Fiction, Reviews

‘Sins of the Fathers,’ by James Scott Bell

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But then the guy smiled. His teeth were like pylons coated with ocean grime.

I’m a great fan of James Scott Bell, one of our best Christian thriller writers (after Andrew Klavan, of course). But for me at first, Sins of the Fathers labored under a few handicaps.

First of all, there’s a female protagonist. I just avoid them in these days of Mary Sues (not that a male writer is likely to write a female Mary Sue.)

Secondly, the setting is early in the 21st Century, when conditions in our country (and specifically in Los Angeles, where this story is set) were somewhat different from today. This was the days of tough, lock ’em up LA prosecutors (I believe one of our current presidential candidates was part of this). It was a very different environment from what we see in California today.

Finally, this is an expressly Christian novel. It’s not the kind I generally prefer, where the Christianity is mostly subtextual (though Heaven knows I don’t practice what I preach in my own books).

So I was a little slow getting into Sins of the Fathers. But it won me over, decisively.

Lindy Field is a defense attorney, but she hasn’t worked in a while. She suffered a bitter defeat in the case of a minor she defended, and she suspects a police cover-up. She actually suffered a psychological breakdown, and hasn’t worked for a while.

But her legal mentor asks her to take on a fresh case. It’s a high profile one, concerning a boy who opened fire with a rifle on a middle school baseball game, killing several boys and one coach. Public anger is high. A powerful victims’ advocacy group is calling for the maximum penalty.

Even worse, the assistant DA who beat Lindy on the last case will be prosecuting this one.

But her mentor thinks she can win. Get a sentence of mental incapacity for the kid. He says he believes in her. So she takes the case.

It will lead to frantic social pressure, media scrutiny, and an attempt on her life. But Lindy – for personal reasons that are only gradually revealed – needs to hold on. She needs to save this kid.

In terms of characterization and plot, I’d say Sins of the Fathers is as good as any thriller novel I’ve ever read, whatever the intended audience. There were delightful surprises, and I was moved by the book’s resolution.

I’ll admit I thought there was a little too much “God talk.” People bringing up Christ and faith in casual conversation, so that the message of the book could be explicitly stated. Of course, this was nearly 20 years ago. Society was different then. You could probably discuss such things in an LA courthouse in those bygone days.

Anyway, if you’re looking for an overtly Christian thriller, written at the very highest level, I can wholeheartedly recommend Sins of the Fathers.

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Yet another old man’s rant…

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

Everyone knows that it’s one of the infirmities of old age to be forever comparing the present to the past – and the past always comes off better. Entertainment was better when I was young… the clerks in stores were more polite and helpful… everyone dressed better… books and movies were better… etc.

Which is all true, undoubtedly. The People in Charge of Stuff Today don’t even deny it – they tell us the old ways were founded on oppression and exploitation. We should be happy to live in a smaller, meaner time now. We’ve got it coming to us.

Still, purely as an intellectual exercise, I can try to name some things I like better about the present.

  • I like having the internet. It makes research a breeze. It’s endlessly entertaining.
  • I like… actually, I can’t think of anything else. All the rest seems diminished and shabby.

Which brings me, in a meandering way, to tonight’s topic (such as it is). Something I’ve probably discussed before here.

At the Viking Festival in Green Bay, I had a conversation with a fellow Christian Viking, one of about my own age.

He talked about getting interested in Norse mythology as a kid. Reading the books, imagining the stories.

“But nowadays there are all these people around who actually worship Thor and Odin,” he says. “It makes it awkward.”

“They took the fun out of it,” I said. He agreed.

Thor was fun when nobody believed in him. Now he’s an object of active worship. Anything I do connected with Thor has become suspect from a Christian point of view. I’ve never worn a Mjolnir, a Thor’s hammer, because I don’t want to look like a practicing heathen. It could do injury to my neighbor’s soul.

