Fiction, Reviews

‘Dead Boyfriends,’ by David Housewright

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Dead Boyfriends

There’s no special trick to conducting an interview. All it requires is a little patience, an ear for the important utterance, and the simple knowledge that to most people the sweetest possible music is the sound of their own voice.

I’m back, after a hiatus of reading other stuff for one reason or another, to working through David Housewright’s superior St. Paul-based detective series starring hobby investigator Rushmore “Mac” Mckenzie. Mac quit the police in order to accept a large finder’s fee from an insurance company, after locating a big embezzler for them.

Dead Boyfriends begins with Mac just trying to help out. He finds a woman, drunk and filthy, on her lawn, screaming about her dead boyfriend. Going inside, he finds the boyfriend several days dead, and proceeds to call the St. Paul police. The cop who shows up roughs the woman up, and Mac tries to cool him down. That earns him 36 hours in a police cell. When he gets out, he’s eager to help the woman’s lawyer, who thinks she can get her off and win a big damage suit from the city to boot.

Getting the case dropped is easy, but the repercussions are bloody, and the threads of the expanding mystery reach into the highest levels of state politics. At the end, Mac will face a hard choice, balancing his sense of justice against his respect for the law.

Good story. It got kind of convoluted at the end, but I’m liking McKenzie more and more. The political comments seem to strike right and left pretty evenly, but some statements are made about government that suggest to me that the author has some sensible opinions. Cautions for language and mature themes, but not too bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cold Fire,’ by Dustin Stevens

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Cold Fire
I bought this book because I got an Amazon discount. Most of the way through I thought it was pretty good, but it fell apart at the end.

When Cold Fire begins, former DEA agent “Hawk” Tate is finishing his last trip of the season as a Yellowstone wilderness guide in Montana. When a woman with a Russian accent shows up asking him to make one last trip, he demurs. It’s too late in the season; snow is coming. She insists, saying that her brother is out there, and he hasn’t checked in with the family. She offers Hawk an exorbitant fee for the job, so he takes her in.

And then there’s shooting, and Hawk is pulled back into a world he’d left behind – a world of law enforcement, Mexican cartels, Russian syndicates, and personal betrayal. The criminals have a plan – but the one thing they haven’t planned on is Hawk’s own burning hunger to get justice for a deep wrong done to him and his family.

Author Dustin Stevens makes the story work right up until the climax, when he loses his dramatic sense. Instead of the rising dramatic tension you want at the end of a thriller, he makes the final climax a plain procession of executions, carried off without a hitch. I suppose he was saving his surprises for the two Big Reveals at the end, but neither of those reveals worked for me. The first was obvious (it seemed to me) from fairly early in the story if you thought about it logically. The second CONTRADICTED EVERYTHING WE’D BEEN TOLD UP TO THAT POINT, without explanation. That was just annoying.

So I don’t recommend Cold Fire particularly. You might like it better. Cautions for the usual stuff.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Disaster Inc.’ by Caimh McDonnell

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Disaster Inc.

Still, the Victory had a colourful history, even by the standards of New York, where any hotel worthy of the name collects incidents of infamy just by existing in the city that doesn’t sleep – or if it does, it sleeps with someone else’s partner.

Caimh McDonnell’s Dublin Trilogy series has come completely loose from its moorings. The trilogy is done, but the characters continue in further adventures, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Because they’re so much fun.

In Disaster Inc., the first book of a new series, we are reunited with big, bibulous Bunny McGarry, former Dublin policeman. Officially he’s dead and buried, but in fact he’s been transported to the United States by a shadowy group possibly connected to the CIA. They’ve equipped him with a debit card and an indestructible cell phone, to facilitate his search for the love of his life. She’s a jazz singer named Simone, and has lived her life on the run from other shadowy agents, because she “knows too much.”

Unfortunately for Bunny, as the book starts he’s eating an unsatisfactory breakfast in a roadside diner, having been robbed of his rucksack, which contained the card and the phone, during a drunken binge. As he’s pondering his next move a pair of masked gunmen invade the diner, announcing that this is a robbery. Bunny immediately identifies them as amateurs, and neutralizes them. Then he beelines for the door, because he’s in the US illegally and he’d rather not explain himself to the police.

