Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘With a Mind to Kill,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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The nights are never kind to Moscow. With nowhere to go, the traffic disappears and the streets seem to parade themselves, mile upon mile of empty concrete glinting uselessly in the flare of the sodium lights. The great monuments and buildings, no matter how proud of themselves in the day, stand there like old men in the darkness, their windows black, their doors bolted fast. No lovers meet. No revellers make their way home from jazz clubs or restaurants. The best you will hope to see are clusters of soldiers or policemen, muttering to themselves as they make their presence known because the population needs to be watched and guarded even when everyone is asleep. Otherwise, nothing moves. The entire city takes on the psychopathy of the graveyard; pleased with itself because it will be there for ever, unaware that it is actually already dead.

This guy Anthony Horowitz is a first-class writer; I’m ashamed I’d never heard of him till recently. Aside from writing early seasons of Midsomer Murders, he’s written a series of young adult thrillers, the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series, and three authorized James Bond novels. I’ve reviewed the first already, and I picked up this final one the other day on a deal. I’ll have to catch the middle book at some point. As I mentioned previously, I don’t much care for Ian Fleming’s James Bond books, but I like the way Horowitz does them.

With a Mind to Kill fits into the chronology just after The Man With the Golden Gun. James Bond is in Jamaica, still recuperating from brainwashing by the Russians, and having been shot in the last book. But he’s called back to London by his superiors, who have a daunting assignment for him. They want him to return to Soviet Russia, pretending to still be under the Communists’ control. He’s to present himself to his former captors, who will either kill him or put him to work on some very secretive project they’ve got going, one British Intelligence wants very much to learn more about. Bond can expect to be tortured when he returns, but the experts believe he’s back in control of himself.

Bond wants very much to get revenge on the people who nearly erased his personality and turned him into a traitorous living weapon. He expects the beatings, the tortures, and the mind games they’ll subject him to. He does not expect the woman who’ll find her way into his heart, one whom he’ll never be sure he can trust…

In Horowitz’s hands, James Bond (I think) takes on greater depth than we’re used to. This James Bond is feeling his age and his many wounds, and is pondering retirement once this job is finished – if he survives.

I thoroughly enjoyed With a Mind to Kill. It’s expertly written. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Pathways of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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I must have enjoyed The Ethics of Magic, the first book in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series. Because I bought the second book, The Pathways of Magic, and read it in one day.

Our hero (though, oddly, he’s not part of the law firm), college instructor Mitch McCaffrey, has a surprise visit from a strange woman – a very strange woman – at his office. She wears a shirt of mesh mail and is carrying a short sword, which they use together to dispatch a werewolf that’s following her. Then the woman makes the werewolf disappear.

Her name is Alyssa McCormick, and, like Mitch, she has magical skills. She is in fact the niece of Mitch’s magical mentor, and she’d like to look at the books of magic her uncle left to Mitch. He’s happy to show them to her. It turns out they’re very rare and valuable.

In fact, they’re so valuable that both the FBI and the CIA (who employ magic in their investigations) want to get their hands on them, and are willing to break all the rules to secure them. Which only gets Mitch’s and Alyssa’s backs up, and they fight back, both with spells and lawyers (this is where the Haunted Law Firm comes in). The stakes get even higher when Monica Gilbert, Mitch’s old Woke enemy from the first book, shows up as an FBI consultant.

The story moves right along, alternating legal give-and-take with scenes of action and spell-casting. The prose remains unremarkable (with an annoying number of typos), but the storytelling worked. And the values are conservative.

I liked The Pathways of Magic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ethics of Magic,’ by Robert Arrington

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Here’s a light, fun novel, aimed primarily at conservatives and Christians. And it works pretty well.

Mitch McCaffrey, hero of The Ethics of Magic, teaches at a community college in rural North Carolina. He enjoys his work and is dating a woman he hopes to marry.

But he has an enemy. Monica Gilbert, the Compliance Officer at the college, has it in for him. He’s a white male, in the first place, and he teaches the classics in his courses. She suspects him of holding the “wrong” opinions, something she feels must not be tolerated in higher education.

