Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Guilty Money,’ by David Crosby

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I get the feeling, as I read David Crosby’s Will Harper series, that the author wants to pay homage to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Will, after all, lives on a boat in a marina in Florida. Instead of “taking his retirement in installments,” he lives the good life on an inheritance. Frankly, except for the sentiment of the thing, I almost wish he wouldn’t. Will Harper is a very different character from McGee.

In the previous installment, journalist Will saved his neighbors from being fleeced by land developers exploiting eminent domain. His girlfriend Sandy, about whom he was getting serious, rewarded him by sailing away to a new life in the Caribbean.

So as Guilty Money begins, he’s rebuilding his life (along with his boat, which got shot up in the action). He’s also acquired a new girlfriend, a girl who wants no commitment and likes to hang around the boat naked (a curiously 1970s plot element in a 21st Century book). But then a friend asks his help in getting someone out of the jail in nearby (fictional) Grove County. There the sheriff’s department, under financial pressure and tempted by plain greed, is milking the jail system for cash – particularly through failing to notify defendants of court dates, then pocketing the forfeited bail. Also they skimp on prisoners’ food, and brutalize them on top of it. There are one or two deaths, which get covered up.

With the help of a friendly (and attractive) ACLU attorney (she brags about how the ACLU defends people of all political beliefs, another dated element in the story), he plans a campaign to expose the corruption. It will get ugly – and fortunately a new ally appears, a young man who knows how to fight. A much needed addition to this cast.

At least in these early books in the series, author Crosby hasn’t yet mastered his instrument, in my opinion. His prose could use some pruning. And the politics lean left (as you no doubt guessed from this review). The theme of the story is the over-incarceration of criminals — something I’m pretty sure isn’t a problem anymore.

But there’s only one more book in the collection of three that I got for free, so I imagine I’ll read it. Guilty Money wasn’t bad.

Authors, Fiction, Writing

Jonathan Kellerman interview

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Tonight I’m giving one of my lectures, and it’s turning into an adventure (and not in a good way). So this post is scheduled ahead of time, and I’ll tell you all about my travails tomorrow.

Above, a short clip of an interview with Jonathan Kellerman, whose Unnatural History I praised the other day. Enjoy.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Cold Winter,’ by Colin Conway

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I stood and shoved my hands back into my pockets but left my coat open. The cold worked its way inside and nipped at the lightly covered areas of my body. I didn’t pull the long coat closed, though. I wanted to feel something other than the hurt inside.

I enjoy a good thriller. Writers like Hurwitz, Klavan, and Hunter stand among my favorites. And yet, for preference, I personally can do without all the fights and explosions. I like the mystery itself, and the interplay of characters. Some people enjoy being scared; they’re probably braver than I.

My point is that a novel that emphasizes mystery and character over action suits me just fine. And that’s what The Long Cold Winter by Colin Conway has to offer.

Dallas Nash is a police detective in Tacoma, Washington. It’s early winter, and his mood is as bleak as the weather. He’s mourning his wife Bobbie, who died just before Thanksgiving in a single-car accident. The hopelessness and futility of it all has unmanned him. He visits her grave every day, and lately he’s been waking up with old songs in his head. Some of them are his favorites, some Bobbie’s favorites. Some he can’t even place. He’s begun to wonder if they’ve been sent as messages from Bobbie. He’s begun to wonder if he’s losing his mind.

He goes back to work, not because he feels ready, but because he can’t handle the inactivity anymore. When he gets to the office, he finds a cold case file on his desk. The brass have decided that’s a good way to ease him back into the job.

The case is the murder of a high school student, Jennifer Williams, back in 1987. This sparks a memory in Dallas. He saw Jennifer on the day she died. He was cruising the main street with some highs chool friends, and a friend of a friend pointed to her and said she was his girlfriend. Oddly, that guy is not mentioned in the police reports.

Here’s a fresh angle on the case. In intervals from investigating another, fresher, murder that also occurs, Dallas will have to reconnect with old acquaintances to locate the guy, whose name he’s forgotten. He’ll make mistakes, and there will be more deaths. But the truth will come out.

