Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Blue Flower, Red Thorns,’ by Ted Clifton

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Vincent Malone is the continuing hero in Ted Clinton’s series set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of which Blue Flower, Red Thorns is the second. Vince went from being a high-flying Dallas lawyer to a successful Denver legal investigator before quitting that work due to his health. He drifted into Santa Fe, where he took a job driving a van for a bed and breakfast. But he found use for his detective skills in the first book, Santa Fe Mojo, and is easing back into that career.

Nevertheless, he’s still driving the van when Blue Flower, Red Thorns begins. He makes a run to Durango, Colorado to get some friends’ son out of a legal problem, and returns to help his pleasant employers deal with a group of important guests. They’re hosting a rising young woman artist and her entourage, while a big auction is held at a local gallery. But these guests act pretty much as you’d expect artists and dealers to act – they’re temperamental, and the artist’s drunken mother makes a scene physically fighting the gallery owner. Which makes her the chief suspect when the owner is found murdered – but if you’re looking for people with motive, there is no shortage. Vincent will have to plunge into the world of art forgery to untangle the mystery.

This is very good entertainment reading, perfect for the beach (or your living room while you’re quarantined). Vince is tough and cynical enough for the hard-boiled fan (though he’s mellowing with a new girlfriend), and the recurring cast of characters is sympathetic enough for cozy readers.

Cautions for language and adult themes. There’s one more book in the series so far.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Final Game,’ by Caimh MDonnell

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In response to this, Gregory’s mouth flapped open and closed in outrage, like a fish that had been slapped in the face with another fish.

Caimh McDonnell’s comic mystery novels are an ongoing entertainment of a pretty high order. They began with the adventures of Paul Mulchrone and Brigit Conroy (called a trilogy, of which this is something like the fifth), amateur private detectives, who hook up with Bunny McGarry, a Falstaffian old policeman, to solve crime. Bunny has been spun off into his own series of adventures in America, but Paul and Brigit soldier on, acquiring in this book, The Final Game, the assistance of James Stewart, a retired cop who (unlike Bunny) does not drink, but keeps falling over anyway, due to an inner ear problem.

Dorothy Graham is a character we know from earlier books in the series. She was a feisty old woman who became Paul’s surrogate mother when he was doing volunteer work with the elderly. She was a brilliant and aggressive player of board games, and immensely rich.

Sadly, Paul comes out of an undercover job to learn that Dorothy is dead. She fell down her stairway while alone. Paul is devastated by the news. But he’ll soon be flabbergasted by her will.

The old woman had a flair for the dramatic, and utter contempt for the idle and self-indulgent step-grandchildren who are in line to inherit her wealth. So she did one better than the old video will gag, where the deceased gets the chance to get the last word on their assembled relatives.

Dorothy has spared no expense to turn the settlement of her estate into a world-class production – literally. She has arranged to make the inheritance a competition. The heirs are to compete in teams of two, in something like a TV reality show, handling various ridiculous and embarrassing challenges. And it’s all to be podcast over the internet.

To Paul’s astonishment, he and Brigit are designated as one of the teams. Dorothy tells them, on video, that she wants them to win the money, rather than her obnoxious step-family. Paul reluctantly agrees, even though it means wearing pink jump suits and Mexican wrestler masks.

But when he learns that Dorothy might have been murdered, it becomes a game of life and death.

Caimh McDonnell excels at this kind of ridiculous story, and the laughs are frequent. It’s also remarkable that there are actually a few really touching moments in the story. The characters are vivid, and we come to care about them (or hate them, depending on which they are).

McDonnell is as funny in his own way as P. G. Wodehouse, and I had a very good time with The Final Game. My only quibble is that he leans pretty heavily on the “smart, tough girls vs. dumb, feckless men” trope, which has been overdone lately. It’s not as new a trope as one might think (it wasn’t even new for Wodehouse), but these days it’s lost all its power through overuse. It’s become a cliché. It’s predictable.

Still, I highly recommend The Final Game. Cautions for language, gross humor, and adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Santa Fe Mojo,’ by Ted Clifton

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Vincent Malone, hero of Ted Clifton’s Santa Fe Mojo, was once a hotshot lawyer in Dallas, until alcohol trashed both his career and his marriage. He drifted to Denver, where he found his niche as a legal investigator. Then he developed gout, and missed too much work. Figuring a warmer climate would help, he headed for Albuquerque, and cheap housing. But in a diner in Santa Fe he saw an ad for a job driving a customer van for a bed and breakfast. On a whim, he applied for the job.

