Not at all blue

BLACK CHERRY BLUES
James Lee Burke

1990

Reviewed by Carol

Five stars

Recommended for: fans of deeply flawed detectives and southern noir

Read on August 23, 2013, read count: twice

Sometimes I wonder if you can really like the Robicheaux series. It isn't easy witnessing a man struggle with his demons, both internal and external, to root for him and watch him both succeed and fail, sometimes in the same breath.

Dave isn't a simple person, which is one of the attractive aspects of him as centerpiece to a series. He knows his weaknesses, fights them and yet is unable to avoid following his pattern, like Sysiphus hauling the boulder again and again only to watch it roll downhill. He's been seeing a therapist since his wife died, and they have an oddly telling discussion:
"'Cut loose from the past. She wouldn't want you to carry a burden like this.'
'I can't. I don't want to.'
'Say it again.'
'I don't want to.'
He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned his palms up toward me and was silent.'"

Beautiful.

Book three in the Dave Robicheaux series opens in a motel, Dave dreaming of the helpless night his wife Anne was murdered. Restless and haunted, he heads to an all-night diner and runs into Dixie Lee Pugh, former roommate, master blues singer, old-time rock-n-roller and dedicated drinker. They only spend a few minutes together, but shortly after, Dixie looks Dave up for help with a couple of thuggish business acquaintances. From there, Dixie's flailing, drunken attempts to stay out of Angola pull Dave into a world of hurt. As he asks a few questions on Dixie's behalf, he runs into his former partner Clete. Dave watches him drive away and wishes him a powerful blessing:
"Whatever you're operating on, I hope it's as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion birds clatter."
Dave almost breaks free of Dixie's situation when the thugs threaten Alafair; Dave's inner demons take over and he finds himself facing a murder charge. Freeing himself will mean digging deeper into Dixie's connections in Montana.

Burke weaves his trademark beautiful, evocative beginning, bringing the varied landscape of the deep south to life, from Louisiana to the edges of Texas. In fact, it's fair to say that the setting stands in for Dave Robicheaux's emotions, and it seems to be raining quite a bit in the bayou these days. Unfortunately, setting doesn't seem to work as well after they head up to Montana, the land of pines, mountainous geography and multi-colored streams. Memories of the south stand in instead.

There is just a touch of humor in this, the kind that makes me smile, albeit crookedly:

"But I had never bought very heavily into the psychiatric definitions of singularity and eccentricity in people. In fact, as I reviewed the friendships I had had over the years, I had to conclude that the most interesting ones involved the seriously impaired--the Moe Howard account, the drunken, the mind-smoked, those who began each day with a nervous breakdown, people who hung on to the sides of the planet with suction cups."

Once the story moved to Montana, I found Clete and Dixie rapidly took over the story with their extravagant personalities. I didn't mind, but if anyone is more flawed than Dave, it's Clete. Clete is no fool either, and is well aware he's Dave's stalking horse:
"'Why'd you keep partnering with me at the First District after you saw me bend a couple of guys out of shape?' He grinned at me. 'Maybe because I'd do the things you really wanted to. Just maybe. Think about it.'"

Character arcs and redemption go farther than I expected, and if the villain is a bit of a sociopath, he's a frustrated sociopath with resources and its no less frightening for it. Batist is well done and avoids both disrespect and pitfalls of the loyal support character. Alafair is written appropriately for a young child, and one of my favorite moments is when Dave acknowledges the foolishness of telling her to be brave: "She had experienced a degree of loss and violence in her short life that most people can only appreciate in their nightmares."

The first read was somewhat less than satisfying, perhaps because I was pushing the mood and the speed. Burke does not write thrillers, although they certainly have their share of violence and mayhem, and his stories are not conducive to skimming. Visual setting and childhood memories are as important as suspect interviews. The second time--largely accomplished on a comfy lounge chair in the sun--was far more successful and satisfying. I always want to visit the bayou after I'm finished with Dave Robicheaux.

Highly recommended. Note: it won Burke's first Edgar Award.
Four and a half, five stars.


Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...

Another Little Piece

Another Little Piece
by Kate Karyus Quinn

Reviewed by Sesana
Five out of five stars

Publisher Summary:

On a cool autumn night, Annaliese Rose Gordon stumbled out of the woods and into a high school party. She was screaming. Drenched in blood. Then she vanished.