I expect some people won’t care for Detective Nash’s depression, and some would prefer more action on-stage (the deaths here generally happen out of sight. Dallas tends to get his confessions through quiet conversation). But I enjoyed A Long Cold Winter very much, and I recommend it.

Cautions for adult themes and language. There’s a priest in the book, and he’s treated positively.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Unnatural History,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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Brophy shot him a compassionate look. He had light-brown eyes that floated like bubbles in a carpenter’s level.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a lot of free books lately, e-books I get through online offers. You may also have noticed that I’ve panned a lot of these. It’s the dark side of the self-publishing boom. They’re books written, essentially, by amateurs.

But I’d pre-ordered Jonathan Kellerman’s newest book, Unnatural History, and Kellerman is in no way an amateur. What struck me most as I read was how easy the reading was. I didn’t have to wrestle with the text or try to figure out what the author meant. This was like an easy flight with an experienced pilot. I could just relax and enjoy.

The opening of Unnatural History is standard for the series. Alex Delaware, Los Angeles child psychologist, gets a call from his best friend, the gay shlub-detective Milo Sturgis. Milo is at a murder scene that shows signs of psychological weirdness. Would Alex come and consult?

Alex joins him at the home of the victim, Donny Klement, a young professional photographer who clearly had money but lived in minimalist style. He’s been shot to death in his bed. His distraught assistant (once Alex has helped her calm down) tells them that Donny had recently been working on a project where he photographed homeless people. He took them into his home, dressed them in “aspirational” costumes, and took their pictures. Then he paid them – generously.

Alex and Milo agree that letting the homeless into your home and showing them where you keep large sums of money is rather poor security practice. Clearly, they need to hunt for a murderer among the street people.

Until they learn that Donny happens to be the son of one of the world’s richest men, a notorious recluse who has fathered several children (each with a different wife), provided them with money, and otherwise neglected them. Could one of these half-siblings, who barely knew Donny, have killed him for a bigger piece of the estate?

They’ll need to walk the mean streets and visit the halls of wealth before they can finally unravel the mystery.

I was particularly impressed with the characterization in Unnatural History. Kellerman does characters exceptionally well (and sympathetically). Two of my favorite characters were a gun-loving supermodel and a self-aware, bipolar homeless woman (the best homeless character I’ve ever come across in a book).

I wouldn’t say Unnatural History is better than the general run of Alex Delaware novels. It’s consistent with the usual high standard. It was a little shorter than most of them, which is too bad.

Cautions for disturbing themes and language. Highly recommended anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Corpus Delicti,’ by Stephen Penner

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David Brunelle is a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office in Seattle. He is, we are given to understand, intelligent and experienced.

You wouldn’t guess that from his conduct in the novel, Corpus Delicti. Even to me, whose legal expertise is mostly gleaned from novels and TV shows, he seemed like kind of a moron.

David is hard-working – too hard-working. He recently broke up with his girlfriend, under circumstances that did him no credit. Now even his best friend, police detective Larry Chen, is keeping his distance. But that doesn’t stop Chen from calling David in when he interviews a witness with an unusual story to tell.

Linda is a prostitute and a drug addict. But she’s worried about her friend Amy, another prostitute. Amy disappeared, after her pimp had publicly threatened her. Linda thinks Amy is dead – but she says she won’t testify to anything.

After David goes to visit Amy’s parents and learns that she hasn’t been back in some time to visit her little girl, who lives with them, David makes up his mind. Amy is dead, and her murder must be prosecuted just like anyone else’s.

His problem is that he has almost no corpus delicti.

“Corpus delicti,” the author explains, is not what most people think. We think it means the body of a murder victim (which does happen to be missing here), and that’s how it’s popularly used. But legally the term means the whole “body” of the evidence – all the verifiable facts that make up the prosecution’s case. And David’s got diddly in that regard. But that doesn’t stop him from proceeding.

