Fiction, Reviews

‘Powers of Arrest,’ by Jon Talton

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Cops burned out of homicide. Not because of blood or gore or being outwitted by criminal masterminds. No, because of its monotony: The same easy suspects, the same filthy apartments, and same kinds of people doing the killing. The pressure from the brass to clear cases. And the paperwork. And that forever part, dead, gone completely… if they let themselves think about it too long.

Cincinnati homicide detective Will Borders is back on the job, but not as he would wish, in Jon Talton’s Powers of Arrest, second entry in a series. Will underwent surgery for a spinal tumor, which left him in a lot of pain, but able to walk with a cane. Because of his service record, the brass let him work now as Public Information Officer, sending out news releases and speaking to the cameras. It’s frustrating duty for a man used to being on the front lines, but it’s police work, and he’s mostly grateful to have it.

Someone is murdering young people, mutilating them sexually. Nobody links the crimes until a young female detective is killed – she’s an actual celebrity, star of a reality show. Will is drawn in when he finds clues leading to his own stepson as a suspect.

Among the murder victims are several nursing students, and that brings Will back into contact with their instructor, Cheryl Beth Wilson, with whom he shared danger – and some mutual attraction – in his previous adventure. This case will give them an opportunity to get closer, though Will fears he’s too damaged to be a lover.

I was impressed by Powers of Arrest. The book is well-written, the characters are interesting (though I thought the culprit insufficiently concealed). No political correctness was noted (perhaps the reverse), and Cheryl Beth is some kind of a Christian, though not a church-goer. At least her faith is treated with respect. Author Talton very clearly loves the city of Cincinnati, which he describes beautifully (you’ll probably want to visit). The love story was engaging.

Recommended. Cautions for language, premarital sex, and disturbing themes.

Fiction, Reviews

‘June Bug,’ by Scott Bell

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The air lay as heavy as a quilt soaked in used engine oil.

The third book in Scott Bell’s Sam Cable series, about a tall Texas Ranger with a remarkable capacity for absorbing physical trauma, including gunshot wounds, is June Bug. There are only three books in the series so far, but the author’s Afterword says he’s planning more. I look forward to them.

FBI agent Rita Goldman is the first to guess that a group of Chechen terrorists are planning a bioweapon attack on the US. This takes her back to Texas, where she is reunited with Sam, with whom she has a whole lot of sexual chemistry, though they’ve been hands-off so far. Memories of Covid are naturally recalled, but what they’re dealing with here is a lot more virulent and frightening than that. And this is not the kind of story where the Rangers save the day before a lot of civilians get hurt.

But worse is to come, if Rita and Sam can’t stop the ringleaders before they get on a plane. And that will be difficult once they’ve both been captured and tied up for use as hostages.

But don’t count them out.

I enjoyed June Bug, though it concentrated more on action than I prefer. I personally would have enjoyed a few more relaxed moments; I like the main characters’ back-and-forth. And the trope by which the hero keeps suffering disabling injuries but just continues on duty and fighting is overused in thrillers (in my opinion).

Still, Scott Bell is a good writer, and I like the characters, and the dramatic tension never flags. I didn’t like June Bug as much as the previous two books, but I liked it fine anyway. The stories feature conservative dog-whistles too (in my opinion).

Cautions for rough language and intense situations.

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Life is full of surprises when you’re absent-minded

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

What progress have I made in easing into Uber Eats driving?, you ask breathlessly. “Well,” I can say, “I watched a few more instructional videos, and (with much prayer and fasting) I also opened the actual app and set up a couple things.

Baby steps.

A funny thing happened the other day while I was working on the magazine for the Valdres Samband (an organization for descendants of immigrants from a particular region of Norway), which I edit.

A while back, one of my stalwart helpers sent me a link to an autobiography, the length of a short book, by one of the pioneer Norwegian pastors in the Midwest. Because of its length, I’ve split the work into three sections for publication– and an appended tribute to his wife will constitute a fourth installment. Good reading for historically-minded people, which our members tend to be.

