Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Burning Bright,’ by Nick Petrie

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She ticked off each item on her fingers. “You climbed a three-hundred-foot redwood. Got shot at, twice. Totaled my car. Saved my life, at least twice. Fractured your leg, cracked some ribs.” She paused for a moment, and Peter wondered how far she’d get into this. She took a breath. “You also killed at least one man, maybe more, depending on how you see things. You got stuck in the hospital, which made your post-traumatic stress flare up. And now we’re on the run in the middle of the night from whoever is hunting me.”

This one was really good.

Burning Bright, by Nick Petrie, is the second in a series about Peter Ash, a Marine war veteran who came home with PTSD that manifests itself as claustrophobia. He’s basically unable to spend any time indoors, so he’s been living under the sky for months, hiking and camping. In the redwoods of northern California he gets chased up a tree by a grizzly bear. There he unexpectedly encounters a climbing rope, which he follows up into a majestic, old-growth tree. Eventually he finds a platform in the upper branches, where he meets a beautiful young woman, pointing a bow and arrow at him.

Her name is June Cassidy. She’s a journalist, and her scientist mother died recently. Not long after, some men kidnapped her, but she managed to escape them, and now she’s here in a research post a friend built, hiding from the kidnappers, who’ve been trailing her. They are in fact at the bottom of the tree now, setting up a trap for her. Peter offers his considerable skills as a protector, and together they make their way to June’s car, in which they begin a breathless chase headed toward Seattle, and eventually into a confrontation with June’s eccentric father, a kind of a cross between Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs.

The writing in Burning Bright was extremely good. The plotting and the action never let up. What made it even better was that the characters were well-realized, and Peter’s and June’s developing relationship was a lot of fun.

Cautions for language and violence. Possible, hinted leftist opinions may become more apparent in later books (or not). But I highly recommend Burning Bright to anyone who enjoys a good thriller in the Jack Reacher vein.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Little Lie,’ by Christopher Greyson

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It’s always awkward reviewing a book in a genre (or sub-genre) you’re not very familiar with. If you criticize something, you don’t know whether it’s a routine feature of the form or not. If someone were to criticize my Erling books because they include magic, for instance, they’d be kind of missing the point.

Christopher Greyson is the author of the Jack Stratton novels, which I like very much, and he was kind enough to provide a free review copy of One Little Lie, which is a departure for him. It’s a women’s thriller.

Now writing women’s thrillers is a shrewd business move. I haven’t seen the statistics, but judging from the titles I see, women’s thrillers are a growth market. Women, after all, are by far the largest reading demographic. And (here I judge by the scripts I see as a translator) women have an insatiable thirst for stories with strong female lead characters, who overcome danger on their own. No rescue by knights in shining armor allowed. A hunky male love interest is acceptable – even desirable – but he has to be taken out of play in some way so the woman can discover her own strength and triumph independently.

That’s the kind of story One Little Lie is.

Kate Gardner has been a doormat all her life. She gave up her career aspirations when she married Scott Gardner, scion of a wealthy family in a small town. Then he dumped her for his high school sweetheart, manipulating her into accepting minimal child support. She is working as a receptionist, a job she hates, and trying to keep up with caring for her two young children. But lately she’s been troubled by depression and memory problems, and the medications she’s been prescribed haven’t been helping. And now Scott wants full custody of the kids.

As a side gig, she got an assignment from a friend to write a review on a new, sophisticated flying drone that can be controlled from her mobile phone. One night at her son’s football game, she tries the drone out, but then gets distracted. When the battery runs down, the drone homes in on her and lands on her head. When people come to help her, they find the drone, with footage on it showing a man stalking her. When the police come, Kate is embarrassed to admit that she was controlling the drone herself. Everyone assumes it belongs to the stalker. Later, Kate’s best friend and her ex-husband both tell her not to admit the omission to the police. If they catch you in “one little lie,” they won’t believe you. This is hard for Kate, a basically honest person, especially because she’s attracted to Ryan, one of the detectives, who seems to return her interest.

From that point, Kate’s life descends into chaos.  She loses her job, her best friend disappears, a slut-shaming campaign is launched against her, and she’s physically attacked in her home. All the while, memory lapses have her wondering if she’s losing her mind. Her wealthy mother-in-law, who claims to be on her side, gives her an ultimatum – she has to learn to stand up for herself. But if she fails, she’ll lose everything.

