Disorganized, as usual

When Elves Attack by Tim Dorsey

2012-01-07T11:29:00.000-06:00

This is a fun little Christmas dose of Serge and Coleman, with appearances by many of the regular side characters -- the Davenports, the G Unit, City and Country.

It's just before Christmas, and the Davenports are living back on Triggerfish Lane, where they first met Serge. Martha is still irritating, but I was able to tolerate her better in this one than some of the others. Jim has a job as a "consultant" of the sort companies bring in to fire people when they are restructuring. The G Unit are living in a nursing home, and bored silly and looking for adventure. And Serge and Coleman? Well ...

"Let's try skipping. You see someone skipping, and you wish wars would stop. Children skip all the time, but you become an adult and forget to skip. Let's skip."

"Wait up!" Coleman skipped alongside Serge. "But I still don't get this elf thing. How can we be elves if the mall didn't hire us?"

"And that's what everyone thinks." Serge skipped and waved at curious shoppers. "But there's no law that says you can't just unilaterally decide to be an elf, buy a costume, and hit the mall. That's the whole key to life: Fuck the conventional wisdom on elves."

"So then that makes us..."

"That's right: wildcat elves."

"But, Serge, what if someone says something?"

"What are they going to say?" Serge stopped skipping. "It's like clipboards. You walk around all smart and serious, writing on a ckipboard, and people stand back in respect. Or orange cones. You can buy them at any Home Depot. Then you set them out according to your needs, and the public thinks, 'He must be official. He's got orange cones.' Those are the Big Three: clipboards, orange cones, elf suits. People don't question ... I need coffee. There's the Coffee Circus."

At first this one was giving me flashbacks to Triggerfish Twist and Atomic Lobster, neither of them favorites. But it got better, and was just a hell of a lot of fun. I know, I say that about every Dorsey novel, but that's because they are. When Elves Attack is a short, feel-good holiday story with sex, drugs, stalkers, and in-laws.

2011 Reading Roundup

2011-12-31T18:50:00.000-06:00

This year I completed 148 novels, novellas (90 pages or more) and scripts. Late in the year when I realized I was getting close to 150 I tried to get in a few quick reads to reach a nice round number, but it just didn't work out. December is a really busy time for me. 148 is still a lot of of books, and the most I've managed since I started keeping track in 2000, except for last year, when I read 253. I doubt that I will ever manage that number again, as it requires doing almost nothing with my free time except reading. And I like reading, but do have other hobbies. On the other hand, I might have done quite a bit better this year if I hadn't taken up Farmville in April. It's fun, but it eats a lot of time. I think one of my resolutions for 2012 may be to spend less time playing Farmville.

I tried keeping a spreadsheet this year in addition to my paper records in the hope that I'd be able to sort the data and make it easier to come up with my numbers, but the online spreadsheet I was using didn't sort things quite as easily as I've grown to expect when using Excel. Nevertheless, it did allow me to track more categories than I usually do.

So, in 2011, here is what I read:

47 fantasy
37 mystery
22 romance
5 horror
4 urban fantasy
4 nonfiction
3 paranormals
2 suspense
1 alternate history
and the remainder were general fiction of one sort or another. As last year, many of them were male/male stories of one sort or another -- mystery, romance, fantasy, etc. However this year I only read 56 gay works of 90 pages or longer (and lots of shorter works I didn't count), down considerably from last year's number.

I figure that I read

73 ebooks
32 hardcover
31 paperback
9 scripts
3 audiobooks

Of those, I bought 88, 38 were from the library, 12 were free works, and 10 were borrowed.

By far, the most unpleasant books I read this year were Embassytown by China Mieville, which I had to finish because I'd received an ARC and was required to write a review; and Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, which I finished so that no one could dismiss my review when I honestly said I didn't like it. Both those books were a a very unpleasant slog.

It's harder to pick the books I enjoyed most. My reading resolution this year was to read entirely according to my whims, whatever I felt like reading, whatever appealed to me, without worrying about what I "should" be reading. I even decided not to bother reading the Hugo Award nominees this year, something I always do in the years when I am eligible to vote. But because I didn't read anything that wasn't appealing to me (with the exception of the two works listed above, and what a waste of time they both were) I had a good reading year. There are many, many things on my list that I enjoyed, though not all of them were outstanding. So let me just pick a few:

I started reading the Ceepak & Boyle mysteries by Chris Grabenstein. They are set in a seaside town in New Jersey and feature two cops, one a former military man with a very firm moral code, and the other his young partner, who has a wonderfully amusing and distinctive narrative voice. They're just a pleasure to read, and I've got my mystery book group reading the first one for this month's selection. Hopefully they will enjoy it as much as I did.

Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson was not at all what I was expecting. It's a novella in a series about a couple of necromancers who travel around and get into trouble. However the main characters barely make an appearance in the story. It is, instead, a sort of fantasy re-telling of the Canterbury Tales, except with cannibalism. Once I finally stopped trying to figure out when the usual characters would appear, I was treated to a very dark and very darkly funny story.

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovich is a paranormal police procedural set in London. A young police officer discovers that he can see dead people, and ends up apprenticed the the police's only wizard. London is richly painted, and it was a compelling read. I believe I gulped it down in one sitting. I have the second one in my TBR pile, and will definitely get to it in 2012.

Aloes by Chris Quinton is a paranormal gay romance, in which a man who suffered a severe head injury now discovers that he has synaethesia -- he can tell when people are lying or telling the truth.

I also really enjoyed Truth in the Dark by Amy Lane, which is a gay twist on Beauty and the Beast, in which a very homely and crippled man goes to live for a year with a beautiful lion-man, and they struggle with their perceptions of which is the beauty and which is the beast. I put off reading this one for quite a while because I wasn't at all sure about it as described, but it turned out to be a really good read, and Amy Lane is working her way onto my list of favorite male/male writers.

Trouble in Mudbug by Jana DeLeon

2011-12-27T19:01:00.000-06:00

I started out enjoying this one, but by the end was not. I'm not sure it's even worth wasting the time to enumerate the ways in which this one didn't work for me, but hey, why not?

I think that part of the problem I had with this novel was one of expectation. Whether it's fair or not, I went into this expecting a funny mystery. The main character, Maryse, is a botanist who lives in a bayou near a little town in Louisiana. Her mother-in-law, Helena, who she fully believes was evil, has died. Unfortunately that is not the end of her dealings with the woman, who is now a ghost and following Maryse around, trying to get her to figure out who killed her. Meanwhile a very sexy man has shown up at her office and flashed her a winning smile, and she's not sure what to do about it.

I was expecting a funny mystery in which we probably find out who murdered Helena. That's not what this book is, though. For one thing -- spoilers ahead! -- we don't find out who killed Helena. However Helena has left Maryse some property and under some arcane covenants on the property Maryse can't leave the town limits for one week until the paperwork is finalized. Meanwhile someone is trying, rather clumsily, to kill Maryse. But frankly that isn't the plot of the novel, either, it's just an excuse for a Woman in Peril story in which Luc, Mister Winning Smile, gets to protect her and win her over.

I had many problems with this novel. First of all, the only likable character is Helena, the supposedly-evil ghost. Maryse was pretty awful, her two friends weren't any better, and Luc was portrayed very inconsistently. Maryse knows someone is trying to kill her. Helena keeps saying there are important things they need to talk about, and Maryse keeps refusing to talk to her, saying that she's too busy and to go away. Yeah, that's the way to handle a dangerous situation -- try not to gather any useful information that could help you. Meanwhile the love interest is portrayed very inconsistently. We start out with him portrayed -- in his own point of view -- as a good looking ladies man who is there to charm Maryse to find out what he needs. In other words, the sort of man who uses his looks and uses women for his own gain. However later we are told that he's always leaping in to rescue women, which is not at all consistent with the earlier description, in his own head. Huh.

There is also the problem of the town of Mudbug, population 500. We are told that it has eight buildings (by which I suppose they mean a business district with 8 buildings). It's a very small place. However over the course of the novel we find out it has a hospital, two hotels, a cafe, and a very fancy restaurant that you need to get a reservation at weeks in advance. Umm, towns of 500 people don't have hospitals, and who the hell is filling up a restaurant in a town of 500 people to the extent you can't get a table without reserving weeks in advance? Presumably not the locals, given that Maryse has only eaten there once in her life. Also, Maryse is not able to leave the city limits, and yet she spends quite a bit of time out in the bayou. Is that within the city limits? I'm confused, and Mudbug was one of the things that strained credibility.

It got far worse, though. Maryse is a botanist, who is searching the bayou looking for "the" cure for cancer, as if such a thing could possibly exist. That one destroyed my willing suspension of disbelief, and DeLeon never regained my trust. Further, the samples that she's sending off to a lab for testing are flying through the tests at a truly impossible rate. The book only covers a few days, and yet we're told by the lab that two rounds of tests were successful. Medical testing simply doesn't operate at that pace. And then we eventually learn that the plants she's found aren't really a cure for cancer, but they're growing in polluted water and are therefore radioactive (!!!) and feeding it to someone is like giving them radiation treatment. (!!!!!!!) Holy schnikes, that's bad writing. I mean really, really bad.

After that, what more can I say? She is shot at and her cabin explodes, but she doesn't spend more than a few moments talking to the police. Her mother-in-law and good-for-nothing ex-husband both explain that they treated her badly because she was such a good person. At the end she instantly develops a completely new outlook on life, and now everything will be just fine. And she and Luc develop insta-love, even though they haven't taken the time to actually get to know each other. And there is still the question of who killed Helena hanging in the background so we can make it a series. Gah. It started out sharp and funny. Why did it have to turn out so bad?

The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett

2011-12-25T10:37:00.000-06:00

This is a collection of Hammett's stories dating from 1924 - 1930. They all feature a nameless detective who works for the Continental Detective Agency. We know little about him, save that he is 35 - 40 years old when the stories take place, and overweight. Hammett worked for the Pinkertons before he turned to a career of writing, and I have to wonder if the Continental Op's work life is anything like realistic. I would have to say probably not, most of the time. But the flow of his work day, in which he rarely reports in, keeps his own hours, and even once decides to insert himself into a situation the agency hasn't been hired to work on, just because he thinks something interesting might happen -- it's a far cry from modern ideals of employee behavior. And I just suspect that it might not be that far off reality -- the last few decades have been obsessed with maximizing employee efficiency, and I sometimes get the sense that earlier in the twentieth century, work was often taken at a more leisurely pace than it is today.

I am also curious about his relationship with the law. The police usually seem quite content to work with the detective, which isn't so common today. Further, they seem to take his word for it when he's right in the middle of a fight and few people get out alive. These days, the police would look very carefully at his actions to determine if he should be charged, but in these stories he seems to be outside the law. And his behavior is also very much outside the law. These stories are from the Prohibition era and, like in The Thin Man, they all drink constantly. The Op gets into fistfights, shoots people, steals a car and runs someone down while pursuing a villain, holds up a couple of thieves at gunpoint and takes their loot and then doesn't turn the money over to the police, lies, manipulates people, and once performs surveillance on a man by going on a three day bender with him in Tijuana, during which three innocent people are murdered. He frames someone for a crime he didn't commit because he can't nail him for a crime he did commit. He shoots and kills a man who was carrying an unloaded gun without waiting to see if the man was going to try to harm him. He gets indignant with a client who suspects that his murdered employee might be having an affair with his wife, because he, the operative, isn't going to bother with gossip like that, he only cares about the murder--and when he finds his client was right, he goes out of his way to help the wife conceal the affair.

Really, the operative acts as judge, jury, and executioner. And nearly every woman in the stories is a con artist, crook, or just a manipulative liar. I do understand that stories like these written for the pulps weren't intended to be at all realistic, but taking them in a whole I really do wonder about Hammett's attitudes. I know I shouldn't read too much into them, as they are fiction. But man, this guy wrote ugly stuff, and I am reasonably sure we weren't supposed to look at his protagonist with disgust. Still, this is taking an anti-hero too far. Anti-heroes need at least some sort of moral or ethical code they're acting by, and I don't see any such thing in the operative.

Chloe, 1998 - 2011

2011-12-13T11:37:00.000-06:00

Today I had to put down my cat, Chloe. The sword that had been hanging over us since her diagnosis of kidney disease finally fell. She stopped eating a few days ago, and today I took her in and my fears were realized. I've been through this before, with Oscar, who also had kidney failure. I watched him decline, and didn't want to put her through that, too.

We'd only been together about three years. I adopted her, and her sister Mina, from the Humane Society in 2008 after Oscar died. Mina lasted six months before a cancer diagnosis, and the surgery we tried was not enough to save her. Now Chloe is gone, too.

She was the sweetest, calmest, most easy-going cat I've ever met. She was incredibly affectionate and soothing to me. She purred easily, didn't mind having her claws trimmed, and was happiest when lying on me. I loved her more than I can express, and I am going to miss her terribly.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

2011-12-11T10:43:00.000-06:00

I read this one in my project to work my way through the piles of unread books that are sitting around. I picked this one up a few months ago during the Borders liquidation. The buying frenzy was apparently on, and I came home with an armful of books, and later looked at some of them and wondered why I had bought them.

I bought Who Fears Death simply because a lot of people were saying good things about it online, which isn't necessarily a good reason to pick up a book. I kept hearing that it was different and original and amazing, so I bought it, even though what I heard about the story didn't necessarily catch my interest.

It is the story of an girl in an Africa-like setting who is obviously a half-breed, whose mother was raped, along with all the other women, and their village burned. Half-breed children like our narrator are viewed as evil and dangerous, and so she has an uncomfortable childhood, despite a loving mother and step-father. And she is an odd, angry child, who develops powers she does not understand or control very well.

This book read too much like YA fiction to me, which is probably partly why I didn't like it. The first half of the book is a coming of age story, and I strongly dislike that story type and usually try to avoid them. Then as she comes into young adulthood and explores her powers and her relationship with a particular young man, she and her friends leave their town to embark on a quest to right injustices that their elders are too complacent to address. I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's what it boils down to, and again, is why this feels like YA. And as they travel they act like 20 year olds, and I could have happily dropped them all down a hole and gone on with my life.

This is a fairly well-written book, don't get me wrong. But it's also a book with a story I didn't enjoy at all, with characters I didn't like, doing things I didn't care about. I did not enjoy the heavy hand of Fate that was obviously pushing them along, nor the promise quite early on that the end of the book is going to be grim, and then there's the female circumcision--if you're going to include that, it seems like a cop-out to me to have her able to later magically undo it.

So, overall: this book has gotten a lot of rave reviews and a World Fantasy Award. But it just wasn't at all enjoyable to me.

Mechanique by Genevieve Valentine

2011-12-06T08:09:00.000-06:00

I picked this one up at Worldcon. I have noticed recently that, as I greatly prefer reading ebooks over paper books, I haven't been reading the paper books in the TBR pile. Therefore I am making a deliberate effort to start working my way through the stack of paper books.

Mechanique is set in the future, after a big war that has pretty much destroyed everything, and through continuous smaller wars and the rise and fall of governments as the world tries to find stability again. It is set in a traveling circus, a circus of mechanically enhanced performers, a show of freak acts. The main narrator is Little George, a young man who was adopted into the circus as a small child, and who wants desperately to become one of the performers himself. George explains about the circus in scattered fashion, and keeps dropping hints that things are darker than they seem.

Though there is eventually a plot, it takes a long time to develop. The first half of the book is a character study of the circus, slowly revealing all the characters and how they work together as a unit. In many cases this would bore me silly, but not here--it's actually an absorbing and fascinating read. George jumps around a lot, revealing a little bit at a time, and eventually the reader realizes things about the circus, without George really spelling them out. It's very well done.

A plot eventually develops, in the form of a government man whose ambitions will not bode well for the circus, and it's time for them to either work together or fall apart. It's a bit bitter in its outcome, but George makes it clear from the very beginning that this won't be a happy story, and it fit.

Mechanique is an unusual novel, dark and interesting and indirect. It squats across the science fiction/fantasy line, containing elements of both, which I often enjoy. Overall, it's a really good read. Recommended.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

2011-12-04T18:19:00.001-06:00

Continuing on my old detective novel kick, this one is from 1933. It actually isn't in public domain--Hammett didn't die until the 1960s, so it's still under copyright. However I did find one short story by him in the public domain, and enjoyed it, which led me to the library to look for more.

It features Nick and Nora Charles, a gay, (in the old-fashioned sense) social couple who are well liked and obviously lots of fun. They, with their pet dog Asta, are spending the holidays in New York City so that they don't have to spend them with Nora's relatives. Nick was once a detective, but he gave that up when his (15 years younger) wife inherited a great deal of money. They spend the novel (I don't know if this is their normal behavior) getting drunk, staying up all night, and sleeping until noon.

The novel came out in 1933, the year Prohibition ended. I am guessing that this was written, and is set, during Prohibition, particularly since there are several mentions of speakeasies. Nevertheless, everyone in the book drinks like a fish.

They get involved with the mystery when Nick encounters Dorothy Wynant, a young woman of 19 or 20, in a speakeasy. She remembers him from some work he did for her father eight years previously, when he was still working as a detective. Her parents later divorced and she has been living with her mother in Europe, but now that she's back in New York she'd like to track down her father. Nick helps her track down her father's lawyer, and after that the mystery seems to chase after Nick and try to force him to get involved.

Dorothy Wynant has developed a crush on Nick, and keeps appearing at their hotel for sympathy and to plead that she's afraid of her mother. Her mother, who Nick knows, and dislikes, from his earlier business with Clyde Wynant, finds her ex-husband's secretary, murdered. Dorothy's younger brother, Gilbert, is very intelligent and has a particular interest in crime, and so he wants to corner Nick and ask him all sorts of questions about detective work. Plus Wynant's attorney, Macauley, is an old acquaintance of Nick's, and keeps contacting him to report on events, plus share what little information he has about his client, who is missing. Wynant himself sends Nick a letter asking him to look into the death of his secretary, and Nick and Nora are awakened in the middle of the night when a suspect in the woman's murder breaks in to try to convince Nick that he didn't kill her.

So, though Nick actually keeps insisting that he isn't interested in getting involved, nevertheless he ends up involved.

Together Nick and Nora seem to quite enjoy themselves as they work on the crime together. They're a fun couple, and fun companions for the reader. It is not surprising, then, that this novel was made into a movie in 1934, which led to it becoming a popular franchise as Nick and Nora and their little dog travel about, attend a lot of parties, and solve crimes, seemingly always to help out a pretty young woman who cries too easily. I've seen several of the films, but not recently. I was curious to watch the film again last night to see how the novel compared with the original film, but of course it wasn't available on Netflix streaming (that seems to be the story of Netflix streaming--it sounds like such a handy and wonderful idea, but whatever you want to watch is never available).

There are a few things that strain credibility, of course. For one thing, everyone loves the Charleses. They are the life of the party, and can do no wrong. The police like them, especially Nora. Criminals like them, even the ones Nick helped put in prison. And, for their part, they like most everyone, except Dorothy's mother. Nick takes Nora to a speakeasy owned by a former criminal so that they can chat with the man who forced his way into their bedroom in the middle of the night and tried to kill Nick, and Nora has a wonderful time, proclaiming afterward that the criminal classes are just marvelous, she couldn't even understand half the things they were talking about!

The Thin Man, the novel, is more complex than the film, which isn't surprising. There are multiple murders, and layers of lies to work through before the reveal at the end. Nevertheless, even if I hadn't already known who the killer was, I might have been able to guess it anyway--the clues are there. None of the characters in this novel are even slightly like real people, but they are interesting, and that is better than being realistic. Overall, I found this novel is quite a satisfying meal.

Edited to add: I have now watched the film again, and it resembles the book less than I had remembered. It is considerably simplified and they took the darkness out of many of the characters. In the book, Dorothy is a hard-drinking brat who is involved with a married man, and her mother an abusive would-be blackmailer who constantly lies. In the film, Dorothy and her father have a warm relationship and she is about to be married to a nice young man. In the films, Nick and Nora *always* seem to be helping a pretty young woman who wants to get married. The film also has a ridiculous reveal at the end in which they have a dinner party with all the suspects and Nick prods them until he figures out who the killer is.

Anderson Crow, Detective by George Barr McCutcheon

2011-11-30T20:43:00.000-06:00

I have been reading some old detective stories that are in the public domain, mostly from Feedbooks. This is one of them.

Like many of the detective novels I've been reading, which tend to be about 80-110 years old, this is actually a series of related short stories. They are set in the small town of Tinkletown, and Anderson Crowe is the deputy marshal of the town, and also the deputy superintendent of the fire department, commissioner of the water works, and various other official positions he has managed to wrangle his way into. He is a very self-important man, prone to bluster and lies to aggrandize himself. He is, in short, an idiot, and on the rare occasions when he manages to be in the right place at the right time it is purely by accident.

The odd thing about Anderson Crow is that, even though the townspeople seem to see right through him, they are oddly fond of him nonetheless. He is especially assisted by Harry Squires, who runs the newspaper, and Alf Reesling, in spite of Anderson believing that Alf is the town drunk. As Alf says:

"Look at me. I ain't had a drink in twenty-three years, and what good does it do me? Every time a stranger comes to town people point at me an' say, "There goes the town drunkard." Oh, I've heerd 'em. I ain't deef. An' besides, ain't they always preachin' at me an' about me at the Methodist an' Congregational churches? Aren't they always tellin' the young boys that they got to be careful er they'll be like Alf Reesling? An' what's it all come from? Comes from the three times I got drunk back in the fall of 'ninety-three when my cousin was here from Albany fer a visit. I had to entertain him, didn't I? An' there wan't any other way to do it in this yerk-water town, was there? An' ever since then the windbags in this town have been prayin' fer me an' pityin' my poor wife."

The tone of these stories is humorous, unlike most of the detective novels I've been reading of the same vintage. McCutcheon is well aware that Crow is an idiot, and pokes fun at many of the townspeople, too. That said, his idea of what is humorous does not always align with modern taste. For instance, three of the stories involve people's dogs getting killed, which McCutcheon seems to believe is funny but doesn't sit terribly well with me. Or the story in which a man beats his wife and suddenly finds that he's instantly become more attractive to many of the other women of the town. It's eventually explained that, after the first time, he never actually hurt her, and she was playing along at having a seemingly foul-tempered, dangerous husband so the other women would envy her, but really--what the hell? Likewise the old farmer who has buried four wives through poverty and grinding hard labor is treated as light and funny, as he complains that he's now got five mothers-in-law, poor him! Urk. Or the story in which the young men of the town are all suddenly anxious to get married so that they will not be drafted to die horribly in the trenches of France, and Anderson decides he has to put a stop to it -- I didn't actually find that particularly humorous, either.

I realize that tastes change, and that's one of the reasons I read these books -- they are fascinating cultural documents about a very, very different time. That said, humor is hard to do well, and for the most part this book was very unfunny to this modern reader.

Camera Obscura by Lavie Tidhar

2011-11-20T08:51:00.000-06:00

Camera Obscura is the second novel in The Bookman Histories. The first is The Bookman. It is a steampunk novel set in a world in which Amerigo Vespucci landed on a Caribbean island and woke up a bevy of hibernating lizard men. They proceeded to try to take over the world, and at the time of these novels they have been running the British Empire for a couple of centuries.

Camera Obscura takes place mostly in Paris. Our protagonist is Cleo, Lady de Winter. She is an agent for the Silent Council which runs France, a shadowy organization run by intelligent machines. We meet her at the scene of a murder on the Rue Morgue, where an Asian man has been killed and eviscerated. This killing gets her involved in the politics of nations, chasing after a killer, searching for what was stolen from the dead man, and trying to learn more about a condition which has the infected rising from the dead.

Cleo is a cold-blooded killer, and very skilled with her beloved guns. She is tough and cynical and nearly fearless. But, like Orphan in The Bookman, she really has no control over her fate or the events in Camera Obscura. She is very much a pawn that the Silent Council is pushing around the board for their own reasons. They keep her in the dark and mislead her as to their motives, and yet more than once in the novel she is chided for being ignorant of the bigger picture, which seemed a bit unfair. Also, more than once she finds that she is in danger from other agents of the Council. They employ all sorts of unsavory characters (though I suppose she is one herself) and jerk her around and very, very bad things happen to her -- and yet she never questions her allegiance to them or seriously ponders whether they are worthy of rule. And in that sense, I suppose she is responsible for her lack of understanding. Cleo is a weapon they aim at problems, and she is content to be no more than that.

As with The Bookman, Tidhar mixes a cast of familiar characters, both historical and fictional, to create a weird and interesting setting. This is a high-action adventure story, and in no way familiar or predictable. It's original and entertaining and interesting. That said, I did not enjoy this one as much as The Bookman. I wasn't as interested in the problem in this one, nor was the protagonist as sympathetic. Cleo did not deserve some of the very bad things that happened to her, but she is no innocent, either. Camera Obscura is still an amazing and inventive story, it just isn't quite as enjoyable as the previous volume.

Of Fiction and Language

2011-11-14T14:42:00.107-06:00

I am, once again, struggling through a book for my mystery group that is leaving me entirely cold. I knew, of course, that there are many subgenres of mystery, and that I like some and not others, but nevertheless I am surprised how many of the books for the group are not only not enjoyable to me but actually repulsive things that I am unable to force myself to finish.

The current book does not fall quite to those depths, but it's flirting with the edge of the dropoff. However that, in itself, isn't exactly what I want to talk about. I want to ponder, specifically, the importance of language in fiction.

Let me say, first of all, that there are millions of books out there, thousands being published every year, and that every reader will like different things. That is as it should be. If everyone was going to like the same things, there would be no demand for thousands of new books every year. We all like different things, and we all are entitled and allowed to like what we like without being sneered at by people who think their taste is better than ours. I, for one, read lots of mystery, fantasy, and male/male, with a bit less science fiction and nonfiction, rounded out by lots of other things in smaller proportions. And I am not at all ashamed to admit that I have a soft spot for gay werewolf romances, or amnesia stories, or even a good old-fashioned psionics story, even though they fell out of fashion decades ago.

What I am, however, is an avid reader. I am on track this year to finish at least 150 books, and last year was over 200. I read a lot, I read widely, and I have been reading voraciously for the last 30 years or so. I can tell the difference between clumsy writing and skilled writing. But I have to say that story and character are far more important to me than the author's use of language.

I hang out online in a lot of places where people talk about books, and there is definitely a somewhat strained relationship between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction. I tend to fall into the genre camp, myself. I prefer to read about distant and imaginitive places, wild adventures, and strong characters. But it's not just plot and character -- I tend to prefer skillful but invisible writing. One of the things I see again and again from defenders of "literary" fiction is that they value the richness of the language used in literary fiction, and they find it much more satisfying and worthwhile than reading the sort of writing that I like.

I have seen this statement so many times from so many people that I believe they are all telling the truth--there are readers to whom the sort of writing and language use often found in literary fiction is an important part of what makes them enjoy literary fiction. Upon reflection I think that this may be why there was great criticism (which was confusing and seemed insane to me when I read about it) when this year's Booker judges made the mistake of saying that they were looking for books this year that were readable, causing many to decry the choices because they thought the judges were wanting light, breezy, junk instead of important and substantive literature. At least, that's all I can figure - that those who think the language use is an important part of good fiction felt that "readability" meant quick, zippy reads lacking what they value in fiction.

Hmm, I seem to be digressing, but I just had a revelation there. Sorry.

OK, back on topic: I have to say that I do not value "literary" language use in fiction. As I said, I like well-done invisible prose that delivers story and character efficiently and seamlessly without calling attention to itself. This is very common in genre fiction, and is every bit as valid, and difficult, as writing flowery language intended to evoke mood. Neither is better than the other, but they are different, and appeal to different people, to different tastes. I like what I like, and find the other type of writing actually detracts from my enjoyment of a book. Doubtless the same is true of people whose preferences are different than mine.

So, as I was saying: I began reading this month's selection for my mystery group. The cover gave me hints that this book wasn't really written for people like me, but it's a library book, so I'm not out anything by trying, anyway. I got to page twelve:

In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through.

At this point, I realized that this book might pose a problem for me. That kind of writing not only doesn't suck me in, it pushes me out of the story, making me restless and impatient. Even though this book is shelved in the mysteries at the library, I now know that this isn't written like a genre book, it's written like literary fiction (WHICH IS PERFECTLY OKAY, just not my thing). Page fourteen:

Chill air stood unwelcoming in the living room, where the rain murmured against the two high windows, relics of a richer age, which no matter how dull the day were always somehow filled with a muted radiance.

