Category Archives: Reviews

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.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Restless Dead,’ by David J. Gatward

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David J. Gatward’s Detective Chief Inspector Grimm series continues with Restless Dead. It’s a small mystery, the kind that couldn’t actually happen, in the same way, in an urban setting. But Harry Grimm, facially-scarred war veteran, is settling in in the relatively bucolic Wensleydale region, and in these parts they give the public more personal service than cops did back in Bristol.

Retired Col. James Fletcher is devastated by the death of his wife, killed in an auto accident while driving him home on his birthday, because he’d been drinking. Although his two daughters, his son-in-law, and his grandson have rallied around him, he’s profoundly depressed. Lately he’s started imagining he’s seeing his wife again around the estate (already rumored to be haunted); the family reports it to the police, who find no sign of an intruder. Col. Fletcher is not mollified, and things are about to get deadly.

Also, somebody is rustling sheep in Wensleydale, and the father of one of Grimm’s team members is a victim.

The Grimm series is semi-cozy and character-driven. I like it a lot (in spite of the injection of a “genuine” spiritualist). Restless Dead ends with a cliffhanger, but the major mystery was solved, and I look forward to the next book, coming in June.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Basil’s War,’ by Stephen Hunter

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In fact, in one sense, the Third Reich and its adventure in mass death was a conspiracy against irony. Perhaps that is why Basil hated it so much and fought it so hard.

First of all, I have to take back a criticism of this book that I made last night. I said I was reading a novella I’d read before, which had been simply re-titled. Now that I’ve completed Basil’s War, based on the novella Citadel, I see that it is in fact a full novel (though a short one for author Stephen Hunter). He took Citadel and added some new action (mostly at the end), and made the whole thing a lot more complex.

Basil St. Florian is a British SOE agent in World War II. Like the character in Beau Geste, he possesses almost no virtue save courage. He’s good at lying, stealing, killing, and seducing women. In ordinary civilian life, he’d probably end up in prison. But now, as a top field agent, he’s more likely to end up dead – and he isn’t greatly concerned about it.

In a secret war room under London, he gets briefed (by Alan Turing, among others) on his next mission (should he choose to accept it), which will involve making his way to Paris and into a museum library. There he is to photograph certain pages from a rare manuscript, which has been used as a “book code.” This code will identify a Russian agent in the Bletchley Park cryptography operation. There are reasons for this, but Basil’s job is to get to the book.

We follow Basil as he parachutes into France, steals false identity papers, bluffs his way through security checks, and generally stays one step ahead of the Germans – until he loses a step.

Basil is an interesting character to follow – he’s very good at his job, and more sympathetic than he probably ought to be, mostly because of his wit. The book is full of mordant observations on the nature of war and of warriors, plus the characters of the French and the Germans. (As well as intimate moments with Vivian Leigh.) The riddles within enigmas that unfold at the end are clever and surprising.

Stephen Hunter is a fine thriller writer, and I think most readers will enjoy Basil’s War. Cautions for mature material, but for a war story it’s pretty lighthearted.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

A run of lackluster books and movies

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My reading of late has been oddly frustrating. After a beautiful Syttende Mai (the Norwegian Constitution Day, on which I had a couple actual human interactions, both of them surprisingly pleasant) I’ve come up against a string of bum books.

First there was a novel from a series I hadn’t revisited in a while. I didn’t get far into it before I remembered why I’d stopped reading the books; I saw some ugly stuff coming and sent the whole thing into the virtual rubbish bin. Then I started a Christian novel that looked intriguing. I have an idea the story might well be worth reading, but the prose was so awful I gave up on that one, too.

Now I’m reading a new book by a favorite author, which turns out on closer inspection to be a novella. A novella I’ve already read. Re-released under a new title. I’m still reading, because it’s pretty good, but I’m a little bitter too.

I’m in the habit of watching old movies on Amazon Prime in the afternoons. Yesterday I saw “High Voltage,” which stars William Boyd (before he was Hopalong Cassidy) and Carole Lombard (in her first major movie role, before she added the “e” to her first name). It was a highly moral melodrama about bus passengers caught in a blizzard in the Sierra Nevadas, and ends with a repentant Boyd on his way to jail in St. Paul.

