Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The Darkness Within

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A lot of foreshadowing preceded episode six of Rise of the Merlin. We’ve seen a woman watching Merlin and riding beside him in his imagination, and in the last episode we learned she was King Custennin’s daughter, Ganieda. But what happened to her? Why did Custennin accuse Merlin of refusing to save her?

Now we know the intense story that provoked the legendary mage to run from civilization when we first met him. After leaving his tutelage with the Hill Folk, he meets a woman who’s hunting a boar, follows her to her fortified city, and learns she’s the king’s daughter. He also learns the people are Atlantean whose boats had been separated from King Avallach and thought to be lost. Both groups thought they were the only ones to survive the ruining of Atlantis.

Did I mention Ganieda is adorable? A year later, she and Merlin are married, and they live happily ever after, which is enough to drive any man mad. (I was going to leave it at that to avoid spoiling the story, but I’ll go ahead and say it. Bad things happen, and Ganieda dies. I’ll get to Merlin’s reaction in a minute.)

Ganieda is a figure from the old Welsh stories, but she isn’t described there as Merlin’s wife. She’s his sister or even his twin. In one story, she’s the wife of a Scottish lord who battles and kills Merlin’s patron. In another account, the Scotsman and patron fight together. Either way, the patron dies and Merlin is distraught, while Ganieda is an observer either grieving or reacting to her brother. Lawhead makes this relationship more personal and so the tragedy that pushes Merlin to madness makes more sense.

At the end of episode two, we meet Merlin under a rock in the pouring rain. This was his response not only to losing his wife (who was with child) but also to his reaction to that loss. We see a moment of that reaction in the trailer. We hear about it when he returns to Maridunum the first time. In two different battles, Merlin falls into a battle trace. The first wins him the throne of Maridunum for his defense of the king and the people. The second is his merciless rage over the death of Ganieda, when the barbarian raiders return to the scene of their crime. Dozens of barbarians charge one admittedly intimidating young man and none survive. Even after they realize they’re getting slaughtered and begin to run, Merlin pulls them back to gut them. It’s this and one more outburst that drives him to renounce his life for many years to follow.

With the finale coming in two weeks, viewers have at least one question to consider, and it’s raised by Charis (in episode four, I think). Though Merlin has refused to take up Avallach’s sword for fear of his battle rage, Charis asks whether the salvation of Britain will require it. When the Saxon hoards are crushed, as surely they must be, will it be the people led by High King Aurellius or Merlin on their behalf? And what terror will Morgian accomplish?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder at Blind Beck,’ by Bruce Beckham

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I found that I had missed one of the recent novels in Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill series. So I purchased Murder at Blind Beck. Once I was reading it, I wondered if I might have skipped it on purpose, for reasons I’ll explain. But I carried on, and had a generally good reading experience.

In this installment, Inspector Skelgill, who operates in England’s Lake District, along with his team, has been assigned to assist a group of documentarians in examining a historical murder case from the town of Kendal, in their stomping grounds. Back in the mid-19th Century, a young, deaf-mute servant woman was convicted of the double crime of attempting to drown her illegitimate baby, and murdering the philanthropist nobleman who employed her. She was sentenced to be “transported” (along with the baby) to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). Their reexamination of the evidence has been prompted by the discovery of a locket belonging to the woman, along with a cryptic note in her handwriting. Inspector Skelgill’s intimate knowledge of the local waterways proves useful in determining facts not until now understood.

Meanwhile, the team is also looking into the affairs of the murdered nobleman’s current heir, whose business operations are starting to smell bad. It looks increasingly as if he’s involved in human trafficking and slave labor.

Much of action centers on Sgt. Jones, who as an attractive young female finds doors opened to her, both among local women and with a lecherous property manager.

The problematic part of the story – for me – is the involvement of a group of local witches (though they do not call themselves that). I’m on record as saying I don’t believe in witches, either in the ancient or in the modern senses of the term. I don’t believe in magic (fantasy writer though I am). And I also don’t believe that there is an ancient, secret order of women who’ve passed the religion of Wicca down through the centuries. I believe modern Wicca is a romantic movement invented in the early 20th Century. This book did not take that view.

Still, I suppose I could take that as a fantasy element in Murder at Blind Beck. It was a good read otherwise.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shadow of a Lie,’ by Steve Higgs

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English author Steve Higgs has written a trilogy about an aging police detective named Tony Heaton, of which Shadow of a Lie is the first volume. It didn’t blow me away, but it was well-written and intriguing in its way.