Right, no doubt about it, now. This is literary fiction masquerading as genre. So I continued reading, another hundred pages. Claustrophobic, full of characters I don't give a shit about, in a setting I just find depressing. Not my thing, and I will yet again go to mystery group having disliked the book. OK, off to Librarything to see if any of the reviews spoil it enough to confirm my suspicions about who the father of the orphaned baby is. And what do I find? The author is actually John Banville, Booker Award winner, writing under a pseudonym. Yes, this is literary fiction, and no, I am not even slightly moved or entertained by the quality of the language. I am a genre reader at heart, and what I want is good story and interesting characters, told cleanly and without dragging too much.

Hurricane Punch by Tim Dorsey

2011-11-12T19:52:00.001-06:00

I may have blogged about this one before, as I have read and enjoyed all of Dorsey's novels about Serge Storms. But I have recently listened to a couple of them as audiobooks in the car, and I'm finding that format to be perhaps even more enjoyable than reading them. Hurricane Punch is the one I just finished a couple of days ago, so I am going to talk about it.

This is a series of manic crime novels set in Florida. The protagonist of all of them is Serge Storms, hyperactive Florida-loving serial killer. His engine runs faster than most of us who are sane, and so he is usually balanced out by a slower sidekick. Sometimes it's Lenny, but in this novel it's Coleman, who is a good-natured substance abuser. He isn't fussy what sort of substance, he is happy to try anything, but most often it seems to be alcohol or pot.

Some of these novels are set around particular Florida themes, like cruise ships or spring break. Hurricane Punch is, of course, about hurricanes. Serge, not surprisingly, loves hurricanes. He and Coleman steal a Hummer in the first scene of the book, and they spend the rest of hurricane season driving around Florida, running in the eye of the storm whenever possible. Occasionally they encounter an asshole who needs to die, and Serge handles each one in inventive fashion.

There is a parallel storyline about a miserable young crime reporter for Tampa Bay Today, owned by a media conglomerate that resembles Rupert Murdoch's properties but with a CEO who seems to be based on Richard Branson. In this storyline, as well as Serge's commentary on hurricane coverage, Dorsey is able to insert a lot of material on the media. Jeff McSwirley hates being a crime reporter, but they refuse to allow him to switch beats because he's very good at it. He is miserable and falling apart, a man getting close to the edge.

There is a series of murders, which Mahoney, formerly a state agent before his nervous breakdown, believes are being committed by Serge. He decides to use Jeff to flush out Serge by planting things in his stories designed to make Serge angry. The problem is that Serge doesn't seem to be the killer, and the real killer has now set his eyes on McSwirley.

Hurricane Punch is a terrifically fun romp. I have enjoyed all of this series to one degree or another, but I love the crazy rush of deliberately running along inside the hurricane. I suppose that's why this one has stuck with me more than some of the others. It was interesting listening to is as an audiobook, too. The reader's voice for Serge was different than I hear him in my head, but probably that's the voice I will imagine in the future. One interesting thing is that listening to the book made me aware that there were some repetitive parts. I'm not sure why Dorsey did it, but for instance the bit about Jeff being miserable and why he's a good crime reporter was explained at least three times. The book isn't so long or complicated that I had forgotten after the first explanation and needed it to be repeated. On the other hand, Dorsey does some interesting things playing around with the timeline of the story (which he also did in the other one I listened to recently, Nuclear Jellyfish), so who knows what order the scenes were originally written in? Anyway, when I read the book I was able to just skim right over the repetitive bits without them sinking in, but when you're listening to a book, you can't just skim a paragraph or three every so often, you have to take it at the reader's pace. This is one reason why I am very careful in choosing audiobooks to listen to.

I love this series, and listening to them is perhaps even more fun than reading them. I look forward to Torpedo Juice next.

Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly

2011-10-31T18:52:00.000-06:00

I didn't like this one nearly as well as the other two. Not much else to say, really. Ray goes back to L.A. and finds that his old circle of fellow criminals have been taken over by creatures from other dimensions. He wants to save them, and can't. Lots of violence ensues. Just didn't really feel this one, unfortunately.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

2011-10-29T08:49:00.001-06:00

Snuff is Pratchett's latest Discworld novel. I am a Discworld fan, so of course when I came home last night and found it waiting on my porch, I sat down and read it straight through, finishing some time after midnight.

Snuff is set in the Watch series, which is a very good thing, as those are my favorites. It features primarily Commander Vimes and his family, Lady Sybil and Young Sam, though we get some brief appearances from some of the other Watch members, including Colon and Nobby, Carrot and Angua, and Cheery and Wee Mad Arthur (who may possibly be my very favorite Discworld character, but it's so hard to pick).

I am not going to spoil the story too much, but there will be mild spoilers in what follows, so be warned:

Sam Vimes is fairly angry at the beginning of the novel, as he is being forced by his wife and the Patrician to take a vacation. They head to Lady Sybil's country estate to take the fresh air and so that Young Sam learns about the country. Vimes is a city man, and he finds the country estate to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. Then a crime is committed, and he is able to do what he does best: get very angry and run around threatening people.

In Snuff Pratchett takes on several themes, from the ideal of idyllic country life to the relationship between the gentry, their servants, and the common people, to deep and painful matters of human (and nonhuman) rights. As is often the case with the Vimes novels, there is a good deal of attention devoted to the important difference between legality or illegality and right and wrong. He struggles with how to do what's right while working within the law, which often has little bearing on matters of right and wrong. And, being Vimes, he continually worries that he may do wrong as he's trying to do what's right, and that is simply unacceptable to him.

The subject matter of Snuff is some pretty heavy stuff, and the moral issues Pratchett is exploring are not handled in at all subtle fashion--the message is hammered in decisively and repeatedly. In fact, even the Patrician's behavior seemed a bit out of character as he was voicing the heart of the issue to Drumknott: "In short, Drumknott, a certain amount of harmless banditry amongst the lower classes is to be smiled upon if not actively encouraged, for the health of the city, but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?" (I don't consider this a spoiler, as it's on page 12) I found Snuff a bit heavy-handed in its message, but it's still a worthy entry in the Vimes novels, and very much worth reading. I really enjoyed it, as usual.

ETA: Abigail Nussbaum has done a much better job than I did at laying out the things that bothered me about the novel. Her review is here: Asking the Wrong Questions

Shock Wave by John Sandford

2011-10-20T15:23:00.031-06:00

John Sandford writes a couple of regular series set in Minnesota -- the Lucas Davenport mysteries and the Virgil Flowers mysteries. He also has a series about Kidd, who is a computer hacker. I tried one of those once, and didn't manage to get through it. My favorites are the Virgil Flowers books -- Virgil is a great character, and the mysteries are set outside of the Twin Cities, all around the state. Shock Wave is the newest.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and decided that I didn't want to limit myself to listening only in the car, so I've been sitting and listening to it and knitting. It's been a pleasant way to spend the weekend.

The story is set in the town of Butternut Falls, in Kandiyohi County. There is a controversial development going in -- a PyeMart, which seems approximately equivalent to a Target. Local businesspeople are worried that they will go out of business, local fishermen and environmentalists are worried that the runoff from the parking lot will pollute the river, and some people are just angry at the sudden flip-flop from the mayor and several city council members who appear to have been bought off to make the zoning changes to approve the store.

First someone sets off a bomb in PyeMart headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then several bombs go off in Butternut Falls, leading the ATF to conclude that the bomber is a Minnesotan. Several people are killed, and there is a lot of property damage. It's up to Virgil, working with the local sheriff's department and the ATF agents, to find the bomber and stop him before even more people are killed.

I found the small town politics quite believable, based on some things I've seen happen around here. There were similar questions when a dog track went into Hudson about twenty years ago. The dog track went out of business after a few years, because the owners (who were in Florida) were wrong about how interested people living in the Twin Cities would be in driving to Wisconsin to bet on dog racing. Nevertheless, there was a lot of outrage and questions about whether it would hurt or help other businesses in town, and whether the city council should have allowed it, and why they eventually did. So all of that rang very true to me.

I was a little less certain about the perceived threat that the PyeMart posed to the local businesspeople, on the other hand. The town already had a WalMart, a Home Depot, a Menards, and a Fleet Farm (also like Hudson). If the WalMart failed to drive the pharmacy and the bookstore out of business, I fail to see why a PyeMart would do so.

Overall, though, this was a really good one. In fact, this may be my favorite Virgil Flowers mystery yet. I really didn't care for Heat Lightning, but have really enjoyed all the others. This one, though -- probably my favorite. I really enjoy these. Virgil is kind of a loose cannon, but he's smart and I, as a reader, can trust him not to be an idiot, which is important. The events in these mysteries can be pretty grim, but there is also humor here and there, which I always appreciate. They're just a hell of a lot of fun, and I wish Sandford would write them a bit faster, because now I want to hear about the case in Wabasha with the feet.

On the Wrong Track by Steve Hockensmith

2011-10-18T12:03:00.050-06:00

On the Wrong Track is the sequel to Holmes on the Range, which I reviewed last winter. It is the further adventures of Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, known more often as Old Red and Big Red. They are brothers, and cowboys, and are all that the other has left in the world, after a flood wiped out the family farm and the rest of their family. Otto is literate, and reads the stories in magazines around the campfire or in the bunkhouse to Gustav. Gustav is particularly taken with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and dreams of becoming a detective himself. In Holmes on the Range, he used his observations and his brain to solve a crime, and now he's anxious to do it for a living.

They apply to various detective agencies, and are repeatedly turned down. Finally someone gives them a tip, and they are hired on as guards for the Southern Pacific Railroad. They are on their way to San Francisco for training when several very bad things happen on their train, and they are the only ones handy to do something about it. This is exacerbated by the fact the conductor despises them and keeps threatening to fire them. A man is murdered, the train is held up, and they both get the tar beat out of them, but that's not going to stop them from getting to the bottom of things.

I had a blast with On the Wrong Track. The narrative voice of story, Big Red, is quirky and entertaining. Like Watson, or Captain Hastings, he often doesn't know what his smarter companion is thinking, but he is no fool himself (unlike Captain Hastings). I appreciated the relationship the brothers have, and there's some lovely character-revealing conversation late in the book, told nevertheless in a suitably gruff and manly way. It was also kind of cool that they were traveling over the Sierra Nevada, as I drove through there myself a couple of months ago, between Sacramento and Reno. It's very dramatic countryside. And Hockensmith does a nice job with revealing things about the time and setting without slowing down to lecture. Really, these stories are just delightful and a lot of fun, even though I don't usually read Westerns and tend to avoid historicals. If they can win me over, they've got to be good.

Rostnikov's Vacation by Stuart Kaminsky

2011-10-16T12:03:00.000-06:00

Probably the best thing I've ever gotten from any of my book clubs was the discovery of Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov novels. I have been reading them slowly over the last year or so, as I sometimes burn out on authors when I read too much of their work in a short time period. This is the seventh in the series, and looking at Wikipedia I see that I missed the sixth. Perhaps that's why this one felt a bit disconnected from the others, like quite a lot of time had passed and we'd picked up in a very different place.

And, actually, we have. This book came out in 1991, and Rostnikov and Russia are dealing with Gorbachev's reforms, Glasnost and Perestroika. It's an unsettled time as things have changed, but they haven't completely settled yet into a new order. And things are quite unsettled with both the police, for whom Rostnikov works, and the KGB.

At the beginning of the novel, Rostnikov has been ordered to take a vacation and sent to Yalta with his wife, who is recuperating from surgery. He runs into and renews his acquaintance with another policeman who has also been ordered to take a vacation. His friend cryptically tells him that he is working on something of a mystery, and then he dies under mysterious circumstances. Naturally Rostnikov must investigate, since local authorities are anxious (or lazy enough) to declare it a heart attack. Add to that his puzzlement at being tailed by a fairly senior KGB agent for no reason he can fathom.

Meanwhile his colleague, Emile Karpo, has also been ordered to take a vacation. But Karpo is a man of strong duty and no social life, so he tells his superior he's headed to Kiev to visit family, but continues investigating the case that he and Rostnikov were working on when ordered to leave. This leads to his witnessing a murder, and puts him on the trail of an unstable drug addict on a crime spree.

His other colleague, Tkach, is still in Moscow, working on a case in which computers are being stolen from Jewish men. He behaves, as he often does, like a young idiot, and spends the rest of the book sorting out his stormy emotions because of it.

As usual with this series, I enjoyed the novel. Despite all of his superiors' attempts to tread on Rostnikov's career and marginalize him, he keeps coming up with the answers. But I also like Rostnikov himself. This is very human and sympathetic writing, from his limp and near-constant pain from a very old injury, to his not always harmonious relationship with his wife, to his sympathy for many of the victims and even sometimes the criminals they deal with. These novels are about believable people who are not hotshots or success stories, who are doing their best to get through life and generally do more or less the right thing. A pleasure, as usual.

Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson

2011-10-09T22:02:00.000-06:00

Crack'd Pot Trail is the latest in a series of novellas Erikson has written about Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. They are related to his Malazan Empire series, but do okay even if read independently of the rest of the series. Bauchelain and Korbal Broach are dark sorcerers who travel around with their servant, Emancipor Reese and get into trouble, often of their own making.

They are not featured much in Crack'd Pot Trail, however. The story is a sort of take on The Canterbury Tales, with a group of people traveling across a dry wasteland. Some of them are pilgrims to the shrine of the Indifferent God, some are performers on their way to a competition, and some are killers hunting Bauchelain and Broach. They suffer hardships, and are struggling to merely survive to the end of their long trek across the Great Dry. The killers decide that, for the good of the group, cannibalism is the only answer and, given that poets are useless, they are the ones who need to die. As the killers are the ones with the weapons, everyone goes along with the plan. Every few days they set the bards to compete, with the loser becoming dinner. This is the sort of dark humor that is prevalent throughout the story.

The book is quite funny, and very, very dark. The narrator is a bard himself, who seems surprisingly confident that he will survive the journey, unlike most of his fellows. One suspects (and so do his fellow travelers) that he is keeping secrets. Various members of the group die in interesting ways, and many stories are told, and we are left wondering where Bauchelain and Broach are. Erikson does this cleverly, as I thought I had figured out what he was doing, and then it turned out I was wrong. That was quite good, and devious, which is entirely fitting for this story.

There are nineteen characters in the group, and Erikson introduces them all in a chapter not unlike the beginning of The Canterbury Tales. I found my attention wandering, and so gave up on that and just plunged into the story. Once I had a better idea of the characters, I went back and re-read the bit that introduced them and took notes. I quickly got the hang of it, except that two of them had names that were too similar--Arpo and Apto--and that sometimes tripped me up.

Overall, I found The Crack'd Pot Trail quite fun. It started slowly, but built into a big, dark, violent, comedic romp. I like these better than the main series.

Just Food: Where Locavores get it Wrong and how we can Truly Eat Responsibly by James E. McWilliams

2011-10-09T10:13:00.001-06:00

First, let me make my biases clear: I am deeply suspicious of the locavore movement. It seems very simplistic and impractical to me, as well as elitist: it's fine to be a locavore if you live in a place with good soil, a good climate, and plenty of water. It's obnoxious and environmentally and nutritionally stupid to suggest that everyone should eat the way you do. Millions of people live in places where it would be very resource-intensive to try to produce all their food nearby. And you are necessarily limiting people to the foodstuffs that can be grown in their local climate and soil, unless we're going to start greenhouse-growing produce to avoid shipping it from elsewhere. Personally, you will have to pry the bananas and peaches (two of my favorite fruits, and neither of them hardy where I live) from my cold, dead hands, asshole. Further, in the past people lived mostly off of food produced locally, and malnourishment and undernourishment were disturbingly common. The ability to easily eat a wide variety of foodstuffs is a vast improvement over the way things used to be. I am puzzled why anyone would think it was healthier to only eat locally available products.

Also, it would cause an ecological disaster to try to feed the populations of dry states by wasting ground water on irrigating the land to grow crops there. It is much more practical and efficient to ship food from places actually suitable for agriculture. And as for the argument that it's important to support the local person who has always wanted to have their own farm/orchard/etc. and they deserve to make a living, so you should be willing to pay a premium to help them out -- do you think that the farmer in a relatively poor, warm country who makes their living by growing produce for export is less deserving of making a living? They also probably have a lot fewer options than the person in the US. (Which is not a slam on US farmers, it's just a slam on a certain sort of grower who shows up at farmer's markets, charges a lot, and opines that it's our social responsibility to help them fulfill their dream of selling organic fruits or vegetables, and the people who actually buy into it)

So, naturally I was interested in what McWilliams had to say. I found the chapters on the locavore movement and organic foods very interesting. McWilliams points out that food miles, per se, are not a useful indicator of how energy efficient a foodstuff is. That, for example, "German apple juice imported from Brazil, which racks up over 10,000 miles on the odometer, is also less energy-consumptive than apples grown and processed locally." Further, of all the fossil fuels used related to food production and preparation, transportation to market is the smallest portion -- 11%. On the other hand, consumers making extra stops to buy their food instead of getting it all at the grocery store, consumes significant amounts of extra fuel.

McWilliams occasionally gets a bit sarcastic, which I am sure irritates some of the people whose lifestyle choices he is questioning. Personally, I found it entertaining, but I'm not personally all that invested in locavorism.

Indeed, these findings leave one wondering how much energy could be saved if we threw out less food, cooked smaller amounts, ate less in general, used energy-efficient ovens and refrigerators, composted all organic matter not eaten, and developed more energy-efficient menus (say, by eating more meals that did not require extensive and prolonged applications of heat). In short, if we were really paying attention to the numbers yielded by life-cycle assessments, we'd be better off focusing on what happens to our food after we buy it than on its place of origin. But of course it's hard to turn a variety of small, energy-saving domestic tactics into a token symbol of an eco-correct food philosophy. "Cook efficiently" just doesn't have the same rousing ring as "eat local."

It should be clear, I think, from that paragraph that McWilliams himself is deeply interested in the environmental impact of our food choices. He is a former local- and organic-eating person, himself, who began to question whether the things he was being urged to do were actually all that productive. He cares, deeply. He has looked into the real numbers, though, and drawn his own conclusions about the best way to feed our huge and ever-expanding global population nutritiously with minimal damage to the environment.

I also agree with this, from what I have seen in the people around me who espouse the local, organic, co-op and farmer's market lifestyle: "When we survey the expansive literature supporting the food-miles approach, one thing becomes evident: the prevailing argument for stressing food miles is driven less by concrete evidence of improved sustainability than by a vague quest to condemn globalization. In this respect, buying local is a political act with ideological implications." That is certainly evident among the local or organic cheerleaders I know. (Of course, the other people who are totally on the bandwagon and singing its praises are the ones who expect to profit from it, and McWilliams addresses that, too.)

After his takedown of the automatic superiority of local eating, McWilliams then moves on to organic farming. He points out it is less efficient and requires more land under cultivation to produce similar quantities, and that many of the fertilizers and pesticides that are acceptable in organic farming are more harmful than the newer ones used in conventional farming. The overwhelming majority of organic food in the US is factory farmed, just like large conventional farms. A few quotes:

Agricultural sprawl is an insidious form of development that threatens the world's remaining natural resources. "If organic farming were to be widely adopted," write two scientists in the 2004 Proceedings of the International Crop Science Congress, "lower yields would require more land (25 - 82%) to sustain production." The Tuskegee University plant microbiologist C.S. Prakash puts it this way: "Converting from modern, technology-based agriculture to organic would mean either reducing global food output significantly or sacrificing undeveloped land to agriculture."

Consumers, swayed by the "chemical-free" reputation of organic foods, tend to take false comfort in the impression that organic products lack potentially harmful external inputs. However, organic agriculture struggles with its own demons of chemical dependency. The fact that farmers have been applying natural chemicals to agricultural systems for thousands of years does not mean that these applications are innocuous, especially when they're used to promote the interests of commercialized organic agriculture.

Organic growers are also allowed to use copper, sulfur, and copper sulfate as natural fungicides. According to Julie Guthman, a geographer who writes extensively about California's organic culture, "Sulfur is said to cause more worker injuries in California than any other agricultural input." Miners who harvest sulfur dust to be sprayed on organic grapes tend to suffer chronic respiratory problems....The dust is generally harmless to land animals, but the Department of Health and Human Services has found that it is toxic to fish.

And so on. McWilliams then moves on the genetically modified crops, which many people fear are dangerous, harmful, and unnatural. He points out that they tend to be more disease and pest resistant, which means that they can be grown with fewer chemicals applied. These new varieties are instrumental in being able to feed more people with less land. He makes many good points in this chapter, but nevertheless I found it rather dull.

I was going along with him quite well until we hit chapter 4, in which McWilliams moves on to what he thinks we should do to feed the world's population with minimal impact on the earth. By this time I was getting a bit bored and restless, and I ended up reading the last three sections, on meat, fish, and government subsidies and a fast skim. These are important topics, just less interesting to me than the first few.

Lest anyone think that McWilliams is an apologist for big business farming, in chapter four he says that we should stop eating land-dwelling meat. He points out the damage that livestock can do to land, the huge resources entailed in raising and feeding meat animals, the horrible living conditions in feedlots (though not all meat-producing animals come from feedlots, of course), the pollution from large animal-producing operations, and the greenhouse gas that come from the digestive tract of bovines. In fact, if we really care about reducing carbon emissions, we should be looking at cow farts.

In terms of general biodiversity, it's also worth noting that cattle dictate the destruction of a wide range of indigenous animals, even when they do not trample riparian zones or damage grasslands. Rangeland management, whether informal or formal, automatically threatens and often substantially diminishes surrounding wildlife....In the United States, to cite a well-documented example, ranchers have legally killed billions of animals, including prairie dogs, wolves, bears, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and, most notably, buffalo. In 2005 alone, the USDA's Wildlife Servies killed 86,000 coyotes at the behest of ranchers grazing cattle and sheep. From a less obvious perspective, millions of pounds of insecticides have been deployed to combat cattle ticks, fleas, and flies. Interestingly, however, the attempt has more often than not backfired, with insects proliferating beyond their original numbers as a result of their insidious ability to resist conventional insecticides. Either way, the ultimate result is the same: biodiversity is compromised, the predator-prey balance is upset, and the environment suffers the consequences.

All of these are valid points, but where he lost me is that I don't think eating a grain-heavy diet is all that healthy, and when he talks about a primarily plant-based diet I don't think he means we can all sustain ourselves on fruit and green vegetables. However he has certainly given me something to think about, and it is likely that I will make some adjustments to my eating habits, consuming fewer animal products, trying to waste less, and after reading the chapter on seafood I will probably never eat it again, not that I was much of a fish-eater to begin with. I wish that McWilliams had managed to make the later chapters as interesting and entertaining as the early ones, but still I think this is actually a quite important book that everyone who is interested in making ethically-conscious choices should read. I think it also could be very instructive for people who aren't all that interested in the ethical choices of food, because it could lead them to think about things differently. I certainly do not enthusiastically embrace all of his suggestions, but it was a fascinating and worthwhile read.

The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church

2011-10-05T17:39:00.011-06:00

The Man with the Baltic Stare is the third novel about Inspector O, a North Korean detective. I have not read the previous two books. O had retired from service and lived in a little hut he built himself on a mountain out away from the capital, which suited him fine. He is very perturbed to be called back to Pyongyang in placed under the command of Major Kim, a South Korean whose motives he does not understand at first.

Indeed, a good deal of this novel involves things going on that O does not understand. He wavers between refusing to listen and being quite uninterested in what is going on to trying to figure out enough to stay alive while refusing to cooperate with any of the people who are trying to get him to work for them. Despite all his efforts (and, really, he is a frustrating character, always talking back and refusing to go along with anything) he gets drawn into the middle of some dangerous events.

The novel is set largely in North Korea, though O does some traveling during the course of the novel. I found it interesting that Church makes no effort to explain things or ease the way for the reader to understand the setting. This does not bother me, as I noted a few months ago in my review of The Case of the Missing Servant. I prefer that the author not feel the need to hold my hand and explain everything to me when the setting is unfamiliar. Nevertheless, I was just having to guess from context what MSS or SSD were, for instance. There are many things that happen that are not explained, or things that left me a bit fuzzy on who did them and why.

And despite this, I nevertheless found it a quite absorbing read. Even though O spends too much time being irritatingly philosophical. Even though I'm quite certain I didn't understand everything that was going on. I really had no idea what was going to happen next, which was refreshing. I appreciated that the setting, which to me is quite alien, was not spoon-fed or made too easy to process. All in all, it was a somewhat challenging but very interesting read.

Bubba and the Dead Woman by C.L. Bevill

2011-10-01T16:43:00.001-06:00

This was a free ebook. It is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.

Our protagonist is Bubba Snoddy, a big, quiet Texan who lives in a little town that loves to gossip. As the story begins, Bubba has a particularly bad night at work, as all his coworkers at the garage/convenience store either quit or are unavailable, forcing him to man the place by himself all night. After this singularly frustrating evening, he returns home to discover a dead woman in his front yard. Worse yet, it turns out to be his ex-fiance, with whom he'd had a bad break-up a few years previously. As she is dead in his front yard, and no one else in town knew her, the police assume that he must have killed her. The problem is that Bubba didn't kill her, and the police seem very uninterested in looking for any other suspects. So he decides that, unless he wants to end up on death row, it is his responsibility to find out who the real killer is, with the aid of his loyal basset hound, Precious.

This is actually a story type I usually avoid. I don't like mysteries whose premise is that the detective is the suspect and trying to clear their name, or some friend or relative is the suspect, and they must find the real killer to save their loved one. But I was feeling a bit uninspired this afternoon when trying to figure out what to read, so I decided to look at the free books on Barnes and Noble. I downloaded three stories, and this was one of them.

I am happy to report that, in spite of being a story type I generally dislike, Bubba and the Dead Woman is a funny and very enjoyable mystery. This is largely because Bubba, himself, is a very likable character. He's a good guy, and he cares about his crazy and irritating mother, and has funny exchanges with Precious. He gets along with everyone in town, many of whom are quite colorful characters themselves. It's a funny, quirky little town, and Bevill manages to pull that off better than a lot of writers.

The mystery is not too simple, in that lots of related stuff is going on, and so it takes Bubba a while to sort it all out. But it's also not surprising (to me, at least) when it's revealed who is framing him. There are enough hints to figure that out, without it being too obvious or too surprising. Bubba and I figured it out at about the same time, which is good.

Overall, Bubba and the Dead Woman was a very pleasant surprise, and I enjoyed it very much. I see that Bevill has other work available, and I intend to read more by her. Recommended.

The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope

2011-09-13T17:48:00.001-06:00

The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure story published in 1894. It is in the public domain, so I downloaded a free copy of it from Feedbooks.

Our hero is Rudolph Rassendyll, a young Englishman of the noble classes with a comfortable income and very little ambition. He explains that it is well known in the family that a few generations earlier, a visiting prince of Ruritania had an affair with a lady of his family, and that influence appears periodically by throwing up a Rassendyll who is tall, red-headed, and with a dominating straight nose. Rudolph is not displeased to resemble the Ruritanian branch of the family, though his sister-in-law views it with distaste as a constant reminder of scandal.

His sister-in-law presses him to do something useful with his life, and so he decides to take a holiday abroad. On a whim he chooses Ruritania as his destination, and arrives on the eve of the coronation of the new king, Rudolph. While traveling through the small city of Zenda on his way to the capital, his meets and is befriended by his distant cousin who will be crowned king the following day. They are surprised to discover that they could easily be twins. Unfortunately the Ruritanian Rudolph's brother, Michael, wants the throne for himself, and he drugs the king to prevent him being able to attend the coronation, which would open the door for Michael to be crowned instead.

The king's loyal retainers press the English Rudolph to fill in for his cousin at the coronation, until he is revived and able to take the throne himself. Unfortunately in the meantime Michael takes the real Ruritanian Rudolph captive, and the English one must continue the ruse until he can be rescued.

The Prisoner of Zenda is a rip-roaring adventure tale. There are gunshots and swordfights exchanged numerous times as our hero and his friends wrangle with Michael's men, who are determined to see him dead. Meanwhile it is necessary to figure out how to somehow spring the true king from Michael's fortress and, bowing to public pressure, to court the lovely Princess Flavia, with whom he falls in love.

