Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shelter from the Storm,’ by Tony Dunbar

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I’m also on the waiting list at St. Olaf’s.”

“Saint who? Who the heck is he?”

“I don’t know. It’s a college in Minnesota. One of the boys I met on my trip to France is going there.”

“Minnesota,” he repeated, incredulous. “Please pass me a scone.”

“I’d like to see more of the world,” she said.

The exchange above is from a conversation between Tubby Dubonnet, hero of Shelter from the Storm, fourth book in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series, and one of his daughters. It’s typical of the droll quality of the dialogue in these books, though I mainly chose it because it’s a rare reference to Minnesota and a Norwegian-American school.

By the way, it’s “St. Olaf,” not “St. Olaf’s.” A typically Catholic mistake.

Anyway, in Shelter From the Storm, a Texas outlaw named LaRue has hired some local criminals in New Orleans to help him crack a bank safe deposit vault during Mardi Gras, when he figures no one will be paying a lot of attention. (He is correct in this.)

What he doesn’t expect is rain – not just ordinary rain, but a torrential monsoon that cancels parades and floods the streets and knocks out power in the city. When things go wrong, LaRue has a tendency to shoot people. One of the people he shoots happens to be a new legal client of Tubby Dubonnet’s, and Tubby takes that seriously. He can’t call the police because the phones are out and they’re kind of busy rescuing people, but he’ll chase the miscreants on his own. Even if it means neglecting the new girlfriend he’s met.

If that seems a little over the top, well, Tubby can surprise you sometimes. He’s a fairly lazy fellow, but he has spirit. These books are rich in quirky characters – a little too quirky for my taste sometimes, though amusing.

As I’ve said before, I don’t love the Tubby Dubonnet books, but I don’t hate them either. I have a fairly low threshold for quirkiness, and New Orleans isn’t really my kind of town.

I must also complain that Shelter from the Storm ended with a sort of a cliff-hanger, which is an offense in my code.

But the books are popular, so what do I know?

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Only Death That Matters,’ by Colin Conway

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I’ve skipped a few episodes in Colin Conway’s excellent The 509 series of police procedurals. That was because The Only Death That Matters became available free. But they’re stand-alones, so it was all right. I enjoyed this book just as much as its predecessors.

Ray Christy is a police volunteer. He’s 72 and an army vet. Every day he visits his wife, who’s in a care facility for memory loss. His only son became a cop and died in the line of duty; Ray volunteered to help the Spokane police in an effort to understand his son’s commitment. He doesn’t carry a badge or a gun; he does routine work to take pressure off the real cops. It fills his time and gives his days a purpose.

One day he’s called to pick up a “found” item, a woman’s wallet found in a parking lot. On a whim, he decides to take it back to the owner, at the address on the ID. But when he gets there, he learns the woman is dead, drowned in a bathtub. This is a group home for the elderly, and the owner treats him rudely. Surprisingly, that owner is a cop.

Ray is immediately suspicious. He starts doing research on the man and his business dealings. And then everything blows up…

The 509 series, set in eastern Washington state, is a top-rank mystery series, in this reader’s view. Emphasis is heavily on character. The people in the story are faceted and relatable; I wanted to see how things worked out for them. Detectives Quinn and Burkett are here again, welcome like old friends.

The Only Death That Matters is highly recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Bedroom Window Murder,’ by Peter Zander-Howell

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The other day I reviewed Machinations of a Murderer, by Peter Zander-Howell, a straight-up serious English police procedural mystery set in the 1940s. I enjoyed it immensely, and straightaway bought the first book in the series, The Bedroom Window Murder.

We meet our hero, Inspector Philip Bryce, as he drives to a country house in Hampshire along with his new partner, Sergeant Haig. In the classic tradition of British fiction, these two Scotland Yard detectives have been dispatched from London to investigate a baffling murder out of town. The justification for this official trip (which I understand never happens in real life), is that the victim, Sir Francis Sherwood, was a friend of their boss.

Sir Francis was found dead at his bedroom window, shot in the head by a .22 bullet. The problem that baffles the police is that there seems to be no one in the world – nobody – who hated Sir Francis. He was famously good to his employees, and as a magistrate he was notoriously lenient in sentencing. Everyone who knew him appears genuinely distraught at his death. A rifle found abandoned on the lawn appears to be the murder weapon, but to whom did it belong?

Solving that problem will involve a process of elimination – excluding the impossible, though (as Bryce emphasizes) identifying the impossible is often harder than Sherlock Holmes stories suggest. It will also give Inspector Bryce the opportunity to meet an attractive, available woman – who is, alas, also a suspect. The final resolution presented a moral problem for this reader, but a twist at the end made even that ambiguous.

I didn’t enjoy The Bedroom Window Murder quite as much as the Machinations book, but that’s because this is a classic country house mystery, and lacks the originality of MoaM. But it’s very good of its kind. It plays no modernist games and is faithful to its time and place.

For me, one educational benefit of this book was learning about a landscaping feature called a “ha-ha,” of which I’d never heard before. It’s a wall behind a recess in the earth, intended to block entry to a flower garden without cutting off the view.

A very good book. I like this series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cost of Deceit,’ by H. Mitchell Caldwell

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A little while back I reviewed Cost of Arrogance, by H. Mitchell Caldwell. I found that novel delightful. It was a legal thriller composed with the authority of actual courtroom experience. Highly educational, and well-written to boot.

Could author Caldwell keep that standard up for a second novel, Cost of Deceit? We shall see.

Our hero, Jake Clearwater, teaches courtroom law at a small California university. Before that he was a successful prosecuting attorney. In the last book he was enticed out of the classroom to work the other side of the street – to defend a client on death row.

Now he gets an invitation to do a prosecution again. Lieutenant Cort, a sheriff’s officer, has been tried once already for the murder of his wife. He is known to be angry and brutal, and confesses to striking his wife at least once. According to the wife’s sister, he explicitly threatened her life. Then she disappeared, and no one has heard from her since. The prosecutors can work out a timeline for how Cort could have killed her. No one questions his capacity to kill her. But no body has been found. It’s notoriously difficult to get a conviction in a murder case in the absence of a corpse, so there was a hung jury. The county has decided to hold another trial, and they want Jake to prosecute. It will be during summer break, so he has time, and he can’t resist the challenge. Also, he watched the trial closely, and he wants to see this guy put away.

Over the course of the trial, Jake will come to care very much about the victim’s family, especially her distraught sister, but even about the hapless stripper Cort wants to use as an alibi. Their lives may be in danger if a way can’t be found to get this very dangerous man out of circulation.

I wish I could say Cost of Deceit was as good as the first book. But alas, no.

The first book did an excellent job of incorporating legal information into a well-realized story. Cost of Deceit is less successful. From time to time I got the feeling I was in the middle of one of those industrial training films, where people ask rote questions in such a way that the instructor can give the right answers at the proper place in the lesson plan. The prose was awkward in places too, this time out.

On the plus side, I was anticipating a big, overblown cinematic finale, but the climax was pretty realistic. I appreciated that.

Informational, but written with less care than the last book. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Reviews

Netflix review: ‘War Sailor’

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Another film project on which I worked as a script translator is now available in the US. War Sailor, a Norwegian film released last year (the most expensive movie ever made in Norway, I’m informed), has been expanded into a three-part miniseries for Netflix. I binged it last night and wish to recommend it to you.

After an opening set in Singapore after World War II, we go back to 1939 and observe our two main characters, Alfred (“Freddie”) and Sigbjørn (“Wally”). Freddie is a hard-working family man in Bergen, and Wally is his bachelor friend. Jobs are hard to find, and Wally encourages Freddie to join him in signing on to a merchant ship. Freddie’s wife Cecilia is concerned about the danger, as the war is going on, but Wally reassures her that they’re only going to New York. As both Norway and the US are neutral there’s minimal danger, he reasons. Anyway, he promises to keep Freddie safe.

By the time they reach New York, Germany has invaded and Norway is at war. The Norwegian government has nationalized the country’s merchant shipping (one of their major industries) and put it all at the disposal of the allies for carrying war munitions and supplies. The sailors are suddenly de facto members of the Navy (albeit unarmed), without the privilege of resigning.

What follows is a season in Hell. German U-boats are taking a desperate toll on the Norwegian ships (fully half of them were sunk over the course of the war) and casualties are high. Freddie takes an underaged sailor under his wing as a sort of surrogate son, and gives up a chance to escape from the service in order to protect the young man. When their ship is torpedoed, Freddie and Wally find themselves sharing a raft with a dying man and a madman.

Meanwhile, Freddie’s family at home is struggling to make ends meet, is worried sick about him, and is facing dangers of their own from Allied bombers. It all culminates in one of those bureaucratic snafus that start in mixed signals and end in ravaged lives.

It’s tempting to call the story a tragedy, but in fact it’s better described as aggravated irony. In the world of this war, virtue is never rewarded, and no good deed goes unpunished.

Brilliantly filmed, directed, and acted, War Sailor is not light entertainment. Be prepared for strong language, horrific violence, and dark themes. Not for the kids, but well worth watching for adults.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Lies,’ by Elliot York

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I do love a story of lost love and old mysteries. I found Elliot York’s Dark Lies a fascinating police novel, though not entirely successful.

Logan Cooper is a detective in Santa Cruz, California. He’s a good cop, but he has a tendency to lose control when he faces a particular kind of criminal – the kind who victimizes the innocent. In those cases he tends to black out and use his formidable fists pretty brutally. His superiors have ordered him to see a counselor. They’ve also assigned him to a new female partner, Reggie, and for the moment he’s reserving his judgment on her.

Then he gets called to view a body. A woman has been found in a local lake, drowned in a car with her hand cuffed to the steering wheel. Logan notices a tattoo on her wrist – it’s his own name. He recognizes this woman as Becca, the girl he fell in love with in high school. The girl who, up until today, he understood to have committed suicide more than 20 years ago.

As Logan and Reggie investigate the murder, clues will begin appearing that point to a single suspect – Logan himself. Even he will begin to wonder whether it might be possible that, in one of his blackouts, he might have killed the greatest love of his life.

Sometimes harrowing, Dark Lies kept me fascinated all the way through. Only at the climax did it fall into the pedestrian and predictable (in my opinion). Cautions are in order for foul language and expressions of contempt for religion.

Still, it was 90% a good novel. The follow-up volumes might be good too.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Machinations of a Murderer,’ by Peter Zander-Howell

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I was surprised to find an authentic, old-fashioned British mystery, set in the 1940s, when I picked up Machinations of a Murderer by Peter Zander-Howell. A very original book, I thought, in an un-original form. It’s a plain, point-by-point police procedural, following first the murderer as he plans and carries out his crime, and then the detectives as they deconstruct his too-clever-by-half alibis.

Dr Robin Whittaker is an Oxford PhD, once a promising scholar. But his weaknesses for alcohol and gambling doomed his academic career, and now he works at a lowly job in a provincial museum. His wife, who has some money of her own, keeps him on a short leash. He chafes at the clean living she forces on him, and decides his only reasonable course is to murder her. Confident in his superior intellect, he’s certain that the alibi he constructs, along with the frames he constructs for hapless alternate suspects, will fool the stupid police, leaving him free to drain the funds he’ll inherit.

It’s not at all certain that even the ordinary police would actually fall for his hubristic scheme, but in the event local detectives are not available, so the police call on Scotland Yard for help. They send Chief Inspector Bryce (himself an Oxford-trained barrister) and his assistant, Sergeant Haig. They quickly recognize the doctor as a wrong ‘un, and put themselves to the task of breaking his rather neat alibi. It would disappoint Whittaker to know that one of the key clues in the case will be uncovered by a young, fairly inexperienced policeman who’s assisting Bryce and Haig.

There are no mysteries here. The reader observes everything as it happens, step by step. The great pleasure of this book (and it was a great pleasure to read) is the moral thrill of watching as a prideful and thoroughly unlikeable criminal slowly weaves for himself the rope of lies that will eventually hang him.

In all of Machinations of a Murderer I detected only one hint of a modern sensibility, and that was an intentional irony. Otherwise the author plays it straight from the 1940s. This absence of wokeness and political correctness was entirely refreshing. Aside from the narrative being fascinating in itself.

I highly recommend Machinations of a Murderer. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Fiction, Reviews

Dark, Stirring Sequel in Kotar’s ‘The Curse of the Raven’

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Something about the voice enchanted Llun. It awoke forgotten images of sharp mountain peaks and waterfalls at dawn, images associated with a childhood longing that flared in his heart whenever he listened to his mother sing a ballad of Old Vasyllia.

“I will gladly pay the price of my life,” said Llun.

“You do not know what you are saying.”

The Curse of the Raven, the sequel to The Song of the Sirin, appropriately focuses on the oppression suffered by everyone who survived the fall of Vasyllia. Llun the Smith keeps his thoughts to himself, while almost everyone else in the city parrots approved words and tries not to upset the overseers or their enforcers, the “dog-men.” But he couldn’t keep himself from making beautiful things or adding unnecessary ornamentation.

