Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Big Empty,’ by Robert Crais

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It had been a couple years since I’d read a Robert Crais novel, and I wondered if I had set my face against him for some reason, as I’m prone to do with authors from time to time. But I discovered that it’s actually been a couple years since Crais has published an Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novel. So I bought and read The Big Empty, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been privileged to read several fine novels in the last few weeks (this seems to be a prime time of year for new book releases), but none of them brought a tear to my eye. The Big Empty did.

Private eye Elvis Cole gets a call from an assistant to Traci Beller. He’s never heard of Traci Beller, but apparently she’s a very popular internet influencer. Pretty and cheery, she does bright videos of herself baking. When Elvis meets with her, she tells her story. Ten years ago, when she was just a little girl, her father, owner of an HVAC company, went out on calls one day and vanished without a trace. Even his van was never recovered. Her mother hired a reputable investigations company to search for him five years ago, and when they were unsuccessful, had him declared legally dead. But Traci is grown up now, and has money of her own to spend. Elvis warns her that chances are poor, but agrees to look into it.

He travels to the town of Rancha, where the father was last seen, and through diligence manages to uncover one previously unknown lead. How is he to know that his inquiries will provoke dangerous people out of the shadows, bringing horror to two families and death to a couple innocent bystanders?

The story of The Big Empty took me places I did not expect to go. It moved me, arousing pity and terror in the classic style of Greek tragedy.

This was an excellent novel. No elegant prose passages to quote, but fascinating and engaging from first to last.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Nemesis’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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“Hero,” Tommy sneered. “Heroes gotta be dead and half forgotten so they can be rewritten by men with weaker chins. There are no heroes. Not me.” His watery blue eyes looked cloudy in the dimness. They gazed unseeingly at Evan. “And not you.”

I announced a little while back that I was giving up on reading thrillers. When I said that I was making a specific mental reservation for a few authors, chief among whom is Gregg Hurwitz. Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels are another matter entirely – because they’re more than high-adrenaline entertainments. They’re brilliantly written and character-intensive. And when I say character, I mean it in two senses.

In Nemesis, our hero, Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, freelance hero, is dealing with a terrible personal betrayal. Tommy Stojack, who provides his weapons, is one of very few true friends he has in the world. And in the last book, Evan saw that one of the worst murderers he’d ever encountered was carrying Tommy’s weaponry. Tommy refuses to explain.

For Evan the next step is clear. Tommy is now a danger to the innocent and will have to be eliminated.

Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time with Tommy this time out. We’re used to seeing Evan getting phone calls asking for help, but now Tommy gets one, from a young man named Delmont Hickenlooper, Jr. “Hick” is the son of one of Tommy’s war buddies. Dying in Tommy’s arms, Hick’s father had asked Tommy to look after his boy if he needed help. Tommy can’t refuse that kind of obligation.

He travels to the town of Calvary (I don’t think the state is named, but it’s somewhere in the Deep South), where Hick is holed up in a rundown farmhouse with a group of other young men as shiftless and useless as himself. They imagine themselves some kind of militia, and recently they broke up a group of picknicking Mexican-Americans by driving a Ford truck through the park. Unintentionally, they lost control and killed four people, one of them a little boy.

Meanwhile, Evan tracks Tommy down in Calvary, and once he learns the story of the killings, and observes that the local sheriff seems to be shielding the killers, he adds a new job to his mission – he has to kill these killers too.

At the same time, Tommy is trying – with great frustration – to knock some sense into the young idiots’ heads, in preparation for getting them to surrender to the law.

Which means there must be a showdown between Tommy and Evan.

Also, four of the most feared hired killers in the world are on their way to Calvary too, also intent on killing Tommy.

Nemesis is an almost perfect thriller, as far as I can tell. Every line, every word, does its job with the efficiency of one of Tommy’s precision-tuned semiautomatic pistols. The main characters come vibrantly to life, arousing the reader’s pity and horror.

As always, the Gospel is conspicuous by its absence. The Gospel haunts the story, looming like a human figure against the night sky, discernable by the stars it blocks out.

My only small quibble is that racial relations, which are an important theme here, are rather idealized. For the sake of avoiding too many complications (I assume), all bigotry in this book is limited to white people (who are nonetheless treated with a measure of understanding). There’s a memorable scene where Evan looks through the window of a brightly lit bar, watching a fairly diverse group of people line dancing together, all in rhythm, all in community, and Evan realizes that for all his physical training this is something he can never do.

Anyway, Nemesis is a delicious book to read. Top-shelf entertainment from a master of the form who shows no sign of flagging.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Open Season,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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This is, it appears, the 40th installment in Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series, about a psychologist who helps out the LA police. Whenever a new one appears, I ask myself, “Is it really worth the trouble? They’re all pretty much alike.”

And then I plunge in and I remember – it’s worth it because it’s so incredibly fun. Yes, the books are formulaic, and the series has long outlived its real-world plausibility. But when Milo the detective calls up Alex the shrink for a consult, we all settle in for a fun ride with old friends. The books never fail to deliver the entertainment advertised.

In Open Season, the initial crime is the mystery of a beautiful young woman, dumped dead at an urgent care facility. She proves to be an aspiring actress (the old, sad story) who seems to have been killed by a date rape drug. A suspect is identified – a sleaze who attended a lot of parties and liked to pose as a movie producer. But before he can be arrested, he’s murdered. Someone shot him neatly through the neck with a rifle as he stood on his apartment balcony (the poor rape victim’s clothes are found nearby).

A search of the records reveals that there have been a couple similar killings in recent years – all with the same calibre bullet and the wound in the same location. So Alex and Milo go on the hunt for a vigilante, a private executioner. An Alex’s psychological insights open up productive areas of investigation.

I enjoyed Open Season all the way through, especially for the characters. Thoroughly reliable stuff, even if less than entirely plausible. The author made me believe it was plausible, and that’s all I ask.

Caution for disturbing situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder in the Wind,’ by John D. MacDonald

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He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.

The idea of a story in which travelers in a random group are thrown together and react to each other like chemicals in a laboratory is an old one. It certainly goes back to Chaucer, and probably further, though author John D. MacDonald uses the setup for a different purpose in his 1956 novel, Murder in the Wind (also published as Hurricane).

Along Highway 19 in west Florida, several vehicles are traveling north. There’s a hurricane blowing in the Gulf, but it’s forecast to move west and north. Nobody knows it’s going to turn east, block a couple bridges, and strand these particular people in a derelict house, hoping to ride the storm out.

There’s the defeated young businessman, headed back north with his wife and two kids, all their possessions packed into their station wagon. The hotshot property developer sharing his ride with a subordinate he’s planning to humiliate. The tennis bum with his new bride, a plain heiress he married for her money – and she knows it. The young widow, carrying the ashes of her suicide husband home with her. The stolen van with three juvenile delinquents in it. And the federal agent between assignments.

Over the course of the next day some will live and some will die. Some of the least likely characters will display courage and honor, as others will turn out to be cowards, sometimes to their own surprise.

Murder in the Wind caught me up completely. MacDonald ushers us deep into the heart of each one of them, telling their stories, bringing them vividly to life. It’s a masterful tale, carried along in increasing dramatic tension as the barometer steadily drops.

An amusing typo gave the federal agent character the name “Steve Maiden” at the beginning, before a proofreader seems to have caught the OCR error and corrected it to Steve Malden.

The book contains a slur against homosexuals which went over fine back when the book was published, but is offensive today – even to puritans like me.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Dark Place,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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“Don’t try to understand them,” said Lieberman. “Just rope those cows and brand them.”

“Wisdom according to Rawhide reruns,” said Bill with a smile.

“Don’t knock it,” said Lieberman. “One can learn much from the Scriptures and reruns in the middle of the night. The gift of insomniacs. God keeps up awake when we want to sleep so we can glean knowledge from the secret messages sung by Frankie Laine.”

I don’t know why I’m not more fascinated by the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman novels. They’re fairly easygoing mysteries, heavy on character. Not more violent than necessary.

Yet they’re deceptive. There’s a lot of realism here – a profoundly Jewish understanding of the world as a dangerous, corrupt place where one needs to try to get along as peacefully and mercifully as possible.