Tony Heaton often thinks about the movie cliché where a cop gets killed just as he’s coming up on retirement. He’s coming up on retirement himself, but has no intention of putting himself anywhere near harm’s way. He serves in a small, quiet community in Kent, and though he was a hotshot up-and-comer when young, his career foundered following a mistake, and he’s been coasting ever since.

Then his commander (who loathes him) tells him he’s been assigned to a special project, investigating cold cases. He’s partnered with a young detective named Ashley (male) Long. Ashley is the kind of rising star Tony used to be, and a martial artist to boot. In spite of seniority, Ashley is put in charge of the project, and he steers them to the disappearance, several years before, of a young man in another small town. No body was ever found, so it’s technically a missing person’s case, but Ashley has a feeling about it.

There are, in fact, people out there who know what became of the missing boy, and they will go to any lengths to muddy up the trail. The action will pass beyond raised voices and threats to actual physical battery and shots fired. Tony will find himself closer than he ever imagined to that movie-cliché ending he used to laugh about.

And when the case is solved, a plot twist will arise, impelling the reader to move on to the series’ second book.

Pretty good. I thought some of the action in Shadow of a Lie was a little implausible; on the other hand I never realized before how useful zip ties could be in a fight.

Not a great mystery, but pretty good. A professional job of work. I don’t recall any content that calls for special cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: Who Is High King?

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The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin continues grim and sober in episode five. Last time, Merlin met two of the lesser kings and persuaded them to pledge loyalty to Aurellius, or at least think about it. This time, he rides into The Old North to urge Custennin and the Northern kings to join. Tension has been building since he left Ynys Avallach. None of the kings have welcomed the prospect of fighting the Saxons, seeming to prefer keeping their heads down until the fight comes to them.

Custennin doesn’t welcome Merlin either, but for different reasons. They have history, which has been described and hinted at. In fact, everyone who remembers him knows of these dark deeds. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen a key moment that has defined Merlin’s present-day character but has yet to be explored for viewers. I think we’re going to get that in episode six. I’ll let you know.

This episode is entitled “The Price of Failure,” which is how Merlin approaches the anger he gets from Custennin. He believes he failed. On the other side of Britain, Uther explores his failures by continuing to bark at the lesser kings when he should be building their confidence in their cause and Aurellius as the High King. He’s not working with soldiers; he’s working with proud men who are used to commanding those around them. Scottish actor Chick Allan (shown above) plays the proud, but sensible, King Gorlas, who may be the strongest warlord among them. Will he submit to Aurellius’s leadership?

As you can tell, the series plot isn’t galloping along. It’s walking at a good pace, focusing on the main characters. This ep. relieved a little tension with two climatic scenes near the end, but the main wire that’s been taut for so long doesn’t slack. The brief scene at the close had me asking, “What?” aloud, because I thought that’s what we were getting this time. Now, I have to wait a week.

I’ve read comments from people who aren’t watching the series complaining about the Christian themes they’ve seen or heard about. It’s lightly handed (is that a phrase?). It’s more demonstrative in this ep. than the fourth and is perhaps most in the foreground in the second, but it comes to mind now because even this light theme gives everything the depth of interest it needs. A story needs a soul, a hearty soul that breathes life into every details. Kudos to the showrunners and writers for having the depth of soul to craft a good story.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Antihero,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Evan jostled to the fringe as the congregation surrounded Anca. Confusion pulsed in his chest, to have allowed himself to be pushed to the periphery, to lose someone he was protecting to a mob. But of course it was not a mob, it was a community, and he felt a sense of loss that his muscle memory had never been taught to distinguish between the two.

Gregg Hurwitz is, by his own confession, not a Christian. He’s a follower of Jordan Peterson, who famously does a perpetual flirtation dance around the gospel, batting his eyes but never committing.

Nonetheless, in his latest Orphan X novel, Antihero, he has given us the most fully realized, sympathetic, and admirable Christian character I have encountered in fiction in this century.

On a New York subway car, a vulnerable young woman is attacked by a feral gang of young thugs, who drag her off, film themselves gangbanging her, and upload the video to the internet.

A sympathetic witness unloads the abduction story to a man who happens to have contact with Evan Smoak, Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, our freelance hero. Evan is able to marshal unusual resources in order to find the young woman, Anca Dumitrescu, a Romanian immigrant. The next job is to locate the perpetrators, and make sure they never do this sort of thing again. Only this time Evan is working under an extra prohibition, beyond the strict rules by which he already lives – Anca is a devout Orthodox Christian, and she insists that Evan not kill them.

