There are books I approach knowing they’ll fascinate me, but also with a certain fear. Because I know they’ll push my personal buttons. Birthday Girl, by Matthew Iden, is that kind of book.
Amy Scowcroft is a woman with nothing in her life but a
quest. A recovered drug addict, she lost custody of her daughter Lacey, who
then – disappeared. Without a trace. People searched, the police investigated,
but the girl had vanished.
One compassionate policeman gives her a suggestion…
reluctantly. He knows a guy, a former forensic psychologist, who was pretty
good at figuring out motives and identifying criminals. His name is Elliott Nash.
The problem is, Elliott’s a homeless bum now. He too had had his child kidnapped.
And murdered. But there’s a place he might be found.
Amy goes and finds him. At first he resists helping her. He
can’t even help himself.
But then he changes his mind. This penniless woman and this
homeless man, with no more resources than an unreliable car and a very few
bucks between them, start tracing down a few facts. Old facts. Questionable
facts. But they have nothing to lose, and are willing to go to whatever lengths
they have to, to find Lacey.
Alternating with the plot thread of Amy and Elliott is the thread that tells us what’s happening to Lacey. Because she is alive. But she’s in the hands of a deeply troubled and dangerous person, one who keeps several children in a remote house. That person has a script and a plan for each of the children’s lives… and deaths.
Birthday Girl is compelling and heart-wrenching, with a ticking clock plot and a neat twist at the end. Also inspirational, in a spiritually generic way.
Birthday Girl grabbed me by the backbone and shook me up. It was painful to read, for personal reasons, but I couldn’t put it down.
Highly recommended, with cautions for intense material.
Though I am not least among Andrew Klavan’s fanboys, I’m not a huge fan of Young Adult fiction, being a serious grownup and stuff. So I skipped Nightmare City when it came out. Now I find it on sale on Kindle, so I gave it a shot. I’ve got to say, it’s some ride.
Tom Jordan is a high school student, a reporter on his
school paper. Along with his mother he’s still mourning the death of his
brother, who died in service in the Middle East.
Then one morning he awakens to a world right out of a horror
movie. His home is empty, his mother has disappeared, and the house is
surrounded by a strange white fog, in which malevolent, zombie-like creatures
wander. They attack Tom when he goes outside, but seem to be restrained from
entering his house – at first.
A message from Tom’s dead brother is broadcast from a television set. There’s something he’s supposed to do, but he doesn’t understand. Then his girlfriend appears, urging him to go to an old ruined monastery above the town. There’s also a voice he hears from time to time, which he learns – almost at the cost of his life – not to trust.
His searching will take him out into the fog, to his school,
and to the old monastery. Along the way he’ll realize that he’s dreaming – but it’s
a serious dream. The choices he makes here will have life and death
consequences. There’s a story to be reported, and only Tom can report it.
I wasn’t sure what to think of Nightmare City at first. The beginning read like a standard teenagers vs. zombies movie script – lots of scares and chases and gore, not a lot of substance. But that was just the hook. The story got deeper and deeper as it proceeded, and in the end it was profound and deeply moving.
Reviewers compare Nightmare City to Stephen King, but I’d say it’s more like Dean Koontz. And that’s a good thing. I highly recommend Nightmare City, for teens and adults both.
There are two novels in the DI Jack Knox police procedural series to date. However, this first volume, The Innocent and the Dead, also includes a prequel novella, Labyrinth.
DI Jack Knox, the hero, is an Edinburgh, Scotland detective. He’s divorced, and his wife and daughter have emigrated to Australia. He is now dating a female subordinate, which is technically out of bounds but nobody seems very concerned about it.
The first story, Labyrinth, involves an attractive young woman found strangled near a tourist landmark. She is found to have been working as a prostitute, though she also seems to have been a practicing evangelical Christian. The investigation is complicated, but gets wrapped up relatively quickly.
In The Innocent and the Dead, a wealthy distiller’s college-age daughter has been kidnapped. After initially cooperating with the police, her father opts to follow the kidnapper’s instructions and keep the detectives in the dark about the ransom drop. This makes it hard for the cops, trying to keep tabs on the father as he attempts to avoid them – it appears at times they would have done better to let him alone. And when the payoff is missed, and a girl is found murdered, it all looks very bad….
This is a new mystery series, and the characters are still not entirely in focus. I found the stories competently written and entertaining, though not highly memorable. At a couple points, I thought the narrative was veering into church-bashing, but the author avoided that.
Moderately recommended. Cautions for mild adult stuff. I
might read the second novel.
Marty Singer, retired cop and occasional private detective, is invited down to Virginia’s horse and wine country, along with his girlfriend Julie Atwater, by her friend Ruth Colvin, who runs a boarding stable. They’re expecting a relaxing vacation. But Ruth has a reason for asking them. Her farm is in trouble. Someone has been sabotaging her operation – knocking down fences so the horses can get loose. In the competitive world of horse people, only a little doubt about the safety of her facilities could ruin her. That’s how The Bitter Fields begins.
Then murder intervenes. One of Ruth’s employees, a charming polo player named Freddie Farrar, is shot to death. Marty can’t help but suspect there’s a connection between the crimes. Who could hate Ruth so much? There are suspects – a bigoted old lady who wants some of her land for a burial plot, a rich young woman who’d been having an affair with Freddie, and that woman’s husband – who has been arrested, but whose guilt Marty doubts.
All this is played out against the backdrop of the changing south, where history is a living presence, opinions are in transition, and people often cover up their real thoughts. One thing I liked about this book was that although it seemed at first to involve a lot of tired southern stereotypes, those characters were treated sympathetically and allowed to have their say – and to change. It all got kind of heart-warming in the end. Except for the killing, of course.
Recommended. Cautions for the usual, particularly sexual
matters, but not bad.
After borrowing this book from the public library, I found that I’d already read and reviewed an earlier novel in the Jonathan Stride mystery series. I said I found it well written, but I didn’t love it. That’s pretty much my reaction to Alter Ego, Brian Freeman’s ninth in the series. But I read it free, so why complain?
Jonathan Stride is a police detective in Duluth, Minnesota. His two chief subordinates are an Asian-American woman and his wife. Both, needless to say, are gorgeous. As is also his teenaged adopted daughter, a former prostitute whom he and his wife more or less rescued, and who is beginning to reintegrate her life.
It’s big news when a Hollywood film company comes to Duluth
to make a movie. Jonathan is less happy than most of the locals, because it’s a
fictionalized dramatization of one of his own cases. He is being played by Dean
Casperson, one of Hollywood’s major players, but the whole business makes him
uncomfortable.
Then a man dies in a freak collision with a deer on a
snow-covered highway. His ID turns out to be bogus, and a gun is found in the
car. Shortly after that, a local college girl who hung around with the movie
people is reported missing. Putting two and two together, the police start
searching the area near the auto accident, and sure enough – the young woman’s
body is found in the snow, a bullet in her head.
And then she turns out to have been using an assumed
identity too.
It’s all confusing, and it’s not about to get simpler. On
top of the murder mystery, there are questions about certain behaviors on the
movie set, behaviors no one will talk to the police about. Stride and his
co-workers (along with author Freeman’s other series character, Florida PI Cab
Bolton, who shows up for his own reasons) will have to move fast and smart to
prevent very ugly history from repeating itself, not on film but in real life.
As stipulated above, I find Brian Freeman a good writer, and I can find no fault with his storytelling. I’m not sure why his books leave me kind of cold, except for a certain political correctness I sense in their construction. Most of the cops in this story are women, and they’re all beautiful. I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager that is not a statistically accurate portrayal of the Duluth police department.
Ah, but I’m probably just jaundiced. I note that my review
of the previous Jonathan Stride book complained about excessively explicit sex
scenes. I’m happy to report he seems to have toned that down.
I might even read another book in the series – if I can
borrow it from the library.
Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.
The organizers of the “Great Pleasure Excursion,” which sailed from New York on the steamer Quaker City in 1867, must have come to regret their decision. I mean their decision to include in their party the journalist Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was traveling on assignment for a San Francisco newspaper. This was (I believe) one of the earliest international pleasure cruises in history – made possible by the capacity of a steam ship to travel on a more predictable schedule than a sailing ship. The notes Twain kept on that voyage would emerge as The Innocents Abroad, his most popular book during in his lifetime.
Although described as a pleasure excursion, the main purpose of the voyage was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule. Along the way, however, they would take in parts of North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and Constantinople (still called by that name). On the way home they would see the sights of Egypt. It was quite a journey, and physically demanding by the standards of travel in our own day.
Mark Twain, only then becoming a celebrity, was prepared to
subject everything he beheld to a typically American scrutiny. It seemed to him
that in a lot of cases, when his fellow travelers exclaimed over the beauty or
wonder of some piece of art or scenic vista, they were only parroting the
responses their guide books had provided them. When Twain found something a
disappointment or a humbug he said so – and seems to have delighted in shocking
his fellow travelers. Which is not to say he lacked appreciation. When something
impresses him, he says it. At some points he grows almost reverent.
