If you’re wondering what I think about the series… well, let me say this. Though it’s set in a high school, if I had high school kids, I wouldn’t want them to watch it.
In other news, we’re expecting about a foot (more) of snow this weekend.
I think I can speak for all Minnesotans when I say this has gone beyond a joke.
The King Tides, which I reviewed last night, is the first book in a new series by James Swain. But he has an earlier series – which is oddly almost identical in character, setting, and themes – and Midnight Rambler is its first volume.
Jack Carpenter, the series hero, is a former Fort Lauderdale
police detective. He used to be in charge of Missing Persons, until he resigned
(or was fired, stories vary) after beating up a suspect. Now he works as a
private eye, searching for lost children.
The book starts with a neat little story where Jack locates a lost child. But soon he gets shocking news. The murderer he beat up, Simon Skell the “Midnight Rambler,” who was convicted anyway, is now appealing for release. The body of one of the Midnight Rambler’s victims has been found (the first to be found). His lawyer claims this proves his client is innocent. Skell will be released if Jack can’t discover the truth in a couple days.
The cops don’t trust him, and the press doesn’t believe him.
And as he hunts, Jack realizes the Midnight Rambler crimes were more than a
one-man show. Many lives will be at risk if he can’t learn the truth, fast.
I’m enjoying James Swain’s books quite a lot. I wouldn’t rank him up there with Connelly or Sandford, but he writes good, solid stories. (The plots veer into the improbable at times, but that’s how it is with thrillers.) The language in the books is fairly tame (sometimes, for instance, he uses “crummy” where I’d expect a real-life character to use a saltier word), and when Christianity or the Bible are mentioned, they get respect.
I recommend Midnight Rambler, with cautions for disturbing situations involving sexual perversion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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