Halloween is similar. If there were Christians warning against celebrating Halloween when I was a kid, I never heard of them. We kids dressed up, we Tricked and Treated (not me, living in the country, but I did attend Halloween celebrations at the schoolhouse in town), and it was innocent, because everybody knew witches didn’t exist.

Nowadays, there are lots of people running around calling themselves real-life witches.

It stopped being fun.

Let me be clear – I’ve said this many times – I don’t believe in witches as such. Not witches with magic powers. In terms of magic, I’m a thoroughgoing materialist.

But other people do believe. So it’s become an area where Christians probably ought not to trespass. Just to avoid the appearance of evil.

Thus, Halloween is taken from the children, and given over to adults, who’ve now made it a season of kink. (Or so I’m informed.)

For me, it’s pretty much all about candy now. Halloween means candy – not to give away to Trick or Treaters, but for myself.

At the grocery store yesterday, I found the Christmas candy was already out on the shelves. Including the little ones from Lindt – I can ration those out, just a couple a day, until spring (there’ll be Easter candy later).

Okay, that’s something good we have now that I didn’t have as a kid. Lindt chocolate.

Hey, when civilization is sliding into ruin, you enjoy what you can along the way.

Bookselling, Publishing

The ‘Mountain’ in my hand

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The package arrived yesterday. At last, after many a year, I can hold a paper version of Hailstone Mountain in my tremblous hand.

The book is thinner than I expected. I suppose that’s because of the 6”x9” format – more words per page. I’m used to thinking in terms of what’s called “mass market paperbacks,” the roughly pocket-sized books you generally see on racks in stores (or used to). For some reason, we self-publishers seem to gravitate toward a larger size. Perhaps we’re compensating.

Maybe the cream paper that I didn’t select would have been a little thicker, too.

In any case, my books are my children, and I’ve known this one only electronically up to now. Like having a kid whose mother took custody and then moved to California – you only know him through Zoom calls. Now at last he’s made his way to my doorstep. He needs money, of course.

I wonder how I should deal with selling these things at Viking events, as one by one they get instantiated in the physical universe. My bestseller at events is Viking Legacy. After that, it’s The Year of the Warrior (the paper version I have printed, not yet available on Amazon). West Oversea comes in third. This one follows in the sequence. I figure demand for each successive book should be smaller than for the previous one. I anticipate carrying a couple cartons of the later books of the saga with me to events, but I don’t imagine I’ll have to stock as many of those. It’s already a lot of cartons to lug around.

At the festival in Green Bay, I was signing somebody’s book and they complimented my handwriting. This surprised me. I’ve always considered my handwriting awful, for the practical reason that it’s hard to read. My writing may possess a certain grace of form, but it’s not pragmatically effective.

I wish my art to be useful as well as aesthetic. But not enough to write slower.

Music, Poetry

Sunday Singing: Dear Lord and Father of Mankind

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Today’s hymn is adapted from a poem by the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. In that poem, “The Brewing of Soma,” Whittier describes a Hindu drinking ceremony over several verses before contrasting it with Christian repentance. “Our foolish ways” are both old pagan practices and the Christianized versions we may have replaced them with. Instead, may we hear the quiet voice of the Living God speaking through Scripture and natural disaster.

“For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel,
‵In returning and rest you shall be saved;
in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.‵
But you were unwilling . . . ” (Isaiah 30:15 ESV)

1 Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways!
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper rev’rence praise,
in deeper rev’rence praise.

2 In simple trust like theirs who heard
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us, like them, without a word
rise up and follow thee,
rise up and follow thee.

3 O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love!
Interpreted by love!

4 Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace,
the beauty of thy peace.

5 Breathe through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm!
O still small voice of calm!

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Poetry

Have We Forgotten Too Much?

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Peter Hitchens blogged about memory a couple months ago, noting Orwell’s 1984 naturally, pointing out “Orwell’s description of the sort of things people actually do remember: ‘A million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago.'”