Today it was “The Naked Hills,” with David Wayne and Denver Pyle. This was a western with aspirations. Instead of the standard shoot-em-up, it’s a story about how greed destroys a man’s life. David Wayne, in a rare starring role, plays a man who grows obsessed with finding a fortune, in the 1849 Gold Rush and after. The message was commendable, but the story was one-dimensional, and the resolution anticlimactic.

What surprised me was the theme song. It’s a number called “The Four Seasons,” by Herschel Burke Gilbert and Bob Russell. I knew this song from before. I have blogged here previously about my fondness for the old “Yancy Derringer” TV series. During the series’ original run, it had its own title song, “The Ballad of Yancy Derringer.” But when it went into syndication, for some reason (probably having to do with copyrights) they changed it to an instrumental theme. And that theme was this same “The Four Seasons” melody. Only without the verses they use in the movie.

There are even lyrics, which somebody sings at the beginning. As best I remember, they go something like this:

We have four seasons, four seasons  
To make our dreams come true.  
God gives a man four seasons, that’s all that he can do.

I don’t know if that last “he” refers to God or the man.

Kind of depressing, actually. But I have an ear worm now.

And if you have to have an ear worm, it might as well be a song you like.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shooting Season,’ by David J. Gatward

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I read and reviewed the first three Inspector Harry Grimm novels previously, and liked them. Somehow the series fell off my radar. But I picked up the fourth book, Shooting Season, recently, and found it still worked for me.

Harry Grimm has a face that literally scares people – due to an IUD explosion during his service as a paratrooper. He was a detective in the city of Bristol, but was seconded up to rural Wensleydale in Yorkshire when the local inspector went on leave. That leave has been extended, and Harry is discovering he quite likes the place. He likes the fresh air, the scenery, and the people. His team (they have no actual police station, but operate out of the community center) is low-key but smart and professional, and they’ve taken to him.

Charlie Baker is a bestselling thriller writer, famously arrogant and hard to work with. Because his latest work is set in a shooting lodge in Yorkshire, his agent (and former lover) has set up a “shooting” (clay pigeons) weekend in the area. But at a kick-off bookstore reading, a fan stands up to accuse Charlie of using a ghost writer. What makes this even more awkward is that it happens to be true – Charlie’s “editor,” also visiting at the lodge, does in fact do most of the work. Also present are Charlie’s elderly accountant, his young female assistant, and a couple shabby-nobility hangers-on.

After the fiasco at the reading, Charlie gets more drunk than usual, and clashes with most of his “friends.” In the middle of the night he’s seen driving off, and the next day his body is found in a field near his crashed Porsche, his head literally blown off by a shotgun. At first it looks like suicide, but the mechanics of this shotgun make that impossible.

There’s no lack of plausible suspects, but everybody has an alibi. Inspector Grimm will need to do some heavy thinking on this one. But he’ll also need to think about his own greatest mystery – what to do about his criminal father, who killed his mother.

These books are pretty low-key, almost “cozy,” but with an edge. I like them a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mercy,’ by Brett Battles

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I’m a fan of Brett Battles’ novels about covert operations “cleaner” Jonathan Quinn, and the spin-off Night Man novels have been fun too. The Night Man is Nate, Quinn’s associate, who has taken up a sideline in his spare time – essentially being Batman. Along with his sort-of girlfriend Jar, an Asian woman on the Autism spectrum who does the computer stuff, he intervenes to help people who need help, but can’t be helped by the law. It’s nice, and his relationship with Jar is quite sweet. Nate is motivated to these actions by the voice of his ex-girlfriend, Lisa, who is dead. Nate doesn’t believe in ghosts, but the voice always seems to be right.

But I was a little disappointed with the latest Night Man book, Mercy. Because this one takes Nate and Jar out of their usual urban environments into American flyover country. And they don’t look good there – in my opinion – though I’m sure they see it differently.

The Cleaner team is on suspension right now, so Nate and Jar have more time for their vigilante activities. Unfortunately, those activities have begun to attract media interest, which they don’t want. So they decide to get a small Winnebago and take a road trip. Jar has never seen much of the US.