But her motivations go deeper. First of all, she once made a pass at him and he turned her down. Nobody does that. Worse, his girlfriend is a woman she knew as a girl, and hated.

But worst of all, Mitch is a magic practitioner. Monica can tell because she is one herself. She’s eager for a showdown, to awe him with her power.

When a few students make a complaint about Mitch, he’s soon facing a hearing to determine whether he’ll be dismissed. That’s when he retains the services of lawyer Kathryn Turner. All this begins the first adventure in Robert Arrington’s “Haunted Law Firm” series.

I had some quibbles with The Ethics of Magic. The prose was adequate, but there were frequent misspellings and typos. I thought the villains were painted a little broadly – they reveled in evil too much. Most people – even the Woke – honestly believe they’re doing the right thing.

And, although most of our good characters here are Christians, and attend church, Mitch and his girlfriend are sleeping together outside marriage. I suppose that sort of thing flies in some churches nowadays.

But outside of those things, I must say I enjoyed reading The Ethics of Magic very much. It was a lot of fun, sort of John Grisham meets Harry Potter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mystery of L’inconnu,’ by Dan Grylles

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As the first installment in a series of mysteries starring Miami police detective Remy Ferguson, Mystery of L’inconnu introduces us to the detective and his team. For this reader, it wasn’t a very impressive debut.

“L’inconnu” (French for Unknown) is a very large, state of the art luxury yacht owned by a yacht manufacturing company. As a sales inducement, the company periodically offers free cruises to small groups of the super-rich, so they can enjoy the service, food, and amenities. But this voyage goes very, very bad.

The first part of the book concentrates on the story of the voyage, in which we gradually learn that one of the crew has made a deal with smugglers to take drugs on board at sea, to be delivered in Miami. Then the deal goes very, very wrong, and soon there are cartel gunmen rampaging through the vessel while the crew and passengers try to devise ways to either hide or defend themselves. They do surprisingly well, and the reader is rooting for them.

(Spoiler coming up.)

Then we switch to the investigation, led by our hero, Detective Remy Ferguson. And we are abruptly informed that pretty much all these people we’d been rooting for are dead. Remy’s investigation is subjected to pressure by his superiors, who are being pestered by the (very influential) yacht company to wrap the case up.

Then we get a final section, where we are presented with a Big Plot Twist (admittedly not a bad one), and a perilous situation from which our hero escapes only through a deus ex machina.

In my opinion, this is a very poor way to tell a story.

On top of that, the prose was weak. The author often misuses words, confusing “Cavalry” with “Calvary,” “flare gun” with “flair gun,” and other such errors. He appeared (I wasn’t quite sure because the prose was confusing) to confuse a rifle with a shotgun. He thinks Multiple Personality Disorder is the same as schizophrenia. And he delivers clumsy lines like, “’Whatever works,’ Brewer mumbled his simplistic estimation.”

Mystery of L’inconnu was a disappointing novel. I did finish it, though, so I suppose it wasn’t a total narrative failure.

Fiction, Reviews

‘April Evil,’ by John D. MacDonald

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Yes, it’s my birthday, thank you. I guess I was a little obscure about that yesterday.

Aside from his Travis McGee novels, John D. MacDonald was a prolific author of stand-alone thrillers. Today’s pick is April Evil, from 1956.

The setting is the town of Flamingo, Florida, whose most eccentric resident is old Dr. Paul Tomlin. It’s well known that Dr. Tomlin keeps all his money in cash, in a safe in his big stone house, as he doesn’t believe in banks.

This eccentricity attracts interest. Naturally his ne’er-do-well nephew Dil Parks is interested, as is Dil’s sexy, scheming wife, Lenora. And then there’s a more distant relation, young Joe Preston, who came to visit with his wife, Laurie. Dr. Tomlin despises Joe, but he likes Laurie, and so allows them to stay with him, while he teaches Laurie about books and music.

