I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel from New Zealand before. The setting in Dead Ground by Justin Warren is kind of exotic. My main takeaway is that it seems to rain a lot on the west coast.
Dylan Harper is a young police detective in Christchurch. He and his older partner are surprised when they’re sent over to Westport on the west coast, to investigate the disappearance of a newspaper reporter who also worked a second job as an environmental inspector. Dylan isn’t keen to go, because Westport was his childhood home, and he has bad memories from the place. Not to mention enemies.
When they arrive, they quickly suspect the missing man’s attractive wife of murdering him. But as they poke around, questions arise about his last known movements, and about water samples he took at a remote farm. Dylan begins to suspect dirty work at a Chinese-owned mining operation in the mountains.
Now, whenever people talk about mining in a mystery these days, you can be pretty certain contamination and some kind of cover-up can’t be far behind. And when the Chinese are involved, that pretty much seals the deal. The real mystery here is who has been corrupted and how high the corruption goes.
The writing in Dead Ground is okay, but nothing to crow about. Author Warren does make some effort to provide colorful descriptive passages for the reader. The major weakness in the writing, from my point of view, was homophone confusion.
What I liked least was that the book ended in a cliffhanger.
There are further books in the series, if this one grabs you.
It’s one of my many moral weaknesses. Whenever I come across a Florida mystery about a detective who lives on a boat, something in my brain says, “Maybe this will be the next Travis McGee.” It never is, and the disappointment skews my critical judgment. And yet I can’t help myself.
The latest self-inflicted wound of this sort is Million Dollar Staircase, by David Crosby. It’s the first in a series starring Will Harper, a retired journalist who inherited money and chose to live aboard a houseboat in a marina in the Tampa Bay area. He’s been enjoying the maritime lifestyle and growing closer to Sandy, a beautiful French woman who runs another marina nearby. One day he finds Sandy in a celebratory mood. She just read that the town is planning to develop a river walk around her property. That will certainly bring business in!
Only it won’t. Turns out the city plans to condemn her property, and that of her neighbors, paying only current market value – though once the development begins, values will skyrocket. It also turns out a local real estate investor has bought out all the homes in the area, at depressed prices. The whole busines stinks of cronyism and corruption.
But Will has a lawyer friend who owes him a favor. He’ll sue the city for them pro bono. There’s a good chance that, if they can’t get the eminent domain process stopped, they’ll at least be able to get the business owners a more reasonable payout.
What they don’t expect is that some people are willing to kill to cover up their corruption.
Million Dollar Staircase wasn’t a bad book. I liked Will Harper and his friends, and was rooting for them. I am entirely sympathetic to those who oppose the way Eminent Domain has been abused in recent decades.
But I thought the story a little… slack. The suspense could have been ramped up more effectively, and I would have liked for Will Harper to be a little more of a fighter (in the physical sense).
But it wasn’t bad. I don’t remember much objectionable language, and the sex scenes weren’t very explicit. I downloaded a three-book package, so I’ll see how I like the next books.
Sometimes I read a book and I think, “This writer is following a formula.” Following a formula can even work, depending on how the writer fills in the blanks.
One Wilde Night by Patrick Logan works, but only on a technical level.
Tommy Wilde, our hero, has a PhD in biochemistry, but ended up running a crime scene clean-up business. He works mostly at night. He’s training a new employee one night when he gets a call for help from his loser brother Brian, a drug addict. Tommy runs to meet him – at their church – where Brian is panicking over the body of a drug dealer. The dealer – Brian says – just dropped dead. Not his fault.
Due to an overwhelming sense of obligation, Tommy helps Brian dispose of the body, while eluding the drug dealer’s associates. Or so he thinks. In fact, this is just the beginning of a long, long night in which Tommy will be beaten up, kidnapped, threatened and physically mutilated.
There’s a template for writing a thriller. Start by putting your character in a bad situation, then make it steadily worse. Turn every step forward into two steps back.
Author Logan dutifully follows this template. The problem is that at some point, if you raise the stakes enough, you start losing credibility. Everybody has bad nights, but nobody’s nights go that bad in this many ways. This is the sort of story logic you find in a thriller movie, but in a book the audience has more time to reflect and ask themselves, “Do I believe this?”
