Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Poison Path,’ by Solomon Carter

Leave a comment

On the beach at Southend, England, a ragtag group of young “guerilla filmmakers” is shooting a movie, one they hope will lead to their big break. Their “star,” a washed-up, alcoholic TV actor, appears to be dozing by the pier. But he’s not dozing – he’s dead. It looks as if he fell asleep there the night before and froze to death. But the crime scene investigator notices suspicious signs. This brings in the police team – Inspector Joe Hogarth and his younger subordinates, Detectives Palmer and Simmons. Then, when Hogarth’s oldest, greatest enemy appears, a villain who’s now a member of Parliament (Tory, of course), Hogarth’s back is well and truly put up—for better or worse. So begins The Poison Path, by Solomon Carter.

I’ve read one Inspector Hogarth book before. I found it well-written but rather dreary; the hero is solitary, depressed, and has a drinking problem. This is a later book, and he seems to be doing a little better – there’s some subdued flirtation with his female subordinate, Palmer. Still, he remains driven, lonely, and obsessed. He’d fit in well in a Scandinavian Noir story, I think. One interesting and unusual element was that our hero is not always right, like so many fictional detectives. In fact, he’s wrong quite a lot of the time. Mostly, he lets his feelings run away with him.

So, all in all, The Poison Path wasn’t bad. Not my favorite kind of story, but I’ve got no real complaints.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bull Rush,’ by David Chill

Leave a comment

The Burnside books by David Chill comprise a PI series I’d never heard of. Yet in many ways Bull Rush was exactly what I look for in a detective book.

Burnside (like Spenser he goes by his surname) is a private eye in Los Angeles. An old acquaintance comes to his office to ask him to look for his missing adult son. The young man was once a hot pro football prospect (Burnside himself is a former college player and sports culture permeates the story), but now he works for a slightly shady real estate operation. The young man has had trouble with drugs in the past, so it’s likely he’s passed out somewhere.


Burnside isn’t entirely happy with the job – the father was never someone he liked a whole lot. On top of that, Burnside knows he got the referral from another mutual “friend,” a crooked sports agent who’s always playing the angles. But it’s a legitimate job, and he isn’t in a position to turn it down.

Then, in the course of his search, Burnside stumbles on a murder victim. Now he’ll have to deal with the police. And soon, with politicians and the very wealthy.

What pleased me best about Bull Rush was its traditional qualities. Burnside doesn’t have an ideological agenda. He doesn’t have a kick-butt female partner. He’s not involved in deconstructing or normalizing anything. He’s just doing a human job among human beings. The main way he differs from your classic Golden Age gumshoe is in having a wife and a young son. Oh yes, and a psychotherapist he sees regularly.

The writing in Bull Rush was clean and professional, without either pyrotechnics or illiteracies. The characters were believable, the dialogue sharp. This is honest, meat-and-potatoes detective fiction. I recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘After Death,’ by Dean Koontz

Leave a comment

Duty is based on something more profound than hope, on faith that what is too wrong to endure will be made right, rectified by a system of justice that underlies all of nature, far beneath the subatomic level, a system that may right a wrong in a day or through the passage of time or outside of time. The schedule isn’t ours to protest or endorse. His duty is to act with all the skill and wisdom he possesses, not with hope but with conviction.

Rejoice! We have a new Dean Koontz book. He just keeps rolling them out – always good, sometimes exceptional. After Death is somewhat reminiscent of Koontz’ recent series of novellas about a character called Nameless. But it handles similar concepts in a different way.

Michael Mace was dead, and is alive again. It wasn’t a miracle in the religious sense, but it still may change the world. Michael was head of security at Beautification Research, a company that was ostensibly a cosmetics business but actually did top-secret genetic and nanotech research. When an accidental leak kills everyone in the building, Michael dies with all the rest. But then he wakes up. And now he’s changed. He has new powers that give him mental access to all the information on the internet. No firewall can stop him.

