Fiction, Reviews

‘The King Tides,’ by James Swain

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James Swain is an author I haven’t read before. But he turns out a good story. The King Tides grabbed me from the first page, and kept my interest as few books have in a while.

Jon Lancaster is the hero. He’s a former cop and Navy Seal who now works as an unlicensed private eye in Fort Lauderdale, specializing in finding missing children. Instead of charging his clients a fee, he asks them to buy him something – a refrigerator, or a set of silverware or something. That way, he says, he’ll always remember them as individuals. (Author Swain has also made an interesting – and puzzling – choice in giving Lancaster a big stomach. It’s the result of a congenital condition, he explains. He’s not overweight, and is in excellent shape.)

At the beginning of the book Lancaster makes a quick rescue in Melbourne, Florida (I mention that because I used to live near Melbourne). Then he gets called in by a family whose daughter has not disappeared – yet. 15-year-old Nicki Pearl is beautiful and seems innocent. But wherever she goes men are following her, carrying their cell phones. And today somebody tried to kidnap her.

About half-way through the book Lancaster connects with FBI agent Beth Daniels, a one-time abduction victim herself (it appears they’ll be a team from here on out). Together they uncover a vicious ring of human traffickers and child pornographers, protected by some very dangerous people.

I didn’t consider The King Tides among the best-written novels I’ve read, but author Swain knows how to grab the reader and keep him riveted to the story. I enjoyed reading this book immensely, and look forward to the next installment.

Cautions for language and some very disturbing accounts of sexual abuse.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Night Man,’ by Brett Battles

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I’m a big fan of Brett Battles’s Jonathan Quinn series of thrillers. I’m less enamored of his recent X-Coms spin-off series, which is heavy on Girl Power™. But I was eager to read his new spin-off in a different direction, Night Man, starring Quinn’s partner, Nate (I’m having trouble finding Nate’s last name. I wonder if it’s ever mentioned).

As you may recall, Quinn and Nate are “cleaners,” employed by covert agencies to clean up things that might constitute evidence at scenes of action – anything from fingerprints to bodies. Their partnership suffered a setback a couple years back, when Quinn’s sister Liz, who’d been helping them out, got killed. Liz had also been dating Nate, and he and Quinn were inclined to blame each other. That break has been mended to a degree, but it’s left a space in Nate’s life. He now fills that space by living a secret life, more or less as Batman.

A psychologist might argue that Nate has suffered a psychotic break, because he hears Liz’s voice talking to him. She directs his attention to crime stories in the news, and he applies his spy skills to locating the criminals and stopping them. He does this for Liz.

This time Liz directs him to the story of a young girl seriously injured in a hit-and-run accident in a northern California town. The accident turns out to be no accident at all, and Nate will uncover a monstrous evil hidden discreetly away in an innocuous setting.

Author Battles is extremely good at creating appealing characters, and can be quite funny. (I especially enjoyed the conceit of using very short chapters, a technique I’ve never had the nerve to try.) The writing is generally good, though I can’t resist noting that he misuses the term “begs the question” once. I would have hoped for better than that, but otherwise I have no complaints.

Recommended. Language and situations are adult, but not terribly shocking. Night Man is a fun thriller.

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The finished product

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And here’s the final poster produced by the 99th Infantry folks. I’m quite happy with it. No, that’s not true. I’m delighted.

What you can’t see in the original picture (below) is that I’m surrounded by snow. Lots and lots of snow. And it’s snowed a few inches since the picture was taken. I mentioned to someone that it’s kind of like living in the trenches in WWI (except for minor details like automatic weapons fire). We have trenches to walk in, and trenches to drive in. We generally don’t go anywhere without a trench.

The gas company sent an announcement that we should check that the vent pipes around our gas meters are clear. If they’re blocked, we could suffocate. But to get to mine, I’d have to plow through two or three feet of snow — more where the snow shoveling piles are. And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to do that. From a distance, it looks as if the snow isn’t drifted very high just at that point.

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

Twitter Mob Turns on Its Own

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People who know nothing about the Bible seem to know a few verses, such as “Judge not lest ye be judged,” but the young, bright users of the Internet will want to think those words through and apply them before a social media mob over takes them. Because (sorry for the remedial) Jesus wasn’t condemning judgement in toto. He was saying, “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

To put it another way, if you call out people for cultural offenses, you put yourself at risk for being called out for the same.