Twain divides his fellow travelers into two parties – the “sinners”
and the “pilgrims.” That doesn’t mean they broke up into cliques. He has a
group of friends he keeps company with, and some of them are pilgrims. He
confesses to admiring them in some respects. But when they appear hypocritical
to him (as when they lengthen their overland journeys on a couple of days in
order avoid traveling on the Sabbath, in spite of inconvenience to fellow
travelers and cruelty to their horses), he seems to take satisfaction in pointing
it out. The man is clearly keeping score. (He is also frustrated – rightly – by
members of the party who insist of chipping pieces off monuments as souvenirs.)
The Catholic Church comes in for a great deal of criticism – he is appalled by the display of wealth in cathedrals, contrasted with the miserable poverty he saw in European streets. However, when he observes real virtue displayed by churchmen, such as the Dominican monks who cared for the sick during a cholera epidemic, or the desert monks who gave his party hospitality in the Palestinian desert, he does it justice. It seems to me (and this is my take on him in general, though I’m not an expert) that he was a man who wrestled with God. He could not be an atheist (in part because he’d have no God to be angry at), but he considered himself too smart to be taken in by any revealed religion. A very American attitude, that, and one that would grow influential.
The humor of The Innocents Abroad arises partly from Twain’s characteristic style – flowery Victorian prose constantly stumbling into premeditated bathos – and his Missourian “show me” attitude. He is not much impressed, for instance, with the artistic works of the Old Masters, but grants that he may have simply been overwhelmed by the numbers of them in places like Rome and Florence. He loves to describe the filth of European cities and is positively scandalized by the tiny size of the Holy Land.
Almost any subject is interesting when described by an interesting man. An expedition like this one, full of material fascinating in itself, can hardly fail to engage the reader when a man like Mark Twain chronicles it. And that’s what we get with The Innocents Abroad.
I read The Innocents Abroad in the linked Kindle edition, which is not a particularly good one. Although it’s described as illustrated, the illustrations in this version are not the ones that properly go with the book. They are images of 19th Century paintings with no particular connection to the text, and even those only show up in the first section. Also there are no proper paragraph breaks.
I reviewed the first book in Jason Richards’ Drew Patrick mystery series the other day. I told you I thought the book not well written, but that I appreciated the spirit of the thing. I liked the hero and his supporting cast, and the positive atmosphere.
So I invested in Shattered, the second book in the series. I hoped author Richards might have learned a little with the passage of time, or perhaps got an editor to help him.
Alas, there’s been no improvement on the writing front.
I like it that Drew has a traditional PI’s office above a Cambridge, Mass. city street. Such offices in hard-boiled mysteries always give me a warm, homey feeling – and it’s nice having Drew’s beagle mix, Dash, there to keep us company.
A couple named Jeffrey and Cynthia Holland are the clients
who come to the office this time out. Their daughter Ashley has disappeared,
and they’re concerned. They don’t want to go to the police, because they fear
publicity.
Alas, Ashley is dead already. Her murder seems to be tied to
the deaths of some other attractive young women – young women who, it turns
out, had been working for a high class escort service, and had been involved
with the same man – a high-powered Hollywood studio owner.
There’s not much mystery in this one; author Richards identifies
the guilty party early on, making the plot a race against the clock to prevent
the next murder.
It seemed to me a lot of opportunities to raise the dramatic tension were lost here. The guilty party could have been concealed, for one thing. And instead of the cops loving Drew and being happy to have him pitch in, they could have resented him and blocked his efforts, in the more plausible tradition of cops in the hard-boiled genre. There could have been conflict between Drew and his girlfriend Jessica.
Also, dramatic opportunities were lost. The character of
Cynthia Holland, Ashley’s mother, is intriguing, but we don’t get to know her very
well.
And there were lots of writing problems. Mistaken use of
homonyms. Spelling errors. Overwriting – Drew tells us more than we need to
know, and explains himself too much. A good editor would have cut this
manuscript down by thousands of words.
So my verdict remains the same. I salute and appreciate the
author’s effort. But he’s not writing very good books at this point. I hope he
ups his game.
The other night, on a sudden whim, I went to YouTube and watched a film I’d only read about. It’s a 1935 English mystery called The Silent Passenger. It has the distinction of being the first cinematic depiction of Dorothy Sayers’ detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Miss Sayers wrote the story especially for the film. Here it is, if you’re interested.
I’d heard bad things about this film, and it generally lived
down to its reputation.
Actually, that’s kind of unfair. For its time and
environment, it’s not a badly done film. It’s a clever, complicated story about
blackmail and mixed-up luggage. It’s atmospheric, and the final showdown in the
railroad repair facility is fairly exciting.