Vincent is a misanthrope, a man who’s seen the worst in people and has distanced himself from them. But the couple who hire him are annoyingly nice. He doesn’t know what to do with them, but he kind of likes working there as he gets used to it.

They’re excited to greet their first guests at the B&B, but something is wrong. The rooms were booked by a major sports agent who lives locally, for a group of his top clients and their spouses. But when they hold a meeting, it ends in shouting and threats.

The next morning the police come. The agent has been murdered. Vincent can tell that the sheriff’s department would like to hang something on him, but they quickly settle one of the clients – a major league baseball player. Security video shows the two men fighting in the agent’s front yard, a few hours before the murder.

Vincent, though, based on his investigative experience, thinks the cops haven’t looked far enough. They found an easy suspect and stopped detecting. The accused’s lawyer shows up, and he’s the accused’s uncle and Vincent’s spiritual twin – a hard man who got rich defending whoever paid him, using any kind of trick he could get away with. But he’s older now, and thinking it might be nice to form some kind of bond with his only surviving relative. At least he forms a bond with Vincent, who shares his bemusement at discovering morality late in life.

Santa Fe Mojo straddles the line between cozy mystery and hard-boiled, and does it pretty well, I think. The gradual softening of Vincent’s hard shell in the warmth of human friendship provides an enjoyable sub-plot. I enjoyed Santa Fe Mojo quite a lot. Cautions for language, mostly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Musketeer’s Seamstress,’ by Sarah D’Almeida

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Sarah Hoyt is a Facebook friend and a fellow Baen author. Aside from her SF work, she has produced, under the nom de plume (a particularly appropriate term in this case) Sarah D’Almeida, a seies of novels about Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. These are mysteries, and have been inserted directly into the timeline of that classic novel. The Musketeer’s Seamstress, second in the series, occurs shortly after D’Artagnon meets his swashbuckling friends, but (if I understand correctly) before all the bother about the queen’s diamonds.

Aramis, the romantic musketeer destined for the church, is at the palace, dallying with his mistress, a lady of the court whom he refers to with his friends as his “seamstress.” He steps out of the chamber for a moment. When he returns, he finds her dead, a dagger through her heart. Like so many idiots in mysteries, he pulls the dagger out, getting blood all over his hands. When he hears people at the door, he makes a leap from the balcony onto a convenient tree and then manages to get away over a wall – stark naked. He is fortunate enough to find his friends Athos, Porthos, and D’Artagnon at guard at one of the gates, and they help make his escape. Cardinal Richelieu, who seems to cherish a particular dislike for Aramis, sets a hunt going, but Aramis manages to get away to his home estate, while his friends try to uncover how an “impossible” murder was committed.

The author, I think, did an interesting job with the familiar characters. She invents back story material for them that Dumas only hinted at, and as far as I can remember it’s pretty consistent with his portrayals. I particularly like the character of Porthos, who is envisioned as a man not stupid, but simply plain-minded and practical. Which makes it possible for him – sometimes – to see things his subtler friends miss.

I felt a certain tension in the insertion of a whodunnit into what is essentially an action/adventure setting. The action is quite good when it happens, but a lot of the book involves people just thinking and discussing matters, which struck me as a little incongruous. However, as I said, I liked what was done with the characters, so such scenes were not without interest.

I wouldn’t rate The Musketeer’s Seamstress as a top-shelf book, either as an actioner or a mystery, but it was an enjoyable read, and I had a good time reacquainting myself with what is, perhaps, the archetypal male-bonding group in all literature.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Desires and Dreams and Powers,’ by Rosamund Hodge

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During the later part of the war, the government issued a pamphlet on how to recognize changelings. Violet read it (a green tinge of the features; propensity to cruelty) and laughed. The real signs had been far more pervasive, far less clear. Sometimes she thought she had only realized she wasn’t human when she was fourteen. Sometimes she thought she had always known.

That’s the first paragraph of a story called “More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand,” possibly my favorite among the stories in Rosamund Hodge’s delightful collection, Desires and Dreams and Powers.

A friend sent me a copy as a gift, and I’m extremely grateful to him. As I’ve often said, I don’t much care for most modern fantasy. But when someone gets it exactly right – as in the cases of Walter Wangerin, and Mark Helprin, and Leif Enger, the result is delight of an exquisite sort.

The stories in Desires and Dreams and Powers are of diverse kinds, within the general fantasy genre. There is urban fantasy, and tales of witches, and tales of monsters. But most of them (at least as I recall them) are faery stories. And that’s like a birthday present to me.

