Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ripped Into,’ by Jack Chandler

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Stuart “Fin” Finlay, the hero of Ripped Into (the first book in a new series by Jack Chandler) is a sort of a private detective in England, specializing in locating missing children. This time he takes a job from a man named Stanton, who wants him to find his missing stepdaughter, Sarah. She disappeared the same night their house burned down and his wife disappeared.

Fin starts running down leads, but the author also follows the activities of Sarah herself, living a high-stress life under a false identity. The mystery becomes one of why she’s hiding, and why she doesn’t simply go to the police.

As the story works itself out, we learn that some extremely dangerous people are hunting for Sarah. Fin eventually is able to take her under his wing, but she is very fragile and paranoid, convinced that she can trust no one, ready to bolt any moment. Only perfect honesty and a measure of self-disclosure, very hard for Fin, will keep her on his side.

I can’t deny that Ripped Into is an intense, fast-moving book. Considerable space is spent on Fin and Sarah painfully disclosing their personal traumas to one another in an effort to build rapport; I’m not sure that element wasn’t a little mushy for a book as violent as this. Which brings up my main problem with the story – it involves an extended scene of the torture of a woman. We have an occasional commenter on this blog who never fails to take umbrage at my objections to female cops in novels. I willingly admit to my sexism, but that’s not the main reason why I dislike the topic. The primary reason is that I just hate witnessing violence against women. (The fact that author Chandler turns out to be a woman herself doesn’t mend the matter for this reader.)

So my final verdict is that Ripped Into is a pretty effective mystery thriller featuring generally good writing, but it did not suit my very subjective taste.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where They Wait,’ by Scott Carson

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The signature sound of the loon is a solitary sound. It’s a haunting cry of undeniable beauty with an undercurrent of sorrow. An announcement of peaceful northern isolation, the Thoreau of birds.

The sound is a lie, though. Loons are not solitary, nor are they peaceful. The loon’s life is a violent one. The birds will stab each other with their beaks, beat each other with their wings, and pull each other under the water. The midnight cry that makes people think of Thoreau at Walden Pond is anything but serene.

I picked up another novel by Scott Carson, whose Lost Man’s Lane impressed me so. Where They Wait did not bowl me over to quite the same degree, but it’s very good.

Nick Bishop is a journalist, out of work, yet another victim of the digital revolution. Living in Florida, he calls an old college friend in Maine, where he used to live and went to school. The friend tells him he’s editing the college’s alumni magazine, and offers him a decent fee to write an article about a distinguished alumnus, a young computer tycoon who lives locally. But Nick needs to come up and interview him in person, he says.

Well, it’s been a long time since Nick has gone home to Maine. His mother is there, but she’s in nursing care, her memory lost to a stroke. Ironically, she’d been a highly respected expert on memory. There’s also the family’s lakeside “camp,” what people in other states would call a cabin, on a lake. Nick drives up and interviews the young tycoon, surprised to be met at the door by a young woman who’d been a childhood friend, and on whom he’d had a crush. The tycoon shows Nick a new cell phone app he’s working on – a relaxation program. Nick tries the beta version, and it works well. Rather too well. His life will never be the same, and soon he’ll learn facts about his past he’d never guessed. Facts that could be the death of him and others.

Where They Wait is an earlier novel than Lost Man’s Lane, and (in my opinion) not quite as successful. However, I considered Lost Man’s Lane almost perfect, so plenty of room remains for this to be quite a good novel. And such judgments are subjective anyway. Where They Wait offers intriguing characters and a compelling mystery, with one foot in science and the other in the supernatural. Very much in my own line, when I’m writing such books as Wolf Time.

I enjoyed Where They Wait, and read it in a day. There are a couple respectful, vague references to Christianity, and the whole thing could be viewed allegorically, if one were in the mood.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Rough Treatment,’ by John Harvey

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In an unnamed city in England’s Midlands, a pair of well-dressed burglars are having a successful run, breaking into rich people’s homes during the daytime when they’re supposed to be gone. But one day they burgle a TV director’s house, to find his wife, Maria Ray, at home. They rob the place anyway, and there are sexual sparks between one of the burglars – Jerry – and Maria. But the big prize of their day’s haul is a kilo of cocaine, hidden in a wall safe. Maria’s husband had been “holding it for a friend.”

So begins John Harvey’s police procedural Rough Treatment. As Jerry the burglar and Maria begin a torrid affair, Inspector Charlie Resnick, the hero of this series, heads up the police investigation. The clues will lead to organized crime and possible police corruption.