In The Last Dark Place, Inspector Abe Lieberman of the Chicago police is boarding a plane in Yuma, Arizona, escorting a hit man who’s handcuffed to him. Suddenly an airport custodian pulls a pistol and shoots the prisoner dead. The custodian in turn is shot and arrested, but he can’t provide much information about who hired him to carry out the hit. Finding the answer to that question will be Lieberman’s next job.

Along with preventing a gang war between Chinese and Hispanic gangs.

And, perhaps most difficult of all, organizing and paying for his grandson’s bar mitzvah.

The Lieberman books are deceptive. They seem mostly quiet, even cozy. But they are mercilessly realistic, and Lieberman is an ancient kind of law enforcer – almost like the Judges of the Old Testament. As often as not he brokers street justice, even setting up the odd extrajudicial execution. For Lieberman it’s about people and community most of all, and sometimes the law just doesn’t understand.

The Last Dark Place is really a fine police story, for those of us who like our mysteries quiet.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Empty Copper Sea,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.

Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.

McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.

And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.

Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.

Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.

They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.

Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.

It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).

Highly recommended, it goes without saying.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gallows Knot,’ by Giles Ekins

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I didn’t intend to review Giles Ekins’ Gallows Knot today. But I honestly got so caught up in it that I spent more time reading than I’d planned. It’s a flawed book, but compelling.

My original impression of the books in this Inspector Yarrow series was that they were rather quiet, almost on the cozy side. But gradually it became apparent that these are in fact very realistic, pretty troubling stories. There’s no sugar-coating here. It’s a truism among authors that you need to torture your characters – author Ekins does not spare his, especially his main character, Inspector Christopher Yarrow, who suffered horrific trauma at the end of the last book (which I won’t describe in this review).

But as Gallows Knot begins, Yarrow is back on the job. His town of West Garside, Yorkshire, is theoretically a quiet place, but before long there’s a new and horrific crime to investigate. A four-year-old girl has been abducted from the children’s ward of the local hospital. Not long after, she is found dead, raped and bludgeoned.

All resources are called out on this one, and we follow the police investigation as they examine the crime scene, interrogate possible witnesses, and even – in desperation – fingerprint the whole adult male population of the area.

Author Ekins is especially good with characters, good and bad, wise and foolish; they are treated justly and with sympathy. The prose isn’t bad, and occasionally the author can even sparkle, as when he coins the phrase, “the dark-murkled copse.”

As in the previous books, there are technical problems. These have improved from the first book, but the author still sometimes forgets his quotation marks or loses track whether he’s writing in the present or past tenses. He also (no doubt inadvertently) repeats a scene already used in one of the previous books. His authorial intrusions aren’t as blatant as in the first book, but sometimes he can’t resist breaking proscenium and commenting on the action from the perspective of the 21st Century.

This book finally gives Inspector Yarrow a romance, which is something we’ve all been waiting for. Personally, though, I have to admit I found it a little implausible (for reasons I’ll conceal to prevent spoilers.)

There’s also one important clue in the mystery that was not fully accounted for, unless I missed something.

Nevertheless, all things considered, I consider Gallows Walk and the whole three-book Inspector Yarrow series a highly entertaining reading experience. In a more just world, a good publisher would have taken this manuscript in hand and polished its rough edges.

Cautions for language and some deeply disturbing (though not too explicit) scenes of child abuse.

Fiction

‘Gallows End,’ by Giles Ekins

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I was rather taken with Gallows Walk, the previous, first volume of Giles Ekins’ Inspector Yarrow series. The book showed signs of authorly inexperience, but it drew me in. There we met Inspector Christopher Yarrow of West Garside in Yorkshire, a former British pilot who lost the sight in one eye during the Battle of Britain. He’s intelligent and empathetic. In that story he hunted down and arrested a robber who had killed a payroll courier and (by vehicular accident) a little girl.

The main action of Gallows End, book two, takes a while getting going, as we begin by following the tragic aftermath of a secondary plot from the last book. But in time we join a group of golfers who discover the nude, strangled body of a young woman in the rough on the links. It takes some time to learn her identity, but she turns out to have been a young woman who was studying fashion design and working occasionally as a model. Her choices of work had not always been wise, but she was apparently liked by everyone who knew her.

The police procedural plot works itself out as Inspector Yarrow gradually sorts through a matrix of personal and professional resentments among a group of locals, until the true murderer is unmasked.

