Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nightshade,’ by Michael Connelly

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Catalina Island must be a nice place. Mystery writers seem to like to set stories there, and it sounds like a beautiful, laid-back community, where people tool around in golf carts and the weather is almost always nice.

Michael Connelly has created a new detective character and set him down on Catalina in his latest novel, Nightshade. “Stilwell” (no first name given) works for Los Angeles County, and used to operate in LA itself. But a beef with another detective ended with Stilwell drawing the short straw and getting exiled to the island. Only he was surprised to discover that he quite likes it there. He’s starting to feel at home, and has a new girlfriend.

Then one morning a yacht maintenance man reports what seems to be a body in a garbage bag on the harbor bottom, weighed down with an anchor. Stilwell dives down to check it personally, and finds it to be a woman – with a distinctive purple streak in her dark hair.

The woman proves to have been a server at an elite local fishing club, one who has a reputation as a gold digger. No matter – for Stilwell (as for Harry Bosch), a murder is a murder. Everybody matters, or nobody matters.

The trail will lead to the highest levels of California society, and to the lowest depths of civic corruption. It will bring him into conflict with his colleagues and superiors. Before he’s done, Stilwell will risk losing, not only his career, but the life of someone close to him.

I must admit I didn’t like Nightshade as much as I had hoped I would. Stilwell is no Harry Bosch. To me, he was kind of one-dimensional, with only three clear character traits – he is passionate about solving murders, he cares about his girlfriend, and he thinks he’s always right. This last trait seems most prominent – when Stilwell gets orders that are inconsistent with his detective instincts, he just ignores them. In the world of the story, he’s usually justified – but in the real world, there are usually reasons for the rules. And cops who make their own rules tend to go very wrong.

But the book was all right. It moved right along, and the writing was good, as you’d expect from Connelly. The usual cautions for language and mature themes apply.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Small Favor,’ by Jim Butcher

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I kept wondering, as I read Jim Butcher’s Small Favor, the 10th volume in his Harry Dresden urban fantasy series, why I don’t like these books more. I’d read one before, and wasn’t over the moon about it. But I watched the short-lived cable series loosely based on the books, and found that amusing, so when a deal came up, I figured I’d try another one. Alas, no joy. It just didn’t work for me. And yet everything’s there – good writing, vivid characters, plenty of action, and even a palpable penumbra of Christianity (fairly explicit in this book).

In Small Favor, Chicago wizard Harry Dresden gets a call from his female cop friend Murphy, who asks him to consult on yet another bizarre crime. This time the front has been knocked off a downtown building, presumably by supernatural means. Harry soon realizes that the building had contained a magical safe room – a place for a wizard to hide from spells and powers – yet some unimaginable force has pried the safe room open. Its occupant, Chicago gangster and magical hanger-on “Gentleman” Johnnie Marcone, has vanished.

This constitutes a crisis worthy of a meeting of the Wizard’s Council, of which Harry is a member. Action must be taken. The Enemy here is sinister enough that Harry is called on to rescue Marcone. For help he turns to his friend Michael, a member of the Knights of the Cross.

As an added complication, Harry has offended some powerful Faeries, who send a weird iteration of the Three Billygoats Gruff after him – no laughing matter.

There’s nothing wrong with the Harry Dresden books. I recognized, even as I read, that I was dealing with quality material. And yet, somehow, I couldn’t get into it.

First of all, I guess wizardry just doesn’t appeal to me. Gandalf’s all right, because he’s essentially an angel and does most of his wonders through his words alone. But more than that, pentagrams and sigils and spells, those things just creep me out.

Also, the level of action was Tom Cruise movie high. Harry caromed from one deadly peril to another, each more dire than the last, with only a few pages in between for rest and character development.

That kind of story just wears this old man out. I like a more sedate pace.

But your mileage is very likely to vary. These books are highly popular, and if you like this sort of thing I think you’ll like Small Favors a lot.

Authors, Fiction

Another forgotten bestseller: Harold Bell Wright

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Well, I’m still moving slowly through the book I’m reading, my time monopolized by work, so I’ll follow up on last night’s post about Rose O’Neill with the story of another famous creative American who’s almost entirely forgotten today – and who also hung around Branson, Missouri. In fact it was this guy, Harold Bell Wright, who made Branson a center of tourism. Not intentionally.

