Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wood’s Reach,’ by Steven Becker

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As I’ve confessed before, I seem irrationally compelled to be forever searching for another fictional detective to fill the gap left behind by John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. So when I discovered there was a series character named Mac Travis, who’s involved with boats and lives in Florida, my old obsession could not be stifled. Steven Becker’s Mac Travis, hero of Wood’s Reach, however, is nothing like Travis McGee (though the name choice has to be intentional). I hope my disappointment didn’t sour my attitude to the book.

Travis McGee, for all his coolness, was essentially the ultimate Peter Pan, a boy who never grew up. He took responsibility as he took his retirement – in installments. He cared deeply about his clients (often damsels in distress) for the duration of his cases, but never took on the burdens of conventional family life.

Steven Becker’s Mac Travis is the diametric opposite. The owner of a struggling diving business, he frets over his debts and yearns for the woman he loves, who has decided they have no future. When an unethical fortune hunter offers Mac a lot of money to help him find a fabled treasure site, he feels as if he has no choice but to take the job. But when he realizes the kind of deal he’s signed up for, Mac starts planning to plunder the plunderer.

I’ve often said that I like boat stories, which was another reason I should have relished Wood’s Reach. But somehow it didn’t work for me. Maybe it’s sailboating stories I actually like. This book mainly involved people rushing around in power boats, alternately pursuing and fleeing from one another, and intersecting now and then to fight, threaten, or palaver. It all seemed kind of frenetic and implausible to this landlubber.

Still, there was a lot of action. The writing wasn’t bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Drowning at Dyes Inlet,’ by D. D. Black

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At Dyes Inlet, an estuary in Washington state’s Puget Sound, a woman walking her dog discovers the body of a drowned, middle-aged woman. The corpse has a crude heart carved into its back. Because the local police department is stretched thin, they call in Thomas Austin, a semi-famous former NYPD detective who has moved there in the wake of his wife’s murder. Austin agrees to help out. He is paired with a new partner, a prickly but attractive female detective recently imported from Los Angeles. So begins The Drowning at Dyes Inlet, by D. D. Black.

It’s soon apparent that this murder is identical to an old unsolved case from the 1970s. A suspect quickly appears – but unfortunately this man is the brother of the sheriff, who is running for governor and desperate to avoid a bad press. It will all build up to a final, tense hostage situation at a wedding.

Thomas Austin has one intriguing characteristic as a fictional character – he has synesthesia – the condition where people experience tastes and smells in response to visual stimuli. This was interesting, though I didn’t see that it contributed to the plot in any noticeable way. Austin himself was not a very interesting character – and in fact, none of the characters here were very interesting (to this reader). They had their quirks and eccentricities, but I didn’t recognize them as people. They didn’t talk like real people – they opened up with personal information where real people wouldn’t. The dialogue simply didn’t remind me of anything I’d ever heard. And the villain’s motivations didn’t strike me as plausible.

I got the impression that perhaps the author is on the autistic scale, and doesn’t understand personalities. Alternatively (and more positively) he might just be such a nice person that he doesn’t understand how bad people think. One way or the other, I didn’t find The Drowning at Dyes Inlet very well-written. This is the sixth book in an eight-book series, so somebody must be reading them, but I can’t recommend them.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Knock at the Door,’ by Peter Rowlands

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I’ve had a conflicted relationship with Peter Rowlands’ novels. I like his prose, and I very much like his characters. But I find his plotting a touch weak. In writing A Knock at the Door, he set himself a daunting plotting task. It was – mostly – successful.

Rory Cavenham is a web designer, temporarily out of work. He’s staying at a friend’s large house in England’s Cotswolds when on a rainy night a woman knocks on the door. She’s young and attractive, and soaked to the skin. He’s reluctant to let her in, but she seems to have no one else to help her, so he does. To his astonishment, she claims to believe the year to be 1972. Her name, she tells him, is Rebecca. She is adamant that she doesn’t want to go to a hospital or talk to the police.

