Category Archives: Reviews

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Dirty Bomb,’ by Michael Leese

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I’ll say at the outset that I do not love the Roper-Hooley detective series, set in London. I don’t hate the books; I just have no problem putting them down. But I bought a set of four (got them for free, actually), they are readable, and times are tough, so I’m reading them.

In The Case of the Dirty Bomb, brilliant autistic detective Jonathan Roper is back at headquarters, having completed his time with a national security agency. But his partner Brian Hooley is concerned about him. He seems to have lost his way; he’s having trouble analyzing information and is worried he’s “losing it.”

With Hooley’s help, he changes his approach and soon realizes the reason he’s been having trouble. They’re facing an unprecedented problem. Someone is gathering fissionable nuclear material cached in secret locations across Europe and smuggling it into England to set up the extortion scheme to end all extortion schemes.

There’s nothing all that wrong with these books; they simply don’t ring my bells very loudly. The autistic character, Jonathan Roper, is really the most interesting one here. I guess that’s not surprising; he is the “exotic.” But the others could have been made more colorful, in my view. I didn’t find myself caring about them a lot.

Toward the end, the author takes an opportunity to make a dig at anti-Communists, but the political side wasn’t really intrusive. One Russian character’s name was inconsistently spelled. The book was okay, though, though I thought the plot a little far-fetched. Maybe you’ll like it better than I did.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Last Orphan,’ by Gregg Hurwitz

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“This man, he sounds like a force to be reckoned with. And it seems … it seems he got his first taste of wisdom. It can be intoxicating. There’s so much to see that you were blind to before. The problem? He thinks he has it. Wisdom. But no one has it. We just wear it from time to time when we’re lucky.”

I wonder if other people enjoy Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X novels as much as I do. For this reader, these books are more than well-written. They possess a solidity. A punch. No energy is wasted, just as the hero wastes no energy when he fights: “People think of a superpower as going fast when everyone else moves slow. But that’s not as useful as going slow when everyone else is moving fast.” It could be that I respond viscerally to the character’s OCD, his feelings of alienation, of being separated from the rest of humanity. Or maybe the powerful prose works the same for everybody. The books certainly sell well enough.

The Last Orphan, the latest entry in the series, begins with our hero, Evan Smoak, in Iceland, where he has traveled for no other reason than to sample a local vodka in a bar on a glacier. Vodka is one of Evan’s few, small indulgences – taken in strictly controlled quantities, and only the best. Iceland recurs as a reference point again and again in The Last Orphan, indicating something pure, refined, cold and remote. Evan Smoak’s personal, unachievable ideal for life.

But life is messy, and even Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, the freelance hero no one can find, can’t keep himself out of its mess. In The Last Orphan, a very carefully planned and executed government operation manages (just barely) to capture him. Confined in restraints, he is offered an assignment by the president of the United States herself (she’s a woman in this alternate universe). She wants him to take out an international wheeler dealer named Luke Devine. Luke Devine has pulled political strings to stall an environmental bill the president wants passed. But he also controls dangerous agents suspected of very bad acts. If Evan can eliminate him, she’ll give him a full pardon.

Evan couldn’t care less about the president’s bill, but he soon learns that Devine’s personal security men have been doing some horrific stuff, and seem to be guilty of at least two unsolved murders. Once Evan (with the help of his teenaged hacker ward, a girl named Joey) understands the kind of surveillance power Devine wields, he’ll have to figure out how to keep an innocent family safe as a side job.

There are echoes of The Great Gatsby in the descriptions of the wild parties (actually orgies) Devine holds at his Long Island estate. We get to see how several of the regular series cast members are doing now, which is gratifying. And Evan Smoak, against his will but with a sense of moral obligation, is forced to move a little further out of his protective shell as he attempts to outthink and outmaneuver the most intelligent – and dangerous – adversary he’s ever faced.

The Last Orphan is a wonderful book, expertly written. Author Hurwitz even includes one of my favorite author’s tricks – one that should only be attempted rarely, and by a master – a one-line chapter.