He will have to deal with a series of preliminary judges of varying degrees of intelligence and competence. A very smart and savvy defense attorney. And sketchy witnesses who have little to say, and don’t want to say that.

Reading Corpus Delicti was frustrating for me. Again and again, David took actions that seemed to me obviously boneheaded, and they generally were. He even got somebody killed. One can argue that this is all good character development – David is feeling guilty and isolated, and is working too hard. But he’s still doing dumb legal work and it’s hard to sympathize with that.

The moment a prosecutor says, “This guy is really evil, and I’m going to get him convicted, with or without evidence,” he’s crossing a vital line. Sure, this guy is a scumbag. But what if the next guy’s innocent; just somebody a prosecutor doesn’t like? Abuse of power is a seductive thing, and corrosive to society and the law.

Also, it’s unrealistic. District prosecutors have budgets; their superiors won’t let them waste money on quixotic fishing expeditions.

I will admit that David pulls a smart trick at the end. I appreciated that. But all in all, I wasn’t impressed with him as a legal hero.

Another gripe: Almost nobody is physically described in this book. It’s the second novel like that I’ve read recently. Is this the new thing? Some way to avoid accusations of racism in the age of Woke?

Also, cautions for language. The prose wasn’t bad in general, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Missing Faces,’ by Michael Leese

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I’m not a huge fan of the Roper and Hooley autism/police procedural series, written by Michael Leese. I find the whole concept of autism fascinating (being on the spectrum myself, I strongly suspect). But I find Jonathan Roper, the autistic English detective in this series, somewhat annoying to read about (which is probably just authorial verisimilitude). Still, the writing isn’t bad, and I bought a set of four books, so I carry on.

Shortly after The Case of the Missing Faces opens with a horrific murder, London detective Brian Hooley is reunited with his partner Jonathan Roper. Roper has been reassigned to a high security national intelligence facility. It’s a center of geekery, full of young geniuses and computer experts, most of them on the autism spectrum themselves, so it was assumed Roper would fit right in. And he did at first, becoming something of a star for his unorthodox but fruitful logical processes. Only lately he’s been having trouble. The official opinion is that maybe he needs the influence of Hooley, with whom he’s comfortable, and with whom he’s worked successfully in the past. So Hooley gets reassigned, and for a change he’s the one who doesn’t fit in.

For a while Roper stays stuck in spite of Hooley’s arrival. He’s certain there’s something important happening that he just can’t see. Something sinister.

Meanwhile, back in London, their colleagues are investigating the deaths of a couple computer experts found murdered in bizarre circumstances, their faces flayed off.

Once Roper realizes that these crimes have to do with national security, he’ll begin to see what’s really going on. But can he figure it all out before he himself falls victim to a brilliant but increasingly unstable serial killer?

I’m not in love with this series, but The Case of the Missing Faces kept me reading. There’s a twist at the end I saw coming pretty far off. There were some conventional references to the dangers of extreme right-wing groups in the US, but (spoiler alert) they came to nothing, so the book wasn’t very political in the end.

I’ll keep reading the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Run For Your Life,’ by C. M. Sutter

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It’s a general, but not inflexible, rule of mine not to read action novels written by women, even if the hero is a male. Somehow I made the choice to download Run For Your Life, by C. M. Sutter, who turns out to be a female writer (the fact that the book was free probably had something to do with this). As is often the case with woman writers, Sutter doesn’t really get male characters right. For one thing they’re too verbal here, gabbing about relationships rather than ball games or weather. And our hero kisses his pet dog on the head. Has any straight guy ever done this? But that weakness ended up not being my biggest complaint.

Mitch Cannon is a Savannah, Georgia police detective. He’s obsessive about his work, and doesn’t date much. But he recently met a woman who’s attractive and just a little crazy, and he’s looking forward to her invitation to participate in some kind of secret “raffle” for the benefit of police.

Then Mitch’s sister is kidnapped, and he has to change his plans. His partner Devon agrees to fill in for him at the raffle. Mitch is nearly insane with fear for his sister’s safety, and it gets worse when Devon and his girlfriend also fail to appear the following day.

