Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dying Breath,’ by Blake Banner

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Here we slowed, but not much, and moved, hooting and honking, among cars and motorized rickshaws, in a city that looked like it was built in the twenty-fifth century to be inhabited by people from the fifth century.

Book 2 in Blake Banner’s Cobra series, about elite assassin Harry Bauer, is Dying Breath. It’s as much fun as the first one.

As I read the Cobra books, I’m reminded, in a way, of Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Except that I like Bauer better than Bond (though I’ll admit I’ve only read a couple Bond books). I find James Bond kind of flat as a character. Harry Bauer is an interesting person, and he occasionally hints at opinions I can get behind. On the heroic indestructibility scale, he’s certainly Bond’s equal.

As I mentioned in my last review, Harry Bauer is a former commando, now employed by a super-secret, non-governmental security organization to take out the worst people in the world. His latest assignment seems relatively straightforward – to infiltrate a New York hotel and execute two Chinese scientists who are working on a plague that could become pandemic.

But, as any reader will expect, things don’t go according to plan. The set-up isn’t what Harry expected, and he ends up on a quest that takes him from New York to Casablanca to Bangkok, and which will introduce him to an intriguing femme fatale with lots of deadly secrets.

What any reader of this book will note is that it’s relevant in a very particular way. A moment of recognition comes packed inside at no additional charge. You’ll know what I mean.

I noted one plot problem: Harry makes use of an EMP (Electro-magnetic pulse) machine to knock out electronic systems, but they don’t seem to affect his or his partner’s cars. This is not explained.

Highly recommended as entertainment. Morally problematic in diverse ways.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead of Night,’ by Blake Banner

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The maître d’ sat me next to a table of noisy, overdressed beautiful people; the kind who leave their plastic surgeon’s designer label hanging out of the tucks behind their ears.

Harry Bauer, hero of Blake Banner’s Dead of Night, is an American and an orphan. Somehow his wanderings led him to Britain, where he joined the Special Services. He’s a valued and effective commando, until the night in Afghanistan when he nearly kills a prisoner – an Al Qaida leader who raped, tortured, and murdered an entire village. He gets kicked out of the service, and is soon back home in New York without job prospects.

There is one party willing to hire a guy like him for security work, however, in spite of his hazy military record – a Russian gangster. Harry goes to work for him, but he goes in with a plan – one that will leave a lot of bad guys dead, and Harry considerably richer.

But then he’s detained by some mysterious agents, who escort him to an interview with the head of a secret, international security operation called Cobra. Cobra is not directly sponsored by any government. Its sole purpose is killing – eliminating the worst of the worst, whom the law cannot touch. Harry agrees to join them with little hesitation. Especially because his first target is the same terrorist he had to let go in Afghanistan.

Trouble is, the CIA is holding that monster as an information source, and Harry will have to get through them to get to his target.

Piece of cake.

I occasionally read military action thrillers, but they aren’t my favorite reading fare. But Dead of Night went down real easy with me. I finished it quickly, and had a good time with it. The action never lags, the prose is good (it even made me chuckle occasionally), and Harry comes through as a complex, fully developed character. I hastened to buy the second volume in the series.

I hesitate to recommend this book wholeheartedly, because it’s very bloody, and the body count is high. There’s also the moral question of revenge and whether it’s right to kill just because the victim “needs killing,” so to speak. So the moral ambivalence here is greater than in your average mystery. And, of course there’s always the language and adult themes.

But it sure was a fun read.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Reluctant Detective,’ by Tom Fowler

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C. T. Ferguson is the scion of a wealthy Baltimore family (his given name is, I kid you not, Coningsby). His only distinctions are skills at martial arts and computer hacking. He just returned from three years in Hong Kong, during which he helped some dissidents out and spent a horrific 19 days in a Chinese prison, before being deported.

Now he wants nothing more than to spend his parents’ money, but they are determined to make something of him. They’ve offered him a deal – work for free at some occupation that helps people, and they’ll provide a generous allowance. After some dithering, he settles on becoming a private eye. Thus he is The Reluctant Detective.