I loved it. I wish it were twice as long.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Crooked Man,’ by Tony Dunbar

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Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series has often been recommended to me, but I’ve resisted. Not sure why. After reading Crooked Man, I still haven’t made up my mind how I feel about it, but I liked the book better at the end than in the early stages.

Tubby Dubonnet, for those of you who (as I was) are unaware of him, is a divorced criminal lawyer in New Orleans. That in itself suggests he’s no moral paragon, but he does maintain two rules of ethics in his practice – never screw a client, and never lie to a judge. By the standards of the place, that makes him pretty upright.

He has a colorful cast of clients. Right now he’s negotiating a malpractice settlement for a transvestite stripper who got a bad skin-darkening treatment from a doctor, and trying to coax payment for divorce work from a buxom blonde who may be available for a different kind of transaction. But when Darryl Alvarez, a nightclub manager, asks him to keep a locked sports bag in his safe for a couple days (he swears there’s nothing illegal in it), Tubby goes against his own better judgment and accepts it. This soon puts him in an awkward ethical position, not to mention a dangerous one. Tubby is a clever man, and he’ll need all his cleverness to stay alive.

I prefer my heroes a little more principled than Tubby Dubonnet, but by the end of Crooked Man – which was a lighter concoction than I expected – I was enjoying the story. I bought a whole set of the novels, so I’ll be reviewing more.

Non-fiction, Reviews

2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox

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Professor Joseph McRae Mellichamp of the University of Alabama, speaking at conference at Yale University to an audience that contained the Novel Price winner Sir John Eccles, famous for his discovery of the synapse, together with a number of the pioneers of AI, said: “It seems to me that lot of needless debate could be avoided if AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence — differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research.” In other words, to cite the succinct title of Mellichamp’s talks, “‘the artificial’ in artificial intelligence is real.”

What was the last thing you heard about artificial intelligence? Maybe it was about ChatGPT, an open AI web app that invites people to ask the computer to write anything they can think of.

Chris Hutchinson on Twitter asked it to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of the psychedelic funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The AI said it would be disrespectful to rewrite such a historic speech in this style. Then he asked for a rewrite of the speech as a haiku, and the AI complied. Later, another user was able to get the speech in the style of Sly and the Family Stone by wording the request differently (and possibly by his preceding requests). Maybe ChatGPT had a change of heart after refusing the first request.

Educators have been worried that this program (and others produced in its wake) will allow students to task their computers with writing papers for them with minimal chance of detection, but educators are prove to worrying and are probably assuming too much AI language proficiency at this point. Writers worry this program threatens their jobs, and those who work for any of the click-bait sites on pop culture, movies, and games should worry. The garbage prose ChatGPT spits out is totally on par with their daily posts.

You won’t find this in Lennox’s book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. It was published in 2020. Developments in this field will be fast and fierce (no, frenetic. Wait, it’s fast and feverish, right? Fulminous?) Lennox couldn’t deal with the very latest news, but he does deal with the ideas and claims many in the field of artificial intelligence are making.

Current advances in AI have sparked hopes and fears similar to George Orwell’s 1984, but instead of INGSOC controlling our society, it would be supercomputers that had developed themselves beyond their creators’ imagination. If it came to reality by 2084, supporters ask, wouldn’t it be poetic?

Lennox explains some of the benefits of current machine learning and some of the changes we see coming as robots take over select jobs. For example, the freight industry could be transformed by trucks that drove themselves. (How would they refuel? Could criminals take advantage of them?) He also explains some of the dangers we can already see in AI’s current uses. China’s surveillance state already looks resembles an episode of Black Mirror in which approved behavior and social media influence controls a society of people constantly monitored by unseeing eyes. Facial recognition programs may violate privacy by design and are only as good as they are accurate. False matches have already gotten a few people in trouble.

Continue reading 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox →
Fiction, Reviews

‘Guilty Money,’ by David Crosby

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I get the feeling, as I read David Crosby’s Will Harper series, that the author wants to pay homage to John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee – Will, after all, lives on a boat in a marina in Florida. Instead of “taking his retirement in installments,” he lives the good life on an inheritance. Frankly, except for the sentiment of the thing, I almost wish he wouldn’t. Will Harper is a very different character from McGee.