Author Ekins seems to like cliffhangers, and there’s a shocking one here. Cliffhangers are something I generally dislike, but in these cases the main mystery of the current novel is always cleared up first, so it’s all right.

The grammar and punctuation are better in this book than in the last one. Quotation marks, a problem before, have been fixed. There are also fewer confusions of tense. The text isn’t immaculate, but it’s much better.

If you like quiet, character-centered mysteries, I do recommend Gallows End. Mild cautions for disturbing situations and language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dame,’ by Richard Stark

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Richard Stark, as is well known, was just one of the pseudonyms employed by the prolific author Donald E. Westlake. Stark was his most famous and frequently-employed nom de plume; generally he wrote his humorous books under his own name, and his cold, hard-boiled ones as Stark.

The Dame is one of the Stark books, an offshoot of his Parker series. The hero here is Alan Grofield, right-hand-man to the larcenous Parker and a sometime actor. Westlake/Stark gave Grofield four books of his own, of which this is the second.

The story begins with Grofield arriving at the airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has been summoned here by way of a mysterious message, relayed by a corrupt general he knows. Someone wants to talk to him, and pays the way. Mostly out of curiosity, Grofield follows instructions, arriving at last at a remote jungle estate, where he meets the wife of a criminal boss along with her house guests. She wants Grofield to be her bodyguard. But he has taken an immediate dislike to her and turns the job down.

That night there is a murder. Soon the mob boss shows up with the announced purpose of identifying the murderer and administering some swift private justice. His chief suspect is Grofield. Grofield will have to come up with some fast moves and fast arguments to identify the true killer and save his own neck.

I can’t fault The Dame in terms of writing. Westlake/Stark was a pro, and he knew his business. The story offers plenty of danger and plenty of suspense, along with a certain mordant humor.

If I say I didn’t like it much, that’s simply personal taste. I tried reading Westlake some years back, reading a few of his much-admired Dortmunder books. But I could never get into them. Basically, I think I’ve never been able to sympathize much with criminals. Call it a prejudice.

I also noted some sophomoric Freudianism in play here, taking it for granted that chastity is just an expression of repression and neurosis.

So, my bottom line is that I recognize the quality of the product, but it wasn’t to my taste. Most readers seem to disagree.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Dreadful Lemon Sky,’ by John D. MacDonald

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A fellow who was pretty handy with a boat once said that anything you feel good after is moral. But that implies that the deed is unchanging and the doer is unchanging. What you feel good after one time, you feel rotten after the next. And it is difficult to know in advance. And morality shouldn’t be experimental, I don’t think.

Another deal on a Travis McGee e-book means another Travis McGee review, to the joy of all. Author John D. MacDonald was at the peak of his powers back in the 1970s when The Dreadful Lemon Sky came out; the result is a neat, tight, engaging mystery.

Our hero Travis McGee, Fort Lauderdale boat dweller and beach bum, is not technically a private eye. He basically does favors for friends and friends referred by friends, mostly recovering stolen property, retaining a large percentage of the value as his fee. The Dreadful Lemon Sky begins with something less than a “salvage” job. Carrie Milligan, an old friend, asks him to hold a large amount of cash for her for one month. If she doesn’t come to claim it by then, he should get it to her sister in New Jersey.

But it doesn’t take that long. A few days later, there’s a news item – Carrie Milligan was killed by a truck while crossing a highway near her home in Bay City (which appeared to me to resemble very much the city of Palm Bay, where I once lived). McGee and his economist friend Meyer sail north in McGee’s houseboat for the funeral. There he meets the sister along with Carrie’s circle of friends. And at that point McGee starts getting suspicious. Something is going on under the surface here – he will discover drug smuggling, political corruption, sexual kink and betrayal. The solution will prove to be a complex one, and cruel.

Every McGee novel includes scenes that stick in my mind, even after decades. This one includes a great moment where McGee rescues Carrie’s sister from being fleeced by a funeral director, and McGee’s meditation on the corrosive nature of corporate takeovers of smaller brands. Also, he rents a yellow AMC Gremlin in Bay City, which happened to be exactly the car I was driving back when I first read the book. We Gremlin drivers needed all the support we could get.

Great story. Great reading experience. Cautions for violence, drug use and a pretty lyrical sex scene.