C. T. doesn’t really know anything about private investigation, beyond what he’s learned from TV and novels. But he sets up his office and goes to work. His first case is, as might be expected, a domestic. Alice Fisher is convinced her husband is cheating on her. C. T. uses his hacking skills to examine the husband’s life, does some discreet surveillance, and decides the man is faithful – even devoted. But now he’s curious about Alice, the wife. There are certain irregularities in her life that make him suspicious about what this whole exercise is in service of. Then somebody gets killed, and C. T. is hip deep in trouble and danger.

The Reluctant Detective wasn’t awful. The prose was generally good, which is a distinction in our times. But two elements kept me from getting engaged in the story.

First of all, I didn’t like the hero/narrator. C. T. never comes to life as a character, or inspires sympathy. His actions and thoughts seem uncoordinated, not rising from any central motivational core. I had the idea the author might have intended him to be a modern Lord Peter Wimsey, but Dorothy Sayers did it better. Perhaps C. T. needs to get a monocle.

Secondly, I didn’t believe the story. The author seems to be as clueless about the law, police procedure, and what a private detective does as his hero is. He seems to think that P.I.s carry some kind of official authority. He thinks a private citizen can just waltz into a police station and drop into an interrogation observation room without being challenged. And he greatly overestimates the willingness of cops to invite P.I.s into their investigations (even when, as in the case, the cop is the P.I.’s cousin). He also raises intuition to the level of evidence, which just doesn’t wash.

I read The Reluctant Detective all through, and that sets it above a lot of other books. But I really don’t recommend it. Cautions for language, as you’d expect.

Fiction, Reviews

Keep It Light, the Fat Man Says

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I know you aren’t used to me blogging every day. Coming here and finding I haven’t posted anything is like walking out of a cramped corridor onto an open patio. The emptiness feels fresh, and you need a bit of air after wading through the ever-swirling stream of political social media. Filthy memes, floating GIFs, and faux deep thought that rises to the surface leaves a reader feeling foul. So naturally you come here, hoping I haven’t written anything.

Well, friend, today is not your day.

I recently finished Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas, the first of his Odd novels. It was published in 2003. That’s about how long a book has to sit on the shelf before I read it. Trendsetters are like that.

Odd Thomas is amusing, despite a story the steers into dark territory. Odd, the young man narrating his own story, says he must keeps his tone light, because his editor and literary mentor is a very large man who has promised to sit on him if he doesn’t. But keeping a light tone can be a bit of challenge with what Odd is called to do.

If Odd Thomas is known for anything, he’s known for seeing dead people. And fluffy pancakes hot off the Pico Mundo Grille. And seeing these terror-eating shadow dogs he calls bodachs. He sees a few of these things slinking around a customer at the Grille and is compelled to follow him. This guy is probably planning to commit a terrible evil in Pico Mundo. Plus, his hair looks like it’s growing fungus. Maybe Odd can find a way to stop the Fungus Man.

Then the ghost of Elvis appears and doesn’t help one bit.

The plot and all its twists work well. I can’t say the story is scary. It has some grit that leans into scary, but nothing like many of the Koontz novels Lars has reviewed. More common are lines like this: “Mr. Thomas, you have a rare opportunity for perfect bliss, and you would be ill advised to poison your life with either academia or drug dealing.”

I’ll be reading the next Odd novel sometime, but I’m picking up a different Koontz book next, after the library sterilizes it or finds it in the stacks or something.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Elsewhere,’ by Dean Koontz

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There was a time to take refuge in the arms of those you loved, and there was a time to stand up to great evil and not be bowed. If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion. (As a reader who hoped one day to be a writer, she was always alert to authors’ techniques.)

Dean Koontz is back with a new adventure, entitled Elsewhere – this one is sort of a sci-fi/fantasy cross. It’s very much in the familiar Koontz style, but (also in his style) it’s significantly different from his other books in concept. Also, there’s no mystical dog in this one (there is a pet mouse, but it has no special powers).