Even worse, One Wilde Night never really resolves any of Tommy’s problems. It ends in a cliff-hanger. In other words, what we have here isn’t even a whole story. It’s just the first chapter of a story.
And sure enough, there’s a whole series of Tommy Wilde stories to follow.
But I ain’t reading them.
I should note that the church and their priest come out looking good here, so the author at least seems friendly to Christianity. However, he also drops a whole lot of f-bombs.
Well, that was an experience. I went ahead and followed my instinct to download George du Maurier’s novel Trilby, based on my weird fascination with the old John Barrymore movie, “Svengali.” I wasn’t prepared for the degree to which the book would grab me. It was one of those “hard to put it down” reading experiences.
My shame is great at being taken in like this by a Victorian bestseller, and not even a mystery or an adventure tale! A love melodrama, of all things.
Most oddly of all, though Trilby fascinated me, I can’t really recommend it to our readers. I have several objections to the thing.
As you may (or may not) be aware, Trilby is a story mostly about the lives of artists in Paris’ Latin Quarter in the 1850s. This novel’s extreme popularity established that time and place forever in the public mind as a colorful, freethinking milieu. Three British painters – the big war veteran Taffy, the jolly Laird, and the young, innocent Little Billee, share an atelier. There they meet a charming young woman, Trilby O’Ferrall, who is of Irish/Scottish parentage but has spent all her life in Paris. She works as an artist’s model and a washer woman. She’s beautiful, unaffected, uninhibited, and charming. They all fall in love with her to some extent, but Little Billee does most of all. However, he can’t handle the fact that she does nude modeling (“for the altogether,” as she puts it. This is where our phrase “in the altogether” originates), and is not chaste. In spite of his religious freethinking (much is made of that), he’s basically an upper middle-class boy.
Another member of their circle, though generally unwelcome, is Svengali, a Polish Jew and a brilliant musician. Svengali can play any instrument beautifully, except for his own voice. When he hears Trilby’s voice, he’s intrigued, but he soon learns that, though the sound itself is magnificent, she is utterly tone-deaf.
Eventually Billee overcomes his scruples and proposes marriage to Trilby. She agrees reluctantly. Although she reciprocates his love, she understands their social differences would doom their marriage. Soon after, Billee’s mother and sister come to visit, and his mother has a talk with Trilby, who agrees to break the engagement and disappears. Billee then suffers a breakdown which marks the end of his time in Paris. But his talent has now been recognized, and when he recovers, back in England, he is a famous and sought-after man.
Five years later, he, Taffy, and the Laird have a reunion in Paris. They’re surprised to learn that their old acquaintance Svengali is now the talk of Europe. He is famous as the manager of his beautiful wife, “la Svengali,” said to have the most ravishing voice in the world. The trio get tickets to her concert, and are almost – not quite – certain that la Svengali is in fact their old friend Trilby, whom they’d thought dead. When by chance they encounter the Svengali carriage on the street, both their old acquaintances pretend not to know them.
From there it all rolls on to a tragic conclusion, more drawn-out than in the film.
I said, in discussing the movie, that the cinematic Trilby reminds me of a girl I once cared about. It disturbed me, as I read, that Trilby in the book was even more like the girl I knew than the actress (though my girl did not share Trilby’s sexual mores). On top of that, elements in the story took me back to my college days. I think it was a feeling that, in some ways, I was reading about my own life that gripped me as I read Trilby.
But you, Kind Reader, never knew that girl. And you (probably) weren’t there when I was in college. So I have no reason to think you’d react to this book as I did.
For one thing, it’s Victorian literature – that is to say, overwritten. Du Maurier isn’t a horrible over-writer like so many Victorians; often he can be amusing in his frequent digressions. (By the way, there’s a lot of French dialogue in this book, so it helps if you have decent French. Which I don’t). But he does take his time telling the story. This isn’t just a narrative; it’s sort of a leisurely travelogue.
But my main objections are moral and theological. This was a somewhat scandalous book in its time – “Read about all the naughty things they get up to in Paris!” Trilby isn’t a virgin for much the same reason that a girl in the South Sea islands wouldn’t be a virgin. It’s alien to her culture. Du Maurier may have been challenging Victorian sexual mores here, but he keeps it oblique.
