Author: Brian J. Noggle

This book tops the scales at 388 pages, and, frankly, it made me miss the days of one hundred and fifty page pulp books. Because let’s face it, this book has more akin to those crime thrillers than to more sweeping classical literature that covers more of the human condition and clocks in at a hundred more pages or less.

It’s a disappointing entry in the Prey series. The main plot revolves around an old woman who gets killed and robbed of a few expensive antiques that won’t be missed. It’s a pair of antique dealers doing this, you see, carefully across different states and whatnot. But it unravels when a young black man recognizes that some pieces are missing. I didn’t hesitate to tell you who did it because Sandford tips it pretty early, too, and then you see, via the narrative equivalent of split screen, what the bad guys do while the good guys try to figure it out. Sometimes it works, but given the other evidence, it cumulatively just looks sloppy.

To pad it out, Sandford spends a lot of time on a subplot, a Republican politician who is accused of sleeping with an underage girl. This subplot doesn’t deal with solving the crime, but how, politically, to deal with it. The Prey books have always had an element of this, but the book really throws this in and then combines the two plots as the antiques dealers use this as a red herring to throw Davenport off. When that doesn’t work, many pages later, the subplot doesn’t get mentioned again.

In the review of Phantom Prey, I wondered if sometimes Sandford didn’t know what he was talking about. Another couple bits within this book often sound tinny, as though Sandford didn’t really get into the context of the subcultures he’s writing about. For example, the young black man (I mean, high school student) goes to a hip hop club’s under 18 night on the night of the murder. He’s there with a couple of friends. A hip hop club, you understand. He takes mass transit down, but:

At ten o’clock, the mother of one of the kids picked up the boys in her station wagon and hauled them all back to St. Paul.
“What kind of car?” Lucas asked.
“A Cadillac SUV–I don’t know exactly what they’re called,” Lash said. “It was a couple years old.”

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but the Cadillac SUV is the obscure Escalade which, as far as I know, a couple of people in the hip hop industry drive. Sure, Sandford intimates that it’s a station wagon, which could mean the vehicle he has in mind is the Cadillac SRX, but the narrator shouldn’t crop that up, and I really think the boy would relate to the Cadillac SUV as either the Escalade or not. Not “I don’t know exactly what they’re called.”

Sadly, I think the series is drooping. Sandford might be phoning these in, and talking for hours while doing so.

This book is another in the Matt Helm series, the fourth (I think).

In it, Helm travels to Mexico, gets some secret information, and then walks into a trap on purpose to get to an agent known as The Cowboy who might be sabotaging a nuclear test. When he gets caught, as planned, Helm turns the tables on his captors and on the woman who has double-crossed him–as planned–even as they’ve fallen in love.

It’s not very complicated, but it’s a 60s paperback adventure. You get a handful of scenes, a female love interest of potentially duplicitious motivation, and then you get a sudden climax with a big explosion. A hundred and fifty pages, and you’re done. Man, I love these paperbacks.

This book takes on a number of media-promulgated myths and explains why most of them are false. As a reasonable, libertarian sort of fellow myself, I already knew most of them. The last chapter of myths covers parenting, and it’s the weakest one. Stossel is a consumer reporter, not necessarily a parenting reporter, so the book ends on a weak note.

Another book that goes along with what I believe, generally, so it didn’t challenge me much. Explaining common sense to someone with some common sense ain’t riveting reading. Sadly, like most political books, only people who agree with it will buy it/acquire it.

Speaking of which, since I just bought a hardback copy, I have a trade paperback to get rid of. Call it if you want it.

So I picked this book up for a quick mad-on for those who would rule us (those in the other party, I mean). It takes on the likes of Michael Moore, Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, and so on and details how their personal lives don’t match their public rhetoric. You know, I found most of these people odious to begin with, and I get enough of this sort of material from the blogs daily, so the book didn’t do much for me. The best I can say is that now I’m conflicted about buying Ravenswood wines because Pelosi owns a stake in them.

