Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Fatal Deception,’ by P. F. Ford

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A Fatal Deception

The eleventh entry in P. F. Ford’s Slater and Norman series has recently been released. Ford wrote, in an e-mail to his fans (which I received) that the publication date had been delayed due to certain family problems. Sad to report, the problems show in the book, A Fatal Deception.

The last book was pretty much all English detective Dave Slater, with almost no appearance by his former partner, Norman Norman, who is now a private investigator. In recompense, this book follows Norman (with his new partner, Naomi Darling) as they search for Jenny Radstock, Dave’s former girlfriend. Jenny has been living off and on in hiding, as a homeless person, for some time, and Norman and Naomi travel to the town where she was last seen. What they find is pretty ugly.

I remain a fan of this good-hearted mystery series, but A Fatal Deception shows all the signs of a rush job. There are a number of grammatical errors (though Ford has always been weak in that department). Bits of dialogue are rehashed twice or even, sometimes, three times. In our introduction to one character, we are treated first to a description of his personality, and then a scene where he demonstrates that description point for point. Which makes the initial description entirely redundant.

And not only was the conclusion a downer, but threads were left untied. As if author Ford couldn’t be bothered to finish the story properly.

Ford makes up for the short length of the novel by appending a novella devoted to Norman Norman celebrating a lonely Christmas. This story was more satisfactory, and left behind a pleasant, heartwarming feeling. So I don’t feel entirely cheated.

But A Fatal Deception is not up to the usual standards of a series more memorable for its likeability than for its literary qualities in the first place.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Well of the Winds,’ by Denzil Meyrick

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Well of the Winds

This is more like it. I was disappointed with Denzil Meyrick’s previous DCI Jim Daley novel, The Rat Stone Serenade (reviewed a little south of here). But Well of the Winds is (to my taste) a much better novel, showcasing the strengths of this engaging police series.

On the island of Gairsay, near Daley’s town of Kinloch, a Jewish family has lived for years. They came as refugees during World War II, and settled well into community life. But one day the mailman arrives to find them all vanished. Shortly afterward the body of the oldest of them, the grandmother, is found washed up on a beach in Ireland.

When Jim’s sergeant Brian Scott goes to investigate, he discovers a hidden cellar under the house – concealing a trove of old documents in German, apparently Nazi in orientation. Who were these people, really?

Although Special Branch and MI6 rush in to take over the investigation, Jim’s new superior, Superintendent Carrie Symington, insists that they carry on their own inquiries, in secret. Jim himself is contacted by a mysterious stranger, who gives him an old journal dating back to 1945. It was written by one of Jim’s predecessors in Kinloch, a detective named Urquhart who disappeared mysteriously in the wake of an unsolved murder. As Jim studies the journal, old secrets come to light.

Unlike the overblown and overcolored previous book in the series, Well of the Winds keeps the story smaller, simpler, and more local, as well as more character-driven. I liked it a lot, right up to the end, which was somewhat frustrating – but probably on purpose, to prime us for the next installment. Some skepticism about the European Union seems to be in evidence here, which doesn’t lose the book any points with me.

Recommended, with the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Empty Nets and Promises,’ by Denzil Meyrick

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Empty Nets and Promises

Author Denzil Meyrick takes a semi-departure from his series of Jim Daley novels to conduct us back in time in the same location as those books – the picturesque Kintyre village of Kinloch, Scotland. The year is 1968, and Empty Nets and Promises offers only one of the regular cast of characters – Hamish the drunken fisherman with the second sight, a man in his prime at the time of this story.

Hamish, first mate on a fishing boat, is concerned like all his friends about the bad catches that year. Never have they taken so few herring in any man’s memory. He and his friends have a theory as to the cause – it’s the supersonic test flights coming from a nearby Air Force base. It’s Hamish himself who comes up with a “brilliant” plan to stop the tests, which involves getting a couple pilots drunk and taking them away to a remote croft so they’ll be AWOL.

Well, it makes sense to them.

But they don’t reckon with the local fisheries inspector, who suspects them of smuggling whisky, and the skipper’s wife and daughter, who suspect them of planning to play a trick on the daughter’s fiancé on the eve of the upcoming wedding.

What follows is an amusing comedy of errors that almost leads to nuclear war.

Empty Nets and Promises is a funny story, full of vivid, idiosyncratic characters and well-painted landscapes. It’s somewhere between a short story and a novella, and good value for your book-buying dollar at the price. Minor cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Rat Stone Serenade,’ by Denzil Meyrick

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The Rat Stone Serenade

I’m quite enjoying Denzil Meyrick’s DCI Daley series of rural police procedurals. So I’m sorry to say that The Rat Stone Serenade was a little disappointing.

Our hero, Detective Chief Inspector Jim Daley, has decided to resign his post and leave police work altogether. It’s partly weariness after the mayhem he’s been witnessing, and partly because he’s grown desperately in love with a subordinate, Sergeant Mary Dunn (with whom he had an affair earlier), and he wants to save his shaky marriage for the sake of his baby son.