One Little Lie was an engaging read. I did have problems with some elements in the story, but I’m not in a position to know if these are standard tropes or weaknesses in this particular plot. A book of this kind calls necessarily for a final crisis where the woman is forced to discover her strength all on her own. But it seemed to me the resolution here was kind of contrived, depending too much on sheer coincidence.

Aside from that, it was an enjoyable read. Recommended, especially for female readers. Subtle Christian messages.

Fiction, Reviews

‘There are No Saints,’ by STephen Kanicki

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It’s 1857. Dexter James, an itinerant demonologist, comes to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he’s sure there must be a lot of demon-possessed people in the backwash of the recent oil rush. He has trouble getting business at first, until he performs a miracle of healing (to his surprise) and becomes a huge success; then he crashes on his own hubris. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a local prostitute, who helps him find his true destiny.

That’s a brief, bare=bomes outline of Stephen Kanicki’s There Are No Saints, which could be classed as Christian fantasy, I suppose, or at any rate religious fantasy. There was a certain amount of creativity in the writing, and the characters showed some genuine depth and development. The ending of the book, I must admit, moved me.

However, I didn’t really like it. The writing style was not outstanding (a number of homophone errors), and the diction was purely 21st Century. No effort was made whatever to make the narrative read like one that could conceivably have been written in the 19th Century.

And speaking of the time setting, it was never explained why Dex had what seemed to be Viagara pills to distribute, or how he knew the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous almost a century before they were composed. I was looking for some kind of time travel plot element, but there was none.

And, as a doctrinaire Christian, I don’t accept the theology expressed in the book. It’s syncretist, saying that all religions are really the same: all about love. Which means Jesus Christ and His Cross were unnecessary, and it’s all good works.

So, in aggregate, I don’t personally recommend There Are No Saints. But you might find it amusing. Cautions for some foul language.

Fiction, Reviews

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin, Rebus #1

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Having read the fourteenth book in Ian Rankin’s John Rebus series, I looked up the first one, published in 1987. It was fairly different overall. I’ll have to read a few more to see whether this one or the other is the anomaly.

In Knots and Crosses, DS John Rebus is pulled away from all of his current cases to join the growing team going after the separate kidnappings of two pre-teen girls. At his first conference, they announce it has become a murder investigation, and they have as many as zero leads. Rebus and a younger officer are assigned to comb the M.O. files for possible leads–the worst mental drudge. The police get nowhere until the murderer finally presses his point, that his main goal is Rebus himself.

Rankin has earned a lot of praise for his use of Edinburgh in these novels. Though Rebus is an officer at the fictional Great London Road police station, other details are well grounded. One of the main ideas you get from this book is that Edinburgh is good city, filled with stone walls and solid people. Kidnapping and murdering random girls couldn’t happen in this city. But Rebus and his fellow officers are dragged into the long shadows of sinful Scottish men.

Knots and Crosses delivers a fairly good original story for the series hero. In A Question of Blood, everyone knows Rebus doesn’t talk about his Army days, but in these pages all of that is spelled out. We also learn Rebus is a Christian, which means something unclear. Maybe he had a churched upbringing (though thinking of his father, I don’t know why they would attend services). He seems to hold to rudimentary Christian tenets and seek hope in a Good News Bible, but his sexual morality is complete mess and he avoids the church as if he has been wounded there. I wonder if we will see more of his faith in other books.

The main thing I disliked about this book is how the perspective jumps between many characters: a few cops, a couple victims, a newspaper man. His editor gets a couple paragraphs. The murderer gets a few lines. I think the ole universal third person may have been a better narrator.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Declare,’ by Tim Powers

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The cracks and thunders made syllables in the depleted air, but they didn’t seem to be in Arabic. Hale guessed that they were of a language much older, the uncompromised speech of mountain conversing with mountain and lightning and cloud, seeming random only to creatures like himself whose withered verbs and nouns had grown apart from the things they described.

Wow.

To what shall I compare Tim Powers’s novel, Declare? Think of John LeCarre. And cross it with C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, or… pardon my blushes… my own historical fantasy novels.

But really, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever read.

Andrew Hale is an English spy. He was born in Palestine and baptized in the Jordan River. He doesn’t know who his father was, though it’s rumored he was a fallen priest. He does know his mother was a failed nun. As a young boy he was introduced to a tall man named Jimmie Theodora, who swore him into a kind of secret organization – he didn’t understand what it was about. But eventually it led him to recruitment in British intelligence. And he began to glimpse a secret known to few and denied by all – that above the business of fighting the Germans and the Russians, there is a metaphysical war going on. Good vs. evil, principalities and powers of darkness in high places.

