Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Media Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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The print media and national networks ran the same basic theme the next day. It was almost as if they were taking their cue from Melinda’s show. In a way they were. She was becoming a significant source for their stories, so they could start with the lame disclaimer, “It has been reported that…” Of course, this is totally unprofessional and unreliable, but it did provide cover for them. They could point to someone else and truthfully say whatever they reported had been reported elsewhere first.

Dennis Carstens is a poor writer, but an excellent storyteller. He badly needs a good editor to fix his prose and punctuation, but he has spun a riveting tale in Media Justice that had me changing my evening plans in order to see how it all came out.

Unfortunately, he also lost me as a reader. More on that below.

22-year-old Brittany Riley is a widowed, single mom. She has a strained relationship with her domineering mother, but depends on her for child care when she’s working out her frustrations by partying with friends. Being a mother can be tough, but Becky, her two-year-old daughter, is her pride and joy, and she dotes on her. And lately she’s met a man, Bob Olson, whom she thinks might just be Mr. Right…

Then one morning she wakes up to find Becky missing from her room. Bob has also vanished. Brittany panics, terrified of her mother’s anger, so for ten days she (stupidly) pretends nothing’s wrong. She searches for Bob and Becky in the daytime and parties with her friends at night to ease the strain.

When the truth comes out, the county sheriff’s office is helpful at first. But gradually they grow suspicious. This mysterious Bob Olson seems to have left no trace. Nobody ever saw him; nobody seems to know him. It’s looking more and more as if Brittany herself is a baby killer and a liar. When hunters find Becky’s body in a river, Brittany is soon in jail, charged with murder.

So Becky’s mother goes to defense lawyer Marc Kadella. It’s clear that the state’s case against Brittany is in fact circumstantial and fairly thin. But public sentiment is another matter. A local legal reporter has turned the case into her personal crusade, and her point of view becomes everyone’s point of view. And there are crazies out there… It all works up to a shattering climax.

The great strength of the Marc Kadella books is their realistic portrayal of the less glamorous side of the legal profession. There’s a real sense of authenticity in these stories. And the picture Media Justice offers of how “journalism” (especially TV “journalism”) filters facts and manipulates public opinion is genuinely horrifying.

I can always put a book down if I need to, but this one was harder than most.

And yet, I’m done with the Marc Kadella series. The author shows considerable laziness, in my opinion, in falling back – not once but twice – on a hoary entertainment trope, a phenomenon quite rare in the real world – the “murderous pro-lifer.” Using it once in a book I could perhaps forgive as a labor-saving shortcut. But doing it twice strongly suggests malice (as Marc Kadella might say in court), in spite of conservative moments in the story. This guy hates us. I’m confident he doesn’t want someone like me as a reader.

Too bad. I’ll miss him.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Key Lime Blues,’ by Mike Jastrzebski

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First, a quibble. Although the cover blurb says Key Lime Blues is a “Wes Darling sailing mystery thriller,” the story really has little to do with sailing, though there is a little boat business along the way. The hero lives on a sailboat called the Rough Draft, which is the name, we’re informed on the Amazon page, of the author’s boat. But that’s a name that’s really only appropriate for a writer’s boat, not a private eye’s.

Wes Darling is a bartender in Key West, Florida. He fled to the Keys after quitting his job with the successful detective agency run by his mother. A bad case which ended in the death of a young girl left him traumatized, and he wants nothing more to do with investigations.

But then one of his mother’s operatives, an older man who was her boyfriend and Wes’ father figure, shows up shot to death on a nearby beach. Wes can’t refuse his mother’s request that he look into it, but he’s adamant he’s not coming back to the firm.

He discovers that the victim was in town looking for a client’s girlfriend, with whom he says he wants to reconcile. Only that’s a lie. The girlfriend is a six-foot, drop-dead gorgeous stripper called Destiny, and the client is a gangster who wants the diamonds Destiny stole from him. He’s also got a couple low-intelligence, twin-brother thugs in town searching for her, and Wes will divide his time between trying to protect Destiny from them, and trying to get the truth from Destiny. Much blood will be spilled – some of it Wes’ – before he solves the case.

