Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Reviews

‘Limelight,’ by Dan Willis

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Book Number 5 in Dan Willis’s “Arcane” series about runewright/private eye Alex Lockerby is Limelight. This book takes the series to a new thematic level, and I enjoyed it.

Alex has come up in the world from his humble roots. He’s getting better-paying cases these days, and hobnobbing with the very powerful, among them the Lightning Lord, the sorcerer who provides electrical power to this magic-dominated 1930s New York City. Another is Sorsha Kincaid, the Ice Queen, who provides its refrigeration and air conditioning. She and Alex are carrying on a wary flirtation, but in Limelight they don’t have much time for anything but crime solving and disaster aversion.

First of all, a famous woman mystery writer has been murdered, to the grief of Alex’s mentor, Izzy. Izzy asks him to investigate the case, and it soon becomes clear that someone wanted to stop her writing a novel based on the unsolved murder of a Broadway actress several years back.

But the police are more concerned with a more spectacular crime, one involving magic. A bank’s wall has been breached by an explosion that appears to have been set off by a rune – only everyone knows that there are no exploding runes. Alex sees evidence here of a level of runecraft he has never seen before – oddly initiated by runes that are themselves quite crudely drawn.

Limelight was not crudely drawn. It was tightly plotted, complex, and highly dramatic. It was fun to read, and I look forward to the next installment.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Man Who Wasn’t All There,’ by David Handler

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There’s a precious handful of writers whom I reread every few years just to remind myself what great writing is. Hemingway isn’t one of them.

Several recent releases from my favorite authors have recently been released, but I haven’t bought them because they’re kind of pricey, and things are a little tight just now. But I couldn’t resist David Handler’s latest Stewart Hoag book, The Man Who Wasn’t All There.

As with all the recent books in the series, this one isn’t contemporary, but is shoehorned into Stewart’s past. The Man Who Wasn’t All There is set in the 1990s. Hoagy has finally overcome the writer’s block that metastasized into drugs, divorce and destitution for him, and is clean again, working at last on his next novel. Even better, he has reconciled with his ex-wife, actress Merilee Nash. He’s been living in her New York apartment, but he’s just moved out to her Connecticut farm to winterize the house when he isn’t creating, while she’s in Budapest shooting a movie with Mel Gibson.

It’s great until he’s approached one day by a tubby little man with serious BO, who’s cobbled together something resembling a state trooper’s uniform, and carries a pistol. This delusional man is looking for Merilee and tries to push Hoagy around. Hoagy and his faithful basset hound, Lulu, run him off.

Hoagy then calls the police, and soon a fleet of official vehicles show up. Turns out the weird little man is Austin Talmadge, the second richest man in Connecticut. He’s delusional, and sometimes goes off his medications and harasses people. This is of concern to his brother Michael, the richest man in Connecticut, a recluse who’s close to the governor. The police are soon headed out to bring Austin in again, but it goes wrong, and Hoagy (along with Lulu) gets kidnapped by the loony billionaire. Much violence and mystery follows, until Hoagy figures it all out.

The Man Who Wasn’t All There went down very smoothly. The Stewart Hoag books are consistently fun to read. Hoagy is a bit of a snob and a dilettante, but possesses just enough humor and self-awareness to make his company amusing. Occasionally he hints at opinions I don’t care for, but (as you see above) he sometimes gets it right. He disses Hemingway in this one, and that always pleases me.

Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bring Her Home,’ by C. E. Nelson

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I’ve gotten some pleasure from C. E. Nelson’s Trask Brothers novels, of which Bring Her Home is the third. The author seems to be trying to fill the gap left by John Sandford when he moved his Lucas Davenport character to a wider canvas than Minnesota. And he succeeds to some extent, especially in terms of cop banter (I love cop banter). The Trask Brothers, our heroes, are identical twins, one a county sheriff in northern Minnesota, the other an officer with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension based in Minneapolis. This adds the element of sibling rivalry to their banter, and that’s fun.