The first item on his agenda is to help a single mother named Nina Dozier and her son John. Michael’s best friend and co-worker Shelby was very fond of them, and probably would have courted her if he’d lived. They’re in danger from John’s natural father, a gang lord who’s decided it’s time to claim his son and make him his successor. Nina will have to be taught a lesson too, for dissing him.

But there’s a larger danger than that. It comes from the Internal Security Agency, the corrupt law enforcement body that supports the corrupt bureaucracy now running the country. Their chief agent is a psychopath named Duran Calaphas, an efficient killer but increasingly delusional. He takes Michael’s appearance as a personal sign for him, giving him a worthy foe he must destroy in order to achieve his grandiose personal destiny. Without loyalty to anyone or anything but himself, Calaphas will stop at nothing, destroy anything, to kill Michael Mace. And his companions.

Koontz hits every note precisely, manipulates the reader with the deft hand of a master. It’s beautiful to behold. Especially delightful (for me) was one amazing plot twist unlike anything I’d ever read before (it involves storytelling). A delightful moment.

My only quibble (spoiler alert) was that I thought the ending might have been too good to be true. But that’s no great failing in a book. No failing at all, actually. We’re allowed a happy ending from time to time.

Highly recommended.

Authors, Fiction

James Scott Bell interview

Leave a comment

Above, an interview — a few years old — with author James Scott Bell. Among the topics touched on are whether writers are born or made, and if a series character can have a character arc.

He mentions his blog, Kill Zone, which I wasn’t aware of. You can find it here.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Up Close and Fatal,’ by Fergus McNeill

Leave a comment

‘More and more, people tend to confuse “understanding” with “agreement”,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘If you say you understand something bad… like a racist or sexist comment, for example… then people accuse you of being racist or sexist. They deliberately confuse understanding with agreement….”

Two “gripping” novels in a row that were actually gripping. I’m on a roll, I guess. Up Close and Fatal, by Fergus McNeill, was a fascinating, sometimes creepy ride.

Tom Pritchard is an Englishman living in New York City. Once a successful journalist, his career is on the skids now. He’s divorced and guilty about neglecting his young son.

One day he gets an envelope in the mail. Inside the envelope is a numbered list. There are names next to some of the numbers, next to others are blank lines. There’s also a driver’s license belonging to a woman, one of the people named on the list. A quick web search shows that the woman is the victim of an unsolved murder. In fact, all the people named have been murdered, but in widely separated locations, and nobody seems to have guessed at a link.

Tom calls a police detective friend to tell him about it. The friend is intrigued, but says this material by itself isn’t enough to take to his superiors.

Soon Tom gets a phone call from the sender. This man, who call himself J, tells Tom he’s been killing these people, because the world is a better place without them. He’s read Tom’s work and was impressed by it. He wants to tell Tom his story, so he can write it the right way.

This gets Tom a meeting with the police, and they agree to give him protection and a tracking chip so he can be bait in their trap. But when he arrives at the rendezvous point, a remote spot upstate, J never appears. However, when Tom gets home he’s attacked, tazed, and dumped in a car trunk.

J still wants Tom to write his story. But he wants him to understand it from up close – through accompanying him on his pilgrimage of murder as he completes his list. And if Tom interferes, J has arranged for his son to be murdered.

It gets worse when they encounter an innocent witness. What will Tom do to prevent J killing her to shut her mouth?

Up Close and Fatal was a well-written book (American location, English orthography) that kept the dramatic tension dialed all the way up. The social awkwardness of enforced socialization with someone you despise, who can nevertheless be charming or even thoughtful at times, compelled my interest. Also, there was a great twist at the end. I was highly impressed.

The only oddity was when Tom and J are riding around in a big SUV and the author keeps talking about its trunk. What’s with that?