In the wake of the last book I reviewed, also set in the Keys, I appreciated the lighter tone of Key Lime Blues. I think the intention was to write a humorous mystery (lots of yuks are gotten out of Wes Darling’s last name), but I didn’t find it all that funny.

And the plot didn’t make a lot of sense to me. This is one of those stories where most of the trouble could have been avoided if the hero had just leveled with the police in the first place. It’s explained that Wes doesn’t trust cops because of bad memories from his tragic case, but it’s still stupid behavior, and that diminishes my empathy.

The main villain is supposed to be a super-genius, but doesn’t seem that brilliant, just repeating unsuccessful tactics over and over, hoping they’ll work better this time.

Also, Wes suffers multiple head traumas, and in the honored (and unrealistic) tradition of hard-boiled private eyes, is back in action an hour later. In addition, the fight scenes weren’t very well written.

There was also a psychic who appeared legitimate, which I consider cheating in a mystery.

And finally, the ultimate resolution was morally unsatisfying to me.

So I didn’t really like Key Lime Blues very much. I don’t think I’ll continue with the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Tropical Freeze,’ by James W. Hall

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It was only after I’d purchased James W. Hall’s Tropical Freeze (got a deal on it) that I realized I’d already read the first book in this series (originally published in the late ‘80s), and didn’t much care for it. But having it at hand, I figured I’d give the series a second shot. Results: ambivalent.

Thorn (his only name) is a beach bum in Key Largo, Florida. He occupies his time making fishing lures and rebuilding his house, which got blown up in the last book. He gets a job offer from his friend Gaeton, who used to be an FBI agent. Now he works for Benny Cousins, another ex-FBI agent who runs a private security form. There’s a place there for Thorn, Gaeton says, if he wants it. Good money.

Thorn doesn’t want it. In fact, he takes an instant, intense dislike to Benny.

Then Gaeton disappears off the face of the earth. And Thorn falls for Darcy, Gaeton’s sister, who’s a weather girl in Miami. Darcy, in turn, is being stalked by a dim-bulb local bartender with delusions of Nashville stardom. Meanwhile, Benny Cousins is doing his best to make himself the most important man in Key Largo. And people who cross him have a way of vanishing mysteriously.

I wanted to like Tropical Freeze better than I did. The prose is really good – lines like “He was feeling sorry for Key Largo, for Florida, for North America. For men and women everywhere. For the race of lonely creatures that walked upright.” James W. Hall can turn a phrase (though he does have a problem with logical logistics, as when he has a guy carry three pistols in one hand).

But I found it impossible to like the characters in this book. The narrative forced us to spend considerable periods of time with sociopathic low-lifes, which always annoys me. But I didn’t even like the hero. I never had a sense of Thorn as a character. We’re told things about his background, but I never grasped him as a person.

And there’s was a pervading sense of gloom all through the story. I found it depressing.

Maybe you’ll like it better. Cautions for language and fairly explicit sexual situations.

Authors, Fiction, Publishing

An Undset day

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Above is the trailer for the 1995 Norwegian film production of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, directed by Liv Ullman. As you’ll see from the link, it’s prohibitively expensive on Amazon, so I don’t expect I’ll be getting it on DVD. I do have the VHS version, but my machine isn’t hooked up so I can’t watch it.

I was, frankly, not entirely happy with the movie version. Liv Ullman was probably the least suitable director in the world; wholly unsympathetic to the author’s intentions. One could come away from watching it with the impression that Kristin and Erlend lived happily ever after, precisely not the point of the exercise.

But Sigrid Undset is on my mind tonight, because I just got an article about her accepted by a journal. My first draft was returned for improvements, which is of course kind of a bummer, but we professionals soldier on. I sent in a second draft, and they told me my prose was so good that they could go ahead and publish it without running it through the usual editorial processing.