Ever since I read Tolkien’s essay, “On Faery Stories,” I’ve wanted to write faeries properly. I tried it in Troll Valley – which I think is a pretty good book, but I’m not at all sure I got the Faery/Huldre thing right. Susanna Clark got it right, I think, in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. And now I declare, by the powers vested in me, that Rosamund Hodge gets it right too. The strangeness, the danger, the alien unreason of the faeries is as well depicted here as it ever has been. Kudos to the author.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. On top of the imaginative genius, the prose is first class. Cautions are in order – not for the usual “adult” material, but for the weird and the alien and the disturbing (and the cruel). But read it, if you’re a grown-up and not overly sensitive. There may be a Christian element here too, though it’s not at all explicit.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rollover,’ by James Raven

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Thrillers as a genre are different from mysteries, but there tends to be a lot of overlap. Thrillers concentrate on building tension and unease in the reader, but a mystery element adds to that tension. Me, I’m more of a mystery person than a thriller person, and Rollover, by James Raven, kept me reading, but took me far beyond my comfort zone. Which will have been, of course the point.

Danny Cain is a journalist, partner in a struggling independent news agency in Southampton, England, with his friend Vince. One evening he gets a call from Vince – he has to come right over. Vince has won the national lottery! Their troubles are over!

But when he gets there, Danny finds Vince dead, bludgeoned to death on the floor. Before he can telephone the police, he gets a call from his wife’s mobile phone – a strange man’s voice says to get out of there and wait for further instructions. They have kidnapped Danny’s wife and 6-year-old daughter; if he doesn’t follow instructions, they will die.

Then begins Danny’s ordeal – once of those situations where things start impossible and then get worse. He has no resources to call on, and his enemies seem organized, omniscient, and remorseless. Doing what he’s told might be impossible, and even if he can, chances of survival are low.

Meanwhile, Hampshire Detective Jeff Temple is called to the crime scene. Danny Cain looks like the obvious culprit, but Jeff isn’t sure. Things don’t add up, but he has no idea what awful revelations will come to light before it’s all over.

Taunt, tense, and remorseless, Rollover is a masterful thriller. It worked so well that I’m scared to continue on with the sequel.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Flood Tide,’ by Robert McNeill

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A woman is strangled in an out-of-the way spot in Edinburgh. Detective Inspector Jack Knox is surprised to learn that the case has been taken over by a “more sophisticated” police team from western Scotland. Their leader, however, turns out to be a decent and sensible fellow. He puts Jack in operational command and makes his people available to reinforce the local cops, who know the territory.

Crime scene investigation, witness reports, and CCTV suggest that the killer drove a delivery van, so the team begins a systematic investigation of delivery companies and their drivers. Slowly the noose tightens, but surprises are in store.

That’s how Robert McNeill’s Murder at Flood Tide goes. It’s not a thriller, but a fairly realistic police procedural, like the previous volume in the series, The Innocent and the Dead, which I’ve already reviewed. The drama is mostly low-key, but along with the threat of the serial killer, there is an insubordinate team member to be dealt with.

I like the realistic approach of this series, but I can’t pretend I find these books compelling. They are entertainment with a moderate level of dramatic tension; nothing to keep you awake at night.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Redhead,’ by Stan Jackson

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I used to be a beanpole, just below six foot of skin, muscle and bone, but now, when I showered in the morning, it was like navigating the Yorkshire Dales.

It is a melancholy thing to come to the end of a book series you’re enjoying a lot. I don’t know if Stan Jackson intends to write any more Perry Webster novels – he’s kind of running out of hair colors. Peroxide? Titian? Dishwater?

Anyway, Redhead is the fourth in the series, and perhaps the best, depending on your preferences. Author Jackson gets better as he goes.

At the risk of spoiling it for people who haven’t finished the previous book, I have to tell you that Perry is married now, to Julia Emburey, the headmistress of a prep school. Julia thinks she has no relations, but is startled to learn she has a cousin – in France. Perry and Julia travel to the home of this woman, Gabrielle Dupont (originally Gale Emburey) who is very rich. Julia had known of Gabrielle’s father, her uncle, who was accused of murdering his wife and disappeared with his baby daughter. Now she learns that he went to France, where he changed his identity and had considerable business success.

Gabrielle says that her late father was innocent of the murder. She would like Perry to investigate the cold case. If he can vindicate her father, Gabrielle will make a major (and much needed) contribution to Julia’s school.

Both of them dislike Gabrielle from the start, but the money is tempting, and what harm could there be in righting an old injustice?

