Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Washington Trail,’ by Lou Aguilar

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Lou Aguilar, like me, writes for the American Spectator (he does it at a rather higher level, though). When he mentioned in an article that he wrote detective thrillers, I thought I’d try one. (Turns out there’s only one thriller so far.) The Washington Trail was a lot of fun. Proust it ain’t, but fun it decidedly is.

Our heroes are Mark Tristan, a former Army Ranger, and Neil Cork, a former FBI analyst, now Washington DC private investigators. Cork is a family man, but Tristan is a bachelor with a pretty flippant attitude to life. He has a car, but he likes to zip around town on a bicycle. He’s a passionate fan of old Western movies, and quotes them constantly.

A beautiful young woman comes to their office and asks them to follow her artist boyfriend and find out why he dumped her. They try to put her off, but she’s insistent. When Cork starts shadowing the young man, he quickly discovers his secret life, which will not delight their client. But hardly has he delivered the bad news than the young man gets involved in a shooting incident, and suddenly Tristan and Cork are plunged into a three-way conflict involving secretive groups they call (of course) “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

The prose in The Washington Trail is passable, but not memorable. The plot and action are, frankly, highly implausible. It’s the characters that lift this book above the level of the herd. Tristan, in particular, is brash and funny and brave, but also relatable (he’s a male fantasy figure, as so many great characters are).

There’s a twist at the end that I saw coming, but it was only one of several.

Author Aguilar is brave, but perhaps foolhardy in making The Washington Trail blatantly political. His conservatism is quite open here – though Trump and Biden are never named as such, references to “the last president” and “the current president” are made in contexts that render it impossible not to figure it out. Most authors would try to be a little more oblique, simply for the sake of potential sales. But Aguilar flies his colors proudly.

So if you’re a liberal, you probably won’t care much for The Washington Trail. But if you’re a conservative looking for a really fun action story, you’ll probably get as big a hoot out of it as I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Enemies Among Us,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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A while back I read a novel by Jeffrey S. Stephens which I found entertaining and well-written. Since then I’ve read two more of Stephens’ books to see how they’d be. Enemies Among Us is part of a series starring a continuing hero named Nick Reagan.

Nick Reagan is a high-level CIA operative. One of his old enemies is an Islamist terrorist mastermind called the Handler. In Enemies Among Us, Reagan gets a chance to capture the Handler, but is ordered by his superiors to stand down. Reagan ignores those orders and manages to catch him anyway, then delivers him up in a neat package. But the Handler himself has warned him that there are traitors in the US government, and they’ll both kill him and Reagan to keep their secrets covered. For the rest of the book, Reagan fights and strategizes to stay alive, to protect his friends, and to save the country.

Was Enemies Among Us any good? I didn’t think so.

I found the prose ponderous, and the story moved (for me) very slowly. I often complain about thrillers that never give you a chance to breathe, where the protagonist shrugs off more physical damage than real humans could survive. But in this story, I felt that the action scenes were separated by endless stretches of clumsy writing. The author told us too much, and not very artfully. (He also has a tendency to misplace modifiers.)

I’m sorry to say all that, because Enemies Among Us is very explicitly conservative and pro-American. I appreciated the intention, but I was bored.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Fairytale,’ by Alan Lee

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Beaches feel lonely when it’s cold. The ocean is too icy to enjoy, and the breeze makes the loveliness of nature remote and hard. Beautiful but sad, like missing someone you loved.

You probably know by now that I’m in the tank for Alan Lee. His Mackenzie August and Manny Ramirez books are great fun, and what I’ve called Christian-adjacent.

Dark Fairytale, book 16 of the Mackenzie August series, springs from an earlier installment, in which Mack,  a private eye in Roanoke, Virginia, was coerced into participating in a secret, to-the-death mixed martial arts tournament in Italy (he won, of course, because he’s still alive). In the course of that adventure, his fiancée Veronica (“Ronnie”) killed a very evil woman, in Mack’s defense. Still, she’s not a killer type. It still bothers her, years later. She asks Mack to locate that woman’s family and see if there’s some way she can make amends by helping them.