This week, a YA author, who led Twitter mobs against perceived social injustices, has had the mob turn on him. He participated in this outcry:

[A] campaign based on misunderstanding and exaggeration led the author Amélie Zhao to take the unusual step of agreeing to cancel the publication of Blood Heir, her hotly anticipated debut novel, which was set to be the first in a trilogy. Advance reading copies had already been sent out. But an angry and underinformed subset of YA Twitter decided that a racially ambiguous character in Blood Heir was black, or this fictional universe’s equivalent of black—the character had “bronze” skin and “aquamarine” eyes—and that therefore certain things that character said and did constituted harmful tropes. (YA Twitter has very conservative norms pertaining to what characters of different ethnicities are allowed to say or do.) The fact that Zhao is ethnically Chinese, is an immigrant to the U.S., and had written Blood Heir in part as a commentary on present-day indentured servitude in Asia didn’t offer her much protection.

Now he has pulled his own novel from publication, having run afoul of his own tribe of trolls.

Jesse Singal (quoted above) notes that this outrage may be warranted or at least understandable if it came from readers who had read the books, but this outrage flames up from shallow reviews, tweets, or public comments before books are even released.

“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture‘s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.

(via Prufrock News)

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“Uncle Lars Wants you”

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Sorry to post another picture of myself.

No, I’m not. I love it.

Anyway, you may recall my small involvement with the group devoted to memorializing the 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate), the commando battalion recruited from Norwegian expatriates and Norwegian-Americans during World War II.

I was recently asked to be their “spokesviking,” and they asked for some pictures of me in my kit, in the James Montgomery Flagg “I WANT YOU” style. I meant to get photos taken during our reenactment group’s Viking feast last week, but the forces of nature made that impossible, as is their wont in these parts.

So I got a friend over to take some yesterday. Here’s one. I sent several off to the 99th people, and I’ve seen a preliminary mock-up of what they’re going to do with it. It’s pretty cool. I look forward to sharing the finished product.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Echo Killers,’ by Danny R. Smith

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A pair of armed robbers, one big, the other small, knock over a store in the rough Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles. The owner refuses to report the crime, but a little boy tells the cops.

The same pair (apparently) hit another store shortly thereafter, killing a well-liked storekeeper and a wino on the sidewalk.

In Danny R. Smith’s Echo Killers, Detective “Dickie” Jones has a new partner – a feisty Latino woman named Josie – and they join the hunt for a team of outlaws who mirror themselves, in a way – a big Anglo and a Latina. We learn the story of these two outlaws, too. They are Army deserters, and the woman doesn’t know she’s still being hunted by an officer she spent a night with once. Their almost star-crossed story bears the marks of tragedy, as the two hurtle toward one another on a fatalistic trajectory.

This is the third volume in Smith’s “Dickie Floyd” series. “Dickie” and “Floyd” haven’t actually been partners since the end of the first book, but they keep gravitating together. Their personal bond is a tight one. The book’s mood is somber, but the ending is rather sublime – an affirmation of what Luther would have called the policeman’s “vocation.” Another book is coming, according to Amazon.

I liked Echo Killers it a lot. Cautions for foul language, cop humor, and intense situations.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Door to a Dark Room,’ by Danny R. Smith

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Book two in the “Dickie Floyd” police procedural series (make sure to read them in order; author Danny R. Smith routinely spoils the previous book each time out), set in Los Angeles, finds Detective Richard “Dickie” Jones returning to the job after six months. He got shot in the last book, and has been recovering both physically and psychologically. When Door to a Dark Room begins, his wife has left him, and his partner, Martin “Pretty Boy Floyd” Tyler, has been teamed with someone else. As Dickie eases back into the schedule, he’s assigned to the Cold Case Unit. Until something more compelling comes up.

In the wealthy, secure city of Santa Clarita, a woman realtor disappears. When her car is found, there’s a body in it – but they’re not sure it’s hers, as the head and hands have been removed. And her husband seems strangely impassive about the whole business.

Meanwhile, Dickie’s cop instinct is telling him he’s being watched. Soon he becomes convinced a man in a car is staking out his apartment. He keeps quiet about it at first, not sure whether his PTSD has made him paranoid.

In the end, the various investigations converge (I wonder how often that happens in real life – probably not as much as in fiction), and the cops begin moving in on a depraved killer who is not all that smart, but has remarkable animal cunning.

I’m growing fonder of the Dickie Floyd novels. They’re not as accomplished as other series I could name, but they have much to teach us. Author Smith is a former detective, and the real heart of these books is a sort of apologia for good cops – that they shouldn’t be judged by their crude jokes, but by the things they do. And that they’re under considerable psychological pressures, pressures that would destroy most people, and which often destroy them. A little like Joseph Wambaugh, without the despair.