But a car pulls up in front of him on the highway. Inside is a woman who was also in the diner. The robbers, she says, were actually there to kill her. She, too, “knows too much.” If Bunny can come to New York and help her get out of her problem, she’ll pay him a lot of money. After some hesitation, Bunny accepts, figuring he can find whoever stole his rucksack at the same time.

Which kicks off a highly improbable, but extremely enjoyable, adventure. McDonnell’s trademark wit is well in evidence, though I found a couple editorial errors – a wrong word choice and a confusion of attributions in a stretch of dialogue.

But still it was a lot of fun, and I recommend it – if you can handle the obscenities.

Uncategorized

A good man and true

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Jury

More pulse-pounding excitement in my larger-than-life life, today. I got a summons for jury service. It starts on a date next month.

This is a pretty mundane thing, of course, but what struck me as I read the notice was that, if I were writing a novel about my life (not a project I’d recommend), this is precisely where I’d stick in a spot of jury duty. A new experience, outside my ordinary routine, just when things were getting dull and I had no particular commitments.

As if there were a Guiding Hand in the universe, or something.

Actually, I did jury duty once before, when I was living in Florida. I got called in, sat through a voir dire (is that how you spell it?) got rejected for the jury (it was a child abuse case, and I’ve been abused). I was told, along with the rest of the pool, at the end of the day (I think it was the third) that our services would no longer be required.

I expect doing it in the gritty metropolis of Minneapolis will be somewhat different.

But hey! Ten bucks a day!

Uncategorized

How we live now

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Sorry I didn’t post last night.

I’m living my life right now like a… I don’t know. I need a good metaphor. Like a duck hunter? I don’t know when a job is coming in, but I try to have my shotgun ready and my eye on the sky. The email arrives – “Can you get this episode done before the end of the business day tomorrow?” (8 hours ahead in Norway) – and I clear the decks for action. An episode revision takes about a day to do, but it can vary. I don’t plan on doing much of anything else that day.

I live a life of action, like a TV hero.

Yesterday I actually did have something else going on – one of those rare occasions when a family member drops in to crash on my sofa for a night. It went fine. I was able to go out to dinner with him and still get the work done by about 9:00 p.m. I wasn’t able to make much conversation with my guest, but hey, that was a plus for him. Continue reading How we live now →

Fiction, Reviews

‘Holy Ghost,’ by John Sandford

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Holy Ghost

John Sandford’s Virgil Flowers novels take a different approach from his more famous “Prey” novels starring Lucas Davenport. Virgil investigates in small town and rural Minnesota, and he generally handles less horrific crimes than Davenport. But that makes the stories no less interesting, and the puzzles in Holy Ghost are plenty challenging for any reader, I’d say.

Wheatfield, Minnesota was a moribund little town until the young mayor and a friend come up with a questionable scheme for reviving the economy. It involves a series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary in the local Catholic church. They mean no harm, though they certainly profit from the situation. Pretty much everyone is happy with how things are going (including a skeptical visiting priest), until somebody starts shooting at visitors.

Virgil Flowers, former lady’s man (he’s now in an exclusive – though unmarried – relationship), and part-time outdoor writer, goes to Wheatfield in his capacity as an agent of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He meets a series of colorful characters (described pretty much without condescension), and pokes into everybody’s business in his low-key style. These are simple people, but the mystery is not simple at all.

I liked Holy Ghost the best, perhaps, of any of the books in this series. And that’s in spite of the depiction of a religious hoax, which is handled more casually than I approve of. But I liked the treatment of small-town people, and the dialogue was often quite funny.

Cautions for language, dirty jokes, violence, sexual references, and lighthearted handling of religious matters.

Authors, Publishing

What to Do When a Popular Author Plagiarizes

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I hate to ask this, but apparently many are. Is Ann Voskamp a serial plagiarist?

World News Group’s Emily Belz writes, “The short answer is ‘No,’ but a couple of examples of minor plagiarism should give authors and publishers new determination to take great care in attributing stories and wordings to their creators.”

She notes that an anecdote in Voskamp’s The Broken Way reads almost exactly as it was written in social media by Cynthia Occelli, so all sides acknowledged the copying, but this passage did not throw a flag when run through the publishing industry’s plagiarism detector.  That puts the responsibility for writing your own words back on the author.