Mack is happy to do it, of course, but it proves a difficult job. The woman and her husband led secretive lives and have left few traces behind. When Mack starts asking questions, he gets pushback and a gang of furries (I kid you not) try to kill him and Manny. That doesn’t stop him, of course. When he and Ronnie finally go on the road to find the family, the trail takes them to Amish country in Ohio, and on to northern Virginia. They encounter a desperately dysfunctional family, and are faced with a Solomonic choice as to whether they should help them, and how. I thought I figured out the trick author Lee had up his sleeve, but I was delighted to find that a couple deeper tricks were concealed inside it.

The prose and dialogue in the Mack August books are excellent, but I think it’s the characterization that’s best. You’ll really love this cast of characters. Mack and Manny are a hoot to spend time with, as they motivate each other through mock-macho cross-talk. There’s real (fictional) love here, and real community and real eternal values.

Dark Fairytale is highly recommended. Cautions for adult situations and rough language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lady in the Lake,’ by Raymond Chandler

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The Gillerlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I think most mystery fans wish Raymond Chandler had written more Philip Marlowe books. He burned hot, like the alcohol that consumed him, but pretty briefly as an artist. The Lady in the Lake is considered neither his best nor his worst novel. It also suffers from the movie they made out of it, starring and directed by Robert Montgomery (Elizabeth’s father). Montgomery chose to go all artsy with it, shooting the whole thing from Marlowe’s point of view, so that we only saw his face occasionally in a mirror. It’s awkward, and it doesn’t work very well. The novel deserves better than that.

Marlowe is hired by a businessman who wants him to find his wife, who has disappeared. She apparently went to their mountain lake cabin, and then traveled with a lover to Mexico, then back to Los Angeles. Then nothing. He knows she doesn’t want to be married to him anymore, but he’s concerned about her anyway.

Marlowe travels up to the mountain cabin, where he happens to witness the recovery of the body of another woman, the wife of a local, who drowned in the lake. Then the missing woman’s lover is murdered. And Marlowe realizes somebody has been lying to him.

The Lady in the Lake’s plot is a little complex (though not as confusing as some of Chandler’s other scenarios), and I thought it ended somewhat abruptly. But the prose is classic Chandler:

This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

The book also features one of my favorite Marlowe side characters, the laconic Constable Jim Patton.

The Lady in the Lake is not the best Chandler, but definitely entertaining.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Be Still My Soul,’ by S.D. Thames

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First things first: WHAT HAPPENED TO S. D. THAMES?

This Christian author produces a string of extremely good mystery novels, and then he just disappears. Sometime around 2018, as far as I can judge. Maybe he was a victim of Covid. Maybe he decided novel writing was too time-consuming a hobby. Maybe he’s left his legal career and become a missionary. All I know is that a web search tells me he doesn’t seem to have died.

It’s kind of like a mystery story where a detective is trying to locate a missing person, goes to his home town, and everybody denies ever knowing him.

But that’s not important to this review (except to warn you that another installment in this very good series doesn’t look to be forthcoming).

Okay, now that that’s off my chest, I’ll review Be Still My Soul, a prequel novella to the Milo Porter mysteries. It tells how our hero first got into the private eye business.

Milo is a veteran of the War on Terror, in which he enlisted to avenge his father, a victim of 9/11. He came home suffering from PTSD. He’s seeing a counselor and taking medications, but sometimes he still has hallucinations. He’s gotten a job as a process server, which brings him to a rundown, stinking house in rural Florida, where an old woman knocks him unconscious with a frying pan.

His situation gets worse when people who should know inform him that the woman who hit him does not even exist, and he must have hallucinated her. On the other hand, he meets a girl and falls in love at first sight.

The story only gets weirder after that.

I greatly enjoyed Be Still My Soul, and wish it had been a full novel. I wish there were more Milo Porter books too, or just anything from S. D. Thames.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Illusions of Trust,’ by Jeffrey S. Stephens

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I read a book by Jeffrey S. Stephens and was impressed enough go on to try Illusions of Trust, a book that reads like part of a series, but doesn’t seem to be, as far as I can tell from Stephens’s author page.

