Stephen Lawhead’s Scarlet, a sequel to his novel, Hood, begins with Will Scatlock (otherwise known as Will Scarlet), the narrator of much of the book, lying wounded on a pallet in a prison cell, awaiting a date with the hangman. A Norman priest has been assigned to write down his “confession,” and Will tells his story.

The action takes place in “The March,” a border region between England and Wales, and the time is the reign of King William Rufus, successor to William the Conqueror. As we learned in the previous volume, King Bran, the rightful king of Elfael, has been displaced by the Normans and has taken refuge in the forest with other victims of their tyranny. The Welsh call him Rhi Bran y Hud (King Bran [or Raven] the Enchanter), but the Normans tend to call him Riban Hood. Will is a displaced Englishman who has traveled west to join King Bran.

The outlaws he finds are not quite the “merry men” of legend. They are a pretty desperate and miserable bunch, living a life of subsistence in a forest hideaway where food is always scarce. A number of women and children are also with them, and among them Will finds a woman he wants to marry. But their wedding is delayed repeatedly, because King Bran has discovered a conspiracy that reaches to the very top of the Norman English government, and his attempts to turn what he learns to his advantage lead to desperate risks and Will’s capture and imprisonment. Continue reading Scarlet, by Stephen Lawhead →

“It’s a war thing. I’m a war guy, he’s a war guy. His dad, my dad, war guys. Us war guys, we’re all connected. So I picked up an obligation. It’s something ancient and forgotten and not in existence no more. Lost and gone, a joke, something from those silly sword-fight movies. Something samurai.”

The 47th Samurai, Stephen Hunter’s latest Bob Lee Swagger novel, centers on probably the most ridiculous premise I’ve ever encountered in a thriller.

I loved it.

I think this may be my favorite Bob Lee Swagger book in the whole series. Which is saying a lot.

What do you do if you’re out working in your meadow, and a car approaches, and out comes a Japanese gentleman, a military veteran, who informs you that, judging from the records, your father probably killed his father at Iwo Jima? And he asks your help in locating his father’s military sword, which disappeared at the same time?

Well, if you’re Bob Lee Swagger, you start rooting through your father’s effects, and then make a series of phone calls and visits, until you’ve located the thing. And you carry it back to Japan personally, as a surprise for your new friend.

And what do you do if your new friend and his family are then brutally murdered?

You go to the crime scene, make a spectacle of yourself trying to give information to the police, and get yourself expelled from the country.

Then you hole up for a while, watching old samurai movies and reading everything you can find about Japanese tradition. You go back again with a false passport. And you learn to use a sword. Continue reading The 47th Samurai, by Stephen Hunter →

This is the second published novel by T. L. Hines. It’s a stand-alone, not a sequel to his previous book, Waking Lazarus, which I reviewed a few days ago.

The hero of The Dead Whisper On is Candace “Canada” MacHugh, of Butte, Montana. The product of a broken home, embittered by the early death of her beloved father, estranged from her mother, she worked first (like her father) in Butte’s mines, before they shut down. Now she’s a garbage collector. She lives a packrat life in her late father’s trailer, and drives his old car. She’s aimless and depressed.

And then, one day, from out of the shadows, she hears her father’s voice speaking to her. He wants her to make contact with certain people, who will recruit her into a secret organization. That organization, he says, is devoted to fighting evil and to saving humanity from a terrible threat.

She does what he asks. Why wouldn’t she do what her father wants? But as she learns her new duties, she has trouble making sense of her assignments. And she learns that she’s being pursued, hunted—by a strange, man-like thing that cannot be killed, a monster of Jewish folklore called a golem. In confronting that supernatural antagonist, she will learn secrets that may save—or destroy—her home city.

