By way of Patrick O’Hannigan’s The Paragraph Farmer, the funniest thing I encountered all day (and I heard a recording of Jimmy Carter calling opponents of government health care racists!).
Slate.com presents: The Interactive Dan Brown Sequel Generator!
Just plug in the city of your choice, and the sinister organization of your choice, and build your own blockbuster! Save money! Impress your friends! Write a bestseller of your own!
I’ve been making the mistake recently of occasionally looking at reader reviews on Amazon when I set up the links for my blog reviews. Because of one of these lamentable lapses, I see tonight that reviews of Randy Wayne White’s Black Widow are decidedly mixed—and widely polarized. Some readers loved it. Others thought it signaled the demise of the “Doc Ford” series.
List me with the people who loved it. Approaching it as a pure escapist novel, I thought it was one of the best I’ve read recently.
I was particularly impressed with the opening. It’s a platitude (and becoming a cliché) that authors (thriller authors especially) need to grab the reader at the very beginning and keep things so tense that they can’t lose him.
In a single day and night in the first few chapters of Black Widow, Doc Ford (marine biologist and occasional government black ops agent) flies to Aruba to make a blackmail payoff on behalf of his goddaughter, Shay Money, who was guilty of certain excesses on a pre-wedding Caribbean holiday with three of her friends. Shay is engaged to an extremely wealthy and influential young man, and can’t afford a scandal. Then, instead of going to bed, he takes his boat, along with his hippie friend Tomlinson, to rescue a woman whose transmission they pick up on a short wave radio, who claims that she and her family are being attacked by sharks. This ends up involving an encounter (in the water) with hammerhead sharks. Then, again before he can get to bed, he’s attacked by a man with a gun in his own house. After handling this guy, Doc gets a call telling him that Shay has been in an auto accident, and one of her friends has attempted suicide. Then, after a hospital visit, he goes to bed with a different friend of hers.
And the next day he’s scheduled for a performance evaluation session with his government employers.
That got my attention.
The blackmailers come back for more of course, and Doc makes a trip to a very exclusive Caribbean island retreat, where a voodoo cult operates a health spa and resort which is actually a blackmail factory. He teams up with a too-good-to-be-true retired English secret agent. He gets drugged, gets beat up and imprisoned, and then kicks serious butt.
It was a lot of fun. Plenty of sex, but not explicit. Not up to the Klavan or Hunter standard, but perfect summer beach reading, in my opinion. It’s still warm down in the Bahamas, even in September.
I did wonder a little about where the star of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s got her money, but I slipped passed me that she might be something close to a prostitute. I suppose I don’t have the frame of reference to make that insight independently. (I also don’t like to assume the worst of people.) [via Book Trib]
David Freer is a Baen Books author, and a very nice guy with whom I’ve chatted once or twice online.
He’s in the process of arranging to move from South Africa to Australia. He wants to take his numerous pets with him. That means time in quarantine, which is expensive.
So he came up with this website. He’s telling a story here, a chapter a week, but the chapters (after Chapter 1) come only when he gets $400 in his Paypal jar for each one. Four subsequent chapters have been paid for to date.
If and when the book gets published, subscribers who have given over $25.00 will receive a signed copy.
Read a good comic fantasy. Help an author.
Tip: Ori Pomerantz.
Why I wrote Hostile Intent. Michael Walsh says: “When I created ‘Devlin’ [the lead in Hostile Intent] – a man you could walk right by and never notice, so protected is he by his cloak of anonymity – I was looking to honor the kind of men and women who fight our nation’s battles in the bazaars and back alleys of the world’s least glamorous places, with no public acknowledgment of their bravery or their accomplishments, people who often lead (as Devlin does) lives of surpassing, nearly unbearable loneliness.”
There was a time when I made it a point of honor to finish every book of fiction I started. As I’ve aged I’ve grown more surly and impatient, and nowadays if a book bores or offends me, I toss it away. Life’s too short. I’ve got stuff I need to read.
So I’m going to do a new thing here. I’m going to post a biased review of a book to which I may not have given a fair chance.
I’d had Tim Severin’s Viking trilogy recommended to me, and I do try to keep up, to some degree, with my competition in the Viking novels field. I looked forward to the book. Severin is the author of The Brendan Voyage, an account of his own Atlantic voyage in a leather coracle, in emulation of St. Brendan, a book I read, enjoyed, and profited from.
But I got up to page 74 of Viking: Odinn’s Child and just couldn’t take it any further. There were two reasons, stylistic and ideological. I’ll start with the stylistic, so that anyone who doesn’t care about my religious views can just read this part and drop the review, as I dropped the book. Continue reading Abandoned book review: Viking: Odinn’s Child, by Tim Severin
Frank Wilson describes The Da Vinci Code‘s reception as I have always understood it.
Earlier this week, James Lileks posted the cover of a 1941 copy of Reader’s Digest magazine (which just went into bankruptcy reorganization. I could go on an on about the decline of that publication, but that’s a story for another day). Continue reading A Student in Thousand Dollar Bills
The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.
Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.
There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.
On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.
Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.
A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.
Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)
But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.