Harold Bell Wright grew up in difficult circumstances, losing his parents at 11, and ended up in Ohio, working at various jobs. He studied for the ministry, and became a pastor in the non-denominational, non-creedal Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), taking a call in Pierce City, Missouri. He later served churches in Kansas and California.

He wrote a serialized story in 1902 that got printed, though he hated it, in a denominational magazine. His parishioners loved it, however, and so it was published as a book. His second novel was his breakthrough. The Shepherd of the Hills, set in the Branson, MO area, which he’d visited for his health, was published in 1907. It became a blockbuster bestseller – the first American novel to ever earn a million bucks. It has since been filmed four times, most notably with John Wayne starring in 1941. Other novels of his have also been turned into movies, notably The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) with Ronald Coleman and Gary Cooper.

But today, chances are you’ve never heard of the man or his books. The reason for that is simple – he wasn’t a very good writer. (Owen Wister called one of his novels “a mess of mildewed pap.”)

Now as it happened, I acquired a copy of Shepherd of the Hills on my trip with my parents to Branson long ago, and I read it. As I recall, I found it entertaining and even inspirational, though a little stiff, as old books tend to be. However, it should be noted that my critical sense in those days was almost nonexistent. I aspired to be a writer, but I definitely wasn’t ready, because I couldn’t tell good writing from bad.

The Shepherd of the Hills is a highly moral tale. It tells a complicated story of mountain people who hold long-time grudges, which they are prepared to settle with blood until their hearts are softened by the spirit of forgiveness. In forgiveness they find peace.

Which is nice, as far as it goes. But it’s not a Christian tale in the sense of talking about Jesus or grace. It is assumed that the blessings of forgiveness flow from the world of the spirit in some sense, but it’s a matter (if I remember correctly) of people achieving their true moral stature rather than of their dying and rising again in Christ.

Wright’s church body was and is a pretty tolerant one in terms of doctrine, but still Wright quit the ministry (to make a much better living as a writer), declaring most congregational life hypocritical. His emphasis was on good works. That was well suited to the rising culture of America at the turn of the 20th Century – an emphasis on progress and self-help, with a sprinkling of Christianity on top, to taste.

I’ve seen the John Wayne movie of The Shepherd of the Hills. Its plot is radically altered and simplified from the book (it would pretty much have to be). It amused me that the film climaxed with John Wayne in a shootout – I guess the writers couldn’t resist that, though it’s not at all in the spirit of the book.

But, who cares? It’s not like the original material was a work of priceless art. Harold Bell Wright toiled in his time, and pleased most of his neighbors, and made a pile of money. His legacy is not his forgotten book, but the tourist mecca of Branson, Missouri, which he fathered unintentionally.

I wonder if he ever hung out with Rose O’Neill in Branson.

Fiction, Reviews

‘I’ll Keep You Safe,’ by Peter May

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It had an atmosphere all of its own, that place. Sometimes mired in the mist that would drift in off the water on a still morning, or lost in the smirr that dropped down from the moor. I came into the loch once on a boat just as the sun was coming up, and mist like smoke rose up all around the lodge in the early-morning light, moving wraithlike among the trees. The water itself was alive with salmon breaking the still surface as they headed in from the sea on their journey upriver, and otters played around the stone slipway. It was magical.

I had not gotten far into reading Peter May’s I’ll Keep You Safe before I realized I’d read it before – even though I had just bought it on Amazon for the first time. Perhaps my previous reading was through a free giveaway, or perhaps I bought the paper version; all I know is I’ve reviewed it already, way back in 2018. Still, I’d forgotten how it came out, so I read on. With considerable pleasure.

Niamh and Ruairidh Macfarlane run a small tweed knitting company on the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. It’s not the famous Harris Tweed, but a more refined fabric derived from it. They’ve made it through hard times to become big successes in the fashion world – some of the foremost designers in the business use their product. And they’re still very much in love.