Cautions for lots of profanity, and deeply disturbing crime situations. Recommended, if you can handle it.

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Alert the Media: Walker could be wrong

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A while back, I blogged about a recent article declaring that a Swedish Viking warrior’s grave, long assumed to be male, was probably that of a woman. I cited Judith Jesch’s critiques of the article, which she considered over the top and under-authenticated.

A recent article in in the Journal Antiquity has addressed those objections. Researchers insist that the body in the grave was indeed that of a woman.

The barrage of questions from the public and other scientists was unrelenting: Were the researchers sure they had analyzed the right bones? Was there more than one body in the burial, of which one was surely a man? And if the warrior’s sex was indeed female, is it possible they were a transgender man? [See Images of the Viking Woman Warrior’s Burial]

Now, in a new study published online yesterday (Feb. 19) in the journal Antiquity, the researchers of the original study have reaffirmed their conclusion that this mighty individual was a woman. The new study addresses all the questions people raised, and more.

Living Science reports on it here.

I have to eat a small amount of crow in this case, but all in all I’ve decided to dig my heels in. I’m suspicious of this story. It doesn’t fit the textual accounts — either the contemporary chronicles or the Icelandic sagas.

I keep coming back to my “dog in the nighttime” argument. If Viking armies were full of fighting females, why are the monastic chroniclers silent about it? How could they resist denouncing “unnatural females” and “monstrous witches” in such a situation?

So I’m waiting for more information. Ms. Jesch seems not entirely satisfied as well.

However, I’ll admit I’m prejudiced.

Fiction, Reviews

‘A Good Bunch of Men,’ by Danny R. Smith

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A book that didn’t grab me at first, but pulled me in as it went on. That’s A Good Bunch of Men, by Danny R. Smith. Smith is a former police detective himself, so authenticity is his strong suit.

A Good Bunch of Men is the first book in the “Dickie Floyd” series. Dickie Floyd is not the name of the main character, but the corporate name of a near-legendary detective team in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They are Richard “Dickie” Jones, and Matthew “Pretty Boy Floyd” Tyler. Although there’s a mystery to be solved, A Good Bunch of Men is more than anything else a book about a relationship, about how two guys relate as friends and partners in extreme circumstances.

When a transsexual prostitute is found murdered in an alley, the Dickie Floyd team catches the case. When another prostitute of the same sort is found murdered nearby, they begin looking for a serial killer. But the victims’ associates have secrets, and other cops on the case aren’t working very hard. The team will wreck a couple of cars and get into a couple gunfights before the case is closed – explosively.

It’s notable that, although the two detectives make plenty of cracks about the murder victim, “her” lifestyle and her job, that doesn’t affect their investigation at all. The victim was a human being who didn’t deserve to die, and they are determined to get her justice like anyone else. I think that’s precisely the proper attitude.

Also, Dickie wears a fedora hat, which always deserves respect.

I didn’t know what to make of A Good Bunch of Men at first. The trick was in understanding Dickie’s and Floyd’s relationship – the way they talked to each other at first, I thought they were mortal enemies. Turns out it was just cop banter. We know cop banter from any number of novels by Wambaugh, Connelly, etc. – but here it is (I think) more realistic and concentrated. We gradually realize that talking trash is a psychological mechanism cops use for survival. If you think of all those dark stories you’ve heard in your life – the kind that keep you awake and night and make you doubt your faith in God – these guys live those stories. They see that stuff in person. Strong measures are necessary to keep one’s sanity, and those methods look ugly to outsiders.

The cop banter here isn’t as witty as what we get in other books. It’s cruder and less witty. But as I got to know these guys better, I got interested in them. Danny R. Smith hasn’t mastered storytelling yet, and but he shows great promise, and I’ve bought the next book in the series.

Cautions for disturbing material and obscene language.

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Series preview

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Sofia Helin (Crown Princess Martha) tries to persuade Kyle MacLachlan (Pres. Franklin Roosevelt) to support the Norwegian government in exile, in a scene from Atlantic Crossing.

I happened to check the IMDb page for Atlantic Crossing, the coming miniseries I helped translate, yesterday. I found the above picture there, and thought it might interest you. I happen to know, through my high-level personal connections in the industry, that this scene was filmed in Czechoslovakia, last month. My boss, who’s one of the script writers, sent me a picture of herself sitting at that desk, in the set replica of the Oval Office.

Don’t rush to pencil in a viewing date, though. The thing apparently won’t be released until early 2021 — and that’s in Norway. Heaven knows when it’ll be available here.