In the previous installment, journalist Will saved his neighbors from being fleeced by land developers exploiting eminent domain. His girlfriend Sandy, about whom he was getting serious, rewarded him by sailing away to a new life in the Caribbean.

So as Guilty Money begins, he’s rebuilding his life (along with his boat, which got shot up in the action). He’s also acquired a new girlfriend, a girl who wants no commitment and likes to hang around the boat naked (a curiously 1970s plot element in a 21st Century book). But then a friend asks his help in getting someone out of the jail in nearby (fictional) Grove County. There the sheriff’s department, under financial pressure and tempted by plain greed, is milking the jail system for cash – particularly through failing to notify defendants of court dates, then pocketing the forfeited bail. Also they skimp on prisoners’ food, and brutalize them on top of it. There are one or two deaths, which get covered up.

With the help of a friendly (and attractive) ACLU attorney (she brags about how the ACLU defends people of all political beliefs, another dated element in the story), he plans a campaign to expose the corruption. It will get ugly – and fortunately a new ally appears, a young man who knows how to fight. A much needed addition to this cast.

At least in these early books in the series, author Crosby hasn’t yet mastered his instrument, in my opinion. His prose could use some pruning. And the politics lean left (as you no doubt guessed from this review). The theme of the story is the over-incarceration of criminals — something I’m pretty sure isn’t a problem anymore.

But there’s only one more book in the collection of three that I got for free, so I imagine I’ll read it. Guilty Money wasn’t bad.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long Cold Winter,’ by Colin Conway

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I stood and shoved my hands back into my pockets but left my coat open. The cold worked its way inside and nipped at the lightly covered areas of my body. I didn’t pull the long coat closed, though. I wanted to feel something other than the hurt inside.

I enjoy a good thriller. Writers like Hurwitz, Klavan, and Hunter stand among my favorites. And yet, for preference, I personally can do without all the fights and explosions. I like the mystery itself, and the interplay of characters. Some people enjoy being scared; they’re probably braver than I.

My point is that a novel that emphasizes mystery and character over action suits me just fine. And that’s what The Long Cold Winter by Colin Conway has to offer.

Dallas Nash is a police detective in Tacoma, Washington. It’s early winter, and his mood is as bleak as the weather. He’s mourning his wife Bobbie, who died just before Thanksgiving in a single-car accident. The hopelessness and futility of it all has unmanned him. He visits her grave every day, and lately he’s been waking up with old songs in his head. Some of them are his favorites, some Bobbie’s favorites. Some he can’t even place. He’s begun to wonder if they’ve been sent as messages from Bobbie. He’s begun to wonder if he’s losing his mind.

He goes back to work, not because he feels ready, but because he can’t handle the inactivity anymore. When he gets to the office, he finds a cold case file on his desk. The brass have decided that’s a good way to ease him back into the job.

The case is the murder of a high school student, Jennifer Williams, back in 1987. This sparks a memory in Dallas. He saw Jennifer on the day she died. He was cruising the main street with some highs chool friends, and a friend of a friend pointed to her and said she was his girlfriend. Oddly, that guy is not mentioned in the police reports.

Here’s a fresh angle on the case. In intervals from investigating another, fresher, murder that also occurs, Dallas will have to reconnect with old acquaintances to locate the guy, whose name he’s forgotten. He’ll make mistakes, and there will be more deaths. But the truth will come out.

I expect some people won’t care for Detective Nash’s depression, and some would prefer more action on-stage (the deaths here generally happen out of sight. Dallas tends to get his confessions through quiet conversation). But I enjoyed A Long Cold Winter very much, and I recommend it.

Cautions for adult themes and language. There’s a priest in the book, and he’s treated positively.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Unnatural History,’ by Jonathan Kellerman

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Brophy shot him a compassionate look. He had light-brown eyes that floated like bubbles in a carpenter’s level.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reading a lot of free books lately, e-books I get through online offers. You may also have noticed that I’ve panned a lot of these. It’s the dark side of the self-publishing boom. They’re books written, essentially, by amateurs.

