Category: Book Report

I read a large number of Alistair MacLean books in high school. Because we were poor, living in a poor community, my reading was indelibly guided by the reading tastes of the all-volunteer Community Library’s volunteers and donors. Ergo, I read a lot of McBain, Parker, and MacLean because the storefront library had a large number of old paperbacks by its donors’ favorite authors, some of whom became my favorite authors, too.

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that I bought this book at the Bridgeton Trails branch of the St. Louis County library for a quarter as it sells off its books to make room for more Internet connections. So I happened upon a couple of Alistair MacLean books I’d read before and would like to revisit.

This book, as its title suggests, takes place in the former Yugoslavia during World War II. A Royalist sympathizer helps to smuggle a group of other royalist sympathizers into Yugoslavia from its ally Italy, where they can help the war effort of their friends the Germans and the leaders against the Partisans. One does need a bit of grounding in history, particularly World War II in the middle of Europe, to understand the overarching framework of the novel. Since it’s less straightforward than the English versus the Germans, a reader might be forgiven for forgetting which group is the good guys and which group is the bad guys.

Of course, as it’s MacLean, the master of the suspenseful switchback, regardless of which group is the good guys and which group is the bad guys, the main character is either not on the side that he starts on, or he is actually on the side he starts on but is pretending to be a double agent to find out the real double agents, or…. Well, it’s enough to say that MacLean books are quite romps in which anything can happen.

But this book, with its slightly more obscure setting and almost esoteric historical plotline, doesn’t work on all levels because of the unfamiliarity with the macroplayers. It also doesn’t present a very clear picture of the problem that the group is supposed to solve at the end of the book. Take down the artillery on a Mediterranean island? Breach an impregnable Alpine fortress? Nah, just get into Yugoslavia. It strikes me more like a Star Trek device: We’re traveling through the Adriatic, and something happened. Since it’s MacLean, it’s something complicated, but nevertheless the reader lacks a compelling goal to draw one along.

Still, it’s a pretty good book. Its writing style alone merited my enjoyment. British and mid-century in its character (although written later), it plays with longer sentences and more elaborate phrasing than contemporary suspense fiction. That alone carried me through the substandard (for MacLean) plot and characterization.

Based on my previous experience with Foster, I bought a number of Alan Dean Foster books last May at Downtown Books in Milwaukee (including Codgerspace, The Dig, and Midworld). Like those, I paid $2.95 for this book, and I offer the same criticism: It reads like a stretched out short story.

Foster does have a predilection for prediction though; in this book, written in 1989 or before, future police officers carry PDAs and hook into the Internet frequently. However, as he wrote the books before Netscape opened the World Wide Web, things have different names (mollyspinners and whatnot), but the intervening 15 years have not rendered the futuristic technologies obsolete; instead, life has developed along those lines, making the book very approachable in 2005.

When an art collector is murdered in Tampa, the methodical detective Vernon Moody draws the case. The industrialist collector died in his art display room, and the murderer also destroyed a Navaho sand painting. Early investigations indicate that someone had argued with the collector about the painting on numerous occasions. The department sends the homebody Moody to the southwest to determine the Navaho connection. Unfortunately, Moody not only finds a murderer, but a world beyond his imagination where sandpaintings and medicine men can tap into something more powerful than police.

An enjoyable, imaginative short story stretched into a short novel with the addition of a lot of filler talk and speculation. Worth a couple of bucks undoubtedly, particularly if you appreciate Alan Dean Foster.

As those of you who have revelled in these book reports know, I bought five of these old Star Trek books last autumn at Hooked on Books in Springfield, Missouri, at three for one dollar. As such, I only paid 33 cents for this paperback, and it was well worth it.

Like the others in the series, it collects and short storiates a couple of episodes from the original television series because, back in the day, they didn’t have the Internet to provide a resounding board for scifi fans to resonate. As a matter of fact, the introduction to this book describes the unexpected success of the first Star Trek convention. This book was originally published a number of years after Star Trek went off of the air and a decade and change before Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted. For crying out loud, it preceded Star Trek: The Motion Picture by a number of years. So pardon me while I repeat my awe at these books. They were old school fandom, werd.