At the Grand Canyon, guided by Lisa’s voice, they hike along the edge of the Canyon and rescue a teenaged boy who is stuck on a ledge just below the brink. When the boy returns to his camper, he is cruelly punished by his father. Nate and Jar do not hesitate to make this guy their target, following the family to their home in Mercy, Colorado, planning to document his abuse and turn the evidence over to the authorities.

However, they soon discover that the man is involved in plenty of other shady activities. There’s a criminal conspiracy under way, and Nate and Jar are on it, whatever the danger.

The adventure in Mercy was up to Brett Battles’ usual high standards. What I didn’t like was Nate’s attitude. He looks at these small-town people and has nothing good to say about them. They’re too white, they use the wrong pronouns, they’re not worried enough about Covid masking. As a resident of the Midwest, I found all this condescending. Nobody in the town is depicted positively, except for the abused kids.

I won’t be boycotting Battles’ books, but I hope he sticks in the future to people he understands and can sympathize with.

Reviews

Miniseries Review: ‘Wisting’

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I’d been waiting a long time to see the Wisting miniseries. It was one of the very first projects I worked on as a screenplay translator, and the scripts impressed me so much I tried the original books by Jørn Lier Horst. I became a fan, and I generally don’t like Scandinavian Noir.

When the series was finally released for American audiences, it was streamed on the Sundance Channel, which limited its audience. It’s now available on Amazon Prime, but you have to pay an extra fee to stream it. I waited in frustration for further developments, and finally broke down and ordered the Blu-Ray.

More than I usually pay for discs, but I have a personal stake in this one.

I was in no way disappointed.

If you recall from my book reviews (here’s one), William Wisting is a police detective in the small city of Larvik, Norway. He’s played here by Sven Nordin, who possesses perhaps the perfect glum Scandinavian Noir face. He’s still mourning the recent death of his wife, and copes by obsessing on his work, with the result that both his adult children feel neglected and resentful. Justifiably.

When a murdered man’s body is found under a tree on a Christmas tree farm, an item on the body carries the fingerprint of one of America’s most wanted serial killers. Once forensics prove that the dead man could not have been the fugitive, a pair of FBI agents, led by Maggie Griffin, played by Carrie-Ann Moss, are sent over from the US to “consult.” Naturally there is friction between the two teams, but unsteady progress is made.

Meanwhile, Williams’ daughter Line (Thea Green Lundberg), a journalist for VG, one of Norway’s major newspapers, decides to do a story on the man who lived next door to the Wistings, who was found dead in his chair, unmissed by anyone for months. When she begins to suspect the man was murdered, her father thinks her imagination has run away with her… an attitude he will come to regret.

That’s the first five episodes. The second five involve a separate, but slightly related case a few months later. The FBI is gone now, and all the dialogue is subtitled Norwegian.

The discovery of the serial killer in the previous case calls into question a local man’s conviction for kidnapping and murder in the same period. His lawyer accuses Wisting, as chief investigator, of evidence tampering. Wisting is temporarily suspended, but that doesn’t stop him investigating secretly (and illegally). Plus a young girl who had appealed to the police for protection because she “felt” she was being stalked, actually disappears.

Line, at the same time, is doing a story on a man who was murdered in a park while walking his dog. Her interviews with the man’s few friends raise her suspicions about who might be responsible; she too gets suspended from her job.

Themes of social alienation and human barriers pervade the series, enhanced by wonderful photography. Especially in the first half, set in the winter, black-on-white, angular winter landscapes convey an evocative, barren mood. This is not picture-postcard Norway – Larvik boasts neither magnificent fjords nor high mountains. It’s a workaday place for workaday human tragedies.

Wisting was extremely well acted, tightly plotted, and suspenseful. It sucked me into bingeing on it, and I’m pretty sure it would have done so if I hadn’t had a (small) part in the production.

In fact, I was surprised how little I had contributed. There were only a handful of scenes in the 9th episode that I remember translating. A couple earlier scenes, I think, were highly revised and compressed versions of ones I worked on as well.

Highly recommended, though pricey. Cautions for language, disturbing situations, and some nudity.