They’re in Paris for an exhibition when Niamh gets an anonymous e-mail telling her Ruairidh is having an affair. She confronts him, and he walks away without explanation. A few minutes later, he’s dead. Niamh is devastated, lost and betrayed. The French police consider her a suspect.

When she’s allowed to take Ruaridh’s remains back home, she faces a hostile world. Both sets of their parents have always opposed their marriage. Lifelong friends turn against her. A French police woman is sent out to investigate her affairs. And she has a sense that someone is stalking her.

I note from my first review that I figured out whodunnit quite early on. Which amuses me, because I didn’t do that on this second reading. The story is told in a complex, non-sequential manner, with varying viewpoint characters, which is just confusing enough to keep the reader intrigued.

As always, one of Peter May’s greatest strengths is his scenic descriptions. One gets a vivid sense of the place – of the geology, the changeable, dangerous weather, the plants and wildlife. I greatly appreciate that quality, very much like taking a brief holiday in the islands.

Cautions are in order for language and some drug use, but I was intrigued to note (on this reading) that the book actually takes some very traditional moral views. That surprised me. Probably unintentional on the author’s part, but appreciated.

I highly recommend I’ll Keep You Safe – again. Women and men alike will enjoy it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Going Home In the Dark,’ by Dean Koontz

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…all in all, his condition was so pitiable that an extraordinary and inadvisable number of semicolons were required to connect the closely associated clauses describing it.

A Lutheran pastor appears as a villain in Dean Koontz’s latest novel, Going Home In the Dark. I think I can be confident that that pastor is a member of the Very Large Lutheran Church Body That Shall Remain Nameless, because he’s committed to the extinction of the human race. (I don’t think that’s too big a spoiler. The guy isn’t the main villain.)

Dean Koontz likes to mix it up, style-wise. He can be dark and tragic; he can be deeply creepy and scary. He can even be funny, and he’s often quite good at that. He’s mostly going for funny (in a scary way) in Going Home In the Dark, and it works, I think… by and large.

The friends who call themselves the Four Amigos grew up as nerds and social outcasts in the midwestern town of Maple Grove (not the one just up the road from me, in Minnesota, I’m pretty sure). They all went on to be rich and famous – Rebecca is a movie star; Bobby is a bestselling novelist; Spencer is a renowned painter, and Ernie writes hit Country songs. Only Ernie still lives in town, near his cold and intimidating mother.

When Ernie is hospitalized in a coma, his friends rush to visit him – but are informed by his mother that he has died, just before their arrival.

Nevertheless, they are all convinced – irrationally but with certainty – that Ernie is not really dead. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. So they conspire to sneak his body out of the hospital and hide it so no one can embalm it before they figure out what’s going on.

Because something is going on. All three of them are suddenly recalling – all at the same time – strange events that happened when they were teenagers, memories they have suppressed until now. Why was the Lutheran pastor concealing half-formed, humanoid creatures in the church basement? Who was the monstrous giant they saw eating a man’s head in the park pavilion on Halloween? Also, why is Maple Grove – a town where the streets have names like Cunningham, Cleaver and Capra, so relentlessly friendly and utterly crime-free?

In spite of its horrific subject matter, the story is presented in a comic, self-parodying style. The unnamed narrator is always explaining why he tells us some things and ignores other things, undermining his stylistic effects by pointing them out. I did find it funny, and laughed more than once, though I thought Koontz was working it a little too hard this time.

However, the book’s conclusion did move me, which is the most important thing.

Not Koontz at his best, Going Home In the Dark is nevertheless a very entertaining book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Safe,’ by George Prior

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James had just returned from the crime scene, and he had the extremely tense look that he got when he was far behind in admin tasks—which he would be after spending the day at a scene. Tense but dead still, like ten pounds of springs in a five-pound spring can.

The basic idea of George Prior’s Casey Stafford novels, of which Dead Safe is the second, strikes me as remarkably similar to John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport books – millionaire cop who drives fast cars, dresses well, and fights crime essentially for fun. But I’d say (based on reading this book) that accusations of copycat-ism would be unfair. Casey Stafford, who works in Los Angeles, is a fully realized character in his own right. (For one thing, he’s free to pursue women, which Lucas Davenport gave up when he married some time back.) Also the writing here is very strong, and the story is pretty original.