Jeffy Coltrane and his daughter Amity are mostly happy in their life in Suavidad Beach, California. He repairs and sells antique Bakelite radios, and she is a smart, well-adjusted kid. Their great sorrow is the disappearance of their wife and mother, Michelle, some years ago. Michelle abandoned them to pursue a career in music, and they have never heard from her since.

One day Jeffy gets a visit from a local eccentric, a homeless but fastidious man they call Spooky Ed. Ed gives Jeffy a box, which he says contains “the key to everything.” He is to hide it somewhere, and if Ed doesn’t return for it, he’s to sink it in the sea in a barrel of concrete.

Then a group of armed men who claim to be official invade their house, searching for the “key.” Jeffy and Amity are suddenly forced to consider the possibility that Creepy Ed knew what he was talking about. They take the “key” out of the box and examine it. It gets activated, and suddenly they’re transported to an alternate universe. This universe appears pretty much the same as the one we know, but it turns out to have a few sinister differences. Soon they’re flitting from universe to universe, trying to not get separated and to escape a dangerous enemy who considers them expendable and understands the multiverse better than they do.

Elsewhere scared me to death, and touched my heart. In other words, it’s pretty much what you pay your money for when you buy the Koontz brand. A couple political points are hinted at, but they were points I liked, so I didn’t mind. It’s a charming and compelling novel. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Quiet Man,’ by Caimh McDonnell

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The midday heat was quite something. It hit Bunny like a punch in the solar plexus. Nevada temperatures were the kind you only experienced in Ireland when they were cooking instructions.

The Bunny McGarry Stateside series (a spin-off of Caimh McDonnell’s Dublin Trilogy) rolls along with a brand-new entry, The Quiet Man. And sorry, this story has no connection to the famous John Ford movie, except for the presence of a heavy-drinking, pugnacious Irishman.

The background, if you haven’t read the previous books, is a little complicated. Bunny McGarry, former Dublin police detective, is now officially dead. He has come to the US on a private quest to locate Simone, the love of his life. She disappeared entirely some years ago in order to escape some dangerous people who were looking for her. But now Bunny has learned of a credible threat to her safety of which she needs to be warned. To locate her, he has formed an alliance with the Sisters of the Saint, an unofficial order of “nuns” who are not necessarily religious (or celibate), but who have banded together to fight evil. Sort of a female A-Team with a mother superior. One of their members may know where Simone is, but she and another sister have been kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. The cartel’s price for their release is that the Sisters find a way to spring one of their members (the titular Quiet Man) from a super-high security prison in Nevada.

Got that?

Bunny, always game, agrees to get himself arrested, and the Sisters’ resident internet hacker manages to get him placed in The Quiet Man’s cell. The Quiet Man is a mysterious prisoner, very large and strong, who never leaves the cell without a Hannibal Lecter mask, and to whom everyone is forbidden to speak. All Bunny has to do is persuade him to come along when the Sisters disrupt prison security. And, incidentally, stay alive while being threatened by various prison gangs, an old enemy who unexpectedly appears, and a homicidal chief guard. And, oh yes, survive in a place where they think a biscuit is what Bunny calls a scone.

I didn’t think The Quiet Man was quite as funny as the previous books (which may be only a trick of memory), but it was an engaging light thriller, and there were a lot of amusing moments and a neat resolution. I recommend it, if you can handle the rough language and “earthy” humor.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Anatomy Lesson,’ by Robert I. Katz

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This book showed up as a freebie, and I figured I’d read it before going back to The Lord of the Rings. The Anatomy Lesson, by Robert I. Katz, wasn’t bad at all.

Our hero is Richard Kurtz, a young New York surgeon whose sideline (and a useful one) is martial arts. The Anatomy Lesson is the second book in which he assists police detective Lew Barent in an investigation. The first time constituted the first book in the series.

