Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘Out of the Shadows,’ by Sigmund Brouwer

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We do not want to risk coming out of the shadows, preferring to remain in the darkness of lives of quiet desperation, afraid of all that is unknown about God and holding on to our only certainty, even if this certainty is the pain we know and understand.

How come nobody ever told me about Sigmund Brouwer before? (I’ll bet somebody did, and I overlooked it.) He’s a Canadian writer, and yet in Out of the Shadows he’s produced an excellent mystery in the Southern Gothic style. It reminded me a little of Walker Percy.

Nick Barrett is a son of Charleston aristocracy, but only in a marginal way. His mother married into the old, moneyed Barrett family, but then bore a child – Nick – out of wedlock. After she disappeared, with Nick’s trust fund money and (according to rumor) with yet another lover, Nick was raised in the family home and tolerated. But they never let him forget his inferior status. He thought he’d beat them all when he married the beautiful Claire, also from their circle. But that all blew up a few nights after the wedding, when several of the young people were in a car accident. Nick lost half his leg in that accident, while Claire’s brother was killed. And Nick found himself faced with an ultimatum from the corrupt county sheriff – sign an affidavit admitting to being the drunk driver (which he wasn’t) or go to prison. Nick left town, the marriage was annulled, and he traveled the world before settling down to teach astronomy at a small college in the southwest.

But now he’s gotten an anonymous letter, telling him that if he comes back to Charleston he can learn the truth about his mother’s true whereabouts. He goes back, limping on his prosthetic leg, to face the still-hostile relatives, and starts kicking over stones and stirring up hornet’s nests. People will die, including (nearly) Nick himself, before the truth comes out and he learns the true power of love, the reality of forgiveness, and something about God.

Out of the Shadows knocked me for a loop. It was thoughtful, lyrical, and even action-packed (I didn’t see that coming). I’ve read a fair number of Christian novels, but never one where the actual act of conversion is portrayed as effectively and movingly as it is here. I was reminded of Leif Enger, but Brouwer is more explicit in his message.

Highly recommended. Really, you need to read Out of the Shadows.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Ten Commandments of Murder,’ by David Breitenbeck

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I thanked him and sat down in one of the armchairs, feeling much the same as I had when I’d been called into the headmaster’s office at school. The big clock ticked off the seconds with an unusually heavy tread, as if it were driving a rivet with each tick.

We have under consideration here an attempt at a new cozy mystery franchise, and it’s not a bad one at all. The Ten Commandments of Murder is sort of blend of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and Nero Wolfe, with a nice, well-integrated infusion of Christian morality. Utterly unbelievable, but plenty of fun.

Alfred More, our Watson/Hastings/Goodwin here, is at the time of the story (1903) a feckless young idler, the younger son of a Pennsylvania steel magnate. The company is run by his brother Jonathan, with whom Alfred lives. Every April, according to established family tradition, they host a dinner party at their mansion on Long Island for family and family friends. Alfred looks forward to seeing Violet, a young woman he’s been in love with since childhood. But that also means seeing her insufferable husband, Nathan Gale, who is vulgarly rich and delights in offending people. The party also includes the family doctor and a “progressive” clergyman and his family.

Nathan Gale loses no time in making himself odious to everyone. At one point he insults his wife Violet, and Alfred our narrator is incensed enough to say he’d like to kill him. That will come back to bite him when he hears a noise in the nighttime and enters Gale’s room, finding him shot dead. In the honorable tradition of stupid mystery characters since forever, he sees a gun on the floor and picks it up, to be found that way by the others.

What follows passes belief, but is highly suitable for a cozy mystery. The intelligent police detective who comes to investigate does not believe Alfred guilty (I was never sure why), and instead suggests that he engage the services of Mr. Malachi Burke, a former policeman and brilliant consulting detective. Burke turns out to be a huge, unkempt (think W. B. Yeats), aging Irishman who walks with a cane and quickly takes charge. He enlists Alfred to assist him (!) and explains his approach to crime solving, based on his personal list of the “Ten Commandments of Murder” (he also frequently refers to the real biblical commandments, and he’s deadly serious about it).

All the rest goes as expected. Malachi Burke discerns secrets, sees through lies, and ultimately identifies the real murderer.

It was all very satisfactory. The writing was good too (though the author has occasional trouble with homophone confusion).

But all things considered, I greatly enjoyed The Ten Commandments of Murder, and look forward to the next installment in the series.

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.