This is a fast-moving, compulsively readable story. In that respect, it reminds me of The 39 Steps by John Buchan. On the other hand, it was also an interesting trawl through a romanticized version of the Victorian psyche. We had a bit of British exceptionalism, in which English Rudolph turns out to be a better king than Ruritarian Rudolph would have been, thus inspiring the admiration and loyalty of those who know his secret. The lovely Princess Flavia also falls in love with English Rudolph, though she did not love Ruritarian Rudolph. And then there were ideas about royalty, and how important it was that the right prince ascend the throne, and that his more popular brother not do so. And Hope brushed up against the idea that English Rudolph, who had proven himself a wise ruler, might end up keeping the throne, if the real king were killed before they could rescue him. But then that idea was fairly quickly dismissed, because our Rudolph is a decent fellow and genuinely believed that the accident of birth that bestowed a kingdom on one man was important and must be upheld. I am glad that he was a decent fellow and wanted to rescue his cousin, but I am less impressed with his true belief in the institution of hereditary rule.

Further, Rudolph and Flavia fall in love with one another, but of course they can't have one another, once his secret is explained to her. It is her duty to marry Ruritarian Rudolph, for the good of the country, and English Rudolph understands completely, because he had always figured they could never be together. They exchange rings and swear their love for each other, and part ways forever. Rudolph looks forward to seeing her in heaven, thus somewhat referencing the Victorian morbid fascination with death. I suppose that this sort of mindset must have been necessary in a time when many of the upper classes married people they didn't care about. However in a sense I can't help but consider it as evidence of what a messed-up place Victorian England was, that it was considered noble and good and perhaps even romantic to watch the woman you love marry someone of higher social standing than you.

Despite my meditations on Victorian culture, I nevertheless found The Prisoner of Zenda an entertaining read. And one of the reasons I read old novels is to get a sense of the time and place. They can be quite educational--the author mentions something in passing that was commonplace at the time, and I go scrambling to Wikipedia to learn about it. Yesterday's word (not in this book, but in a hundred year old mystery I was reading) was macadam, which is a paving process that seems to have been the predecessor of the chip-seal paving that my city uses to prolong the life of the streets.

The Bird of the River by Kage Baker

2011-09-10T17:48:00.002-06:00

I've gotten behind on my blogging again. I read this a week ago, so hopefully I can remember it clearly enough to write a coherent entry.

The Bird of the River is the third in a fantasy series by Kage Baker. I love the first, The Anvil of the World, which is a set of stories about a killer trying to find another career. I was less enthusiastic about The House of the Stag, which fills in some of the backstory of the setting, talking about how the demon lord and the earth mother goddess got together. I didn't know about The Bird of the River until someone mentioned it at Worldcon last month, and I made a note to track it down. Baker died last year, and I had thought there would be no more from her--and, indeed, this appears to have been published posthumously.

The novels are set in a place (which I have heard may be a fantasy version of California) in which there are two races of people who often don't coexist harmoniously. The Children of the Sun are humans. They are clever, industrious, and destructive. The Yendri are a more peaceful, plant-focused race with California sensibilities. They live in the forests and are great herbalists and are always concerned that the Children of the Sun are damaging the earth.

In The Bird of the River, our protagonist is a teenaged girl named Eliss. She has a mother who is a drug addict, and a younger brother who is half-Yendri, which causes all sorts of problems for them because many of the Children of the Sun don't like the Yendri at all. Eliss forces her mother to apply for a job and, despite the fact she is an addict and there are doubts about whether she can do the job, she is hired on by a river barge called the Bird of the River. The Bird travels upstream, clearing snags where trees have fallen into the river and can cause hazards for the boats that travel it. They clear the snags and harvest the wood, which is valuable because the Yendri won't allow anyone to cut down the trees where they live.

Quite early on their trip up the river, Eliss's mother dies. The captain allows Eliss and her brother to stay on board and join the crew, and they accept. As time passes, Eliss starts to mature into a young woman, and finds a new home for herself. It is a coming of age story, except that it didn't annoy me as much as they usually do. There is also a plot involving raiders on the river and tracking the movements of a murdered nobleman to figure out where he died and who killed him.

I have to say that I enjoyed The Bird of the River, in spite of it being a coming of age story. It lacks the humor that I loved about The Anvil of the World, and the stakes here are much smaller than they were in the two previous books. This is a story about young people finding their place in life, not about the rise and fall of races. But it was an entertaining read, and very enjoyable.

It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn

2011-09-04T14:58:00.000-06:00

I got this through LibraryThing Early Reviewers, and it has taken a couple of months to get around to reading it. There are so many things in my to-read pile, and this one wasn't the most interesting.

It's All About the Bike is the author expressing his lifelong love affair with the bicycle, pulled together by the thread of having his dream bike custom-built for him. With each chapter he takes on a piece of the bicycle, talking about the history of the part and why he is choosing the specific brands he is. In several cases he visits the factories or workshops where the parts are made. Penn is a traditionalist, liking the solidity and tradition of builders and companies that have been in the business for a long time. There is nothing wrong with that, but to the cycling population there's also nothing particularly surprising or interesting about choosing a steel frame, a Campagnolo Record groupset, a Brooks saddle, and Continental tires. All are reliable and widely agreed to be good. But they are not unique or special in any way--heck, I'm a much less serious cyclist than Penn, and I have a steel bike with Campagnolo components and Continental tires, and tried a Brooks saddle before deciding it wasn't for me. Though there was one thing notably missing from the work, and I'm a bit curious why he didn't talk about pedals.

So I'm not entirely sure who Penn is writing this book for. He talks about the parts without sufficient images for it to be clear to someone who isn't already quite familiar with bikes, so I don't think it would work so well for non-cyclists. I suppose it is probably written for fellow cycling enthusiasts, then. But most of things he says about his bike he is building -- about the importance of good fit, and the component choices he made -- are not exactly going to be surprising to people who love bikes. There are some interesting bits about the history of the bicycle, and one particularly good section when he visits California and talks about the beginnings of mountain biking, but I'm not sure that those alone are sufficiently interesting to make the book worth picking up for another cyclist. Perhaps it is intended to appeal to the cyclist's inner geek, who loves bikes so much they just love talking about them. I could see myself reading a book like this in the middle of the winter when I couldn't be out riding, to give me a little hope that warmer days are coming again. But I still don't think there is enough interesting content to make it worth buying.

John Thorndyke's Cases by R. Austin Freeman

2011-08-27T18:09:00.000-06:00

Ebooks are a wonderful thing. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and others, lots of old works in the public domain are available, free, for download. Sometimes they are classics, but just as often they are more obscure things that I would be unlikely to ever see a paper copy of. Fortunately we have the internet, and I have been reading some old works that I probably never would have had the opportunity to try without ebooks. OK, that's my spiel for the day.

John Thorndyke's Cases is a volume of related mystery short stories published in 1909. There are apparently a whole series of mysteries featuring Thorndyke, and I have downloaded a few more and intend to read them. This format is similar to other mysteries of the day, from Sherlock Holmes to Father Brown to Cleek, the Man of Forty Faces. Like the Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu stories, it is told not from Thorndyke's point of view, but that of his friend and sidekick, Dr. Jervis. Thorndyke, who is essentially a consulting forensic physician, is very observant and methodical, and constantly amazes Jervis and everyone else with his results.

Thorndyke usually works for the defense, not the police, though they occasionally consult him, as well. So he wanders into the middle of crime scenes and investigations, makes his own observations, goes home and runs experiments, and then shows up at the coroner's inquest and surprises everyone with his conclusions. He takes a very scientific approach to crime investigation, like a century-old version of CSI. While the police are jumping to the obvious conclusions, Thorndyke takes fingerprints and casts of footprints, examines evidence under a microscope, performs exercises that never make sense until after he has explained them to Jervis, and seems to always easily and instinctively figure out things that are not at all obvious.

The stories, overall, are all a bit too easy -- Thorndyke always figures it out pretty quickly, every piece of evidence they see turns out to be important, and the police and the coroner's court always take his deductions at face value. This is okay with me, actually, as it's the puzzle I'm interested in, not power struggles and courtroom wrangling. The author, Freeman, was himself a physician, and he notes in his preface that he has personally conducted all the experiments and procedures that he has Thorndyke undertaking, to ensure that they are correct and will work. For the time, it was probably pretty good, hard science.

So I was entertained enough by the stories, but the novelty of a hundred year old book is more than the plotline. In fact, what I think I find most interesting in reading books like this are the casual cultural assumptions in them. England in 1909 was very different than our current time and place (in my case, Wisconsin). There are various mentions of things that are unfamiliar to me, or references that get me to thinking. For instance, there was a line to the effect of "he took off like a lamplighter" which made me ponder the practicalities of lamplighting as a profession or public service, and whether they habitually ran about. I suppose they must at one time have been commonly considered to move quickly. Honestly, it's something I had never previously thought about much. And then I came across a grammatical usage I'd never seen before: "By the way, usen't there to be a cab-yard just about here?" Usen't. Cool. I hadn't ever seen that before, and yet it's perfectly understandable, and presumably at the time was not an uncommon phrase. It's things like this that make popular books of this age fascinating cultural documents to the modern reader.

I enjoyed this very much, and plan to read more stories about Thorndyke, quite soon.

Back From Worldcon

2011-08-22T19:26:00.000-06:00

I have just returned from a six day trip to Reno to attend Worldcon (well, really four days of con and a day of travel at each end). Overall, it was a really good Worldcon. My friend Kristin thinks it may be the best Worldcon she's attended. I think Chicago in 2000 may have been better, but maybe my memories of that one are special because it was my first Worldcon. At any rate, it was a good con.

I attended a number of panels, and some of them were good. One of the things the con did right was having the panels limited to 50 minutes. Sometimes cons do 75 minute panels, and really, no topic is so exciting that there's 75 minutes worth of material to talk about. 50 minutes is much, much better.

The bane of my con seemed to be steampunk. Frankly, I occasionally read a bit of it, but I'm not a fan, per se. It hasn't captured my imagination, I don't get excited about the idea of reading more, it's sort of okay but not particularly interesting to me. Nevertheless, it seemed like it kept coming up. I attended one panel on the topic, The Moral Aesthetics of Steampunk, which was supposed to be a discussion about the current enthusiasm for and romanticising of the Victorian Era, all the while mostly ignoring that the actual historical Victorian Era was absolutely horrible. However the moderator said: "I disagree with the description," and so they didn't talk about that. Instead, they tried to spend 50 minutes trying to think of things to say about steampunk in extremely general fashion, and mostly kept mentioning Makers and The Difference Engine every few minutes. Very disappointing. However that should have been the one and only steampunk panel I attended.

Unfortunately it didn't turn out that way. The next day I attended Scientific Romances of the Victorian Era, which was supposed to have been about works actually written in the Victorian Era, rather than modern novels set in the Victorian Era. However one of the panelists seemed to be under the impression that it was another steampunk panel, and kept bringing up modern authors and encouraging us to read all the steampunk we could get our hands on. Sigh.

But the most disturbing instance was when I was at Whatever Happened to Cyberpunk? and they started talking about steampunk. On the surface, it would seem to me that cyberpunk and steampunk are very, very different things, so I wasn't too happy when they brought it up. However one of the panelists actually made a coherent argument comparing new works of cyberpunk and steampunk that I actually found quite interesting. Still, I would rather it had not been brought up at all. I really just can't get on the steampunk bandwagon. It's not very interesting to me.

I also attended the Hugo Awards ceremony, even though I didn't vote this year. However, um, how can I put this? I certainly do not agree with some of the results. I don't think I will say any more than that.

Hard Spell by Justin Gustainis

2011-08-10T17:25:00.000-06:00

This is another book that I bought on clearance at Borders recently (and then got home and discovered I could have gotten the electronic version for 99 cents. Sigh.). It is another mashup urban fantasy/police procedural. This one is set in Scranton, PA.

Scranton is set at the intersection of lots of ley lines, making it an attractive place for supernatural creatures to live. Our protagonist, Markowski, is an officer in the Occult Crimes Unit of the Scranton PD. They handle crimes by and against supernatural creatures.

The tone of this one is hardboiled. It's full of lines like "My name's Markowski. I carry a badge." We discover that in his backstory Markowski's wife was killed by a vampire, and his daughter is a vampire. His partner dies, and he is assigned to a work with Karl Renfer, a relatively new officer to the unit. Isn't it always thus with hard-boiled detective stories? Anyway, he starts out with doubts about Karl but by the end of the book they have formed a good working relationship.

They are called to the scene where a wizard has been tortured to death, and something valuable stolen from him. He talks the department witch into trying a ritual that will allow them to ask the dead man who killed him, but it goes horribly wrong. Then someone starts killing people in ritual fashion. Markowski doesn't know what it means, but he knows it's going to be bad.

Hard Spell turned out to be quite a good read, once I got into it. It was one of those books that I read straight through in an afternoon. I was entertained, I enjoyed it, who could ask for more?

The Loch by Steve Alten

2011-08-06T09:39:00.000-06:00

The Loch is horror, which I rarely read. But at Borders horror and dark fantasy are shelved together, so I came across it a while back while browsing. I decided not to buy it at the time, but have picked it up and looked at it a few times, so when I was at Borders last weekend and everything was on clearance, I decided that it was time for this one to come home with me.

On the surface of it, I probably shouldn't like this book. But this is due to my own tastes and reading quirks, and the things that bug me are usually acceptable to most readers. As the title implies, it's about the Loch Ness Monster. That's only a minor problem for me, because while it's been done a lot of times, there's still something kind of creepy about Loch Ness, so huge and cold and dark and deep, that I suppose for me that vein hasn't been entirely worked out. There are other things about it that do bother me, though, for my own personal reasons. I hate it when stories are told or explained through flashbacks. Yes, it's a perfectly acceptable technique that many people use, but I don't like it. So sue me. The Loch has sections of explanation through the journals of a historical person. Fortunately they were easy to skip, so I didn't let it interfere with my enjoyment of the novel.

The bigger problem, and had I known about it before I read it I never would have bought the book, is that the backstory is about Templars and their treasure. Gad, I hate that. What a boring, overused, tacky, tedious, asinine cliche. I can live with Loch Ness monster stories, but I can't stand Templar secrets in fiction. So there are members of a secret society running around doing secret and gruesome things and working at cross-purposes with the protagonist. Ick, ick, ick.

Despite that drawback--and for me it's a huge one--I mostly enjoyed the book anyway. Even though the protagonist is an idiot and an asshole, and his pining for the female love interest didn't seem plausible, going from ooh she's really hot to I love you without the necessary steps in between. And I didn't really think the last chapter seemed emotionally true to the journey the character had followed. Still, Alten can write really compelling text. It sucks you in and hauls you along for a wild ride, and I kept happily turning the pages (skipping over the historical sections, of course) to find out what happened next. The plot itself is pretty predictable, as a marine biologist with father issues returns to the Scottish village of his childhood and, despite his rational objections, ends up finding and facing down the Loch Ness Monster. And then he hushes certain things up because, you know, Templars and so on. Nevertheless, as I said, it was an oddly compelling read.

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch

2011-08-01T18:29:00.000-06:00

Midnight Riot takes place in London and features a young policeman. He has just finished his two years as a probationary officer, and fears that he will be assigned to the Case Progression Unit to do paperwork. Fortunately a murder happens, and a ghost talks to him, and he is assigned to work with Inspector Nightingale. Nightingale turns out to be a wizard, and he takes Constable Grant as his apprentice.

Grant does not have remarkable talent, and does not immediately master the tasks that are put before him. He works hard, for a long time, before he masters the rudimentary magic that Nightingale is teaching him. Meanwhile he is also working on a series of murders and trying to negotiate peace between the two deities who claim ownership of the Thames.

I have read other books that are said to really capture the feel of London, but none has worked for me as well as this one. I am usually pretty indifferent to setting. Plot-driven reader that I am, I want to know what the characters say and do. I don't care what they look like or what they're wearing or what kind of car they drive or what the wallpaper looks like. It doesn't really matter to me. But Midnight Riot made me actually wish I knew London better, so that I had a better grasp of the places he's talking about. It always impresses me when a writer can write about setting in a way that catches me and interests me, because it's very rare.

I also really enjoyed the crime-solving aspect of the novel. I am a mystery reader, and I like a good police procedural. I also read science fiction and fantasy. A fantasy that is a police procedural, and a very absorbing one at that, is right up my alley. A lot of urban fantasies have a mystery or problem element to them, which is probably why I continue to read them. And perhaps it's old-fashioned or authoritarian of me, but I always prefer police procedurals to books featuring private eyes or amateur detectives or criminals or reporters. And I would rather read about a psychic police constable than a bodyguard or thief or bounty hunter or something. Solving crimes and restoring order is actually his job, and apparently that resonates with the tidy part of my psyche.

Overall, Midnight Riot is just a fantastic read. It has interesting characters, it is very much set in a particular place and the story could not be the same if it were set somewhere else, there are several interesting problems to chew on, and it just moves right along. Grant is neither too competent nor incompetent, and was a very easy protagonist to ride along with. The secondary characters were interesting and individual. It was a hell of a read, and I look forward to reading the next one.

Master of None by Sonya Bateman

2011-07-30T18:22:00.000-06:00

Master of None is yet another urban fantasy, but this time our protagonist is male. Gavyn Donatti is a thief whose jobs always seem to go wrong. He thinks he's just the unluckiest person alive. After stealing and then losing an artifact that had been commissioned by a psycho crime boss, at the beginning of the novel he is on the run, and time has just run out. Cornered in a warehouse by the crime boss's thugs, he is about to take a trip to visit the psycho bastard who wants to hurt him very badly.

He is rescued by a surly man who claims to be a djinn. They have adventures trying to stay ahead of the crime boss, and Gavyn tries to call in favors from a couple of his former colleagues who both have good reason to hate him. Not surprisingly, things backfire. They get the shit kicked out of them repeatedly but Gavin, who turns out to be more than human, eventually manages to marshall his newfound powers sufficiently to save the day.

I don't really have a lot to say about this one. It was a quick read from the library. The writing itself is perfectly competent, but I wasn't really enjoying the story the author had to tell. It felt a bit forced at times as the author maneuvered things so that the djinn couldn't act at various points and Gavyn had to be the one to do it, and I wasn't really that interested in the djinn politics. Shrug. This one didn't inspire a very strong response from me either way. It was okay, I guess.

I am not posting about the Hugo nominees this year

2011-07-28T09:11:00.000-06:00

Ususally by this time of year I would have several posts up about the Hugo-nominated novels. After all, I am going to Worldcon, and I always cast a Hugo ballot. But this year is different; I haven't read any of the novels, and don't intend to.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, I am very, very underwhelmed by the books on the ballot. I'm uninterested in any of them. I've heard good things about the Jemison and the McDonald works, but they really don't interest me. I just don't read a lot of secondary-world fantasy any more, so the Jemison doesn't appeal much, and my prior experience with McDonald has led me to the conclusion I'm unlikely to like his other works, either, no matter how much praise they get. And the other books are even less appealing to me. Nevertheless, in a normal year I would have attempted them, anyway, out of a sort of sense of duty.

Which leads to the second reason: My reading resolution this year is to read whatever I want, whatever catches my eye, and not worry about what I "should" be reading. As in, I "should" read this book that people are talking about, or I "should" be reading more science fiction and less paranormal romance, or I "should" read the books on the Hugo ballot. I'm not in school, and I'm not taking assignments this year. My reading follows my whims, and I'm not going to waste my time on books that I'm not that into, or feel guilty because I'm reading fun fluff instead of meatier, more serious work. The only assignments I've accepted this year are the books for my mystery group, where it's getting to be a running joke that I don't bother to finish the books if I'm not enjoying them; and review copies I get from Librarything, where the deal is that you have to read and review the book. Which is why I slogged through Embassytown, even though I really, really didn't like it. And it was a miserable waste of time, so the experience just reinforced my inclination to not allow others to dictate or influence what I read.

As for the short works on the Hugo ballot, I attempted a couple of them and was alternately bored and repulsed. But SF shorts have never worked for me, so that's no surprise.

I think that participation in the Hugos is important, especially at the nominating stage (and I did submit a nominating ballot), because you shouldn't complain about the result if you didn't bother to vote. And so I always vote in the years I am able to do so, even though my tastes and those of the other Hugo voters do not really align, and I am usually unhappy with the end result. I still think the only way to change that is to participate. And so I ought to feel guilty that I am not participating this year, but actually I feel free to have slipped out from under the burden of forcing myself to read books I'm not into in order to vote in a race that rarely produces what I think is the right winner.

Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler

2011-07-19T19:53:00.001-06:00

Tempest Rising is sort of urban fantasy, except that there's nothing urban about it. Once again we have a heroine who discovers she is a special snowflake attracting the interest of hot, powerful paranormal males. Once again she is jerked into the magical underworld that most humans know nothing about, and she's in over her head. Yeah, whatevs, seen that many, many times before.

However Tempest Rising is much less irritating than most of this type of story. I realize that's not a ringing endorsement, but I mean it sincerely--it's really hard to strike the right note with one of these heroines, to make her not an annoying, whiny, self-absorbed little brat, or have the rest of the cast revolve around the annoying, whiny, Special Snowflake heroine.

Jane True lives in a small seaside town in Maine. She is pretty much the town pariah, and has the self esteem to match. The only thing that makes her happy is skinny-dipping in the ocean, year-round, swimming out far from shore where the currents are dangerous. It is of course no surprise to the reader to discover that Jane is half-selkie, but I thought she handled the discovery well, with a mixture of knowing it's true on a gut level while still doing a serious reality-check. What follows is not Jane whining about how she just wants to be normal, thank goodness. Instead she gets pulled into the investigation of the death of another halfling like herself, and she discovers that there are quite a few other supernatural creatures living in town, too.

She also gets involved romantically with a hot, hot, sexy vampire. And she has the good sense to wonder if it's really a good idea, given that he exists by seducing and feeding off women. The other possible love interest was evident to me immediately, because I know how stories are put together and it seemed pretty obvious, but Jane was totally oblivious. But I loved Jane's internal monologue throughout, as she keeps wondering if things are too good to be true, if things are not quite as they seem, if reality is going to soon come crashing down on her again. She's got good instincts, and I appreciated that she could keep thinking, and not just become the unthinking victim of her throbbing vulva, as usually happens in paranormal romances. Jane really does have a good head on her shoulders.

I don't think there's really anything that original or different about Tempest Rising, it's another entry in a crowded field of similar works, but what makes it stand out is that it's well-done, and I didn't hate the heroine. That is an accomplishment. In fact, I think it's likely that I will track down the rest of the series. It was actually quite refreshing.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

2011-07-17T07:40:00.000-06:00

This is a paranormal romance that's trying to pass as something else. It's published by Viking, and I think being sold as mainstream, but really, it's a paranormal romance. Except that if it were published as paranormal romance it would be quite a bit shorter and probably better.

Our protagonist is a witch who is trying to avoid using her magic. She comes from a long line of powerful witches, and she is uninterested in the expectations from the other witches. She wants nothing to do with them, or magic. However she is an exceptional Special Snowflake. She graduated high school early, went straight on to college, where she was brilliant and graduated at twenty, then went on to get advanced degrees with brilliance and at a young age, and then she got tenure at Yale, even though everyone agreed she probably wouldn't get it. She studied in England and now is on a one-year sabbatical where she's doing research at the Bodleian, and she loves tea, and rows on the river, and she seems to want to be more British and the British. Gag. We later learn that she is probably the most powerful witch alive, if only she knew how to use her powers. And most people like her, and she can charm animals. Double gag.

The love interest is a 1,500 year old vampire who is astonishingly handsome, and also brilliant. He holds multiple advanced degrees and has a research lab where he is working with the DNA of supernatural creatures. He becomes interested in the heroine because he thinks she has an old and powerful magical manuscript he wants to read, but very quickly he is astonished to realize that he loves her like no other woman in his long life, but he's worried because he's too badass and evil for her, and so there's tension as she wants him and he holds back to try to protect her from himself. Triple gag.

There is nothing particularly special about this book, except that it's too long. The author indulges in too much description of things we don't need to see -- I'm pretty turned off in the first chapter or two of a book to be given the character's life history in a huge infodump. I'm not that interested in flashbacks from secondary characters' pasts. When the two of them went to yoga together, we most likely didn't need a long description of the class. Nor a long description of the heroine going to the river to exercise. And so on, and so on. If there is one rule that writers should follow, it's this: leave out the boring parts. Harkness is far too wordy, and takes far too long to not say very much.

Anyway, I threw this one across the room halfway through. It's nothing special, and fairly irritating. There are much better books out there with supernatural creatures facing tough situations and falling for each other. Not recommended.

NADWCon

2011-07-16T08:32:00.000-06:00

Last weekend I went to Madison for five days to attend the North American Discworld Convention. The con itself had a very different vibe than the other science fiction conventions I've attended, and mostly was a bit of a bust. I'm glad I saw Terry again, and I particularly enjoyed the conversation between him and Neil Gaiman. But other than those mid-afternoon events, the con just wasn't that interesting to me. I have concluded that while I am a fan of Discworld, I am apparently not a Discworld Fan, if you see what I mean.

Nevertheless, that left plenty of time for wandering around Madison.

I experimented on this trip with not bringing a computer. Instead I got myself an iPod Touch, which allows me to check my email and surf the web with a wireless connection. It worked pretty well. I also used it to take my photos on this trip, and found that it's not a great camera. So sorry about the picture quality.

We were staying just one block from the Capitol, and near State Street, so we spent a lot of time wandering around that area. There was a huge art fair going on around the Capitol last weekend, and we wandered until I was sunburned, overheated, and foot-sore. We also found part of the farmers market, and picked up berries and jerky and bread for lunch. By this time, after hours surrounded by stuff for sale, the buying frenzy was apparently on me, so I also bought two jars of jam to bring home with me. Considering how little jam I eat, this doesn't make much sense. Apparently it was the heat and the exhaustion.

Because this trip was exhausting. The weather in Madison was hot, humid, and sunny, and we spent hours outside in it each day. I find being out in the sun and the heat tiring, and five days in a row of it really wore me out. Plus the hotel elevators were not up to the strain of hosting an SF convention (nothing new there). But after climbing the stairs to the sixth floor three times, I decided that waiting for the elevator really wasn't such a bad thing. Anyway, I haven't managed to blog since I got back because I've been wiped out. Last night I finally conked out about three hours earlier than usual, and I'm feeling much better now.

We went back to the art fair again on Sunday, where I Spent Too Much Money, which seems to have been the theme of the weekend, and also wandered around the state Capitol. It's a really beautiful building, though I didn't do a very good job of photographing it.

Monday we went to the Arboretum, which was also a bust. But we wandered around for a while until our feet were thoroughly soaked and looked at trees and wild turkeys. The turkeys were really cool. The rest, not so much. Then we went over to the Henry Vilas Zoo, which was a very pleasant surprise. It's clean, well-maintained, and seems to be well-funded. I fed the goats and we had hot dogs for lunch.

Tuesday we left Madison early and on the way home stopped at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's home in Spring Green. It was both cooler and not as good as I expected. We took the 2 hour house tour (which cost $47!! Holy crap!), and I enjoyed it much more before we actually went into the house. We spent quite a bit of time outside, looking at the landscape and the garden and the exterior of the house, and talking about Wright's ideas and how he ran the place with his students doing a lot of the work. The garden was beautiful, and inspiring. I think I may rip out a whole bed on the south side of my house and start over. The house, on the other hand, was less than I expected. It's actually a pretty big place, but the tour only takes you into six rooms, and the place isn't air conditioned, and it quickly became obvious the place is kind of falling apart. So it was hot and tedious and my hips were hurting from standing in one place too long, and the tour would have been better if it were about half an hour shorter, and the time was cut off the inside portion of the tour. Nevertheless, I'm really glad I saw it.

The President's Vampire by Christopher Farnsworth

2011-06-26T18:45:00.000-06:00

This is the sequel to Blood Oath, which I liked despite it being high suspense, which I usually don't enjoy.

The President's Vampire, on the other hand, did not work for me. Again, it is a work of high suspense--spies and the White House and shadowy CIA conspiracies. I read 3 chapters and then threw it across the room.

Oh, well.

Touched by an Alien by Gini Koch

2011-06-23T06:24:00.002-06:00

Touched by an Alien is sort of like urban fantasy, except it's science fiction, if you see what I mean. It has the typical storyline with the attractive single woman in her 20s who one day gets pulled from normal life and thrust into a secret war she knew nothing about, and meanwhile has a couple of hot superpowered hunks panting for her. You see what I mean about it being like urban fantasy? Except that instead of them being paranormal creatures with magical powers, they're aliens with technology that substitutes fairly well for magic.