But even more darkly, a man named Harry Mullin has come to town. He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and he’s heard a rumor about a lot of money in an old man’s house. He’s assembled a team of specialists, and they’re planning a quick, easy job and a clean getaway.

Lawyer Ben Piersall is not involved in any of this. When Dil’s wife, Lenora, tried to get him to help them have the old man declared incompetent, he laughed her off. What he doesn’t know is that the criminal Harry Mullin has moved in next door, and his own son has developed a powerful curiosity about these secretive strangers.

It’s a powder keg situation, with several different fuses burning to it, and it’s all set to go off on one terrible afternoon.

April Evil is not the best of John D. MacDonald’s novels (I found it a little melodramatic), but it’s well-written and fairly representative. As always, the characters are the great strength. They’re varied and believable, and they sometimes surprise the reader.

Recommended. Cautions for violence and sexual situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tomorrow Is another Day,’ by Stuart M. Kaminsky

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A deal came up on a Toby Peters mystery by Stuart M. Kaminsky, and I bought it. Turned out I’d read it before, but it was fun to read again, and it turns out I haven’t reviewed it here. So, Tomorrow Is Another Day.

It’s 1943. Toby Peters, small-time Los Angeles private eye, gets a call to meet with Clark Gable. Gable is supposed to be overseas with the Air Force, where he’s trying to get himself killed in his grief over the death of his wife, Carole Lombard. But he’s briefly on leave, and somebody has been sending him threatening notes. It all seems to harken back to an incident during the filming of “Gone with the Wind,” where an extra was accidentally stabbed to death with a saber. The notes are cryptic, but they seem to indicate that the dead man was the note-writer’s father, and that he blames a group of people who were present on set – including Gable. And he means to kill them all, finishing up his murder spree with an attack on the Academy Awards banquet.

Though Gable is clearly a tragic character, the story as a whole is farcical, in the great Toby Peters tradition. Why a star of Gable’s magnitude would hire a PI who can do no better for a security team than his fat dentist, his retired wrestler landlord, and his “little person” best friend is a very good question, but they bring it off in the end, with only a few innocent bystanders lost along the way.

Light entertainment from a master mystery writer. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Close to Death,’ by Anthony Horowitz

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I’ve been pretty happy with the Anthony Horowitz novels I’ve been able to pick up on special deals. His Hawthorn and Horowitz novels are an intriguing twist on the classic Holmes & Watson template – author Horowitz writes himself into the stories, and Hawthorne, his detective, is secretive and unsociable, a mystery in his own right. Hawthorne works for an equally secretive – and slightly sinister – private agency. Although the books were his idea in the first place, he is often reluctant to cough up the facts.

In Close to Death, it’s been a while since Hawthorne has produced a case for Horowitz to follow, and Horowitz’s agent is pressing for a new book. Hawthorne comes up with an old case that he worked back in 2014 with a different sidekick, about whom (of course) he is reluctant to say much.

The crime took place in Riverview Close, an expensive, gated cul-de-sac in a posh London suburb. The residents of the close were friendly and congenial until the Kentworthy family moved in. Giles Kentworthy was wealthy and ostentatious, and also right-wing (so obviously racist. Is flying the Union Jack actually considered offensive in England? Sad.) Their children are loud and occasionally destructive. They hold loud parties late at night and block a shared driveway with their vehicles. And now they’re planning to build a swimming pool that will ruin a view that means the world to one of their neighbors, a woman dying of a lingering disease.

When the neighbors call a meeting to air grievances, the Kentworthys don’t appear, which only raises tensions. Then Giles Kentworthy is found murdered with a crossbow, and the police call in Hawthorne and his old partner Dudley to consult.

I must give author Horowitz credit for masterful plotting. He’s a “fair play” mystery writer, providing the reader everything he needs to know to figure it out for himself, but diverting attention with expert sleight of hand. And the final solution was extremely clever – I didn’t see it coming at all. Then there was a dark coda that lent gravity to the whole exercise.