This book collects the following episodes:

• Return to Tomorrow
• The Ultimate Computer
• That Which Survives
• Obsession
• The Return of the Archons
• The Immunity Syndrome

I only remembered “Return to Tomorrow” certainly, although I suspect I might have seen “The Ultimate Computer” and “The Return of the Archons” before. As such, they really urge me to spend the THREE HUNDRED SCHNUCKING DOLLARS that a set of the original shows would cost on DVD, but then I remember that it’s THREE HUNDRED SCHNUCKING DOLLARS, which doesn’t really add up since I could buy THIRTY OTHER DVDS or TEN YEARS OF THE SIMPSONS for the price, or if Hooked on Books could find them, NINE HUNDRED COPIES of these books.

But still, I grew up when these were the only things science fiction things in syndication, with Buck Rogers and (the original) Battlestar Galactica and Space 1999 only coming onto television, so the stories and the original crew–especially now that two of them have passed on. So I’ll enjoy the books at three pages per penny, but not the actual shows AT A COUPLE BUCKS PER, you hear me PARAMOUNT?!

I bought this paperback book from Downtown Books in Milwaukee for $1.95, but that comes as no surprise to you, gentle reader, if you’ve paid attention to the book reports I’ve proffered. I love John D. MacDonald and had I not sworn allegiance to Robert B. Parker at an early age, you know I would be a paladin in the service of John D. MacDonald. But that explains why I have this book, but not what I thought of it.

The book, like most paperbacks of the era, runs about 190 pages, unlike the unwieldy behemoths published today (to justify their $30 price tags). Working within these constraints, MacDonald provides an interesting riff. He spends the first half of the book detailing a number of separate travellers’ lives, from the failed businessman moving back to New York to the agent at the end of his vengeance quest to the prison escapees. travelling north on Florida’s west coast as a hurricane strikes. They’re thrown into an abandoned house to weather the storm, with the results one might expect from the collision of Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. Himself conflicts colliding. Brother, it’s bad enough to collide, but when collisions collide, watch out.

Still, within the compact framework, MacDonald spends the first 100+ pages on individual character studies discussing whose lives will come into conflict at the last half of the novel. That’s okay if you’re going to read the novel in a sitting or two, but if you’re going to spread the novel over a week or so, you might find yourself at a critical moment wondering who is Stark? Who is Mallard? Are they even characters in this book? Heck’s pecs, I don’t know. But when the separate lives come together circa page 110, the book becomes unputdownable.

Unfortunately, those first 100 pages do make the book seem as though a series of short stories lacked resolution which was grafted on, or as though a novella had been padded into a novel. Still, if you’re a fan of MacDonald or if you’re wondering what a cynic would have thought of Florida development throughout the fifties, you’d find the book enjoyable. I’d read one of MacDonald’s shopping lists if he were to characterize each item on it.

But this book probably only acted, for MacDonald, as a rough draft for Condominium. Thirty years earlier. Brother, if I am recycling my underread 2005 material, successfully, in 2035, I will consider myself a successful writer worthy of paladinage decades into the future.

I bought this book last autumn at a clearance book store for $5.00 because 1.) I have a fond memory of an old Scholastic copy of Ben Bova’s Escape and 2.) I have a fond college-era memory of Cyberbooks. So I opened this book as a break from the suspense I’d been reading lately, and….

I was underwhelmed.

Sure, I see that this is Book 1 of the Asteroid Wars, which unfortunately means that there’s some greater arc that the book will set up and that some plot lines will be unresolved at the end of the book, unfortunately. When my brother was in the Marines, he gave me all of his basic training reading material before he shipped off to Hawaii. This reading material comprised numerous books one or one and two of a trilogy, but never a book three….unless it was to a separate trilogy with no preceding books to set the plot up. So I have some experience with this sort of thing. Besides, every trilogy or whatnot begins with Book 1. So I got in on a ground floor opportunity here.

The premise: As the world runs over the “greenhouse cliff” (the Precipice), a space industrialist bucks cutthroat competition and overregulation to use a fusion drive to go to the Asteroid Belt to claim resources that can help the Earth alleviate its disaster.

Sounds kinda stock, with a topical interest whose political ramifications made me put down the book after a couple of pages once before. But I soldiered on this time, friends, For you.

Unfortunately, to accommodate its arc (and its past, which I will hint at now and later), the book spends the first half (200+ pages) on the political and corporate wrangling leading to the funding and the initial reaction to the prospect of the mission. Major yawn, and it was only through discipline that I really made it through. After the midpoint of the book, when the industrialist and his plucky pilots and capable geologist steal his ship to go to the Asteroid Belt without the approval of the government, the pacing picks up, and we’re in a rollicking science fiction book instead of some sort of corporate drama set tomorrow. Lester Del Rey, who was clawing his way out of his grave to beat Ben Bova, settled back to rest.