But I’d pre-ordered Jonathan Kellerman’s newest book, Unnatural History, and Kellerman is in no way an amateur. What struck me most as I read was how easy the reading was. I didn’t have to wrestle with the text or try to figure out what the author meant. This was like an easy flight with an experienced pilot. I could just relax and enjoy.

The opening of Unnatural History is standard for the series. Alex Delaware, Los Angeles child psychologist, gets a call from his best friend, the gay shlub-detective Milo Sturgis. Milo is at a murder scene that shows signs of psychological weirdness. Would Alex come and consult?

Alex joins him at the home of the victim, Donny Klement, a young professional photographer who clearly had money but lived in minimalist style. He’s been shot to death in his bed. His distraught assistant (once Alex has helped her calm down) tells them that Donny had recently been working on a project where he photographed homeless people. He took them into his home, dressed them in “aspirational” costumes, and took their pictures. Then he paid them – generously.

Alex and Milo agree that letting the homeless into your home and showing them where you keep large sums of money is rather poor security practice. Clearly, they need to hunt for a murderer among the street people.

Until they learn that Donny happens to be the son of one of the world’s richest men, a notorious recluse who has fathered several children (each with a different wife), provided them with money, and otherwise neglected them. Could one of these half-siblings, who barely knew Donny, have killed him for a bigger piece of the estate?

They’ll need to walk the mean streets and visit the halls of wealth before they can finally unravel the mystery.

I was particularly impressed with the characterization in Unnatural History. Kellerman does characters exceptionally well (and sympathetically). Two of my favorite characters were a gun-loving supermodel and a self-aware, bipolar homeless woman (the best homeless character I’ve ever come across in a book).

I wouldn’t say Unnatural History is better than the general run of Alex Delaware novels. It’s consistent with the usual high standard. It was a little shorter than most of them, which is too bad.

Cautions for disturbing themes and language. Highly recommended anyway.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Corpus Delicti,’ by Stephen Penner

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David Brunelle is a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office in Seattle. He is, we are given to understand, intelligent and experienced.

You wouldn’t guess that from his conduct in the novel, Corpus Delicti. Even to me, whose legal expertise is mostly gleaned from novels and TV shows, he seemed like kind of a moron.

David is hard-working – too hard-working. He recently broke up with his girlfriend, under circumstances that did him no credit. Now even his best friend, police detective Larry Chen, is keeping his distance. But that doesn’t stop Chen from calling David in when he interviews a witness with an unusual story to tell.

Linda is a prostitute and a drug addict. But she’s worried about her friend Amy, another prostitute. Amy disappeared, after her pimp had publicly threatened her. Linda thinks Amy is dead – but she says she won’t testify to anything.

After David goes to visit Amy’s parents and learns that she hasn’t been back in some time to visit her little girl, who lives with them, David makes up his mind. Amy is dead, and her murder must be prosecuted just like anyone else’s.

His problem is that he has almost no corpus delicti.

“Corpus delicti,” the author explains, is not what most people think. We think it means the body of a murder victim (which does happen to be missing here), and that’s how it’s popularly used. But legally the term means the whole “body” of the evidence – all the verifiable facts that make up the prosecution’s case. And David’s got diddly in that regard. But that doesn’t stop him from proceeding.

He will have to deal with a series of preliminary judges of varying degrees of intelligence and competence. A very smart and savvy defense attorney. And sketchy witnesses who have little to say, and don’t want to say that.

Reading Corpus Delicti was frustrating for me. Again and again, David took actions that seemed to me obviously boneheaded, and they generally were. He even got somebody killed. One can argue that this is all good character development – David is feeling guilty and isolated, and is working too hard. But he’s still doing dumb legal work and it’s hard to sympathize with that.

The moment a prosecutor says, “This guy is really evil, and I’m going to get him convicted, with or without evidence,” he’s crossing a vital line. Sure, this guy is a scumbag. But what if the next guy’s innocent; just somebody a prosecutor doesn’t like? Abuse of power is a seductive thing, and corrosive to society and the law.

Also, it’s unrealistic. District prosecutors have budgets; their superiors won’t let them waste money on quixotic fishing expeditions.

I will admit that David pulls a smart trick at the end. I appreciated that. But all in all, I wasn’t impressed with him as a legal hero.

Another gripe: Almost nobody is physically described in this book. It’s the second novel like that I’ve read recently. Is this the new thing? Some way to avoid accusations of racism in the age of Woke?

Also, cautions for language. The prose wasn’t bad in general, though.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Case of the Missing Faces,’ by Michael Leese

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I’m not a huge fan of the Roper and Hooley autism/police procedural series, written by Michael Leese. I find the whole concept of autism fascinating (being on the spectrum myself, I strongly suspect). But I find Jonathan Roper, the autistic English detective in this series, somewhat annoying to read about (which is probably just authorial verisimilitude). Still, the writing isn’t bad, and I bought a set of four books, so I carry on.

Shortly after The Case of the Missing Faces opens with a horrific murder, London detective Brian Hooley is reunited with his partner Jonathan Roper. Roper has been reassigned to a high security national intelligence facility. It’s a center of geekery, full of young geniuses and computer experts, most of them on the autism spectrum themselves, so it was assumed Roper would fit right in. And he did at first, becoming something of a star for his unorthodox but fruitful logical processes. Only lately he’s been having trouble. The official opinion is that maybe he needs the influence of Hooley, with whom he’s comfortable, and with whom he’s worked successfully in the past. So Hooley gets reassigned, and for a change he’s the one who doesn’t fit in.

For a while Roper stays stuck in spite of Hooley’s arrival. He’s certain there’s something important happening that he just can’t see. Something sinister.

Meanwhile, back in London, their colleagues are investigating the deaths of a couple computer experts found murdered in bizarre circumstances, their faces flayed off.

Once Roper realizes that these crimes have to do with national security, he’ll begin to see what’s really going on. But can he figure it all out before he himself falls victim to a brilliant but increasingly unstable serial killer?

I’m not in love with this series, but The Case of the Missing Faces kept me reading. There’s a twist at the end I saw coming pretty far off. There were some conventional references to the dangers of extreme right-wing groups in the US, but (spoiler alert) they came to nothing, so the book wasn’t very political in the end.

I’ll keep reading the series.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Run For Your Life,’ by C. M. Sutter

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It’s a general, but not inflexible, rule of mine not to read action novels written by women, even if the hero is a male. Somehow I made the choice to download Run For Your Life, by C. M. Sutter, who turns out to be a female writer (the fact that the book was free probably had something to do with this). As is often the case with woman writers, Sutter doesn’t really get male characters right. For one thing they’re too verbal here, gabbing about relationships rather than ball games or weather. And our hero kisses his pet dog on the head. Has any straight guy ever done this? But that weakness ended up not being my biggest complaint.

Mitch Cannon is a Savannah, Georgia police detective. He’s obsessive about his work, and doesn’t date much. But he recently met a woman who’s attractive and just a little crazy, and he’s looking forward to her invitation to participate in some kind of secret “raffle” for the benefit of police.

Then Mitch’s sister is kidnapped, and he has to change his plans. His partner Devon agrees to fill in for him at the raffle. Mitch is nearly insane with fear for his sister’s safety, and it gets worse when Devon and his girlfriend also fail to appear the following day.

And the whole thing ambles along to the showdown and ultimate revelations. I figured out the big final twist quite early on, and other aspects of the story disappointed me too. The dialogue was clunky and unnatural in many spots. At one point Mitch briefs his superiors on events we readers have just observed, and the author rehashes his briefing. This could have been covered by just having him say, “I told them about what I’d been doing.” Less boredom for the reader.

Another annoying element was that almost nobody in this book is described in any way, except to say how attractive one girl is, and that Devon is a little overweight.

There were also fact and logic problems. One character runs from captivity after being restrained in a kneeling position for more than a day. Would a person even be able to walk without a recovery period, after that much cramped immobility? And somebody says that nobody spends just two years in jail for murder – what country are they living in?

I must mention, in the author’s defense, though, that she has her characters pray quite often. I appreciated that.

But overall I wasn’t much impressed with Run For Your Life.