That’s not the only personal challenge Evan faces in Antihero. His teenaged female ward, Joey, is becoming a woman, and he has no roadmap (or role model) to help him deal with that. Or with Mia, the single mother who lives in his building, with whom he can’t get involved because she works for the DA and she’d have to arrest him. Or Candy, the fellow assassin who’s becoming a good friend and – this time out – a lover.

The action is explosive and excessive, but it’s the characters that killed me in this book. I cared about them deeply. They intrigued and surprised me.

I don’t know when I last read a book I enjoyed as much as Antihero. Get it. Read it. I’ve run out of superlatives.

(Cautions for sexual content and — of course — violent scenes.)

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Green Wound Contract,’ by Philip Atlee

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The author James Atlee Philips (father of the musician Shawn Philips) wrote thrillers under the pen name Philip Atlee. He’s best remembered for a series of thrillers called the “Contract” novels, featuring freelance assassin Joe Gall. The Green Wound Contract is the first in the series, set in 1963.

At that time in history, James Bond was all the rage. Joe Gall, it seems, must have been one of the American attempts to provide an American equivalent, cross-pollinated with Mike Hammer. It’s not entirely unsuccessful.

A former CIA agent, Joe Gall is called in by the director to do a special contract job. In the southern town of Lafcadio, racial tensions are rising, and the agency suspects an outside hand is manipulating people and politics. Going in undercover, Joe meets the town’s white political boss and his beautiful wife, and ventures into the town’s black section, where anger is simmering – until it all blows up. Further developments will lead to commando action in the Caribbean.

For the 21st Century reader, The Green Wound Contract is a little disorienting. The Black Civil Rights movement is not treated with a lot of respect, and in this story at least part of it is directed by a hostile world power. (Though not a Communist one. Anti-communists are also dismissed, and Castro treated sympathetically).

The writing was quite good, often elegant, with lots of Shakespeare quotations. The story was violent, and there’s some sex, the sex and the violence overlapping at one point. The topic of human trafficking is handled in horrific detail.

The Green Wound Contract is pretty well written, I think, but it hasn’t aged well. It does make an interesting read in light of actual historical events.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Jigsaw,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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The amazing thing about Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware series is its combination of consistency with a high level of professionalism. Each of these books is very much the same in execution, and yet they never seem stale – at least to this reader.

I’ve occasionally wondered why, a few years back, Kellerman changed his description of Alex’s cop buddy, Milo Sturgis. Milo used to have a “skunk” pattern in his hair, with white on both sides and black down the middle. Now his hair is just described as black. I suspect that change marked the point where the author decided he would henceforth utterly ignore the passage of real-world time. Neither character will ever age again, as long as the series continues.

Jigsaw, the 41st (!) entry in said series, involves the investigations of the strangulation of a young woman in one part of town, and the dismemberment of an old woman in another part of town. There is nothing to link the two crimes, and yet Alex begins to suspect there has to be. He is, of course, correct.

I found the culprit in Jigsaw particularly interesting. Discovery of that person’s identity is delayed, and the motive kept obscure, in a very effective way. Sort of an out-of-left-field solution, and it was fun to watch the investigators work it out.

I enjoyed Jigsaw precisely as much as all the Alex Delaware books, which is to say, very much. Cautions for disturbing language and situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Code of the Woosters,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

The first Jeeves and Wooster book I ever bought was The Code of the Woosters. That was about 50 years ago. I recall pausing a moment, in the B. Dalton’s aisle, to wonder whether I’d like the book. I was young then, I need hardly say, and knew nothing.

The Code of the Woosters is Wodehouse (as he himself might have put it) at his fruitiest. It’s such a tightly plotted farce that I, for one, was forced to pause my reading every few pages, just to get my breath back.

The plot, even in a broad sketch, requires some setting up. So curl up on the nearest chesterfield and pour yourself a restorative libation.

The tale begins with Bertie Wooster getting a call from his Aunt Dahlia, asking him (for once) to do what seems to be a fairly simple task. He is to go to a particular antique shop and sneer at a silver cow-creamer. Her husband, Tom Travers, a silver collector. yearns to buy that creamer. Aunt Dahlia hopes Bertie’s scorn will demoralize the shopkeeper, who will then knock down the price for Uncle Tom. Then she can touch him for a loan for the insolvent magazine she publishes.