There seem to be echoes of both Perry Mason and Nero Wolfe at work here, though the characters are entirely original as they operate. Russell Palmer is a young New York attorney who has lucked into a dream situation. Thanks to an anonymous patron, he’s able to take only the cases he wants, cases where a real injustice needs to be set right. He has a partner named Robbie Wyghte, a smart, retired cop.

When Christina Franco, a wealthy and beautiful socialite, comes into his office insisting he represent her in divorcing her husband, he sees no reason why he should. She has the resources to hire the best divorce lawyers in the business. But she says she needs him because her husband has threatened her life. When she mentions the name of a particular criminal Palmer has tangled with before, a man he hates and wants to bring down, he’s motivated to take her case.

Soon after, a prominent corporate lawyer who has worked with Christina’s senator father commits apparent suicide. Threats begin coming in. Palmer himself is physically attacked. And Christina’s mother asks him to prove that the late lawyer, who had been her friend, did not kill himself.

The whole thing resolved itself in a way that pleased me, with minimal fights and fireworks. I liked the ending. The rest of the book I found just a little low-key. Palmer seemed a fairly dull sort of hero – we’re told he has OCD, but his symptoms are minimal and don’t interfere with him much.

Nevertheless, it was a good story. Good prose, good dialogue, good characters. Worth reading. Some homosexuals show up early on, and the author takes pains to show his acceptance of them, but it’s not a big part of the story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Key West Dead,’ by Mark Nolan

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The other day, in discussing author Stephen Lawhead, I referred (jokingly) to my seething envy of his success in a field where I also write.

Yet I am indeed capable of resenting other author’s success. Specifically, when I see that they’re “Amazon bestselling authors,” and observe, in reading their work, that they can’t, in fact, write.

Key West Dead, by Mark Nolan, is part of a series of novels starring Jake Wolfe, a California private eye. A veteran and a PTSD sufferer, he works with his dog Casey, who both calms him and, thanks to his experience as a bomb dog, alerts him to guns and explosives – which turns out to be valuable in this story.

Jake and Casey are in Key West for a wedding when they witness the explosion of a yacht causing the murder of two innocent people, by means of an IED. Infuriated by the crime, Jake, with the support of his partner Terrell and his girlfriend Sarah, embarks on a personal game of wits with the obsessive bomber, whose original purpose was to extort money from the island government but is now at war with Jake and Casey as well.

What did I dislike about Key West Dead? First of all, the author doesn’t know how to write dialogue. His characters all speak the same way, in stilted, lecturing fashion, delivering information dumps in classic “as you know” form. The narrative passages are no better – descriptions and events are described in the most rote and pedestrian ways. For instance:

As Jake listened to Bart’s cultured voice and his articulate, well-spoken reasoning, he was reminded that the man had graduated from Harvard Law School.

This is first-draft writing, with zero effort exerted for vivid impression or original observation. However, people seem to buy these books and to rate them highly, so maybe I’m the fool for trying to be a wordsmith in my own work. There is plenty of action here; often implausible – again and again we see danger approaching, but Jake – warned in time by Casey’s priceless nose – always draws on his resourcefulness to prevent (or minimize) loss of life.

The dog may be the key. Casey is nice dog. Even I liked him.

But I don’t recommend Key West Dead. Unless you’re looking for a beach read that makes no demands whatever on your thinking brain.

I should probably mention that there are a couple positive references to the Second Amendment. So there’s that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fool’s Errand,’ by Jeffrey S. Stevens

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Writing this review, I find myself in the odd position of not remembering what the narrator/hero’s name is. The Amazon synopsis doesn’t say either. Maybe Jeffrey S. Stephens, author of Fools Errand, never tells us that – or maybe I just missed it. But if Stephens held it back, that’s an interesting authorial tactic.

