Among the many pleasures of the reading life, one of the rarest is the unassuming but excellent novel. That was what I found, to my delight, in Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman.

Hell Around the Horn has no grand pretensions. It does not try to be a romance, or a mystery, or a political tract. It is what its manifest states – a straightforward account, fictionalized, of a memorable voyage by a windjammer and her crew in the year 1905.

The windjammer, if you’re not familiar with the term, was the last stage in the age of commercial sail. Like the clipper ships before them the windjammers drove under a cloud of sails, but they were generally steel- or iron-built, and bulkier in the hull to accommodate more cargo. Although a seeming anachronism, windjammer commerce endured as late as 1957.

The story is told through the eyes of four main characters on board the vessel Lady Rachel – Capt. James Barker, a young captain keen to make a profit on his first voyage as a partner, Apprentice William Jones, a teenager just learning the ropes (literally), Able Seaman Fred Smythe, an American sailor with a little education, and Mary Barker, the captain’s wife, who has come along bringing their two children. Continue reading Hell Around the Horn, by Rick Spilman →

Talk show host Hugh Hewitt has been promoting Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon spy novels for some time, so I finally tried one. I’m happy to report that Portrait of a Spy is an excellent novel, well-written, well-plotted, with engaging, believable characters. I highly recommend it, while at the same time confessing that I probably won’t be reading any more in this series. My reasons are not aesthetic or moral or political. More below.

Gabriel Allon is a skilled, even legendary Mossad agent whose working cover is his vocation as an art restorer, one of the best in the world. At the start of this novel, late in the series, he has at last broken his ties with Israeli intelligence, and is living with his beautiful wife in a secluded cottage on the Cornish coast. He’s excited about his latest commission, a recently identified lost Titian masterpiece.

And then one day, while visiting London, he witnesses a suicide bombing, one in a series of such bombings across Europe. He is drawn into the hunt for the masterminds, first back with Mossad, and then with the CIA as well. Their plan to locate and destroy the enemy involves a wealthy young Arabian heiress who has come (they’re pretty sure) to hate the jihadis.

No plan, as the generals say, ever survives contact with the enemy, and there are betrayals and deaths (and frustrating CIA political meddling) before the job gets done. It was all very suspenseful, and even moving.

Portrait of a Spy is a very good novel and (according to my lights) pretty much entirely on the right side of the issues. I recommend it highly, with the usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations (not explicit).

The reason I can’t go on with the series is that I discovered something in reading it that I should have realized long ago. I’m just uncomfortable with spy stories. That world of deception and betrayal is tremendously stressful for me to think about. I could never live that way. I’m a very bad liar (not, I hasten to add, because of my high moral character, but because I just don’t do it well. My face gives it away). Spending time with espionage stories makes me uneasy.

You’re probably not like that, so you’ll very likely enjoy it.

My friend Robert Mullin sent me a manuscript of his novel Bid the Gods Arise a while back, and I read it and provided the following blurb:

Bid the Gods Arise possesses the music of epic and the color of myth. It’s a big story, spanning planets, but with a specific human heart. Once read, it lingers in the mind like a dream.

It’s not uncommon for me to receive manuscripts from people who’d like me to read and comment on them. It’s very rare that I can say much good. Bid the Gods Arise is an exception. A genuinely original work, it combines fantasy with interstellar travel far more successfully than you imagine it could.

The story involves two young men, Aric and Maurin, who are kidnapped from their home planet by interstellar slave merchants. Separated and sent to very different fates, they meet again at last and join with a company of others on a quest which involves both Aric’s true destiny and his greatest temptation.

This is a really good book, a Christian fantasy novel with no preaching. I recommend it.