The upshot is, of course, disastrous. On arriving, Bertie finds Sir Watkyn Basset, a retired judge, already at the shop. Sir Watkyn is Uncle Tom’s rival, also coveting the cow-creamer. He and Bertie are acquainted, as Sir Watkyn once fined him for stealing a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night. Accompanying Sir Watkyn is the gorilla-like Roderick Spode, leader of an English Fascist party. Caught unprepared, Bertie ends up stumbling over a cat in a manner that convinces Sir Watkyn that he’s attempting to steal the creamer.

Back in his flat, Bertie gets a telegram from his fatuous friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wants him to come to the country estate where he’s staying. The estate just happens to belong to Sir Watkyn, as Gussie is engaged to Sir Watkyn’s daughter Madeline. Except that Madeline, Gussie reports, has broken the engagement off, This horrifies Bertie, since Madeline has conceived the erroneous idea that Bertie is in love with her, and threatens to marry him if it doesn’t work out with Gussie.

Then there’s a visit from Aunt Dahlia, who reports that Sir Watkyn has now acquired the cow-creamer. So she needs Bertie to go to the same estate and steal the thing. If he refuses, she’ll bar his access to the cooking of Anatole, her incomparable French chef.

Clear so far?

After that it gets complicated.

Oh yes, I need to remember Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Sir Watkyn’s niece, who is also on site. She is engaged to an old friend of Bertie’s, whom she is pressuring to steal (recurring theme here) the local constable’s police helmet.

It’s all hilarious. Brilliant. Incomparable.

Most highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Rise of the Merlin: The King of Maridunum

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We see brutal melee in the fourth episode of The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin as Merlin, Pelleas, and Uther travel north to rally lesser kings to fight for Aurellius against the Saxons.

First, Merlin recommends the High King take refuge in Ynys Avallach, the realm of former Atlanteans, now considered fairies or elves by men. King Avallach is hailed as the Fisher King, because they find him fishing, but I don’t know if the writer is teasing us with Arthurian easter eggs or intends to identify him as the Fisher King who keeps the Holy Grail. It could be the latter, because Avallach is wounded as the Fisher King is wounded and his kingdom is in decline.

Thinking Merlin may be raising an army for himself, Uther insists on travelling to Maridunum with him. When they arrive, we learn more of Merlin’s past and why Uther has good reason to fear him. In the image above, Finney Cassidy as Aurellius is in the foreground, Myles Clohessy as Uther behind him.

A lot more fighting this one, some of it brutal. About half of it had me wondering what a real melee would look like. I’d think there’d be more shield usage and no cracking someone’s helmet with your sword hilt and pushing them behind you. Aurellius goes against a brute in one scene that leaves you feeling the blows.

I didn’t talk about the power-hungry Morgian before. She appears again in this episode, having established herself as the wife of one of the lesser kings (and, of course, rooting for the Saxons). It’s clear she was a bad egg from the start. She sought out the deal Taliesin rejected at the start of the series. I’d love for it to turn Faustian on her because she’s earned that, but I doubt that’s where the story will take us.

Speaking of that, I assume this seven-episode series will leave us somewhat hanging. This is only the first part of a longer story. Will they attempt to wrap it up, believing they can’t afford a second season?

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder On the Menu,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Strands of cotton wool cloud stretch like forsaken laundry across Skiddaw’s darkening lower slopes.

Yet, like a split time zone, the setting sun spotlights the great fell’s scree-capped summit – and overhead, at some indeterminate altitude (but not so high) rays incandesce in a layer of fine golden mist.

I’ve read most of Bruce Beckham’s Inspector Skelgill novels. I can’t say I actually love them, but they’re uniformly satisfying. The great virtue of the books is probably their prose. The author spends a lot of time describing the landscape and weather of England’s lake district, which he obviously loves.

In Murder On the Menu, Skelgill and young female detective Emma Jones are looking into some non-fatal poisonings at restaurants in the area. It appears that their region is a hotbed of fine dining (Skelgill generally cares more about quantity than quality), and the restaurants that have seen the poisonings are contenders for an important magazine award. Could somebody be trying to nobble the frontrunners?

In a rather comic subplot, Sergeant Leyton, the citified London transplant, finds himself slogging around the countryside, stalking a man he suspects of being a poacher.

Murder On the Menu is notable for the fact that Inspector Skelgill himself spends quite a large part of it out of commission – and yet manages to save the day.

Quite entertaining, especially if you’re a lover of the outdoors. No cautions I can think of.