Non-fiction, Religion

Stanley: Make the Church Irresistible Again

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Andy Stanley wants to make the church Irresistible again (maybe he should get ball caps printed). He explains the problems he sees in the American church in his new book, released last month, and according to Marvin Olasky, gets several things right.

Stanley notes rightly that “skinny jeans and moving lights” won’t keep many young people from abandoning Christianity. But he argues that the way to hold them, and win others who say they’re “spiritual,” is to abandon the hard things in the Bible and emphasize a smiling Jesus. C.S. Lewis brought us Mere Christianity. Pastor Stanley brings us Mere Sponge Cake.

Stanley says he knows “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” but seriously people, “the Ten Commandments have no authority over you.” I don’t think Jesus would sign off on that. The new covenant is the fulfillment of the old covenant. The law given to us by Moses still reveals the state of our sin and our need for salvation. When Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount, he essentially told us if we thought we knew what the law required, we didn’t know the half of it.

I don’t doubt Stanley has a pretty good point somewhere at the beginning of his line of thought, but where he runs with that line is straight heresy. I love what Steven Graydanus said about Stanley’s solution, published in an interview this summer.  Stanley said, “Without the OT, we can make a better case for Jesus,” to which Graydanus replies, “As *what*? Go into the Sistine Chapel and paint over everything except the figures of Yahweh on the central ceiling panel and Jesus on the west wall. At that point, what on earth are you looking *at*?”

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Forbidden Door,’ by Dean Koontz

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The Forbidden Door

I’ll read pretty much anything Dean Koontz writes these days, and the Jane Hawk series definitely has an intriguing concept. But frankly, I think The Forbidden Door is an unnecessary book.

We continue the saga of Jane Hawk, former FBI agent who is all that stands between civilization and The Arcadians, a high-level conspiracy of elites who are gradually taking the country over through implanting nanomachines in people’s brains, turning them into slaves without free will. The Arcadians have already murdered her husband, and now they’ve turned Jane into the FBI’s most wanted criminal. Legal and extralegal resources are being marshaled to capture her. She hid her son Travis with friends, but now that hiding place has been discovered, and Travis is now staying with the most unlikely protector in the world – a brilliant agoraphobe who lives in a hidden bunker. If the Arcadians capture him, they’ll use him to bring Jane in.

I was interested to read The Forbidden Door, but I found it hard to read. Jane actually doesn’t do much in this story. Most of our time is spent either with her vile enemies, or with their victims or potential victims. The level of unease is high, and it’s not relieved as often as I would have liked.

I have a suspicion (probably wrong) that Koontz sketched this series out as a trilogy, and the publishers persuaded him to pad the story with one extra volume, to increase revenue. This book mostly represents that padding.

So I don’t recommend it highly, except in the sense that if you’re reading the whole series – which is worthwhile – you’ll probably need to read this one.

Cautions for language, violence, and disturbing themes.

Reviews

Amazon Prime film review: ‘The Hunter’s Prayer’

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The Hunter's Prayer

Some time back I reviewed Kevin Wignall’s novel, The Hunter’s Prayer. I like Wignall’s work, and judging by my review, it was an interesting story that took a somewhat shopworn premise in unexpected directions. We’re used to stories about hit men who have a crisis of conscience and decide to save a target. In this book, a hit man saves a young girl, but then their paths diverge, going in surprising – and shocking – directions.

The movie version, which I watched on Amazon Prime the other night, does not follow the book very closely. It starts right – a teenaged girl in a private school in Switzerland (Ella Hatto, played by Odeya Rush) is attacked in a nightclub along with her date, but they are suddenly rescued by an efficient professional killer, Stephen Lucas (Sam Worthington). They go on the run, but contrary to the book the boy soon bails out. And the story after that runs along conventional action movie lines. The climax, though featuring plenty of violence and shooting, is pretty predictable.

My own judgment, as a storyteller only peripherally connected to the movie industry, is that the filmmakers had the choice of being faithful to the book and doing something dangerous and unconventional, or sticking to tried and true patterns. They chose the safe route, and came out with an adequate action film that no one will remember much a few hours after it’s over.

Cautions for language, violence, and adult themes.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture