Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Camelback Falls’ and ‘Dry Heat,’ by Jon Talton

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This will be a rare double review. I need to pick up my pace, as I’ve been running through Jon Talton’s David Mapstone series pretty quickly. It’s not that I don’t have other things to do than read, but I’m fighting a respiratory infection at the moment and I keep stopping for breaks. And when I take a break, I read. And when books are these good, the breaks tend to get long.

David Mapstone, if you recall yesterday’s review, is an unemployed academic historian, hired by his friend, chief deputy sheriff Mike Peralta, to investigate cold cases in Phoenix. When Camelback Falls opens, Mike has just been sworn in as the new sheriff – but a few minutes later he’s cut down by an assassin. As Mike fights for his life in the hospital, David finds himself – much against his will – appointed interim sheriff.

Soon David finds himself investigating another cold case – the murder of two deputies. Evidence he uncovers seems to suggest considerable corruption in the sheriff’s office – corruption that seems to involve Mike himself.

Moving on to the next book, that’s Dry Heat. This time out, David investigates the death of a homeless man whose case becomes more interesting when an FBI badge is found sewn into his jacket. The badge is that of the only FBI agent ever murdered in Arizona, a crime long unsolved. Meanwhile, David’s new wife Leslie, a digital forensic detective, has become the target of assassins, sent by a Russian gangster whose operation she helped close down.

The David Mapstone books are excellent in several ways. The prose is very good; the characters are vivid. The mysteries are genuinely intriguing. And the values generally please me (though David and Leslie cohabit before marriage).

I’m really enjoying these books.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Concrete Desert,’ by Jon Talton

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A search of our old posts shows that I reviewed a Jon Talton novel some time back, and liked it very much. But somehow he dropped off my radar.  Concrete Desert, the first book in his David Mapstone series, showed up cheap recently, so I bought and read it. Now I’m a fan.

David Mapstone is a native of Phoenix, Arizona. He was a policeman there in his youth, then he went away to earn his doctorate in History. But he found that there are few opportunities in academia nowadays (the early 2000s) for white males who don’t hate western civilization. He ended up back in Phoenix, where his old police mentor, Mike Peralta, is now chief deputy sheriff. Mike offers David a job as Sheriff’s Department historian, investigating old cold cases – not necessarily a permanent job, but something to do, and he’d carry a badge and a gun again. David accepts.

Almost immediately, he gets a visit from Julie, his old lover. She has a younger sister who has disappeared, and she wants David to look for her. David still has a weakness for Julie, and agrees. Meanwhile, on the job, he discovers a pattern in old cases of murders of young women. A serial killer had been at work, he realizes, and nobody noticed.

But there are people out there who want the past covered up. And there are others who are lying to David, and are ready to kill him and anyone else who gets in their way, if he can’t unmask them first.

I was highly impressed with Concrete Desert. The book had a strong sense of place; the descriptions of Phoenix and its environs were vivid and tactile. The prose was excellent (not as quotable as, say, Chandler or MacDonald, but most effective), and the dialogue and characters were lively. And to put the cherry on top, culturally conservative opinions popped out frequently.

Highly recommended. Cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Mask,’ by Dean Koontz

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Dean Koontz, always a prolific author, turned out several thrillers under pseudonyms early in his career. He wrote The Mask, published in 1981, under the name of Owen West. That’s not the very beginning of the author’s career, but the book struck me as rather underbaked Koontz.

Carol Tracy is a psychologist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She gets the job of treating a teenaged girl known only as Jane Doe, who has shown up with total amnesia about her past. Jane is beautiful, well-mannered, and sweet. Somebody must miss her, because she’s a child any parent would cherish – Carol herself, who’s been trying vainly to conceive, begins to cherish her, and soon takes her into her home. But why has Carol begun to to have terrible nightmares? And why is her husband hearing unexplained thumping noises in their house?

There’s also Carol’s friend and mentor Grace, who starts receiving cryptic phone calls from the voice of her own deceased husband, warning her to keep Carol and the girl apart.

The book escalates, in typical Koontz fashion, to a violent, wrenching, and abrupt climax.

I was not greatly impressed by The Mask. It seemed to me a conventional supernatural thriller, lacking the deeper themes the author would later bring to his work.

It was okay, if you’re not too offended by reincarnation.

