Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘City of the Dead,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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At this point in time, one doesn’t go to Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels for novelty. A pile of them have been published over the years, and in a non-fictional world both the main characters would be long retired.

But there are other reading pleasures in the world than novelty. Psychologist Alex Delaware and his L.A. police lieutenant friend Milo Sturgis are old buddies to fans, and you don’t need a new experience every time you get together with old buddies. So we have City of the Dead, the latest in the series.

This time out, Milo asks Alex to accompany him to view a body in an exclusive neighborhood. A naked man has been hit by a moving van. The cop on the scene notices a blood trail leading to a nearby house. Inside he found a woman murdered. When Alex views that corpse, he realizes he knows her.

She is a sometime model, now an “internet influencer.” She poses as a psychological counselor, which is how Alex encountered her, pretending to a doctorate she doesn’t possess. She seems to have been a charlatan, but she didn’t deserve to have her throat cut.

A deep dive into her background, and that of the male victim, leads into sad stories of family dysfunction and personal “reinvention.” But it’s harder to find anyone who had reason or opportunity to kill them. The true solution will be far more bizarre than anyone imagined.

I found the plot of City of the Dead a bit disappointing, to be honest. The solution depended on a coincidence rather than detective work.

But it was an opportunity to spend time with a couple of my favorite literary characters. I’m not complaining.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Horse,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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Aragón set the glass down, pushed it away. “Maturity is graduating from the belief that the world misunderstands you to the awareness that you misunderstand the world.” He laced his fingers together. “Who I have failed to become is the story of why my daughter suffers. That load of product I burned yesterday? I could have burned it, burned them all, two years ago or three. And then maybe she would be safe. I didn’t need you to tell me to do it. I didn’t need you. But clearly I did.”

The Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz is an amazing set of books that keeps getting better and better. I have a couple personal quibbles, but reading the latest, Dark Horse, was a delight overall.

As you may recall, Orphan X is Evan Smoak (also known as the Nowhere Man). A former super-secret government agent, he managed to get free and now operates as a freelance white knight, rescuing people in bad trouble. He lives in an expensive Los Angeles penthouse apartment. It’s a sterile, minimalist space where he finds comfort in his OCD.

That space was violated in the last novel, and now he’s in the process of rebuilding. But he’s interrupted by a plea for help from someone to whom he ordinarily wouldn’t give two seconds – a drug lord from the Texas border country.

Aragon Urrea tries to operate at a higher level than the cartels. He eschews terrorist tactics, contributes to the welfare of the people in his territory, and has always maintained his family’s home as an island of normal life. He has raised his daughter Anjelina to be a good person. But now she’s been kidnapped by a cartel, from her 18th birthday party.

Evan doesn’t like the idea of working for a drug dealer, but Anjelina is an innocent. He agrees to try to get her out, which involves infiltrating the cartel.

But that’s not Evan’s only problem. He’s having trouble relating to his teenaged ward, the female computer hacker Joey, who wants his permission to go on a solo road trip. Evan has no idea how to deal with adolescent rebellion, but he knows he doesn’t want her running around unprotected in this dangerous world.

And then there’s his almost-girlfriend Mia, who lives in the same building, and is facing a personal crisis beyond Evan’s power to help. Except that she wants him to give support to her son Peter. Another kid needing guidance from a guy who never experienced a real family.

Dark Horse is more than an action thriller. It’s about a damaged, obsessive-compulsive man forced (reluctantly) to engage with the world of human feelings and needs, far outside his comfort zone. He can put a bullet through a human heart with no trouble – but can he comfort a broken heart?

Author Hurwitz has been constantly raising the level of the Orphan X books. They’re becoming (in my opinion) something really wonderful and moving. I highly recommend them. Cautions for language and mayhem.

My only problem was that some PC elements were inserted where they really weren’t necessary. I hope the author gets over that.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald

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I rarely buy the e-book versions of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels. I just can’t justify paying the prices they ask for books I’ve already got in paperback. But now and then one shows up at a bargain price, and I always snap it up. So it was with The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, one of the most memorable in the series – in a dark way. I got it during a brief sale.

Travis McGee, Florida beach bum, calls himself a “salvage specialist.” That means he recovers things that people have been robbed of, returns them to them, and keeps half the value. But he makes exceptions for friends, and the Pearsons are friends. Years ago he helped them with a boat deal, and then after the husband’s premature death he comforted the widow – in a carnal manner. They’ve kept in touch and he’s very fond of her and her two daughters.

At the start of this book, he comes back from a job to find a letter from the mother, Helena, telling him she’s dying of cancer. She’ll probably be gone by the time he reads this. She asks if he’d see if he can help her older daughter, Maureen, a beautiful woman married to a prosperous land developer. Maureen is suffering from a mysterious malady involving short-term memory loss, and has attempted suicide several times. McGee can’t imagine what he could do to help with a problem like that, but guilt (and the large check enclosed with the letter) motivate him to travel to their central Florida home and check things out.

