Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Showdown on the River,’ by J. L. Curtis

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Rio Bell is 22 years old, the son of a Texas rancher. In spite of his youth, he already has an impressive reputation as a gunfighter. But he doesn’t expect to need that skill a lot on his present job – leading his first cattle drive, up the Goodnight-Loving Trail to Colorado. He’s got some older friends to back him up, but the decisions will be his, and he feels the responsibility.

The first part of the novel Showdown on the River, by J. L. Curtis (who happens to be a friend of mine, I need to confess) is pretty standard Western fare – the hard days of riding, the boredom and the danger involved in a cattle drive. I didn’t mind that at all. I can read that stuff all day long, if it’s done well, and it is here (Red River is one of my favorite Westerns).

Once the drovers reach Colorado, they encounter challenges they didn’t expect. Rio was planning to visit his hermit uncle in the mountains, but discovers the old man is dead. The people living on his old place are a father with two daughters, one of whom is away at school. But another rancher has moved in on the other side of the valley, with a plan to take over the whole area, at any cost in human lives. With the help of some old mountain men, friends of his cook, Rio and his cowboys will risk their lives to save his new friends – one of whom is a very attractive young woman.

Taken purely as a story, I thought Showdown on the River worked pretty well. I felt the last scenes were a little rushed, and could have been fleshed out. But reading the book was a lot of fun, and that’s the main thing we ask for in these parts.

I have a couple historical quibbles – which may be unfounded. The author likely knows more about these things than I do.

One is the availability of dynamite. Dynamite is overused in Western stories, especially ones set as early as this (1871 by my calculations). The stuff did exist at the time, but I have the idea that finding some just lying around stretches probability a little (could be wrong).

The other is the issue of violence against women. There’s the famous incident of the killing of Dora Hand, Dodge City dance hall singer (involving Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp). Though the killer escaped the gallows, the immediate reaction demonstrates the kind of outrage that the denizens of the American West were capable of when encountering violence of any kind against a (white) woman. They were rare out west in those days, and the culture was romantic and Victorian. In this book, women get threatened with rape and murder. There is negative reaction, I’ll admit, but some of the “bad guys” show an indifference that seems to me improbable. Even the bad guys wouldn’t stoop that far in that time and place. I’m not familiar with any historical exceptions.

In spite of this, I thoroughly enjoyed Showdown on the River, and recommend it highly.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Divided Loyalty,’ by Charles Todd

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Charles Todd, author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, is actually a mother-son writing team (our commenter Paul informed me of this). I found the first book in the series (the first I I read; we’re actually pretty far along in the series here) a little depressing, but I liked the positive attitude displayed toward Christians and the church. So I figured I’d try another, when a cheap download became available. Thus did I purchase A Divided Loyalty.

Inspector Ian Rutledge is an isolated man. He’s unpopular at Scotland Yard because he’s a victim of shell shock, considered a moral coward by other officers. He hangs onto his job only because they’re short of manpower, due to the losses of World War I. His shell shock takes a particularly painful form – persistent hallucination. His friend Hamish MacLeod, a wartime subordinate whom he was forced to order shot on the front lines, is forever at his shoulder, commenting on events. These comments are mostly – but not always – negative.

Avebury in Wiltshire is a famous place in England. It’s a double stone circle, not far from Stonehenge, less complete but larger. The village of Avebury nestles inside it.

A young woman was found stabbed to death in the ditch that surrounds the stones. Inspector Leslie, an older, respected officer, was the first to investigate, but he found no clues. Rutledge recently solved a similar mystery in another town, so his superior (who despises him) sends him to see if he can do any better. His real motive, Rutledge believes, is a desire to see him fail.

No clue to the woman’s identity has been found. She doesn’t “look English,” but she might have come from anywhere in the world. And what brought her here? How was she lured to the murder site?

Rutledge goes to work systematically, asking questions in a widening circle, investigating routes by which the woman might have come. Gradually a few facts – or probabilities – appear. And he begins finding indications of the culprit – indications that lead somewhere he does not want to go. However, the final twist will astonish even him.

I liked A Divided Loyalty better than I liked A False Mirror, the first book I read. It was by no means cheery, but it was less a downer than that one. And I liked Inspector Rutledge’s relentless professionalism in the face of depression and manifold obstacles.

I don’t recall any particular concerns in terms of language or themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Low Tide,’ by John D. MacDonald

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She nodded. It was the first time I’d ever had a good chance to look at her face. Big bright black eyes, and just a shade too much in the tooth department, so she had a very faint look of coming out of one of Disney’s woodland dells.