I was, frankly, a little disappointed with this book. I had hoped to see more growth in Hines’ technique. All in all I rate this book slightly lower than Waking Lazarus. There’s only one fully developed character in The Dead Whisper On—Canada herself. Everybody else seemed pretty sketchy to me. In the later part of the novel Hines brings on a collection of Butte miners who are intended to be colorful. But colorful in itself isn’t enough. You need to establish the characters in the readers’ minds. They all kind of coalesced in my memory, and Hines didn’t help me by offering a lot of differentiation.

The final action centers on a plan by Canada to save the city through a fairly elaborate operation involving explosives and mining technology. For all I know, the plan may be realistic and based on solid engineering principles, but it seemed kind of out there to me, reading as a layman. Maybe other, more knowledgeable, readers had less trouble with that.

My guess (and such guesses are frequently wrong) is that Hines wrote this novel under a fair amount of time pressure from his publisher, and wasn’t able to develop his concept as well as he’d have liked. (Been in those parts myself.)

I still recommend it, especially for those looking for a G-Rated alternative to Dean Koontz. But I hope Hines develops the promise of the first novel a little more in the next one.

First of all, thanks to Phil for sending me this book.

Waking Lazarus is the story of a man who calls himself Ron Gress, a school janitor in the town of Red Lodge, Montana. He lives alone, and is socially isolated, partly by his own choice (although, as we learn later, he has a young son in town, living with his mother, with whom Ron had a one-night stand a few years ago) and partly by plain fear.

His isolation is mostly a result of the fact that he is not, in fact, Ron Gress. His real name is Jude Allman, and he used to be famous. He used to be known as The Boy Who Died Three Times. Three times he fell victim to fatal accidents, and three times he came back to life, to the confusion of doctors. He was on television and radio, and he wrote a book. The trouble was, everything he told the world about what he’d learned “on the other side” was a lie. He got sick of the lying, and so disappeared and took on a new identity.

But he can’t hide forever. There’s a mysterious woman in town who recognizes him and knows too much about his past. And there’s a serial killer loose, a predator of children. Jude will soon find himself forced to choose between his anonymity and his son’s life. In order to unmask the murderer Jude will have to face up to his own past, and his own grudge against God.

As someone who suffers from a shyness disorder myself, I was extremely impressed by the author’s portrayal of what it’s like to live with that kind of social phobia. As a matter of fact, I found the book somewhat uncomfortable at times and had to put it down for a while. I don’t think normal people will have the same difficulty.

I believe that any reader familiar with Dean Koontz will realize almost immediately that author T. L. Hines is plowing much the same ground here. I think he does it creditably. His characters and dialogue are very good. The plotting could be stronger, and there are some holes. But if you like the sort of thing Dean Koontz does, but would prefer something without obscene language, something with less violence on stage, T. L. Hines will probably please you very much. He pleased me, and I’m glad I have a second book of his to read, thanks again to Phil.

I read a couple books over the holiday, but I don’t think they’re really worth separate reviews. I’ll take a few superficial swipes and move along.

Strangers by Dean Koontz appears to me to be a transitional work for the author. First published in 1986, it shows considerable improvement in character development and dialogue from much of his other early work.

It follows the adventures of a group of people, scattered all over the country, who begin to have similar anxiety symptoms (but not identical symptoms—there are interesting variations and contradictions). Most of them are suffering nightmares. Some of them develop obsessions. The moon, in particular, becomes the focus of more than one. Continue reading A couple reviews →

It’s late in the day, but to all you veterans, thank you for your service. Slackers like me owe you big.

The Second Saladin, it appears to me, marks a milepost on author Stephen Hunter’s journey toward finding his niche as a novelist. Some of the elements that will make his Bob/Earl Swagger books so compelling are already there, but he hasn’t yet shaken off a tendency to demonstrate his realism through grim pessimism.

Nevertheless, I found it a compelling book. Though published in 1982 and set in that same time period, the centrality of Kurdistan to the plot makes the whole business remarkably relevant more than two decades later. Continue reading The Second Saladin, by Stephen Hunter →