Fiction, Reviews

‘One Green Bottle,’ by M. Jonathan Lee

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A murder story set on a Norwegian fjord cruise? I could hardly turn that down, especially getting it cheap. I assumed it was a sort of a mystery, but it’s more of a suspense story. The mystery in One Green Bottle isn’t whodunnit, but who didn’t?

The tour guides leading a group of cruise ship hikers up a mountain in Norway assure them that they’ve never lost a customer. Well, that’s about to end. They’ve hit a perfect storm today, because there are eight people in this particular party, nearly all of whom are planning to kill either themselves or someone else.

There’s an English couple getting away from home for a while to deal with the tenth anniversary of their only daughter’s death. The experience is complicated by the husband’s growing conviction that his wife is having an affair with another man – who just happens to show up with his own wife on this cruise (surprise)! There’s an American financier planning suicide because he knows his embezzlement is even now being discovered by his co-workers. And a psychopathic American heiress worried that her alcoholic sister will blab to the police about how they murdered their father.

Yet we learn at the beginning of the book that only one of them actually dies. Which one will it be?

There’s much to admire in One Green Bottle. The prose is good. The characters are admirably faceted – the most sympathetic among them can be annoying, and the most annoying have sympathetic moments. The story was fascinating and engaging.

But it left a rather sour taste in my mouth. This is a fictional universe whose God, if there is a God, is Irony.

I recommend it moderately. Cautions for language and disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘To Have Everything,’ by Alan Lee

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The heavens were purpling when I reached Washington, DC. The sun had disappeared beyond the simple Federal-style architecture found in Georgetown as I drove through, and beyond into Spring Valley, a spacious, secluded neighborhood inside the city with grand estates and private yards. If you were rich, you couldn’t live here. These residents looked down on the rich. These residents blew their nose with the rich.

I think I’ve now caught up with Alan Lee’s delightful Mackenzie August series, about an upbeat Raleigh, NC private eye who lives in a house with several family and friends, because he believes in community. I haven’t read all of the Manny Martinez books, though, so there’s always that.

To Have Everything features two main plot threads. First there’s a rich old woman who wants Mack to surveille her three grandchildren. She wants to leave extra money to the one who’s most responsible, but Mack suspects she’s already made her mind up – possibly very badly.

Then there’s the problem with Sheriff Stackhouse, Mack’s father’s girlfriend. She’s running for mayor, and a shoo-in – if she lives. Unfortunately, people keep trying to kill her (which Mack, of course, has to stop). Mack has contacts (some surprisingly friendly) in organized crime, but nobody seems to know who put out the contract. Mack will have to get proactive. Fortunately, as he confidently asserts, he can handle anything.

Lots of fun, as usual. I think To Have Everything was one of my favorites in the series. My only quibble is that (possibly due to an autocorrect mistake) the word “diffusion” keeps appearing where what’s wanted is “defusing” (as in a bomb).

Otherwise, great. Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Damsel in Distress,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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George began to sit up and take notice. A cloud seemed to have cleared from his brain. He found himself looking on his fellow-diners as individuals rather than as a confused mass. The prophet Daniel, after the initial embarrassment of finding himself in the society of the lions had passed away, must have experienced a somewhat similar sensation.

I posted a song from the Fred Astaire musical, “A Damsel in Distress,” a few days ago, mentioning that the film was based on a novel by P.G. Wodehouse. I hope to view the movie as soon as I can, but I wanted to read the book first, as it’s one I’d missed so far.

A Damsel in Distress was published in 1919, which puts it fairly early in the Master’s career. It’s highly interesting as representative of a key moment in his artistic development. He hasn’t yet made the decision to slip the narrow bonds of earth and sail into comic fantasy, but it definitely shows signs of things to come.

Lady Maude Marsh is the daughter of the Earl of Marshmoreton. She has fallen in love with an American, but her imperious aunt, Lady Caroline, who effectively runs the family estate, has utterly forbidden it. Maude manages to slip away to London one day, but is horrified to sight her status-conscious brother Percy approaching up the street. So she quickly jumps into a cab with a young man, imploring him to hide her. With perfect aplomb, the young man, an American musical comedy composer named George Bevan, conceals her, managing to knock Percy’s silk hat off in the bargain. Maude is very appreciative, but leaves George (who has fallen in love with her on the spot) with no information on her identity.

Nevertheless, George manages to discover who she is. He makes his way to the neighborhood of her home, and sets about insinuating himself into brother Percy’s birthday party. And it goes on from there.