Much worse is the antisemitism. A lot has been written over the years about Svengali as a Jewish stereotype. Which he certainly is. He’s arrogant, selfish, grasping, and filthy (an odd accusation to make against any Jew, when you think about it). The passages concerning Svengali are frankly horrifying. However, fortunately, Svengali isn’t in the book as much as in the movie.
It should also be noted that there are several Jewish characters in Trilby, and the others are rather nice.
Even worse, from my perspective, are the theological digressions. The author takes several opportunities to have his characters contemplate – or discover – the complete absurdity of Christian doctrine. Everyone who thinks about it (in this book) soon agrees that the Judeo-Christian God is ridiculous and there is no Hell to fear. Either everyone is saved or everyone just goes to sleep. Nothing to worry about, as long as you do good.
So I don’t really know what to tell you about Trilby. It might fascinate you as it fascinated me. Very likely it won’t. If you do read it, you’ll have to wade through some nasty spots, but there are also many rewards.
Roper’s memory had cinematic qualities. He could call up the past and watch it like a TV show. If that wasn’t astonishing enough, he had also revealed another factor. His recall mirrored the technology of the moment. This meant his early memories appeared as if on a VHS tape, while the more recent ones were in digital format. Hooley had once speculated that had Roper been born a hundred years earlier his memories would have been on a flickering black-and-white film reel.
A standard scene in a detective mystery – if it’s not a plain police procedural (a very good thing of another kind) – calls for the master sleuth to stand in a room surrounded by lesser men, as he sees things they don’t see and makes mental connections they can’t make. They often think he’s crazy, until he explains his deductions. From Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Monk, this has been a set piece.
So it wasn’t much of a jump, once we became aware of the existence of autistic savants, to come up with an autistic detective. I’ve encountered several examples. Jonathan Roper, hero of Michael Leese’s The Case of the Headless Billionaire, is one of them, and it’s not a bad effort.
When a billionaire philanthropist disappears, Chief Inspector Brian Hooley is assigned to the case. The man vanished into a London crowd in broad daylight, and the police are baffled. Considering the difficulty of the case, Insp. Hooley asks to get Jonathan Roper assigned to assist. Roper is on suspension, having nearly ruined an earlier investigation through his artless honesty. Roper is on the autistic spectrum, and other detectives find him hard to work with. But Hooley has always gotten along with him, managing to adjust to his eccentricities. He treats him as a sort of substitute son.
Roper is the right man for the job. In his time off, he’s been working on his social skills, and he’s learning to ask for explanations of “normal” behavior. He’s also constructing a new way of organizing his own memories, making his deductions more efficient.
Their investigations will lead to corruption in the medical research field, and to human smugglers (human smugglers sure show up in a lot of stories these days. I wish the authorities paid as much attention to them as authors do). The detectives’ lives, as well as those of many innocents, will hang on the efficiency of Jonathan Roper’s remarkable brain.
I liked The Case of the Headless Billionaire. The writing wasn’t bad, and the characters were okay. I won’t say this was a masterful book, but it did the job it set out to do, and I was interested in Hooley and Roper. The issue of fetal stem cell research played a part in the story, but it was framed in a way that sidestepped the controversial issue of whether it’s morally acceptable in the first place.
Worth reading.
[Note: I discover, on searching our files, that I reviewed this book once before under its previous title, Going Underground. I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it, and can only attribute this to old age. But I liked it better this time around.]
Sometimes I hate a book enough to read it all through just so I can tell you in detail how bad it was. That was the case with Impression, by Ray Clark. I’ve read worse novels, but few combined inept writing with such personal offense to myself.
Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener and his partner Sean Riley are the heroes of this police procedural, part of a series set in Leeds in North Yorkshire. When a local prostitute is found dead in her kitchen, stabbed to death with a bayonet, and then a local businessman is found choked to death with sealing wax (!) in a butcher shop doorway, their investigation begins. That investigation, to this reader, seemed a remarkably ham-handed one. A local online journalist comes to them with a theory that these murders are recreations of historical murders in the area. They laugh him off, with tragic results. Also, when a couple whose daughter was recently kidnapped show up on their radar, they treat the two with surprising insensitivity – largely because the husband is a born-again Christian, and so (in their eyes) contemptible.