He is pulled into the enemy’s chambers where they imply he would be useful to them for a project they won’t describe. He is fairly certain that any job they give him will be the last one he ever does, but the enemy won’t make a demand, preferring to hint. They give him time to think about it.

I could give you ninety percent of the plot in three more paragraphs, because the story takes only 84 pages. It’s a good side story that allows time to pass while Voran, the hero of the larger story, is doing small things offstage. Another twenty pages are given to the first chapter of book three, The Heart of the World.

In these few pages, we feel the significant dread smothering the kingdom and have an opportunity to wonder if their hope for salvation is in vain. The Russian spirit still comes through in the nature of the oppression and neglect of the people, which keeps this book in the spirit of its predecessor.

I look forward to the next one.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Suit,’ by Colin Conway

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Even though Matt was younger, Craig admitted his brother was the smarter one. Now, many years after high school, Matt still read books when no teacher was making him.

Another novel in the 509 series by Colin Conway, which I’m enjoying very much. This is Number Four, and it’s called The Suit.

Times are tough for cocaine dealers in Spokane just now. The cops have shut their supply down, and nerves are frayed. One frustrated junkie, Craig, takes it into his head one day to stick a knife into a random guy walking past, a guy in a suit. But the “suit” surprises him by defending himself quickly and efficiently, leaving Craig with a broken nose. Video of the incident goes viral.

Craig’s brother Matt, meanwhile, is trying to keep his “crew” of coke dealers under control. To focus their attention, he suggests they play a game. It begins with “the knockout game,” a fad from a few years back where street punks punched strangers, trying to knock them out with one blow. But Matt adds a new wrinkle. They pool their money, film each attack, and then award points by vote. The winner takes the pot.

Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burkett are on the case, but it’s a tough one. The attacks are random, scattered all over the city. But once the game finds a focus – once the attackers start targeting “suits,” men in business attire, alone, they begin finding a few leads. Which will lead them to, among other people, the original hero “suit” of the video – a man with secrets.

Another good book in an outstanding series. I personally enjoyed The Suit a little less than the previous books, because it required the reader to spend a lot of time with Matt and his “crew,” who are not pleasant company at all.

I also have to admit – and this will surprise no one who follows these reviews – that I have a little trouble with Detective Marci Burkett. I dislike the cliché of the kick-butt female cop who can beat any man. Marci is definitely one of those – I still insist that size and strength count for something, and such characters often seem to deny the laws of physics.

On the other hand, Marci is a better crafted character than most of her sisters in literature. It’s clear she has anger management issues, that her emotional ducks aren’t all in a row. That helps.

But mostly I put up with her because the books are so good otherwise.

Minor cautions for the usual stuff. Good book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shooting Gallery,’ by Stuart Doughty

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I sometimes complain that action novels are written like movies – that is to say, the action is implausible if you stop to think about it.

Stuart Doughty’s Shooting Gallery was (in my opinion) more like a TV show. The plausibility was even less plausible.

I’d read one of Doughty’s John Kite novels before, and liked it more than not. I found it insubstantial but fun. Shooting Gallery, seventh book in the series, is much the same, but it struck me as a little formulaic and (possibly) shopworn in concept.

John Kite’s specialty is recovering stolen works of art. At the beginning of Shooting Gallery, he’s in Massachusetts, attending the unveiling of a stolen Modigliani painting that he recently recovered. But during the ceremony, an intruder starts shooting a gun from a balcony, in the general direction of the front stage. Nobody is seriously hurt, but John (with the reckless disregard for danger that seems to be his style) pursues the shooter on foot, though he does not catch them.

Shortly thereafter, he learns that the recovered painting is a fake. As he asks questions and digs into the records, he begins to suspect that one of the most important figures in the art world, a man on the verge of an important government appointment, is a fraud, a murderer, and very likely something worse.

The writing in Shooting Gallery was generally good – not great, but better than average in this degenerate age. The attempts to render American dialogue could have been better, but I probably couldn’t do any better writing British dialogue. (I might add that there were opportunities to criticize American gun laws, and the author — to his credit — did not take advantage of them.)

What bothered me most was John Kite’s TV-style heroism. More than once he rushes to confront armed opponents with no weapon of his own, and walks into obviously perilous situations without a plan for survival. TV characters act like that, but not, I think, real people, even heroes. If they do, they don’t last very long.

Shooting Gallery was okay as pure entertainment. Read it if it seems like your cup of tea.