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Nice Guy and the Devil,’ by Tom Trott

1 Comment

If your great complaint about the world of thriller novels is that they all tend to look the same (and it’s often a valid complaint ), Tom Trott’s Cain novels might just be what you’re looking for. I’m not sure The Nice Guy and the Devil was my cup of tea, but it was definitely original.

Harrison Byers (known as “Cain”) is a Canadian, a former CIA operative (not sure how that works). He’s in Nice, France, enjoying the weather, when he notices a small, unprepossessing man asking clumsy questions about his “missing sister.” Cain figures him for an amateur trying to be a private eye. But when he notices the woman the man described sitting alone in a café, he can’t help introducing himself.

They make a date, but the unprepossessing man shows up at Cain’s apartment and commits suicide in front of them. The police come and arrest both him and the woman, and when they’re finally released they spend the night together. She asks him to accompany him to her daughter’s wedding the next day, and he figures why not? Little do they expect that the reception will be attacked by terrorists, one person kidnapped, and several others murdered. Cain sets off in pursuit, soon teaming up with a young Interpol agent who’s the daughter of an old friend.

The most surprising element in the story is Cain himself. He’s not your bog standard thriller hero. He’s middle-aged, bald and overweight (he actually wears a toupee and a girdle). But he still has his shooting skills and his fighting instincts, along with (sometimes insane) nerve. The story is packed with suspense and danger, the big twist at the end comes at you out of left field, and the conclusion is satisfying.

What annoyed me was the author’s habit of not describing characters until they’ve been on stage for a while. This is particularly aggravating when he fails to tell us the character’s race, and then makes race an issue. It’s as if he’s first saying, “Look how colorblind I am,” then turning and saying to the reader, “Why were you so racist as to assume they were white?”

On the other hand, there’s a devout Christian character in the book, and his faith is treated respectfully.

The Nice Guy and the Devil was a very neat thriller, capably plotted and written. I didn’t love it, but it was professionally done.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder At the Bridge,’ by Bruce Beckham

Leave a comment

Skelgill reels in and turns his boat. He takes a bearing off Skiddaw Little Man; keeping the false summit dead astern will send him arrowing into Peel Wyke, the tiny hidden wooded inlet that has echoes of the wild oarsmen that once ruled these parts, literally the ‘Wyke-ings’, the Norse ‘baymen’, who left their mark on today’s maps with descriptions that abound, like beck and dale, fell and pike, gill and skel.

The snippet above features one of those not infrequent references to the Vikings of Cumbria that add to the appeal of the Inspector Skelgill books (for me). Skelgill is an odd sort of policeman, operating primarily off his instincts as an outdoorsman and fisherman. In Murder At the Bridge, he actually discovers one clue by following a literal scent in the air, like a bloodhound.

Kyle Betony is an “outcomer” to Cumbria, a brash go-getter who fits in poorly with the other members of the Derwentdale Angler’s Association (of which Inspector Skelgill himself is a low-key member). But he managed to get elected to the board of directors anyway. When his body is found, dressed in evening clothes, floating in the River Ouse, it could mean he accidentally fell from the bridge, but indications on the body, as well as the river currents, suggest foul play. Betony had been attending the annual banquet of the DAA board that night. An old photograph has been stolen from the wall of the inn where the banquet was held. It was a group photo, including the image of a man now a fugitive murderer. Was the man in the photograph the man who was now calling himself Kyle Betony? Or did Betony recognize that man and get murdered for his knowledge?

Murder At the Bridge was largely what I’d call a “shoe leather” mystery. Most of the book is taken up with interviews with various suspects and the comparison of alibis. This lowered the level of suspense until the very end, when things picked up nicely. The conclusion was satisfying, and provided a clearer confirmation of Skelgill’s relationship with his female subordinate, DS Jones, than I think we’ve had before.

Murder At the Bridge was far from my favorite book in the Skelgill series, but it’s worth reading. One nice element is the creative circumlocutions the author employs in order to avoid actual profanity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Strait Over Tackle,’ by Colin Conway

Leave a comment

What kept coming to mind as I read Colin Conway’s Strait Over Tackle, first book in his “Flip-flop Detective” series, was the movie “The Big Lebowski.”