In Bring Her Home, the brothers have taken a week of common vacation leave for fishing, their favorite pastime. But it’s been raining all the time, and finally boredom drives them to the local police department to inquire about a missing person’s poster they’ve seen. The local chief is happy to have them review his files on the disappearance of a young woman three years ago. They don’t come up with any new ideas, but when a similar-looking young woman disappears up north, they start to suspect the two abductions might be connected. Don, the BCA brother, assigns a female officer to go north to look into things. After a while she becomes suspicious of a security officer at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Having given the Trask Brothers three books to win my favor, I have to say the weaknesses in the stories outweigh the virtues for me. The author isn’t a particularly good wordsmith, and makes a fair number of word mistakes – using “lead” for “led” and “dived” for “dove,” for instance. Also, there’s too much dependence on sheer good luck and coincidence to get main characters out of deadly danger – characters have a right to some luck, but you shouldn’t go to that well too often. I was slightly annoyed that a lot of the actual investigation in this book was delegated to a brand-new character – an improbably attractive female BCA agent whose presence I can only attribute to creative affirmative action. Also, I was supposed to believe that some highly placed people were covering up actual serial killings to avoid bad publicity. Few people have less respect for high officials in Minnesota than I do, but that strained my credibility. Also, the violence in this book was of a particularly distressing kind.

Some amusing banter doesn’t make up for all these weaknesses. I think I’m done with the Trask Brothers. Regretfully.

Fiction, Reading, Reviews

Dune: Atreides Triumphant

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{Reading Dune for the first time] Update 5: Dune ends in a sudden halt. I suppose everything is wrapped up neatly enough, but there’s no page or two about everyone settling into a new life or looking forward to a new day. Nothing about drawing Rose closer, setting Elanor on your lap, and saying, “Well, I’m back.” It ends with Paul lowering the boom on his enemies, making demands, and done. Maybe the next book picks up immediately, but that brings me to main thing I intend to say in this post–pacing.

(By the way, how do you pronounce Harkonnen? I know how the 1984 movie says it, but I’m more comfortable putting the emphasis on the first syllable. Emphasizing the second syllable strikes me as thoughtlessly American. Herbert frequently agreed with me when he said the name, so I’ve read, but he may have said it the other way too.)

Book 1: Dune builds at an appropriately slow pace to strong climax. Book 2: Maud’Dib felt slow as I read the first few pages, but I may have been projecting. After Paul and Jessica collect themselves on the heels of the main event in book 1, the story kicks back into gear. This section has the one chapter I was tempted to skip. It focuses primarily on the death of an important figure, so it’s good to give such an event proper weight. But it’s also like reading appendix 1 on planet ecology and the visionary who intended to change Arrakis. Too much lecturing. Book 3: The Prophet picks up a few years after the end of the previous section and tells a quick story of longer period of time.

Dune has a lot of fighting, but Herbert doesn’t focus on it. The fights we see are the personal ones. He skips over taking village strongholds, defending hideouts from imperial soldiers, and knocking patrol ships out of the sky. Instead we get an explanation of how the tough, imperial troops are losing 3-1 against rebels, who are supposed to be scattered ruffians, to the disgusting Baron Harkonnen, who had assumed any fighting had already been handled. That’s just one example of how the story tells us where the conflict lies ahead in one chapter and how it’s behind them in the next.

Herbert writes well. He doesn’t try to make irrelevant scenes appealing. He’s willing to wrap them up off camera. I do wish he would have refrained from constantly referring to training. The reader has plenty of time to understand the deep, lengthy training Paul and Jessica have endured. Do we have to mention it every time they try not to blow a gasket?

Photo by Juli Kosolapova on Unsplash

Fiction, Reviews

‘Mind Games, by Dan Willis

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Dan Willis’s Alex Lockerby series of urban fantasy/mysteries grows more intriguing as one reads on. The fourth installment is Mind Games, in which many puzzles are solved and puzzlier ones appear.

Alex operates as a runewright/private eye in a 1930s New York where magic is the main technology. In Mind Games, a rich couple ask him to find their daughter, who has gone missing. Alex uses a finding rune to locate her in a nightclub, but the owner says she’s with him and they’re going to be married. The girl agrees that’s true, so Alex leaves them alone. But the next day she calls the police for rescue.

There’s also a young man who asks Alex to prove his wife didn’t murder her lover. In fact, he says, his wife didn’t even know the man she was arrested for shooting to death. Alex assumes he’s just in denial, but in fact there’s no evidence she even knew the guy. So why would she kill him?