But I had some trouble working with the text, which came to me in a pdf. You can copy and paste from a pdf to a Word document, but you’ve got to watch it every minute, because the algorithm often mistakes words (especially Norwegian words) and punctuation. And one of the pages got scanned crooked. That one couldn’t be copied and pasted at all; it would have to be transcribed. I was trying to print that page to work from, because it’s a pain to switch from one browser tab to another, but my printer had gone on strike (we have since come to an accommodation).

And then, while going through my saved files, I discovered a Word document with the same title as the biography. I opened it and – what do you know? – I had already edited the whole document for publication, and forgotten about it completely. I guess I did it after I finished the last issue, just to ease my future labors. Ungrateful wretch that I am, I failed to remember my own generosity to myself.

Is this a sign of approaching dementia? Could be, but I think I’ve always been like this. “Boy, you’ve got a one-track mind,” my dad used to say. Once a thing is out of my sight, I tend to forget its existence. Which explains why nothing’s ever put away in my house. Also my social life.

I’ve probably got the Great American Novel tucked away somewhere around here, lost down the memory hole.

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Driven to extremes

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Photo credit, Why Kei, whykei. Unsplash license.

From time to time in this space I’ve announced exciting new developments in my employment history. I’m afraid I may have bragged a little, boasting about translation jobs and books (self-) published.

Today I must humble myself, as is appropriate in Lent. My delusions of grandeur are past. My pomp has taken physic. I have signed up to drive for Uber Eats.

I complained of my financial challenges to the guys in my Bible study, and one of them kept urging me to try UE. “You can work when you want,” he says, “and pick your jobs.” Also, you don’t need a very nice car, like an Uber driver, which matters in my case.

So I did it. My understanding was that the vetting process would take a few days, but I got approved in one. I was not prepared for this; I figured I’d have more time to summon up my blood and play the tiger. However, the YouTube videos I’ve been watching suggest that you really ought to have a hot bag to keep your orders warm (or cold), and my order for one of those won’t show up till Thursday. So I’ll hold off till then.

On Thursday, I’ll probably come up with another excuse for delay. I am, to say the least, a timid driver.

The great joke of it has not escaped me – I lost my translating gig due to Artificial Intelligence, and this job is likely to go the same way. Even as I write (according to news reports), Uber is testing out self-driving delivery vehicles.

I suppose we all wonder where this will end. What job is safe from our digital overlords? I’m convinced that AI will never do creative work to match human art. But what it can do is work cheap. It’s the ultimate illegal immigrant, undercutting wages for the natives.

But if nobody has a job anymore, who’s going to buy all those cheap products? And how will mere humans subsist?

Perhaps after the Great Revolution, every human will be assigned a personal robot. That robot will do the human’s work, and the human will be paid for it, being legally responsible for the maintenance of the machine.

But what will we do with our spare time, then? Judging by our current behavior in the first stages of AI, I’m not optimistic.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Graffiti Conspiracy,’ by Colin Conway

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This is another installment in Colin Conway’s The 509 series, about policing in the Spokane area. I like Conway’s novels very much, his short stories (oddly) not much at all. But The Graffiti Conspiracy is a novel, and a pretty good one from where I sit.

Detectives Quinn Delaney and Marci Burke are assigned to the murder of Earl Ricci, a maintenance man for a real estate management company, who was shot to death while covering up graffiti painted on the back of a vacant building.

There are several suspects, including the talented young man who painted the graffiti, and former associates of Ricci’s (at one point he was accused of stealing money from an fleabag hotel, the Hope, which has since been gentrified. This theft, the subject of one of the 509 short stories, shows up in one way or another in several of these novels).

The solution, once it is found, does not involve any shooting or chases. Just a sad story in a sad world, where confused people take the line of least resistance.

Like all the other 509 novels, The Graffiti Conspiracy is character-driven and highly believable. Cautions for adult matter, and moral ambiguity.

I enjoyed it.

Goofing, Religion

Excerpt from the Chronicles

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Photo Credit: Alex Shuper. Unsplash License.

An extract from The Chronicles of the Last Days:

After the second Great War had been won, the victorious Americans went home to an undamaged country. They proceeded to build the freest and most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Vowing that their children would never suffer as they had, they lavished on them high-quality education, material comfort, and indulgent freedom.

