When it came to bad relationships, he had no equal, and Valentine couldn’t help but like him, even though he liked practically nothing about him.
James Swain writes novels about cheating in the gambling world, based on the expertise of a magician. I took a chance on Grift Sense, the first book in his Tony Valentine series, because I thought it might be interesting to peek into that world.
Tony Valentine is a former Atlantic City cop who knows just about
everything there is to know about gambling cheats. He’s retired in Florida now,
but casino owners still send him surveillance tapes, so he can study them and
identify some particularly clever scam.
He gets a request from Nick Nicocropolis, who owns the
Acropolis casino in Las Vegas, once a premiere venue, now aging and on its last
legs. A guy has come in twice and won big. Too big for the odds. And the video offers
no explanation for his “luck.” Tony doesn’t care for Nick much, but he accepts
his offer to fly out to Sin City for two reasons – one is the challenge. The
other is to avoid his estranged son Gerry, whom he wants to avoid just now.
Tony will learn, after a lot of looking, that Nick has a bigger problem than just a single card shark. Something major is being planned, a crime that will shake Vegas and destroy Nick – unless Tony can stop it.
There was a lot to like in Grift Sense. Author Swain plots with the instincts of a sleight-of-hand artist, equipped with big surprises up his sleeve. He’s also a good writer, capable of turning out a pretty good sentence. His characters are interesting and layered.
But I won’t be reading any more. I find that I just don’t like the world of gambling. It’s full of predators, and cynicism is the only sensible attitude. The nicest, most sympathetic people are either victims or con artists. I feel no desire to revisit that world.
You might have a different response. If so, this is a pretty
good book.
In the latest installment in Brett Battles’s solid Jonathan Quinn thriller series, he takes us on a diversion back in time. The Damaged is a prequel, telling us what happened before Jonathan Quinn first appeared in The Cleaner.
Jonathan Quinn, if you’re not familiar with him, is a “cleaner.” That is, he’s one of the guys who cleans up the scene after a government agency assassinates or abducts somebody. In The Damaged, he’s still building his reputation. He’s efficient, honest, and thorough in his work. He owes his career –and his life – to his former mentor, Durrie.
But Durrie’s star is in decline. Always a gruff and surly
type, recently he’s become erratic. He takes shortcuts at his work, and blames
his mistakes on others. His narcissism is devouring his personality.
Quinn wants to help him, both for friendship’s sake, and for
the sake of Durrie’s girlfriend, Orlando, with whom Quinn is silently in love.
So when he gets an assignment and is asked to take Durrie along as his helper
(a demotion for Durrie), he agrees, hoping to help him get his footing again
and reinstate himself.
But Durrie has his own plans. In the classic style of bad
characters, he’s incapable of believing in virtue in others. If Quinn is
helping him, he must have ulterior motives. He must be planning to move in on
Orlando.
Durrie is going to thwart this “plot.” And he doesn’t care
who gets hurt along the way.
The Damaged was a pretty good story in a dependable series. Its chief defect is a somewhat anticlimactic ending, but that’s because it’s setting the scene for The Cleaner. New readers will find it a decent introduction to the series, and old fans will find it entertaining.
I wrote, some time back, about “discovering” Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” – years and years after the rest of the world did, of course. And I mourned the man’s death, having found some of his stuff both intriguing and moving. I didn’t know a lot about his personal life, though. Kyle Smith fills in the details in his article about a new documentary on Cohen’s romantic life, over at National Review:
Directed by Nick Broomfield, the new documentary Marianne &Leonard: Words of Love is intended as a tribute to the relationship that inspired one of Cohen’s best-known songs. It is actually more of an indictment. In nauseating detail, it documents the damage wrought by open relationships and other errors of the counterculture. Cohen, once he achieved success as a performer, discovered he was the Elvis of bookish depressives and indulged himself with the women who stampeded to his shows. He was living with Marianne while writing songs about hooking up with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea Hotel. A friend of Cohen from those years, Julie Felix, recalls, “Leonard was a great, uh, feminist. He said to me once, ‘I can’t wait till women take over.’” Ladies, when a man says this, listen carefully. What is he really saying? Cohen was giving himself a license to treat women badly.
And there it is again, the sour legacy of the ‘60s. And the ‘70s. When I reminisce about those anarchic decades, you must bear in mind (in fairness) that I was not a neutral observer. I didn’t envy the hippies their drugs – I’ve never understood why anyone would want to lose control of their mind – but I envied them the sex. Sex in the Age of Aquarius was a loud party in the next room, keeping me awake all night.
From Leonard Cohen to Charles Manson to Ira Einhorn (the founder of Earth Day who murdered his girlfriend and stored her body in a suitcase), the Sexual Revolution was an era of the manipulation of young women, justified by high-sounding philosophical and psychological claptrap. We’ll never know the cost in ruined lives, ruined health, and actual deaths. (The movie Forrest Gump is one of the few honest treatments in cinema.)
When we look back at that era from the perspective
of contemporary sensibilities (which happens rarely, because the old hippies
are still around and still determined to hush it up) it’s hard to comprehend. “How
could people allow this to happen?” you might ask. “With so many victims, why
didn’t anyone say anything?”
The answer is that some people were saying something. Preachers were saying something. Church people were saying something. Small town people were objecting, and farm people.
Uncool people. People nobody listened to. People
they made fun of on TV.
Today, the victims are different. My friend Moira Greyland Peat, author of The Last Closet, one of the earliest “guinea pigs” in the Great Gay Experiment, has chronicled how children in “gay families” are subject to sexual abuse far out of proportion to their percentage of the population.
Again, people are sounding the alarm. But we’re not the cool people. The very fact that we don’t parrot the approved public narrative is proof that we’re bigots, and unworthy of a hearing.
We live in a new age of ignorance, I think. Through
most of history, information was limited by physical unavailability. Most
people knew what their neighbors knew and what their priests told them, nothing
more.
Nowadays there’s so much information around, we
depend on great information aggregators to choose for us what we’ll hear. We’re
back to depending on the neighbors and the priests, only those neighbors and
priests are wealthy strangers far away, with their own motivations.
You can’t operate on lies forever. Structures with flimsy
foundations must inevitably fall. So the falsehoods won’t stand forever.
I just fear how many more innocent victims will be crushed in the collapse.
He had always been a deceptively good athlete, in the sense that, to look at him, you wouldn’t have thought he was any kind of an athlete at all.
Bless me Father, I loved this book. Loved it to death. I’ve enjoyed all Caimh McDonnell’s novels, but this one was a special delight.
If you haven’t been following the series, fat old drunken Bunny McGarry, former Dublin policeman, is thought by his Irish friends to be dead. He is not. Instead, he’s in the United States on a personal mission. The love of his life is living in hiding, protected by a shadowy, renegade order of nuns called the Sisters of the Saint. He needs to contact her and warn her about something. As I Have Sinned begins, he has learned the name of a man who might be able to put him in touch with those women. But that’s another challenge. The man is Father Gabriel de Marcos, a priest in a New York ghetto neighborhood. Father Gabriel has no time for Irishmen on missions – he’s trying to save a few of the kids in his flock from the trap of gangster life – a girl who can box, a boy who can paint, a young man with a gift for words.
But Bunny stubbornly insists on sticking around until Father Gabriel can help him. Bunny can even help with coaching the kids in the church gym. Reluctantly, Father Gabriel lets him move in as a type of assistant priest –a tough gig for Bunny, devoted as he is to getting drunk and cursing. Gang leaders are threatening Father Gabriel, accusing him of stealing “their” people. But the priest insists he has no need of Bunny’s protection.
And it’s almost true. Father Gabriel has secrets, and a
history. A history that’s catching up with him.
It all comes together in a farcical explosion of improbable
action, slapstick, and genuine heroism and grace.
What I loved most about I Have Sinned was that along with exciting fights and witty writing, there was genuine goodness and sweetness here. Father Gabriel is a tremendous hero, a sincere man of God, loving his neighbor and struggling to redeem his past (I could quibble that he has a poor understanding of grace, but what do you expect from a Catholic?). I was charmed even while I laughed. You’d have to go far to find a more positive portrayal of a man of God in any novel.
Nevertheless, you need to be prepared for lots of foul language. But other than that, I highly recommend I Have Sinned. You’ll probably want to read the rest of the books first, though.
I very much enjoyed John C. Wright’s wildly creative – and wildly fun – fantasy novel, Somewhither, which I reviewed a while back. There we met one of the strangest heroes in fiction – teenaged boy Ilya Muromets, who always knew he was adopted – after all, he looks like a Neanderthal, while the rest of his family is slender and blond. What he has learned since is that he is actually an alien from another universe, and pretty much invulnerable. If he gets wounded – even beheaded – his body just reassembles itself. So one day when he saw the girl he had a crush on – scientist’s daughter “Penny” Dreadful – pulled through an interdimensional portal into an alternate reality, he did what came naturally. He followed her, wearing a bathrobe and carrying his grandfather’s katana sword. After all, he’d always wanted to be a hero. Then followed the bizarre adventures of that book.
At the beginning of Nowhither, the second book in the series, Ilya finds himself trapped in a sort of interdimensional transit station, besieged by evil wizards who are slowly breaking down his own wizard’s defense spells. With him are some friends he’s made plus 150 pretty slave girls he’s rescued, all of whom look to him as a leader for some reason. At last he and his friends work out an escape plan, and they manage to escape to Penny’s home planet – an undersea world peopled entirely by something like mermaids. Here Ilya will be reunited with part of his family, and learn some hard truths about himself and the consequences of his actions.
Nowhither is an unabashedly Christian novel – though the Christianity is emphatically Roman Catholic, which will probably bother some Protestant readers. The theological implications all through are complex, and I generally didn’t bother worrying about them. The book is fun, and I wish I could say it was as fun as Somewhither was. But in fact I have some reservations.
One is complexity. Author Wright has created a richly imaginative world, full of characters, nationalities, religions, and even universes – all anchored in the Book of Genesis. But a by-product of that fecundity of invention is that lots of exposition is required. It seemed to me that about half of Nowhither consisted of people explaining stuff. There was some action, but a lot less than in the last book.
