Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Engine House,’ by Rhys Dylan

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It’s nice to run into a professional writer these days, one who knows how to lay out a sentence and to spell, and who has a feel for settings and character. All that describes Rhys Dylan’s work in The Engine House, first installment in a series featuring retired Detective Inspector Evan Warlow of Pembrokeshire in Wales.

The story opens with a landslide that uncovers a hidden cave near a cliffside path. Revealed now are the bodies of a pair of hikers who disappeared more than seven years ago. And this was no death by misadventure – the couple had been beaten to death and stuffed into the hole.

Which leads to a call to Evan Warlow, retired chief inspector. He was a successful detective before his early retirement, and he worked on the missing persons’ case. He is reluctant to get involved – for reasons not revealed in this book to his colleagues or to the reader – but at last his great curiosity and the passion he’d invested in the mystery lure him back onto the job. On a temporary basis.

He’s set to work with Inspector Jess Allanby, a highly regarded woman detective. They form a task force to re-open the old files in light of the new discoveries. And the things they discover – and have a hard time discovering – are troubling.

Meanwhile, a young couple has moved into the old house where the deceased couple had lived. They’re creative and eager, though the young woman is disturbed by a sense of being watched, from somewhere on the other side of the ravine, near where the old, derelict Engine House stands in ruin. (The story flirts with the paranormal here, but doesn’t go too far in that direction.)

I have only praise for the writing and storytelling here. Rhys Dylan knows what he’s doing as a novelist.

My own personal reservations rise from a hint – and it’s really only a hint – of conventional stereotyping in the story. The author doesn’t go as far as to suggest – as so many modern novels seem to – that the police force is actually “gender-balanced,” but the team we follow is half male and half female. And it annoyed me when Jess (Inspector Allanby) reprimands Evan for trying to shield her with his body when they’re threatened with a firearm. Blast it, protecting women is what we men do. There’s not much excuse for our existence otherwise.

Also, the scenes set in the present are written in the present tense, something I object to on stubborn principle.

So I probably won’t read on in the series, but that shouldn’t stop you. The Engine House is really a very good police procedural, in a picturesque and exciting setting. I do recommend it.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lieberman’s Choice,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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I have made no effort to read Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Lieberman books in chronological order. So reading Lieberman’s Choice slings me back almost to the beginning – it’s the second in the series. Rather unlike the others; Abe Lieberman himself is almost a peripheral character here, though a consistently present one.

Bernie Shepard, a Chicago police detective, shoots his wife and her lover (another cop) to death one day. Then he climbs to the roof of his apartment building, where he has already constructed a bunker of concrete blocks. He informs the police that he has rigged bombs around himself. He will blow up a good chunk of the city, he says, unless Detective Alan Kearney, whom he blames for turning his wife into a “whore,” comes to meet him on the roof in the early morning.

The story follows as Abe and his partner Bill Hanrahan assist in countermeasures, not always strictly legal ones, meanwhile dealing with a crazy man (sadly, a crazy evangelical Christian) who is abusing his wife and child. Also we follow the mayor as he struggles with his conscience on one side and political calculation on the other. And, as always, Lieberman has quiet domestic drama within his own family.

It all ends in a sort of High Noon showdown, but one where truth is the chief weapon.

Lieberman’s Choice is good, consistent Kaminsky stuff. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Brass Cupcake,’ by John D. Mac Donald

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The breeze was crisp. She turned toward it, her hands jammed into the jacket pockets. I wanted her carved on the bow of my next clipper ship, but it would have to be a good guy to capture the way that silvery hair moved in the wind.

John D. MacDonald actually wrote in various genres before finding his niche in mystery fiction. His first published mystery novel, in 1950, was The Brass Cupcake. I had read it before, and remembered it positively. But it’s clearly an immature work, and a little derivative.

The title is the narrator’s joking nickname for a policeman’s badge. He is Cliff Bartells, an insurance investigator in the fictional (I think) town of Florence City, Florida, somewhere near Tampa. He used to carry a badge himself, but he left the Florence City police force because of its prevailing corruption. Now he has a reputation for brokering the recovery of stolen property – it’s cost-effective for both the criminals and the insurers to buy the stuff back rather than paying out full settlements. He’s trusted by the crooks, because he never informs on them.

Only now a case has come up that’s a whole different matter. A wealthy old woman has been murdered in a jewel robbery. When he hears from the thieves, Cliff’s position is impossible – if he doesn’t betray the robbers, the local police (who hate him) will arrest him as an accessory. And if he does betray them, his professional reputation will be shot.

Then there’s a further complication – the old woman’s beautiful niece and heir. They dislike each other on first meeting, only to find themselves irresistibly drawn together. The police suspect them both. Can he trust her? Can he trust anyone?

It’s easy to see why author MacDonald impressed his publishers with this book. It’s almost ideal for its time – a tough-guy story with a principled hero in a bad spot, featuring fights and police beatings and a little sex (mild by our standards). Noir cinema seems to have been an inspiration: “I pushed the draperies back so that the neon sent its pale redness into the room, off and on, off and on, the furniture bulking oddly large in the intermittent shadow.” I have an idea the story may have been inspired in part by James M. Cain – though that’s an ignorant opinion, as I’ve never read Cain.

The book’s age is made apparent in several ways, not only in the cars and the smoking – but especially in the featured idea that women (or some women, anyway) need a slap or two to figure out what they really want.

Anyway, that’s The Brass Cupcake. Underdeveloped MacDonald, but certainly entertaining and worth a read.

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.