This postwar generation was known as the Baby Boom. These “Boomers,” as they came to be called, took advantage of their opportunities, enjoying their freedom to the utmost, giving no thought to future generations – indeed, they made it a point to have few if any children of their own.

Yet this was not enough for them. They desired even more freedom. They identified Christian Puritanism as the one thing that was keeping them from total self-indulgence. “Let us destroy Christian Puritanism,” they said, “that there may be no limit to our license.” And so they did. Their contemporaries in Europe did the same. Together they plumbed the depths of depravity, squandered their nations’ wealth, and left the whole mess to the progressively smaller generations that followed them.

And when the Boomers finally aged and weakened, and realized that they must soon relinquish power and die, they said, “It is not right that the world should go on without us to enjoy it. Let us destroy the world – or let us at least destroy our civilization.”

And so they turned their civilization over to Islam, so that all liberty would be erased.

And this is why the name of Boomer remains a hissing and a byword among all the peoples of the earth, even unto this day.

Fiction, Reviews

‘May Day,’ by Scott Bell

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“Please, God,” I said to myself, “don’t kill us today. I’d rather not go out like this, if it’s all the same to you, but if that’s your will, at least don’t let me pee myself.”

Couldn’t resist immediately picking up the second book in Scott Bell’s Sam Cable series, about a modern Texas Ranger.

As May Day opens, our hero, fully vindicated in respect to the criminal charges he faced in April’s Fool, is sent to California in a state-owned small airplane (which Cable hates), to pick up a fugitive in custody. This is a young woman, Jade Stone, accused of stabbing a man to death. About the time somebody shoots their plane out of the sky over New Mexico, he begins to suspect that this woman may be telling the truth when she says she was set up.

The story then becomes a wilderness cat and mouse tale, as Cable, Jade, and their injured pilot attempt to evade a crew of rogue federal agents. It won’t be a surprise to the reader that Jade Stone is gorgeous, and increasingly drawn to Cable – but she’s a fascinating character in her own right, and provides a very well-done plot twist toward the end.

Wilderness chase stories are not my favorite kind of fiction, but Sam Cable remains an appealing character, and the dramatic tension ran high. I judge that Cable came out lucky in a few too may close calls, but that’s common in the genre. I certainly enjoyed May Day, and I recommend it.

Cautions for violence, rough language, and a sex scene.

Reviews, Uncategorized

A medicine for melancholy

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Photo credit: weston m, shootnmatch. Unsplash license.

Beautiful day in Robbinsdale; the first really beautiful day of the year. The temperature soared to 70 degrees. Tomorrow will only be 45, and Friday colder yet, but still. It happened. We had a nice day. Means a lot in Minnesota.

I went to see my doctor this morning, to have him look at a small infection in one of my fingers. It wasn’t swollen to the size of a Hostess Twinkie, and it didn’t hurt all that much, but it just wouldn’t heal up. I’ve tolerated it for about a month, faithfully feeding it Neosporin and re-bandaging it twice a day, but it refuses to take the hint. So, shame-faced, feeling like a sissy, I went to see my personal physician. I fully expected him to sneer and tell me to rub some dirt on it, but he dutifully prescribed an antibiotic.

Now I’m waiting for the prescription. I am, to tell the truth, growing disillusioned with Walgreens. The last prescription my doctor sent them sat unfilled for a week, until I went in personally and requested an explanation. (They needed my new insurance information as it turned out, but they might have – you know – sent me a message informing me of the problem.) Now I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go in and hold them up for my Miracle Bread Mold. I remember an old gag from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, where somebody wanders into the Dogpatch post office and asks if there’s any mail for him, and the postmaster drawls, “Well, looky here – Ah got this Speshul Dee-livery letter fer yuh 20 years ago. Ah been meanin’ to drop it off next time I was in your neck o’ the woods.” Walgreens seems to have adopted a similar policy for prescriptions.

That wasn’t even what I meant to post about tonight.

I wanted to talk a little more about April’s Fool by Scott Bell, the delightful cop novel I reviewed last night. When I ask myself, what made it so much fun? the answer was easy – the hero was cheerful.