A year later, Annaliese is found wandering down a road hundreds of miles away. She doesn't know who she is. She doesn't know how she got there. She only knows one thing: She is not the real Annaliese Rose Gordon.

Now Annaliese is haunted by strange visions and broken memories. Memories of a reckless, desperate wish . . . a bloody razor . . . and the faces of other girls who disappeared. Piece by piece, Annaliese's fractured memories come together to reveal a violent, endless cycle that she will never escape—unless she can unlock the twisted secrets of her past.

My Review:

I can't talk about the plot of this book in much detail. There's a lot to discover, and it's far better to learn the whole truth of Annaliese through reading. This is one of those situations where getting spoiled could entirely ruin the experience. The publisher summary strikes a pretty good balance between telling enough to hook a reader and keeping enough held back to preserve the secrets of the book, so I'll leave it at that. I should also point out that there are shifting timelines, and those parts of the book can happen very suddenly. You have to be ready to roll with the punches in the book. For me, the first time it happened I was a bit thrown, but I was ready for it the next time it happened.

What I can talk about is the feel of the book, the sense of getting thrown off balance every fifty pages or so. Annaliese's memory is a blank as the book begins, so she's learning at the same pace as the reader. And it takes nearly the entire length of the book to learn the whole truth of who and what and why she is. Not that every question is answered within the pages of the book. If you hate loose ends, this is the sort of book that will frustrate you. But if you can take and are even intrigued by a book that deliberately leaves things unexplained to the reader (they are, after all, unexplained to Annaliese, and we shouldn't expect them to be), then that's a point in this book's favor.

More points for the characters, particularly our narrator. Annaliese starts from a very vulnerable position, naturally. No memory, apparently victim of a horrible crime, and being sent to live with people she is told are her parents but she can't remember nor have any immediate feelings for. And she shows that vulnerability, but she is by no means a weak character. I would describe her as someone determined to find herself in a stable life, but not someone willing to let others do that work for her. As a character, I found her fully believable. And the same goes for the secondary characters, particularly her parents. Quinn definitely thought about the impact this scenario (a vanished child returns after a year missing) would have on a loving family.

There is romance, of course. This is YA. Luckily, the romance developed at a believable pace and for believable reasons. No instalove! I understand what Annaliese sees in Dex, and what he sees in her. And it doesn't distract from the main point of the story. The romance doesn't take over the rest of the book, which is probably the main reason I like it. It's not that I have a problem with romance, I just don't like it taking over stories when I should be able to concentrate on what are, in the context of the book, much more important things.

I was just riveted by this book, especially towards the end. I read it mostly during my lunch break at work, and at the end of my breaks surprised both by how quickly lunch had gone by and how much I'd managed to read in that time. And that's why I'm bumping up this 4.5 star book to 5 stars. It isn't perfect, but it is wonderful.

I won an ARC of this book from The Midnight Garden blog. Thanks, guys! I loved it!

Also reviewed at Goodreads.

A Double Dose of Chris F. Holm's Short Fiction

8 Pounds: Eight Tales of Crime, Horror & Suspense
Chris F. Holm
Poisonville Press
Available Now! (Kindle Exclusive)

In 8 Pounds, author Chris F. Holm presents us with eight tales of crime, horror and suspense.  The stories themselves provide glimpses into selfishness, self-preservation, betrayal and straight up horror.

“On the first day, nobody paid it no mind.  Sure, the power flickered and the gutters overflowed, but most just figured it’d blow over by daybreak.

On the second day, the river swelled.  Folks took off work to haul sandbags to the riverbanks, hoping to keep the rising waters at bay.  They worked for hours in the wind and wet, and in the end, that river breached its banks and sent ‘em running.

On the third day, they found the body.”

Look, if that doesn't grab you right away, I don’t know what will.  The collection starts off strong with Seven Days of Rain, a story about guilt and doing what’s right despite your own best interests.

While I wasn't a huge fan of the follow-up, A Better Life, Holmes hits us with a thriller in the third story about a woman on the run and an unsuspecting good Samaritan caught up in her circumstances with A Simple Act of Kindness.

The book moves along smoothly with the pulse pounding Eight Pounds.  Holm turns the suspense up to eleven as two best friends share drinks at a pub – one harboring a secret from the other.  The tension rises when the guilty party suspects he’s been outed leading to a memorable conclusion.