That’s what I like to hear.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Weird Tales from the Northern Seas,’ by Jonas Lie

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In the days of our forefathers, when there was nothing but wretched boats up in Nordland, and folks must needs buy fair winds by the sackful from the Gan-Finn, it was not safe to tack about in the open sea in wintry weather. In those days a fisherman never grew old. It was mostly womenfolk and children, and lame and halt, who were buried ashore.

I thought I was buying a collection of north Norwegian folk stories when I purchased (OK, it was free) Weird Tales of the Northern Seas, by Jonas Lie (considered one of the “four greats” of Norwegian literature in the National Romantic period, along with Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnsson, and Alexander Kielland [whose writing retreat near Stavanger I visited this summer]). What I got was something somewhat different, and in some ways better. It certainly left its impression on this reader.

Jonas Lie wrote novels in the “realistic” style (I’ve never read any of them), but he didn’t mind incorporating a folk tale or two into them, as sort of psychological local color. He also assembled some collections of genuine folklore stories. It from both of these categories that the editor (and translator? I’m not sure) R. Nisbet Bain collected this volume in 1893.

These stories are grim. They mirror the attitudes of a culture that learned to eke a marginal existence from the cruel sea at the cost of perpetual danger and human tragedy. The monster that shows up most often here is the draug. The name refers to a kind of revenant in other parts of Norway, but in the north he was a sea-troll who had a head like a seal’s (or a lump of seaweed), who took ruthless, often long-delayed revenge on those who offended him. Most often the lesson of the story is that you will pay for your sins, and nothing can be done about it.

Probably the most famous of the stories is the first, “The Fisherman and the Draug,” which is exactly the sort of thing I just described. The one that impressed me most was the next, “Jack of Sjöholm and the Gan-Finn,” probably the weirdest of the collection. It shows the most obvious marks of literary craftsmanship, especially in its poetic, dream-like quality, and ends in an obscure manner that you never find in real folk tales.

But all in all, these stories are genuinely atmospheric and haunting. If you like this sort of thing, I recommend it. The translation isn’t bad – a little stilted, but that very likely echoes the original text. This was the 1890s, after all. The worst problem is that the footnotes at the end of each story aren’t linked, which creates a difficulty for non-Norwegian readers.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Desperate Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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Dennis Carstens is not a very good prose stylist. His diction can be awkward, even confusing, and his punctuation is best described as whimsical. But I like his characters, he poses very challenging moral problems to the reader, and he’s not politically doctrinaire.

At the beginning of Desperate Justice, Minneapolis attorney Marc Kadella is enjoying an upswing in his business fortunes. His success in his last big case has brought in needed clients. But when a prominent local defense attorney asks him to come on to defend his client’s co-defendant in a linked case, Marc is suspicious. Still, he takes the job, and soon regrets it. He and his client have been set up to take a fall, and Judge Gordon Prentiss – whom we remember with distaste from the last book – does not hesitate to take his personal rancor out on Marc’s client, who goes to prison.

So Marc is astonished when Judge Prentiss is himself charged with murder, and asks for Marc to defend him. Marc has no objection to representing a guilty man (and Prentiss looks guilty as sin), but he considers him a complete sleazeball. Which, the reader soon learns, is entirely correct. Perhaps the man ought to go to prison on general principles.

Desperate Justice is a kind of a diffuse story, which heads off in several directions before bringing it all together in the end. But I very much enjoyed the ethical dilemmas raised. What does “presumption of innocence” really mean? How do you defend a man you despise? How do you respond when even the good guys lie to you?

Stories of moral ambivalence can be corrosive and depressing, if they’re done nihilistically. But the Marc Kadella books never fall into nihilism. They ask honest questions, leaving the reader to draw judgments.

The politics seem pretty moderate to me, but the very fact that Democrats in Minnesota get criticized at all (Republicans come in for it too) is a breath of fresh air.