There’s a private security vault in Beverly Hills where anyone who can afford it can store anything at all, without any fuss about identification. Obviously a business like that will cater to criminals, though it’s technically legal.

A group of young men who run a YouTube channel where they demonstrate “jackass” stunts has fallen on hard times, and needs an infusion of cash. They figure out how to disguise themselves digitally from the security cameras, and they clear out a number of safe deposit boxes, collecting a lot more money than they ever dreamed.

They’re clever and tech-savvy, but they lack the imagination to guess that the kind of man who hides that kind of money is not likely to be either philosophical or forgiving about loss. Before long the young YouTube stars are dying in horrible ways. And our hero Casey Stafford, along with his female partner Banchet Suwan, are several steps behind, following a digitally erased trail after criminals unknown to the police. In the end it will become a three-way game between Casey, the murderer, and the last, resourceful survivor of the YouTube gang.

I was very impressed with the writing in Dead Safe. It was smooth, elegant and expressive. The dialogue snapped and the characters – of which there were many – were well drawn. I particularly liked a gunfight scene where things went wrong in a highly plausible manner. No overt politics came up, though I thought I saw some subtle hints of conservative ideas (could easily be wrong).

My only real objection was that I thought a scene of a home invasion was unnecessarily graphic (I prefer to enter such stories after the violence is over, when the cops are viewing the crime scene). Plenty of cautions are in order for violence, sex and profanity. (The cop banter here is pretty good; perhaps just a notch below John Sandford’s. But I still don’t buy the women cops’ good-humored participation.)

All things considered, Dead Safe was an excellent detective thriller. This reader was impressed.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

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The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Red Harvest,’ by Dashiell Hammet

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He was a gentle, polite, elderly person with no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. The Agency wits said he could spit icicles in July.

Dashiell Hammet wrote a number of stories about “the Continental Op,” a fat, nameless private detective working for a company based on the Pinkertons, as well as two Op novels. I reviewed the second Op book, The Dain Curse, not long ago, so I thought I might as well do Red Harvest (1929) too. I’d read it before, but way back in the 1970s.

We find the Continental Op in the western mining town of Personville, which seems to be in Utah. The town bears the nickname of “Poisonville,” and well deserves it. It used to be controlled by old Elihu Wilsson, the mine owner, but he’s allowed it to fall into the hands of various groups of criminals (these are Prohibition days, after all). Elihu’s son, Daniel, who has taken over the local newspaper, has decided to be a reformer. He’s requested a detective to come and help him ferret out corruption.

But Daniel is dead before the Op can even meet with him. The Op manages to get in to see Elihu, the old man, and eventually gets his permission to investigate his son’s murder.

Poisonville is in every way worthy of its name. The police are just as corrupt as the various criminal organizations, and as the Op stirs the waters, he finds that poison entering his own soul: “This d**ned burg’s getting to me,” he says. “If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.” (This is where the Coen Brothers got the title for their movie, “Blood Simple.”)

There is no subtlety in Red Harvest. This is a story about killing, and lots of it. As in Hamlet, the stage is nearly empty at the end, most of the main characters dead, our very unromantic hero still standing, but shakily.

There is a pervasive rumor (denied by director Akira Kurosawa himself) that his classic samurai movie, “Yojimbo,” was inspired by Red Harvest. If so, it would be the grandfather of “A Fistful of Dollars” and a score of other imitators. However, Red Harvest is more complex than those movies. Instead of a scenario with two warring gangs, this novel features a complex situation. There are multiple factions, and the Op busies himself with inciting each of them against the others in various combinations, just stirring things up to see what reactions he can get, increasingly callous to the sanguine results.

When one has grown accustomed to Raymond Chandler’s prose (I can never resist the comparison), Dashiell Hammett comes off as something of a blunt instrument. But Hammett came first, and was breaking new ground, so to speak. Critics consider Red Harvest a classic and a groundbreaking literary work.

But it’s pretty grim.

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.