He snorted, took a drink.  ”We’re all of us the killing kind,” he said.  ”With the proper motivation, any one of us is capable of just about anything.  Murder. Theft. Betrayal.  But then you of all people should know that.”

Aside from the very short The Well, the collection finishes up with a classic crime caper in The Big Score and a coming of age story in The World Behind.  While I felt The Well seemed out of place and had a bit of a puzzling ending, the two stories that followed finished strong.  The Big Score kept me guessing right until the very end while The World Behind tugged on the ol’ heartstrings.

Overall, while I felt it was not as strong as its stellar successor, Dead Letters, 8 Pounds is a good collection of varied stories from a great author.  Given its bargain price on Amazon right now – you should give it a read.

Dead Letters: Stories of Murder & Mayhem

Chris F. Holm

Poisonville Press

Available Now! (Kindle Exclusive)

I think I’m finally starting to come around on short story collections. While I’ve read a few that I couldn’t quite get behind, the ones that I’m enjoying are seemingly outnumbering the ones I don’t. I was a big fan of John Connolly’s Nocturnes as well as Stephen King’s Full Dark, No Stars and now you can add Chris F. Holm’s Dead Letters to that exclusive club.

There’s a lot to like about this collection. While most of them were enjoyable, a select few completely blew me away. My favorite of the bunch involved a couple moving into a home believed to previously have been inhabited by a famous writer from Maine. Without giving anything away, Holm crafted an ending that gave me chills the likes of which I cannot recall. In addition to that, there’s a fantastic story involving a murder mystery featuring the characters from Rankin Bass’ Rudolph The Rednose Reindeer. Holm had me laughing out loud injecting these G-Rated personalities into a noir-style setting.

A few other great ones include “Action”, a hilarious bank robbery involving pretentious artists that goes awry, “A Native Problem”, a downright chilling tale involving cannibalism (or zombies) and “The Man With The Alligator Shoes”, a story that seems to mirror the frustration following the 2008 market crash.

Oh, and it would be a crime not to mention the story that kicks things off. ”The Putdown” was certainly interesting enough given the style in which Chris chose to narrate the story. For someone not from the south, writing in a southern twang had to have been challenging. However, it was the ending that gripped me. I knew after finishing that solid opener, I had some interesting stuff ahead of me.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I can’t get enough of Mr. Holm’s work. Between his Collector series and now this short story collection, he’s an author that everyone should be looking out for in the coming years. Now, time to get 8 Pounds.

Small Change

Elizabeth Hay

Counterpoint 

Reviewed by: Nancy 

3 out of 5 stars

Summary

These twenty superbly crafted linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and ends, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations. A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favour with a neighbourhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the “unconsummated courtship” she was drawn into by a male colleague. With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humour, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page.

My Review

I was at the McGill University Bookstore looking for something by a Canadian writer I hadn’t heard of. On the sale table, I came across this collection of stories by Elizabeth Hay, finalist for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Impressive. 

Bethie is the narrator of the story. Was Bethie a fictional character or was the author revealing certain aspects of her life and personality through the main character? Maybe a little of both. At times Bethie seemed too real, too honest. I often felt like I was intruding on her private thoughts.

“And here was I, where I had wanted to be for as long as I had been away from it – home – and it didn’t register either. In other words, I discovered that I wasn’t in a place. I was the place. I felt populated by old friends. They lived in my head amid my various broodings. Here they met again, going through the same motions and different ones. Here they coupled in ways that hadn’t occurred really. And here was I, disloyal but faithful, occupied by people I didn’t want to see and didn’t want to lose.”

These loosely linked stories delve into women’s friendships – the difficulties, the joys, and how love, loss, marriage and children can change friendships over time. Reading these stories forced me to examine my own life and contemplate why I have difficulty maintaining close friendships. Maybe it started when I was a child, much too introverted and different to fit in. Or when I was a teenager, forced to leave my two closest friends behind when my parents wanted to leave the big bad city. These stories made me glad I keep people at a distance and manage to avoid the problems that can happen between friends. They also make me feel that I’m missing a vital part of life.

Also posted at Goodreads.

REPOSTING LOST REVIEW Ninth Jay Lake Pre-Mortem Read-a-thon.

KALIMPURA (Green Universe #3)
JAY LAKE
Tor Books
$27.99 hardcover, available now

Reviewed by Richard, 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: This sequel to Green and Endurance takes Green back to the city of Kalimpura and the service of the Lily Goddess.

