Dominic Sandbrook talks about the virtues of author Catherine Cookson, who published 104 works before her death in 1998. “She is not cool or trendy. Cookson was sneered at a lot in her lifetime because her readers were the antithesis of the readers usually celebrated by literary critics: predominantly middle-aged and elderly women, often working class. Her books are conservative.”
Sandbrook has produced a biopic for BBC2 on Cookson. (via Prufrock)
First of all, let me state at the outset the important fact that Missing You by Harlan Coben is an exceedingly good novel. One of his best, I’d say, and that’s no mean praise.
I have to say that because I’m going to do some ideological quibbling at the end.
Anyway, the main character of Missing You is Kat Donovan, a New York City police detective who very quickly finds herself tugged in several directions by a number of worries and crises.
First of all, a friend has signed her up for an online dating service. Looking through possible matches, she discovers a photograph of the fiancé who abandoned her eighteen years before. She’s never gotten over him. Everything was going fine, they were planning a life together, and then one day he was gone without a word. Now here he is, describing himself as a widower with one child. And when she sends him a message, he doesn’t seem to remember her. Continue reading ‘Missing You,’ by Harlan Coben
I have to review this book just because it fooled me in a couple ways. It’s not a bad novel, but what stuck with me was the non-plot-related surprises.
First of all, although the story is set in America, it gradually dawned on me as I read that the author had to be English. I noticed, eventually, that double quotation marks were set inside single quotation marks in dialogue, in the English style. Also the author threw in English-isms like “bonnet” for the hood of a car, or “Too right,” as an idiomatic phrase.
The second surprise only came at the end. More on that later.
The story of The Anniversary centers on Paul Rigby, a police detective in a small town. For the past year he has been balanced on the edge of career disaster. He’s approaching the anniversary of the death of his fiancée. He loved her deeply, but learned after she was gone that she’d lied to him and betrayed him. Since then he’s been drinking heavily, getting into fights, and being self-destructive in general. The only thing standing between him and unemployment is his police chief, who has a fatherly fondness for him and has allowed him to live in an apartment above his garage, where he can keep an eye on him.
The plot of the book involves an accountant who’s arrested for embezzlement, but swears he’s innocent. Rigby narrowly avoids going to bed with the man’s wife, and does his best to investigate the case, in between fights and suspensions from duty and getting his ankle in a cast.
The character of Rigby was well-conceived, but went a little too far for my taste. What I mean is, it’s fine to create a damaged personality with lots of anger and pain in him, but so much time was spent on Rigby’s unhappiness that (for me) it slowed the story down and told us more than we cared to know.
Which was all explained when I discovered that the author, Mel Parish, is not a man as I had assumed, but a woman. Usually I can (or think I can) identify a male character written by a female, but Rigby fooled me. What I took for a failure in narrative was in fact just a woman’s point of view. Author Parish did a better than usual job of getting into a man’s head, but (in my opinion) spent too much time in there, describing the exotic furnishings.
Not perfect, but you might enjoy it. Some rough language and mild sex. And some violence, of course.
As the gods would have it, someone is talking about the fictitious author Neal Stephenson over on The Millions.
In the 1990s, Stephenson looked like the best thing to happen to science fiction since William Gibson blew things open with Neuromancer the previous decade. Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) tangled with big ideas like the onset of the Web and nanotechnology years before they entered the popular nomenclature and knocked them into dramatic shape with humor and pop-culture savvy. Here’s the famous opening of Snow Crash, establishing the character of one Hiro Protagonist, a master of samurai sword usage, hacking, and near-future high-speed pizza delivery.
Apparently, his novel Seveneves
I’ve been interested to read one of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion books ever since I saw Peter Davidson’s portrayal on a BBC television series some years back. Books in the series have recently become available for Kindle at low prices, so I bought Police at the Funeral.
Albert Campion, the amateur detective of these books, bears a resemblance to Dorothy Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and it’s not by accident. Campion began as a parody of Lord Peter, but took on a life of his own. Nevertheless, they’re still alike enough to be brothers, except that Campion wears horn rimmed glasses instead of Wimsey’s monocle.