I liked Close to Death very much.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Valley of Fear,’ by Arthur Conan Doyle

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Holmes laughed. “Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,” said he. “Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-stated performance.”

The last Sherlock Holmes novel (as opposed to short stories) that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote was The Valley of Fear, which was serialized in the Strand Magazine during 1914-1915. Doyle set the story well back in time, before Holmes’ “death” in a fight with Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Doyle places Moriarty in the story’s background, laying some preemptive groundwork for the story, “The Final Problem,” where Moriarty, one must admit, appears a little suddenly for an arch-enemy and nemesis.

In The Valley of Fear, Holmes gets a cipher message from an informant inside Moriarty’s organization, warning him of danger to a man at a country place called Birlstone House. Soon after this, a police detective named MacDonald arrives to ask him to help solve a grisly murder at that very place.

They arrive at Birlstone, which is a stately house surrounded by a moat, whose drawbridge is drawn up every night. So it’s virtually impossible that anyone sneaked into the house during the night. But some time that night, the owner of the house, Douglas, was murdered in his study, his face destroyed by a blast from a double-barrelled shotgun. The circumstances make suicide unlikely, but in that case how did the murderer get away? Holmes, of course, goes over the crime scene carefully with his magnifying glass, and it’s not long before he hits on the solution.

I have to admit that The Valley of Fear is one of my least favorite Holmes stories. It follows the pattern Doyle used in A Study In Scarlet, where you have half the story describing the investigation, and the other half consisting of the killer’s confession, in which he explains his back story and motives. (Borrowed loosely in this case from the story of the radical American labor group, The Molly McGuires.)

Doyle seemed to believe (and perhaps he was right in terms of his audience at the time) that people would enjoy stories about far-away, exotic places like the American West or India. I find Doyle a pretty pedestrian writer in these narratives. He tends to get the local details wrong – his American slang here is pretty clumsy, for instance. When I read a Holmes story, I want Holmes, and London. Or at least Victorian England.

So I can’t say I love The Valley of Fear. But if you’re a Holmes fan, you’ll want to read it.

Fiction

New Discovery of Old Fantasy

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Praise for the 1989 Ken Follett novel, The Pillars of the Earth.

Also, World released its book issue this month with several reviews, including this list, “Devils and dragons: Eight books for summer.”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Graveyard Shift,’ by Jack HIggins

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Back in the 1960s, before he became a bestselling thriller writer (The Eagle Has Landed, etc.), the English author who wrote under the name Jack Higgins produced mysteries under his real name – Harry Patterson. Among them was a short series featuring London police detective Nick Miller. As The Graveyard Shift, the first entry in the series, begins, our hero has just been promoted to detective, after some special training. He is young for a detective, and well-educated. He’s also rich and likes to dress fashionably. Not a natural fit for the Crime Squad, but his extreme self-confidence never wavers, and he operates with a James Bond-like cool.

Meanwhile, Ben Garvald, a convicted robber, is being released from prison. He’s barely on the street before a couple of thugs attack him with a message to stay away from his ex-wife, now married to their boss, a crime lord. It takes more than that to intimidate Ben, who casually cripples them both and leaves them with a message for their boss. He has business to attend to, and then he’ll be on his way. If they want to stop him, they’ll need to kill him. Which they’ll try to do.

The ex-wife’s sister asks the police to find Ben and warn him off. This will lead to a trail of mayhem and death.

I was a big fan of Higgins/Patterson back in the day. He was a good storyteller, and set a good scene. His prose was adequate. As time went on (in my opinion), he got formulaic and predictable in his storytelling. But this is early work, and pretty fresh.

The book definitely shows its age in many ways. The cops are all men. Most everybody smokes, and they smoke in the office. The language is assuredly un-PC. I generally liked all that. I feel at home in that world.

I did figure out whodunnit, though.

The Graveyard Shift was intended to be dark and gritty by the standards of the time, depicting the hopelessness and desperation of the denizens of the rougher districts of London. Little did they know that it would only get worse with the coming years.

Not a bad book. Cautions for violence and insensitivity.