I found much to like in Paul Levine’s light legal thriller, Solomon vs. Lord, first in a series. I also found elements that creeped me out. I’ll give you my reaction; judge for yourself.

Like most male readers, I don’t actually hate romance in a story. I just don’t care for stories that are only romance. I want some swords or some guns, or stuff getting blown up. If you’re going to have romance, the best kind is the Benedick and Beatrice sort (as in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”), where the man and the woman fight like a dog and a cat, and everyone but they can see that it’s because they have unusual sexual chemistry.

That’s what we have in Solomon vs. Lord. Steve Solomon is a talented, not-overly-ethical Miami lawyer, who at the beginning is defending a man charged with importing exotic animals illegally. Arguing for the prosecution is Victoria Lord, scion of a wealthy family that’s fallen on hard times. Her life plan calls for her to pay her dues in the DA’s office, then get a job with a respectable law firm. She’s also going to marry Bruce Bigby, a handsome and wealthy avocado grower and real estate tycoon. Continue reading Solomon vs. Lord, by Paul Levine →

We said goodbye to our mothers. They’d been around all our lives, but we’d never properly seen them. They’d been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night in the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn’t want to bother them.

That was how we showed our love. With silence.

…Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that’s how we’re connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

I really didn’t have much choice about buying Danish author Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned. I’ve been telling you how much I like sea stories, and this is a sea epic. One quarter of my ancestors were Danes, and this is the story of a small maritime village on a Danish island, not all that far from where my people came from (though mine were farmers, as far as I know. My sailing ancestors were Norwegian. Close enough).

We, the Drowned is a long book, and strange. It starts out in an almost whimsical faction, telling us of Lauritz Madsen of the town of Marstal, who started a war with Germany singlehanded, and was blown up over the mainsail, saw St. Peter’s backside, and landed on his feet back on deck to tell the tale.

But that’s pretty much the end of the whimsy. Author Jensen quickly falls into the fatalistic tone so common in Scandinavian literature. Things get grim, and they stay grim by and large. There are fantastical, magical realism elements to the book, but they mostly follow sailors’ superstitions—visions and omens and objects carrying bad luck. Continue reading We, the Drowned, by Carsten Jensen →