Some things don’t add up. And then people start physically attacking McGee, which just gets him mad. There’s a lot of rot in this community, it turns out, and McGee is ready to kick it over to see what’s underneath. And – hopefully – save a life or two.

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper is one of the darkest books in the series, and features one of its most shocking climaxes. There’s a lot of sex, but it’s described metaphorically, and quite beautifully. The rough language, as always, is consistent with the times, which means it’s cleaner than you’ll generally find in books written today. The book deals quite heavily with the race issue, in what seems to me fairly prophetic terms, though the scenes were a little awkward to my ear.

When I pick up a John D. MacDonald novel, I have a sense of plain, solid quality, like Shaker furniture. Nothing dazzling (though MacDonald can turn a fine phrase with the best of them), but every part is strong, and the whole thing is assembled with a craftsman’s eye. The books just work. Highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Does the Old Man Lose to the Sea?

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I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea with friends last month. It was my first time. We found the essential story of catching a prize-worthy fish fairly gripping. I’ll summarize it quickly with spoilers.

Santiago is a poorer-than-most Cuban fisherman whose sail resembles a flag of defeat. The community has decided he is unlucky for catching nothing over the last 84 days at the start of the novella. But what is he going to do–sit on the beach and starve? With the encouragement of a neighbor boy who is as a grandson to him, he goes into the sea again, intending to go farther than all the other fishermen. He does so and hooks a gorgeous and enormous Marlin that takes him the rest of the story to pull in.

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again.

Christians will notice the explicit Christ imagery in the story’s second half. Santiago is wounded with stripes on his back and pain like a nail through the hand. In the final pages, he carries his mast on his shoulder toward his hut and stumbles. He lies in his bed, arms outstretched, palms up. What does this mean, because the old man doesn’t redeem himself or anyone else? Perhaps the old man’s suffering and endurance is meant to be the ultimate a man can give.

His suffering is the cost of pursuing something great. He challenges a noble beast, his equal in some respects, and conquers it. He makes mistakes along the way and considers whether some of them are actual sins (though he claims to disbelieve in sin), but he achieves his goal nonetheless.

Continue reading Does the Old Man Lose to the Sea? →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Quicksilver,’ by Dean Koontz

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To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.

Dean Koontz’s umpteenth novel is Quicksilver. I wouldn’t put it on the highest tier of his works, but it’s quality, patented Koontz all the way through, and all the expected pleasures are present.

Quinn Quicksilver is a young man living in Phoenix. He is an orphan, found abandoned as a baby in a basket on a highway median and raised by loving nuns in an orphanage. Now he works as a writer for a small magazine, and is entirely unremarkable – except for a “strange magnetism” that sometimes draws him to locations where he finds valuable things.

So when, one day, he finds a couple of tough guys from a covert government agency sitting on either side of him in a diner, about to abduct him, he manages to escape out the back and successfully get away by car. Following his strange magnetism, he drives to an abandoned farm, where he’s just in time to rescue a kidnapped old man and his granddaughter – the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen. They’re grateful but not surprised by his arrival. They’ve been expecting him, they say. On top of that, they inform him that he’s going to marry the granddaughter. If they survive.

But first, they have a mission to complete. There’s a secret compound in the desert where a reclusive billionaire is running a sex cult. Joined by one further team member and a dog, they set their course to find the billionaire and rescue his victims.

Beautiful prose. Goofy humor. Action with a supernatural element. And the occasional moment of transcendence. That’s what we buy Koontz books for, and it’s all there in Quicksilver.

Also a lesson on theodicy and free will, at no extra charge.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Silent Blade,’ by Blake Banner

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I’ve been following, and enjoying, Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer series of action thrillers. The Silent Blade is the sixth in the series. It delivers all the action you could ask for, though it’s probably best not to think about it too much.

Harry Bauer is a covert operative for a shadowy private organization called Cobra. His particular passion is wiping out drug lords. In the last book he got rid of two at once, and now he’s on the run in Trinidad, cut off from his employers, trying to figure out a way to get back to New York without alerting either the law or the cartels.

Then he meets a beautiful woman who works for the CIA, who first helps him and then turns him over to her bosses for “enhanced interrogation.” They want to recruit him, they explain, but first they need to know who he’s been working for. He finally escapes from them and runs to the leader of a Colombian cartel, offering (he claims) to be their source inside the CIA when he goes to work for them. Here he meets another beautiful woman, and fireworks (of a couple kinds) follow.

The action is hot and heavy, the sex pretty much the same (though not too explicit). But I can’t resist noting that the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. Harry has reached a stage where he seems to just jump into deadly situations without a plan for survival. Are we supposed to think he’s a master strategist, or does he just have a death wish? I have a suspicion we’re not supposed to think that far.

Good of its kind. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Truth or Die,’ by Jack Lynch

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The sixth volume in the late Jack Lynch’s 1980s detective series starring Pete Bragg is Truth or Die. I like Pete Bragg more and more because a) he’s pre-Woke, and b) he seems to be smoking less pot these days.