What’s wrong with it – and the reason Dorothy Sayers hated
it – is the portrayal of Lord Peter. Peter Haddon, a well-respected actor of
the day, seems appallingly miscast. He has a long nose – which is right – but
otherwise he’s too tall and too dark – and kind of oily, like a gigolo. Instead
of a monocle, he sports a repellant little mustache. And instead of playing Lord
Peter as we love him – as an affected, amusing twit in the tradition of the
Scarlet Pimpernel, he walks around with his mouth gaping open like the village
idiot.
Still, it has its place in history. You might find it
amusing.
It isn’t often I like a book without considering it well written. But that’s the case with Jason Richards’ novel Chasing Shadows, first in his Drew Patrick private eye series.
Drew Patrick works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He gets hired by a single mother named Bonnie Ross, who is concerned about her teenaged daughter Tina’s relationship with a young man named Aaron. Aaron is a college student and a promising football player, but Bonnie doesn’t trust him, and Tina has changed and grown distant since they started dating.
There’s nothing criminal about that, but Drew agrees to
check the boy out. Turns out Bonnie’s concerns are justified. Aaron has been
working as a collector for a loan shark, and is being pressured to commit
murder. But Drew, assisted by his girlfriend Jessica (also a PI), a couple
friendly sheriff’s detectives, and his faithful beagle mix, Dash, will do his
best to get between the kids and disaster.
Okay, about this book. It’s not very well written. There are proofreading and spelling problems. The dialogue is often turgid – a lot more contractions could have been employed, for one thing. The author’s attempts at wit are hit and miss – more often than not he presses his jokes where a lighter touch would have been more effective.
But I appreciated what he seems to be doing here. He seems to be trying to recreate the magic of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books – Spenser worked not far away in Boston. The Spenser books were refreshing in their time. Unlike past hard-boiled shamuses, Spenser was optimistic in attitude and took care of his health. He also had healthy relationships with women, and eventually connected with a regular girlfriend. I really liked those books until Parker allowed Spenser to become totally whipped.
Similarly, Drew Patrick is a positive guy with a healthy attitude. He is devoted to his girlfriend, cheerfully rejecting all passes from other women. He even has a dog – something often useful in breaking the ice with people, and (for most of us) a sign of good character. Also, perhaps, a nod to the Thin Man.
But he isn’t entirely believable. He doesn’t seem to care much
about paying the bills, and pursues “justice” even when not being paid. And the
regular cops seem happy to have him meddle in their investigations (something I
find hard to believe).
So I can’t give Chasing Shadows my highest recommendation. But I won’t deny I kind of enjoyed the book. You might too. Only mild cautions for adult content.
I’ve cut out buying the pricey books for the time being. But it turns out I’d pre-ordered Michael Connelly’s new Harry Bosch/Renee Ballard book, The Night Fire. So I read it, and now I’ll review it.
As you may recall if you’re following the books (not the Amazon
Plus TV show), Harry Bosch is pretty old now (about my age), and is retired as
an LAPD detective. But his old motto, “Everybody matters or nobody matters,”
still drives him, so he finds ways to keep involved. Mostly by providing help
(off the books) to the young detective Renee Ballard. Renee works the night
shift, which she likes, because it allows her to work alone. (She can generally
call on Harry if she needs backup.)
One night Renee gets called to a scene of death by fire. A homeless
man has burned to death in his tent. It looks like an accident, but
investigators say no. However, the case is assigned to Robbery-Homicide, and
Renee gets shut out. But she doesn’t forget about it.
Then Harry Bosch receives a surprising legacy. An old cop,
once his own mentor, died recently, and he left something behind for Harry. It’s
a “murder book” – a ring binder containing all the case notes for an old
homicide investigation. The thing was police property, and should not have left
police custody. The case involves the murder of a drug addict in his car in an
alley. For the life of him, Harry can’t figure why his old friend stole this
book, or kept it. There’s no sign he ever investigated it on his own.
What follows for both Renee and Harry is a case of what I call “retro-telescoping prioritization,” a situation where you set out to do one thing, but can’t do that until you do another thing, but there’s something else you have to do before you can do that. The plot of The Night Fire gets fairly complicated, and I lost track of a few threads now and then. But it all comes together in the end, and there’s a suitably suspenseful payoff.
The Night Fire was not the best book in the Harry Bosch saga, but it wasn’t bad. Cautions for language and adult situations, and a brief public service announcement about gay rights. Connelly fans will enjoy this new installment in the series.
I am concerned about Renee Ballard, though. She’s surviving
on a diet of coffee and surfing. If she doesn’t resolve some of her personal
issues, she’s gonna crash hard.