Unfortunately, after 180 pages of a good science fiction story buttressed by 250 pages of corporate wrangling. I found the end unsatisfying because of the extensive lengths Bova went to make the villain available for future novels in the series.

And while researching the book for this report (read: Clicking around on Amazon on related links), I discovered that the industrialist, Dan Randolph, is the subject of a long-running series of novels by Ben Bova. So perhaps I’m not privy to the nature of that series, nor of the significance of this book in that particular pantheon. Perhaps if I had bought the last ten years’ worth of Bova work, I’d be satisfied with the book and would recognize its position in the constellation, and admire its beauty as part of the whole.

But I’m too steeped in the world of suspense series, where the books are discrete units that build upon one another, and although later books might refer to earlier works in the series, one doesn’t have to read earlier books to understand the significance, and the current book does not have cliffhangers and hooks into the next or the next several for resolution.

So this novel got better as it went on to the new reader, but I don’t expect to buy the remainder of the series nor of the preceding series unless I can get them for a buck or less each sometime after I’ve diminished my stack of to-read books.

I picked up this book from my to-read shelves for two reasons:

• I just read a book based on a movie starring Madonna, and this book shares the title with one of her early hits.
• The Robert B. Parker endorsement on the front cover: “Gerry Boyle is the genuine article.”

Man, I hope I get a book published before Robert B. Parker dies so I can get a quote. That would be the highlight of my life, werd. (Except for you, honey, but fortunately you’re not entirely consistent in reading this far into book reports, so I might be safe.)

The book chronicles a freelance writer, former New York Times reporter (not that there’s anything wrong with that), who is working on a travel story following Benedict Arnold’s march and assault on Quebec when he finds a mystery. A man has stepped off of a bus at a rest stop in a small Maine town and didn’t get back on. Jack McMorrow’s curiosity is piqued, and when he finds the man was travelling under a false name and paid for his ticket with a bad check, his big city reporter instincts take over.

So McMorrow investigates this possible crime amid his paying job, an article that follows the path of Arnold’s march on Quebec and ultimate rebuff at the hands of the English at Quebec. As he meanders through his investigation, the police don’t believe him, and actually offer to set him up for a crime to get him out of their small town.

As such, this book has a very Existential subcurrent running through it; McMorrow’s connection to history, personal life, and alienation from the professional law enforcement led me to think of it in those terms before the author/main character invoked the names of Camus and Sartre. So I related to the character in a way I hadn’t before, and I didn’t mind so much the slow pace of the book or the ultimately less-than-climactic resolution.

I won’t dodge Boyle’s work in the future, and I might even spend a couple bucks on further hardbacks in this series. I’m wonder, though, whether prolonged exposure to the book’s pacing and its ultimately only slightly heroic main character might wear upon me.

I bought this book at a garage sale in my old eBay days. When cleaning out the backstock of those old books, I decided to add it to my personal library since I’ve never seen the movie, but I was kind of familiar with the plot. So I read it.

What do you want? It’s the novelization of a romantic comedy about Baby Boomers being New Wave in the middle 1980s. Man, they actually used to novelize those things. Now, that tradition is only upheld for books that geeks and fanboys will buy.

Roberta, an aging (26!) and disenchanted suburban housewife, lives vicariously through the personal ads, particularly a series of ads wherein a man desperately seeks Susan. When she follows the directions to one of Susan’s rendezvous, Roberta becomes more immersed in Susan’s life than in her own.

I took two things away from this book:

• If Madonna had been born 20 years later, she would have been one of the first stars with a sex tape accidentally leaked to the Internet.
• I find it unintentionally amusing when I read books where characters in their mid twenties think they’re old. You don’t really get old until your middle thirties, anyone in his or her middle thirties will tell you.

Now I’ll have to get the commemorative twentieth anniversary two-DVD retrospective that’s due any day now.

I inherited this book from my aunt, which explains why I’ve read a chickthrilla. That in itself lends itself to some interesting contrasts with the crime fiction I tend to read, where every protagonist has a shot in an equal fight with amateur bad guys. Here, the protagonist is a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than commone adversaries. Weird.

This book revolves around a true crime writer who has put to bed a book on a south Florida crime of passion. A minister who has argued against the death penalty has been convicted of killing his wife to cover up an affair or to be with his lover. Coincidentally, he’s now on death row in the next cell from the inmate whose cause the minister championed. But as she sends the book off, the narrator has some niggling doubts about the crimes, and she investigates a little more.

The book intersperses chapters of the fictional true crime book with current thoughts of the true crime author/sleuth, Marie Lightfoot. It struck me as odd that the chapters of the book are all in third person past tense, but the current investigations are in the first person present. I mean, that’s just weird. I’m sure the author (Pickard, the real author) used the conceit to differentiate the fictional book from the real fictional book, er, story. It’s more jarring than it needs to be, though, and I could have done without it.

Overall, it’s a serviceable book with an interesting plot but with an ending and whodunit resolution that seems sudden, but part of that’s the function of the first part of the book including a higher portion of fictional chapters from the true crime book, which presents the story as it’s thought to be, and the last part of the book includes a higher portion of contemporary investigation of the fictional author. I don’t regret reading it, unlike some books with which I have burdened myself of late, but I won’t actively seek out other works in Pickard’s Marie Lightfoot or Jenny McCain series on the basis of this exposure.

The Publishers Weekly blurb that appears on the Amazon page for this book begins, “Timeliness adds considerable juice to Rosenberg’s frenzied political thriller, set a couple of years in the future.” Riiiiiight. The book is set in 2010. Saddam Hussein is behind a plot to assasinate the president who wants to bring peace the Israel, finally, by talking to Chairman Arafat and with the deus ex discovery of oil off the shore of Israel and the Gaza Strip. Or something.

I bought this book for $5.98 off of the discount rack at Barnes and Noble, using gift cards, natch. I picked it because I thought Joel C. Rosenberg was Joel Rosenberg. I started reading it last week because I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about Joel C. Rosenberg. Friends, don’t be fooled. Although Joel C. Rosenberg gleefully blurs the distinction to draw suckers like me in (why else is is Web site JoelRosenberg.com when he’s diligent about putting his middle initial on his book covers, hmmm?), he’s not Joel Rosenberg. He’s not even a decent fiction writer.

All right, so I’ve already mentioned the gripping premise of the book, whose shelf life expired by the end of 2002. Now, I will break down the book’s composition for you:

• 60% meetings
  of the cabinet and president or the president and someone or someone and staff. Includes 4 pages spent on a “tension-breaking” anecdote about flatulence and its counter tension-breaking 3-page story of misunderstaken lesbianism. The characters loved these particular stories, breaking up in laughter I, the reader, didn’t share. Most of the rest of these meetings involve various cabinet members debating the stakes of the plot.

• 12% character sketches
  thrown in simply because the author went through the trouble of creating them. The life story of the minor character of the Chief of Staff? Hey, we’ve got the material, throw it in!

• 4% action,
  presented in riveting cut scenes of short length and of pointless peril. Whoa, the helicopter of SEALs almost got shot down by an Iraqi MiG! That was close. Considering that they don’t do a fallujin thing in the book, it’s wasted space.
• 8% miscellaneous exposition.

Hey! That doesn’t add up to 100%!

Neither does this ordeal of a book. Lord amighty, although I took some snickering amusement from the book (what was it with using rimming BlackBerries all the time, including the middle of a firefight between the Wall Street protagonists and the dreaded uberterrorists in the red shirts? Why do the bad guys send clandestine e-mails to each others’ AOL accounts?), I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone at any price.

It’s Clancy without the technology. Or suspense. Or any redeeming feature one finds in Clancy.

How many rules of fiction does it break? I just wrote an essay about things fiction writers should avoid, partially inspired by this book. I mean, when he wrote the book in 2001 or early 2002 (that long weekend this book took, three whole days, no doubt), its premise was believeable and compelling, but Rosenberg mistakes the personalities of the enemy (Hussein and Arafat) for systems (the Cold War Soviet Union of countless fiction writers or the WWII Nazis of Alistair MacLean and others). And then he projects their existence almost a decade into the future–probably because they existed for most of his adulthood. Three years later, both Hussein and Arafat are gone, and five years before this book’s setting, the world is a different place. Rosenberg also dips technologically into waters that will change by 2010. BlackBerries? Who’s going to have a BlackBerry in 2010? We could have chip implants by then. Telling us how careful the bad guys are to empty their deleted items folder in Microsoft Outlook? In 2010? Eight years before this book was published, Outlook was a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye.

This book is the equivalent of a contemporary conservative book attacking Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. They’re designed for quick bucks and quick obscurity. This one, on the discount racks as late as 2005, won’t be on a publisher’s backlist because it’s irrelevant and dated before its action takes place.

(Note: Hi, MLI! You’re the only one who reads these things in their entireties, and I laud you for making it this far even though I told you in person how bad this book sucked even before Joel C. Rosenberg reached his word limit and destroyed Baghdad with a last minute Deus Ex Nuclea. I hope I’ve adequately ruined the ending so you never, ever, bother with this book.)

Maybe this C. Rosenberg guy got better after this, his first fiction book, but I’ll never know because from now on I shall be vigilant in avoiding the C. and in not taking Rush Limbaugh’s advice on fiction. I weep for the portion of my life I sacrificed for this book. I got nothing from it.

This book represents the third of the Lucas Davenport series that I inherited from my aunt. It’s the second book following Chosen Prey, so certain personal situations within Davenport’s life have resolved themselves. Not really to the detriment of this particular item in the series, as they really only provide characterization and background in this book instead of Important Life Decisions which the main character must face.

Lucas Davenport now works for the state of Minnesota (crap, I ruined it for the single reader who’s made it this far into the review). He’s got fewer of the previously-developed characters within the Minneapolis police department to prop him up, but a richer supporting cast of temporary (but perhaps recurring) characters to help him out.

The plot deals with a northwestern Minnesota car theft/drug dealing ring exposed when small-time members decide to kidnap and kill children for ransom. Well, they only kidnap for ransom and then kill, but the whole thing comes crashing down when a murderous Republican comes to town and inadvertently destroys the compassionate drug-reimportation smuggling ring run by some Catholics with conscience.

Aside from the laughable political aside and the other implications, the book makes a quick read. I like the Minnesota winter as a character slightly more than the millionaire political appointee detective main character, but Sandford makes the book compelling enough to read if it falls into your hands.

“Do you want to buy more in the series?” my beautiful wife asked. “Not for more than $1 a book,” I replied. So there you have it. A good set of stock novels set in the upper Midwest, but in a Democrat stronghold (which the books remind you).

This bookis the second of the three that I have inherited from my aunt and all three are well along in the series. I’m glad I read the preceding book, Easy Prey, since that book begins with some characterization of the main character and his relationship with his team.

Chosen Prey jumps right into the chaotic world of Lucas Davenport and his special Minneapolis police team. Well, no, it starts with a quick insight into the mind of the named criminal, a sex fiend academic (do I repeat myself?) named James Qatar who likes to do kinky things to artsy blondes and then kill them. We know this in the first chapter, because the semi-omniscient narrator follows Qatar to a tryst.

So the book is a race between Qatar and the police, who must track him down before he kills again. Or at least must stop him before he depopulates Minnesota and western Wisconsin.

The book’s pace captures the nature of the frantic team investigation captained by Davenport. His personal life interrupts, as his True Love and recently (Easy Prey) returned Weather wants to have a child and marry Lucas. The sub plotline would detract had I not read the preceding book and known who she was and why this was different or difficult for Davenport.

It’s an okay turn for a series book, but I’d hardly recommend it as the first in the series, as the author expects the reader to be familiar with the characters. Heck, I probably missed most of the inside humor. On his worst day, McBain does a better police procedural and characterizes the familiar so even the uninitiated can pick up on them. Sandford doesn’t, and he doesn’t seem to try. Of course, this isn’t much of a police procedural, either, since the main character is at a high level and although he does do some interrogation himself, he’s also a millionaire zipping around in a Porsche (when the weather’s good) and a deputy chief with all the resources of the police department at his disposal. So it’s not so much a police procedural as as a simple suspense page turner.

So Sandford’s no Ed McBain, but no one really can hold a candle to that. He’s no Randisi either, and he actually suffers from that particular comparison. Unless he really is Randisi in a different pseudonym.

This book collects a number of John Steinbeck short stories. They’re centered around the Salinas Valley in California, and I feel a little more connection with them and the topography that Steinbeck describes since we visited northern California this year. Suddenly, I understand mountains at the edge of the ocean.

Steinbeck’s writing is accessible enough for modern readers steeped in commercial fiction (like me) to grasp. James Joyce, Benjy Campson, and all the tangled verbiage artists have done more to drive readers away from any literary fiction than Steinbeck or Hemingway could hope to save.

I find Steinbeck’s style a little disengaging, although easy to read, and it can take me a while to get into a rhythm where I appreciate the characters and want to find out what happens next. In Steinbeck’s novels, this doesn’t pose difficulty other than the initial start-up costs of turning the first few dozen pages by discipline. However, with short stories, you have to start over with a new character or set of characters. So a number of stories just don’t work.

However, the last set of stories features the same set of characters, so I was able to plunge, enjoyably, through the last quarter of the book.

So I enjoyed the book, but not unabashedly. But this completes my hardback study of Steinbeck spurred by the purchase of a set of these hardback editions at an estate sale two years ago. Although I still have East of Eden in paperback, I don’t know how quickly I will get to it.

Man, I don’t know where I got this book, but all evidence seems to indicate that I paid $2.00 for it. Of course, since it’s P.J. O’Rourke, of course I would.

The book features trademark O’Rourke humor, but its from his early, Reagan and Bush era stuff, which means it’s not as hard-hitting and topical as the work he’s created after Clinton became president. Ergo, its subject matter and style more closely tracks the The Bachelor Home Companion (oddly enough, 1997 and not as early as I’d originally thought). The humor is more collegiate, but it has its flashes of O’Rourkean brilliance. But the nugget sized sections really don’t give O’Rourke enough room to work up a full head of rhetorical steam.

So it’s a good book, but not the best in the O’Rourke obra.

I bought this book for $4.95 on the discount rack at Barnes and Noble while spending the holiday gift cards. Of course, the trip turned from burning off the gift cards to an orgy of book purchasing, so we ended up with more than our $50.

This book represents a retro reprisal of hard-boiled detective novels. The main character, Ike Van Savage is a former soldier, former cop, drinks-too-much, womanized a bit too much, kind of private eye. In Rochester, New York, 1959, Van Savage gets a call from a mysterious hottie who thinks her husband wants to kill her. The husband’s the local syndicate kingpin whose two previous wives had accidents. Suddenly, Van Savage finds himself where every hardboiled private detective is: fending off willing chippies and dodging the accidental bullet-cushioning while over his head in crime and plots he can barely fathom.

A good book and a pleasant throwback to a readable genre that failed to teach us the life lessons about how being a man in society means something other than being tough and tenacious. Where it means something more womanly. Which is why some reviewers call the main character “cardboard” — They’re part of the drive that lead to more sensitive, bleeding, crying soft-boiled detective who are more frail than the middle-aged working schlubs who read the books. Once they stopped being comic books with heroes to whom readers could aspire, they stopped being good. But this book bucks the trend, fortunately.

You know, I found this book in the second rank of books on my to-read shelves, so I’m not sure where I got it. Did I inherit it from my aunt? Did I buy it at the 80% off store last autumn? I cannot remember. All I know is that I was disappointed that an Ed McBain book made it to the back of my bookshelves without getting read. So I rectified the error.

This book represents the 50th 87th Precinct novel. Ponder that, if you will, and revere it. Ed McBain has produced fifty of these novels over the course of the last half century or so; considering that this one is five years old and that they’re coming fewer than one a year now, it’s worth our awe. Like Perry Mason novels, these books hold up well enough for people of a certain age, who remember a life without the Internet. We remember the typewriter and can accept books with reproductions of typewritten reports within them to lend authenticity. Damn kids wouldn’t understand.

This book gets away from that and actually mentions the Internet and mentions Steve Carella’s age. He’s just turned 40, which means I’ve almost caught up with him. If Ed McBain lives another decade, I’ll call Steve Carella a damn kid, and he was 35 when I was 15. Talk about unfair.

The book deals with a number of murders surrounding a revival of a 1920s musical and features a nuanced and ultimately dual-tragic plot. If you stop to think about what the primary (first) murder means, you’ll understand. But the boys from the 87th and Fat Ollie Weeks (of the 88th) get their workouts covering the City looking for clues in the brutal winter (that offers relief, even if the characters don’t know it, from the brutal summer).

Of course, if you don’t know the characters, perhaps the book proves a little hard to follow. Over the last three decades especially, we’ve come to know Carella, Meyer, Hawes, Brown, Parker, Byrnes, Kling, and Generro (wait, he’s not here; don’t tell me if I missed the book where he got it). But this series is proving more resilient than a number of television series, for crying out loud, and proves to be an old friend to which one can turn again and again (since books take longer than an hour minus commercials on television or DVD).

Okay, enough late night blathering. I liked the book, not only because it’s a good enough book in the genre replete with McBain’s poetic touches but also because it’s a link to my youth, when I read adult books in my middle school and high school years.

As you know, I buy every Robert B. Parker book immediately, although in the recent years and with the recent novels, “immediately” has come to mean the week of release, sometimes the month of release instead of the day. So I got this book within a week of its hitting the shelves and the Amazon shipping room.

Like Phil Connors at the end of Groundhog Day, I have to admit to my perfect woman that something’s different, and anything different is good. The protagonist is not the biggest, baddest gun in town who happens to be co-dependent to a slut and a Korean War veteran. Instead, the first person narrator is the sidekick, and damned if that ain’t enough difference.

Virgil Cole, the toughest marshal-for-hire in the business, and his sidekick Everett “I” Cole come to Appaloosa at the behest of the local aldermen to handle the local band of rowdies who killed the last marshal. As they move into town and onto the badmen, a new woman shows up in town and draws the codependency of the formerly impervious Cole even though she’s a flighty Jewess woman. The tandem of Cole and “I” capture the leader of the murderous band and see him through to a conviction, but his lackeys hire the other baddest guns in the west to concoct an escape with the woman as a hostage and….

Well, I won’t get into detail since my beautiful wife has yet to read the book. However, the book really breaks out of the doldrums into which the Parker books have fallen, amongst the Jesse Stone, Sunny Randall, and Spenser novels. This book represents what Potshot and Gunman’s Rhapsody could have been. It’s The Searchers, Sherlock Holmes, and slightly the Spenser novels intermingled in a way that freshens the Parkerverse. It lacks a number of cookie-cut features of the Parkerverse, such as the Korean War service and the tough good gay guy; not that there’s anything wrong with those, but they’re too much a part of Parkers’ other works to really add to those other works. I admit that sometime in the midst of the novel, I didn’t know where it was going, and I was interested in being surprised. And felt the book was capable of it.

My only complaint with the book is that it ends rather abruptly. The last sixth of the book runs very quickly and the ending, although satisfying, provides the satisfaction of a Chinese meal. Sure, it’s good, but I am going to be hungry later.

Perhaps that’s the intention, as the further adventures remain available for Parker to write.

Also, gentle reader, note that this is the 50th book I have read and reported for you this year. I fully expect my store-bought-and-amateur-calligraphed-certificate and coupon for a free Dairy Queen Sundae from each of you. Considering my annual goal is 70 books this year, perhaps I could afford at this time to try Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury again. Fortunately, though, for both of us, my aunt left me more pressing suspense and horror novels.

Yes, this book is the novelization of the Dirty Harry movie of the same name. I know, you’re thinking that I am not a very serious reader of true literature and that I should have my English degree revoked for bothering with a mid 1970s movie tie in (as opposed to the high art represented by Harry Potter books in the twenty-first century). But I read a lot of things, and besides, this only cost me 95 cents at Downtown Books in Milwaukee, so I got it, and that’s the last we’ll hear of it.

So I read the book having watched the movie first, which follows the pattern of creation for the book. Unlike regular movies, where you watch them to see how they differ from the book from which the movie sprung (whoops, I need a helping verb there; I mean done sprung), these novelizations use the movie itself as source material, so the writers of these books either give or take away things from the movie rather than the screenwriters doing the opposite. In a lot of my youth, I’ve read novelizations before seeing the movie, so my comparative experience always favored the book anyway. This time, though, it’s different.

I’ve seen the series of movies and it’s through their prisms that I look at the book and say: eh, it wasn’t bad, but it certainly tried to soften up Harry. I will have to review the movie again, but I don’t remember Harry crying at any point, nor did I detect the facial expressions on Harry that the author puts there. Still, perhaps he had one of those new Videocassette Recorder things and was pausing while he typed the manuscript on his Smith-Corona, but most likely he was trying to add something to attract a wider audience, the subtly different audience who did not follow Dirty Harry in the movies nor Clint Eastwood and who wanted more characterization. Well, that’s a laudable goal. He didn’t really succeed.