His final duty is to help with security for the Annual General Meeting of the Shannon Group, “the world’s largest corporation,” which sprang originally from an estate in a nearby town on the Kintyre Peninsula. Once a year the Shannon heirs and other corporate officers meet at the great manor house on the cliff. It’s a haunted place, cursed by a blacksmith from whom an ancestor stole the land, and by the mysterious, unsolved abduction of the heir apparent years ago, when he was a small boy.

What follows is kind of a mess, in my opinion. There are so many plots and counterplots going on, so many double-crosses, so many generational secrets to be revealed one after another, that it’s pretty much impossible to keep up. (Also there’s a convenient once-in-a-century snow storm to isolate most of the cast of characters. And a sinister ancient blood cult, in case things get dull.) I found it all pretty unconvincing.

And I didn’t care for the direction Daley’s relationship with Sergeant Mary took (although a surprise is coming there, too).

I like the series and plan to continue with it, but The Rat Stone Serenade was built a couple stories taller than building codes ought to allow.

Cautions for language and sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Heretics of St. Possenti,’ by Rolf Nelson

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The Heretics of St. Possenti

Not what I expected, that was what Rolf Nelson’s The Heretics of St. Possenti was. I figured it for a military sci fi novel, set in a dystopian future. In fact it’s a utopian story of a sort, set in the present or the very near future.

By “utopian story” I mean the kind of story that proposes a major societal change and tries to demonstrate how well it will work. The books of this sort I remember best are Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. I suppose Ayn Rand’s novels are the same sort of thing (quite close to the kind of story this is), but I’ve never read Rand.

The Heretics of St. Possenti introduces us to Bishop Thomas Cranberry, who through misadventure spends a night in jail and is then given a leave of absence by his archbishop. Intrigued by the complaints of the men he’d met in jail – who said the Church offered them nothing that was of use here and now – he decides to get to know some of these “marginal” men. In a dojo and in a bar he meets military veterans, many of them suffering from PTSD, who can find no place in the world. They encounter nothing but Catch-22s in the VA, the welfare offices, or drug treatment centers. They can’t get work with a living wage. Many are deeply in debt. Continue reading ‘The Heretics of St. Possenti,’ by Rolf Nelson →

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Awful Truth About Forgetting,’ by L. Jagi Lamplighter

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The Awful Truth About Forgetting

I’ll confess right here that I feel a little embarrassed following a Christian Young Adult fantasy series starring a girl character. But the Rachel Griffin series is delightful, rewarding, and uplifting. The Awful Truth About Forgetting is just as good as its predecessors.

In this episode, Rachel returns to the Roanoke Academy of the Sorcerous Arts after a visit home, following the traumatic battle that ended Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland. Rachel, as you know if you’ve been following along, lives in an alternate world where magic is real and neither Judaism or Christianity has ever been heard of. She is one of the “Wise” – those who see and understand magical things, as opposed to the “Unwary” – ordinary folks who know nothing of Rachel’s world. In other words, Muggles. Rachel is the daughter of an English duke who is also a top law enforcement agent in magical matters.

Rachel has an eidetic memory – she remembers everything, which makes learning easy. But she’s in an odd situation now, since false memories were implanted in her mind after her recent traumas (for her own protection). This means she has a double set of memories. She can fool the people who gave her the false memories by pretending those are all she has, but then her friends – who do remember what she’s supposed to have forgotten – would know something was wrong, and they might get drawn into the whole mess. But she has the help of a very powerful supernatural protector, which also comes in handy when the school comes under magical attack.

There’s also a lot of typical school story material here, about who’s best friends with whom, and how different friendships are ranked against each other. And boyfriend stuff, and a new attraction.

But what I love about the Rachel Griffin books is that there are Narnia moments. Not only moments of homage to those books (“Jack” even gets a mention), but scenes that evoke the feelings I get from Narnia stories. That’s what really makes this series shine.

Recommended for teens and up – except that there’s a lot of magic and wizardry and mythological stuff which some Christian families will find unacceptable.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Suits and Sad Songs,’ by Denzil Meyrick

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Dark Suits and Sad Songs

I’m liking Denzil Meyrick’s series of DCI Jim Daley mysteries more and more. Dark Suits and Sad Songs could have gone badly off course, in my opinion, but author Meyrick brings it in to port with the sure hand of an old pilot.

Jim Daley is a Glasgow police detective who’s been put in charge of the station at Kinloch, a beautiful town on the Kintyre peninsula. The idyllic, old-fashioned community is beset by a continuing problem with drug smuggling, and its past chief inspector was found to be corrupt. But Jim has suspicions that he’s been sent to Kinloch for less obvious, more sinister reasons. And he’s right.

The trouble starts when a senior civil servant douses himself with gasoline on a local dock and commits suicide by immolation. Then a couple local drug dealers are found murdered in vicious ways characteristic of foreign drug cartels. Closed circuit TV reveals that a well-known international assassin is in town. And – oh yes – UFOs have been sighted.