Green is hounded by the gods of Copper Downs and the gods of Kalimpura, who have laid claim to her and her children. She never wanted to be a conduit for the supernatural, but when she killed the Immortal Duke and created the Ox God with the power she released, she came to their notice.

Now she has sworn to retrieve the two girls taken hostage by the Bittern Court, one of Kalimpura’s rival guilds. But the Temple of the Lily Goddess is playing politics with her life.

My Review: That's a fine summary, as far as it goes; but it doesn't touch on the fact that Green, our first-person narrator, spends her entire coming-of-age in thrall to capricious, unkind gods and goddesses who can barely be arsed to help her stay alive, and will at the drop of a hat turn on her to harm her for mysterious (sometimes not so mysterious) reasons.

Yay religion.

There are three things I liked about this book: First, I love the world that Lake builds. I mean, I don't necessarily love *the*world*, but the world-building yields results that feel real to me. I find the fact that Green really inhabits that world, really notices and attends to it, an effective device for a character who is a species of assassin. It makes perfect sense that she would be vigilant and attentive and well-informed. So is James Bond, for many of the same reasons. It's believable that Green says this to us:

For all the imposing glory of the frontage of the Temple of the Silver Lily, the rear facing was as anonymously crowded and busy as the back of any other substantial institution. Carters, beggars, small tradesmen--a steady traffic passed in the alley behind. We slipped into the stream, walking briskly with our heads turned down. Most of the servants in this city or any other walked briskly. A shuffling step would have cried out that we wished not to be recognized.
Swiftly we merged into the crowded streets beyond, losing ourselves away from the Blood Fountain with its swarm of angry Street Guildsmen. After about six blocks, I pulled the limping {fellow traveler} into someone's walled garden to rest a short while beneath the shade of a papaya tree. It was a shame about the latch on their gate, which I was forced to cut through with the god-blooded dagger.

I feel the alley traffic jostling me; hear the angry crowd noises, see Green testing gates surreptitiously, finding one her extraordinary dagger can be used in the ordinariest of ways, to cut the latchstring on; strain with her in supporting a lamed companion in an effort to escape unnoticed from people who wish to harm both of them. It's an economical passage typical of many that make Lake's imaginary city of Kalimpura such a layered and believable place.

At multiple points in the series, but most notably in this last book of three, Green passes casual comments that can stop you in your tracks if you're paying attention. She muses that the Prince of the City's thugs would, in a city that wished its streets to be policed, be a watch; here in Kalimpura, it suits the rich and powerful that the streets not be policed. Green also notes that her struggles against the enemies of the Lily Blades (her order of assassins) are those of a have-not against haves; she muses that the poor hide from the powerful and administer their own forms of justice exactly as the powerful do among themselves, as well as attempting to on the powerless. How pefectly observed, and apt for us in the twenty-first century "land of the free," too.

Again, it makes sense that an assassin would think these thoughts, or at least a top-ranking and powerful one would. She has to have a clear picture of the ground in order to negotiate its twists and curves successfully, not getting herself killed.

And this is all a succinct evocation of Green's state of mind, hypervigilant, as well as an expression of the reason she's so very good at her killing. She does not miss a trick, her eye is sharp and her grasp of what she needs to do to survive this godless passage is firm. Her self-directed wryness is catnip to me, too.

As Green is in a religious order, and in direct communication with her goddess (a fact that many in power in her order and her world find extremely threatening), she finds herself needing to put religion in a place, a slot, in her world-view, with borders and limits:

The memory of the divine is like the memory of pain--you know you have experienced it, but you cannot relive the experience...I have come to realize this protects us all from the sharp edges with which the world is filled. Every day dawns like shattered glass, then passes to depart on bladed wings, which only the ignorant and the lucky survive unscathed.

Yes, indeed, this is true. Anytime the divine touches a human being, the consequences are dire. Look at the fates of all the prophets! But also, and tellingly, Green equates the experience of divine communication with pain. It causes her pain, it gives her pain, it spreads pain in the world. When a particularly terrible problem needs solving, Green summons the sea from its bed and smashes the problem, causing much death, bringing much pain to the survivors, and wracking her with guilt.