In Police at the Funeral, Campion goes to stay in a great house in Cambridge, at the request of a friend, and of his fiancee who is a lady’s companion there. The resident family is an eccentric and crotchety assortment of elderly siblings and cousins, all constantly quibbling and chafing under the iron rule of a formidable great-aunt. One of the residents has disappeared, and soon his body is discovered, bound with a rope and shot to death.
The story is perfectly a perfectly adequate example of the “cozy” English variety of mystery, but I found it less interesting than I hoped. Perhaps my tastes have been spoiled by the ugly realism of the modern mystery, or perhaps I just compared it unfairly to Dorothy Sayer’s books, which are (in my view) a notch brighter and more interesting.
Not bad, though. I’m sure many of our readers will enjoy it.
Harlan Coben is a remarkable writer of thrillers. It has been noted that he avoids profanity in his dialogue, and his use of violence is pretty restrained. Nevertheless he is capable of producing books as shocking as any you will ever read, in their own way. The Stranger is Hitchcockian in its portrayal of a very ordinary man thrust into a world of lies and mortal danger, and raises societal and existential questions as well.
Adam Price is no man of action. An easygoing type, he’s a successful eminent domain lawyer, living in a prosperous New Jersey suburb. He loves his beautiful wife and his two teenage sons. He’s “living the dream,” as one of his friends likes to say.
But, as the author is careful to emphasize, “dream” is precisely the word for their lives. Their security is insecure, their happiness fragile. Adam learns this first hand when a stranger sidles up to him after a youth lacrosse league meeting at the local American Legion, and tells him, “You didn’t have to stay with her.” Then he gives him information to prove that his wife has lied to him about something that matters deeply in their relationship.
It’s not just him who’s receiving such messages, Adam learns in time. There are people who search the internet, ferreting out secrets and blackmailing people, self-righteously believing they’re fighting the good fight against hypocrisy.
And they’re not even the worst ones….
Besides questioning our illusions of security and secrecy in the modern world, The Stranger also raises interesting questions about what they call “hacktivism” nowadays. This book is as relevant as anything you’ll read this year.
It drew me in. It fascinated me. It broke my heart. Highly recommended.
Jordan J. Ballor reveals how “a newly discovered section of Madeleine L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time (1963), which was excised before the book’s publication, makes clear the author’s classically conservative vision of political and social order.”
The passage was uncovered by L’Engle’s granddaughter. In it, Meg talks to her father about how IT came to run over Camazotz. Mr. Murray replies that old fashioned totalitarianism was involved, but also prosperity and a “lust for security.”
“In a gloss on the famous passage from Paul’s first epistle to Timothy, Mr. Murry concludes that the love of security is “the greatest evil there is.” Placing security as the highest social good leads people to stop taking risks, to cease being entrepreneurial, to give up liberty, and even love itself.” (via Hunter Baker)
Recently I reviewed a couple of Ridley Pearson’s Lou Boldt novels, part of a continuing series I enjoy and watch for. I went on to try out another series of Pearson’s, the Risk Agent novels, which are very different stories, though equally well told. Though less to my taste.
The Risk Agent stories have two main characters. One is John Knox (interesting choice of name). John is a former commando, now running an import/export business. He makes good money, but he needs a lot of money, because his younger brother Tommie, whose guardian he is, suffers from an autistic-type disorder. Tommie functions well with good care, but such care is expensive. So John regularly takes side jobs with Rutherford Risk, an international private security firm. He was recruited as a risk agent by an old military friend.
The other main character is Grace Chu, formerly of the Chinese army. She is beautiful (of course), trained in martial arts, and a computer expert. She has a troubled relationship with her family, who do not approve of her career or her wish to marry a man of whom they do not approve.
John and Grace meet in The Risk Agent, in which they deal with a hostage situation in Shanghai. In an adventure they barely survive, they learn to like and trust each other, though they won’t admit to their mutual attraction.
In Choke Point they are sent to Amsterdam to deal with a child labor racket. And in The Red Room they are sent to Istanbul on a strange, off-the-books mission that makes no sense to them and leaves them on the run without support.
There’s an interesting character arc in the Risk Agent books. It’s not only the growing awareness of mutual attraction between the two main characters, but a hard fact about themselves that John already knows and Grace begins to learn. They are both adrenaline junkies, danger addicts. John tells himself he does his risk agent work for Tommie’s sake, but in his clearer moments he can see that his main motivation is his need to live as intensely as he did when he was in combat. If he gets himself killed, Tommie will be left all alone. And Grace discovers that she’s becoming exactly the same.
This intensity is the reason why, although I liked the Risk Agent books well enough, I still prefer the Lou Boldt stories. The level of stress achieved and maintained in these books is so cinematically high – and so generally unrelieved – that it kind of wore me out. I need a few breaks in my action stories, some down time and comic relief.
Still, I think the Risk Agent books will work very well for people who like their action poured straight. I can see them being turned into action movies, and very successful ones.
Cautions for the usual things – language, adult situations, and violence. But not bad by contemporary standards.
Author S.A. Hunt posted this fan letter on his Google+ feed (now defunct) yesterday. It’s a nice Found Reader story.
I don’t mean to hit you in the feels, but I have to share this with you and the community. My brother hates books, hates reading. He’s always had trouble with it, and he always felt like books were a world (really many worlds) he was locked outside of. In the last year he finally got new glasses and reading became a lot easier, he came to me and asked if I had anything lying around the house that he might be interested in reading. I handed him The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree and gave him an adapted Princess Bride speech: “swords, guns, torture, revenge, giant robot things, mad men with masks, chases, escapes, true love, miracles: you want it, this book has it.”
I kinda backed away slowly, hoping for the best, but Devin hasn’t read a book since high school. Over the next couple of weeks I started getting way more texts than usual: “I just got to the ocean monster,” “text me the name of that town they visit, I wanna name my city after it in Risk Legacy,” “I feel like the world is conspiring against me to finish the last few pages of this book. Every time I have a moment something has to happen! WTF!” I realized that he was going to need the second book before I’d find time to finish it, so I primed it right to his house. He texts me the next day “Yeah that first book cliff hangs hard! Glad I can just pick up the next one, thanks sis.”
He wanted to write you a thank you letter, but he’s less confident with writing than he is with reading, so I got drafted.
TLDR: My brother hasn’t willingly opened a book in his whole 30 years, and your book, your writing just opened a thousand doors. He took WitTT with him EVERYWHERE until he finished it, and now he won’t shut up about it. He beat that book up so hard that he told me he “owes me a new, nice copy.”
One of many things that irritate me in this world is reviews that say, “This book just didn’t work for me.” I’m sure I’ve written some myself, but it seems a pointless exercise. Reviews should be reserved for people who understand what’s going on, whether they love it or hate it. If it just disappoints you for reasons you can’t articulate, why bother reviewing at all?
Still, here I am reviewing a book written by a friend of several friends, who is acclaimed by all as a good guy and a fine writer. And yet about all I can say is that it didn’t really work for me.
Bolg P.I.: The Bolg and the Beautiful is a comic mashup, a combination of hardboiled detective story and fantasy. A “bolg” is a kind of Irish dwarf, and our hero/narrator, who is generally just known as Bolg, has survived (like the characters of Gaiman’s American Gods) into the modern world. Surviving with him are a number of mythological beings, including a wizard, the goddess Freya and some family members, and the dwarfs of the Rheingold.
When Freya, who is quite old now but still retains the power to dazzle any normal male, is robbed of her savings by a con man (who is immune to her charms because he swings the other way), Bolg is called in to try to recover the money for her. He employs natural and supernatural means to accomplish this task, and there’s a lot of comedy along the way.
I did laugh sometimes, and the author now and then made comments on the world with which I agreed profoundly. But the mix didn’t satisfy me. It didn’t entirely work either as drama or farce, for my taste.
I won’t deny, however, that the prose was good and I got some laughs out of it. So your mileage may vary, and likely will.