Aside from the inner sentimentalism added to Harry, the additional characterization-through-a-paragraph-of-exposition trick doesn’t work. All minor characters get one or two paragraphs of explanation for their behavior, but that’s it. The author’s limitations included fidelity to the filmed scenes, and this author doesn’t seem to stray far-or any–from the scenes filmed. And he adds that paragraph to give depth to the characters. Ultimately, it doesn’t bring additional meaning to the source material. Perhaps he could have added scenes that did not run counter to the story or he could have added more interior dialogue to each character than the single paragraph, but hell, man, he was probably just banging it out for a paragraph.

I guess we can’t all be Tom Stoppard, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead isn’t exactly a direct novelization of Hamlet, but its techniques could serve those trying to write novelizations on movies. But that might double the actual writing time from four hours to eight or ten, which eats into the profit.

So would I recommend it? Sure, if you’re a collector, a voracious reader, or someone like me who dabbles in these things for the curiousities that lie outside of the actual text.

I inherited this book from my aunt along with a couple of the next books in the series. Amazon informs me this is the eleventh book in the series, so I’ve undoubtedly missed a lot of the references and asides within this book that allude to incidents which the long-time fans of the Lucas Davenport novels would recognize. Each time I hit one of these many references, I recognized it for what it was, but I let it go. I know what a Robert B. Parker fan who started with Hugger Mugger must feel.

The book starts, chapter 1, in the mind of the killer with a bunch of foreshadowing; the killer awakens and doesn’t know he’s going to kill someone later, but he does. Honestly, given the plot of the book, ultimately the cheap foreshadowing doesn’t hang right with the rest of the plot. But the frenetic nature of the action, with the multitude of police characters and considerations in handling a case, one can overlook them–or forget the first chapter by the time the bodies start to pile up.

Good points:

• Set in Minnesota, which is the upper Midwest. Although they worship the pagan Vikings and even refer to them once in the book, they’re of good Scandinaviagerman stock like my ancestors in Wisconsin.
• Frantic pace of novel, coupled with allusions to previous novels, intimates an incident in a line and a past to which the characters are privy even if you, fool who starts with book eleven, are not.
• Main character, in mid forties or so, is: rich due to his sale of a computer company; drives a Porsche due to his wealth; juggles attractive women of his own age with 20-something models; and serves as a deputy chief of police who bends the ear of the chief and the mayor.

  Face it, he’s the hardboiled fantasy from the 1940s or 1960s aged a couple decades.

Bad points:

• The intro, foreshadowing chapter is ultimately misleading.
• Multiple murderers throw the investigation off. Also, they confuse the reader.
• Multiple murderers mean that the bulk of the book spends time chasing red herrings.
• Book is split between whodunit and high level police procedural; the first chapter would indicate whodunit, but who does it doesn’t depend upon clues given but late breaking developments and insights and, frankly, who’s not dead among the suspect pool at the end.

Still, the pacing of the book and the engagement of the characters–or at least the condolence of the main character to the adolescent fantasies that carry over into adulthood–carried me along to the end. I have two other books in the series, and I look forward to reading them. They will determine whether I backfill the previous novels and buy more recent novels. Overall, I’m optimistic, which is the most I can say for any suspense series I’ve picked up in a while (barring the Robert Crais books which, gentle reader, you remember I started out optimistic and sort of soured).

I inherited this book from my aunt, and with her legacy I’ll read plenty of horror/suspense fiction in the next couple of years.

This book deals with a suspense writer whose family is stalked by his evil twin. I get it. It’s Stephen King’s The Dark Half, without the birds. I had a lot of time and extra thinking energy through the first 120 pages, which Koontz spent lavishly assuring us that the writer is a good family man and that the dark, er, copy is a bad man. I explained to Heather that I was turning the pages out of discipline and not desire. Face it, it’s no Odd Thomas.

After the first quarter of the book, the action picked up and the story began. I’d have enjoyed it better if the first 120 pages had been 30 pages and if the dark half–an inadvertent clone, as it turns out–hadn’t fallen to a caricature.

I note that one of the reviewers on Amazon couldn’t stand the PC tone of some of the books asides. Odd, for the political asides were not what one typically considers PC–pro gun ownership, pro independence and self reliance. They were more libertarian than anything else, affirming the family as the basic unit of society, and so on. I believe a lot of the stuff, so I could make it through them even though they were semipreaching in nature. I could have also lived without the author taking the assumed name of John Gault at the end of the book.