The mystery starts with what looks like a grotesque practical joke. At a Halloween party for medical students, somebody substitutes genuine cadaver parts for plastic ones that had been set out as decorations. The body parts turn out to come from medical school dissection specimens, but it’s hard to figure out who could have stolen them.

Barent asks Kurtz to inquire into the matter, and one of the people he talks to is Rod Mahoney, a lecturer at the medical school. When Mahoney is murdered in a grotesque manner shortly after that, the motives remain impossible to guess, but soon there is talk of a drug connection.

The story has lots of twists and red herrings; it was challenging. I certainly didn’t figure it out. On top of that, Kurtz and Barent make an interesting team – Barent is the jaded cop who’s seen everything, while Kurtz is young and full of vinegar, and quite enjoys the opportunity to fight bad guys off now and then. Barent is always telling him to stay out of the investigation, but then doesn’t hesitate to call on him when he needs an entrée into the medical world. They’re believable and amusing.

My main problem with this book – and it was purely personal opinion – is that the cause of drug legalization keeps coming up, and the author leaves no question what he thinks. He may even be right – maybe legalization is the only way to mitigate the social disaster – but I’ve never been able to shake the idea that legalizing drugs is a marker of societal surrender and imminent death.

But that’s my opinion. The Anatomy Lesson was an enjoyable read with enjoyable characters. Cautions for the usual.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Interviewing the Dead,’ by David Field

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I thought I’d read something less challenging before returning to The Lord of the Rings. So I picked this up…

Victorian London offers a fascinating and atmospheric location for murder mysteries, as Conan Doyle learned to his great (if grudging) profit. Author David Field has begun a new series of mysteries starring a somewhat similar (or reminiscent) team – prominent London physician James Carlyle (nephew, we are told, of Thomas, the philosopher) and Matthew West, an impecunious young Methodist preacher serving London’s poor. We meet them in Interviewing the Dead.

Both happen to be present, out of curiosity, at a lecture given by a spiritualist. The spiritualist makes a prediction – that the spirits of medieval plague victims, whose common grave was dug up during the construction of the Aldgate Underground station, will soon be rising up to take revenge on the living, for the disturbance.

The two men strike up an acquaintance, although they are very different in outlook. Carlyle is the rationalist scientist, and can’t help tweaking Matthew for his faith, which he judges naïve. But they are both concerned – for different reasons – about the spread of superstition among the populace.

Soon reports are coming in of people being terrified by revenants encountered on the streets. Carlyle and West cooperate to apply logic to the problem, and note an interesting fact – all the ghost sightings seem to have involved people who visited pubs owned by a particular brewery. Their inquiries will lead Matthew into considerable danger, both to his personal safety and his career in the church.

I didn’t hate Interviewing the Dead. It was a fairly pleasant read. But it didn’t excite me much either. I’ll give the author credit for being able to write a grammatical English sentence, which is an improvement over a lot of writers today (though there were a couple minor homophone errors). But I found Carlyle hard to like – he’s pretty darn manipulative. Matthew West is OK, though I wasn’t sure of his theology – he hints at not believing in Hell (it’s unclear), and also declares himself in favor or women’s ordination – which I don’t think was even an issue among Methodists at the time. It’s nice, however, I must admit, to encounter a pastor in a novel who isn’t a hypocrite. In spite of all the teasing about the supernatural that goes on between them, Carlyle and West seemed to me kind of dull in their interactions.

But what really annoyed me was the character of Adelaide, Dr. Carlyle’s daughter, whom we are supposed to regard as a romantic object for Matthew. Like pretty much all female Victorian protagonists you run across today, she’s a fervent feminist. I suppose we’re meant to admire that, but honestly, the girl is a bore. She’s rude to all men on all occasions, and can’t speak two sentences without making a speech about being oppressed. I have to concede that the author strongly suggests that her prickliness has more to do with emotional frustration than with ideology, but I still found it impossible to root for the romance.

For that reason, I’m not strongly tempted to renew my acquaintance by reading the next book.