There was another suspect in the case, the “redhead” of the title – a French au pair who also disappeared at the time of the murder. But she had no apparent motive. Perry begins questioning friends and associates from those days, asking questions that most of them find puzzling, but that one of them finds absolutely threatening…

I enjoyed Redhead, as I have enjoyed the whole series. The writing has always been good, and the plotting has improved from book to book.

I’m happy that Perry has found a satisfying marriage, though I’m not entirely sold on Julia. She’s great most of the time, but occasionally she exhibits a prickly, feminist humorlessness that puts me off. No doubt female readers will react differently.

There’s an odd element in this one related to religion. Perry visits a sort of modern hippie commune, where they teach what seems to be a rationalized Christianity. “Grace” is their watchword, but without all that supernatural stuff. No doubt that seems positive to the contemporary English; I don’t think it holds up in practice. You’ve got to deal with original sin – a topic which, ironically, gets mentioned in passing.

I should note that at one point author Jackson uses the phrase “begging the question” correctly. Full marks for that! A rare pleasure in contemporary books.

Also, there’s a chilling anticlimax.

Good book, and recommended. I’ll read the next, if there is one. Mousy? Bald?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Raven,’ by Stan Jackson

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Like the raising of the Mary Rose, Suzie’s words, and now Cyl’s, had brought it to the surface and like the Mary Rose, the thought emerged covered in stuff I didn’t want to delve into.

I’ve been calling this series of mysteries by Stan Jackson the “Ste Webster” series, because that’s what everyone’s been calling the character up to now in the books. But in the present volume, Raven, “Ste” and his friends have started referring to him as Perry. Which is also what the series is called on the Amazon pages, so I guess that’s what I ought to be calling him now.

Ste, or Perry, Webster is, as you may recall, a professor of philosophy at the University of York. His fiancée was murdered in the first volume, Blonde, and he managed to identify the killer. This has given him a reputation as a detective, and occasionally people ask him to solve other crimes.

This time out, Perry is approached by a former student, Laura “Raven” Wellbourne. She tells him that as a girl she attended St Barnabas School, a prestigious nearby institution, comparable to an American prep school. During her time there, she tells him, she was blackmailed and serially abused in secret by the headmaster, Dr MacDonald. As an adult, now with an academic degree, she changed her identity and appearance and returned to the school, getting a job as an instructor. Her plan was to somehow find evidence of MacDonald’s true character, and expose him.

But now Dr MacDonald has been murdered, found floating in the school swimming pool with his head smashed. Raven is the police’s chief suspect, but she swears she didn’t do it. Since she’s been relieved of duties, someone is needed to cover her classes. Could Perry fill in for her, on a pretext, and try to find the real killer?

Perry is so appalled by what she’s been through that he agrees to do it. Before long an audit reveals that Dr MacDonald has been involved in massive misappropriation of school funds, to the extent that its future is jeopardized. This is of great concern to the acting interim headmistress, Julia Emburey, a very attractive woman who has raised an interest in Perry that he hasn’t felt since his fiancée died. But is MacDonald’s embezzlement the motive for the murder?

I’m enjoying this series of novels immensely. Sometimes you just “hit it off” with a series or a character. I like Perry Webster, and enjoy spending time in his company. Also, author Jackson has fixed some of the writing problems I’ve identified in earlier books.

So I recommend Raven, along with the whole series. Mild cautions for adult themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Fatal Liaison,’ by David Pearson

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On a country road near Dublin, a wealthy property developer is found dead in a crashed car. It wasn’t the crash that killed him.

Not far away, in a shed in the woods, a young man is found naked and stabbed to death.

Detectives Aidan Burke and Fiona Moore are on the case. The books at the older victim’s office look fishy, and his company’s labor force seems dodgy. But his family situation was odd as well. No lack of motives here, but lots and lots of secrets.

That’s the premise of David Pearson’s A Fatal Liaison, second in his Burke and Moore mystery series. I’ve reviewed the previous volume before, and this one completes the series to date. No doubt there will be more, because these books work pretty well.

As a Typical Male ™, I assumed at first that Aidan Burke, the senior detective, was the main character. But he’s really not. Aidan is smart enough and knows his job, but he has a drinking problem and has lost a step or two. He doesn’t treat Fiona badly, according to his somewhat Neanderthal lights, but his younger sergeant is actually smarter than he is. More than once she suggests a line of inquiry that he barely notices, which turns out vital once she’s followed it up.

A Fatal Liaison is a solid entry in a solid series. It’s not one of my personal favorites, but I have no cause to complain. Cautions for language and mature subject matter. Also implied criticism of traditional Christian morality.