Early (1953) John D. MacDonald. That promises a great story, set back when men were men and women were women. Dead Low Tide does not disappoint in any way.

Andy McClintock lives in a small, cheap Florida cabin in a court originally built for tourists. It’s all he can afford on his current salary. His boss, land developer “Big” John Long, lured him to the state on promises of promotion and good money, but neither has appeared. (Rapacious land development was a continuing theme in MacDonald’s books, and it’s interesting to note his criticisms even at this early date.)

Then John’s wife, the small, intense Mary Eleanor, asks Andy for help. John has been acting strangely, she says, and she’s concerned what’s troubling him. Andy agrees to talk to him. He goes to see John on a building site, and concludes that the man is hiding a problem – likely a health scare. Andy also confronts John about his job, asking for more responsibility and money. To his surprise, John hands him a contract the next day, and the deal involves a partnership.

Then John is found dead, apparently having committed suicide with a speargun that belonged to Andy. He does not identify it for the police. Mary Eleanor asks Andy for another favor – there’s an envelope in John’s desk, she says, that belongs to her. Don’t open it. Just bring it to me. Andy doesn’t agree, but he does search the desk.

The next thing he knows, he’s been arrested for John’s murder. The cops know the speargun was his, and the new contract is motive. But that’s only the beginning of his troubles. Something far, far more valuable than his freedom is about to be taken from him…

Outstanding prose. A tight, gripping plot. Vivid characters who surprise you. A shocking twist toward the end. Dead Low Tide had everything. I highly recommend it.

Minor cautions for mature themes.

Fiction

Superpower Upends She-Hulk’s Career – Isn’t That Fun?

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We tell superhero stories in a variety of ways. The lone gunslinger fighting rebels and outlaws, hiding his identity to avoid the repercussions. The agent/family man who was targeted but not killed and now brings his particular set of skills back to the field to punish evildoers. The burger maid who delivers warm burgers and fries to your table or car just after you pay for them. Actual heroes walk among us in the stories we tell each other before the boss joins the video conference.

And superhero stories probably have room to play around, find some diversity, and do fun things. Fandom talked to some people in the new show She-Hulk: Attorney at Law about motivations and what’s going to happen. Does this sound like superhero fun to you?

“One of the biggest themes of this first season is about acceptance, because I think it’s very unrealistic to expect a normal average everyday person to suddenly out of the blue get imbued with superpowers that they didn’t ask for [and just embrace it].”

“So much of her identity is based on her career. . . . So the idea of being handed something that changes her life and blows up all her plans is not appealing to her.”

“Suddenly she’s thrust into this whole other identity and people sort of look to her for all the expectations that you put on a superhero. But she really has a full life outside of it.”

People getting superpowers, like, out of the blue, powers they didn’t ask for? You mean, people like Spiderman, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and even the Hulk himself? Many others have come back from the dead or from fatal injury with powers greater than the average bear, so they should qualify as not asking for power. And many villains have been caught in accidents that only amplified their twisted desires and turned them into presidents of home-owners associations. So stories of unsolicited power leading to a few bumps in the road, yeah, we know a few.

This show appears to be a long But Actually to Uncle Ben’s well-known advice.

Fiction, Reviews

‘No More Lies,’ by James Scott Bell

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I’ve become a big fan of James Scott Bell, one of the very few really good Christian mystery writers out there. So I picked up No More Lies, a newly released revision of one of his earlier works. The book shows obvious signs of a writer still in the learning stages, but it also showcases a lot of the virtues that make Bell such a good storyteller.

The location is the small town of Pack Canyon, once the site of Old West movie sets, in the western San Fernando Valley. Arty Towne is out hiking in a wilderness area with his new wife, Liz. Arty has recently become a born-again Christian, and has left a good-paying job on principle. Liz doesn’t get this. Money is everything to Liz. It makes her very angry. Tragedy follows.

Caught up in the ensuing drama is Arty’s sister “Rocky,” an insurance investigator whose life has been blighted by a facial scar she acquired in childhood. And “Mac” MacDonald, an ex-con and new Christian who’s trying to keep straight in spite of numerous pressures, including recurring headaches from wartime injuries.

No More Lies is a tight, convoluted tale with lots of surprises (some of them a little far-fetched). Lots of “Noir” elements – weak-willed people wading into crime and getting caught in the undertow. I liked the characters, and the book contained moments of laughter as well as pathos.

What didn’t work – and it pains me to say it – is the “God talk.” One of the hardest things for a Christian writer trying to write for a secular audience is making the God talk sound natural. And it’s strained here. (No doubt it’s often strained in my own books.)