I guess this book works best for readers who don’t traverse the blog circuit regularly and instead buy books from advertisements in National Review or the conservative book club.

This is the second book I’ve read recently that was set soon after the Cuban revolution, and Fleming didn’t think it would last (to the contrary, Brett Haliday thought it might be a good idea.) These things strike me.

This book deals with a post-brainwashing, post-trying-to-assassinate-M Bond unbrainwashed and assigned to kill a Caribbean hitter who used a goldern Colt .45 revolver and custom gold-loaded bullets. Bond goes down there, infilitrates, and gets his man.

I can’t remember how the Roger Moore Bond film of the same name worked, but I would guess it differed greatly from the book. It’s a pretty good read, an artifact of the times and of the medium (pseudo-pulp spy fiction, the good stuff before the epic, moral-grey-area stuff came on).

This book, like the other book I’ve read most recently from Agatha Christie (By The Pricking Of My Thumbs) comes from Agatha Christie’s later works (remember, gentle reader, she started in 1920; this book is from 52 years later and is the penultimate book she wrote). Maybe I’m crazy, but I like the earlier works better, back before the main characters got old.

This book features Hercule Poirot and Mrs. Oliver trying to suss out the story behind a murder/suicide fifteen years earlier. A rarely-seen goddaughter of Mrs. Oliver is set to marry, but the groom’s mother worries about the goddaughter’s parents’ deaths. The protagonists puzzle it out based on reminisces and rumors from people only tangentally involved with the story. As a matter of fact, a main part of the story turns on the goddaughter not knowing her own family or forgetting things that happened at age 14.

So it’s not a very satisfying book in Mrs. Christie’s canon, but reading the book, I’m reminded that she had her own book club as late as the 1980s; one could join the club and get a different Agatha Christie book every month for several years if one was inclined. Wow. I remember Stephen King had one, too, and he’s the only author of our generation that I can recall having such. These days, nobody reads enough to rope them into something like that. And I notice the BOMC offers to send out two books automatically each month unless you send back the card. Just so they can soak the negligent double until they cancel, I guess.

Well, it’s a Parker Western. I picked it up because Appaloosa‘s movie version opened this weekend.

The moral bankruptness of the Parker universe progresses. In it, Cole, the marshal from Appaloosa, has left Appaloosa after his lover runs off with another man. Off-page, Cole hunts down the man and kills him simply for taking up with Cole’s interest. Then, when he joins Hitch in Resolution, the town of the title, Cole takes up with a married woman. Does he deserve to die for it? Apparently not, for some reason that might include he’s a gunman or the woman’s husband has beaten her (but she still loves him and returns to him at the end after the empowerment-through-adultery trope that Parker repeats lately).

Forget it. I’m not even wasting money on Book Club Editions of the new Parker books. I’ll pick them up at book fairs. Maybe.

Oh, for the plot of the book: Everett Hitch signs on as a lookout man at a saloon, and eventually Cole shows up and they navigate through a dispute amongst the homesteaders and their employer. The book meanders through a large number (70+) chapters-as-scenes with semi-unrelated fuguish subplots. Finally, when the word count is reached, Cole faces down the bad guys in a quick shootout. The bad man and his plot to build subdivisions (!) in the old West are thwarted.

Seriously. The man is running homesteaders off to build subdivisions.

On the plus side, unlike Ed McBain, Bush’s name isn’t invoked in his historical or contemporary works, not that I’ll know anymore until the election is way over. I’ve also avoided Parker’s new line of Young Adult novels, but part of me has a morbid curiosity to see how he injects adultery-as-affirmation thing into them.

And I now pose this question for debate, although none of you will debate it with me because you’re all wiser than I am and have avoided the collected works of Parker, but here it is: Which was more detrimental to Parker’s writing: whatever adultery occurred in the middle 1980s to make it the single biggest recurring theme in all of his subsequent work, or Parker’s work for the Spenser for Hire television show that subsequently turned all of his novels into chapters scenes with simple stage management but mostly dialog along with the reliance on recurring guest stars and formulaic endings?