Pete’s relationship with his girlfriend, the artist Allison, is developing well, in spite of her reservations about his career as a private eye. He’s keeping a promise to her as Truth or Die begins, spending a weekend with her at the Monterey Jazz Festival. It’s a little awkward, though, when one of the people they run into is Jo Sommers, a beautiful woman Pete used to flirt with in his bartending days. Jo seems to be a compulsive flirt, and Pete can’t deny the attraction, even though she’s married to a prominent local psychologist.

Then the psychologist turns up dead, smothered with a pillow in his den. Jo is arrested for the murder, and appeals to Jack to clear her. Allison gives him limited permission. Pete’s not sure Jo didn’t actually kill her husband, but he soon uncovers evidence leading to old military secrets, secret tapes, and blackmail. Then Allison is endangered, and we get to see Pete in full Lone Ranger mode.

Lots of fun. Not much to object to except for extramarital sex, which seems almost chaste these days. I enjoyed Truth or Die.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The detective wakes,’ by Jim McGhee

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Occasionally I run across a book that reminds me what non-Christians must experience when they attempt to read a conventional Christian Booksellers’ Association novel. That was my response, at least, to The Detective Wakes, by Jim McGhee. It’s the start of a series, but I’m not taking it further. I did, however, finish it. I wanted to know whether it would surprise me. No such luck.

Barney Mains is an Edinburgh police detective with a moribund career. He isn’t sure why he’s never gotten on with the department. Then (for some reason) he’s assigned to nursemaid a young female detective, Ffiona (two f’s) McLusky, whose star is rising in the department. Their assignment is assumed to be routine – go to the French Riviera to check on an expatriate Scot – Dot-com billionaire Shona Gladstone, who has been reported missing by her assistant. Everyone assumes the woman has just taken an impromptu holiday. But soon they know it’s kidnapping, and the race begins to figure out why she was taken, and to get her back.

The plot sketch above is in fact misleading. This is actually a political drama, about a plan by young international billionaires to change the world through getting all the governments to adopt social democracy – guaranteed minimum income, wealth tax, green policies – to save civilization in the wake of the Covid epidemic. There are few nuances here – the good guys wear white hats, the bad guys are either corrupt or fascists. No real consideration is given to the possibility that the plan might be counterproductive, as so many socialist schemes have proven in the past. The good guys don’t always use legal means, but hey, everything’s cool when you’re fighting fascism, right?

There were moments of comedy, but they were mostly unintentional – as when the author assures us that the media are almost totally controlled by the right wing.

Thanks, I needed a laugh.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Murder Unsolved,’ by Bruce Beckham

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Have there already been 18 Inspector Skelgill books, set in English Cumbria? I must be enjoying them, because I keep coming back. Inspector Daniel Skelgill is definitely an example of the “curmudgeonly detective” trope, but he manages to remain a sympathetic character. In some ways he seems barely human – especially in relation to women, he seems entirely impassive. Some fun is had with that character trait in this book, Murder Unsolved.

Skelgill’s parents came from rather different families. He seems to favor his father’s side, hard-working, disciplined, stoic. But he’s a Graham on his mother’s side, and they are a different matter. The Grahams are a marginal clan in Cumbria (I remember them being mentioned in accounts of the days of the Border Reivers). They party hard and are inclined to cut corners with the law. But Skelgill has recently had some positive contact with some of his Graham cousins, and one of them, a young woman, asks for his help.

She has a friend, Jade, a beautiful young woman whose old boyfriend, Dale Spooner, a petty criminal, is serving time for a murder three years ago. Two local gangsters were found dead in a burned-out car, and forensic evidence put Dale at the scene. But Jade says Dale has an alibi, which he won’t talk about.

Skeptical at first, Skelgill and his team, DS Jones (female) and DS Leyton (male) look into the evidence (off the record) and find that the case was very shoddily investigated. The case was covered by a team led by Inspector Smart, a smarmy and sly detective none of them respect. They soon realize that a lot of criminal activity has been going on in this apparently quiet country area, and there are people with much greater motives for the murders than Dale Spooner had. And those people will not hesitate to eliminate nosey coppers.

Murder Unsolved was as enjoyable as the previous books in the series. One of the great strengths of author Bruce Beckham’s writing is his wonderful descriptions of the fell country. My only disappointment was that he confused “flout” with “flaunt” on two occasions.

The Skelgill books contain no profanity; sometimes the author openly explains that he’s employed a circumlocution.

Bookselling, Fiction, Publishing

Winnie-the-Pooh is Now Public Domain

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Every year creative works slip into the public domain for use in Geico ads and local craft fairs. This year, the first story by A.A. Milne of his delightful bear in the Hundred Acre Wood has become public domain.

Johnathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today spells out what isn’t public domain, which is every Disney created and other Winnie-the-Pooh stories.

“Milne actually wrote four books based on the character and books 2-4 have not lapsed into the public domain. This means that many of the characters from the series, most notably Tigger, have not lapsed and will not for a few more years. In fact, the image of Pooh wearing a red shirt was not published until 1932.”