I did not like “The Big Lebowski.” I don’t, in general, find slackers amusing.

Sam Strait is a former sheriff’s deputy in the same area (around Spokane, Washington) that is the setting for author Conway’s more serious “The 509” police procedural series. He got kicked off the force on false charges, sued them for damages, and won a cash settlement, which gives him some financial freedom. He lives in the lake cabin he inherited from his grandparents. This allows him to live the life he wants to. He lives by a short set of rules, the first of which is, “Only be where flip-flops can be worn.” That makes him a snowbird. He flies off to warmer climes each fall, taking temporary jobs like dishwashing to eke out his expenses. He’s happy with this life (or claims to be), but it angers his on-off girlfriend, a gorgeous local actress who wants permanence and doesn’t give up easily.

Sam comes home to open up for the spring and finds that somebody has held a party in his house and left it trashed. But it gets worse. He goes down to the lake to look at his boat and finds a young woman’s dead body in it. His call to the police brings Detective Shane McAfee, whom we know from the 509 novels.


When Sam discovers that someone has left a bag of drugs in his refrigerator, he ponders calling McAfee, but decides to go around and ask questions himself. This – as he eventually realizes – is a stupid decision, leading to confrontations, threats, and several fistfights (all of which he loses). But in the end he will identify the murderer.

Generally speaking, slackers make poor heroes for novels. Interesting characters operate from some powerful motivation, which is the main thing slackers generally lack. Sam’s chief motivation is avoidance of intimacy and commitment. His motivations for investigating the murder rather than letting the police do their job are unclear to the reader, and apparently to himself. He seems to have a poor conception of personal safety, which is bad because he keeps getting beat up (even by a woman). This is one of those stories where the hero gets “his bell rung” multiple times, and people even warn him of concussion, but he brushes the suggestion off and appears to suffer no serious trauma (which is implausible).

In the end, I figured out that Strait Over Tackle was intended to be taken as comedy. I guess it had its moments, but it didn’t amuse me a lot.

You might like it better than I did. Especially if you liked “The Big Lebowski.”

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

Leave a comment

Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Fells,’ by Bruce Beckham

Leave a comment

Her face is big-boned like a Herdwick sheep and in the greenish-blue eyes rests an innate kindliness.

I’m not sure I’d have ever read the Inspector Skelgill novels if they’d been described to me first. An eccentric police detective whose main expertise is as a hunter and fisherman, who detects mostly by instinct and intuition rather than by reasoning, doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. And yet I find these books by Bruce Beckham fascinating, and they seem to get better and better as they go. They are set in the English county of Cumbria, up by the Scottish border.

In Murder in the Fells, a shepherd discovers a lost wallet in a fox’s “earth.” It contains an American woman’s passport. Probability indicates it belongs to a woman whose body was found near a waterfall in the fells, who has not been identified so far. Inquiries are begun to find out more about the woman.

Meanwhile, in a separate plot thread, we follow a woman named Dorothy T. Baum, another American who has traveled to Cumbria to meet a man, a professor of history, whom she met online and with whom she plans to move in. The reader soon realizes she’s the victim of a “catfishing” scheme, that she’s been lured to England to be fleeced of her money, then murdered. One suspects at first that this is the story of the dead woman – but it’s contemporaneous with Skelgill’s team’s investigation, and the dead woman’s name wasn’t Dorothy.

Tension builds as Dorothy survives a couple “accidents,” and Skelgill’s team becomes aware of her and begin trying to locate her in the tangle of mountain and valley paths that crisscross Cumbria.

And in the end, a big surprise. Very well done.

I liked Murder in the Fells very much. Enjoyed every page. It’s become a cliché for publicists to advertise every English mystery as “gripping.” But in this case it’s true.