And the whole thing ambles along to the showdown and ultimate revelations. I figured out the big final twist quite early on, and other aspects of the story disappointed me too. The dialogue was clunky and unnatural in many spots. At one point Mitch briefs his superiors on events we readers have just observed, and the author rehashes his briefing. This could have been covered by just having him say, “I told them about what I’d been doing.” Less boredom for the reader.

Another annoying element was that almost nobody in this book is described in any way, except to say how attractive one girl is, and that Devon is a little overweight.

There were also fact and logic problems. One character runs from captivity after being restrained in a kneeling position for more than a day. Would a person even be able to walk without a recovery period, after that much cramped immobility? And somebody says that nobody spends just two years in jail for murder – what country are they living in?

I must mention, in the author’s defense, though, that she has her characters pray quite often. I appreciated that.

But overall I wasn’t much impressed with Run For Your Life.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Writing

Dean Koontz interview

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Our friend Dave Lull kindly shared this link, where the Lit Hub blog interviews him (about half an hour) about his latest novel, The House At the End of the World. Contrary to the title, he doesn’t actually explain how to sell 500 million books. I would have noticed.

I didn’t like the book as well as I hoped to, but I concur that the very important themes the author talks about here are highlighted in it.

Fiction, Publishing, Uncategorized

Podcast plug: ‘Sithrah’

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My friend J. S. Earls is involved with a podcast called ‘Sithra.’ It’s an adaptation of a graphic novel presented in radio drama form. I’m pretty clueless about podcasts, but apparently you can access it on Spotify here. Also available, he tells me, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and “most anywhere podcasts are heard.”

I listened to Episode One. Engaging story, well produced.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The House at the End of the World,’ by Dean Koontz

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“My point is, it’s clear to me that any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a mason and an engineer…. An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”

I’ve become a great fan of Dean Koontz’s work, but my enthusiasm is not bestowed equally on all the branches of his work. I’m not a fan of horror, and his latest book, The House at the End of the World, is pretty intense horror.

Katie (I’m pretty sure we’re told her last name at some point, but I can’t find it) is an artist. A few years back, following the horrendous deaths, due to crime, of her two daughters and her husband, she withdrew to the island called Jacob’s Ladder. (One assumes it’s on one of the Great Lakes, but that’s not specified.) Here she paints, but not to her own satisfaction. She knows she has enemies who might decide to dispose of her at any time, so she found herself a solid, fortified house and keeps well armed. She has no social contacts. She promised her husband she’d go on living, so that’s what she’s doing, but without happiness.

Then strange things start happening. Odd sounds in the night; an unidentifiable animal pattering across her roof. There’s unusual activity too at Ringrock, a nearby island that houses a government facility. It’s supposed to be something to do with the EPA, but it’s too hush-hush for that. When a couple armed federal agents show up on her island and arrogantly order her around, she bridles. Then a vicious storm comes up and one of the agents reappears, seemingly insane. Katie begins considering leaving the island, but the agents have disabled her boat.

Then a young girl shows up from another neighboring island. She has a horrific story to tell. Her parents, who worked at Ringrock, are dead, and her nurse has been murdered by a monster. Together they will face the challenge of fighting whatever unearthly creature has taken up residence in Katie’s basement, and then take a dangerous boat trip ashore, after which they’ll have to face both aliens and their own government.

Aside from my distaste for horror stories, I also thought The House at the End of the World started rather slowly. A lot of time is spent with Katie alone, establishing her character and back story without a whole lot happening. Once the girl, Libby, shows up, things move faster. The book is exciting, and if you go for bug-eyed monsters, there’s a pretty spooky one here. Then the government proves to be worse (a sign of the times).

Cautions for language. The author has chosen to use a lot of obscene language in this book, even out of the mouth of the teenaged girl.

The House at the End of the World isn’t a bad novel, but it didn’t suit me as a lot of Dean Koontz books do.