Now, I'm not knocking urban fantasy or the fiction that can be lumped together with it, justly or unjustly. I read and enjoy some urban fantasies, and what I really have a soft spot for is a good gay werewolf romance. Though it doesn't even have to be werewolves, really--shapeshifters of other sorts usually work, too. Anyway, the point is that I'm not much of a reading snob and I'm quite capable of enjoying a good example of this variety.

In Touched by an Alien, our heroine, Kitty Katt, sees a man on the street transform into a hideous creature and start killing everyone in sight. She manages to kill the creature by stabbing it in the right spot with a pen. She is then swept away by a carful of extremely handsome men in designer suits who claim to be from a worldwide government agency. They want to recruit her, and thereafter follows about 100 pages of infodump relieved by one action scene in which Kitty stands up unbelievably well against a superpowered rampaging monster. We then discover that, unknown to her, Kitty's parents are both government agents, and her mother is an antiterrorism expert who reports directly to the President.

The tone of Touched by an Alien is deliberately light. It's not supposed to be gritty, believable, or realistic. It's practically a spoof. I am aware of that, and yet still found it too ridiculous and occasionally irritating.

Kitty may be the biggest Mary Sue I have ever encountered. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it comes from Star Trek fan fiction, to mean a self-insertion character who is too exceptional. They're so smart, and capable, and everyone loves them, and they figure out things no one else does, and save the day, and sometimes attract the romantic interest of at least one desirable male character, unless it's slash fiction. The male version of the character is called a Marty Stu.

Kitty is that character. From the moment she is whisked away from the opening scene, two incredibly handsome aliens, who also happen to be the most talented and therefore the leaders of their operations, are instantly attracted to her. They immediately invite her to join their agency, but unlike the other humans she isn't relegated to merely being a driver. She is also the only woman on the fieldwork side of their operation. And she alone seems to be able to face down the big bad guy who is trying to kill them and take over the planet. And she marches into their operations and on her second day tells them they're all wrong and she has the answers, and they let her take over operations. On her second day! Or maybe it was her third. And when faced down with all sorts of ugly dangerous monsters for the first time, only she can figure out how to kill them. And she gives all the orders, and she's the one who figures out who the traitor is, and she leads a crew of Navy pilots in to retake the facility that's been taken over by terrorists. And the two most powerful aliens are trying to kill each other over their jealousy because they both want her.

Give me a fucking break.

Which isn't to say that the book isn't readable--it is. Even as my eyes were glazing over through the hundred page infodump, and rolling as she confidently pulls right answers out of her ass every. single. time., I never had the urge to abandon the book. Even when she spouted bullshit about artists feeling emotion more deeply than normal people. I know a lot of artists. Believe me, most of them aren't any more emotional than the rest of us, and the ones that are are a pain in the ass you don't want to have to deal with. Oh, and even worse -- the highly empathic love interest who nevertheless is under the mistaken impression she's not that into him. Uh, yeah, right. Because romance must have a Big Misunderstanding? Sigh.

So, though Touched by an Alien is, quite deliberately, supposed to be a fun romp that doesn't take itself too seriously, it failed to strike the right tone to work well for me. Writing comedic material is hard, and not all readers will respond to it. Touched by an Alien doesn't misstep horribly, I read the whole thing, but I can't help but feel that lurking under the breezy Mary Sue-ishness is the raw material that could have been a different book I would have liked better.

The Stranger's Woes by Max Frei

2011-06-20T20:19:00.000-06:00

The Stranger's Woes is the second in a ten-volume series of fantasy novels originally published in Russian. Max Frei is actually a pseudonym of Svetlana Martynchik, if Wikipedia is correct. The novels are told in first-person by a character named Max, though we don't learn his last name.

In the first volume, The Stranger, Max manages to travel to another world, a place he has frequently dreamed of. He is hired by Sir Juffin Hully to serve as the Noctournal Representative of the Most Venerable Head of the Minor Secret Investigative Force of the City of Echo. Max, a natural night owl, gets a job working as the night shift for the city's magical police. Max says he was a bit of a loser in our world, and is surprised and pleased to find that he is happy, comfortable, and successful in his new home. As a native of a different world, he finds that he has a powerful and instinctive grasp of magic, which sometimes works to his advantage and sometimes causes him problems.

I loved The Stranger, and spent a year impatiently waiting for this volume. When it arrived on Saturday, I dropped the book I had been working on so that I could read this one first. I was a little underwhelmed by it.

It has the same cast of characters, and again they are dealing with the problems that arise for the magical police to handle, but it didn't have the same spark as the first volume, at least for me. When I read The Stranger, I eagerly absorbed every detail, wanting to know what happened next. In The Stranger's Woes, on the other hand, the material wasn't as fresh. The characters felt more like a collection of tics and attributes than real people. Max is always tired and hungry and begging for coffee. His coworker Lookfi Pence is bumbling and absent-minded. Melifaro must constantly tease Max, to the point of not being even slightly funny. We see very little of Shurf Lonli-Lokli, who was featured prominently in the first volume. It felt like they were just going through the motions. On one occasion Max spends the night at Juffin's house, and yet there is no mention of Juffin's dog Chuff, who is a great friend of Max's, and would certainly have greeted him and crawled into bed with him. Likewise Max's pet cats, Ella and Fitzgerald, are basically forgotten. The whole thing just felt a bit spare and like not all the details had been painted in where they belonged.

The plot itself has all sorts of good stuff -- murder and kidnapping and revenge and wizards rising from the dead, as well as the question of how to get rid of an annoying house guest, and an important development in Max's social life. We discover that buriwoks are more powerful than previously understood. Max becomes a king, sort of. Melifaro pines romantically and gets drunk.

And yet this volume, to some degree, lacked the sense of wonder I got from The Stranger. It also is not a good place to start -- if you're interested, get The Stranger first. It's out in trade paperback now. The Stranger's Woes just thrusts you into the setting with little or no attempt to explain or introduce anything to a reader who starts with the second volume.

I will say, however, that the translation of The Stranger's Woes seems smoother than with The Stranger--that one at times felt quite clumsy in its use of language. This one flows more smoothly, but lacks something in charm. I do not know if the blame for that lies with the author or the translator.

However, though I suppose that this review mostly boils down to me trying to put my finger on why this one lacked some of the magic that the first book had, clumsy translation and all, I still enjoyed it enough, and can't wait for the third one.

Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth

2011-06-09T21:17:00.000-06:00

Blood Oath is a secret history and high thriller. The premise is that supernatural creatures exist and most of humanity doesn't know about it, and that over 100 years ago a young vampire was captured, pardoned by the president, and pressed into his service. Being nearly immortal, the vampire is still serving, and is sent out by the president to deal with really serious shit, especially supernatural stuff.

At the beginning of Blood Oath the vampire gets a new liaison, an ambitious young political shark named Zach Barrows. He is not given any choice about this assignment, and is not very happy about it. Cade, the vampire, scares the hell out of him, and he feels singularly unprepared for the work. Zach was occasionally annoying, as he swerved between being clever and suicidally stupid.

It comes to their attention that someone is assembling piecemeal creatures using parts from dead bodies. Cade focuses on the only man he knows of who is capable of animating the reassembled corpses, and both of them are nearly killed. And then things get really violent.

I liked Blood Oath more than I should have. I usually don't care for thrillers, and I don't usually like flashbacks, and I hate novels with conspiracies, especially those involving the CIA. And those elements certainly annoyed me a bit, but I enjoyed the book anyway. Blood Oath is compulsively readable. I had to make a conscious decision last night to set it aside and turn out the light so I could get some sleep, because it's the sort of book I could have stayed up all night to finish. You (or rather, I) just plunge forward through the text in a rush of narrative lust, wanting to find out what happens next. I don't think there's really any question whether Cade will manage to save the day in the end, but I still wanted to see how they got there. Great fun, and I look forward to reading the sequel.

Stop telling me to cheer up, damn it

2011-06-08T11:22:00.000-06:00

Evidence suggests that having a positive attitude does not help you.

The Negative Evidence About Positive Thinking and Health

The Huckleberry Murders by Patrick F. McManus

2011-06-01T19:11:00.000-06:00

This is the fourth in McManus's series of mysteries taking place in Blight County, Idaho. Sheriff Bo Tully takes a day off to go out and pick huckleberries and he encounters four screaming and out-of-breath pickers who have just stumbled across three corpses in the huckleberry patch. Bo calls in Lurch the CSI, Dave the tracker who thinks he's an Indian, and his ex-girlfriend Susan, the medical examiner.

They decide that there was an intended fourth victim who escaped, and Bo sets about searching for him. He also finds himself partnered with an FBI agent who is annoyed because the bodies were found on federal land, and Bo didn't bother to notify the FBI, under whose jurisdiction the crime should have fallen. And he is investigating the disappearance of a farmer whose remains may or may not be hidden under his house.

I find these mysteries very entertaining. They strike a good balance by being light and fun, but not too far into cozy land. I just abandoned one of Laura Child's tea shop mysteries because I couldn't tolerate the twee characters and their twee little lives. Ick, ick, ick. Bo and his constituents are odd and funny but the novels show small town and country life with a jaded eye, not rose-colored glasses. I appreciate that. I love the tone McManus strikes, and could happily enjoy a steady diet of them, if only he wrote more quickly.

Many a Midnight Ship: True Stories of Great Lakes Shipwrecks by Mark Bourrie

2011-05-29T16:37:00.000-06:00

Apparently I am kind of fascinated by the Great Lakes. I haven't actually spent much time on or near them, but I keep finding myself picking up books about them, and especially Lake Superior. Given that I live in Wisconsin, which is surrounded by great lakes on two sides, I suppose this is not a particularly unusual thing to be interested in.

In Many a Midnight Ship, Bourrie talks about shipwrecks and disasters on the lakes. He starts out with a bang, literally, as he describes a naval battle that took place on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. He then moves on to talk about November storms, especially a hurricane that took out 12 ships and nearly 300 sailors in 1913. That chapter was absolutely fascinating, and I expected to really enjoy this book.

However Bourrie appears to have packed his best material into the front of the book. What follows is a series of stories of the Great Lakes, some of them about shipwrecks, and others not. For instance, there is a chapter devoted to the history of the US naval ship Michigan, which never wrecked. However there was an interesting story to tell about how some Confederate spies wanted to hijack it in order to use it to free the inmates at a prisoner of war camp, so Bourrie went with it. Nevertheless, the Michigan didn't wreck. The author has written two previous books on the subject, so I wonder if he might have been stretching to find new material he hadn't already used. He also included a long section on a ship that had been used to house prisoners in Australia, which had been removed from service and was being dismantled in Cleveland when someone set it on fire. That really isn't a shipwreck, either. And a description of an overloaded pleasure boat that rolled over while still at the dock on the Chicago River. Which, while fairly interesting, also should not be classified as a Great Lakes shipwreck.

Bourrie is a journalist, and it shows in his writing. Every chapter opens with a hook, and some of them are pretty silly. For instance:

Jonah survived his trip in a whale, but, for more than 800 passengers on the excursion ship Eastland, the tickets to the "big event" advertised for July 24, 1915--an excursion out of the hot city of Chicago to the dune-lined beaches of Michigan City, Indiana--was an invitation to die.

An invitation to die? Really? Or how about this one:

Politics can kill. The most terrible disaster that ever occurred on the open water of the Great Lakes was the loss, with more than 400 passengers, of the steamer Lady Elgin on September 8, 1860. It happened largely because a politician insulted hundreds of loyal soldiers just before the outbreak of the Civil War.

I've got to call bullshit on that one. The political aspect of the story explains why that particular group of passengers were traveling on Lake Michigan that night, but really, a political insult did not cause the disaster. Those people died because they were rammed by another ship in the middle of the night, not because they were mad at the governor.

Overall I found Many a Midnight Ship a little puzzling, sometimes a little silly, and sometimes interesting. I realize that in shipwrecks where no one survives we often don't know what happened or why (or where, in some cases) they sank. But some of the material included seemed surprisingly far off topic. Because it's not written in chronological or geographical or any other order that would make sense to me, the stories seemed disconnected as they jumped around through time and space, and the work felt like a series of articles strung together rather than like a book.

Embassytown by China Mieville

2011-05-22T18:02:00.001-06:00

Embassytown is China Mieville's first work of science fiction. It is set on a distant planet, where there is a small community of humans and other aliens living in a conclave amid the Ariekei. Due to the Ariekei's unusual language, only a select few modified humans can communicate with them. It is narrated by Avice, who left Embassytown to work as crew on a series of space ships. She returns mostly to please her latest husband, who is a linguist and wants to see what the place is like. Avice settles awkwardly into an odd position in Embassytown, as one of the few who has seen the universe beyond it. She moves in higher social circles because she is somewhat unusual, but she isn't really one of the people with power or responsibility, however much she keeps trying to insert herself into everything.

The first half of the book is spent building the setting in a very indirect fashion through flashbacks to her childhood and events that took place after her return to Embassytown. Mieville never really tells us anything, he just hints at it and we're supposed to piece it together ourselves. I found it all a tedious slog as I kept waiting for the story to actually begin.

Eventually we switch into the current timeline as a new Ambassador to the Ariekei has arrived from Bremen, of which Embassytown is a colony. EzRa is very different from all the other Ambassadors, and it leads to a massive diplomatic incident that endangers everyone on the planet. The story picked up after this, but it was still hampered by the narrator. Avice's voice is oddly distant for a first-person narrator. I had very little sense of what she was like. I didn't understand her, and didn't trust her judgement, and did not enjoy spending time in her company. I really didn't like or care about any of the other characters, either, except Bren, a weird old guy who makes everyone else uncomfortable.

This work is supposed to be about people facing likely doom, and yet I just didn't care if they lived or died. No, actually, I take that back. I would have been quite content if they'd all died, if only it hadn't dragged on so long. This was just tedious and uninvolving.

Hell Hole by Chris Grabenstein

2011-05-21T09:16:00.000-06:00

This is the fourth in the mystery series featuring John Ceepak and Danny Boyle, police officers in the seaside town of Sea Haven, NJ.

It seems that about another year has passed since Whack a Mole. Ceepak has married his girlfriend Rita and adopted her teenage son, TJ. One night Boyle is on duty with Samantha Starky, one of the seasonal officers and, on a noise complaint, they wind up at a house rented by a group of rowdy, obnoxious, and drunk soldiers. While they are there, the soldiers receive a call informing them that one of their friends has apparently committed suicide. The sergeant is determined to go identify the body. Because he's too drunk to drive, Boyle and Starky take him to the scene, which is outside their jurisdiction.

Boyle sees enough of the scene to convince him that something is wrong, and because it is being investigated by a man known to be sloppy and lazy, he takes his concerns to his partner, John Ceepak. They decide to investigate, under the premise that they believe a couple of Sea Haven locals were probably on the scene committing a crime at the time.

Though it isn't too overt, Hell Hole seems inspired by the theme of September 11, from the soldiers and the war in the Middle East, to the Patriot Act, to a few members of the New York Fire Department who wander into the novel in time to save the day and then wander back out again. This is a particularly personal subject for Ceepak, because he is a former MP who spent time in Iraq and had some bad experiences there. Throw in a corrupt senator who aims to be president, always a favorite of thriller writers, and his bodyguards who are all ex-Special Forces, and you have a testosterone-soaked novel of crime and cover-ups.

I didn't like this one as well as the others in the series. I think this is partly because I don't especially enjoy thrillers, and this is wandering over into that territory. But more importantly, I was struck that Danny Boyle had a brain transplant since Whack a Mole, and is now an idiot. Danny is young and a bit green, but in the prior books he wasn't a fool who kept doing the wrong thing. In this book, he is. He keeps leaping to incorrect conclusions and blurting out things to the wrong people at the wrong times, making the situation worse. I didn't enjoy it at all. Until now, Danny was developing nicely under Ceepak's tutelage. I have always hated stories about rookies making rookie mistakes, and in this one Danny took a giant leap back. Very disappointing.

And then there is the bit with the drug dealer. Apparently there is a serious drug problem in Sea Haven, and the police are stumped. Until it occurs to Ceepak to actually, you know, ask someone who used to use drugs if they know who the dealer is and where he can be found. Voila, we have an answer to the problem that has had the police stumped for years! Uh, yeah, right. That was almost as fortuitous as the FDNY guys who appeared just when they were needed to save the day and then vanished again.

Overall, this book is okay but not great. Grabenstein is a good writer, and I like the characters and the town. But this was definitely my least favorite of the four I've read so far, and I hope that the series goes back to its old form of being well-narrated police procedurals, rather than continuing in the vein of thrillers.

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

2011-05-19T20:15:00.000-06:00

Equations of Life is a high-action apocalyptic science fiction novel. It takes place in London about 50 years from now. The background of the time and place is only hinted at, but apparently something really bad happened. Japan has sunk into the sea, the US is trying to reconstruct (? apparently? as I said it's never explained) and much of the rest of the world, though not spelled out in detail, is apparently dangerous or uninhabitable, as far as I could tell.

Warning, there are some spoilers in the description below.

The protagonist is Samuil Petrovitch. He is a university student from Russia, and it turns out he's got a criminal past. One morning while on his way to the university he prevents a young Japanese woman from being kidnapped, and that indirectly leads to the near-destruction of London. The young woman, Sonja, is the daughter of the head of a powerful Japanese crime boss. The would-be abductors are Russian mobsters, like Petrovitch himself used to be. Petrovitch manages to get Sonja out of danger long enough for reinforcements to arrive, and then he has a heart attack and dies.

This is apparently not an unexpected occurrence. Petrovich's heart apparently was damaged by radiation, and he has a pacemaker to keep things ticking along, so long as he leads a quiet and cautious life. Running from mobsters who are trying to kill him is not a good idea. He is revived and told that he needs to get a replacement heart. He schedules the appointment, but in the meantime he's running around London trying to stay alive and save the city, and having periodic heart problems. It certainly adds a sense of urgency to everything.

Petrovich is, in a sense, the sort of hyper-competent protagonist that is not uncommon in science fiction novels. I like that character type, myself. However Morden takes it a bit far too far for me. Not only is Petrovich tough and street-smart and a genius and the only one who can save us, he's also very, very young. He admits to being 22, but we later learn that is part of his fake ID, and he's actually three years younger than that. So, he's 19. And a genius. And a tough bastard, and very, very clever. And, oh yeah, the only one who can save us all.

I have to say, I didn't really buy that. He was just too competent to be that young. Not that he'd be believable even if he were 15 years older, but he would be less unbelievable.

Equations of Life feels a lot like Jeff Somers' novels about Avery Cates, except not quite so bleak. Not that it's cheerful, but Morden doesn't do bleak to the same extent as Somers, and that's just fine with me. The reason the city of London is nearly destroyed seemed a bit strained to me, too, but the whole novel pushed too far past my willing suspension of disbelief, so I don't suppose that's worse than any of the rest of it.

However, though I may sound critical, Equations of Life kept me entertained. I was fully engaged and absorbed in it, and kept eagerly picking it up again to find out what happened next. Which makes this a far more successful work, in my mind, than the new China Mieville novel, which I am currently struggling to force myself to finish. I want to enjoy the fiction I read, and I enjoyed Equations of Life. And that's the only thing that matters, in the end.

High Season by Jon Loomis

2011-05-14T19:39:00.000-06:00

As I have mentioned earlier here, I spent most of April sick. I got terribly behind at work and on household stuff, and have been scrambling to get caught up ever since. This week I got sick again. Sigh. I'm coughing and not breathing too well, exhausted and seemingly have lost half my brain function, and now it feels like I'm getting another ear infection. Peachy.

Anyway, I haven't been reading much lately, and what I have been reading has mostly been short stories and scripts. I just haven't had the time or ambition to take on a novel, and I see that it's been about two weeks since the last one I read, Whack a Mole by Chris Grabenstein. Further, I have a novel I need to review sitting on the pile, and I don't want to read it. I stalled out about 50 pages in, and I've been avoiding it all week. So when I sat down today to try to take on a novel, I naturally chose something different

Jon Loomis apparently lives in my general neck of the woods, in western Wisconsin. Ironically, I heard about High Season from an Australian blogger, Bernadette at Reactions to Reading. It sounded interesting, and my local library had a copy, so I picked it up a couple of weeks ago.

High Season is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod which in the summer is a vacation hot spot for gays and lesbians. Our protagonist is Frank Coffin, a former homicide investigator in Baltimore who returned home to Provincetown after a nervous breakdown. He has panic attacks around dead bodies, and so working in a small resort town is a good deal less stressful for him. His peace is interrupted, however, by a series of murders, beginning with a cross-dressing televangelist.

The matter is being investigated by the state police, but Coffin's superiors lean on him to do his own investigation. It's bad form, but he reluctantly agrees. His life is further complicated by a mother with Alzheimer's, his girlfriend announcing that she wants a baby, and the reappearance of his uncle, the former chief of police, who was thrown out of office for corruption.

High Season provides an interesting contrast to Chris Grabenstein's Ceepak & Boyle novels, which I have been reading recently. Both take place in seaside tourist towns, but the mood is very different. The Grabenstein novels are smart and fun, while High Season is a lot more depressing. Despite his hot younger yoga-instructor girlfriend, Coffin is otherwise a fairly miserable guy. His mother's nursing home bills are high, he is broke and drives a car that's going to collapse at any moment, he has panic attacks and bad dreams, his relatives are incompetent or corrupt, and he lives in a funk of gloom.

Despite his local connections, Coffin doesn't figure things out very quickly. Several murders are committed, and Coffin himself is almost killed. There is a parallel storyline I didn't really care for in which his girlfriend is being stalked. Ho, hum. There are a lot of good things about the novel, though, that balance them out. There are a couple of strong female characters who get themselves out of danger without needing to be rescued or being the crazy angry super-powered chick that seems to be the common conception of a strong woman in urban fantasy these days (shudder). Gay and lesbian characters are numerous, and treated as real people instead of tokens or stereotypes. I figured out who the killer was before Coffin did, but it didn't annoy me. Overall, it was worth the few hours I spent on it, and I will probably seek out the sequel.

Sorry, nothing new to review

2011-05-10T18:00:00.000-06:00

I'm reading my way through a pile of scripts at the moment for play selection committee.

I am certainly discovering that, just because I've read and liked plays by a particular writer, it's not guarantee I'll like their other work. Sigh.

Whack a Mole by Chris Grabenstein

2011-05-02T20:45:00.000-06:00

Whack a Mole is the third in Grabenstein's mysteries featuring John Ceepak and Danny Boyle. Ceepak and Boyle are police officers in the town of Sea Haven New Jersey, where the tourists swarm in the summer months.

This one is set about a year after Tilt a Whirl and about 10 months after Mad Mouse. It's the middle of summer, and the town is planning a sand castle competition to try to draw in even more tourists. The preparations are disrupted, though, by several grisly discoveries that lead Ceepak and Boyle to the conclusion that there has been a serial killer working in Sea Haven for a long time. The police chief initially wants to push off the investigation until later, thinking that the killings were in the past and pose no current threat, so there is no point in disrupting the festivities. But he is forced to change his opinion when it becomes clear the killer is still around. He still wants to keep it quiet, so they do not call in the FBI, and it's up to Ceepak and Boyle to resolve this, quietly and discreetly.

The novels are narrated by Danny Boyle, who is a young and relatively inexperienced officer. He is still learning the ropes and developing as a person. His partner Ceepak, a retired MP with a strong personal code of behavior, is a good influence on Boyle. The narrative voice of these novels is great. It's not that common to come across witty and amusing books dealing with murder, but Grabenstein has pulled it off. The subject matter of Whack a Mole is dark, but the book zips along, well paced and compulsively readable. There are several possible suspects and as different characters were introduced I was imagining how each of them could have done it, but in the end it turned out my speculation was wrong.

This series is great and entertaining, and I think I could gulp them all down very quickly and not get tired of them, as sometimes happens with series if I don't space them out far enough. Seriously, go out and read these.

Ten Years Ago Today

2011-05-01T09:31:00.000-06:00

A massive hail storm hit the town where I live. I didn't experience it -- I was at work at the time. I had just moved into my house a week and half previously, and was quite new to the whole homeowning thing. The windows on the north side of my house were broken, and hail and broken glass were scattered in the bedroom and living room. The siding on the north side of the house had holes punched in it, and it all needed to be replaced. The screens on my porch windows were shredded, and all needed to be re-screened. And the house and garage needed new roofs.

This was a lot to take in, and I had no idea where to even start. But I spent the summer dealing with the insurance company, my bank, contractors, and roofers, and eventually got everything fixed, with a bit of money left over, which came in handy when my refrigerator died that fall. And at the end the house was probably a bit better than it had been when I bought it. It was a hell of an introduction to being a homeowner, though.

Not about books

2011-04-30T12:38:00.000-06:00

I haven't been reading a lot over the last week, so I don't have anything I want to review here. The respiratory thing that laid me low is clearing up, though I haven't quite kicked the cough yet. I still have an ear infection (almost 3 weeks now), but the antibiotics have helped, and it's better than it was. I'm pretty sure I'll be going back in to the doctor about this in a few days.

Instead of books, I'm going to talk about knitting today. I've just returned from the yarn shop, where I spent too much money. I bought yarn for the Verdant Shawl. It calls for lace yarn in five colors. The yarn shop didn't have the yarn the pattern specified, so I had to substitute. I bought these:

I've been thinking about dish cloths recently, and want to experiment with gauge and with different yarns than the usual Sugar n Cream, so I also picked up these:

The green yarn on the top is made of hemp, which is apparently more durable than cotton. The yarn on the bottom is cotton, but interesting colors and is softer & thinner than what I usually use.

While I had the camera out, I thought I'd take a photo of this. I knit these over the winter. Off the top of my head I can't remember the pattern. I'll have to see if I can find it so I can post it on Ravelry.

And this is Chloe investigating the yarn, because she's cute.

River Marked by Patricia Briggs

2011-04-17T07:54:00.000-06:00

I've been sick for the last week and a half, and I still am sick. I've been feeling lousy, and therefore I haven't been posting, or anything else, really, except lying on the sofa, coughing until I heave, and taking lots of drugs. Judging by the state of the shelves at Walgreens, I am not the only one who is sick right now. Fortunately I didn't want any Nyquil, anyway, given that they were out of it.

I read River Marked a week ago. It is the most recently installment in the awesome Mercy Thompson series of urban/paranormal fantasy by Patricia Briggs. Mercy is a walker, a Native American creature who can shift into the shape of an animal and can see ghosts. Specifically, Mercy can become a coyote. Mundanely she is a mechanic who specializes in German cars. Her significant other, Adam, is the alpha of the local werewolf pack. I suppose there are some very mild spoilers ahead, so be warned:

At the beginning of River Marked, Mercy and Adam get married. They head off for their honeymoon in a camper lent by a faery friend, to a campsite suggested by another faery. This makes Mercy uneasy, as she knows that the fae rarely do anything completely out of goodwill. Her suspicions prove correct quite soon, as she and Adam encounter and rescue a man in a boat whose foot was apparently bitten off by something terrifying. It quickly becomes apparent that there is something really scary lurking in the river by the campground, and it's hungry.

It is also apparent that it's going to be up to Mercy and Adam to try to fix this. Obviously the fae sent them there to handle the problem, and by now Mercy has come to terms with the fact that she will never be able to lead a quiet life and sit back and let others solve problems. Her life just doesn't work that way. In Moon Called, the first in the series, Mercy dealt with werewolves. In Blood Bound, she dealt with vampires. Iron Kissed was about dealing with fae, and now in River Marked, Mercy gets involved with Native American magic. She learns more about walkers, and more about herself. At the same time, she and Adam are having some much-needed time together away from their jobs and the werewolf pack.

River Marked is a good book. I enjoyed it very much, and intend to re-read it again soon, once my head clears up and I can concentrate better. That said, I didn't love it quite as much as some of the others. It's good, and interesting, and moves Mercy's story forward well, but it didn't seem quite as intense as some of the others have been. On the other hand, I read the book under the influence of the flu and an incipient ear infection, so perhaps my perceptions were a bit dulled by the circumstances.

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin

2011-04-11T07:27:00.000-06:00

This is a very, very odd book.

I read it because I have enjoyed several Russian fantasies over the last couple of years, and was looking for more. This did not really meet my expectations. Though it has magic and supernatural characters, it is a work of literary fiction, not fantasy.

The main character is A Hu-Li, a many-thousand year old fox from China, apparently. Like her sisters, she feeds off human energy, and so she works as a prostitute in Moscow. Her sister U Hu-Li works in a massage parlor in Bangkok, and her sister E Hu-Li lives in London, where she marries and kills a succession of husbands from the noble classes. A Hu-Li is actually uninterested in sex, and has never participated herself. Foxes can use their tails to mesmerize people, and she uses it on her clients. They think the apparently teenage prostitute is fulfilling all their sexual fantasies, and she sits by and reads and feeds off their sexual energy.

The thing that is immediately clear about A Hu-Li is that she is very smart and very thoughtful. Though she looks about 14 years old, she engages her clients in discussion of philosophy, and has a quick wit and has obviously spent a very long time thinking about these things. She meets a high-ranking officer in the FSB, and is stunned to discover he is immune to her tail, immediately before he stuns her with her first real sexual encounter in her very long life. After the sort-of rape (he asked her permission and she gave it, incorrectly thinking that nothing would actually happen), she ends up falling in love with him. She is a fox, and he is a werewolf, and together they spend way too much time discussing politics, religion, and philosophy. He eventually gets an idea of her real age and leaves her because she's too old, and she decides to transcend reality and seek her destiny on another plane of existence.

Huh.

At first I found the book entertaining, if a bit odd. She is a very odd character, and has an interesting voice. For instance, here:

We foxes are keen hunters of English aristocrats and chickens. We hunt English aristocrats because English aristocrats hunt us, and it's a sort of point of honour. But we hunt chickens for our own enjoyment. Both types of hunting have their passionate supporters who will shout themselves hoarse defending their choice. The way I see things, hunting chickens has several serious advantages:

hunting English aristocrats is a source of bad karma, which is acquired by killing even the most useless of men. The karma from chickens is not all that serious.
to hunt aristocrats you have to travel to Europe (although some velieve that the best place is a transatlantic cuise ship). You can hunt chickens anywhere you like.
while hunting English aristocrats, foxes don't undergo any physical changes. But when we hunt chickens something happens that bears a distant similarlity to a werewolf's transformation - we come to resemble our wild relatives for a while.

I haven't hunted English aristocrats for many decades, and I don't regret it in the least. But to this day I'm still enthusiastic about chicken-hunting.

Unfortunately the character's unique voice was not enough to carry me through to the end, when it became more and more a discussion of how to seek true enlightenment. Gad, it got dull. I have looked online at other reviews, which tend to say something to the effect that it's an incisive commentary on modern Russia. I can't say that I saw that, except for A Hu-Li's distaste for the new power classes accompanied with perhaps a little yearning for socialism again. But I tend to read fiction wanting story, not message (and resenting Message if it's too overt); and I'm sick and definitely not at my sharpest just at the moment.

The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall

2011-04-10T06:51:00.000-06:00

I want to talk a little bit about writing and setting. When writing about a setting that is not native to the reader, how do you go about describing it? There are different approaches to this, and I got to thinking about it while reading The Case of the Missing Servant.

If the character is native to the setting, to them it is everyday and usually unextraordinary. So if you are telling a story from that character's point of view, you would not have them think, on their way to work: "My automobile is red. It is powered by an internal combustion engine and operates on four rubber tires. I use a wheel and two pedals to control direction and speed as I navigate it down a network of paved pathways we call roads." To the character this sort of thing isn't given a moment's thought, and certainly doesn't need explanation. But if the reader is from a vastly different place, then it might need to be explained.

This problem comes up frequently in science fiction and fantasy, where the settings are usually not our present-day world. How can you describe the setting for the readers without long expository lumps, where you interrupt the flow of the story to describe and explain everything? Writers in the SF genre often use a technique called incuing, by which they don't explain everything up front, but drop hints throughout the text that the reader can pick up and piece together themselves to come to understand the place and situation. If done well, it works very well, at least for readers who are used to the technique. I have heard that this style can be confusing and frustrating for readers who are not accustomed to it, who don't know to trust the writer and keep reading, and things will make sense eventually.

The Case of the Missing Servant is set in our world, in India. The writer is not Indian himself, and obviously is writing for the non-Indian market, and it shows. I recently told someone I don't like reading mystery novels set in foreign places, unless the author is a native of that place, and she was surprised. But to me the differences are kind of obvious. If I read a mystery by Andrea Camilleri or Arnuldur Indridason, they don't waste a lot of pages telling me what Sicily or Iceland are like, because to them and their characters, it is everyday life and not much worth notice. But a foreign writer, even one who now lives in the country they are using as a setting, seems more likely to try to describe and explain. Doubtless this is attractive and more accessible to some readers, who like to feel like a tour guide has taken them around the setting of the story. Personally I always doubt the accuracy of the vision, or the interpretation, from a non-native. For instance, I used to listen the BBC World Service on the radio, and sometimes found their interpretation of things going on in the US to be very, very odd. So I have to say, I personally prefer books set in foreign lands to be written by the people who are actually from there. This is a personal quirk and I am certain that many people would disagree with me.

So, on to The Case of the Missing Servants. Hall chooses to use the expository lump method of worldbuilding. He spends a great deal of time describing and explaining, and by the end I felt like instead of a story I was getting a lecture about the social problems of India, and it was not a particularly welcome message.

I am under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that this is a bit like an Indian version of The Ladies #1 Detective Agency. I have not actually read those books, so I base this solely on having watched some of the television series. Our protagonist is Vish Puri, a middle-aged Indian man who operates a detective agency in Delhi. His agency is well-established and he is comfortably off. He employs a number of people in his agency, most of whom he refers to by nicknames such as Face Cream and Tubelight. He is married, with adult daughters, and also employs a number of servants in his house. Though he does all sorts of business, a lot of it is investigating potential spouses before marriage to make sure that they are a good choice.

Puri and his operatives handle a couple of these cases in this novel, while also working on the title case, in which a respectable and refreshingly non-corrupt lawyer has been accused of murdering one of his servants. The woman disappeared one night, and no one knows where she went, what happened to her, or even where she originally came from. The case is apparently being launched by the lawyer's political opponents, and it is up to Puri to find out what happened that night before the lawyer's reputation is irrevocably smeared.

Puri does not like being called the Indian Sherlock Holmes, but he certainly has his Holmesian moments:

"You are a lawyer residing in Jaipur, is it?" interrupted Puri.

Kasliwal looked taken aback. "That's correct," he said. "But how...Ah, Bunty told you, I suppose."

Puri enjoyed impressing prospective clients with his deductions, despite the simplicity of his observations.

"I've not spoken with Bunty, actually," he said plainly. "But from your Law Society of India monogrammed tie and type of briefcase, I deducted you are a man of the Bar. As to your hometown, traces of red Rajasthani sand are on your shoes. Also you mentioned air-dashing to Delhi. You arrived here thirty minutes back. So should be you came by the five o'clock flight from Jaipur."

Puri is not always a likable man, which I appreciate. He is sexist, has a low opinion of servants, and some very old-fashioned ideas. I did not always like him -- in fact, I have to say that I generally enjoyed the book less and less as I read on -- but I do appreciate the fact that he is a believable, flawed character. Though actually, from his perspective, they probably aren't even flaws.

The Case of the Missing Servant was moderately entertaining and held my attention all the way through. Some of the things I disliked about it would likely be no problem at all to many readers. It's light and fluffy and not bad, but not filling. Sort of like cotton candy or marshmallow fluff.

Mad Mouse by Chris Grabenstein

2011-04-08T08:12:00.000-06:00

Mad Mouse is the sequel to Tilt a Whirl. It again features police officers John Ceepak and Danny Boyle, who work in a seaside town in New Jersey. It takes place a couple of months after Tilt a Whirl, around the Labor Day Weekend. Labor Day is a big deal for the town, especially as the mayor and chamber of commerce are trying to make people forget about the earlier murder. So they're having a giant barbecue with MTV and 3 Doors Down.

However, a problem emerges: Danny and his friends are being shot at. At first it seems that it's just paintball, which is unpleasant but not life-threatening, but soon the bullets are real. The town leaders are worried, of course, torn between protecting public safety and not wanting word of a sniper to ruin their festivities and the tourist dollars that come with them. So it's up to Danny and Ceepak to figure out who is targeting them and find the culprit, ASAP.

I enjoyed this book almost as much as Tilt a Whirl. Ceepak is a great character, and Danny has a great narrative voice. The story glides along smoothly and in entertaining fashion, and I had a great time reading it. It even managed to distract me for a few hours from the misery of being sick. I will definitely be reading the rest of the series, quite soon. Highly recommended.

Still Waters by Nigel McCrery

2011-03-29T17:34:00.000-06:00

Continuing my streak of mysteries, Still Waters is a British police procedural. I picked it up because the detective interested me -- DCI Lapslie has synesthesia, a condition in which the senses get their wires crossed, so one perceives sensation in odd ways. Specifically, in Lapslie's case, he tastes sounds. At times this is overwhelming, and working in an open office surrounded by dozens of other people, phones, fax machines, and so on, is more than he can bear.

Lapslie is called in off of medical leave to investigate a body found in a forest. It is the corpse of an elderly woman, and appears to have been there quite a long time. He has no idea why he has been assigned to the case, and his superior hasn't got anything more than vague answers.

So the story is about Lapslie trying to get back into the routine and manage his condition enough to be able to work. The parallel story line is about our killer, an older woman who we discover is killing old women and assuming their identities and assets. She is, in fact, a serial killer, and the parts told from her perspective are appropriately creepy and depressing.

I have to say that I generally don't care for this structure in novels: I prefer to discover things as the detective does, rather than know things he doesn't and wait for him to catch up. Of course Lapslie does eventually catch up with her. I also am very tired of serial killers, so that makes me disinclined to love the book on general principle. There isn't anything wrong with them, but they're overused and I'm tired of them, rather like I'm tired of depressed alcoholic detectives.

Further, as Lapslie continues his investigation, he begins to suspect -- okay, this sounds stupid -- a shadowy government conspiracy to prevent him from solving the case. And he's not wrong. Aargh. [Lean over and pound head on desk] Really? Why? I mean, come on, we have an interesting detective and a serial killer. Do we really need a government conspiracy too? Sigh. Which is why I am undecided whether I will read anything else by this author. I like Lapslie. I'm interested in him and would like to read more. But I'm not sure that these are a type of story I am capable of fully enjoying.

Tilt a Whirl by Chris Grabenstein

2011-03-27T18:56:00.001-06:00

Tilt a Whirl is a mystery set in a beach town in New Jersey. Our protagonists are John Ceepak, former MP, and his sidekick Danny Boyle, who is a seasonal police officer over the summer months, when the city needs more police because of the tourists.

Ceepak and Boyle are eating breakfast at their usual diner one morning when a girl, covered in blood, comes running down the street claiming that her father was killed before her eyes. They had snuck into an amusement park before it opened, and were sitting on the Tilt a Whirl when a man walked up and shot him. Ceepak and Boyle rush to investigate, of course, and find that the dead man was a ruthless and dirty real estate tycoon, and that the girl has inherited his billions.

Ceepak is a good guy with a rigid code of behavior, both professional and personal. Boyle is young and impressionable, and over the course of the investigation they grow into true partners. Boyle is a native of the town, and knows the place and the people. Ceepak is a smart investigator and a forensics nut. Together, they fight crime.

The story is told from Boyle's perspective. He is our Watson to Ceepak's Holmes. I think this is necessary--it's important not to reveal too soon what Ceepak is thinking. Boyle isn't stupid, though, and his voice is delightful. The novel is entertaining, fast-moving, frequently funny, and a joy to read. Really, I loved this book. It had been on my list to read for a while, and I regret not getting to it sooner. What a great, fun book, and I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

Burn by Sean Doolittle

2011-03-19T16:53:00.000-06:00

I think I mentioned in my last review that my reading has been in a bit of a funk lately--I have been trying books, but nothing seems to really grab me. This morning I picked up Burn at the library with no particular expectation of liking it--it's more a crime novel than a mystery, and didn't particularly look like my thing. However, my usual thing hasn't been working for me recently, so I figured it was worth it to try something different.

The main character is Andrew Kindler. He has recently moved to Southern California, and is living in his cousin's beach house. In his previous life Andrew was involved with organized crime in Baltimore, but he decided to get out, and now he's resting and hiding. He is surprised to receive a visit from a police detective who is asking him about a homicide and a missing man, as he knows nothing about it. He is further surprised when he finds a private detective rifling his home and asking him the same questions as the police. Why would anyone think he knew anything about it? However circumstances lead him to decide to get involved himself, and he digs into the business and family of the missing man, who have made a fortune off the fitness industry. We also meet a cast of colorful characters who all have a role in unraveling what happened to the dead man.

I am happy to report that I enjoyed Burn very much. It's always so satisfying when you start something without expectations and it turns out to be enjoyable. I was sucked in from the first page, and read it straight through in one sitting. What a fun and entertaining story. It moves right along, lots happens, and the characters are very entertaining. For instance the PR guy: "Todd Todman tried to never think in terms of problems: only challenges and opportunities." We've all met people like that, and I think we all hate them. I certainly do. Our protagonist, Andrew, is smart and capable without being a superman. The police detective is also smart and capable, which is nice. In the end the bad guys get what they deserve and the good guys are alive to tell the tale. Burn was really great fun, and I am going to seek out the author's other works.

Dog On It by Spencer Quinn

2011-03-15T17:57:00.000-06:00

I'm sorry there haven't been many entries recently. I'm in kind of a reading funk--nothing much appeals to me at the moment, so I've mostly been re-reading lately. I probably wouldn't have read this one, either, except that it's for my book group, which meets tomorrow, so I pushed through it.

The narrator of Dog On It is Chet, who is a dog. He lives and works with Bernie, a recently-divorced private eye and former cop. Bernie is hired to look for a missing teenager, and Chet is instrumental in his eventual success.

I wasn't very interested in the missing teenager plot, frankly, but that's probably because I'm in a reading funk and this is a book I never would have picked to read myself. That said, it was pretty entertaining, entirely because of Chet. Chet is awfully smart and perceptive for a dog, but he is still doggy enough to be sort of believable--he is often more interested in barking at the dog next door or sniffling around under furniture for treats than he is in what the humans are talking about. He is a charming narrator, and I enjoyed his perspective. That said, the mystery wasn't that interesting to me.

If this were not a book group selection, I probably wouldn't have bothered to finish it. But then I never would have selected it in the first place. It's light and cute and I didn't mind it, but I won't be reading the rest of the series.

So Dark the Night by Cliff Burns

2011-03-06T08:05:00.001-06:00

So Dark the Night is a noir fantasy private eyes save the world story. I'm not sure that's an actual established story type, but it's what happens in this story. Our protagonists, Zinnea and Nightstalk, work the graveyard shift for After Hours Investigations in the city of Ilium, which seems to be built on Lake Erie. The agency apparently consists of three people--the Old Man owns the agency, reads their reports, and hides in his office--neither of them have ever seen him, and he scares the crap out of them both; and Cassandra Zinnea and Evgeny Nightstalk are the investigators.

The Old Man sends Zinnea and Nightstalk to investigate the murder by immolation of an unidentified man in a park. They have the usual private-eye unfriendly run-in with a couple of cops, and then set about testing the area for signs of magical activity. So Dark the Night is a secret history--magic is real and dangerous, and our protagonists know it but most people don't. So they realize that the killing had some magical motivation, which the police would never guess, and they set about trying to learn more.

Nightstalk is the narrator of So Dark the Night. He is apparently short, broad and muscly, not very magical, a good man in a fight, and head over heels in love with Zinnea. Zinnea, at least as seen through Nightstalk's eyes, is tall, gorgeous, smart, a powerful sorceress and a great investigator. And, though aware that he's in love with her, is not that interested in him. I was a little uncomfortable with their relationship. She depends on him, demands the support and reassurance of his love, all the while rubbing his nose in the fact that she's got an active dating life that will never involve him. And he knows it, and it makes him miserable, but he still offers steady support, adoration, and hero-worship, and showed no signs of getting over it. It was kind of creepy and sad. I felt bad for the poor guy, and therefore I never liked her, no matter how perfect she was in his eyes.

Anyway, back to the dead guy. They set about investigating, and end up stuck in the middle of a struggle between two groups called the Brotherhood and the Cabal. A few people they talk to are horribly murdered, which leads to no one else wanting to talk to them. Nevertheless they keep plugging away at it, tracking down and investigating various members of the Cabal, who frankly I wasn't able to keep straight. Too many of them, not introduced in a way that allowed me to distinguish between them. Meanwhile Evgeny is having dreams about evil stuff and Zinnea being in danger, which makes him go all caveman in his determination to keep her safe while providing foreshadowing that he may not be able to.

Despite all the gruesome deaths and the very high stakes if the bad guys succeed, So Dark the Night is written with a slightly humorous tone. Zinnea and Nightstalk banter back and forth, his assessment of all the whackos and losers she likes to consult for psychic advice, his killer houseplant--it starts out sort of clever and humorous. I read a sample online and liked it well enough to buy the ebook, but in the end it disappointed me. With the setup, the tone, the action, it should have been rich and interesting. But instead it was just really flat and a bit dull. I already mentioned the fact that I couldn't keep the bad guys straight. I also thought the story was quite a bit longer than it needed to be, and would have moved along much better if it were more compact. Which is really too bad, because I expected to like the story. I wanted to like the story. But in the end it was flat and disappointing and took longer to read than it would have if I'd been enjoying it.

Leaving aside the story itself, I will also note that the story is not widely available online, so I ended up buying it from Powells. It turned out to be in Adobe Digital Editions format, which is more horribly sucktastic than I can express in polite language. Proprietary format, doesn't play well with others, DRM, requiring me to download extra software and register with Adobe, and then there was no obvious way to get it onto my ereader so I wound up printing the story out and reading it on paper. It is a horrible, horrible pain in the ass format and I will never again be foolish enough to buy another story in that format, no matter how interested I am in reading the story. Just say no to crappy DRM-laden proprietary file formats. Phooey.

The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook

2011-02-27T19:48:00.000-06:00

On one hand, The Iron Duke is a steampunk alternate history with adventures in the city streets, in the air, and on the seas. On the other hand, it is very much more a romance novel than it is a work of steampunk adventure.

Set in an England recently freed from 200 years under Mongol control, mainland Europe and Africa are wastelands filled with zombies. Our heroine, Mina, is a police inspector from an impoverished noble family. She has the considerable disadvantage of being half-Mongol, as her mother was raped. The Mongols are very, very unpopular, and she faces daily insults and assaults. Though frankly it was unclear to me why anyone would blame her, given that she clearly was in no way at fault.

She is called away from a ball to a dead body found on the estate of the Iron Duke, Rhys Traheaern, who freed England of Mongol control 9 years previously. Their attraction is instant, and he announces he will have her, and she spends half the book insisting she's not interested in him while turning to jelly whenever he touches her. Sigh.

They set off on a mission to save England from a new super-weapon that could kill thousands of people, but the book is really more about their developing relationship, which was frankly a lot less interesting to me than killing sea monsters and capturing pirate ships. This is a very competently-written historical romance, with all of the attendant problems of that story type, from dubious consent, to the quaking virginal heroine who says one thing and means something else, to the circumstances that drive a huge wedge between them, only to inevitably come back together, to talk of making babies at the end. Sigh. Just not really my thing.

Knitting Update

2011-02-24T16:20:00.003-06:00

I haven't been reading anything recently that seemed worth blogging about (a pretty-good gay romantic crime story and an absolutely terrible mystery), so I will just show you a couple of the things I've knit this winter:

I knit this scarf to match my new blue mittens this year. I used a very soft and squishy yarn, and the result is that I have a soft and squishy scarf whose pattern doesn't show very well because it's curled up around my neck. Not quite what I was hoping for, but a fairly entertaining knit.

I knit these socks as an experiment. I had bought some yarn that looked like it would self-stripe, and was looking forward to seeing how it knit up. Unfortunately it didn't self-stripe, it knit up all blobby. So this, too, was not quite what I was hoping for. And both disappointments were due to yarn choice. Knitting is more complicated than just knitting and purling, casting on and binding off.

Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason

2011-02-19T06:50:00.000-06:00

Silence of the Grave is apparently the fourth of Indridason's mystery series set in Iceland, but only the second one translated to English, after Jar City. I have not read Jar City, but I did see the film. The protagonist of the novels is Erlendur, who is a truly miserable man. I got a sense of that from Jar City, but his misery and background are explained more in this one.

It begins with the discovery of human remains at a building site in a new area that is being developed outside Reykjavik. The police are called, which includes Erlendur, Elinborg (who is female, nurturing, and generally good), and Sigurdur Oli (kind of a selfish jerk, sometimes played a bit for humor). As the remains are buried, an archaeological team sets to (very slowly) excavating the body. Until the excavations are complete, the police know nothing about the victim--sex, size, or even exactly how old the remains are. So they set about investigating the place, to see who might have lived there or near there in the past. This involves interviewing neighbors to ask them what they remember about the property, which leads them to learn that there was once a chalet on the spot, long since fallen apart, and the knowledge that during World War II there were English and American military installations nearby.

There is also a parallel storyline about a woman and her children who are badly abused by her husband. Over time it becomes clear that the body is a member of that family, and yet until the end the reader doesn't know which of them is in the grave. Did the husband finally kill his wife? Did she finally snap and kill him? I found those passages rather hard to read, though it got easier when we shifted out of the head of the abused woman and into the perspective of one of her children. Still, I didn't at all enjoy reading about their misery and desperation, and skimmed those passages fairly quickly.

While Erlendur is trying to lead this investigation, he's got personal problems. His pregnant, drug-addicted daughter has landed in a coma, and this leads to a great deal of reflection on his family and his feelings of guilt. His ex-wife, who was bitter about their divorce and prevented him from having any contact with his children until they were messed up beyond redemption, hates his guts, and his children mostly do, too. His daughter calls on him when she's in trouble, but then throws abuse at him when he tries to help her get her life straightened out. He accepts that everything must be his fault, though I'm not sure he should, and he broods on it.

I am trying to identify why I was able to get through this book, when I recently gave up on the The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbo. It, too, is a Scandinavian mystery with extensive flashbacks to World War II and a depressed (alcoholic) detective. As a rule I hate flashbacks, and I decided years ago that life was too short to waste on depressed alcoholic detectives. Perhaps it helps that Erlendur, though a miserable bastard, isn't a drunk. Perhaps I was more motivated because I've actually visited Iceland, so I feel a little more connected to this setting. I don't know. But the two books are superficially quite similar, and I was able to read and enjoy this one, and could not force myself to pick up The Redbreast and read any more.

Indridason stretches the story out, dealing the relevant information out to the reader in little dribs and drabs. The police follow some leads that turn out to be wrong, we learn more secrets and of more people's misery, and the more you read the more it seems that life just sucks. Neverttheless, I was interested enough to keep reading. And then there is the dialogue. It reminds me of the stylized dialogue that Steve Brust used in his Three Musketeers pastiches, in which it takes everyone a long time to actually say anything useful. That sort of dialogue, in more modern form, seems common in this story, and I have to wonder if it is stylized, or if Icelanders actually talk that way. I noticed several bits of dialogue along these lines, when the detectives are asking people questions:

detective: "What was she wearing?"

witness: "What do you mean?"

detective: "What was she wearing?"

witness: "What are you insinuating?"

detective: "Nothing. I just need to know what she was wearing."

witness: "Why do you want to know?"

detective: "Because I'm curious. Tell me, what was she wearing?"

witness: "Calm down."

By this point I was ready to punch the witness myself to get them to just answer the fucking question. And there were several instances of dialogue like that. Ask a simple question, wrestle to get them to answer. I found it annoying, though perhaps Icelanders really do talk that way to the police when asked a simple question. I've no idea.

Anyway, I enjoyed Silence of the Grave, even though I probably should have reacted to it the same way I did to The Redbreast. I will probably read more, if for no other reason than that I hope poor Erlendur can find some sort of peace. Silence of the Grave is a very gloomy, rather depressing story, but it kept me turning the pages to find out what happened next.

An Occupation of Angels by Lavie Tidhar

2011-02-16T06:20:00.003-06:00

I bought this one because Tidhar wrote the awesome steampunk novel The Bookman, which I loved. I also really enjoyed this one.

An Occupation of Angels is, basically, a Cold War spy novel. It is set in an alternate world, in which World War II was interrupted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of various angels at places where people were dying en masse. They took up residence in various cities, and resided there for about 35 years. That would set An Occupation of Angels in the 1970s, though the exact year is never specified.

Our protagonist, "Killarney," is an agent for the British. We join her in Warsaw, just as she's killing the Archangel Raphael. It's never explained why she is there killing him, we just know that it's her mission. She manages to escape back to Britain, and along the journey we learn that she's ruthless. It isn't long before she is called in for another mission: a cryptographer on vacation in Paris is missing, and they want her to track him down. Though her superiors are pretending that it is an easy mission and should be no problem, she knows that they are lying. She accepts, nevertheless. In Paris there are a couple of attempts on her life and the Metatron, who resides in Notre Dame, is killed. Then later it is Behemoth, who resides in London, and Azrael, in Russia. Someone or something is killing the angels, and somehow it is tied to the fellow she is tracking.

Killarney takes off after her quarry, who is apparently now in the hands of the Russians. She tracks him across Russia and has some exciting adventures, and it becomes clear that, like her quarry, she is somehow involved in whatever is happening. I'm not going to spoil it, but the eventual resolution involves Nazis.

In one sense, An Occupation of Angels is treading familiar territory. They have fallen out of fashion now, but these cold war spy stories used to be very common. The appearance of Nazis, too, could be viewed as a tired cliche. But I didn't mind at all. Tidhar, I'm sure, was quite aware of what he was doing, and played quite deliberately with the old tropes. The result is an entertaining, sort of nostalgic story. It was fun to slip into the familiarity of a Cold War spy story, which was nevertheless written for the modern taste, with modern twists. The pace was fast, and it could have been a much longer work in the hands of a different writer. I'm glad it wasn't, though I occasionally wished things were fleshed out a bit. I always prefer works that are spare to those that are verbose, so the pace worked well for me. Overall, this was a quick and fun read.

Skin Deep by Mark Del Franco

2011-02-14T09:37:00.052-06:00

Skin Deep takes place in the same world as Del Franco's Connor Grey novels. I have read four of those, but see that I only blogged about two of them--in a nutshell, I liked each one better across the first three, but was quite disappointed by the fourth. In this world, over a hundred years ago the Convergence occurred, in which fairies, brownies, trolls, and other magical creatures found themselves transported to and trapped in our earth. They settled in because they had no choice, but there is still considerable tension between humans and the fey folk.

The Connor Grey novels take place in Boston, while Skin Deep is set in Washington, DC. The protagonist is Laura Blackstone, aka Janice Crawford, aka Mariel Tate. By day she works as the public relations director for the Fey Guild, the magical law enforcement agency. She is also an agent for InterSec, the International Global Security Agency, and has two other personas she maintains when working for them. In Skin Deep, she is forced to juggle between all three of them, and it is an exhausting task.

The story begins with Laura in her Janice Crawford persona. She is a druid, and was on loan from Intersec to the Washington SWAT team. They go to raid a drug lab and walk into a trap. Laura is nearly killed and the police officer she's with is killed, and because she was concussed she doesn't remember exactly what happened. But on her way home later that day someone tries to kill her again, so she has to assume that the first time wasn't an accident. Laura juggles the three personas as Mariel Tate is investigating what happened, Janice Crawford is getting her ass chewed out by the SWAT team leader who is taking out his frustration on her, and Laura Blackstone is trying to arrange an important event and has to play nicely with the bigwigs and try to prevent a diplomatic incident.

The story has a lot of action, and Laura repeatedly thrusts herself into danger even when her boss is trying to get her to be sensible and back away. There is a good deal of focus on her emotional wellbeing, which is not particularly good. Laura realizes the enormous personal sacrifices her career has forced her to make, and she is exhausted and re-evaluating her life. There was rather too much politicking for me, and Laura Blackstone's job as a public relations officer sounded far more awful than the undercover, getting shot at business. Overall, I enjoyed it. I sat down and read it in one sitting, and found it a solid, pleasant read, not outstanding but enjoyable.

The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer

2011-02-12T21:37:00.000-06:00

The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu was published in 1913. It is now in the public domain, and I downloaded it free from Feedbooks.

The narrator of the story is Dr. Petrie, who is pulled into a shadowy world of espionage and crime-fighting by his friend, Denis Nayland Smith. Smith is a law enforcement agent working for the Empire in Burma, but he has returned to England hot on the trail of an evil Chinese crime genius named Dr. Fu Manchu. For some reason he shows up at Petrie's door one night and recruits him to help him track down the mastermind. But it's worse than it sounds--Fu Manchu isn't just breaking the law for his own profit, his goal is to destroy Western civilization.

The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu is a rather extreme example of the Yellow Peril, an idea that was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that all the yellow people (which in Rohmer's mind apparently means everyone living between Egypt and Japan) are set on the destruction of the white people. If I were to speculate--and this is entirely speculation--I suppose that the Europeans might have had some cause to be concerned that the residents of a large part of the world were not particularly happy to have their countries run as European colonies, for the enrichment of the Europeans. That is to say, they probably did correctly sense that they were unpopular with certain parts of the world. This led some people to fear that the white nations were threatened by the Asians, and led to policies limiting immigration of Chinese to countries like the US and New Zealand. This novel, with its portrayal of the dangerous, clever, and untrustworthy Asians, certainly reinforced the stereotype.

Anyway, as I was saying. Smith recruits Petrie to help him track down Fu Manchu. They have many adventures like sneaking into an opium den in disguise and then being discovered and plunging through a trap door in the floor into the Thames. A recurring theme throughout the novel is that Smith thinks of someone who Manchu might view as an adversary, and they rush to try to prevent the man's death. (And now, for something completely different) It rather reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about The Bishop, a crime-solving Anglican bishop, who races around trying to prevent various clergymen from being murdered, and always arrives a moment too late. This book is a bit like that. Fortunately they managed to save the intended victim's life once or twice, but often they do not. And Fu Manchu, evil mysterious genius that he is, is not content to kill people in straightforward ways, instead the murder is always committed through some exotic or seemingly impossible method that mystifies the poor stupid Englishmen until Smith figures it out. It usually involves drugs, poisons, exotic creatures, or entering apparently inaccessible windows through Asian cunning and acrobatics.

Despite all the action, I found The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu to be a fairly slow read. It didn't hold my attention all that well, and I found that I was finding ways to pass the evenings without reading, like knitting or watching hockey, even though I'm not really a hockey fan. As I noted with Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces, which is from the same time period, some of the cultural assumptions were quite interesting, for instance the idea that upon receiving bad news a woman would be so prostrated with shock that she would lie abed ill for days afterwards, or the ability of everyone in the story to know, off the top of their head, when the next train was leaving for any given destination.

Dr. Fu Manchu escapes in the end, of course, so that there can be more novels in the series. And though I found it a bit slow going, I'm still glad I read it. Really, reading hundred-year-old popular novels is quite interesting.

Hooray!

2011-02-09T18:39:00.000-06:00

I am typing this on my new laptop. It's a Macbook Pro, a step up from my old machine as well as being new, of course. It feels sleek and crisp and science fictional. Zoom!

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, translated by Robert Van Gulik

2011-02-07T13:37:00.000-06:00

I have read and blogged about several of the Judge Dee historical mysteries written by Robert van Gulik. Judge Dee is an ancient Chinese magistrate who acts and investigator and judge in crimes committed in his district. What I didn't realize until now is that they were inspired by this book, Dee Goong An, an actual eighteenth century Chinese mystery novel, which van Gulik translated and then wrote more stories about the character.

Van Gulik has an introduction in the book explaining the traits of old Chinese mysteries and why they are mostly not to the taste of Westerners, and then explains why Dee Goong An is more accessible than most. As is typical of these novels there is a supernatural element present, in this case in the form of the spirit of a murdered man hanging around the graveyard. Also as typical in these novels it seems to be common to have suspects tortured, and the torture is described. Van Gulik left that out of his own stories about Judge Dee. It also, typically, describes the execution of the criminals, something else that is uncommon in Western mysteries.

Judge Dee solves three crimes in Dee Goong An: the deaths of a traveling silk broker, of a poor shopkeeper, and of a bride on her wedding night. It is the poor shopkeeper's death that gives him the most trouble, as he knows the man was killed and knows who did it, but cannot prove it, and the dead man's mother keeps weeping and wailing and obstructing him at every turn. There are a few things that seem a bit hard to believe, for instance in the death of the bride, when Dee asks a servant several times to tell him exactly what she did that day, and then when he discovers that her account was incorrect she insists that she just didn't remember. It seems likely she didn't remember only so that the crime would not be solved too quickly. Nevertheless, I found this a very interesting read, and quite entertaining.

Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces by Thomas Hanshaw

2011-02-04T07:19:00.000-06:00

It took my a while to finish this one because my Nook developed technical difficulties, and I had to wait until a replacement arrived. Incidentally, Barnes & Noble has been great with support on the Nook.

Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces is a detective novel from 1912. It's in public domain, and can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks. I got the Feedbooks version, and it was very nicely formatted and a pleasure to read.

Cleek is a burglar and master criminal. He and his associate, a French woman, are responsible for a series of thefts, and to add insult to injury he starts sending letters to Scotland Yard informing them of what he's planning to steal next. At the beginning, he intends to steal the wedding gifts that have been sent to the participants in a high-profile high-society wedding. The police know this, and station men all around the house to try to catch him. They fail, and he succeeds. However, while making his getaway he encounters the niece of the house owner, and instantly falls in love with her beauty and purity and decides to swear off his life of crime.

After this, Cleek becomes a consulting detective for Scotland Yard. He is a clever man who knows all about the criminal classes, and furthermore he has amazing control over his facial features so that he can alter his appearance and assume new identities merely by concentrating. In fact, this is how he carries off the first crime: he assumes the appearance of someone who had legitimate business there. The book is a series of related stories, rather like the Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown books, rather than a novel-length story. But throughout is the overarching theme of Cleek trying to atone for his crimes and win the hand of the young lady whose appearance convinced him to abandon a life of crime.

Cleek: The Man of Forty Faces was published 99 years ago, and it's very interesting to see the differences between the world Hanshaw wrote about and our own. It's hard to know, of course, how much of what he wrote was an accurate reflection of normal English life and how much was literary fashion of the time. For instance, the text is littered with relatively young widows and widowers. I suppose it is likely that mortality rates among the young were much higher then than they are now, but wow. Further, every young woman is beautiful, and nearly all of them marry men considerably older than themselves. There are even a couple of cases in which a man and his young adult son were both courting the same young woman. While in today's society it would be assumed that the older man would be at a disadvantage, in this book the opposite is true. The sons' ardor was considered foolish and not to be taken seriously, when the older and more established man was available.

There are multiple instances of suspects coming from far-flung places, like South America or the Far East. The British Empire was still pretty strong at the time and so a lot of men traveled to far-flung places, but still: were there that many people from exotic places living the the English countryside, or was this authorial embellishment to add to the air of mystery? I've no idea. There are multiple murder plots involving inheritances, including two in which the intended victim once saved the life of a wealthy person far away, and don't realize they have recently inherited considerable wealth. These are puzzle stories, so the crimes aren't committed with a blunt object to the head, they often include clever or mysterious agents of death. But, even for a former burglar, Cleek is remarkably knowledgeable about exotic poisons, and his methods rely on knowing things no one else does. For instance, at one house he drugs them all so that he can go around to the different bedrooms and observe the position everyone sleeps in. When he finds the one who sleeps curled up, instead of stretched out flat, he knows he has the killer.

Cleek's facial ability and his unbelievably complete knowledge of crime of all sorts certainly strain credibility. I'd go so far as to say that his ability to alter his appearance might as well be called magic. Nevertheless, I found it a quite entertaining read. There's never any doubt that Cleek will have the answer, but who cares? This is good popular entertainment from another time, and I enjoyed reading it.

Holmes on the Range by Steve Hockensmith

2011-01-26T10:58:00.000-06:00

This was my most recent audiobook. A historical mystery, it features two brothers, Gustav & Otto Amlingmeyer, who are cowboys. At the beginning of the novel they are unemployed, and sign on to work at the Bar VR ranch, despite its bad reputation locally. The novel is narrated by the younger, known as Big Red, who becomes uncomfortably aware that his brother, Old Red, has an ulterior motive for taking the job: he is curious and wants to do some investigating. Old Red, you see, is an avid fan of Sherlock Holmes, and would like to try his hand at solving a mystery.

They are given the opportunity when one of the other ranch hands is found murdered inside the locked outhouse. The seedy and corrupt ranch manager wants to sweep it under the carpet, but Old Red manages to convince the ranch owner to give him a chance to figure out what happened. Big Red and Old Red spend the day running around poking their noses into everything and trying to avoid the ranch manager, who intends to kill them if he gets the chance.

It turns out, of course, that the matter is more complicated than a dead man in an outhouse. There is a lot more wrong at the Bar VR than just that, and of course Old Red manages to figure it out in time for a reveal scene where everyone is gathered together for the explanation. I think I figured things out before Old Red did, but it's hard to be sure because Big Red is our Watson--he reports what happens, but often has no idea what his brother is thinking. I often find the ignorant narrator in mysteries to be an annoying character, but not in this case. I liked both the Amlingmeyers, and the progression of their relationship through the story was interesting and moving.

Holmes on the Range was a very enjoyable story. I liked it despite my general dislike of historical fiction and my complete lack of interest in cowboys. And I even learned something - I had never heard of cattalo before, though I think I had heard of beefalo, which is the same thing. I thoroughly enjoyed Holmes on the Range, and will seek out more in the series. Good fun.

The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel

2011-01-21T18:19:00.000-06:00

Translated from French, this fantasy novel feels basically like The Three Musketeers with dragons. It is, alas, not my type of book. Which is too bad, because I sometimes like a good adventure story, but this one just isn't for me.

As for the plot, I only have the faintest idea what it's going to be about, as 125 pages in I was still waiting for the story to begin. At page 95 I began skimming, as nothing of any import or interest had happened to that point. It jumps from scene to scene, from character to character, every few pages. Really--the first 125 pages were 31 chapters, which is an average of four pages per chapter, and each one jumps to a different chatacter. This makes it both hard to keep them all straight and hard to give a damn about any of them, since we don't get much of a sense of any of them as people.

Further, the writing is very visual--whole paragraphs are devoted to describing what everyone looks like and how they dress and what they own and what their surroundings look like, but that gives me no idea of their character. As I have said here before, I don't visualize much as I read. I form very few images in my head, and I can't absorb descriptive passages. I've tried many times, and inevitably my mind skitters off and I think of other things and when I force my attention back to the book I discover that my gaze has traveled down the page, but I haven't absorbed any of it. Even when I force myself to go back and re-read and try to envision what's being described, I'm rarely successful. It's just the way my brain seems to be wired. And it seems that Pevel is my opposite--someone whose thinking is very visual.

The writing itself isn't utterly horrible, but it's mildly clumsy. There are plenty of lines like this: "The freebooters entered with a swagger, as thugs everywhere enter a room when they are certain they are danger personified." Or exposition like this: "And so we have returned to Hotel de l'Epervier, the House of the Sparrowhawk, which, as you can see, has lost none of its charms." Given that all three of the characters know exactly where they are, that was an As You Know, Bob moment of explanation for the reader.

I am frustrated enough with The Cardinal's Blades that I probably will not continue, but not because I'm disliking it, merely because it has left me bored and indifferent. To invoke the Eight Deadly Words, I don't care what happens to these people. I don't care about the plots and counter plots that the writer is clumsily hinting at. I haven't been given any reason to be interested in them, and if the story is only beginning 125 pages into the book, then the author started in the wrong place. The writing style is very much not my thing, but might work quite well for a different sort of reader. Not terrible, just really not for me.

The Double Jack Mrders by Patrick McManus

2011-01-19T18:53:00.001-06:00

The Double Jack Murders is the third in this series featuring Bo Tully, the sheriff of Blight County, Idaho. It follows The Blight Way and Avalanche.

Bo has a problem: Lucas Kincaid, a man Bo arrested, has escaped from custody and is gunning for Bo. He's nutty and dangerous, and the threat is very real. So when Bo is asked by an old friend to look into a cold case for her, he decides it would be a good time to go camping--not, as people seem to assume, because he's running away from Kincaid, but because he thinks it would be easier to hunt Kincaid down and kill him away from town. Bo is a basically honest guy, but not exactly the rule-following sort, and he isn't really interested in arresting Kincaid again.

So Bo goes camping with his ornery father, Pap, who used to be sheriff, and his friend Dave, who likes to think he's an Indian. They are interested in the disappearance of Bo's friend's father in the 1920s. He and his assistant were doing a little mining. One day they went to work on the mine before staking a claim on it, and they never returned. They figure out approximately where the old mine must have been, and set about searching for it. Eventually they find the answer to what happened to the missing men.

The joy of these books isn't really the mystery, though that was fine, and wrapped up in a satisfactory manner. The joy is the characters and the place and they way they see life. There is, for instance, the matter of an ornery little dog, and the boy who asks if he can come to a funeral because he's bored. I don't read these novels because they're riveting crime novels, I read them because I enjoy spending time in the county McManus is sharing with us. They're almost cosies, even though they're police procedurals. Overall, it's just a pleasant, feel-good read.

Kill the Dead by Richard Kadrey

2011-01-17T22:13:00.000-06:00

Kill the Dead is set about six months after Sandman Slim. Stark has returned to Earth from Hell, he has gotten revenge against the man who sent him to Hell, and now he's not quite sure what to do with himself. He works for a government agency exterminating dangerous supernatural creatures to earn money to pay the bills, as his video store is just barely hanging on. He lives with the animated head of Kasabian, a former friend who now keeps tabs on him for Lucifer. Mostly, though, Stark drinks and smokes and broods. In Sandman Slim, he was an immature, angry asshole. In Kill the Dead, he's a slightly less immature, depressed asshole.

Several things happen that force Stark out of his rut--someone killed a member of a formerly-powerful old magical family and he is consulted by the government agency he sometimes works for, there seem to be an unusual number of zombies wandering the streets, he meets a really hot chick who seems interested in him, and Lucifer is in town and expects Stark to be his bodyguard. Naturally this leads to a threat to the world, and Stark is the only one who can save us. Well, some of us. A lot of people die in this book, but not everyone dies, so Stark could be considered successful.

Regular readers of this blog are aware that I've been experimenting over the last five months or so with urban fantasy, trying to pinpoint what sorts of it I like and what I don't. This is the kind I like: very violent, not at all romantic, where the stakes are high, people die, and the main character isn't the center of the universe. It avoids many of the things that I dislike about urban fantasies, especially those with pretty young women who find out they are special snowflakes and find love along the way. However it does have one cliche that I sometimes see in urban fantasies with male protagonists, and it always makes me roll my eyes: the hot chick decides they can't be together because he's just too badass and dangerous for her. Stark is genuinely more dangerous than most characters I've run across, so this is less silly than usual. Still, it's an irritating cliche, and becomes more so every time I run across it.

The best thing about Kill the Dead, though, is the voice. The writing is witty and often funny. For instance, this bit, in which Stark asks Lucifer why he is visiting LA instead of in Hell:

Lucifer: "Why does anyone come to L.A.?"

Stark: "To kill people."

Lucifer: "No, that's just you. Normal people come here to get into the movies."

Stark: "You're in a movie?"

Lucifer: "Of course not. I'm here as a technical adviser. A producer friend is in preproduction for a big-budget film of my life story."

Stark: "Please tell me you're bringing Ed Wood back from the dead to direct it."

Lucifer: "This is strictly an A-list project. I'm disappointed, Jimmy. I thought you'd be more excited. You love movies."

Stark: "Why do you need a biopic? About half the movies ever made are horror flicks and aren't all horror flicks really about you? So, you already have about ten thousand movies."

Lucifer: "But those are metaphorical. Even the ones where I'm depicted, it's never really me. This will be the real thing. The true story. My side of the story."

Stark: "Don't take this the wrong way, but who fucking cares? Are there really enough Satanists and girls in striped stockings to pay for a flick like that?"

Lucifer: "It's a prestige picture, Jimmy. Sometimes a studio makes a movie it knows won't show a near-term profit because they know that it's the right thing to do artistically."

Stark: "You own the head of the studio, don't you? Someone sold you their soul for fame and power and hot and cold running starlets and this is them paying you off."

Lucifer: "It's only a partial payoff. I still own the soul."

Blind Descent by Nevada Barr

2011-01-12T08:30:00.000-06:00

Blind Descent is the sixth in the Anna Pigeon series. Anna is a middle-aged ranger for the National Park Service. The mysteries take place at various national parks. This is the third of them I have read.

In Blind Descent, Anna has been sent to Carlsbad Caverns to assist with a cave rescue. The park has two large caves -- Carlsbad, which is open to tourists, and Lechuguilla, which is not. There is a group of cavers working in Lechuguilla, and there was an accident and one of them has a broken leg and needs to be carried out. Anna herself is not a caver, and she is there to serve as above-ground support. However she is then informed that the injured caver is a friend of hers from Mesa Verde, the park where she usually works, and that she is asking for Anna.

We find out that Anna has a deathly, overpowering, suffocating fear of enclosed spaces. This is hardly surprising, as in previous volumes I have also learned that she is terrified of Lake Superior and of fire. Why not caves, too? We all have our hot buttons and insecurities, but it seems that Anna has a neverending supply. Anyway, she agrees to go down into the cave anyway, and then we are treated to a long description of the rather complicated and dangerous trip into the cave, punctuated by Anna occasionally being paralysed by fear. Ho hum.

Things get better when they meet up with the group of cavers and other characters are introduced. Anna stops thinking about her fear constantly and only thinks of it periodically after that. We are introduced to Frida, her injured friend, and the people who were with her when she had her accident. Frida has a broken leg and is concussed, but she tells Anna that she doesn't think it was an accident: someone hurt her deliberately, though she has no idea who or why, and she's not even positive it was deliberate. They begin a long climb back out of the cave and along the way there is a landslide. Frida is killed, and Anna and another climber are injured. Anna is certain it wasn't an accident, either.

When she finally gets free of the cave Anna reports that Frida was killed to one of her superiors, who doesn't take her seriously. She decides to investigate on her own, and what happened from that point on made me realize how very much I dislike Anna Pigeon. She pokes around in other people's business, she lies, she spends hours speculating endlessly about who it might be and why, and then starts all over again. She accuses people without reason, she speculates aloud and incorrectly, she offends most everyone around her, and she is wrong about who did it. Anna Pigeon is a pain in the ass, and if I met her, I wouldn't like her any more than most of the other characters did. But I will say this: Barr appears to be aware that her character isn't likeable, and that is easier to take than if she was an ass who was portrayed as a hero.

I found it rather predictable, as well. I knew about five pages in that in the end Anna would end up alone in the cave in a confrontation with the killer, and I wasn't wrong. It was also very obvious when she went off to meet someone who apparently knew something that he would be dead when she arrived and again, I wasn't wrong. I don't know why Anna was so surprised.

I began listening to Blind Descent as an audiobook and, though Barbara Rosenblat is a wonderful narrator, after a while it really grated on my nerves. Audiobooks force you to take the story at a much more slow and deliberate pace than reading the book yourself. I could read a book like this in 3-4 hours, while the audiobook takes 12. When you're listening, you can't skim forward through the long descriptions of Anna's paralysing fear, or when she is being an ass, or speculating endlessly in circular arguments that lead nowhere. Disc 9 was chewed up enough to make it unlistenable, and I happily abandoned the audiobook for a paper copy, which allowed me to find out what happened much more quickly and with less irritation.

I'm not sure if I will continue with this series. I've done three in rapid succession, and that may have been a mistake. The thing is, Barr is a really good writer. She can actually sometimes make me see the landscape she is describing, and that is really quite extraordinary, given how infrequently I visualize what authors describe. The settings are interesting and varied. The secondary characters are, too. Many of the things Anna is doing in her job are also interesting. So really, I like everything about the books except the main character, and that's too bad. But if I continue I think I will go back to reading them myself rather than listening to them -- it's less irritating when I can skim when I want to.

Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

2011-01-08T17:53:00.000-06:00

In a nutshell, Bitter Seeds is an alternate history of World War 2 in which British warlocks are using their powers against the Germans.

It is told from both sides of the war. Klaus, his sister Gretel, and a handful of others were taken in by a creepy German doctor in their childhoods and experimented upon. Those who survived now have, basically, super powers. They have wires running from their skulls which are attached to battery packs, and so long as the batteries are charged they have a variety of powers such as great strength, control over fire, or to be able to pass through other objects. When the second world war breaks out, they are used to help with the invasion of France. Beyond that, though, the Germans seem unsure what to do with them. Gretel, however, is different. She is precognitive - she knows what's going to happen, and at times she offers very good information to the military. But she is also manipulative, and uses her knowledge to arrange things to her advantage.

The British intelligence service becomes aware of these mutant super soldiers, and are very concerned. Thinking that their powers are unnatural, they seek specialists, and consult a warlock. Once the British government becomes aware of the warlocks, the genie is out of the box and cannot be put back in. The government will use every tool at its disposal, and damn the consequences and how many people it destroys.

Bitter Seeds is aptly titled - the story is very bitter, indeed. I usually avoid alternate history, but I'm glad I read this one. I can't say I exactly enjoyed it, but I was interested enough to keep going and get through to the end. What makes this novel is Gretel. We don't see that much of her, and never know exactly what she is thinking. But it is clear that she has a plan, and I wanted to see what she was doing and why. I was only partially satisfied, in that I still don't know why she did some of the things she did. But it was certainly an interesting, if not pleasant, journey.

Bitter Seeds is really quite good. There is a good chance that this one will end up on my Hugo nominating ballot. Recommended, while noting that this is not a happy book.

Dead to Me by Anton Strout

2011-01-07T18:08:00.000-06:00

Is this YA? It sort of feels like it.

Young and stupid psychic fellow gets a job as an agent for a secret government agency that handles paranormal events in New York City. A broad smear of what a wacky place it is to work, a mention of the drudgery of working for the government, and hints of vicious and mysterious office politics at the upper levels. A bit like a clumsy rough draft of The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, except not intelligent, funny, clever, subtle, or entertaining.

Black Wings by Christina Henry

2011-01-03T17:36:00.000-06:00

A moderately tedious paranormal with angels. Like many of these stories, our protagonist works at the edges of the magic world, but discovers herself to be more of a special snowflake than she had imagined. And then she turns out to be even more special than that. She reacts to her new circumstances and amazing new powers by mouthing off and having temper tantrums like a toddler. Ho hum, seen that plenty of times before. Why are so many heroines of these stories so unlikeable, and mostly in the same ways? Parts of it felt stitched together from things borrowed from other sources and the bits that seemed original were just tedious.

More seriously, she has only two friends. One of them is killed at the beginning, and it seems to have no real effect on her emotional world except as an excuse to fight with her boss. Who is an annoying guy, but turns out actually to be attracted to her. She's got the hots for someone else she probably can't have. So by the end we have the requisite love triangle. And add dream sequences - and goodness I do hate flashbacks and dream sequences - and we're just not on a good trajectory. And, though there are lots of fights and lots of bystanders get killed, I didn't ever particularly worry about her ability to survive, because with each encounter she seemingly developed amazing new powers from nowhere. She kept surviving, only to pass out and be cared for by the hot hunk she shouldn't have. Sigh.

2010: The Year in Reading

2011-01-01T09:16:00.000-06:00

Every year at this time I review what I've been reading for the past year. I started keeping a list of my reading in 2000, and have found it quite interesting, as my assumptions about my reading are not always accurate. For instance, for years I assumed that I read a lot more science fiction and fantasy than mysteries, but that's not true. For the purposes of my list-making, I only count books I finished, and I do not count re-reads.

I read a lot more this year than I have in any year since I began keeping records. This is partly because I bought an ebook reader this year, which makes reading more convenient, and gives me much faster access to books. I used to drive to the bookstore and hope they had what I wanted, or order books online and wait up to a week and a half for them to arrive. Now I pick something out and can be reading it five minutes later. Much faster access to books means I read more. But I was on a fast pace for the year even before I bought the ebook reader: I read 72 books in the three and a half months before I bought my Nook. The Nook just made it even easier to keep up that pace.

In 2010 I read a whole lot of gay fiction: gay romance, gay mystery, gay paranormal, gay horror. Many of these were shorter than an average science fiction or mystery novel, so they went fast and helped get the count up. I also dove into the depths of urban fantasy and paranormals, with mixed results. I have concluded that I really do like some of the genre, if it's the right type, but most of it isn't the right type. The average UF, to me, tends to be somewhere between bad and so-so, but those rare gems are really great. I'm glad I decided to explore, or I never would have discovered the awesome Mercy Thompson novels by Patricia Briggs. I also brushed the surface of heterosexual paranormal romance, but my sampling has been disheartening.

So, on to the numbers:

I finished 253 books and scripts this year.

11 were regular science fiction
27 were crime or mysteries
45 were fantasy or urban fantasy
10 were scripts
139 were gay fiction of some sort
The remainder were general fiction, nonfiction, or hetero romance

It's hard to pare down a list as long as mine to pick out the best works, but here are some of the things I really enjoyed this year:

Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (urban fantasy)
Psycop series by Jordan Castillo Price (gay detective/paranormal)
Serge Storms series by Tim Dorsey (zany Florida crime)
Yellow Blue Tibia & New Model Army by Adam Roberts (science fiction)
Luck In the Shadows & Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewelling (fantasy)
Virgil Flowers series by John Sandford (mystery)
The Stranger by Max Frei (fantasy)
Dixie Swim Club & Marvin's Room (scripts)

The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia McKillip

2010-12-26T09:35:00.000-06:00

This is the newest fantasy from Patricia McKillip, whose books I always snatch up as soon as they come out. Even though I got burned out on fantasy in the early 90s and mostly avoided it for a long period of time, McKillip is one of the handful of fantasy writers I continued to read, along with Terry Pratchett and Steve Brust.

McKillip's works are dreamy and fairy tale-like. The Bards of Bone Plain has a multi-thread plot that takes place across two time lines, in which the more modern time line is trying to figure out what happened in the past time line, because it's important to their present day. It has bards, of course, and a princess who is struggling for self determination, and it seems that the fate of the kingdom hangs in the balance. McKillip weaves in many things she has used before: bards, towers, plains, riddles, war, music, and magic.

Like many of McKillip's fantasies, The Bards of Bone Plain turns out to be about healing old wounds and setting things right again. This is a fairly common theme for her, as she has used it in The Book of Atrix Wolfe, The Tower at Stony Wood, Od Magic, and The Bell at Sealy Head, just off the top of my head, and there are probably more I'm forgetting. It would probably fall under the definition of consolatory fantasy, a term China Mieville coined in 2002 as he sneered at fantasies that were about restoring order and had a happy ending that made the reader feel good. I'm not sneering at it, though. I find the theme of healing and repairing what has been broken to be a humane and mature thing to write about.

McKillip writes quite a bit about music in this one, and has in several others in the past. Music is a difficult thing to write about, and McKillip does it better than most. The Bards of Bone Plain features bardic competitions where the stakes are high, and in this world a select few can do powerful magic through their music. Perhaps the magic is why she equates outstanding music with deep feeling, but it's a concept I find somewhat offensive. Now, if two equally skilled musicians are playing the same piece and one breathes and feels the song they are playing and the other is an impersonal but brilliant technician, it may be that the first performer's rendition could be considered superior. But ultimately what makes for good music is skill, years of practice, and some innate talent. Desire or depth of feeling are not an adequate substitute. You cannot make yourself a great musician just because you really want it, without having to do all the work. Now, McKillip isn't really saying that, either. But it's hinted at in a couple of places, when the characters give outstanding musical performances because they have feeling behind their performance. And as anyone who has ever watched the American Idol auditions knows, there are a lot of people who seem to honestly believe that because they really want to be a great musician, they can be a great musician. And that's just not true.

But back to The Bards of Bone Plain: I enjoyed it. The characters are likable, the recounting of the historical events is quite compelling, and the ending is fairly happy. That said, this isn't one of my favorites by this writer. It's a good, solid McKillip, but not one of the ones that blew me away.

A Superior Death by Nevada Barr

2010-12-24T09:47:00.000-06:00

I have just finished A Superior Death, and am also in the process of listening to Endangered Species, by the same author, in my car. So some of my observations about the character and the writing are based on both books, not just A Superior Death.

The protagonist of these stories is Anna Pigeon, a forty-ish national park ranger. In A Superior Death she is working at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. She has come to this assignment after working in Texas, and she isn't adjusting well to the climate and landscape of the new park. For those of you whose sense of this geography is as foggy as mine, Isle Royale sits off the very northeastern point of Minnesota. The nearest city is actually Thunder Bay, Ontario, but when the rangers head for the mainland they usually cut across the lake to Houghton, in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

Anna lives in a damp, squalid little ranger station where she issues permits and cuts fishing hooks out of park visitors, and sometimes she goes out on patrol in a park service boat. On her days off she camps and kayaks. Her station is pretty isolated, but she still gets to know the other park service staff and the others who work in the area. She is distracted from her daily routine by the mystery of a missing woman, Donna, who is married to one of the other rangers. Her husband is obnoxious and lies about his wife's location, and then gets surly and threatening when people try to push for more details.

There is also the matter of Carrie, the surly 13-year-old daughter of Patience, who manages the lodge. Carrie is staying out until the wee hours of the morning, and since there isn't much of anything to do on the island, she's pretty well got to be seeing a boyfriend. It is, of course, Anna who decides to do some snooping and realizes who it is hanging out with the inappropriately young girl.

But the big problem of the novel is the discovery of Denny Castle, who owns a boat and takes tourists diving the wrecks under the lake, dead inside a wreck under the lake. This is a surprise to everyone, because they all thought Denny was on his honeymoon. But since he is inside a deep and dangerous wreck with no scuba gear, he can't have gotten himself there, so there is an investigation. Despite the arrival of an FBI agent, Anna pretty much decides to keep him in the dark while she does her own investigating, only taking information to him until after she has figured things out herself. It's probably a good thing that A Superior Death wasn't the first of this series for me--as I said, I'm listening to one in the car and frankly I'm enjoying that one more than I did this one--because this might have been my last Nevada Barr otherwise. I really don't have a lot of use for amateur detectives who decide to take on crime-solving and bumble around on their own. The FBI agent was neither stupid nor corrupt, and she could and should have told him some of the things she was keeping from him.

Which leads to the second problem--Anna is a vigilante. She doesn't just ask nosy and intrusive questions and dig around in people's personnel records, she periodically decides to stake out people she's suspicious of, and sometimes confronts them. And I've got no use for the character (all too common in mystery novels) who decides to go off alone at midnight to confront the killer by themselves and usually gets into trouble because of it, instead of either handing it off to the proper authorities or at least bringing help along. Anna is that annoying character.

Anna is not always likable, but at least she's not a cardboard character. She is middle-aged and not entirely comfortable with herself or her life, which I certainly can empathize with. Anna was happily married until her husband died in an accident, and after she climbed out of the bottle and her crushing grief, she joined the park service and fled into the wilderness. She really enjoys being outside, and loves the wilderness, and enjoys being alone, but also sometimes worries about being alone too much. Which is the sort of mental conversation I frequently have myself, so I found that very believable. One thing that is striking to me from the two novels, however, is how often Anna is terrified. She's terrified of the lake, terrified of fire, often afraid as she's off on her hare-brained sleuthing adventures. I found that a little harder to empathize with. Of course, she wouldn't need to be so afraid if she didn't insist on doing stupid and dangerous things. However in her defense, she usually pulls through and does what she needs to do despite her fear. I just found it very striking and a bit uncomfortable how often her reaction to things is deep, paralysing fear.

A Superior Death was okay, but not great. The one I am listening to, on the other hand, is really very good and I'm enjoying it immensely. I think this is largely down to the reader. It's read by Barbara Rosenblat, and she's wonderful. I think in the future I will listen to the other Anna Pigeon stories, rather than reading them.

Right Hand Magic by Nancy Collins

2010-12-22T21:09:00.000-06:00

This is yet another paranormal. I'd heard good things about this one online, though I no longer recall where, but it sounded interesting enough for me to put it on my list of books to look for. On the whole, I'd have to say it did not live up to the hype.

We have a love story between two beautiful young overprivileged folks who are slumming it and playing at trying to make a living on their own instead of living on their parents' wealth and fame. Not that I'm sure one could even classify living off trust fund payments while making sculpture to be an honest attempt at earning a living. Honestly, neither one of them have any real problems. Their lives are pretty easy compared to most everyone else on the planet, and even when the conflict finally arrives right at the end, they aren't the ones in any real trouble, they are just trying to save an acquaintance, who does have real trouble.

Tate's father is one of the wealthiest men in the country, and she has a comfortable income from her trust fund. She lives in Manhattan and likes making metal sculptures, but her neighbors don't like the noise of her metalwork, so she decides to find a new place. She sees an ad for a room for rent in Golgotham, the neighborhood where all the magical folks live, and decides to go look at it. The landlord, Hexe, is a Kymeran, a sort of elf-like creature who is exotic in ways that human women find extremely attractive. He works as a right-hand sorcerer, practicing white magic and unravelling curses placed by those who do left-hand magic. The house belongs to his family, and was given to him to help him support himself. Though it is supposedly a boarding house, and the place is very large, Tate is the only tenant except for a fellow who lives in the basement in a self-contained apartment and is never seen. The room she rents at a ridiculously good price is much bigger than her old place, and ideal for her metalwork. Odd that she saw the place and decided to move in without ever mentioning to the landlord that she's going to be welding and hammering metal in his spare bedroom ... One would think it's the sort of thing a reasonable person would make clear in advance, so there are no nasty surprises later.

Anyway, she moves to Golgotham and Hexe invites her to spend a lot of time with him and shows her around and introduces her to people and takes her out to dinner and helps her solve all her problems. Oddly enough, she doesn't figure out that he's attracted to her until someone tells her, near the end. Does she think that is normal behavior for a landlord? Tate keeps making stupid assumptions that are awkward and embarrassing. One might hope that she would learn to keep her eyes open and her mouth shut, but she never does. That, and her obnoxious ex-boyfriend who seems to have a lot more power over her than she should allow him to have, are the only real problems in her otherwise idyllic life.

It seems that the entire novel is just going to be a travelogue of what a cool place Golgotham is, until finally near the end a friend of theirs is abducted and they need to rescue him. This was extremely predictable, and I figured out that was going to be the problem the plot centered around about 80 or 100 pages in. It was just a matter of waiting for it to happen, since it was obvious it would. And then it was obvious they would succeed, so it was just a matter of skimming through to find out what happened afterward.

Right Hand Magic was oddly paced, predictable, and shallow. Nothing much happens until the last couple of chapters, and then it's a rush to solve the problem. Tate is not a character I can really care about, because her life is so artificial and easy there's nothing to sympathize with. Was I supposed to feel sorry for her that she didn't have the balls to kick free of the smarmy ex? Was I supposed to be pleased that she found a man so perfect he wasn't any more believable than she was? Mostly I was just rolling my eyes at how everything aligns so perfectly for the two of them in their perfect little lives. Right Hand Magic isn't terrible, the writing is fine at a sentence level, but the pacing is wrong and the characters not at all compelling. It was like a soft serve vanilla cone--sort of smooth and fake and sweet but also dull and not good enough to be worth the calories. I prefer something rich and interesting.

Blood Song & Once Bitten

2010-12-18T09:23:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I read Blood Song by Cat Adams. I generally enjoyed it, but was struck by the similarities between it and another book I've been working on, Once Bitten by Kalayna Price. So I'm going to talk about both of them in one entry. There will be some mild spoilers.

Both novels take place in a world where supernatural creatures exist. In both, after a short intro, the heroine is attacked in an alley. In Once Bitten, she is attacked by a shapeshifter and rescued by a vampire who changes her. In Blood Song, she is attacked by vampires and then saved by shapeshifters before she is completely changed, so she's caught somewhere between human and vampire.

Both heroines are pretty upset about their change, and kind of in denial. Both of them, despite being told they will lose control and attack someone if they don't feed regularly, disregard this advice, with unpleasant consequences. That may be one of the hardest things for me to accept, actually: I realize that there are people who don't have much appetite, and at times in my life when my health was going haywire I have had a very low appetite, but I still don't believe in characters who going running around all day or all night and never get around to eating anything. In the case of Kita in Once Bitten, her vampire sire keeps trying to get her to eat, and she just refuses, like she thinks she can just decide that blood isn't for her, and that's final. Which is absurd, and is one of the many reasons why Kita is an immature and unlikeable character, and I couldn't finish the book. Celia, in Blood Song, isn't a full vampire and can eat some things, she just usually doesn't get around to it or plan ahead far enough to have food handy when she needs it. For a supposedly fairly smart woman, she was sometimes remarkably dense.

In both novels, the heroines are special vampires because they weren't entirely human before they were turned. Because the heroine of the novel is always a special snowflake, isn't she? Kita is a shapeshifter, something we know in advance, though she seems to lose her shapeshifting abilities when she becomes a vampire. But the fact she was a shapeshifter makes her more interesting and attractive to the other vampires, which is actually why she was turned in the first place. Her sire just found her irresistible. Celia keeps claiming that she's a plain vanilla human despite the fact that ghosts seem unusually attracted to her, but we later find out that she's got some supernatural blood in her family tree, which gives her an advantage in controlling some of her vampire tendencies and that she also has other special powers she uses to get herself out of a couple of jams.

Both heroines have their support crew of attractive men who are attracted to them, who help them with their problems. Kita has a deadline to find a bad guy, so she gets her own little posse of her vampire sire, her old boyfriend who's still in love with her, and an odd researcher who has been assigned to observe her. Nearly all their actions are to help Kita deal with her shit, as if the other characters' only function for existing is to support her. This, and the fact Kita is so childish and obnoxious, may be why Once Bitten felt more like paranormal romance than urban fantasy to me. Romance heroines are so often infantilized, which is one reason why I prefer gay romance.

Celia's situation is slightly less annoying than Kita's, as it seems a more mature situation, but nevertheless the population of the novel can be roughly divided into the people who are her opponents and the people who are there to help her. There's the werewolf who rescued her and apparently loves her, though they aren't really in a relationship. There's the police detective who is remarkably helpful. There is her old boyfriend and his brother, who show up and immediately throw in with her. And the psychic psychiatrist who gets her through some rough moments. And the priest who saves her and her mother. Plus her receptionist, who she relies on very heavily. Yeah, she has a large cast of characters who leap in to help her out, and pretty much everyone else turns out to be an antagonist. So in Blood Song the world revolves around the heroine, too.

And finally, both heroines have a big mouth and an antagonistic personality, and frequently make situations worse.

There are differences between the novels, however, as evidenced by the fact that I completed Blood Song and mostly enjoyed it, but could not force myself to finish Once Bitten.

I say I enjoyed Blood Song, and I did, but upon reflection I'm not sure the plot really holds together when I think about it. There's so much action that it can just pull you along, but still--I don't really know why some of the things that happened in the story happened. There are mysterious forces at work behind the scenes and Celia doesn't know all of it, but still it's not clear to me why certain characters did what they did, or how Celia and her friends came to be involved. One particularly confusing bit was that when she wakes as a human/vampire mix there's a fellow there who seems to belong to some sort of government agency. He looks her over coldly and tells her that he intends to follow her in order to find her sire and kill him, (and we later find that he knows that with mixes like her the first feeding is always fatal to the person they attack) and yet then he backs off and promises to leave her alone and not follow her and we don't see him again until near the end. Maybe I missed something important, but it doesn't make any sense that he would drop his interest in her, or let her wander off on her own in the full knowledge she will almost certainly kill someone. It makes no sense that both he and her friends would allow her to take off on her own at that point. It also isn't entirely clear why her friend was killed on the same night she was attacked, or ... well, so many things now that I think about it. Perhaps these things will be explained in volume two.

I'm not sure that I'll read volume two, though. Blood Song was a sort of entertaining read with a not entirely likeable protagonist with not really believable dark secrets in her past that are only hinted at, but at the end is a setup for book two--someone shows up out of the blue for no apparent reason and announces that they are now enemies--and it was an incredible turn-off. It was immature plotting, inexplicable and unlikely in the story as presented so far, and felt childish. And it makes me retroactively like the book less because of the way it ended. So, though Blood Song was competently written and action-packed, I probably won't bother to read farther. I like plots that make sense, characters who aren't so preoccupied with telling me how tough they are (she's a bodyguard), and foreshadowing more subtle than the sledgehammer used in the last chapter of Blood Song.

Charlie Chan: The Secret Service

2010-12-17T09:35:00.001-06:00

This is a film from 1944 in which Charlie Chan, who is now working for the Secret Service, is called in to investigate the death of a scientist. The man is dead of unknown causes, the secret bomb plans he had in his pocket are missing, and he had a houseful of guests over for cocktails at the time. Which of them have stolen the plans? Only Charlie Chan can figure it out.

The first thing that must be said of the film is that it is racist. This is largely a product of the times it was created, but still--really racist. Charlie Chan, the obscure but very intelligent Chinese detective from Hawaii, is played by a white man with a goofy goatee and a terrible accent. Two of his children decide to tag along for comic relief, and they are fortunately played by actors of the correct ethic background. And then there is the character of Birmingham Brown--he is the chauffeur of one of the party guests, a black man with wide bug eyes who is played for laughs. I just looked up the details on the film to remind me of the character's name, and he apparently became a regular character in the Charlie Chan movies that followed. I can see why, in that he is funny, and the actor's performance was really very good.

Which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the cast. The various party guests are herded into the living room while the Secret Service searches the house to look for the missing plans, and they are barely introduced. What little dialogue they have is badly delivered and forgettable. (Well, mostly. When one man places his hand on the shoulder of another, and says something to the effect of "He's been with me for four years" for a moment I thought they were being surprisingly modern in their portrayal of a gay couple, until I realized they were referring to employment, not personal attachment. Personally I find the first interpretation more entertaining.) So we have the nearly interchangeable party guests, the completely interchangeable lawmen, Charlie Chan exchanging wisecracks with his two children, and a creepy old housekeeper, I suppose because at the time all mysteries needed a creepy old woman in them.

Charlie pulls a solution to the scientist's murder out of thin air, and then that suspect is shot dead through an elaborate booby trap that I'm pretty sure is not actually physically possible. Though I'm not sure the scientist's murder was acutally possible to set up, either. When are the killers supposed to have snuck into the house and altered the wiring and set up an electromagnet in a lamp that can trigger a gun mounted on the wall to fire at someone sitting on the sofa if triggered by a switch concealed under the piano? It's not the sort of thing you can set up on a moment's notice, and I doubt that the second killer could have anticipated that their co-conspirator was going to make a full confession while sitting on a particular piece of furniture.

The entire thing is paper thin and falls apart under any scrutiny at all. On the other hand, it's light and entertaining and even a bit funny in places (though not as funny as the filmmakers probably intended), and in 1944 I think Hollywood figured this was exactly the sort of thing people would want to see. And they may have been right. The Charlie Chan films are not good, but they are sort of entertaining, and I kind of enjoy them despite their flaws.

Clockwork Scarf

2010-12-13T09:22:00.002-06:00

This is one of the things I've been working on over the last few weeks, especially in the last week as I was avoiding reading two paranormals that are annoying and stupid.

This scarf is called Clockwork, and it was designed by Stephen West. It's a pretty time-consuming knit, but I found it pretty entertaining, so I zipped through it. There is enough variety, with the two colors of yarn and the increases and places where you slip stitches, to keep it from getting monotonous.

This photo doesn't really capture the colors very well. The lighter colored yarn is dyed to gradually change color, from green to blue to purple to pink, but it's fairly subtle. Anyway, I've finished it except for weaving in the ends, and it was a fun project.

Comeback by Richard Stark

2010-12-12T20:36:00.000-06:00

I am a mystery reader as well as a science fiction reader, and for years I've been hearing good things about the Parker novels by Richard Stark. Until now, I never got around to reading one.

Parker is a career criminal. He agrees to pull off a heist with his associate Mackey and Liss, a guy he'd never worked with before. Liss has an acquaintance who works for an evengelical preacher and has become disillusioned that the man is vain, corrupt, and that the vast sums of money he takes in are used for his own profit instead of doing the good he is collecting it for. The acquaintance can get them into an event, to steal about $400,000 in admission fees collected from the faithful.

The heist itself goes off without a hitch, except that they do not intend to give the inside man the cut he is expecting. But things go pear-shaped when Liss tries to kill Parker and Mackey and scoop all the money for himself. They chase him off, but he will try to find them again, and there is the added complication that the inside man blabbed about the heist to someone else who blabbed, and now there are three inept would-be criminals on their tail as well to confuse matters, and they need to find a place to lie low until law enforcement backs off, but of course Liss knows their intended hiding places.

This is not a mystery, it is a crime novel. Come to think of it, the other works I've read by this author (Richard Stark is a pen name of Donald Westlake) were also crime novels. I generally prefer mysteries. That said, it was very entertaining. Quite bleak, too, frankly. There isn't a happy ending for anyone, though we're sort of rooting for a successful escape for Parker. Lots of bad things happen, people are wounded or killed, buildings burned down. Parker doesn't go out of his way to hurt people, but he doesn't hesitate if he thinks he needs to, and Liss is actually does go out of his way to hurt people.

Comeback is a nice, compact story, not too long and moving right along. I like that in a novel. It's a quick an compelling read, and though I don't usually seek out crime novels this one is entertaining enough I might read another, if I come across one. Recommended.

New Model Army by Adam Roberts

2010-12-05T16:19:00.000-06:00

New Model Army is a near-future science fiction novel that explores the issue of war. The narrator, Block, was a member of Pantegral, one of the New Model Armies that have sprung up by the time of the novel. They are a military force without the heirarchy, with no officers or strategists. Instead they run by consensus, as a democracy. Technology allows them to communicate instantly, and most larger decisions are voted on by the troops, and they follow the decisions of the majority.

They are much more decentralized than a regular army, and are much cheaper to operate, for many reasons which our narrator explains. Because they are cheaper to operate, it makes military conflict more accessible to groups other than large governments, which is not necessarily a good thing.

The narrator explains all this, and details his experiences as part of Pantegral as they fight the British Army on behalf of Scotland. It's a very interesting idea to explore, even if the explanation of how they came to be fighting that particular war is farfetched. But I'm more interested in the story than the background, so I am able to forgive that.

New Model Army's structure is remisicent of Stone in that the narrator is explaining himself to an interrogator after the fact. I was curious, of course, to find out how he ended up there, and the central section of the book was spent in some anticipation of that event. Nevertheless the middle section was my least favorite part of the book. The beginning is spent introducing the character and the New Model Army and how it works. In the middle section things aren't going quite so well, and we know that something is going to happen to land him in the hands of the enemy. My favorite part was the final section, in which he is set off to do something that doesn't go according to plan. By this point Block is broken and passive, tossed around by others as they try to decide what to do with him.

I enjoyed New Model Army a lot. It isn't a happy book, and isn't as funny as Yellow Blue Tibia was (though that isn't a very happy book either, but it is funny). There are a few moments that I found amusing, and the ideas were interesting. I don't actually get that much of a sense of what sort of person Block is, but he says right at the beginning that he isn't the hero of the novel. He's telling it, but it isn't about him. The final chapter was hard to follow and seemed kind of pointless, but otherwise I found it to be a great read, and quite interesting. That's three books now by Roberts that I have liked--it is an encouraging sign, and I must track down all his others.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar

2010-12-04T16:45:00.001-06:00

The Bookman is a work of steampunk. I have to admit, I'm not wildly enthusiastic about steampunk as a genre. I don't really understand the fascination with writing or reading stories harking back to the Victorian era, except with anachronistic machines and attitudes. It wasn't a particularly good time. Nevertheless, I've been wanting to read The Bookman for a while. It's published by Angry Robot Books, a new imprint that starting publishing in the Commonwealth last year, and in the US this year. They've got some interesting books on their list, and they've recently started selling e-editions of their works at very reasonable prices.

Anyway, The Bookman: It begins in London, with a character named Orphan. He is a writer and poet, and lives in a bookshop with his friend, who is a revolutionary. He has a girlfriend named Lucy, who works with the whales that live in the Thames. He is a fairly happy young man, and looks forward to a happy future with Lucy. This is all shattered, however, when his friend Gilgamesh is killed, he witnesses two terrorist attacks by the legendary Bookman, and he is recruited by Inspector Irene Adler of Scotland Yard to help her track him (The Bookman) down.

Orphan is wrenched from his normal life and bounced around the various factions like a ping pong ball. He is a pawn, used and moved with little understanding of what is happening to him. Orphan isn't in control of his life, he is merely being shoved from place to place.

That said, his adventures are very interesting and entertaining. He travels, meets many interesting people and witnesses many interesting things, and in the end he helps change the course of the Empire. Tidhar has created a very enjoyable alternate British Empire, peopled with many familiar characters, both historical and literary. And then there is the added twist that the Empire is run by lizard men. I have read other steampunk works that do interesting or horrible things to Queen Victoria, like making her a cyborg, but this is the first one I've read in which she is a lizard.

The Bookman is a very entertaining story with lots of action, airships, pirates, and lizard men. It's a hell of a lot of fun, and I can't wait to read the sequel when it comes out. Highly recommended.

Grave Witch by Kalayna Price

2010-12-02T08:02:00.000-06:00

Grave Witch came home with me from my recent trip to Barnes & Noble. It was an impulse buy off a free-standing display near the front of the store, so in this case that extra bit of marketing was successful. It's an urban fantasy.

Alex Craft is a grave witch--a medium, essentially, she can see ghosts and raise the spirits of the dead--in Nekros City. This is set in a timeline in which the fae and witches are known to the public, and Nekros City sits on a bit of land created, or found, by the fae. It is a city with a large magical population, and yet the government seems to be controlled by Humans First, a movement that disapproves of the magical portion of the population. Alex's father is one of them, which is why they haven't spoken to each other in years.

Alex is broke, as private investigators often are, so she accepts a job from her estranged sister, Casey. The governor, Theodore Coleman, disappeared, and now his body has been found. The police are looking suspiciously at the lieutenant governor, their father. Casey wants Alex to raise the dead man's shade and find out what happened to him. She exchanges favors with a homicide detective friend, which gains her access to Coleman's body in exchange for her doing some work for him on a dead Jane Doe. Neither operation is successful, and she is interrupted by the arrival of Falin Andrews, the detective who is investigating the Coleman death. He is angry and she gets angry back, which makes it inevitable, in story-logic, that they're going to end up in bed together.

Alex has various adventures which include attempted murder and kidnap, and she and Andrews get closer, unsurprisingly. She walks into a couple of forseeable traps, but at least she had self-doubt about the second one, and tried very hard to extricate herself in a sensible way, rather than just charging in bull-headed like many heroines in this sort of book. In the end it turns out, more or less, that she's the only one who can stop the evil plot of the evil guy.

There are a lot of things to like about Grave Witch. There is a nice cast of supporting characters, including her fae landlord, the neighborhood garoyle, her two girl friends who are warm and supportive but keep pushing her at men, and her goofy little dog, Prince Charming. Alex gets herself into avoidable rouble a couple of times, but at least she/'s cautious about it and thinks before plunging into danger. There is a bit of a love triangle in which two hunky desirable guys are both interested in her, a story that I always have trouble believing in, but it didn't bother me too much. There's a lot of action, and it sweeps you along briskly. I read it straight through in an evening, and if there were a sequel out I would happily go buy it right now. It was highly entertaining, and I will certainly seek out the next one.

Afterlight by Elle Jasper

2010-11-30T09:09:00.002-06:00

Afterlight is a heterosexual paranormal romance. I've been reading gay paranormals for the last year or so, and have enjoyed many of them. I have also been reading more urban fantasy lately, and have enjoyed some of them. So it seemed a natural step to investigate straight paranormal romances. The line between urban fantasy and paranormal romance is sometimes quite indistinct, and it occurred to me that there could be some material on the romance side of the fence that I might enjoy. Unfortunately my sampling on that side of the fence has been unencouraging. Frankly, a lot of the paranormal romances that I've seen, well--they might be good romance, but they are painfully bad fantasy. Nevertheless I have not completely given up, and yesterday I stopped in Barnes & Noble and browsed the shelves and came up with Afterlight.

The main character of Afterlight is Riley Poe, a 25-year-old tattoo shop owner in Savannah, Georgia. She was a wild teen who did a lot of stupid things, but after her mother died she was left in the guardianship of an old couple who practice voodoo, who got her straightened out and who own the shop next door to hers, and are still like parents to her. She is raising her younger brother, Seth, who is ten years younger than she, and she's very protective of him. So when he goes off with his friends one night and she finds they aren't at the house where he'd said they were going to be, she goes looking for him and finds them at a cemetery breaking into a mausoleum. She chews him out and takes him home.

The next day he begins behaving oddly, sleeping all day, not eating, and not acting at all like the affectionate and friendly teen she's used to. After a few days of it he scares the hell out of her and runs away, and she asks her voodoo guardian neighbor for help. He takes her to an old mansion and introduces her to the Dupre family. After a some drama, they eventually manage to hammer it into her head that they are vampires, and that her brother and his friends released a couple of other nasty vampires who have taken control of them, but if she trusts the Dupres it should all turn out okay. She is also told that she has a special blood type that makes her unique and irresistible to vampires, which is why her neighbors have been feeding her a special tea for breakfast every morning, to mask what she is.

She is sent home with Eli Dupre to act as her bodyguard. He's the romantic interest. One of the ways it is obvious that this is paranormal romance instead of urban fantasy is that the moment they first saw each other, she was stunned, caught, her breath taken away by a glimpse of him. So there isn't exactly any uncertainty about who she's going to end up with, or for that matter whether or not they'll end up together. The only question is how soon they're going to end up in bed together, and how often. Oddly this doesn't bother me at all when it happens in gay paranormal romance, but in straight romance it makes me roll my eyes. I have no idea why.

Anyway, the Dupres say that Seth and his friends are not vampires yet, but in a month or so they will be. Also that the nasty vampires they released are currently very weak, but are getting stronger with every passing day. Their plan, oddly, is to wait until the enemy is stronger and the youngsters are about to turn before they act. Meanwhile her brother and his friends are abducting people who are killed by the vampires, which Riley finds deeply upsetting. She keeps trying to insert herself into situations where she cannot possibly win, despite constant reminders that she can't handle the situation. She is unable even to follow such practical instructions as: "I'm going to go take care of this situation. Stay here out of sight where you'll be safe." Does she stay out of sight? Of course not. Because Riley has less survival instinct than a lemming. In fact, she seems to have a death wish. So the Dupres are faced not only with trying to control the evil vampires and their minions, they have to repeatedly rescue Riley, because she's too fucking stupid to remain among the breathing.

But Riley isn't the only one who is frustrating. She's got a problem with Eli Dupre, too. Because she's getting a very mixed message from him--on the one hand she's told that she can trust the Dupres with her life and that everything will be okay, but on the other hand he keeps telling her that she should be afraid of him, and he can barely resist the impulse to kill her. And their plan doesn't seem terribly bright, either, as I mentioned earlier. I wasn't convinced that waiting until your enemies are strong is the best tactic. They also say that they need her to guide them into the night clubs and drug dens of the city, because she used to hang out there, and only she knows the way. This is somehow supposed to help them track the bad guys, though I confess it wasn't at all clear to me what good this was supposed to do.

Riley is a rather old-fashioned heroine for this sort of story. She is the prototypical angry, fearless chick who runs around in heels and short skirts trying to kill supernatural creatures that is going out of style now on the urban fantasy side of the fence. There is even a sequence straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie, I mean, not the TV show) where they take her in and train her to kill vampires and have her running around and doing gymnastics and learning to throw knives. Personally I much prefer characters like Mercy Thompson, from Patricia Briggs's wonderful series of novels, who is an auto mechanic, wears jeans, sneakers, and greasy T-shirts, drives old VWs, and is older and a lot smarter than Riley. She feels a lot more real to me than the young tattooed goth girl who has to describe her outfits at length every morning, which seemed very teenaged to me. But hey, I've never been a skinny young tattooed goth girl, so perhaps the mindset is just alien to me.

Anyway, the time comes for the final showdown and they have a plan, but of course Riley decides at the last minute not to follow the plan, which allows one of the bad guys to get away and Riley is nearly killed. This allows there to be a sequel, so it can be a series instead of a stand-alone novel.

Despite my complaints (and the main characters are certainly annoying, and the plot kind of stupid), Afterlight is nevertheless not a bad read. It is miles ahead of most of the other straight paranormal romances I've looked at. I'd still rather read about gay werewolves than human girls who fall into the beds of brooding vampires, but that's just personal taste.

Gilded Latten Bones by Glen Cook

2010-11-28T09:08:00.000-06:00

This is the thirteenth in Cook's series about Garrett, a somewhat lazy investigator in the fantasy city of Tunfaire. The novels have evolved over time, and the city is changing. Overall, Garrett lives in a house with a dead Loghyr, an ancient and powerful creature who hasn't let the death of his body be the end of his existence. Garrett calls him The Dead Man, and he is both much more intelligent than Garrett and has the advantage of being psychic. Nevertheless his body is dead, and so he must rely on Garrett to do the leg work and on witnesses being brought to him. Some of the early novels read a lot like Nero Wolfe stories, with The Dead Man as Nero, Garrett as Archie Goodwin, and their cook, Dean, as Fritz. Garrett runs around the city and frequently gets beat up, and everyone important is brought back to their house for The Dead Man to interrogate.

However The Dead Man spends much of his time asleep, and sometimes is asleep at an inconvenient time, forcing Garrett to try to figure things out on his own. He has a circle of friends, and an ever-increasing circle of recurring antagonists, plus various attractive women flowing through his life. A theme in recent books is that Garrett may be maturing. At the end of the last book, Cruel Zinc Melodies (which I thought was quite a good one), Garrett finally settles down with one woman, Tinnie Tate, an attractive and pushy lady he's had an on-again, off-again relationship with for years.

The beginning of Gilded Latten Bones finds that Garrett and Tinnie have set up housekeeping away from his house or her family. Someone breaks in during the night and is apparently trying to kidnap Tinnie. Garrett is outraged and wants to investigate, but the next day he's summoned away by Belinda Contague, a crazy crime boss lady and former romantic entanglement, because his oldest friend Morley Dotes has been attacked and is near death, and Belinda wants someone to guard him and keep him safe while he recovers. So Garrett goes to the brothel where Morley is recovering, and makes friends with the pretty ladies of the night who are caring for Morley.

There are a couple of attempts to get into the room, and some people end up dead, so they decide to move Morley to Garrett's old house, still occupied by The Dead Man, Dean, and a genius ratgirl named Pular Singe who has become Garrett's business associate. They hole up there, and the place becomes Grand Central Station as everyone they know, plus a few people they don't, come by for one reason or another. One of the people who stops by is the Windwalker, Furious Tide of Light, a powerful sorceress he met in a previous book. She has apparently decided that he's ideal husband material and, despite Tinnie, he's quite attracted to her.

And this is where things got a little odd. Though Garrett apparently loves Tinnie and was pretty happy with her, now that he's gotten away from her for a few days he's reconsidering their relationship, his acquaintances including The Dead Man are saying that they think he'd be better off with the Windwalker, and various other people are saying that it would be okay if he dumped Tinnie, and she probably deserves it. There was even a scene in which The Dead Man proclaimed her love for him to be a form of mental illness. And all the while I'm wondering where this came from. Were there hints that I missed? Perhaps. It's been a while since I read the last book, and I started out with this book as bedtime reading, until I found that reading a book every night when you're drowsy is detrimental to reading comprehension. I've never actually liked Tinnie and feel no particular loyalty to her, but it seemed an odd about-face.

The actual mystery plot of this one is pretty weak, frankly, but I'm so far into the series that I don't particularly care. They're often a bit stupid--and Garrett is frequently stupid--but I like them anyway. Actually I kind of like the fact that Garrett is unrepentantly a dude, with all the strengths and weaknesses that entails. He will never be smooth, he will probably always be lazy. For some reason women are attracted to him despite this. He's no romance hero, he's a lot more believable than that. These books fluff, and I always snatch them up as soon as they come out, and I enjoy the series enough to keep reading.

Bad Blood by John Sandford

2010-11-24T11:54:00.000-06:00

Bad Blood is the fourth in Sandford's series of mystery novels featuring investigator Virgil Flowers, who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In this case, a young man in a southern Minnesota town killed a farmer, and then was himself killed by a deputy while in custody. They go to interview the deputy, only to find that he has been killed, as well. This sets them to investigating, and in particular to looking at the religious group that both the dead farmer and the dead deputy belonged to. Nasty, nasty stuff is turned up. I will not say more, because you should read it yourself and I don't want to spoil it.

I really enjoy the Virgil Flowers stories. He's smart but a lot more laid back than his boss, Lucas Davenport. I was a bit startled in the first one when he went around blabbing everything he knew to the public in the hope of turning up more information, but it usually seems to work for him. The only thing I'm not so wild about is the scenes in which Virgil isn't present, where Sandford lets us know what the other characters are up to. Then we know things Virgil doesn't, and we're waiting for him to catch up. It adds length and suspense to the narrative, but I'd rather find things out at the same time Virgil does. Other than that, I really, really enjoy these mysteries.

Death of a Dissident by Stuart Kaminsky

2010-11-19T08:39:00.000-06:00

This was the November selection for my book group. The book came out in 1981, and is set in Moscow, in the winter. A couple of the members of the group felt that the whole thing was too cold and bleak and depressing, but I thought it fairly accurately set the mood in the USSR in winter in the early 1980s. Winter there, like here, is dark and cold.

The dissident referred to in the title is Aleksander Granovsky. He is on the eve of his trial for being an enemy of the state, and he is quite content with that. It is his intention to make a speech at the trial, the text of which will be smuggled to the west by his allies and hopefully make him an internationally known figure and a rallying-point for political protest. He is at home before the trial, working on his speech, when he answers a knock at the door and someone stabs him with a sickle. Later that evening, a cab driver is murdered by his passenger with a broken vodka bottle.

Because the murder is political, the KGB prefers not to be the ones investigating the case. It will look better if someone else solves it, or if someone else is the one who fails to solve it. So the case is given to a police inspector named Porfiry Rostnikov. Rostnikov is an older fellow with a wife and grown son. He isn't very ambitious politically, and realizes that he is unlikely to rise any further. Rostnikov was wounded in World War 2, and has a limp and constant pain as a reminder of the war. He selects two other policemen to work with him on the investigation. Karpo is an austere man who lives for the job and prides himself on having no friends. Tkach is a young officer who looks even younger, and is still relatively inexperienced.

They interview the dead man's peers and find that no one liked him, including his wife and daughter. They immediately decide that the crime must have been committed by a madman, and in the end it turns out that they are correct--the killer was a madman. I found that a bit odd. I mean, in old mysteries they're always proclaiming that the killer must have been a vagrant or a madman, but nearly always it turns out not to be true. However, in this case, he was crazy. Even so, I found the killer the least interesting character in the book.

They figure out who the killer must be but are unable to immediately apprehend him. Karpo is injured, and there is some drama over whether or not he will be all right. They eventually track down the killer outside the city, barely preventing him from killing again.

I loved the novel. I've studied a lot of Russian history over the years, and I often enjoy reading novels set in Russia. I think that Kaminsky did a good job of capturing what life in the Soviet Union was like at the time, and I enjoyed the slightly humorous characters they encountered. Other members of the group thought it was too cold and grim, and didn't particularly like the culture and environment described in the novel. But I was enchanted, by the setting and the characters and the story, and I plan to read more in the series.

An experiment

2010-11-14T13:38:00.000-06:00

OK, I am going to put off writing a book review for a moment in order to discuss something nonliterary: tuna noodle casserole.

I was paging through The Joy of Cooking over the weekend and realized something that might seem hard to believe -- I have never eaten tuna noodle casserole. Never, ever in my life. I guess it's supposed to be a universal food experience for Americans, particularly those from the Midwest, sort of like tater tot hot dish, something else I never had until someone brought it to a potluck luncheon when I was about 30.

Nope, my mom never made tater tot hot dish. And she never made tuna noodle casserole. She did have a tuna casserole she served fairly frequently, but it had tuna, Minute Rice, peas, and a can of cream of celery soup, as I recall. I liked it as a kid, but the couple of times I've tried it as an adult I thought it was fairly revolting. No tuna noodle casserole, though. And I have never had anyone else serve it to me, either.

So I looked at the recipe in The Joy of Cooking, and it seemed fairly straightforward and didn't involve a can of cream soup. My upbringing scarred me in that respect -- I will never make a recipe if it contains canned cream soup. But this recipe had a sauce made from scratch, and had some vegetables, and looked pretty doable. So today I made it for lunch.

I have to say, what's the point? It's sort of bland and mushy and, while I didn't really mind it, I also didn't really enjoy it. I would guess it has hung on as a staple not because it's good, but because it's a fairly inexpensive way to feed a family, and it's bland enough the kids probably won't refuse to eat it. Nevertheless, I was expecting it to be better. I certainly wasn't missing out on anything.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max

2010-11-09T09:32:00.000-06:00

I listened to this as an audiobook.

I've been wanting to read The Family that Couldn't Sleep for several years. The title references an Italian family who have a genetically inherited disease which causes them, usually in middle age, to lost the ability to sleep, which eventually leads to their death. I often find nonfiction about medical issues to be interesting, and the description sounded interesting to me.

The book turned out not to be quite what I was expecting. The material about the Italian family is very thin, indeed, and much of what the author writes of them is speculation. As he describes the final months of people's lives, he notes that they probably did something, or may have thought about something, because there isn't a detailed record, so the author guesses. Doctors who have examined the problem have concluded that the family has a prion disease, but there is no cure and members of the family currently don't really have any hope of one.

The story of the family is really just window dressing for an exploration of prion diseases, including kuru, scrapie, mad cow disease, and chronic wasting disease. It particularly focuses on mad cow disease and whether, and how, it may be transmitted to humans. I found all this mildly interesting, but also feel as if I picked up the book under false advertising. Really, if it had been entitled: A History of the Research on Prion Diseases and Especially Mad Cow, I wouldn't have bothered to read it. Which, I suspect, is why it was advertised as being about the Italian family.

Brooklyn Knight by C.J. Henderson

2010-11-06T09:34:00.000-06:00

I am going to do something unusual for me and make an entry on a book I didn't finish.

Brooklyn Knight is an urban fantasy featuring Piers Knight, a curator for the Brooklyn Museum. He is apparently a specialist in ancient cultures, but I get that from the back of the book since I didn't get far enough in to get much of a sense of what he does on an ordinary day when he's not magically foiling people trying to rob the museum. The novel begins with him picking up his new assistant at the airport and then going on at some length about how awesome New York City is. His assistant's role is apparently to be beautiful and ask him leading questions so he can lecture the readers. I didn't particularly like either character.

The worst part of the book is the writing, though, and that's what prompted me to write this entry. It's just...stilted and awkward and wrong. It feels a bit like things I've read online that were written by people for whom English is not their first language. Either that, or it's an unsuccessful attempt to capture the flavor of a period piece, even though it's set in the present day. Either way, it just set my teeth on edge.

I will give examples. In this scene, he is being questioned at the police station after magically foiling the would-be robbers at the museum. First we have his new assistant's reaction to being asked not to interrupt:

The young woman steamed, not taking kindly to being dismissed so brusquely. Having the good sense to realize that she had no cards to play in that situation, however, she accepted the detective's rebuke and sat back in silence. At the same time, noting that the well-oiled pair knew their parts well, that while his partner had addressed Knight's assistant, LaRaja's eyes had never left him, the professor also held his tongue from letting slip any of the somewhat frosty comments he really wanted to say."

That was a bit awkward, but then it gets worse. In response to a question from a detective, Knight says:

"Why, whatever do you mean, Denny? I like both you fellows considerably. You've always been very good to the museum, not to mention they way you've always--"

"Oh, cut it--Knight." Dollins' voice roared up out of him like a geyser rushing to the surface. Spewing it at the professor, he shouted, "Do not think you can get away playin' us! I'm warning you--do not do it. Do not try. We're talkin' four goddamned dead bodies. Blown to mother-humpin' little gooey bits! They're jelly, for Christ's sake. Your cleaning staff's gonna be Four-oh-nining that lobby for the rest of the week."

"It was quite a mess," admitted the professor.

"A mess?" Dollins rubbed a beefy hand over his face. "There's man-meat blown up, down, and around in every direction possible. You've got intestives festoonin' the front stairs and eyeballs embedded in your ceiling. That's more than just a goddamned mess, Knight!"

"Well, yes," answered the professor softly. "I do agree with you, of course. But I don't understand your meaning."

It's a bad sign when I'm reading a passage of text and making notes so that I can later quote it as an example of bad writing. People don't talk like that. And the awkward descriptions of the characters' actions and mannerisms are perhaps even worse.

As evidenced by some positive reviews at Amazon, obviously not all readers are bothered by the writing. But me? I was bothered, and found the text so distracting that the book is, for me, unreadable. I have no idea how this got accepted by Tor. Not recommended.

Blood Orchid by Stuart Woods

2010-10-31T08:17:00.000-06:00

This is the first novel I've read by Woods. It's a very light mystery set in the small town of Orchid Beach, Florida. When they described Orchid Beach as "the way Florida should have turned out but didn't--no high-rises on the beach, beautiful neighborhoods," I wondered for a moment if this was going to be a crime novel in the vein of Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, both of whom express sadness for the way Florida has turned out. However, though Blood Orchid was very light, it didn't approach the humor and mayhem that those writers achieve.

Holly Barker is the chief of police of Orchid Beach. She's ex-military, an excellent shot, and has a pet doberman pinscher. She inherited a beautiful beach home and a large insurance settlement the previous year when her fiance died, but she's lonely without him. One evening a gentleman strikes up a conversation with her, and then invites her back to his home to see his orchids. While there, someone shoots into the greenhouse, narrowly missing her new acquaintance. He is a retired land developer, and when she learns that two other developers were shot to death, she has to assume that the cases are related.

Her new friend, Ed, purchased a development that the government had seized from drug traffickers and auctioned off, and re-named it Blood Orchid. Meanwhile someone breaks into her home and bugs her phone, a dead man is found floating in the river, and the FBI places a very attractive undercover agent in the area but won't tell her what he's working on. She quickly falls into bed with the FBI agent, then goes running around investigating the dead man and periodically calling the Miami FBI office and being angry that the agent in charge won't share information with her.

Holly is amazingly indiscreet. She rages that people won't tell her anything, but she doesn't hesitate to babble everything she knows to people she's only just met. This turns out not to be a good idea, unsurprisingly. A bunch of people die, some of them killed by Holly. It's all very light and mildly entertaining. This certainly isn't a great book, or even a terribly good one, but it held my attention for a couple of hours.

The Murder Room by Michael Capuzzo

2010-10-28T09:36:00.001-06:00

The Murder Room is a work of nonfiction about the Vidocq Society, a group of detectives, law enforcement professionals, and crime experts who meet in Philadelphia and re-examine cold cases. It centers especially on three men who helped create the organization: Bill Fleischer, a federal agent; Richard Walter, a psychologist and profiler; and Frank Bender, a forensic artist. Though there are many more members of the Society, and many of them are mentioned, this book is mostly about the three men named above.

I picked this book up after my boss mentioned it to me. There was a double murder several years back in Hudson, the town where I grew up, and the Vidocq Society examined the case and helped lead to its resolution. In fact, the book's prologue is about the Hudson case, but the resolution doesn't come until almost the end of the book. I know how it came out, of course, but still was interested in what the book would say. And it certainly provided a good hook in the prologue:

The profiler studied the case file and chatted with the police for three hours before narrowing the eleven suspects to one. "It's the priest," he told the police. "Of course, I know you don't want it to be the priest. Nonetheless, it's the priest."

Other than the case I was personally interested in, the book also focuses on other cases: an unidentified murdered child found in Philadelphia in the 1950s, a young man killed by his girlfriend in Texas, a college student murdered at school whose shoes were missing, a girl found murdered in a church, and many others. It makes for grim, if fascinating, reading. Though, frankly, I think the most grim thing about the book was the number of crimes that people get away with. Sometimes they discover the killer too late to bring them to justice, sometimes there isn't enough evidence, and sometimes local law enforcement or the DA are uninterested.

The book's narrative style bothered me a little bit, as sometimes happens with works like this. There is a lot of dialogue, a lot of conversations, that surely weren't recorded at the time, and I have to assume that the author recreated them based on what the participants later told him. Doubtless they are more or less correct, but still it always sets off little alarms in my head, thinking: Really? How do you know, word for word, what was said in a conversation 15 or 20 years ago? It's probably a minor thing, but it always jerks me out of the enjoyment of a work of nonfiction when I have to wonder how much of it is fabricated. The author also repeats things too much, like reminding us of what happened in a case we read about a few chapters earlier. Yes, I read the book. Yes, I remember that. No, you don't need to tell me again. And he has an irritating of habit of rarely using Walter's name, instead describing him again and again as 'the thin man.' I felt like at any moment we were going to step into a comedy featuring a rich drunk, a pretty airheaded bimbo, and a small dog. It doesn't irritate readers when an author calls characters by their name, but it can be irritating to readers when they try to think of ways to avoid calling characters by their name.

I was also struck by the way the local case was portrayed, which led me to wonder about the accuracy of the other stories. The account isn't substantially wrong, but there were problems: the town isn't as small as described, the local newspaper's name was wrong, and he relocated Wisconsin to place it west of Minnesota. Plenty was left out, there are broad generalizations that weren't entirely accurate--it's not exactly wrong, but also not exactly right. I understand that the author is more interested in a brief, entertaining chapter in a larger work than an in-depth exploration of this particular event, but it just seemed a little sloppy.

The Hudson chapter is near the end, and then we revisit a couple more cases the author had talked about earlier in the book, and the final chapter is very soppy and sentimental. (Ick, ick, ick.) However, though I see that in this review I have mostly expressed reservations about the work, it is still pretty readable and quite interesting. I don't actually believe the author's portrayal of Richard as always right and Bender as psychic, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The Night she Died by Dorothy Simpson

2010-10-23T06:17:00.000-06:00

I joined a mystery book group, and this was our first selection.

I used to read Dorothy Simpson, and I read this book about 20 years ago, along with all the others that were available at the time. At some point, though, I got frustrated with the author and stopped reading these mysteries. Reading The Night She Died again, I can remember what I used to like about these books. And I can also remember why I stopped reading them.

This is the first in a series of British police procedurals featuring Inspector Luke Thanet. He and his sidekick Lineham are called to the a murder scene where they find a young woman stabbed to death in her entryway. They eliminate the husband as a suspect, and begin to study the dead woman's life, because Thanet believes that the way to learn how someone died is to understand what kind of person they are, or something like that. They find her smarmy boss and her smarmy ex-boyfriend and her marriage counselor, and Thanet and Lineham spout all sorts of nonsense speculation about how she's a cold and frigid woman who is incapable of loving anyone.

And then Thanet goes off on a tangent. He sees that she owns a painting by a deceased artist from a nearby town, and wonders how she came to own it. So he does a little digging, and finds that the victim was born in the nearby town, and that on one horrible night her father died in a car crash, so her mother left the toddler with a sitter while she went to the hospital to be with him in his final hours, and that same evening someone came in and murdered the sitter before the child's eyes. And that her mother packed her up and they moved away, but that she (the victim) had recently been having nightmares that Thanet is sure are based on repressed memories of the night she witnessed a murder from her crib.

Sigh. What a load of bullshit.

Anyway, Thanet goes off on this tangent, and he thinks that, because our victim resembles her mother at the same age, and because she loaned her painting to an art exhibition and attended the opening, that someone might, all these years later, realize that maybe she witnessed the murder, and decided to silence her. So he spends some time interviewing very old suspects and speculating about that unsolved murder all those years ago---and it turns out that they had nothing to do with her murder. Except that Thanet believes that her repressed-memory nightmares put her on edge which led her to fighting with her ex boyfriend which led her smarmy boss to murder her. And that if she hadn't had those memories, it wouldn't have set that chain in action, and she would be alive if she hadn't attended that art exhibition.

Gack. That is so bad.

The Night she Died was written 30 years ago, and we were all struck by how the mystery genre has changed. For one thing, it's a 200 page book, though she packs a lot in. Mysteries these days tend to be longer, and at least in the police procedural subgenre, readers today expect that they be more realistic. Unfortunately one of the ways writers try to make them more realistic is to make them grim, frequently by making the detectives depressed alcoholics with miserable home lives who are often loose cannons constantly struggling against their superiors. Given those as examples, it is refreshing that Thanet has a happy home life that forms a major part of his identity. On the other hand, the home life was one of the reasons I stopped reading Simpson. I believe the final straw was the one where his teenage daughter was having panic attacks over her exams, and Thanet spent more time agonizing over his daughter's angst than he spent trying to solve the crime. And there were other ones, too, in which Thanet spent much too much time on family stuff to suit me. I'm reading mysteries because I want to read about the crime and how they solve it, not dozens of pages of the detective mulling over what to do about his obnoxious children.

However getting back to this particular book, it was fairly engaging and yet also fairly weakly plotted. A great deal of time is wasted on a wild goose chase (although a bit refreshing, in that in mysteries like this the wild hunch usually turns out to be correct), the resolution was a bit abrupt, and once they decided who the killer was, they had no evidence, so Thanet tripped the guy up on a really ridiculous ruse. Several of us also thought that given the situation, the character's motivation for killing her was not believable. We didn't believe, in that situation, that even that unlikeable jerk would have decided to kill her. Which isn't to say that we didn't enjoy the book, I think most of us did. It just wasn't that good when you really scrutinized it.

Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia

2010-10-17T18:31:00.000-06:00

Vendetta is the sequel to Monster Hunter International. It again features the monster-splattering adventures of Owen Pitt and his buddies at Monster Hunter International.

This one is set almost a year after the last one. Owen is engaged to Julie, the woman of his dreams, and happily killing monsters. Things go wrong, however, on a trip to Mexico when he is attacked by a necromancer and then the hotel is overrun by zombies. This unfortunately brings him to the attention of the US government's monster-hunting branch, who are interested in the necromancer and the crazy cult he heads, and view Owen as the best way to find him. He isn't very happy about it, but becomes even more unhappy when his family are endangered. In the long run it turns out that Owen isn't finished with being the Chosen One who can save the world, though I thought we'd kind of worked through that in the first book.

As I noted with Monster Hunter International, this book isn't a sensitive and perceptive study of human nature, it's a first person shooter. Owen spots monsters, Owen tries to kill monsters, something gets in his way, Owen gets really mad and does stupid things. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the book--I did, actually. It's almost 650 pages, but it just flies by. It's a lot like the last one, really, and I don't have much else to say about it. I enjoyed it, though, and if a third book comes out, I will happily read it. It's just good, fun, mindless violence.

Unholy Ghosts by Stacia Kane

2010-10-13T19:33:00.000-06:00

Unholy Ghosts is the latest in my sampling of urban and paranormal fantasies as I try to figure out if my earlier impression that I don't care for them was correct. Regular readers will recall that I've had a streak of books I didn't care for, and I was nearly ready to give up this reading experiment and go back to books I'm more likely to enjoy. If I hadn't had such great success with Patricia Briggs, I probably would have already given up by now.

Anyway, I realized last night that Unholy Ghosts was due back at the library today, and I couldn't renew it because someone else had a hold on it. That meant I had to speed through this one to finish it and return it this evening. I started the book yesterday evening and struggled with it a bit as I was very sleepy. I occasionally have a night like last night, when I'm dozing off on the sofa by 8:30. That certainly wasn't conducive to my enjoying the book. However I finished it today, and then went back and re-read the beginning and found that it was much better when I was awake.

I am happy to report that Unholy Ghosts is pretty good. In fact, it's good enough that I will look for the next one. And after this last reading streak, what a relief it was to read a book I enjoyed!

Unholy Ghosts is set in the near future. The point of departure from our world happened in 1997, when the spirits of the dead rose and killed two-thirds of the population of the earth. Since then the world has come to be run by the Church of Real Truth, who collect taxes and keep the spirits under control and protect the population. It is not the Christian church or even a real religion--they do not believe in god, and do not believe in faith. Faith, they say, isn't necessary when you know the facts. The Church monitors the dead and protects the populace, and occasionally need to banish the odd haunting.

If a true haunting is found, the Church gives a large settlement to the property owners. This provides incentive for people to fake hauntings in the hope of getting a settlement, sort of like insurance fraud. Thus the Church has a category of employees known as Debunkers, whose job it is to investigate these claims and prove them to be either false or true, and if true to banish the spirit. Most claims are false.

Our protagonist, Chess, is a young Debunker for the church. She is quite poor, as Debunkers aren't paid much (though they get a bonus whenever they find a claim to be false) and what she does make she spends on her drug habit. Chess, you see, is an addict, and also has suicidal thoughts. She is currently in debt to a drug dealer named Bump, who says that she can work off her debt by looking into an old air field where he's been trying to land planes of drugs, but they keep crashing. Chess is sent off to investigate with Bump's enforcer, Terrible. She finds no signs of a manufactured haunting, but does encounter ugly black magic at the abandoned air field. Meanwhile she is also officially investigating a suburban family called the Mortons who seem to be faking a haunting.

Not surprisingly, the two investigations turn out to be connected. Someone has performed a dark ritual and summoned a supernatural creature that feeds off people's dreams. Chess is somewhat protected because she doesn't eat or sleep, she just pops uppers. She realizes that someone from the Church must be involved, and Kane drops two big, obvious clues on our heads. One points to a particular fellow, and then when it turns out he isn't the guilty one, she drops another big, obvious hint so that the reader can figure it out before Chess does. That part was perhaps a bit clumsy, but really I think it's the only misstep in the book, and it isn't really an important flaw.

The writing is quite good. One thing I particularly appreciated was the way some of the characters spoke. Chess was educated by the Church and speaks normal grammatical English, but she lives in a poor neighborhood and is dealing with various members of the lower and criminal classes. They speak in their own dialect, but it never felt forced or awkward or hard to understand. It read right--like the sentences were made in a way that could be spoken naturally. Though, on further reflection, the novel seems to take place approximately 20 years after the events of 1997, and most of the people she is dealing with were apparently born before then. I'm not sure that 20 years is long enough for people to forget normal grammar and develop a separate dialect. So it perhaps doesn't entirely make sense, but it read well and believably anyway.

I cannot help but compare Unholy Ghosts with Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire. Chess is, really, almost as much of a loser as October Daye, and yet Chess didn't piss me off. I'm at a little bit of a loss to define exactly why I hated Rosemary and Rue and liked Unholy Ghosts, but I did. My experiment in urban fantasy isn't providing as many answers as I expected it would. I have concluded that I apparently do like urban fantasy, if it's the right kind, but defining what makes some novels the right stuff and others not--that's eluding me. I would have guessed, for instance, that the Harry Dresden novels would be the right kind--they're not that different than Mark del Franco's Connor Grey novels, which I like--and yet Dresden doesn't work for me and Grey does. Likewise Chess works for me and Toby Daye doesn't. And I really don't know why. But I'm glad I enjoyed it, and will track down the next one soon.

Grave Peril by Jim Butcher

2010-10-09T17:54:00.000-06:00

I read this in my continuing experiment with urban/paranormal fantasy. I read one other Butcher, years ago, and didn't love it but didn't mind it. I then picked up the second one, and couldn't get past the first chapter. This is a later one in the series, featuring Harry Dresden, wizard-for-hire in Chicago.

I'm not going to bother to recite the plot. Harry gets into deep trouble, and then deeper trouble, and then deeper trouble yet. Really the only thing I have to say is, I'm quite surprised by how intensely I came to dislike this one. I wasn't expecting that. This reading experiment has led me to the conclusion that I sometimes like urban fantasy, if it's the right type, and I would have guessed that the Harry Dresden series might fit into the type I like to read. However, it appears that I was wrong, because I didn't like this at all.

Hunting Ground by Patricia Briggs

2010-10-05T13:53:00.000-06:00

This is the sequel to Cry Wolf. It takes place just a few weeks later. Bran, the leader of all the werewolves in North America, has decided that it's time for werewolves to emerge from the closet. He intends to let the word out that they exist, and has selected a few strong and respectable wolves to be the initial public face of the werewolves. The European werewolves are not very happy about this idea, as it will affect them, too. So a contingent of European Alphas have come to meet with him.

Charles, Bran's younger son, has a bad feeling about the meeting, and convinces Bran to send himself and his new mate Anna in his stead. They travel to Seattle for the meeting, where Charles introduces Anna to the major players of the story. The two most important people at the meeting are the French alpha, Chastel, who is a sadistic killer, and the British alpha, Arthur, who believes himself to be the reincarnation of King Arthur. Chastel has no intention of cooperating with Bran because they dislike each other, and he is dangerous enough that most of the others won't dare cross him. Arthur might take Bran's side, but if so it would be in order to thwart Chastel, as he and Bran aren't allies, either.

Things don't go very smoothly, as Anna is frightened of all the dominant wolves around her, and then she's attacked by a squad of vampires. She and Charles need to figure out what's going on, and to keep the peace among the others. Charles is going crazy at the threat to his mate, who he needs to protect. Anna has some growing to do, and I am happy to see that she toughened up and stood up for herself a few times. It's a good sign.

As in Cry Wolf, Anna is just sometimes a little too special to stomach. Nevertheless, this is more of an action book than a relationship book, and I enjoyed it more than the first one. It still isn't as good as the Mercy Thompson novels, but the series has some promise.