He spent half of the post on the former Communist novelist Arthur Koestler (1905-1983). He said at one point everyone with a decent education on world affairs knew about Koestler and the novel Darkness at Noon. “It was perhaps the most devastating literary blow ever aimed at Communist tyranny,” Hitchens said. Important because it exposed truths the world didn’t want to believe. In WWII, Stalin joined the Allied forces, and people wanted to forget any crimes he may have committed before that. Others wanted to believe Marxism was a force for good in the world, so they waved away evidence to the contrary.

“For a large part of my life,” Hitchens wrote, “this potent political novel, and its accompanying volume Scum of the Earth were vital parts of human knowledge and understanding.” Those who had read them were “the undeceived, and the hard-to-deceive.” Where are those people now?

“What if the past has already disappeared?”

Rings of Power: In far more trivial news, reviewer Erik Kain argues that defending Amazon’s ‘Rings Of Power’ by claiming Tolkien had no canon “would make Sauron proud.” A professor with ties to the show has said, “Tolkien’s ideas were ever evolving,” meaning all of his notes and drafts demonstrate none of his ideas, even the published ones, are fixed.

Poetry: To end on cheerful note, read this delightfully modern love poem by Daniel Brown. Here are the first three lines.

A first “I love you” still implies the start 
Of serious, but we moderns also have 
Recourse to a preliminary move; ...

Photo by Hans Eiskonen on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Road to Middle-Earth,’ by Tom Shippey

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This was Tolkien’s major linguistic heresy. He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognize language ‘styles’, could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgments based on phonology. He said the sound of ‘cellar door’ was more beautiful than the sound of ‘beautiful’. He clearly believed that untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not.

I didn’t really know what I was getting into when I bought Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth. I had read his Tolkien biography, Author of the Century, and generally enjoyed it. When I stopped to see my friend Dale Nelson recently, he praised TRTME as one of his most prized books. So I thought I’d give it a try.

And it is a fine work. A deep-diving overview of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ideas, work life, and achievements. But it may have been more of a book than this reader was qualified to handle.

I was pleased that the author seems to have moderated his comments about Augustinianism and Manicheanism, which (in my opinion) went too far in his Tolkien biography, where he actually labels C. S. Lewis a Manichean. What he’s actually talking about is our conception of evil – is it (as Augustine – and C. S. Lewis, whatever Shippey says – insisted) a lack, a corruption of the good, or does it have existence in itself? He seems to be convinced that if you believe the Augustinian view, you can’t really embody evil in a character. I’ve never accepted that – it’s enough to have a character submit to evil and live out its qualities.

My personal difficulty with the book, I’m afraid, was that I haven’t read enough of the post-Rings Tolkien material. I’ve read the Silmarillion, and several of the books involving single stories, but I couldn’t make it through the books of Lost Tales, and never even tried to read The History of Middle Earth. That means that a lot of the material Shippey deals with in the later chapters of this book was unknown, or only vaguely known, to me.

But if you’re a true Tolkien geek, I would say this is a book you absolutely ought to read. It’s been revised twice, and the author conscientiously corrects previous errors (mostly errors of ignorance).

Highly recommended, for its proper audience.

Uncategorized, Writing

Hurricane memories, and writing update

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Photo credit: Laura Adai. Unsplash license.

I don’t follow the news obsessively, but my impression is that, in terms of Hurricane Milton, things could have been a lot worse. It seems as if the storm hit with less force than expected. No doubt there has been great loss and suffering, but apparently it might have been worse.

Almost as if our prayers had efficacy.

So I’ll come out and say it, and let the skeptics laugh at me (since they will anyway) – thanks and praise be to God.

I can never forget my Florida years, when I lived in a mobile home and ruminated much on hurricanes in my lonely bed. One year a bad one (I think it was called Aaron. Or Erin) hit while I was on vacation in Minnesota. I came home to find my tin house almost unscathed – but the screen porch had been excised as neatly as if by a surgeon’s knife. The only damage to the main structure was a slit in a window screen.

That looked like divine timing in my case. I had recently lost my job, and I took the insurance money for the porch and lived on it, until I got work back home in the north. I sold the house without a porch.

I am currently in the toils of shaping The Elder King up for its paperback regeneration. I’m finding more than one spot where I’d like to do some re-writing, but I am practicing restraint. I don’t want the e-book and the dead tree version to be too different from one another. I only change obvious – and small – errors. Mostly.

But I just discovered that a certain character, when I introduced him in this book, looked differently from the way I describe him in The Baldur Game. Which means I’ll have to dip into TBG and make some changes tomorrow. I guess it’s another divine providence that publication has been delayed.

Though I have no doubt there are myriad inconsistencies I’ve missed completely, and with which I’ll just have to live.

Fiction, Reviews

Well-Crafted Start to a Series: Memory Man by David Baldacci

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Guest Review by Adam H. Douglas

Memory Man is the first book that launched a best-selling series of novels by David Baldacci back in 2015. It’s a tight, expertly crafted novel that effectively achieves what it sets out to do—to give us a creepy, thrilling read that keeps you guessing until the end.  

Amos Decker, a former football player turned detective, suffers a life-altering tragedy when he discovers the brutal murder of his wife, Cassie, his young daughter, Molly, and his brother-in-law, Johnny, in their home. Returning from a fruitless stakeout, Decker finds Johnny with his throat slit, Cassie shot in the head, and Molly strangled. Baldacci’s well-honed writing skills describe the scene with a haunting efficiency.  

Fifteen months later, we find Decker living in a state of emotional numbness, his life in disarray, drifting in and out of homelessness. He desperately wants to die but cannot seem to find the will to kill himself. 

Not sure what else to do with his broken existence, he becomes a private investigator and scrapes by on low-paying cases. The trauma of losing his family never leaves him, intensified by his unique condition—hyperthymesia—which forces him to remember every detail of his past. He can’t forget anything, including the faces of his dead family.

As Decker struggles with the weight of his loss, his old partner—a great tough-as-nails supporting character named Mary Lancaster—tracks him down to let him know that a man named Sebastian Leopold has walked into police custody and confessed to the murder of Decker’s family. 

The confession sparks conflicting emotions in Decker—anger, suspicion, and a desperate need for closure. Decker questions the man’s motivations and credibility while revisiting the crime that destroyed his life.

Worse still, the chaos of the situation is intensified by a nearby high school shooting that leaves several dead. Incredibly, the shooter escapes and is still at large. Local police are baffled by the crime and are strained almost to the breaking point. Based on Lancaster’s recommendation, they take on Decker as a consultant to help solve the case. 

But Decker is beginning to suspect that the cases are linked. And that Decker himself might be the ultimate target of the mass killer.  

Bestselling author and former lawyer David Baldacci is widely known for his thrillers and suspense novels featuring complex characters, fast-paced plots, and legal or political themes. His debut novel, Absolute Power (1996), was adapted into a film starring Clint Eastwood. He’s written over fifty novels in almost thirty years.

In short, Baldacci knows his stuff. And it shows here. 

Memory Man is a solid, tight thriller that keeps you turning pages and guessing almost the whole way through. It’s no wonder why this novel—with its complex, gritty lead character—launched a best-selling series of seven books so far (Note: the eighth is due to drop sometime this year). 

The book’s main failing appears when we finally learn the solution to how the school shooter escaped. Rather than a revelation, the killer’s motives and methods come across as a somewhat unnecessarily intricate plot point that confuses more than entertains. 

True, this is a common problem with villains in American thrillers, which the public demands must create ever-increasingly complex and psychopathic plans to torture our heroes both mentally and physically. So, I’ll easily overlook this minor hiccup in what is ultimately a very worthy read. 

Guest Bio: Adam H. Douglas is a full-time writer and ghostwriter with over two decades of experience in nonfiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, and horror fantasy fiction. Adam’s award-winning short stories have appeared in various publications, including the Eerie River Publishing anthology “It Calls From the Doors,” I/O Magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, and many more.

Photo by Klim Musalimov on Unsplash

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Leif Eriksson Day 2024

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Painting of Leif Eriksson by the Norwegian artist Christian Krohg. Krohg liked his models, male and female, to have a little meat on their bones.

I’m thinking a lot about the people of Florida today. I lived there eleven years, you know, and if I still lived in my old house, I’d be in the path – though on the opposite side of the state, so chances are the damage will be less there. But many a night I lay in bed thinking about hurricanes. More about that, perhaps, tomorrow.

I feel I should acknowledge Leif Eriksson Day, a holiday we Norwegians love to talk about, but rarely do much to celebrate. Heaven knows it’s my busy time of the year.

Leif Eriksson features in the Netflix series, Vikings: Valhalla, the sequel to the History Channel Vikings series. It should not have surprised me that they made him about 40 years younger than he actually was and sent him gallivanting around Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean as sidekick to a young Harald Hardrada.

The story of the discovery of America (Vinland) in the sagas is recounted in two different sagas, The Greenlanders’ Saga and The Saga of Erik the Red, which feature enough similarities to argue for a common factual basis, but which are quite different in content. One version (I forget which offhand) says America was first sighted by a man named Bjarni Herjulfsson, who did not go ashore. Leif, when Bjarni finally arrived in Greenland, bought his ship and went to the new country himself. The other saga credits the first sighting to Leif himself. Either way, Leif is the first Norseman to actually go ashore in Vinland.

Most stories about Leif mention that he was the first missionary to Greenland. That’s a somewhat complex issue, in fact. The saga says that King Olaf Trygvesson (whom you may recall from The Year of the Warrior) commissioned Leif to take the gospel back to his home, where he had good success with his message, except in his father’s case. His father, Erik the Red, rejected the new faith violently, and it caused a separation with his wife, Leif’s mother Thjodhild.

However, historians today tend to doubt that account. They note (and I’m talking from memory here, because for the life of me I can’t find documentation, though I know I’ve read it in more than one book) that early accounts of Olaf Trygvesson’s life say he “evangelized five lands” (I think it was five), while later accounts make it seven lands. One of the extra lands – added centuries later – seems to have been Greenland. Hence, they assume that the Greenland business was invented later in time and just appended to the list by later writers.

For my own part, I decided to square the circle in my novels. I portray Leif as a Christian (which is perfectly plausible) but say nothing (as far as I recall) about Olaf’s commission.

The foundations of a tiny church have been found in Greenland, near the farmstead identified today as Brattahlid, Erik’s and Leif’s home. This seems to corroborate a passage in the sagas that says that Thjodhild built a private church out of sight of the house, so her husband wouldn’t have to look at it.

However, I spoke to a man at the Viking Festival in Green Bay last weekend, who told me about a tour he’d taken to Greenland. There he met a man who believes he has good archaeological evidence that the farm identified as Brattahlid today is not the real one. He locates Brattahlid further up the fjord.

In any case, I do consider Leif a Christian. So I resolve to celebrate his holiday.

Next year, for sure.

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The Viking house in Green Bay

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I am (once again) reading a very long book, and so will be a while getting to my next review. As I pondered what to post tonight, it occurred to me to check whether there was any video about the Viking House that formed the centerpiece for the Midwest Viking Festival in Green Bay – from which I returned on Sunday.

And behold, there is one. This seems to be a promotional video, produced before the house was relocated to Green Bay, touting the idea of making it part of the campus.

The house is in a form called a “grind house,” after the “grind” (rhymes with “wind,” I think) which is a section of the house comprising its length between the sets of internal pillars. The buildings are constructed in an almost modular fashion, as I understand it.

The video features my new friend Owen Christianson and his wife Elspeth. Owen is – as I mentioned yesterday – a physicist. He also has a black belt in karate (I kid you not).

All in all, a formidable individual.