Meanwhile, a number of the lower-level runewrights who operate from street carts have started working for a company that’s mass-producing runes in a way Alex had always assumed impossible. And homeless people are disappearing altogether.

And then there’s the little problem that Alex gave up the majority of his life force while saving the city, a few adventures back. His energy clock is running down, and his friend and mentor Iggy is working feverishly to create a life-extension rune for him.

As Alex Lockerby’s world develops over the course of the books, it grows increasingly interesting. I especially like the chemistry between Alex and Sorsha Kincaid, New York’s foremost sorceress. She’s beautiful, rich, highly dangerous, and a denizen of the highest society, while Alex is a lowly P.I. But there are sparks between them, and she’s learning to respect him. You can’t help wondering what comes next.

The prose is pretty ordinary, but the storytelling and world-building are excellent. And the characters aren’t bad. I’m enjoying the ongoing series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Clean Kill,’ by C. E. Nelson

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The second of the Trask Brothers murder mysteries, set in Minnesota, is Clean Kill. The first book centered more on David Trask, sheriff of Lake County in northern MN. This time we spend a bit more time with his twin brother Don, a big shot with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

A band on tour borrows a tour bus, only to notice a foul smell coming from one of the luggage compartments. Inside they find a ripe corpse, which has – oddly – been cleaned with bleach, and had its finger- and toenails removed. Soon similar bodies, all of drug addicts, start showing up around Two Harbors, where David lives, and so the cop brothers will have to join forces. Meanwhile, Don is growing curious about a prominent, highly connected man who seems to be connected to all this, and his bosses are telling him to back off. Which only makes him more suspicious.

Since John Sandford has taken Lucas Davenport national, there seems to be an opening for a new fictional Minnesota super-cop. Or cops. I’m not sure the Trask brothers quite fill that vacancy yet, but they’re not bad. My main complaints were that the author seemed ignorant of Chinese buffets (he seems to think you pay after eating), and the addition of a new homosexual character, one assumes in order to fill some quota. But the character isn’t all that annoying, and isn’t on stage too much, so I’ll put up with it for now.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Chain,’ by Dan Willis

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In an alternate-universe New York City, where they mostly have magic instead of science, Alex Lockerby is a runewright/private detective. In an earlier adventure, Alex saved the city by transporting the floating castle of Sorsha Kincaid, one its foremost sorceresses, into the Atlantic. This succeeded, but left him with snow-white hair and only a few months left to live. Thanks to a restorative potion he takes several times a day, he’s able to still function as a runewright, but he’s well aware of time running out.

In The Long Chain, Number 3 in the series, a Nobel-prize winning chemist disappears, and his daughter hires Alex to find him. He does, but the old man has been injured and has lost his memory. Meanwhile a number of prominent alchemists have disappeared, and Alex is concerned for the safety of one of those remaining, the mother of his new girlfriend. However, Sorsha the Sorceress wants Alex to use his “finding rune” to identify the source of a mysterious, unnatural fog that has blanketed the city for weeks and seems to be growing worse day by day.

As you’ve probably noted, the plot of The Long Chain is a complicated one, but I was impressed with the way author Dan Willis tied it all together. And one of the mysteries ended in a resolution that was at once surprising and poignant.

The writing could be better, but I’m enjoying the storytelling in this Arcane series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Color of Blood,’ by Keith Yocum

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For a while there, I thought I’d found a new series to follow passionately. I liked the first half of Keith Yocum’s The Color of Blood very much. But it faded in the stretch for this reader.

Dennis Cunningham is an investigator for the CIA. He’s not an agent; he investigates crimes committed against, or by, Agency operatives. His strength is interrogation, his chief method bullying. He offends people, gets them angry, and they lower their defenses and unload the truth. He has a high clearance rate, but very few friends, at Langley or anywhere else.

He’s just back from compassionate leave, after a breakdown following the death of his wife. To ease him back into the job, he’s assigned to look into the disappearance of an agent in Australia. Basically he’s just supposed to check somebody else’s work; no big deal.

But when he gets to Australia, (where he’s required by law to be accompanied by a local police officer, who turns out to be a woman who hates him on sight), he begins to suspect that the missing agent is not dead at all. He also grows curious about what that agent had been investigating. And that leads him down paths of inquiry leading to danger, both from bad guys and the unforgiving Australian outback. Along the way, he and his Australian cop escort will begin to see each other in a new way.

For reasons that won’t be hard to guess, I generally like stories about “difficult” male heroes, your Monk/House/Holmes types. I like them even better, for even more obvious reasons, when they get paired up with attractive women. So this story gratified me very much for about the first half.

But then it got out of hand (from my perspective). Dennis’s obsessive risk-taking abruptly ended my identification with him. Unsurprising perils led to not unexpected rescues. Also, there was what I perceived (I could be wrong) as a political message that seemed to me extreme.

So I won’t be continuing with this series. It was fun for a while, though. You might like it better.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Other Emily,’ by Dean Koontz

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She was in that highest rank of beauties that inspired stupid men to commit foolish acts and made wiser men despair for their inadequacies.

One storytelling element I like very much is the book that opens with an impossibility. Dean Koontz’s latest novel, The Other Emily, is such a book. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with all of it, but it led me a merry chase up to the end.

David Thorne is a bestselling author, and very wealthy. But he lives a distanced life, ever since the loss of his girlfriend Emily. She disappeared on a California highway one rainy night ten years ago, when her car broke down. She is assumed to be one of the victims of a serial killer active at the time. David actually pays the man to visit him periodically in prison, in the hope of gleaning a clue to Emily’s fate. He’s grieving, of course, but also racked with guilt, because he should have been with her that night.

Then one evening, in a bar in Newport Beach, he spies a woman who looks exactly like Emily. Not similar to her, but precisely like her in every detail. She even talks like Emily, and seems to know things only she would know. Except that she’s the age Emily was when she disappeared, not the age she’d be today.

David plunges into a passionate affair with this mysterious woman, meanwhile embarking on an obsessive investigation to discover who she really is, where she comes from, and what she’s here for. The secret, when he learns it, will be almost unbelievable and very likely deadly.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the conclusion of The Other Emily. I thought it contrived and implausible, even on science fiction/horror terms. However, the process of reading the book provided a persistent sense of dread all along its length, and I found that very stimulating.

Cautions for language and disturbing subject matter.

Fiction, Reading, Religion, Reviews

Dune: Cynical and Yet Pro-Life

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[Reading Dune for the first time] Update 4: A couple observations on what I’ve read so far.

Paul Atriedes and Lady Jessica, son and mother, are both highly trained in the Bene Gesserit order. Jessica was a nun (if that’s the right word for her position) before being sold to Duke Leto as a concubine. You can see in that statement why nun doesn’t seem like the precise word for her. Others call her a witch and call the Eastern mystical quality of Bene Gesserit ways witchcraft. But what they do doesn’t look like magic at all. It looks like highly accurate intuition, mental processing power, and even kung fu.

At the same time, Jessica frequently criticizes signs of manipulative indoctrination she finds on the desert planet. There’s no indication of universal truths or God Almighty who calls people on every planet to himself. They never speak of faith, only of training. It seems somewhat, but not entirely, secularized.

Contrasted with this is faith of the Fremen, which Jessica would say has been delivered to them by emissaries of the Missionaria Protectiva. This part of the Bene Gesserit order is defined in the glossary as being “charged with sowing infectious superstitions on primitive worlds, thus opening those regions to exploitation.” Paul looks at the honest faith of the Fremen as a seedbed for jihad.

If the Atriedes would speak of universal moral truths or spiritual realities just once, it could remove the cynical smear of every other characterization of faith. But I don’t think they will.

Despite their jaded religious training, they take a remarkably pro-life stance on Jessica’s unborn child. Several times Jessica’s pregnancy has come up, never in the bizarrely clinical way some people talk today, and at a point when she feels compelled to risk her life for the greater good, Jessica asks herself if she has the right to risk the life of her child as well. In 2021 A.D. America, that’s an incredible statement!

I’m a little worried matriarchs of the Bene Gesserit order will emerge to play the part of Big Organized Religion Bent on Evil. Maybe they won’t in this book.

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash