he had two suicidal “breakdowns” in a row in 1840 and 1841. (One of these may or may not have been related to the death of the fabled Ann Rutledge.) After that he withdrew into himself; his closest friends – and certainly his wife – never felt that he entirely opened up to them. But they all agreed that he suffered from long spells of melancholy. Then he would shake himself, so to speak, and start telling jokes. Or go to work. He had found a way to manage his depression; to use it as a spur to achievement. Having given up on personal happiness, he aimed for significance. He came to believe that God had destined him for some great purpose; his challenge in life was to make himself worthy of that purpose.

Which brings us to his religious beliefs. I’ve heard more than one atheist quote Lincoln triumphantly, as a patron saint of their un-faith. But as Shenk documents, it’s more complicated than that. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone sect (unusually condemnatory even among Calvinists), Lincoln abandoned Christianity as he understood it. But years later, after his breakdowns, he went to Louisville to visit the family of his friend Joshua Speed. There Speed’s mother (a Unitarian) placed a Bible in his hands and told him gently that he’d find comfort there if he read it correctly. And by all accounts he did just that. He became a regular reader of the Bible, and it seemed to help him with his depression, though It’s impossible to know exactly what his theological beliefs were:

The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church—which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which Lincoln repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.

I found Lincoln’s Melancholy fascinating, moving, and helpful in my personal situation. I recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Runaway,’ by Peter May

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But there was something else in her gaze, something that I have never been able to identify, which left me unsettled then, and still to this day. A look that has haunted my worst nightmares and darkest hours. Almost as if God himself had peered through a crack in the brittle shell of my mortality to pass his judgment upon me ahead of the grave.

It’s not often I encounter a book that’s not only different from what I expected it to be, but wonderfully different. I expected Peter May’s Runaway to be yet another Baby Boomer paeon to the “glories” of the Swinging 60s. It is no such thing. Far from it.

Jack Mackay is a resident of Edinburgh, a man dwindling into old age. He has been edged out of his house by his daughter’s family and installed in a nursing home. He’s consumed with regrets over an unsuccessful life, over sins committed, dreams unfulfilled, and opportunities thrown away.

Then he’s summoned by an old friend, Maurice Cohen, who was lead singer of the band they were in together in their teens. In 1965, aged 17, they “ran away” to London, to be rock stars like the Beatles. Instead they experienced violence, victimization, and a peripheral connection with a famous celebrity murder.

Maurie is in the terminal stages of cancer now; not much time left. He shows Jack a newspaper story, telling how the man accused of the celebrity murder, who disappeared at the time, has now been found murdered. Maurie says the man was not guilty. He himself knows who did it, and they have an obligation to go to London and set things right.

It sounds insane, but Maurie doesn’t have much time left, and Jack feels a personal debt. They collect Dave, one of the other surviving band members, and dragoon Jack’s couch potato grandson, Ricky, into driving them. They set off on a ridiculous, ill-planned pilgrimage, retracing the route of their ridiculous, ill-planned “escape” 50 years before. Along the way we follow two parallel accounts – Jack’s own first-person memoir of the original trip, and a third-person account of their present 2015 journey. We will learn the source of Jack’s guilt, and the secret Maurie has been hoarding all these years, leading up to an explosive conclusion.

 I have no idea what Peter May believes. I suspect that, like most sensible modern people, he probably wouldn’t care much for my beliefs. But I have to say that I have rarely encountered a better description of sin and guilt – from the human point of view – than I found in Runaway. It amazed and moved me.

This is no CBA novel. Cautions for very adult themes. But I highly recommend Runaway to adult readers.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Emperor’s Sword,’ by Andrew Klavan

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I could tell just by looking at their faces that they were awed by the genius of my writing. At least, I could tell they were pretending to be awed by the genius of my writing – and really, this was Hollywood, so what was the difference? In this town, to be admired and to be in a position where people had to pretend to admire you were pretty much the same thing. In fact, the latter might’ve been a little tastier than the former, when you came right down to it.

I’d been waiting for the third and final volume of Andrew Klavan’s Another World fantasy series, but somehow I missed its release. I have remedied that omission now.

The Emperor’s Sword opens on a world in some ways far weirder than the fantasy world to and from which its hero has been shuttling. That weird world is Hollywood. Austin Lively has made it to the big time. He’s sold a screenplay to a major studio, he goes to the best parties, and he’s being hailed as an “important new talent.” He has an expensive car, an expensive home, and his pick of eager starlets to share his bed. However, like Hamlet, he has dreams, dreams that remind him of places and adventures he just can’t remember and doesn’t want to believe in.

But when his neglected girlfriend Jane is framed for murder, the memories come back in a storm. He has an unfinished job to do in the Other Kingdom, and he can’t save Jane unless he completes that job. He returns to the Other Kingdom, only to find it’s too late. The Emperor to whom he was to bring a message is dead. And Austin now needs to fight a duel he can’t win to save innocent people from death.

Fortunately, in the Other Kingdom, death sometimes works differently than it does here.

Nobody, but nobody, knows how to build plot tension like Andrew Klavan. The Emperor’s Sword puts you on a roller coaster like those old movie serials tried to, but failed. The roller coaster works here. The reader accompanies the hero from the depths of despair to the peaks of triumph and back, with barely a moment to catch his breath.

There’s also a lot of (no doubt semi-autobiographical) realism about Hollywood, and how truly evil and soul-destroying the industry and its culture can be. I do not recommend this book for younger readers, because there’s some very sordid stuff going on here. It pleases me, on the other hand, that top-grade fantasy is being written for an adult audience.

I’m a harsh critic of fantasy – I compare everything to a) Tolkien, or b) the things I imagine my own work to be. In terms of fantastic imagination, I wouldn’t say this book climbs the heights. Some of it seems kind of boiler-plate medieval to me. But in terms of storytelling and plotting – mixed in an uplifting way with brutal spiritual honesty – it would be hard to do better. Highly recommended for adults.