Cautions for language, sexual situations, and themes of extreme perversion.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Ranching in Colorado,’ by J. L. Curtis

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I enjoyed the first book in my friend J. L. Curtis’ The Bell Chronicles, Showdown on the River, so I picked up book number two, Ranching in Colorado. The title’s a little generic, but the story was excellent.

Rio Bell, gunslinging Texas rancher’s son, survived the dangers of a trail drive and a range war, and now he has his reward. He’s married and owner of a large spread in Colorado. He wasn’t entirely prepared for mountain life or for northern winters, and when his wife gets pregnant he really feels out of his depth.

But he has some his hands with him, along with the crew of old mountain men who helped so much in his earlier adventures. He’ll learn the business, survive a stampede, and face back-shooting rustlers before he’s done.

I don’t know why I don’t read more westerns. I have an infinite taste for cowboy stories. This book was a little less bombastic than the first one; not much gunplay until the last third of the book or so.

I have quibbles, of course. Wedding dresses were not, as a rule, white in the 1870s. A woman we’re told is Scandinavian uses German words like “mit” (with) and “danke,” rather than “med” and “takk.” Some of the English diction is distractingly modern, like, “this baby is an affirmation of our commitment.”

But those are small things. Enjoy the story. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Key to Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I’ve been reading the later books in the Marc Kadella series of legal thrillers (set in Minneapolis), and enjoying them with some reservations. So when I got a deal on a package of the first three books, I bought it. Not sure what I was getting. I had the idea the first books might be a little clumsy. Instead I found that The Key to Justice, the opening novel, was remarkably good and wickedly entertaining.

The book opens with Jake Waschke, an honest, respected Minneapolis police detective. He’s half-brother to the governor’s chief aide, a troubled young man whom he has protected all his life. Now he faces a horrific problem. A knife-wielding serial killer is raping and murdering young women in the Twin Cities (including the governor’s daughter), and Jake knows his brother is doing it. So he selects Carl Fornich, a scumbag with a past rape conviction, and fakes evidence to get him prosecuted.

Carl’s brother comes to Marc Kadella for a defense. Marc is a struggling, small-time lawyer. He needs all the business he can get, especially because he’s involved in countersuing the US government in a tax case and it’s taking forever. Though the prospects of collecting a lot from Carl’s family seem small. But when Marc meets Carl, he’s convinced he’s innocent. If he is, that means the police are framing him. Which makes Marc mad.

In his Introduction, author Dennis Carstens informs us that one of his main motivations for writing the story was to dramatize the un-glamorous side of the practice of law. The long hours, the tedium, the difficulties in getting paid, the official arrogance that has to be swallowed. And that element was in fact one of the things I’ve liked about the books all along.

But to be frank, the later books have gotten a little formulaic. This first one is genuinely original. Lots of surprises and twists, and very dark irony. Carstens isn’t a great prose stylist (and he has a real problem with punctuation), but he can tell a heck of a story.

Also, thanks to his stinginess with character description, I’ve never known what the beautiful Maddy (Marc’s investigator, later his girlfriend) looks like . Now I know she’s tall, brunette, and blue-eyed. Good to know.

Recommended, with the usual cautions.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Man of Affairs,’ by John D. MacDonald

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I had the uncomfortable feeling that you could be marooned on an island with this fellow for seven years and never get a clue as to what he was thinking. He would be inevitably and interminably polite and charming, and were he forced to kill you and eat you, he would be deft and slightly apologetic and quite noble about it. And he would know exactly which leaves and berries to boil with you to give you the right flavor.

John D. MacDonald wrote paperback novels for Fawcett Gold Medal, whose stock in trade was cowboys, private eyes and soldiers of fortune. It’s a tribute to his skill that he could write a saleable (and engaging) story for that market about business. (He had a business degree from Harvard.) A Man of Affairs isn’t one of his top novels, I think, but it’s a pretty good read.