The narrator’s last name, though, is Rinaldi. He comes from a “colorful” New York Italian family. His father and uncles were involved in organized crime – not as kingpins but as lower functionaries. His father, a mercurial, charismatic alcoholic, ran numbers. The story is set in the 1970s, after his father has been dead several years. One day, his mother informs him she has a box of his father’s papers that was meant for him. When he goes through the material, he finds a letter addressed to himself, written not long before his father’s death. The letter tells of something the old man had bragged about many times, when drunk. It speaks – vaguely – about some “Money” that he, his friend Benny, and a Frenchman stole while he was in the army during the war, working on repatriating stolen artworks.

Our hero contacts Benny, who’s living in Las Vegas. Benny gently suggests he leave the whole matter alone, but (knowing he won’t do that) he gives him the name of the Frenchman.

Soon he’s on a plane to Monte Carlo, accompanied by Donna, a young woman he met and struck sparks with on the plane back from Vegas. Once there (where he is shadowed by employees of his mobster cousin Frank, who thinks he has a claim on this “treasure” whose nature he has no clue about) he meets his father’s old friend, and begins to put together the very strange story of his father’s wartime adventures.

Fool’s Errand was, simply put, a really good story. Fascinating. Well-written. Insightful. Suspenseful, but not a thriller. A character study and a love story.

I liked it a whole lot. Jeffrey S. Stephens is an extremely good (and smart) writer. Recommended, with cautions for mature content.

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘The Screwtape Letters,’ by C.S. Lewis

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And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends.

I was in high school when I first read C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. It had been recommended by a Sunday School teacher. The story of two devils consulting on a human’s damnation set off something like a series of small explosions in my brain. I’d never run across Christian thought anything like this before (pleasures weren’t necessarily sinful? Who knew?), and it dispensed a guilty thrill of possible heresy. It was for me the beginning of a lifelong grappling match with both Lewis himself and with orthodox Christian theology.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve read it in my life. The depressing part of revisiting it again is observing how little progress I’ve made in resisting my own personal Wormwood. To make it more uncomfortable, I understand the nature of sin and temptation better now than I did when I was in high school. The knives, therefore, are sharper.

I was also impressed, in reading the sequel essay, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” to note how prescient it is. Writing in the 1950s, Lewis observed trends in society and in education that have since metastasized in a way no one could have conceived of at the time.

The Screwtape Letters is a clever, masterfully written, insightful book about temptation that is actually extremely uncomfortable for anyone with any moral insight. And it gets more uncomfortable as you get older.

So I recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Damage Man,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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And so you, you will mediate the space between what is sanctioned and what is not. And to do that, part of you must belong to what is not. That is the sacrifice you must make. You must be half-darkness while not serving darkness.

Gregg Hurwitz has gotten into the generous habit of providing Orphan X novellas once a year, to give us a little hit in between the great feasts of the novels. The novella The Damage Man was just released, and I tore through it like a Doberman on a Beggin’ Strip.

Evan Smoak, our lone wolf hero, is not summoned by a call on his high-tech phone this time around. He happens upon a middle-aged man, Rusty, who is being threatened by a loan shark’s collector in an alley. The collector is telling Rusty that his son Blake will get no delay; he has to pay up or he’ll be hurt. Evan intervenes, and when the collector pulls a gun, Evan puts him in the hospital. Then he asks Rusty about Blake’s problem, and informs him he’s going to take care of it. Because that’s what Evan does.

He learns that Ray and Blake are alienated. Ray abandoned his family when Blake was young, and Blake has never forgiven him. Though the two men have to hide out together temporarily, they can barely keep from coming to blows. Ray is desperately remorseful, but Blake’s anger runs deep. They are two inarticulate men, needing each other but unable to make contact.

This brings Evan’s own absentee father to his mind. He found the man once, discovering him to be a wholly superficial and contemptible human being, who only warmed to him when he lent him money. This operation involves phone conversations with Joey, the girl hacker who Evan has sort of adopted, and she’s intuitive enough to do a search for Evan’s father. She discovers that he’s dying.

Now Evan is faced with somethig he fears more than any number of terrorists or gangsters – the risk of reaching out again to his father.

Nobody matches Gregg Hurwitz when it comes to writing stories that not only excite you but probe your heart like a catheter. If you find yourself a little misty-eyed when you’re finished with The Damage Man, I can tell you (from a friend) that you’re not alone.