This hatred for born-again Christians comes up again and again in the book. Author Clark wants to make sure we’re in no doubt how he feels on the subject. “Real practicing Christians,” DI Gardener states authoritatively, “see the born-again converts as part-timers—people who are not really taking the Lord and the good book seriously.” Further on, Riley says that the fact that a man is a born-again Christian “tells me that he is hiding from something in his past.” That’s an odd way, in an English book, of dismissing John Wesley, John Newton, and William Booth, among so many others.
But my complaints aren’t only theological. The author is lazy. His characters never come to life, and most of them are hard to keep straight. He misuses the term “begging the question,” and is prone to misplacing modifiers and misusing words, as in the line, “Despite being still in the throes of summer, [a character] was dressed in a camel hair coat and trilby….”
One major plot point involves a child, decades ago, playing constantly with a Polaroid instant camera. However, we’re also told that the child’s family was very poor. Apparently the author has no idea what Polaroid film used to cost.
Finally, the climax was melodramatic and implausible.
Last week, an independent bookstore in Chicago splashed up attention for many Twitter users with a tweet complaining about a customer who wanted to rent rather than buy some expensive books. Rebecca George, a co-owner of Volumes Bookcafe in Chicago’s Wicker Park, wrote in Jan 9 tweet: “Turns out one of our biggest sales last month was for the person to stage their home for the holidays and now they want to return them all. Please don’t do this to a small business, people. That one sale was a third of our rent.”
The books were eye-catching art and cook book, no doubt published to show off the reader’s good taste. The most modest book in the set was entitled Authenticity: The Vain Attempt at Finding the Real You. (I’m sorry. I made that up.)
The tweet has been seen almost seven million times and picked up by news outlets, making January a very good month for sales by good-hearted book-buyers showing their sympathy.
What else is online?
Reading Good Books: An essential freedom that builds character more than we know. “American kids, more than ever, are stratified into those who read—those who have regular access to books—and those who don’t. I’m not talking here about basic literacy, but being open to the human good that is the enjoyment of literature.”
Kristin Lavransdatter at 100.Sigrid Undset wrote a “medieval romance in the twentieth century (published between 1920 and 1922), [and] she somehow reverses a thousand years of morbidity, bringing a long dead genre back to life. . . . Kristin Lavransdatter is really just a love story—but one of the most savagely honest love stories ever written.”
Mystery: All About Agatha is a podcast that has read all of Agatha Christie’s novels, discussed them, and ranked them against each other. I look forward to looking up All Hallow’s Eve to see if they place it within the worst five.
Writing: Backstory brings characters to life, making them appear as real people, except when it floods the reader with irrelevant details. So it’s a very good, except when it isn’t.
Terry Teachout: The New York art critic died last year on Jan. 13. Patrick Kurp calls that fact “comparably difficult to believe. It’s like saying France no longer exists. Seldom in my experience was so prominent and successful a writer so generous with his success.”
Another free book by an author I’m not familiar with. I think this is the fourth in the string. I’ve disliked each book less than the last, and The Blood Line by Solomon Carter was the best so far. Not stellar, but not bad.
Aging Detective Inspector Joe Hogarth of Southend in Essex, England, is summoned to a very nasty crime scene with his two female colleagues. The deceased has been dead several days, and decomposition is well under way. The dead man was known as a forger, specializing in false passports and other IDs. The method of the murder is interesting – first the man was given a powerful “speedball” injection of cocaine and heroin, and then he was stabbed to death before the drugs could kill him. Why would anyone take the trouble to do all that?
Before long another local criminal, a human trafficker, is found murdered exactly the same way. This is obviously personal for the killer, but who could that person be? The field of possible suspects is wide; the problem is finding the person with the right kind of hate.
Joe Hogarth is a sort of a sad sack – middle-aged, never married, lonely but scared of commitment. Instead of taking risks in dating, he medicates himself with alcohol. Meanwhile, an old enemy of his has been released from prison. All unknown to Hogarth, this psychopath has come to town and is laying plans to repay him for all the time he spent behind bars.
I thought The Blood Line was well-written. Joe Hogarth is a good character, and not politically correct; I was interested in him. My only real objection, though, is a big one – the story is kind of dreary. Hogarth has a dreary life, and little hope is in view. Maybe things will get better in the next books in the series.
I’ve been reading a lot of free books made available through various Kindle promotions lately. As you may have noticed, I wasn’t entirely happy with the last couple I reviewed. Was J. C. Fields’ The Cold Trail more satisfying?
Well, yes. But not entirely.
This book is part of a series, and there were the usual problems with character relationships that had to be explained, but that wasn’t handled too badly. The story begins with the disappearance, a few years back, of three female volleyball players from a college in Missouri. A few years later, our hero, Sean Kruger, a professor at another Missouri college, is able to rescue a different volleyball player. Kruger is a former FBI agent, and he worked on the earlier abductions. The similarities prompt him to get his hacker friend to do some checking in the records, and he believes he can discern the work of a serial killer. Because of this he makes up his mind to go back to his old job at the FBI, which assigns him to the case.
Eventually he and his team are able learn that one thing connects a number of disappearances of female athletes over recent years. In each case, a particular software company was installing a system in the college at the time. And the man overseeing the installation was the son of the company’s owner, computer mogul Robert Burns, who recently retired as a senator. The son in question was Robert Jr., “Bobby,” and he has just been elected to his father’s old seat. Is it possible a US senator is a serial killer?
Of course it’s possible, and much money has been spent on covering up Bobby’s “indiscretions.” But it goes far deeper than that. We’re talking about the Russian mafia and international human trafficking.
The story worked pretty well. The characters were interesting, and they interacted well. The dialogue was good. The book could have used a proofreader – I found misplaced modifiers and word confusion (like “vanilla folder”). But as a narrative, it wasn’t bad. I caught what looked to me like one plot weakness, but that happens.
My reservations were mostly political and paranoid.
The evil senator is, of course, a conservative Republican. And he is owned, part and parcel, by Vladimir Putin and the Russians, who are using him to destabilize the US economy.
It occurred to me that Robert Burns might be a stand-in for Donald Trump in a left-wing fantasy.
Also, we got to watch the FBI at work investigating a senator, and they cut legal corners from time to time. Nothing sinister about the squeaky-clean FBI illegally surveilling a Republican, right?
Also, the bureaucrats in this book never worry about wokeness. There’s no concern over microaggressions, and nobody talks about their preferred pronouns. I did not believe this was true to contemporary life in the federal government.
All in all, The Cold Trail left me with chilly feet.
Writing a story (of any length, but novels are hardest in this respect) presents many challenges, and it’s a surprise any of us ever gets it tolerably right (I’m not saying I get it right myself; that’s for others to determine). You’ve got to cobble together an interesting plot, and then you’ve got to cat-herd your characters into doing the (sometimes outrageous) stuff they need to do in order to keep common sense from breaking out. A story implies unusual activity, and unusual activity usually means forcing characters to do extreme stuff. This can be done well or badly. I felt it was done rather badly in Lewis M. Penry’s One Other, second in his DS Jerome Roberts police procedural series.
Dr. Ben Carr is one-half of a medical practice in the London suburb of Shefford. He’s a family man and football (soccer) coach. Apparently popular with his neighbors – so why did someone stab him to death in his home?
Detective Sergeant Jerome Roberts, along with his superior DI Richard Martin, starts questioning neighbors and friends, and a darker picture of him emerges. Dr. Carr seems to have had his share of enemies – there’s his business partner (whom he’s been blackmailing), and the families of female students he’s been sleeping with. There’s the football mom who threatened him publicly for not putting her son into a game. There’s his own brother, too.
As police pressure increases, the suspects respond violently, turning on one another, and even on themselves. The whole thing erupts in a series of homicides.
And that’s my problem with this book. This isn’t supposed to be grand opera or Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a story about ordinary middle class citizens in a suburb. No doubt they’re all sinners like the rest of us, but (it seems to me) the author overestimates the capacity of the average person for deadly force. Killing another human is the first and most stubborn taboo. It takes serious fear, trauma, or specialized training to get past that taboo. Communities don’t just break out in murder like an epidemic of chickenpox.
One Other fell down, for this reader, in the psychology department. I simply didn’t believe the story.