A Damsel in Distress is full of Wodehouse themes in embryo. Maude’s father Lord Marshmoreton is a dreamy man, devoted to his flower gardens, oppressed by his sister. Obviously we have here Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle in embryo – but Lord Marshmoreton is more realistic. He is not an amiable idiot, but simply a highly suppressed man.

George poses as a waiter to get into Percy’s party. This is another standard Wodehousian device, but George is not as blatant an imposter as the imposters to come, and he gets out of the false position as quickly as he can.

In other words, Wodehouse hasn’t found his full powers yet. It hasn’t occurred to him to cut his ties to realistic psychology and turn his characters into cartoon figures. He has not yet found the courage to fly – but that doesn’t mean A Damsel in Distress isn’t a very enjoyable comic novel in its own right. If Wodehouse had ended his career in 1919, the book might still be remembered as a fine, funny romance.

I liked it a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Old Guns,’ by Alan Lee

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[W]hat bothered me about Islam was that the Quran and its rules seemed to undo all the new covenant changes bought by Christ on the cross. The Quran took its followers back to the Old Testament.

What bothered me about Christianity was, I sucked at it. I kept shooting people.

I’m catching up on a couple books I missed in Alan Lee’s Mackenzie August series, about an upbeat Roanoke, VA private eye.

I’ve often expressed (tediously, no doubt) my idea that the average fictional male PI character is a masculine wish fulfillment figure. What man juggling a marriage, a mortgage, and rambunctious kids does not, now and then, imagine how nice it would be to live like Philip Marlowe or Travis McGee, having adventures, seeing a series of attractive women, no responsibilities except to one’s personal code?

Mackenzie August is a different kind of fantasy figure altogether. He’s the man we aspire to be. Big, buff, brave. Women hit on him all the time, but he brushes them aside easily, because he’s married to a gorgeous woman who’s all he ever wants. He lives, not alone, but in an extended family, featuring his wife, his toddler son (who doesn’t seem to ever age), his father and his girlfriend (who’s the county sheriff), his buddy, the hyper-patriotic US Marshal Manny Martinez, and (now and then), Manny’s partner Noelle.

Mack August does not agonize over futility. He is optimistic and happy. For him, being a detective is a calling, a way to help people.

In Old Guns, Mack begins to suspect that his generous nature is being taken advantage of. A woman accountant who has hired him before asks him to take her son Elijah as an apprentice. Elijah already has a license (which he got without studying), but it’s been confiscated, because he didn’t know the rules of surveillance and was arrested for breaking and entering. Mack is not interested at all, until the boy’s father, an illegal gun dealer, makes the same appeal, offering Mack a lot of money plus a bazooka, a weapon Mack has always wanted.

Elijah is a nightmare to work with. He’s lazy, he’s unmotivated, he’s always on his phone and he thinks he can lie because objective truth doesn’t exist. But gradually, Mack begins to care about the kid, who’s been dismally raised and desperately needs a male role model.

Then people start trying to kill Elijah. It turns out there’s a hit out on him, at an exorbitant price that’s bringing top assassins in from all over the world. What could this feckless kid have done to deserve that? And can Mack keep him alive long enough to find out?

Old Guns was, like all the Mack August books, a lot of fun. Not exactly a Christian novel, but Christian-adjacent, and full of interesting characters and plenty of action. Highly recommended, with cautions for language.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Uncle Fred in the Springtime,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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The Duke shot back in his chair, and his moustache, foaming upwards as if a gale had struck it, broke like a wave on the stern and rockbound coast of the Dunstable nose. A lesser moustache, under the impact of that quick, agonized explosion of breath, would have worked loose at the roots.

I recently reviewed P. G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Dynamite, which I enjoyed immensely. So I was happy to see Uncle Fred in the Springtime show up on sale soon after, and I snapped it up. I knew I’d read it before, and had been somewhat disappointed. I consider the classic short story, “Uncle Fred Flits By,” the funniest story ever written, and I felt (this was many years ago) that “Springtime” was just a little below the Plimsoll line. Perhaps, I thought, a re-reading would show me the error of my judgment.

Alas, no. I won’t say Uncle Fred in the Springtime is a bad book (a bad Wodehouse book is an oxymoron), but I still felt just a tad disappointed, like a lion in the Coliseum (as Wodehouse might have put it) sitting down to devour his daily Christian, and suspecting that someone has substituted a Gnostic in heavy French sauce.

The plot is the sort of thing you’d expect, and features the added pleasure of taking us to the familiar precincts of Blandings Castle, where the wooly-headed Earl of Emsworth desires nothing more than a quiet life in contemplation of his prize fat pig, the Duchess of Blandings. But he’s bedeviled by a neighbor, the Duke of Dunstable, a choleric and officious busybody who’s convinced the earl’s pig fixation is unhealthy, and who demands that Emsworth give it (the pig, that is) to him.

Meanwhile, Uncle Fred, himself an earl, is concerned about the fortunes of Miss Polly Pott, daughter of his friend Claude “Mustard” Pott, a former bookie and confidence man. Polly wants to marry a poet who’s looking for 250 pounds to enable him to purchase an onion soup bar in London. Uncle Fred, who is kept on an allowance by his wife, is hunting for a way to find her the money. This leads, through complex narrative paths and byways, to Uncle Fred and his nephew Pongo traveling to Blandings Castle, where Fred, as is his custom, takes up residence under an assumed identity, in this case that of the esteemed brain disease specialist Sir Roderick Glossop. The theft of the pig becomes a central theme.

My problem with this story – and it may just be me – is partly that it contains about one more main character than I can easily keep straight in my head. Also, though it’s always a delight to watch Uncle Fred lie with a straight face when caught in a previous lie, this time out I thought his prevarications sometimes a little thin. I had trouble believing anyone would fall for some of them, in spite of the old man’s charm.

Nevertheless, it’s Wodehouse, so it’s fun to read. Recommended, but a little less than other books from the Master.

Fiction, Music, Uncategorized

‘A Foggy Day in London Town’

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Tonight, not a hymn, but “A Foggy Day in London Town,” a show tune loosely connected to the sainted P. G. Wodehouse.

“Damsels in Distress” is a 1937 Fred Astaire vehicle, co-starring Joan Fontaine. This was the first movie Astaire made after his partnership with Ginger Rogers broke up, and the project was complicated by the distressing discovery that Miss Fontaine couldn’t dance. Oops. (I find it hard to understand how anyone, even a very pretty young woman, could make it in the theater/movie world without learning to dance a little. Maybe she just wasn’t up to Astaire’s standard. That I call highly plausible.)

The film’s story, in any case, is based on a 1919 novel of Wodehouse’s, incorporating his personal experience in Broadway theater. Sadly, he didn’t do any lyrics for this show.

The movie, I’m sorry to report, did not do well, despite the presence of a young couple of comedians who called themselves George Burns and Gracie Allen. But its reputation seems to have grown with time.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it. I need to check it out.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Justice Without Mercy,’ by Blake Banner

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Looking at my old reviews on this blog, I see that I stopped reading Blake Banner’s Harry Bauer books mainly because they featured cliffhanger endings, which I hate. I absentmindedly picked up Justice Without Mercy, and was relieved to find that it did not end with a cliffhanger. So that’s good. But I still wasn’t entirely happy with it.

Harry Bauer works with Cobra, one of those super-secret semi-governmental security organizations so vital to the survival of the thriller genre. In Justice Without Mercy, he is sent to the small island of I-Takka, between Guyana in Surinam. The island, he is told, is essentially ungoverned. Control is in the hands of a mysterious corporation mining lithium and (according to rumor) carrying on mysterious human experiments. There are reports that children are being abused and murdered. Harry’s brief, which he welcomes, is to see if it’s true – and if it’s true, to take out the main people with extreme prejudice.

Harry Bauer suffers as a character from his extreme aptitude for his job. He’s big, strong, fast, trained to the limit. Throughout the story, whenever he needs to kill somebody (which happens with increasing frequency), he has so little difficulty that the author has to throw in a dozen hyperdeveloped mutants at the end to give us a dramatic climax. Harry is given a few meditative moments in which he ponders the morality of killing, but to someone who just finished reading Mark Helprin’s Elegy in Blue, it was pretty perfunctory. Also, the ending was a little incoherent, I thought.

I’m getting old, after all. I don’t enjoy high body counts as much as I used to. The Harry Bauer books are actually quite well-written (I liked the prose), and they fill the much-needed market niche of books tailored to male readers. So I shouldn’t complain.

But personally I found it rather dreary. It’s fine for its target audience. though. Cautions for lots of violence, rough language, and sexual situations.