Sam Glidden is a top manager for a small manufacturing  company, the Harrison Corporation, in a fictional town. He rose from the work floor partly with the assistance of the company’s late owner, who was energetic but improvident. Since his death, Sam and the other managers have been trying to rebuild an out-of-date operation, which has prevented them from paying dividends to stockholders. This results in discontent, particularly with the late owner’s two adult children, one of whom, Louise, Sam has carried a torch for since high school.

Then Harrison Corporation comes into the sights of Mike Dean, a famous investor who’d be described as a “corporate raider” today. Dean talks a good talk about rebuilding the company, but Sam knows how this guy operates. He’ll pump the stock up, unload it, and leave the other shareholders in possession of the smoking ruins of a gutted operation. When Dean invites Louise and her brother and their spouses to his compound in the Bahamas, Sam manages to get himself invited too, in hopes he can counter Mike Dean’s persuasions.

What he finds is a house party with a creepy but seductive vibe. Millionaires, publicity people, entertainment people, hangers-on. Greedy, bored, kinky. Sam finds that Mike Dean’s charm and psychological strategy have him on the point of selling out. Then people start dying…

It’s a tribute to MacDonald’s narrative skill that he could transform a story about business into a life-and-death thriller and make it work. There’s sex in A Man of Affairs – fairly shocking by the standards of the time though tame nowadays (it’s all straight sex). The violence is a little far-fetched, but that goes with the territory.

The heart of the story, however, is a pretty solid examination of personal and business integrity. I think it holds up well on that level.

Recommended for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Color of Magic’ by Terry Pratchett

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“He talks pretty big for a gutter wizard,” he muttered.

“You don’t understand at all,” said the wizard wearily. “I’m so scared of you my spine has turned to jelly, it’s just that I’m suffering from an overdose of terror right now. I mean, when I’ve got over that then I’ll have time to be decently frightened of you.”

Terry Pratchett’s first book in his long-running Discworld series, The Color of Magic, has an explosive start with the city of Anhk-Morpork (doubtless based on Dallas-Fort Worth) in flames and main characters Rincewind the wizard and Twoflower the tourist dragging themselves away from it. Both the wizard and the twin city, “of which all the other cities of time and space are, as it were, mere reflections,” found themselves completely unprepared for the arrival of a new type of visitor, a tourist. Here they have a man who doesn’t speak any of the languages, has plenty of money to spend, and hopes to see some of the legendary, fantastical people and events he has read about in his homeland far across the sea. Heroes, bar fights, dragons, magic–how fun it would be to see some of that!

Twoflower the tourist is guided into a tavern that happens to be tolerating the presence of Rincewind, who isn’t really a wizard because he was kicked out of magic school, but he can converse in many languages and consequently approaches the tourist as he attempts to talk to the innkeeper via a phrase book. The two can understand each other, and Rincewind is hired as a tour guide, a challenge he may not be able to rise to.

More than that problem, however, is the problem of helping his patron survive the night, because not only does he overpay in pure gold coins (not like any coins you’d find on the streets of Morpork), but his luggage is made of rare, very expensive wood and follows him around on its own tiny legs like a faithful, aggressive dog. Even without eyes, it leers maliciously at perceived threats. Rincewind immediately discerns there’s no telling what that thing could do when cornered or its master harmed.

Because Twoflower doesn’t understand the natural, human yearnings of the Morpork heart, he is instrumental in burning it to the ground, which can’t be a spoiler because you can see the flames on page one. But that story only takes you to page 87. There are more stories as the two travelers ride to the next city–all of it zany, funny, and ridiculous. The last story in this book is quite beautiful.

The humor isn’t particularly chaste, but it never gets bawdy. I wonder if that holds throughout the series. Once I thought it sounded just like The Princess Bride, and a couple times I noted turns of phrase that echoed Wodehouse.

I’ve read you can pick up the series at any point, because there isn’t a grand narrative to follow. The second published book, The Light Fantastic, does appear to be a direct sequel to The Color of Magic, so there’s some sense of order to some of them.