The second problem is one I hesitate to name, but can’t avoid. Nowhither is a very sexy book. Young Ilya gets subjected to a level of sexual temptation that’s hard to describe. His (successful) efforts to keep his chastity are admirable, exemplary, violent, and biblical. But lots and lots of time is spent describing the sensual delights of “the drowned world.” (The “mermaid” on the cover is dressed much more modestly than the ones in the book.) I fear that, for teenaged male readers, that may have… unintended results. This much “skin” in a book will not, I fear, contribute much to the Gross National Continence.
Maybe I’m just a prude.
Anyway, I do recommend Nowhither, but mainly so you can keep up with the series and be ready for the next book. And for the jokes, because it’s pretty funny.
The formula for the British police procedural seems to be fairly well established. You have your stalwart Inspector, both wise and experienced (and always male for me, because I don’t read the other kind). You have his stalwart, younger partner – usually, but not always, male – who seems dumb but only in comparison to his boss. Underneath these, a scattering of team members of both genders – the females usually more gorgeous than is probable, but correspondingly smart, and one or two members of racial minorities. You pretty much need to resort to personal quirks to distinguish one series from another.
In the Harrogate Mystery series, set in English Yorkshire,
the main character is Detective Chief Inspector Cyril Bennett. He distinguishes
himself by being a good dresser, and somewhat OCD about organization. At least in
this book, he’s unusual in suffering from Bell’s Palsy, which temporarily
paralyzes half his face, leaving one eye constantly staring.
But that doesn’t keep him from working in Only the Dead. On the grounds of a teacher training college, workmen discover the buried bodies of two infants. At the same time, a vigilante is walking the streets of the city, using mustard gas recovered from unexploded World War I shells to attack and incapacitate (not kill) certain disgraced members of the elderly care industry. Investigation will lead to an insidious human trafficking operation.
I found Only the Dead a little hard to get into at first – the descriptions seemed kind of amorphous. But that got better. After that, the story moved right along and kept my attention.
My problem with the book stems from my personal beliefs and
reactions. This book is not an apologia for the “gay” movement – the gay
characters in the book are fairly unpleasant people. But we spend a fair amount
of time with them, and the scenes get kind of… intimate. I find that icky.
So all in all, my verdict is “neutral.” Not a bad book; the
writing was good. There seemed to be a strong moral sense undergirding all – whether
it’s consistent with my own sense it’s too early to say. But the “ick” factor
may keep me from going back.
Journalist Andy Ngo has spent a good bit time looking at hate crimes and hoaxes of them. He said, “If you constantly tell the public that bigotry is everywhere, some will do anything to seek it out or even create it when they can’t find it.” This piece backs up that assertion, in which Ngo starts with the lawsuit Oberlin College lost to a local bakery and notes the numerous hoaxes its student body has generated. He reports,
In 2013, students at the elite liberal arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration cancelled all classes for the day. The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes.
Twitter is good at these misdirections. Today people are noticing a trending hashtag #NotMyAriel, supposedly in response to the adorable Halle Bailey being cast in a live action remake of The Little Mermaid. However of all the comments pushing back on her casting, none of them use that hashtag. You’re yawning; I can tell. Am I boring you?
Ngo’s reporting is far more serious than unused hashtags. He has worked to expose Antifa for the dangerous group it is. In Portland, Oregon, last Saturday, he was attacked by protesters and consequently hospitalized. Quillette magazine states, “Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.”
Ngo has written more on the attack in this piece for the Wall Street Journal, going so far as to say Portland is growing into a sanctuary city for “domestic terrorists.”
For some reason I’m in the mood for some jingoistic, flag-waving music today. I bet you didn’t even know “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had lyrics. Well, here they are, courtesy of some Barber Shoppers.
I was impressed with J. D. Kirk’s first DI Jack Logan novel, A Litter of Bones. So I pre-ordered the second book, Thicker Than Water. It’s out now, and I’d say the quality has been maintained, though I have cautions.
For the convenience of the reader, Detective Inspector Jack Logan has decided to leave his former post in Glasgow and move permanently to the Highlands, where he solved the Litter of Bones mystery. Now he’s officially in charge of the squad he headed up last time, even including another outsider who also conveniently transfers in.
The body of a woman is found floating, wrapped in a
tarpaulin, in Loch Ness. She was murdered in a particularly savage way, and it’s
extremely aggravating that internet nutbars are flocking in in droves to proclaim
with delight that the Loch Ness monster is responsible.
The mystery leads to some pretty ugly worms under pretty weird rocks, and Jack will (in the honored tradition of fictional detectives) have to “walk off” a concussion and several broken ribs in his effort to bring a very twisted killer to some kind of justice.
The strength of the Jack Logan books is the characters and
dialogue, especially the constant teasing of a junior detective. What I have
the most trouble with is that the murders seem to be selected for their extreme
cruelty. Also, I’m not sure what to make of one purportedly Christian
character.
But all in all, pretty good, if you like this sort of thing.