There’s  much to be said for Rough Treatment. It has a creative idea – particularly memorable for the character of the burglar with a heart of gold. Inspector Charlie Resnick himself is a pretty good hero, with a properly tragic back story – I wish we’d been given more information about it. One would need to read the first book in the series, I suppose – this is the second.

I found the writing style kind of ragged, though – the author is inclined to make sudden scene changes without alerting the reader (this may be a formatting problem, though). He also likes to begin scenes without telling us where they’re taking place, leaving that illumination for a few paragraphs on. Which annoys me.

The story is set in the 1990s, and so is gratifyingly free from the fashionable 50-50 male to female personnel ratio that’s become so popular today, at least in fiction. Cop humor is much in evidence, and in the (general) absence of women, tends to be pretty dirty, without any of the wit we find in John Sandford’s novels. There’s also a lot of offensive racist talk (disapproved of, of course). The sex scenes get pretty steamy too.

Rough Treatment was all right of its place and time, but I didn’t love it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lost Man’s Lane,’ by Scott Carson

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“Sure,” Noah said. “But to be any good, it takes time and it’s humbling. Anything worth doing in life meets that criteria. Detective work has one essential requirement: a willingness to admit that you might be wrong. Being observant and quick on your feet is nice, but self-doubt is mandatory.”

What an exceedingly fine book this was.

I didn’t actually realize what I was buying when I got Scott Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane on a discount offer. I assumed I was getting an ordinary, mundane missing person mystery. But this book is more like my Epsom novels – two parts urban fantasy and one part horror. Just enough horror to spice the mixture, but not enough to put off a wuss like this reader.

The story takes place in Bloomington, Indiana in the late 1990s. Marshal Miller is a teenager, the son of a single mother. The very day he gets his learner’s permit to drive, he’s pulled over by a policeman, a hostile man who speaks threateningly to him and writes him a ticket. Through his rear view mirror, Marshall sees a young woman in the back seat of the cruiser, wearing a tee-shirt from a local ice cream shop and crying.

No court summons arrives, so Marshall turns his attention to other things – until someone shows him a missing person’s flyer being posted around town. It shows a picture of the very young woman Marshall saw in the police car. He contacts the private investigator whose contact information is on the flyer, a genial local man who passes the information on to the police and takes him under his wing as an apprentice P.I.

Marshall is suddenly a local celebrity – but that turns sour when he makes another police report that appears to be false. Now Marshall is a laughingstock, accused of inventing hoaxes, bringing false hope to the missing girls’ family

It’s a hard time for Marshall, but he weathers the storm with the help of his mother, the girl he loves (who is unfortunately dating somebody else), the private investigator, and a couple good friends. He will be tempered in fire as he comes of age at the turn of the millennium.

Scott Carson (actually bestselling author Michael Koryta) is simply a top-notch fictioneer. If you asked me to find a flaw in Lost Man’s Lane, I couldn’t think of one. The characters are vivid and faceted. The dialogue is fast and crisp. The prose sings. And the plotting – the plot is an intricate web of threads, all of which tie up elegantly at the end. Reading this book was a delight from beginning to end.

The supernatural elements in Lost Man’s Lane bear no marks of Christian theology. The approach seems to be similar to that of Manly Wade Wellman (whose Silver John stories are referenced at one point). The book’s sexual morality doesn’t follow Christian ethics, so don’t look for that sort of story.

But overall I find no fault in Lost Man’s Lane. Wish I’d written it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Handful of Dust,’ by Evelyn Waugh

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Tony Last, who is sort of the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, is a landed Englishman, barely managing to maintain his ancestral estate in the 1930s. His ancestral home, we are informed, has been defaced in hideous Victorian Gothic style, but he loves it. He also loves his wife Brenda and his little son John.

Over the course of this book he will lose all three of those, in various ways, and will be last seen on a feckless exploratory expedition, in search of a lost city, in the Amazon region of South America.

A Handful of Dust has a high reputation as a satirical novel. I found it a very wry book, but funny only in a mordant way. The humor is subtle (much went over my head, I’m certain) and exceedingly dark.

Perhaps later history was too much in my mind as I read. This book was written before World War II, before the British Empire dissolved, and before the Anglosphere fell into the hands of people committed to its erasure. Tony Last, the hero of A Handful of Dust, is an idealist and a romantic, which is his tragedy.

It is also the tragedy of everyone who ever loved England, if only from afar.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Sayulita Sucker,’ by Craig Terlson

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Ahead, I saw the tall concrete wall painted the color of Meyer
lemons. Terminal de Autobuses was emblazoned in thick black letters. Behind the station a hill rose, half covered in foliage, with orange-roofed buildings poking their heads up like school children. The sky was painted the perfect blue, a light breeze cooled my sweaty neck, and the events of the last couple of hours faded with the distant cries of gulls.

My friend Craig Terlson was kind enough to send me an advance copy his next novel Sayulita Sucker, now available for pre-order. It’s a shorter book (a short story is appended for good measure), but features Terlson’s usual excellent neo-hardboiled prose.

Luke Fischer, our continuing hero, is a Canadian expatriate, living as a beach bum near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He subsists on the hospitality of his patron, Benno, a genial crime boss. From time to time Benno takes advantage of Luke’s size, strength, and fighting skills to help him out with various small problems.

Benno is out of town as Sayulita Sucker begins, and Luke is approached by a man who claims to be a friend of his. He has a daughter, he says, who has always been a little wild. Now she’s disappeared, and he fears she might have fallen into the hands of traffickers. He has an idea she’s being held in a town a little way north up the coast. Luke agrees to go and look, and takes a bus up. Clues lead him to another town called Sayulita, and violence ensues.

Luke is a laconic character, and his ability to handle himself in a fight always surprises me a little. He strikes me as sort of a cross between Travis McGee and Jeff Lebowski. His investigative technique mostly involves sitting in bars and hotel lounges until somebody takes offense at one of his questions and tries to kill him. The whole story had, for this reader, a kind of dream-like quality.

Quite an enjoyable story, adorned by the author’s excellent prose and dialogue. Recommended. Cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Lonely Heiress,’ by Erle Stanley Gardner

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When all else fails, a Perry Mason novel is always reliable. Erle Stanley Gardner was an old pulp man who knew his craft and understood what the reader wanted. The Case of the Lonely Heiress delivers the goods, complete with a nude female corpse for cover art opportunities.

Perry Mason’s new client is the proprietor of a sleazy lonely hearts magazine, which thrives on ads (some of them even legitimate) from people looking for romance (that’s what they used to do before Tinder).

The man tells them that one of his recent ads has been getting a lot of response. The woman who bought the ad claims to be an heiress, and is looking for a young man who comes from the farm. He wants to find this woman, who is obviously a fraud. Perry agrees to put his detective Paul Drake on the case, and soon the woman is located.

Oddly enough, she turns out to be completely legitimate. And before long Perry’s working for her, and then things get complicated, and then somebody gets killed.

And it all comes down to a neat criminal plot, unraveled in the nick of time in the classic Perry Mason style.

Those of us who know Perry Mason mostly from TV don’t really know the early Mason. That Perry Mason was forever young, while actor Raymond Burr aged (and put on weight). He lacked the judge-like gravity of Burr’s interpretation. He was light-hearted, physically active, and not always strictly ethical. In this story (published in 1948) he sails pretty close to the wind in terms of his handling of evidence.

Good entertainment, The Case of the Lonely Heiress is an amusing book for occupying your time while waiting in a train station.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lethal Prey, by John Sandford

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I’ve enjoyed John Sandford’s Prey novels, featuring millionaire Minneapolis cop Lucas Davenport, for many, many years. The books have changed with time, and Davenport, once a borderline psychopath local cop, is now a US Marshal and a settled family man who stays in law enforcement because, by his own admission, he likes shooting bad guys.

Lucas works all over the country now, but in Lethal Prey he’s called back home to Minnesota (which pleased me) due to a law enforcement crisis. Lara Grandfelt, a wealthy Minneapolis woman, has decided she wants to get her sister’s case solved. Twenty years ago, her sister Doris, an employee at an accounting firm, was stabbed to death. Her body was found in a suburban park, and examination showed that she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The investigators got the DNA, but no match was found. For years Lara has been bothering the police about the case, but now she’s decided to go public. She promises a 5 million dollar reward to anyone providing evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction.

Lucas gets teamed up again with his old friend Virgil Flowers, and, looking at all the work that will be necessary in running down old, faint leads, they decide to go public in a different way. There are a lot of true crime bloggers out there, and they’re keen to get in on the reward money. Lucas and Virgil put the word out that any private researcher who helps substantially in solving the crime will get a share of the reward. Such amateur participation will create problems of its own, but the added manpower will prove invaluable – if they can ride herd on their helpers.

They have no idea – though the reader does – who their adversary is, and it’s a formidable adversary indeed, one of the most formidable and memorable in the Prey series, I think.

Author John Sandford knows his business as few writers do, and Lethal Prey is entertaining all through. I liked that it featured no kick-butt female cops this time out, and the story didn’t involve the high level of perverse sexual cruelty many of the previous books have featured. But I was troubled by the fact that the reader is left with a sort of cliff-hanger at the end. Sandford doesn’t usually do that. Perhaps things will be explained in the next book.