In occupied Paris in World War II, Andrew meets and falls in love with a Spanish Communist agent, Elena Ceneza-Bendiga, But their work will keep them apart, as Andrew carries out various assignments taking him to the deserts of Kuwait, to Turkey, Berlin and Moscow. And again and again he will come up against a man whose fate seems entwined with his – the charming, stuttering, utterly treacherous and amoral Kim Philby. The two men’s shared birthright will bring them together in epic confrontations on Mount Ararat and, finally, in Moscow.

This novel, as I mentioned last week, is very, very long. Be prepared to invest time in it. But it’s packed full of historical detail – Powers says in his afterword that all the dates and events (except for the invented supernatural activity) are scrupulously faithful to the documented record. It’s also packed with fascinating fantasy speculation.

The final impact of it all is hard to describe. Almost perception-altering. I highly recommend Declare.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Spy Who Came In From the Bin,’ by Christopher Shevlin

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‘He’s a hard man to photograph,’ said Lance.

‘But these are good likenesses, right?’ said Lizzie.

‘Sort of. It sounds weird to say, but there are other people who look more like Jonathon than he does himself.’

I’ve been trying to come up with blog topics all week, and I forgot I’d finished a book last week that I hadn’t reviewed yet.

There’s a third book in  Christopher Shevilin’s weird Jonathon Fairfax series, The Spy Who Came In From the Bin. Jonathan Fairfax, if you recall my earlier reviews, is a well-meaning Englishman who bumbles through life, never quite sure what’s going on as adventure swirls around him.

In this book, Jonathon wakes up in a garbage truck in Berlin, being unloaded from a bin, having completely forgotten who he is. He’s taken to a hospital, but manages to escape after an assassin shows up to murder him. Soon he’s taken in by a friendly American student and her Russian boyfriend. They go on the run, pursued by CIA killers, as Jonathon’s best friend and girlfriend rush to rescue him, assisted by other CIA killers, who may or may not actually be on their side.

It’s all very weird, in the style of these books, where there are very few actual gags to laugh at, but the situations are highly comic in cumulative effect.

What I disliked about this book was a lazy European anti-Americanism, that sees the US as the world’s only real problem. I’m not sure whether I can overlook that attitude enough to read the next book, assuming there is one.

But it’s funny. I can’t deny that.

Fiction, Reviews

Starting Inspector Rebus Series in the Middle

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I think I picked up of Ian Rankin’s A Question of Blood at a library sale. I remember bringing it home along with a Brad Meltzer book. I didn’t know anything about the series, not even that this is the 14th in a total of 23 (which was released last October). A Question of Blood was published in 2004. It may be the third novel that features Siobhan Clarke as a main character.

Rankin doesn’t punish new readers for starting in the middle. Even with Siobhan’s name (which I looked up as I began reading), Rankin explains the Irish pronunciation (Shi-VAWN) and makes a point of it with character interaction to help us along. All of the characters are introduced appropriately so that new readers will not be lost among many names.

As Siobhan’s name is foreign to the Scottish characters in this series, so are many of native elements foreign to me. I loved various Scottish words and details that cropped up as I read. At least, I attributed them to Scottish culture. Maybe I’m just ignorant. The writing is tight and suspenseful, perhaps even restrained.

In A Question of Blood, Rebus gets called to Queensberry to offer perspective on a murder-suicide at a private school involving a former army special forces soldier, the son of judge, and the son of an MP. It’s clear the soldier snapped and decided to kills some school kids, but why those kids in the common room of Port Edgar Academy and not any of the students he passed on the way? Was there some vendetta? Did they know each other?

At the same time, Siohban has been stalked by a man she tried to put away for assault. She’s started scanning for him out of windows and watching her back more than usual. It’s been going on for three weeks, and suddenly the stalker’s house burns, killing him. A coincidental accident or is someone seeking revenge on her behalf?

I plan to pick up the first Inspector Rebus novel next to see if Rankin started off as strong a writer as he is in this book or grows into it latter on.

Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Straight Shot,’ by Jack LIvely

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“You’re using yourself as bait, Keeler. Is that wise?”