Meanwhile, Jim is worried about his marriage, and whether it’s worth saving. His wife has given birth to a son, but he has reason to doubt whether the child is his. Also his best friend, DCS Scott, has been sent to help him out, but is largely useless, as he’s been traumatized by a gunshot wound and has crawled into a bottle for comfort.

The action of the story becomes fairly cinematic toward the end, which means plausibility suffers. But it’s exciting anyway, and some important ongoing narrative threads get tied up at last (though the series goes on). I had a good time reading Dark Suits and Sad Songs, and I recommend it. Read the books in order for the best effect.

Cautions for language, violence, and gore. No attacks are made on Christianity, which is always nice. And the CIA shows up, and for once is not the bad guy.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Watches of the Night,’ by Sally Wright

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Watches of the Night

I find, as I work my way through Sally Wright’s Ben Reese series of mysteries, that I enjoy the books that center on Ben himself most of all. Watches of the Night, the fifth of them, set in 1962, is one of those.

Ben is having some trouble at work as the story starts (after a flashback to World War II). His university’s integrity-challenged new president is putting pressure on him to collude in an illegal act. His immediate boss, the chief librarian, is aiding and abetting the president.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, Kate Lindsay, a widow to whom Ben is attracted, receives a shocking package in the mail. It’s the eye of her late husband, killed nearly 20 years before in combat. Ben is planning a trip to Europe on archive business anyway, so he agrees to talk to her. Little do they know that they’re uncovering the secrets of a powerful, ruthless man, who will stop at nothing to keep his past covered. Before they’re done there will be murder and Ben will face a nightmare out of his own past.

I was particularly impressed by the treatment of war scenes in Watches of the Night. One doesn’t expect (because “one” is a famous sexist) that a female writer will handle battle situations well, but I found those parts in this book (and there are many in flashbacks) extremely good.

Also Ben’s and Kate’s cautious courtship passes a milestone this time out, which is nice.

Mature themes, but no profanity. Recommended.

Authors, Fiction, Religion

Peter De Vries

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Peter De Vries

The other day I recalled – for no reason I can state – a movie I saw in my college days. It was Pete ‘n Tillie, starring Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett. Some friends and I saw it cheap at a second run theater somewhere in Minneapolis. I didn’t like it much.

And yet, having thought of it, I looked it up on Wikipedia. I discovered, to my surprise, that it was based on a novel called Witch’s Milk, by Peter De Vries.

And that reminded me of Peter De Vries. He was a prominent novelist back in those days. A Dutch Calvinist from Chicago, he had served in the OSS in World War II (very hush-hush), and eventually went to the work for the New Yorker, at the invitation of James Thurber.

His Wikipedia article quotes James Bratt, who called him “a secular Jeremiah, a renegade CRC missionary to the smart set.” However, this interesting article from Image Journal describes him as essentially an atheist.

De Vries dwelled in familiar settings because he wanted to dismantle the belief systems that struck him as too smug or self-sufficient. Religion was his enduring target, but he also mocked modern medicine, psychoanalysis, feminism, academia, and the advertising industry.

I’m not really qualified to pass judgment on him. I only read one of his novels, The Glory of the Hummingbird, which left a lasting impression on me, but did not inspire me to read more of his books. He was one of those authors I didn’t feel qualified to grapple with.

The Wikipedia article says all his books were out of print at the time of his death in 1993. I am happy to report that some are now available in Kindle form (like the works of that other brilliant but neglected author, Lars Walker). The Blood of the Lamb is the most famous.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Out of the Ruins,’ by Sally Wright

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Out of the Ruins

Book four in the Ben Reese mystery series by Sally Wright is Out of the Ruins, a venture into Southern Gothic. In this episode, archivist Ben has returned to his university in Ohio from Scotland, but is taking some sabbatical time to travel to the South, to evaluate a collection of art being donated to his school. While there he gets a call from an old friend named Hannah Hill, who owns a large estate on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Hannah suffers from MS, and is confined to her bed. She is concerned about local attempts to acquire her estate for development, or for a national park. Also, she has had “dreams” about a masked figure coming into her room at night and spraying things with a spray gun.

By the time Ben arrives, Hannah Hill is dead, apparently of pneumonia. Most suspicious. He enters a world of old family feuds, greed, and hypocrisy, in which Hannah’s heir – a young female opera singer – is the target of long-simmering, murderous hate.

Out of the Ruins was not my favorite book in this series. I found the action of the climax kind of hard to follow. And author Wright, though generally a good writer, has one bad habit that annoys me. When writing telephone conversations, she employs what I call “TV phone call writing.” You know how it goes on TV – you only hear one side of the conversation, so they have to have the character on screen repeat everything the character on the other end says, even though people don’t do that in real life (Bob Newhart did some great comedy routines in that format back in the ‘60s). There are only two ways to handle phone conversations in a novel, in my opinion. Either leave the reader uncertain about what the unheard party is saying (this could be useful in a mystery), or just give us both sides of the conversation.

But Out of the Ruins was generally entertaining, and I enjoyed reading it. Recommended.