Also, there’s a weird anticlimax scene that serves no dramatic purpose I can discern.

But other than that, No More Lies is a lot of fun. Excellent entertainment. No cautions for language or themes.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Music, Reading

Ranking Dostoevsky’s Works and Life as the Ice Grows Thinner

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Amazon’s Middle Earth series, The Rings of Power, will begin September 1 and run into October. I don’t know much about it, but I hope to enjoy it if we still have a Prime membership (which seems to come and go regularly of late).

Because of the series, I intend to read The Silmarillion soon. I know I read about half of it before, but I don’t remember where I stopped. One of the chapters, perhaps thirteen, dragged on about geography about as warmly as a fifth-grade social studies text. I aim to push past those parts and enjoy the stories beyond them.

I don’t know if I will attempt to blog about the series if I’m able to watch it near the release days. I probably wouldn’t have enough thoughts to share.

Crime or Punishment? A Dostoevsky enthusiast categorizes all of the famous author’s novels and novellas into must-reads, read-afters, and only for other enthusiasts.

Notes from Underground, Poor Folk, and The Brothers Karamazov are among the must-reads. The Double and The Gambler are on the list for reading after the must-reads. Uncle’s Dream and The Permanent Husband are only for the most dedicated readers.

“I won’t be exaggerating,” she says, “when I say [The Brothers Karamazov] brought me back from abyss. It might not work the same way [for you as] it did for me, but there is an obvious need for more people to read and understand the beautiful intricacies of life and its fallacies, to love life in its entirety.”

Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

“Notes from Underground,” Fyodor Dostoevsky

On Death: R.L. Stevenson wrote, “[A]fter a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.”

Social Media: “How teens use social media often drives how everyone uses social media.” YouTube is the most-used social media platform and the second most-used search engine.

Online Fiction: “China is producing and consuming the largest amount of web fiction in the world, with an estimated 20 million full-time, part-time, and dabbling writers. The grind is hard, and the conditions can be exploitative, but those who do it are on the vanguard of a reading revolution.” (via Literary Saloon)

For Love of a Hero: Mo Ghille Mear (My Gallant Hero), performed by The Choral Scholars of University College, Dublin.

Photo: March Mobil Gas, Mount Clemens, Michigan. 1986. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shaking the Tree,’ by Mike Donohue

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Max Strong works as a baker in a diner in the small town of Essex (which I learned, about half way through the story, is in Minnesota). That’s not his real name, though. He’s in the federal witness protection program. He has a history in organized crime that’s not clearly explicated. But he’s trying to make a fresh start, to keep his nose clean. He likes the place and the people. That’s the setup for the thriller, Shaking the Tree.

One of the people Max likes is his roommate Stevie, an inveterate runner who is nearly beheaded by a briefcase falling from the sky, one morning out in a country road. When he gets the case open, he finds it contains millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, a man’s body is found impaled on an apple tree in a farmer’s orchard.

Suddenly a shady DEA agent and a Russian hit team show up in town. The local sheriff, who’s involved in cooking meth, is trying to figure a way to keep the heat off his operation while locating the missing money for himself. He will lie, bully, torture or kill to make his pile and get out of this town.

Innocent people are going to die. And that will make Max Strong mad.

There was a lot about Shaking the Tree that intrigued me. The story was complex, and the shifting points of view through which it was told were well-realized.

But I found the book hard to like. It was grim, grim, grim. Noir-ish in the sense that sin is punished brutally. It reminded me of No Country for Old Men. I didn’t like Max Strong well enough to care about reading the next book.

There are odd, obscure references to the Bible through the story, but I’m not sure what we’re supposed to make of them.

Cautions for language, violence, and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

What Would You Do If You Could Become Invisible?

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Heist movies have many examples of criminals slipping into a crowd and becoming essentially invisible. Either there are too many similarly looking people to spot the ones the cops want or there are too many people period. Without an identifier of some kind, the criminals have gotten away without consequences, at least for the moment.

In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a gifted chemist works out his theory for making things invisible. Recklessly, he applies his experiment to his own body and becomes an inhuman and invisible man.

His glassy essence, like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.

“Measure for Measure” Act 2, scene 2

When the invisible man tells his own story, you see his arrogance runs deep. He attempts to live without any social obligations, taking food or clothing for himself without payment, assuming these things would simply disappear like he has. He quickly learns it won’t work that way, because he isn’t an incorporeal ghost; he’s a naked man that no one can see. If he weren’t such a hot-tempered fool, he might have worked more methodically and converted a set of clothes into invisibility before converting himself.