You realize how rare cheerful main characters are in today’s fiction?

Now I’m not exactly a world ambassador for happiness. I’m known, among my constantly shrinking circle of friends, as the Ancient Mariner at every wedding, the Banquo at every feast.

But I am not immune to the charm of a cheerful voice. I can’t produce the effect, but I can respond to it.

We have a highly false stereotype in literature, it seems to me, that says happiness equals shallowness (I blame the Russians). Anyone who acquires a teaspoon full of wisdom, our stories proclaim, must necessarily be plunged into despair.

Several of the police mystery series I follow – and enjoy – have heroes that blur together in my memory. I can’t distinguish one from the other, because they all have the same back story. Every bloody one of them is mourning the death of a beloved wife. He has never gotten over it, and he obsesses on his job to mask his grief.

I’m not saying it’s entirely unrealistic. But it’s become a trope.

Life, you’ll note, isn’t like that. Aren’t the best leaders people who know how to raise other people’s spirits? Aren’t optimistic people more likely to succeed than pessimists (such as I)?

If we want to be realistic as writers, shouldn’t most of our heroes (unless we’re writing tragedy) be optimists?

I think this qualifies as testimony against interest, so you should pay attention.

Fiction, Reviews

‘April’s Fool,’ by Scott Bell

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The captain lived in his car, ate takeout food every meal, smoked more than a creosote brushfire, and had his admin print all his emails rather than learn how to use a PC. Dinosaurs were more progressive than Captain Marshall.

One of the delights of being a reader is discovering books that are just fun. I’d never heard of Scott Bell (not to be confused with James Scott Bell, another excellent author), but it seems I’ve been missing something. April’s Fool is the first volume in a series starring contemporary Texas Ranger Sam Cable.

Sam has drawn the unwelcome job of providing personal security for a senate candidate. The candidate is a black woman with a chip on her shoulder, who delights in testing his patience. He disliked her, but hardly wanted her dead. So when he wakes up in her hotel room naked, lying next to her strangled corpse, he is completely unable to account for his actions.

Thanks to his commander’s support, he manages to stay out of jail – for the present. His orders are to lay low and let his colleagues investigate, but (of course) that’s not Sam’s way. He pokes into the candidate’s past and her present associations. Along the way he’ll form an alliance with a diminutive female FBI forensic accountant, and they’ll prove a formidable team.

April’s Fool featured many delights. The writing was sharp, in a brightly hardboiled way:

I was not in a good place. The sofa wouldn’t stop an angry fly, let alone a bullet, and it wouldn’t hide anyone bigger than Goldman. I felt like a cartoon bear hiding behind a pine tree.

Also the characters were vivid, and the dialogue often funny. This wasn’t exactly a comic novel, but Sam Cable is an ebullient personality who keeps his sense of humor most of the time. He’s easy to like. Racial issues are dealt with in what I considered an evenhanded way. All references to Christianity were respectful.

Highly recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.

Fiction, Reviews

‘When the Wicked Rest’ and ‘Murder by Any Other Name,’ by Colin Conway

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I have bestowed glowing reviews on previous books in Colin Conway’s 509 series of police procedurals set in Washington state, east of the Cascades. When I purchased When the Wicked Rest and Murder by Any Other Name, I didn’t realize that they were not novels but short story collections set in the 509 area.

I discovered I don’t enjoy Conway’s short stories nearly as much as I enjoy his novels. The novels are well-written, character driven, and compassionate. The stories (at least in these collections) are more concentrated. They mostly deal with criminals – either losers who have no hope, or successful ones who make you fear for the world. Neither is much fun, at least for this timid reader.

One story in particular, in Murder by Any Other Name, is especially horrific. It’s called “Angel.” It’s a prison story, a short peek into Hell. Well done, but the stuff of nightmares.

My bottom line on these two story collections is that they’re good (in Chesterton’s sense of being good shots) but also not good (in Chesterton’s sense of shooting one’s grandmother from a distance of 500 yards).

Maybe you appreciate this kind of stuff more than I do. Cautions for extremely disturbing content and lots of bad language.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture