Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shooting Gallery,’ by Stuart Doughty

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I sometimes complain that action novels are written like movies – that is to say, the action is implausible if you stop to think about it.

Stuart Doughty’s Shooting Gallery was (in my opinion) more like a TV show. The plausibility was even less plausible.

I’d read one of Doughty’s John Kite novels before, and liked it more than not. I found it insubstantial but fun. Shooting Gallery, seventh book in the series, is much the same, but it struck me as a little formulaic and (possibly) shopworn in concept.

John Kite’s specialty is recovering stolen works of art. At the beginning of Shooting Gallery, he’s in Massachusetts, attending the unveiling of a stolen Modigliani painting that he recently recovered. But during the ceremony, an intruder starts shooting a gun from a balcony, in the general direction of the front stage. Nobody is seriously hurt, but John (with the reckless disregard for danger that seems to be his style) pursues the shooter on foot, though he does not catch them.

Shortly thereafter, he learns that the recovered painting is a fake. As he asks questions and digs into the records, he begins to suspect that one of the most important figures in the art world, a man on the verge of an important government appointment, is a fraud, a murderer, and very likely something worse.

The writing in Shooting Gallery was generally good – not great, but better than average in this degenerate age. The attempts to render American dialogue could have been better, but I probably couldn’t do any better writing British dialogue. (I might add that there were opportunities to criticize American gun laws, and the author — to his credit — did not take advantage of them.)

What bothered me most was John Kite’s TV-style heroism. More than once he rushes to confront armed opponents with no weapon of his own, and walks into obviously perilous situations without a plan for survival. TV characters act like that, but not, I think, real people, even heroes. If they do, they don’t last very long.

Shooting Gallery was okay as pure entertainment. Read it if it seems like your cup of tea.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ruse,’ by Pete Brassett

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One of several quiet British police procedural series that I enjoy is the Scottish one starring Inspector Munro, by Pete Brassett. I have to admit, though, that I have trouble telling them apart from the Inspector Skelgill series set across the border in England. The central figures and supporting casts are highly similar, but I like both of them.

In Ruse, the latest Inspector Munro book, we find Jim Munro newly retired, but still meddling in investigations. This is not resented at all by his old team of detectives, who are happy for his input.

Tam McDonnell has retired from his career and bought a pub, but isn’t doing very well. Then a young man approaches him and offers his services as a DJ. He promises to deliver a big crowd for one night, in return for a percentage of the night’s takings. It all seems to go splendidly, until a young woman’s body is found in a restroom, stabbed to death.

The investigation will uncover links to drug dealing, Meanwhile, there’s been a string of robberies in high end shops in the town of Ayr. The proprietors find themselves suddenly unconscious, to discover on awakening that valuable goods are missing. In time, a link between the murder and the thefts will become apparent.

Ruse is standard Brit, Midsomer-esque police procedural stuff – the gruff older detective showing his younger subordinates the way. But it’s solid standard stuff too, well-written, reassuring and fun. I enjoyed it. No major cautions for subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Blind Trust,’ by Colin Conway

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Sheriff Tom Jessup is investigating the death of an elderly man, a loner, in Whitman County, Washington state, as The Blind Trust begins. It could be natural causes, but something doesn’t seem right. His investigations will put him in touch with Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett in Spokane, who are investigating another death. Gradually a picture develops of an extremely dysfunctional family, of five siblings who haven’t communicated in years, suddenly dying out at the same time. What no one can figure out is why anybody would go to the trouble of killing them.

As the story unrolls, they’ll cross paths with another Spokane detective named Morgan, a corner-cutter neither Delaney or Burkett likes. They have the same objectives, but will their mutual mistrust delay the resolution of the case?

As with all the books in Colin Conway’s The 509 series that I’ve read so far, I relished The Blind Trust. I especially enjoyed the fascinating, layered characters. I was particularly intrigued with the dubious Detective Morgan – a lesser writer than Conway might have made him a caricature, but when we spend time in his head, his thinking makes perfect sense – from his own point of view.

Only mild cautions are in order for language and mature subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Side Hustle,’ by Colin Conway

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“The 509” is the eastern, more rural part of Washington state, where Spokane is the big town. I’d already read one of the books in Colin Conway’sThe 509 series, The Long Cold Winter, and liked it very much. So I picked up the first installment, The Side Hustle.

Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett are homicide detectives in Spokane. When they’re called to view the body of Jacob Kidwell, online financial guru, they find him with his neck broken at the bottom of a stairway in his apartment building. It could easily be an accident, but the detectives suspect he was pushed. The suspicion is increased when they learn that one of his two computers has disappeared.

Young Kirby Willis, an Uber driver and budding entrepreneur, idolized Jacob, who was his friend, and can’t resist making his own investigation. In theory, the cops should resent his interference, but he has sources of information unavailable to them, and anyway, Marci thinks he’s kind of cute.

Quinn, meanwhile, is having trouble concentrating on his work because of personal problems that he won’t discuss with Marci. When he does finally open up to someone, it’s almost the last person you’d expect… but that could be the very person who can offer him hope.

Author Colin Conway excels at portraying three-dimensional characters. I liked Quinn, Marci, and Kirby very much, and followed their adventures with just as much interest as if the book had been a blood-and-thunder thriller. The Side Hustle has the added value of actually offering good advice for living, at no additional charge.

I liked The Side Hustle even more than The Long Cold Winter. I’m officially a fan of this series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Trick Question,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I’m still getting accustomed to Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet novels, set in New Orleans. They’re not my usual kind of fare; I like my heroes to have a little more existential angst and shining armor on them. But the series is growing on me.

In Trick Question, Tubby gets a desperate plea for help from a fellow lawyer. That lawyer is working a murder case as a court-appointed advocate. His problem is that he’s a hopeless lush, and he’s done almost no prep work, and the trial is about to begin and the judge won’t postpone. Tubby’s a sucker for an old friend, and he hates the idea of a defendant getting railroaded, so he agrees to do the best he can in the few days available.

The defendant, Cletus Busters, is the janitor at a medical research facility. One night he opened a freezer door, and a man’s frozen body tipped out onto him. The body was that of a scientist who’d been using that laboratory. He had complained in the past about Cletus playing with the laboratory mice. Also, drugs stolen from the lab were found in Cletus’ apartment.

In addition, Tubby is doing some estate work for a young female boxer, and he gets a peek into the world of that rising sport.

The whole subject of women’s boxing gives me the willies, personally, so that was uncomfortable. But eventually (spoiler alert), Tubby comes over to my view, so that was OK.

Cletus the defendant turns out to be a voodoo practitioner, but that’s played mostly for laughs, so I didn’t mind that too much either.

Trick Question was entertaining. Still not exactly my cup of jambalaya, but I can see why people are fans. Only mild cautions for subject matter are in order.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder on Long Island,’ by Owen Parr

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“Matt Scudder meets Father Brown” is what the Amazon blurb says about Owen Parr’s Joey Mancuso-Father Dominic mystery series. I suppose you could say that about it, assuming the two classic detectives met in an auto collision and both got stunned a little. I got a free copy of Murder on Long Island, and I read it all the way through just to give it a chance. It didn’t get better as I read on.

Joey Mancuso and Father Dominic are half-brothers, we are told, sons of the same mother, one with an Italian father, the other with an Irish one. Through some sorts of shenanigans in the previous volume (Murder on Long Island is volume two in the series), they ended up running a bar and cigar club together, and solving murders on the side, using the establishment as their office. Though Father Dominic, to his credit, devotes most of his time to his church.

A Long Island property developer is accused of murdering his wife. He claims he found her shot to death, but the timeline shows that he waited 20 minutes before calling the police. Also, he was found covered in her blood and had gunshot residue on his hand. The man’s daughter persuades their lawyers to ask Joey and Father Dom to investigate, and they agree to look into it. Joey begins to suspect that those lawyers haven’t been working very hard on the case. There are plenty of leads to follow up, but the trial has already begun.

There is the germ of a good story in this book, I think. Joey and Father Dom could be interesting characters (though I get uneasy when I’m told a priest is “adapting his ministry to the 21st Century”). But the writing simply isn’t very good. Misplaced modifiers are common. Word meanings are confused. Many passages are clumsily written and/or too wordy.

There are courtroom scenes, and (perhaps this was aggravated for me by the fact that I recently read a very good legal thriller) those scenes struck me as highly inauthentic, Perry Mason Show stuff.

There are also technical problems with the text. The paragraphs (without indentations) are separated by multiple spaces, so that many whole pages contain just one paragraph and a lot of white space. Also, oddly, there are occasional digital footnotes which seem to be notes from preliminary readers. These should have been stripped out, if any care at all had been taken with the publication.

Overall, this reader was not much impressed with Murder on Long Island.

Fiction, Reviews

’21 Hours,’ by Dustin Stevens

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Felix “O” O’Connor, hero of Dustin Steven’s novel, 21 Hours, is an ex-con, now a cowboy in Wyoming. He rarely gets back to Columbus, his home town, but keeps in touch with “Lex,” his twin sister. He doesn’t much care for her husband, but he adores their daughter Annie, his niece.

He gets a call from Lex one day, asking for help. She and her husband were attacked, and Annie was abducted. There’s been no ransom demand, and they don’t have a lot of money anyway.

O gets into his car and drives straight to Columbus. If it’s not a ransom kidnapping, it must be human traffickers. Investigating that will mean going to bad places and dealing with very bad people. O can handle himself, and he won’t let anything stand in his way.

Essentially, this is “Taken,” with an uncle instead of a father, and the locations changed.

21 Hours is another example of the recent phenomenon I guess I’d call the “made for the movies thriller.” It involves the sort of action we usually accept in the rushed context of a movie, but (at least for me) doesn’t work as well on the printed page. Our hero suffers excruciating, repeated physical trauma over the course of his adventure, but just keeps on coming, killing multiple enemies who are fresher and in better health than he is.

I suppose that’s all that’s left for the male hero these days. We’ve decided, as a culture, that women can fight men on equal terms, that there is no male strength advantage. All that’s left to a man is his ability to take punishment. So he gets punished beyond all plausibility.

One other quibble I have with this book is that on two occasions the hero opens padlocks by shooting them with a pistol. I’ve never tried the experiment myself, but I have it on good authority that you can’t actually do that.

But other than that, the writing was good. 21 Hours is an entertaining book, if you’re into this sort of thing.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cost of Arrogance,’ by H. Mitchell Caldwell

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Cases are seldom won on cross but rather are more likely to suffer serious setbacks. Most seasoned trial lawyers will admit that a successful cross is one that did not assist the other side. A good cross, like a good plane landing, is one you can walk away from.

You may have noticed that I’ve been posting a lot of negative reviews recently. This is because, due to circumstances I won’t discuss in detail, I’ve been reading a lot of books I get free for my Kindle through promotional offers. The bulk of these books is from independent authors, and (I must confess, though I’m now one of the club), independent authors tend to be amateurs. People who haven’t paid their dues and learned the craft.

So it’s a pleasure to happen on a book that’s published by a genuine publisher, and eminently worthy of that publication. I’m delighted to recommend Cost of Arrogance, first in a coming series starring California attorney Jake Clearwater.

Jake Clearwater used to be a prosecutor in a county (fictional, I believe) north of Los Angeles. He left after a new district attorney proved more interested in chalking up convictions than in seeing justice done. Now he teaches trial law at a small university. It’s a good life, but lately he’s noticed he misses the excitement, the cut-and-thrust of courtroom work.

He’s not enthusiastic at first when he’s approached by representatives of an organization committed to filing appeals for convicts on death row. As an old prosecutor, Jake rarely loses much sleep over condemned murderers. And the convict they want him to help, Duane Durgeon, is no poster boy. He’s a hulking career felon and open racist who actually asked for the death penalty during his trial. Nobody wants his case. That, the activists tell Jake, is precisely why he needs an advocate.

A classroom discussion touches Jake’s legal conscience, and he agrees to hold his nose and go to work on Duane’s case. He little suspects that he’ll soon earn the hatred of an entire grieving town, or that he’ll suffer assault and attempted murder before he’s done. But he’ll also regain his moral center and get his appetite for life back. With a beautiful new girlfriend to top it off.

A book like Cost of Arrogance could have easily been preachy and predictable. Author H. Mitchell Caldwell avoids those pitfalls by writing it right. His characters are not caricatures, but many-faceted humans who often surprise us with their depth. We sympathize with them, even when we disagree (and you can disagree in different ways; there’s scope here for a range of opinions). The writing is clear and workmanlike, the dialogue realistic. The author’s experience as a lawyer and law professor is readily apparent in the obvious authenticity of the courtroom scenes. The plotting is excellent, too. The story kept me fascinated from beginning to end.

The love story was also good – maybe too good to be true. Jake meets a gorgeous woman who is fearful of commitment and needs a sensitive, decent man to teach her to trust again. I can speak authoritatively when I say this is an archetypal male fantasy. But it added to the fun of the story, so I’m not complaining.

Highly recommended. Cost of Arrogance is honestly one of the best legal thrillers I’ve ever read.

Authors, Fiction, Non-fiction, Writing

An Endless Night, Culture Wars, and Editors Make Rotten Writers

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I read The Diary of Anne Frank in sixth grade and don’t remember thinking much about it. Something of the oppressive air stuck with me. Something of the final terror. One of my daughters read it last year and went on a rant against it. Maybe I read an abridged version, because I don’t remember reacting to any nasty thoughts or talk of her period. I think I would have noticed something like that in sixth grade. Then again, I could have drifted into a fog here and there, not realizing what I wasn’t reading.

I read Elie Wiesel’s Night for the first time recently. The author won a Nobel Prize in 1986 “for being a messenger to mankind: his message is one of peace, atonement and dignity.” While reading, I thought he had won the prize for literature for this book. Its sparse prose is marvelous, gripping, and conveys much of the dread of his experience.

In the opening pages, Wiesel’s family and neighbors didn’t know what was coming. Two people tried to warn them, but they couldn’t believe the outrageous truth. Who would do take 100s of people into the woods to dig their own graves before shooting them? Men couldn’t do that to each other. When the Germans came to town, one officer brought chocolate to his Jewish “host.” See? The Third Reich isn’t so bad. Many of them clung to any scrap of human decency they could imagine. Even when others were being killed, surely they would be shown mercy.

Such fantasies about the essence of mankind persist throughout the world and are one reason the museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau exists. Many, perhaps most, would say loving your neighbor as yourself is fairly easy if you just try it. They don’t recognize that Christ called this the second commandment, related and subordinate to the first. The first one they would call a nice premise or its own kind of fantasy, and there we have the seed for the hatred Weisel called an endless night.

What else do we have to talk about?

Spring Books: Goodreads has a long list of anticipated books. Some of these look good, not that I’ll ever get around to ’em. My supply of round to’em is a mite limited.

Writing: Jenny Jackson, an accomplished editor with many years of experience, suggests editors make terrible writers. They are used to calls shots, not executing the shots called.

College Closure: The King’s College in New York City has been running deficits for years and experimenting with online education without success. It will likely close by the end of the current semester.

Culture War: Professor Elizabeth Stice argues for living in the truth. “Those who think our culture can be changed only by those with obvious power should consider an alternative philosophical perspective. In 1978 Václav Havel published an essay titled “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel was writing from behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, in a society he described as ‘post-totalitarian.’

“For Havel, the Soviet system was much bigger than the imposition of rules from a handful of powerful figures. It had come to rely on its own subjects for perpetuation. Using the example of a greengrocer who unthinkingly puts a ‘Workers of the World Unite’ sign in the shop window simply because life is easier that way, Havel explained that the people in Czechoslovakia were engaging in ‘auto-totality.'”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder For the Bride,’ by John D. MacDonald

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The temporary relief of the rain hadn’t lasted long. The thick heavy heat had spread itself over the city again, like a fat woman face down on a mudbank.

Another non-McGee MacDonald, an early one. I think Murder For the Bride is one of John D.’s less celebrated books, but I liked it fine.

Our hero, Dillon Bryant, is an oil engineer. When Murder For the Bride opens, he’s in South America on a job, thinking every minute about Laura Rentane, the beautiful woman he married just before he left the country. It was a whirlwind courtship, but she was the girl of his dreams. More than one friend expressed doubts about her character, but Dill wouldn’t hear of it.

Then a letter comes. Dill had better come home to New Orleans. Laura is in big trouble. When he arrives, he finds a police detective outside their apartment door. Laura is dead, he is told. Strangled with a length of wire.

Dill has to do something about it. He starts asking questions. The more questions he asks, the more he’s forced to realize that Laura lied to him. Her name wasn’t Rentane. She was older than she looked. Her background wasn’t what she claimed. When the FBI takes over her case, the cops toss Dill some clues, just to spite them. They think they know what Dill is likely to do, but they’re not prepared for how far he’s willing to go.

As in any John D. MacDonald book, the prose in Murder For the Bride is crisp and compelling. There’s just enough sex to satisfy the original paperback audience, which is pretty tame by today’s standards. And beneath it all, a story of integrity and coming of age.

As an added bonus, Commie spies are involved, and there’s no moral ambiguity in their depiction. This is anticommunism at its best, circa 1951.

Recommended.