But your mileage may vary. Interviewing the Dead wasn’t bad, really. Just not to my taste.

Non-fiction, Reviews

Do Facts or Stories Drive Your Political Vision?

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Conservative Christians often decry the fact that stay-at-home mothers seem less valued than they once were, and the working mom is now the norm. Well, what do you expect from a society where the ability to contribute directly to the wealth-creation process is ultimately the measure of somebody’s social standing and value?

Finishing up Carl Trueman’s Republocrat is not the best preparation for the 2020 presidential debates, because his final chapter argues that we have given the pride of place in American politics to an appealing narrative and general aesthetics. We don’t want real debates. We don’t want to wrestle with too many details or facts. We want that feeling that we are better off today than four years ago or the impression that our neighbors are better off. (When was it (2008? 2004?) that many of us feared the direction of our nation, and that while we were personally stable, we believed our neighbors were not?) You may remember when Bill Clinton didn’t offer details when answering a question about drug problems in America; he told us about his brother.

What we will get tonight will be 95% entertainment, especially from our comedian in chief. Fact-checkers will be burning up their keyboards, and many of them will need auditors to fact-check their fact-checking. But voters — let me stop there–fans of a candidate and those who like, tweet, and share are not necessarily voters. The Biden campaign got campaign posters inserted into Nintendo’s popular game Animal Crossing as a way to appeal to college kids, but it’s one thing to gain emotional support from people on the couch and another to gain their vote. The latter takes effort, even thinking ahead a bit. And so many get out the vote efforts have been scuttled, because though people would like to see change, they don’t want to vote for it or perhaps can’t overcome personal hurtles to do it.

But what was I talking about?

Trueman criticizes all sides for sloppy thinking in favor of their preferred narrative. Too many of us excuse our side and condemn the mere suspicion of wrongdoing on the other side. Christians, particularly those who endorse the doctrine of total depravity, should expect to see evidence of the curse everywhere we go, so we should readily understand that the best system or social structure in the world will hurt people and fail others when filled with self-seeking sinners. Because that’s true, we should seek healthy accountability everywhere for everyone, particularly our officials.

Overall, Republocrat is a good book. It mentions some issues you may disagree with, but the main theme of being more circumspect of our political beliefs and aspirations is a good word. Too many of us look for hypocrites only on the other side and broad brush everyone who disagrees with us. We need wisdom and humility to live together as one nation under God.

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Reading report: ‘The Fellowship of the Ring,’ by J.R.R. Tolkien: A veteran’s story

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‘Yes sir!’ said Sam. ‘Begging your pardon, sir! But I meant no wrong to you, Mr. Frodo, nor to Mr. Gandalf for that matter. He has some sense, mind you; and when you said go alone, he said no! take someone as you can trust.’

‘But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,’ said Frodo.

Sam looked at him unhappily. ‘It all depends on what you want’ put in Merry. ‘You can trust us to stick to you through thick and thin – to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours – closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo. Anyway: there it is. We know most of what Gandalf has told you. We know a good deal about the Ring. We are horribly afraid – but we are coming with you; or following you like hounds.’

No major revelations from my reading of The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. Just a thought on a subject I’ve touched on before – The Lord of the Rings as veteran’s literature.

What struck me in the scene above – which takes place at Frodo’s new house in Crickhollow, before the adventure even properly begins – is how different the tone is from what we see of the hobbits in the films. Merry and Pippin are pure comic relief in the movies – up till the moments when they’re forced to grow up.

And there’s certainly an element of that in the books too. But in this scene we see them in a different light. Here they are Frodo’s comrades – his buddies in the military sense. They’re freemen and equals, under no illusions, and loyal to their officer. There’s a time for games and laughter, but when it comes to the point, we all know what we’re here for, and we’re in to the end. Whatever the cost.

If we were privileged to have access to Tolkien’s memories, I think we’d find that this scene echoes some moment (or moments) in his wartime career. He’s memorializing men he served with – most of whom would probably have never come home. Jack Lewis would have recognized it right off.