“Probably better to think of me as a carnivorous plant with legs. If they’re wise, they’ll just give up now, immediately. At least they’ll have a chance of staying alive.”

I think the idea with Tom Keeler, hero of Jack Lively’s Straight Shot, is to emulate Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Tom is newly retired from US Air Force Search and Rescue. But he belonged to a special unit, one trained for weapons, tactics, and covert operations. He’s a very dangerous man. Right now he’s touring Europe. He stops off at the town of Alencourt, France, because his mother’s family came from there. Maybe he can scare up some relatives.

He’s hardly off the train before somebody tries to murder him. He handles that situation with aplomb, killing his assailant, and the police give him no trouble – in fact one of them, Officer Cecile Nazari, strikes some romantic sparks. When Tom learns that a local citizen who may be his cousin has been crippled by a similar attack, and that various murders are happening around town, he starts investigating. He finds clues relating to human smuggling and official corruption. So he makes up his mind to clean the town up.

What I liked best about Straight Shot was the writing. Jack Lively knows how to put a sentence and paragraph together. The final action seemed to me kind of predictable – the previously invulnerable hero suddenly becomes vulnerable, to increase dramatic tension. And female fighters are brought in for equal opportunity or something.

But all in all I thought Straight Shot a pretty good read. I might go on to the second book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Maine Events,’ by Rodney Riesel

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What a weird reading experience this one was.

Rodney Riesel’s novel The Maine Events begins with our hero, bestselling mystery writer Allen Crane, arriving in York Beach, Maine. Blocked in his creativity since the loss of his wife 3 years ago, he’s hoping a couple weeks at a motel by the beach will help him find his creativity again. With him comes his faithful mutt, Frankie.

On the first day, at a restaurant, he stumbles in on a couple guys fighting in the men’s room. He intervenes, and the bigger guy suddenly collapses with a mild heart attack. However, the next day the guy himself shows up at Allen’s room to assure him there’s no hard feelings.

In fact, everybody seems to be nice in York Beach. There’s the pretty waitress who goes out with Allen, the friendly family staying next door, the elderly couple from Oklahoma, and the gay guy who makes a pass at him (but whom Allen befriends anyway, just to show how openminded he is). For about half the book, nothing much really happens, though the character interactions are pleasant enough. Then a couple young boys disappear, and Allen starts putting clues together.

And at the end of a relatively implausible final action scene, the author comes in out of left field and turns the story in a whole different direction than it had been going up to then.

I did not like the ending. I do not recommend this book.

Also, the author has trouble with his characters. There’s a difference between giving your characters quirks and just throwing in weird behavior that makes no sense. That sin is committed now and then in this book. The writing isn’t actually bad – not great, but passable – but the author is capricious.

Poetry, Reviews

‘Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary,’ by Andrew P. Boynton

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A lone Geatish widow   a death-wail
braided for Beowulf.   Bound hard, 
she sang sorrowfully   of how she in full 
dreaded the dark days   that soon would come, 
a flock of the slain,   the fear of the folk, 
thralldom and shame….

Andrew P. Boynton is a friend of mine on Facebook, so I may be prejudiced, but I was greatly impressed by his recently released Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary.

Boynton, unlike some modern translators who’ve opted for rhymed verse or prose, has taken up the challenge of recreating Old English alliterative poetry (very similar to Norse). Lee Hollander took the same approach to Eddic poems. This is difficult to do in modern English, which lacks the flexibility of diction the old languages possess. One way to increase your options is to employ obscure words (something Hollander did too). However, these words are explained here in the copious notes. Tolkien fans (and Tolkien’s influence is a constant presence) will welcome the word “mathom,” though Boynton uses it to mean “treasure,” which is not quite how Tolkien used it.

I found Boynton’s Beowulf vigorous and enjoyable, though sometimes difficult to follow (the notes help). Seasoned fans of the poem will find it very satisfying. The Commentary seems to me (as an amateur) very good; the best modern scholarship is referenced, and Tolkien is there in abundance.

I will make this one recommendation – the paper version is probably better for most readers. I got the ebook, and this particular work is awkward to use in that format. It’s set up for facing pages – the translation on one side, the original Old English text on the other. That means the pages are tied to one another, so you can’t adjust typeface size as in an ordinary Kindle book. The print was quite small for me, so I had some trouble reading.

Otherwise, I recommend Beowulf: A New Translation and Commentary.