But it accomplished her purposes, and nothing else would have. So the guilt and pain are, of necessity, borne and worn away. Like all pain, Green's pain wears her edges down, sharpens her inner blades and polishes her outer ones, and carves her a new shape.

This is called adulthood. She achieves it. She survives the process, where many do not. They succumb to addiction and fantasy and apathy. Green does not. She accepts that her future won't look like her past or her plans, and moves into it without undue drama.

Note the word "undue." She fights and kicks against the demands of the universe, like we all do, but she doesn't give way and fill the skies with her whining. Goodness knows she has a right to. She chooses instead to get on with the work in front of her.

And that is the third thing I truly appreciate about this trilogy, and this volume in the trilogy. A story where someone comes of age is common as pig tracks. (My mother's memorably sniffy dismissal of my almost-third wife.) I love the fact that this woman comes into her full growth by embracing her own power and choosing not to rely on anyone or anything outside herself. I love that she loves her children, her companions, and her world enough to do what needs doing despite the fact that some people can never forgive her or understand what she has done.

In the end, I love the fact that this novel, likely Jay Lake's last published in his lifetime, expresses better than any I've read in a long, long time the simple truth that, "In the end, so is the beginning. In the beginning, so is the end:"

The first thing I can remember in this life is my father driving his white ox, Endurance, to the sky burial platforms. His back was before me as we walked along a dusty road. All things were dusty in the country of my birth, unless they were flooded. A ditch yawned at each side to beckon me toward play. The fields beyond were drained of water and filled with stubble, though I could not now say which of the harvest seasons it was.
Though I would come to change the fate of cities and of gods, then I was merely a small, grubby child in a small, grubby corner of the world.

And so does the time spent with Green, and Jay Lake, end where Green begins. Hail, and farewell. You and your creations have enriched me. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A Dark Fairy Tale With Mixed Results

Sea Change
by S. M. Wheeler
Published by Tor Books

2 Out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Amanda

A fantasy bildungsroman, Sea Change follows the isolated, lonely and headstrong protagonist, Lilly, as she explores the limits of friendship. Born into a prosperous house to parents who fight as fiercely as they once loved, Lilly is a disappointment to her father because she is not the male heir for whom he hoped and the birthmark that blemishes half of her face ostracizes her from the townspeople who fear she is a witch. It is not until she meets Octavius, a young kraken who can appreciate the beauty of her intelligence and compassion, that Lilly finds a kindred spirit with whom she can share her innermost self. When Octavius disappears and trouble at home forces Lilly to choose loyalties, she sets off on a quest to free the only true friend she's ever known--but the price may be more than she's willing to pay.

With its dark fairy tale quality, female protagonist, and unusual take on gender roles, Sea Change should have been a safe bet for me. And while S.M. Wheeler certainly creates a fantastic journey for Lilly and does not shy away from the more horrific, gruesome aspects of life, the novel struck me as being somewhat uneven. The transitions that occur in Lilly's life are indeed sea changes, often abrupt and unpredictable events that turn her entire life upside down, but the result was that I often felt as though I was reading a disjointed narrative. Certain events are given too much weight (such as the lengthy interlude with the bandits, during which Lilly's original intent for being there--a bit of clever trickery on her part regarding promised wealth in exchange for her life--is forgotten for several pages), and others are sadly given too little (the kraken appears very seldom in the book and only serves as the motivation for Lilly to undertake a quest that leads to self-discovery).

I also found Wheeler's syntax and phrasing to be confusing, often cluttered or inverted for no particular reason or to any desired effect. There are also several instances where references are made to people, objects, or events as though the reader should remember them from a previous mention--which never existed. By the end, I still found myself re-reading sentences and grasping for the meaning.

Despite this, I found myself experiencing a sea change in regard to the book once Lilly set off on her quest. Whereas I found the beginning overly long and tedious, Lilly's adventures after leaving home became compelling and I looked forward to seeing what peculiar character Wheeler would introduce us to next: a skinned witch, a troll who exacts an unthinkable price, a pair of homosexual bandits (I particularly enjoyed Wheeler's depictions of sexuality and the domestic, devoted relationship between these two men--even though they were every bit as violent as Neverwhere's Vandemar and Croup), the dark-wife who dines on memory, a zombie tailor whose specialty is the sought after Coat of Illusion, and many others. After a time, though, it seemed that too much was being crammed into one book. Some restraint in the number of characters may have resulted in a more streamlined narrative that was able to showcase these characters in all of their macabre and magical glory.

