I feel guilty about the savaging I’m about to deliver to the novel Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave. It’s clearly a labor of love. Musgrave attempts to craft a mystery in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which his hero, post-Civil War detective Pat O’Malley, seeks to learn the truth of Poe’s own death back in 1849, when he was found apparently drunk and dying on the streets of Baltimore.

Pat O’Malley is a decorated Union Army veteran working as a private detective in New York City. Because he knew and liked the poet Poe, and because he happens to be renting the cottage where Poe once lived with his doomed young wife, O’Malley decides to investigate the reported circumstances of his death (which were indeed questionable). He interrogates a series of Poe’s associates and acquaintances (including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), and begins to suspect a cruel plot. This puts him in danger for his life. Continue reading Forevermore, by Jim Musgrave →

You’ve probably noticed that, from time to time, I review a novel and tell you that I admired the writing, but did not like the book, either because of the characters or the values, or just the author’s attitude.

Henry Wood Detective Agency by Brian Meeks presents precisely the opposite situation, and I don’t recall this happening before. I didn’t think the writing was great, but I liked the book immensely, like a friend who never combs his hair and isn’t very articulate, but is still a lot of fun to be with.

The story starts on New Year’s Day 1955. Henry Wood is a Manhattan private detective. He’s a quiet man whose great pleasures are reading and woodworking.

A beautiful young woman comes into his office and asks him to help her find a journal belonging to her father, an accountant who has disappeared. He takes the case. Soon after another beautiful young woman comes to him and asks him to find the same journal. She’s the daughter of an inventor, who has also disappeared.

This is kind of fishy, but things are about to get fishier still. There’s a mob connection, and there’s a fire and a murder, and cryptic clues lead to strange – make that improbable – discoveries.

There’s also a science fiction – or fantasy — element. Henry has a closet in his house which periodically dispenses “gifts” – magazines dated in the future, woodworking tools, even a DVD player with a disk (and, thankfully, instructions).

It’s all very bizarre. I kept being reminded of Alice in Wonderland, though this isn’t the same kind of story at all. Through all this strangeness Henry Wood maintains his quiet, earnest character. He does right, and he works most of it out in the end.

Brian Meeks’ writing style is odd. It’s extremely understated. That could be a brilliant stylistic choice on the author’s part, though a fair number of common writing errors scattered through the story suggest that it isn’t. But I wish more new authors would opt for plain, simple prose instead of trying to dazzle us and failing. The dialogue is odd – the characters generally avoid contractions, saying “I will” instead of “I’ll,” and “do not” instead of “don’t.”

But reading Henry Wood Detective Agency was a very pleasant experience. The prose was almost incantatory. It relaxed me.

I enjoyed this book and plan to read the others in the series.

Recommended. It has subdued violence, no sex, and one obscenity that I noticed.

Simon Orwell is a bartender who used to be an electrical engineer. When we first encounter him in Davis Bunn’s novel Unlimited, he’s in a Mexican ditch, fleeing an assassin, trying to protect a device he helped invent.

Simon had a promising career before he self-destructed and betrayed his closest friend, a professor from Mexico. Professor Vasquez’s great dream was to find a way to salvage the energy wasted in electric generation and transmission, to provide cheap energy for the poor. Now he’s been e-mailing Simon, telling him he’s made a breakthrough and wants him to come and join him with his version of the device.

Simon was eager to come. Not so much for the project, though that interests him, but for a more personal reason. To ask Vasquez’s forgiveness.

When he finally reaches his goal, the village of Ojinaga just south of a desolate stretch of the border, he finds that Prof. Vasquez has been murdered. Injured and still pursued by the assassin, he finds refuge in a Christian orphanage, where the director, Harold Finch, a former NASA scientist, has drained his personal fortune caring for the children. He’d like to see Prof. Vasquez’s dream realized as a way to subsidize the orphans’ care. But as much as that, he’d like to see Simon find the answer to his personal torment.

Simon is also befriended by two of Harold’s co-workers, Pedro and Sofia, both of whom grew up in the orphanage. Pedro is assistant to the town mayor, a rising politician who is dating Sofia. Sofia feels obligated to marry the man for the sake of the good he can do the orphanage. But she doesn’t love him, and gradually – against her will – she finds herself drawn to Simon, whom she doesn’t even trust.

Meanwhile drug cartels are interested in Prof. Vasquez’s device for some reason. Simon finds himself in a cross-fire, terrified that he’s bringing danger on the first people to care about him in a long time. And he’s not even sure he wants to go on living, bearing the weight of guilt and self-loathing. His new friends offer an answer, but could there really be a power so unlimited?

Unlimited genuinely moved me. The story, if you accept its science fiction premise (which is not that outlandish), is believable, and the characters live and breathe. I wouldn’t rank Bunn in the top tier as a stylist. It seemed to me that time and again he chooses almost the right word, rather than the right word that would really have sung. But your taste may differ. I also suspect that Mexican government corruption, though certainly addressed in the story, is underestimated.

Recommended. Unlimited will go on sale September 1. (A movie of the same title, starring Fred Thompson, is scheduled for release in October.)

Full disclosure: I received a free advance review copy of Unlimited.

I’ve reviewed one or two of Paul Levine’s Jake Lassiter novels before. The books irritate me a little, but they also entertain me a great deal, and I generally recommend them.

Last Chance Lassiter is a prequel. It goes back to tell the story of how Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter came to be in practice on his own.

When the book begins, he’s a round peg in a square hole. A former pro football player whose lasting fame comes from making a wrong-way run on national TV, he’s earned his law degree and joined a high-priced firm, which values him primarily for his contributions to its touch football team. He refuses to dress like a lawyer, refuses to decorate his office like a lawyer, and is not beyond getting physical with a prospective client who offends him.

Soon he’s no longer working for that firm.

So he sets up in a tiny, windowless office in a parking ramp, and screens a string of unpromising clients. Then a woman comes in, the granddaughter of a famous but impoverished blues singer, asking him to help them sue a rap star who seems to have plagiarized one of the old man’s songs. This is a case Jake believes in and he throws himself into it, even though he’ll be up against his old employers, and knows them to be smart, ruthless, and very well capitalized, unlike himself. Jakes first case just might be his last.

Last Chance Lassiter was a fast read, and I enjoyed it a lot, even though I wanted to slap Jake upside the head occasionally. His “loose cannon, plays by his own rules” act has been done a thousand times, and I grew bored with it long ago. Jake even sets it up as his professional motto: “I live by no laws but my own.” This is moral hooey. It never seems to occur to him that his corrupt former employers live by exactly the same motto.

Still, plenty of fun, and lots of fighting for the underdog. Cautions for language and sexual situations.

There’s no real reason why novels about the British navy of the Age of Sail must always concern the Napoleonic wars. The British navy has a long history, and stories about an institution finding its feet can be as intrinsically interesting as stories of it at its zenith. J. D. Davies, a historian and an expert on the subject, delivers an extremely entertaining novel in The Mountain of Gold, a sequel to a novel I haven’t read (but need to seek out) called Gentleman Captain.

Matthew Quinton may or may not be the heir to the earldom of Ravensden, depending on whether his older brother ever produces an heir, which seems… unlikely. Then, in a move that shocks everyone, the older brother’s friend, King Charles II, arranges a marriage for him to a beautiful woman of mysterious antecedents. Meanwhile Matthew has returned from a voyage with a prisoner, a brash Irishman who converted to Islam and joined the “Sallee Rovers.” He swears he knows where to find a mountain of gold in Africa, and King Charles, desperately in need of money, sends Matthew on a voyage to find that mountain (and incidentally to start a war with the Dutch). But Matthew has an implacable enemy, in the person of a French commander of the Knights of Malta, who is skillful, relentless, and ruthless. There are also wheels within political wheels, and plots intersecting with plots, and nothing is exactly what its name declares.

The Mountain of Gold was simply a lot of fun to read, an unpretentious, old-fashioned adventure story featuring a sympathetic hero and an interesting cast of characters. I was particularly pleased with its treatment of Christianity. There are Puritans and Cavaliers here, all still smarting from the injuries of the Civil War, but author Davies treats them all with respect.

Highly recommended.

Kindle here. Paperback here.