After a few months of experimental living as an invisible man, the chemist wants to terrorize people. He wants to pursue his scientific interests without having to earn anyone’s favor or deal with normal social pressures. He probably blames his father, his old boss, and all of his research colleagues for his jaded view of the world, but I think Wells may intend these people to represent everyone. There are no contrasting noble characters in this story. Even the chemist’s closest friend may have been just as self-seeking as everyone else.

Wells provokes readers to ask what anyone would do if he or she could be invisible, or to put it another way, what would you do if there were no consequences to pay? Would you plagiarize? Steal someone’s research? Slander someone’s character to get rid of them?

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Fortuitous Justice,’ by Dennis Carstens

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I continue to follow Dennis Carstens’ Minneapolis-located Marc Kadella series of legal mysteries. I also continue a kind of love/hate relationship with the books. The writing doesn’t impress me a lot, but the storytelling is good, and I generally like the characters.

Marc Kadella, as you may recall, is a Minneapolis attorney. He is now engaged to Maddy Rivers, the uber-hot private detective. In Fortuitous Justice, we pick up several plot threads, which had appeared to be tied up, from the previous book, Twisted Justice. That book involved a group of former Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders who’d formed a prostitution ring, and who found themselves way out of their depth when they became a security risk to some of the richest – and most ruthless – movers and shakers in Minnesota politics (which means, in case you’re not familiar with my state, Democrats. It’s not stated in so many words in the book, but that’s the way it is).

At the end of Twisted Justice, Burt Chayson, a local political fixer who knew too much, was reported dead, an apparent suicide. But now the police say murder, and they have their eyes on one of the Housewife Hookers, Hope Slade, the last person seen with him. Hope had enough on her plate already with prostitution charges and public humiliation. Her husband has left her. Now she’s facing Murder One. She goes to Marc Kadella for defense.

The investigation will be complicated, really scary hired guns will come to town to shut people’s mouths, and the final resolution will be a surprise.

As a mystery, I thought Fortuitous Justice was pretty good. I was annoyed by too many typos (a common problem these days, alas), and by Carstens’ habit of inserting paragraph breaks at unexpected places in the midst of chunks of dialogue, leaving the reader wondering who’s talking now.

I was also peeved when one unpleasant character was identified as a member of the “far right religious bunch.” That peeve turned to utter confusion as the character was later identified as a Democrat. (Insert image of Leonard Nimoy here, with one eyebrow cocked: “Highly illogical.”) Honestly, I think the author just lost track.

Not a great book, Fortuitous Justice was entertaining and fun. Cautions for language and mature themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Those Who Remain,’ by Chris Culver

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Good writing. Fully rounded characters. Love, pathos, and moral horror. Chris Culver’s Those Who Remain is a fascinating and disturbing book. I can’t say I loved it, because it left me troubled. But it’s darn good.

Homer Watson is a sheriff’s detective in St. Louis County, Missouri. He’s a family man, and happy in his life. But there are pressures. One of his small sons is autistic, and doing poorly in school. He and his wife would love to put the boy in a special school, but their salaries just won’t stretch that far.

One day he’s called to the site of a possible suicide. He recognizes the victim. It’s Hailey Bowman, a young woman who killed a policeman a year ago. She claimed he’d tried to rape her and was found not guilty. There are a lot of cops who’d have liked to see her dead.

But Homer’s a straight arrow. When the death proves to be murder, he looks to his fellow cops for suspects. That doesn’t pan out, but he gets a tip that Hailey has been living as the kept girlfriend of her defense lawyer, a man Homer has personal reasons to despise.

And when Homer gets an offer of a good-paying job from someone he cleared as a suspect, and he accepts it for his son’s sake, all his colleagues suspect the worst about him.

But the reader knows from the very beginning that Homer’s on the wrong track. The person really responsible is Pilar Garcia, a loving grandmother. Pilar runs an ostensibly legitimate cleaning business, but her main work force is composed of illegal aliens. She brings these people in and pays them below minimum wage to maximize profits. On the other hand, she makes sure they’re well fed, healthy, and housed, and helps them get established once their indentures are over. She is full of good will, and cares about her family above all things. She cares so much for her family that she’s willing to kill innocent outsiders to protect them – or to keep them in line.

Pilar is a masterfully painted portrait of how even a human’s best natural instincts can lead to appalling evil. I don’t know what the author intended, but one can’t help thinking of the doctrine of Original Sin.

Those Who Remain was well-written, compelling, and horrifying. I’m not sure I’m brave enough to read the next Homer Watson book. But I can recommend this one highly.