I look forward to reading Wheeler's next novel as there is a lot of promise in Sea Change, but there's also a lot of room to grow.

**I received a free copy of Sea Change from Tor in exchange for an honest review.**

RIP, Elmore Leonard

This morning, we lost one of the best when Elmore Leonard passed away after complications from a stroke.  In tribute to old Dutch, here are reviews of three Elmore Leonard books I've read in the last couple years.


52 Pickup by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Blackmailers have factory owner Harry Mitchell over a barrel. Either he pays them $105,000 a year or they turn over an incriminating film to the police and press, and more, if he doesn't pay up. Too bad Harry Mitchell has ideas of his own...

Elmore Leonard sure knows how to weave a serpentine tale, doesn't he? He takes a story that seems simple on the surface, that of some blackmailers hitting up a pigeon for money, and turns it into something else all together. It was written in 1974 but has a certain timelessness to it.

Harry Mitchell is the usual Leonard protagonist: cool, capable, and not entirely spotless. The way he handles the blackmailers set the stage for later Leonard protagonists like Chili Palmer and Raylan Givens. I like that Leonard made Barbara's behavior toward Harry believable after she found out he had an affair. About my only complaint with the story is that I wish Barbara would ahve gotten a crack at getting some payback on Alan.

The bad guys are an unsavory crew, as to be expected. I didn't expect some of them to go out the way they did, though. That's one of the reasons I mean to read more Elmore Leonard in 2012. He manages to surprise me in each outing. As usual with Leonard, the dialogue is as smooth as fine Scotch.

While it may be slightly less polished than some of his later works, all of the Leonard hallmarks are there: double crosses, slick dialogue, and fairly believable situations. I couldn't wait for the blackmailers to get what was coming to them and Leonard did not disappoint. Very highly recommended.

Swag by Elmore Leonard

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


When used car salesman Frank Ryan catches Ernest Stickley stealing a car off his lot, ideas start going through his head. Soon, Ryan and Stickley are armed robbers and damn good ones. Things go smoothly until someone offers them a crack at even bigger money...

Like many Elmore Leonard books, Swag is a fast-moving crime story. The two main characters, Ryan and Stick, are cast from one of Leonard' standard molds: the criminals who aren't as smart as they think they are. They're a bit of an odd couple. Stick's nervous and not all that confident while Ryan is overconfident and thinks he knows everything. They were pretty likeable as far as armed robbers go but I kept thinking about how Richard Stark's Parker would mop the floor with them.

The bad guys were suitably bad, both Sportree and the cops. As he does a lot of the time, Leonard makes the antagonists almost as interesting as the protagonists. Once complications start surfacing, they come in droves, from Arlene witnessing one of their early robberies, to Stick having to shoot two men, to Billy Ruiz. The ending was surprising but was also perfect.

Leonard's smooth-flowing dialogue and twisting plot were the stars of the show, as they normally are in one of his books. I loved that Frank Ryan had his rules of robbery, just like Elmore Leonard has his rules of writing.

It wasn't perfect but I liked it quite a bit. It was a good way to spend a Sunday evening.


The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bootlegger Son Martin has 150 barrels of whiskey his dad made stashed away somewhere and his old war buddy, Frank Long, now a crooked prohibition agent, has his sights set on them. Will Son cave in under the pressure and hand over the whiskey or will he put Long and his cronies into the ground?

Reading an Elmore Leonard book is like bullshitting with an old friend on their front porch. In this case, it would be whiskey we'd be drinking instead of a couple frosty beers.

Rural Kentucky in the 1930's is far from Elmore Leonard's usual haunts but after watching several seasons of Justified, I figured he could handle it. I was right.

The Moonshine War plays out like a lot of Elmore Leonard books. The promise of violence keeps building until the glorious shitstorm at the end. Frank Long trying to strongarm Son Martin out of his valuable whiskey is more of the same. It went a little differently than I thought it would near the end, which is always a plus for me.

The country dialog is very well done and drives the plot forward. Like in most Leonard books, Son Martin is just a little slicker than Frank Long and the others.

Son reminds me of Raylan Givens a bit of Raylan was running moonshine instead of being a US Marshall. He's a conflicted character, his young wife dying from the flu while he was in the army leaving him somewhat directionless. He's got a bit of that Givens inner rage going as well. When his neighbors started turning on him when he wouldn't roll over for Long and the others, I knew the violence was coming. The Moonshine War actually feels like a western more than anything else.

Any gripes? Not a one besides wanting to read more about Son Martin. 3.5 stars.

Thanks for the memories, Elmore.  There won't be another one like you.

Whosday II - Two Eleventh Doctor Who reviews

In the wake of the announcement of the actor playing the Twelfth Doctor, I decided I'd better finish reading the Eleventh Doctor novels I have on the pile.

Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The TARDIS takes a wrong turn on the way to Leadworth to drop the Ponds off for Christmas and The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find themselves on a far flung colony world that is in the grips of the worst winter the world has ever seen. But what's causing the hellish weather? And what's killing the livestock? And can the Doctor and the Ponds get to the bottom of things before it's too late?

Of course they can! After all, he's The Doctor.

The Silent Stars Go By sees the Doctor and Amy get separated from Rory early on, wandering around the frozen colony world of Hereafter. If only Rory hadn't gone back to the TARDIS for a heavier coat. After some mistaken identity shenanigans and disbelieving colonists, the meat of the story gets flung on the table in all it's frozen glory in the form of classic Who enemies, The Ice Warriors.

Abnett does a fairly good job. Rory and the Doctor both ring true to form from the TV series. It was hard not to hear the actor's voices in my head while reading. Amy, on the other hand, doesn't get to do much and is on the weaker side of things.

TSSGB felt like an old adaptation of a Doctor Who episode, lots of banter, running from things, and timey-whimey, which was the main problem I had with it. The whole thing felt really thin, like maybe Abnett had written a Doctor Who script at some point and slapped a few descriptions on it. The book was very dialogue-heavy and I could almost pick out where the commercial breaks would go.

Still, it wasn't all bad. There was a twist at the 75% mark, just like a lot of Doctor Who episodes, that was unexpected and saved the book from being a monster of the week affair. Abnett did a lot more with the Ice Warriors than I thought he would and the colony had some secrets of its own. Overall, I enjoyed the experience but I really wanted to love it. 3 out of 5 stars.

Doctor Who: Paradox Lost by George Mann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory wind up in London in 2789, just in time to see an android dredged from teh Thames. But how could a model of android that's just been created be almost a thousand years old? And what does its warning to the Doctor mean?

I'm not sure why I originally picked this up since I pretty much swore off reading George Mann after so-so experiences with The Affinity Bridge, The Osiris Ritual, and Ghosts of Manhattan. I think what sold me is that the plot description reminded me of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they found Data's severed head in a cave beneath San Francisco.

This Doctor Who novel was actually the best Eleventh Doctor novel I've read so far. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory were portrayed with more accuracy than I've encountered in the past. The supporting characters, Arven the Android and Archibald Angelchrist, an old man with a past of adventuring, did their part more than adequately.

The plot is a pretty good one and could easily have been an Doctor Who episode. While the Doctor goes back to 1910 to investigate, Rory and Amy stay put in 2789 to check on Professor Gradius, a scientist conducting time travel experiments, only to run into trouble on their own. There's some timey-whimey and the two plotlines converge, complete with running away and the Doctor saving the day.

The threat, the Squall, are a batlike species of hive-minded aliens who invade the two points in time via a rift created by Gradius' experiments. Even though I knew all the main characters would survive, things got pretty tense a few times. The Doctor wrapped things up nicely and the epilogue was pretty fitting.

For once, everything is fish fingers and custard. This is probably as close to a 4 that I'll ever give a Doctor Who novel.

What's In The Box?

Skinner
by Charlie Huston
Reviewed by Kemper
4 out 5 stars.

You gotta love a book in which the weapons used by the bad-ass hero include a pair of socks and a ruler.

Skinner was raised in a closed environment as part of a screwy experiment from his autistic parents, and as an adult he worked for an international security firm called Kestrel where he became legendary for his unique method.  Skinner’s Maxim dictated that if anything happened to anyone under his protection, that he would wreak bloody vengeance on anyone and everyone responsible.  This scorched earth policy worked well for a while, but eventually Skinner outlived his usefulness and had to go underground when Kestrel tried to arrange a permanent retirement for him.