Rory turns to the internet (something Rebecca doesn’t understand), and soon learns that there was indeed a girl named Rebecca who disappeared in 1972 – a convicted murderer who escaped from a psychiatric facility. But how could she turn up fifty years later, little older than when she vanished? He also discovers another missing woman who could be her, who supposedly died in a fire a couple years back. But, oddly enough, that woman was a documentary researcher who’d been researching the original Rebecca’s story…

And when uniformed thugs show up to try to kidnap Rebecca, the whole thing starts spinning out of control,

I was often reminded of my own novel, Death’s Doors, as I read A Knock at the Door. The author navigated the same kind of plot situations, where a time-traveling newcomer has to be guided – and to some extent protected – through and from culture shock. The mystery of Rebecca’s identity was a compelling one, and kept me reading with fascination.

Rory, our hero, is a good character, but artistically weak in that he commits the sin of acting naively, in exactly the same way, on more than one occasion.

The final resolution – really a series of resolutions – didn’t, in my opinion, quite live up to expectations. It was emotionally satisfying, but less so in dramatic terms. In short, it fizzled a bit – not entirely, but the bang wasn’t quite what I hoped for. Also, I did see it coming, at least to some extent.

Rebecca’s culture shock was handled reasonably well, but in her surprise at how the world has changed, she fails to mention something that would surely have been remarked on by a true time traveler – the major demographic changes in England since 1972. I can understand why an author would feel it necessary to skip that part, but it weakened plausibility a little.

Still, all in all, A Knock at the Door was an enjoyable story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Fabled Falcon,’ by Neil Howarth

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As I work my way through the backlog of free books I’ve been acquiring through online deals, I found that I’d arrived at two books in a row about art experts. The last one was Aaron Elkins’ A Glancing Light (review a few inches down), which I liked quite a lot. I liked Neil Howarth’s The Fabled Falcon too, at the beginning, but my enjoyment faded as the story proceeded.

Darius Fletcher (known as “Fletch,” not to be confused with Gregory McDonald’s American “Fletch” character) is a former soldier and a former convict. Now he’s a professor of art at the (fictional) Canterbury University in England. His college is funded by the slightly shady Bancroft Foundation. Fletch is a little shady himself, providing occasional help to an art forger friend, but he genuinely loves art in itself.

One day while he’s lecturing, he looks out at his audience and sees a man there who is not a student. That man turns out to be dead. Fletch recognizes him, though – he’s Francis, a young man with whom he recently worked on an archaeological dig on Malta. Francis had confided to him that he’d discovered something fantastic – a signed painting by the master Caravaggio, who only signed one other known work.

Though Fletch is briefly detained by the police, the Bancroft Foundation quickly secures his release, and sends him off to Malta to find out what’s happened to Francis’ discovery. What he doesn’t yet know – but will soon discover – is that this treasure is being sought by competing sinister, ruthless, and deep-pocketed interests. Teaming up with a beautiful Russian Interpol agent, Fletch does his best to stay one step ahead of them, following cryptic clues to uncover ancient secrets.

If all this suggests to you parallels with Dan Brown and Indiana Jones, you’re not wrong. For this reader, the book steadily lost credibility as mystical and supernatural elements began to intrude – implicitly, at least. I probably would be okay with it if those supernatural elements were Christian, but here the flavor is explicitly Gnostic.

On top of that, there was a definite Hollywood approach, not only in the Fighting Girl Boss character of the Interpol agent, but also in the hero’s tendency to quickly heal from injuries and come back battle-ready.

So all in all, I was disappointed with The Fabled Falcon. It was heretical and implausible (but I repeat myself).

Authors, Fiction, Reviews

My invaluable opinion on a Nobel-prize winning book

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I’ve written a review of Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s Nobel-prize winning novel, Septology. It was posted today by Ad Fontes here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Glancing Light,’ by Aaron Elkins

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In the last few decades the field of art thievery had developed well beyond the crude old days when paintings had usually been stolen and then held for ransom. Now, with the prodigious rewards offered by insurance companies, nasty ransom demands had become unnecessary. You could be more decorous. You merely stole the piece of art, waited awhile, and then turned it in for the insurance reward. All you had to do was come up with some reproachless way of “finding” the object in question and getting the word to the insurance company.

I have read at least one novel by Aaron Elkins before, and I reviewed it favorably. Nevertheless, his name is one of those that remains vaguely familiar in my mind, but I can’t quite place it. Maybe A Glancing Light will help me remember in the future.

The hero of A Glancing Light (this is the second book in a series) is Chris Norgren (extra points for the Scandinavian name!) a curator for a Seattle art museum. Chris is preparing for a trip to Bologna, Italy to arrange for an upcoming exhibition. He gets a request to evaluate a couple paintings that showed up unexpectedly in a shipment for a low-rent art importer. One of the paintings he dismisses as a fake. The other turns out to be one of a group of paintings stolen in a recent major art heist.

Arriving in Italy, Chris is treated to a welcome dinner by a group of friends. Afterward, he sees one of them being attacked by thugs. Chris rushes to help him. He escapes serious injury himself, but his friend is permanently crippled. Chris is certain this has something to do with the aforementioned art heist, but when he goes to see Bologna’s chief artistic crime cop, he’s not impressed with the man – and the feeling is mutual. The information he has to share is dismissed, and he is ordered to stay out of the whole business.

As you can guess, he will not follow that advice. Before he’s done, he’ll have cause to regret the.

The tone of A Glancing Light is (appropriately) fairly light. Chris is not one of those omnipotent amateur detectives who’s always one step ahead of the police, which makes him all the more believable. And the book is educational too.

I very much enjoyed A Glancing Light.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Three Minute Hero,’ by Craig Terlson

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I’d been away long enough that I struggled to connect the word home with this landscape. My body still felt it. My heart did, too, but that organ was buried in so much scar tissue it was hard to get a solid reading from it.

Sometimes a novel will astonish you with its high quality. Such is the case with Three Minute Hero by Craig Terlson, who – so far as I can tell – is an author who should have written a lot more novels, and ought to be much more famous than he is.

Luke Fischer, our hero and narrator, is a native of the Manitoba plains. But he fled the small town where he grew up, finally drifting to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he works now in an informal way – favor for favor – for Benno, a crime boss. Now Benno wants him to drive a car up to Canada, to look for a fellow employee Luke calls “Mostly Harold.” Mostly Harold is a professional hit man, a huge guy who wears cowboy boots and is devoted to the music of Burt Bacharach. He set out for Canada himself recently, in pursuit of a girlfriend who dumped him. And Benno suspects she had something to do with the recent murder of his own nephew.

Luke hasn’t been back to the Canadian plains for a long time, and he doesn’t find the folks especially friendly. Particularly as he’s following a string of dead and wounded tough guys, left behind by Mostly Harold’s juggernaut. But he’ll still find some time to confront his own past along the way.

The most obvious quality of Three Minute Hero, for the fan of hard-boiled detective fiction, is the obvious inspiration of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, another mystery centering on a big thug in search of a dangerous dame. But (with all due respect to Chandler) Mostly Harold is a far more complex and interesting character than Moose Malloy.

The prose is also very much in Chandler’s league. I don’t think I’ve read such a well-written hard-boiled story in a long time. Finely-crafted lines abound, like, “Worn-out tables were filled with circle fossils as memories of beers gone past.”

Some of Chandler’s weaknesses are also emulated. The plot is extremely complex and confusing. It was hard to keep track of the players. And there are some rookie factual errors, probably derived from TV and movies – pistols seem to have infinite ammunition supplies, a bullet wound to the shoulder is dismissed as minor, and automobiles get undue credit for their bullet-stopping properties.

Three Minute Hero is clearly set sometime before the turn of the 21st Century – there are no cell phones or internet. I don’t know when the book was actually written – the data on Amazon.com gives no clue. The author, Craig Terlson, is apparently a successful graphic artist as well as a novelist. I wish he’d written more than he has. This is good stuff.

Cautions for language and lots of violence. Highly recommended for hard-boiled fans.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Home,’ by Bruce Beckham

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The air is still and smells of mulch and fungal spores, and woodland sounds resonate – the harsh porcine screeching of jays and the fine ticking of robins.

The snippet above is just a sample of the deft natural descriptions that give Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels their unique tactile qualities. I’m not a great fan of outdoor stories, and I prefer my detectives more cerebral than instinctive. Which makes these novels entirely wrong for me, but I like them very much anyway.

In Murder at Home, book 22 in the series, our hero is out fishing on Bassenthwaite Lake, his favorite haunt, when he notices an old man on the shore in a wheelchair. The old man greets him as if he knows him, and talks to him about fishing. When a nurse comes to collect the old man, she tells Skelgill that he’s an indigent, dumped in a hospital and on the minimal welfare plan. They call him William, but aren’t sure that’s his name. He suffers from dementia.

Skelgill feels an affinity with the old man and decides to look more closely into the situation. This is not entirely outside his duties, as he and the attractive Detective Sergeant Jones are investigating welfare fraud.

Their other cohort, DS Leyton, is working undercover as a welfare worker. A flirtatious co-worker gives him a tip that the scam he ought to be looking at is one where people create false identities and then “double-dip” under their own and their assumed names. That will lead to a mother and son who are living the high life, not only on double benefits, but on murder.

I was a little ambivalent about Murder at Home at the beginning, purely for emotional reasons. But it grew on me, and having finished it I consider it one of the best entries in a stellar series. Highly recommended. The mature material is subdued enough to qualify the book as a Cozy, but the tone is a little tougher than a Cozy.

Oh, I might mention that all these books are written in the present tense. I object to that on principle, but in actual practice I always grow inured a few pages in.

Bookselling, Fiction

The Hobbit Illustrated and Animated

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One book I own that I wish was in perfect condition is a Rankin & Bass edition of The Hobbit (1977). It’s a coffee table book, perhaps designed to read with two or more children in and around your lap. The full text is included, so you won’t miss any details, except maybe those skewed by the illustrations.

The cover of the Rankin/Bass edition of The Hobbit
The death of Smaug can't be held to one page.

I assume my parents bought this, and I don’t remember it being a gift to me. I just acquired it at the appropriate hour. My own children rough it up a good bit, as they have done with many books.

Continue reading The Hobbit Illustrated and Animated →
Fiction, Reviews

Omni’s Fall by Tom Reynolds (Series #4)

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Book cover of Omni's Fall

I understand when a cast of characters is in high school, the plot usually entails going to class, but I remember the third novel, Rise of the Circle, ending on big decisions and cosmic revelations. This novel, Omni’s Fall, begins with our hero struggling through math class.

I guess that means it’s just another Monday.

Teenaged metahuman Connor Connolly feels compelled to act, even when he doesn’t know what to do. That gets him into big trouble and threatens to end his heroic career. The authorities over him keep telling him to stand down and not draw attention to himself, while at the same his Batman-like mentor is calling him out to missions. After each feat of heroism, his metabands, the technology that makes him a superhero, look more damaged than before. Should he keep using them? As soon as he decides to rest a while, another threat or opportunity arises.

The plot and structure of the book are fun and maybe hold together, but they aren’t strong. I liked the villain and the new developments to the world. I still like the characters. But everything together didn’t work as well as I wanted it to.

It’s one thing for the hero to press on when everything is telling him to play it safe. Maybe he can’t stop, because the threat will run him down or the bad guys will get away. Maybe he’s the only one with all the facts to bring justice. It’s another thing for the hero to keep risking his life because “somebody’s got to do something.” No one throws himself in front of a runaway train because somebody has to do something to stop it. Of course, when you open the possibility of being able to stop the train with your super strength, how big does that possibility have to be for you to make the jump?

With the threat of his metabands failing, Connor must confront the possibility that he may no longer be able to fight bad guys as Omni, but when that argument comes up, he gets defensive and denies all of his worries like a man denying he has colon cancer. He isn’t mature enough to have the power he has, and he isn’t mature enough to recognize his immaturity. The fear of having your power taken from you is a good theme, but this story doesn’t go deep enough to make it compelling.