Cautions for language and adult themes. Fun for grownups.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Perfect Lawyer,’ by Gregg Bell

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Icarus “Ike” Thompson, hero of The Perfect Lawyer, used to be a legal superstar in Chicago. He defended high-profile criminal defendants and usually won. Then he ran up against Ursula Rush, a hard-driving prosecutor who not only beat him but humiliated him in a case in which he was personally invested. Overwhelmed and shamed, he retreated to a leafy suburb, where he now practices property law. When he interviews Abby Blum, an attractive young lawyer from Colorado, as a new partner, and she brings up criminal law, he shuts her down and almost rejects her application. But she persists, and he takes her on.

Then “Father K.” shows up. He’s a Catholic priest and a well-known social crusader. He wants Ike to defend Mia Hendrickson. a media sensation, a mother accused of setting her house on fire and burning her two children to death. She’s already been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. Ike wants nothing to do with the case, but we just know Father K. will get through to him in the end.

Then follows a tale of increasing drama as Ike and Abby take on what looks like a hopeless case, only gradually realizing what kind of power and corruption they’re facing. And at the prosecutor’s table, once again, will be none other than Ursula Rush.

If I were teaching a novel writing class, and a student had submitted A Perfect Lawyer as a final project, I would give them an A. The book is well-plotted, generally well written, and gripping. The prose could have been better – occasionally an overwritten line shows up: “He was burning with their insolent intimidation.” But overall the writing is good, and way better than a lot I see these days. The dialogue is sometimes kind of bookish, and could use some polishing. But I’d tell the author he showed great promise and had produced a publishable work.

I was a little disappointed that some plot threads were left loose at the end, but no doubt the next volume in the series will pick them up. I almost mistook this book for Christian fiction, because I noticed no profanity (kudos for that).

All in all, The Perfect Lawyer, though less than perfect, is pretty good.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Drowning My Sorrows,’ by Martyn Goodger

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The other day I reviewed Biding My Time, the first novel of Martyn Goodger’s Alan Gadd series. I was highly impressed by the originality of the concept and the quality of the prose.

Having now finished the second book (I don’t think there will be more), I fear I have to dampen my praise a little. Drowning My Sorrows was certainly an original book, but it left me baffled as to the purpose of the whole exercise.

To recap, Alan Gadd is an English lawyer. In the previous book he was working for a large Cambridge law firm. His legal expertise was top-flight, but his utter lack of social skills made him much disliked among his colleagues. His suspicious nature enabled him to detect the fact that a co-worker’s death, apparently a suicide, was in fact murder, and he was nearly killed himself in uncovering the truth. But his methods were so underhanded and cowardly that he got no credit.

As Drowning My Sorrows begins, Alan has lost that job, and is now working in the legal department of a not-very-prestigious university in Cambridgeshire. Once again he regards his colleagues and superiors as inferior to himself. He obsesses over their sexual lives, while feigning moral superiority even as he lusts after a female assistant who’s not interested in him. Once again he is universally disliked by his co-workers.

But part of his job is reviewing university business contracts, and in those he detects some genuine problems. A university-held patent is being sold off to a private corporation at what seems to him an absurdly low price. A superior appears to have granted contracts to personal cronies. Alan’s characteristic response is to set one of his underlings to asking questions, while he himself stalks people and sends anonymous e-mails to get his enemies into trouble. All the while congratulating himself on his ethical superiority.

Then someone gets killed, and once again Alan will find himself facing death.

One weakness of Biding My Time, which I neglected to mention in my review of that book, was a slow start. Author Goodger delights in setting the stage and giving us time to get to know our narrator (I won’t say hero). In this book that problem is even worse – we’re half-way through the story before the murder happens. Frankly, it doesn’t take nearly that long to get one’s fill of Alan Gadd’s company. There were many points when I was ready to drop the book in frustration, and I’m pretty sure a lot of other readers won’t be as patient as I was.

I frequently wondered, as I read, exactly how I was supposed to take the Alan Gadd stories. Sometimes I thought I was taking them too seriously – that they were meant as dark comedies and I was supposed to be laughing as Alan, again and again, falls into pits he has dug for himself through his gormless manipulations. But the ending of this book – admittedly an unexpected one – convinced me that probably wasn’t the purpose. There were moments of sympathy for Alan – we learn that he was bullied as a child and that he had concerned parents who didn’t know how to help him – but he was impossible to like, and difficult to care about.

So, taken all in all, I can’t recommend these books very highly. The author has considerable talent, but I wish he’d put his hand to something more sympathetic.