Terrance was Skinner’s boss who was forced out of Kestrel, but they want him back to track down the people responsible for a cyber-attack on the US.  Terrance recruits Jae, an analyst with a talent for building robots and OCD tendencies that allow her to find patterns in the chaos of world events, and he contacts Skinner and talks him into providing protection for her.  Jae had a bad experience with Kestrel previously and doesn’t trust them so she and Skinner have that in common.  The two race around the globe uncovering a vast conspiracy that somehow involves a slum in Mumbai.

Charlie Huston used to crank out hard boiled books featuring criminals and/or vampires and then fill them up with enough attitude, atmosphere and graphic violence to make them highly entertaining reads.  He was good enough that he probably could have had a successful career if he had no bigger ambitions, but Huston has been showing a remarkable capacity for growth over his last several books.   In Skinner, he takes what could just be a good set-up for an action spy thriller and gives it a huge amount of depth by using a couple of complex characters to throw around some very big ideas.

Skinner’s story examines how a bunch of variables like economics, political unrest and climate change have combined into a murky threat cloud that always hangs on the horizon and perpetually seems about to engulf the world.  Huston has nailed that general unease that comes with scrolling through a day’s worth of news stories and realizing that the problems far outnumber the solutions.  The Jae character is particularly good at conveying this since she has a tendency to start following patterns obsessively to conclusions that indicate the world is doomed.  While there’s plenty of action, gee-whiz tech and the usual tropes of covert thrillers like suitcases full of fake passports and money, it’s the bigger picture that makes this feel a lot more important than just a typical spies-on-the-run-against-a-vast-conspiracy story.

My one gripe is that there’s almost too much in the book.  I would have liked to get more with Skinner and Jae because they’re both such intriguing characters, but it kind of feels like we’re racing through their history to keep the core story moving.  It almost seems like this could have been the conclusion of a larger series, but it was nice to get a self-contained story rather than an author just kicking off a new multi-book narrative so I won’t bitch too much about it.

Three Characters Haunted by an Event from the Past

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Three of five stars


I first tumbled to Harlan Coben very early in his career when a friend recommended the first or second book in his Myron Bolitar series. I enjoyed the Bolitar books and found Myron to be an unusual but engaging protagonist who almost always found himself in the midst of an interesting plot.

After writing a number of these books, Coben began writing stand-alone thrillers, and I followed dutifully along. Some of these books I liked a lot; others I thought did not work as well, usually because the author insisted on piling one implausible plot twist on top of another until the reader could no longer suspend disbelief and the entire structure collapsed in ruins.

Stay Close falls into the middle of the pack of Coben's books; it's okay, but it's certainly not his best effort. The book involves three central characters who are united by their ties to a terrifying night seventeen years earlier when a man named Stewart Green disappeared. Two people saw Green in an isolated area, dead or very close to it. But neither reported the discovery; the body was never found, and Green is still officially listed as a missing person.

Ray Levine was once a world-class photographer, but he made a number of bad choices that came to a head that fateful night and now he has spiraled down to rock bottom, drinking heavily, living in a crappy apartment and working as a fake paparazzi. Jack Broome is the police detective who can't let go of the case that has haunted him all these years, and Megan Pierce is the suburban wife who's "living the ultimate soccer-mom fantasy and hating it."

Megan is also a woman with a very dark past that she escaped on that night seventeen years ago. After all this time, she decides to pull the curtain back just a bit for a quick glimpse into her former life. Just as she does, though, another man goes missing in the same way as Stewart Green. Everyone involved in the earlier case will be sucked into the new one, with potentially disastrous consequences for all of them.

As is usually the case in one of Harlan Coben's thrillers, this one moves fairly swiftly along, but I had a hard time moving with it. Unhappily, this is one of those books in which the main protagonist, in this case Megan Pierce, makes one astoundingly stupid decision after another, which is the only thing that allows the plot to advance beyond the first chapter. But after seventy-five pages or so, I simply stopped caring what happened to the woman. My attitude by that point was that a person as stupid as she deserved whatever bad things might happen to befall her. And once you stop caring about a book's central character, you usually stop caring about the book itself.

It doesn't help that at some points the writing seems unusually clunky and that the book contains a couple of villains who are simply unbelievable from the outset. By the last hundred pages or so, the book finally gets some traction and the conclusion is fairly satisfying, but by then it almost seems too little too late. Again, this is not a bad book, but a person new to the work of Harlan Coben would probably want to start with another of his efforts.