{"id":19405,"date":"2024-03-06T20:05:58","date_gmt":"2024-03-07T01:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19405"},"modified":"2024-03-06T20:05:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-07T01:05:58","slug":"manistique-by-craig-terlson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19405","title":{"rendered":"‘Manistique,’ by Craig Terlson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n

I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just looking for answers,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That part was true\u2014otherwise, I would\u2019ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Luke Fischer,<\/strong> hero of Manistique<\/a><\/em>, a Canadian transplant in Mexico, is emphatically not a private eye. But he ends up looking for people anyway. When his friend Franco, who is a private eye, asks him to sit in on a private poker game, he ends up witnessing a shooting. A young woman dies, and there\u2019s talk of missing money. Soon Luke is headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (of all places) trying to find the young woman\u2019s father, who is rumored to have stolen a lot of money from some dangerous people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Michigan, Luke finds himself teaming up with \u201cSam,\u201d an attractive female county sheriff. The body count rises steadily as they pursue Luke\u2019s quarry, and when that man is killed, they pursue the killers. The trail will finally lead them all the way to New Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I very much enjoyed, and positively reviewed, Three-Minute Hero<\/em>, the book that follows Manistique <\/em>in the Luke Fischer series (I seem to be reading them in the wrong order). And the virtues of that book were displayed here \u2013 colorful hard-boiled prose and strong dialogue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the weaknesses were here too \u2013 a little more apparently. Chief of these is a certain aimlessness in the plotting. Although there\u2019s plenty of violence in this story \u2013 and it\u2019s pretty explosive \u2013 one can\u2019t help wondering in the intervals what these people are here for. Luke\u2019s mission is somewhat vague from the start, and even when he\u2019s finished the job he was paid to do, he feels obligated to keep following the money \u2013 \u00a0though he doesn\u2019t seem interested in it for its own sake. It\u2019s something about justice, for people he barely knows.\u00a0 One senses an echo of Carlos Castaneda, too, \u00a0as he has a mystical conversation on a motel porch with an old man who may or may not exist. Perhaps this is all an existentialist exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I must also confess my slight annoyance at a surrender to current intellectual fashion, evidenced by the inclusion of not one, but two Girl Boss characters \u2013 women indistinguishable from men except in their physical appearance, one of whom easily tosses much larger men around a room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I have a couple Gun Culture quibbles \u2013 a .40 caliber pistol is described as remarkably powerful, and a \u201csilencer\u201d reduces pistol shots to a near-whisper (that\u2019s technology firearms companies would pay good money for, because it doesn\u2019t exist yet).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Craig Terlson is now a friend of mine on X, and an entertaining one. I like his writing very much, and all in all I enjoyed Manistique <\/em>\u2013 especially as the story approached its big, climactic showdown. The next book in the series will show considerable improvement, so he\u2019s learning the craft. I recommend this book, in spite of some weaknesses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I shook my head. Lydia studied my face, looking for the lie. \u201cWe\u2019re just looking for answers,\u201d I said. That part was true\u2014otherwise, I would\u2019ve left this soggy grayscape days ago. Even now, the sun pulled a Houdini and went back to its usual place, shining somewhere over a cornfield in Kansas. Luke Fischer, hero … Continue reading ‘Manistique,’ by Craig Terlson<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[5098,5099,5100],"class_list":["post-19405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-craig-terlson","tag-luke-fischer","tag-manistique"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19407,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19405\/revisions\/19407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}