Musings from Brian J. Noggle

When I cracked open this book, I thought I’d read it before. It begins with a water-infiltration attack on an oil drilling platform. But as I went through the set piece, I thought, No, the other book included an assault on an oil platform in the North Sea, and this one is in the Caspian Sea. Completely different. So it’s like James Bond: Watching the movies rapidly in succession, one realizes how many of the set pieces are repeated, especially ski chases, SCUBA fighting, or the sudden large scale assaults of United States troops, astronauts, or ninja on the enemy compound.

At any rate, in this book, Marcinko is in Azerberjan to “train” the locals, but when his plane lands, he finds a hostage situation that requires the oil platform landing mentioned above. After the hostages are rescued, the convoy taking the hostages to safety is hit by tangos, resulting in the loss of all those the SEALs saved. So Marcinko investigates the connection between the Russians, the Iranians, and a questionable NGO and its billionaire founder. Which leads to a number of set pieces and assaults that you would expect, all told in the meta- and, erm, course style of the Rogue Warrior series.

How meta? Well, he talks about the editor telling him to move the story along, and he even admits

Now, this here book is pure fiction, but the sort of Warrior leadership I’m talking about can be found in real life, every now and then.

Like the example set by Master Sergeant Roy Benavidez. Master Sergeant Benavidez was attached to Fifth Special Forces back in Vietnam. Here, quoting from the citation for his Medal of Honor, is what he did–and how he led by example.

The book then relates the story of what he did.

So the book–and the series–blend the fiction with real actions and authentic government behavior effectively. I like the series overall.

However, this book comes at the end of the Clinton years, and Marcinko calls the former president out by name several times. I don’t like sucker punches from the left, so I rankle a bit about the ones I agree with, too. It not only can turn off half the audience–well, by then, the circles in the Venn diagram of Marcinko fans and liberals were probably far apart already–but it also dates the book. By just fuming about military cutbacks, you could imagine it in just about any Democratic administration instead of pegging it to something that kids these days won’t relate to.

At any rate, still a fun book to read while waiting for my thirst for Shakespeare to resume.

Well, well, well. This was a pleasant surprise. I was not pleased with Blind Spot, the first Jesse Stone book that Coleman took on after the Brandman Dynasty. I knocked it for its slow pacing, for its early revelation of the bad guys, and some thick prose of the sake of thick prose.

With this book, though, Coleman seems to find his footing. In it, the collapse of an industrial building in a winter nor’easter uncovers the bodies of two teen girls killed twenty-five years ago, and Stone has to uncover the unlikely group of killers. Paradise thinks this is its deep, dark shame from the past, and it threatens to hidden secrets from people Jesse has known for a long time. In series business, Jesse is still dealing with the aftermath of Suitcase Simpson’s shooting in the last book, starts visiting the shrink again, and meets the new ME who will become his friend and maybe more. The series business doesn’t overwhelm the story of this book, though.

So, overall, not bad, although the whole “in the deep past of 25 years ago” might ring a little truer if the first Jesse Stone novel hadn’t come out in 1997, 21 years ago. Also, deep, dark past doesn’t work for me since I can remember being an adult(ish) back then.

But good enough that I’ll look for other entries in this line at book sales.

I picked this book from my to-read shelves because, whenever I turned around at my desk to talk to my beautiful wife, the red dot that indicates that it was a dollar book I bought from Hooked on Books once upon a time (probably before this blog existed, werd). I’m very conscious of the red dots these days since the current employees at Hooked on Books don’t know what they meant. So when it came time for a new fiction book, I finally settled on it, unsure of what I was getting.

As it turns out, it is a British private detective novel. For a moment, I had some reservations given how little I really enjoyed my last British mystery (Cotswold Mistress from almost a year ago already). But this book’s tone is more akin to American private eye books with a British sensibility to them rather than an Agatha Christie ministers-and-gentlemen-dying locked room thing.

The protagonist, January (called Jan) Esposito, is a bit of a ne-er-do-well loafing about in Italy and teaching English to Italian students. He’s got a hustler of a half brother, with whom he had a previous adventure that led them to believe he could be an adventure or private detective, so when the son of a gentleman goes missing, the Sir reaches out to the half brother, who enlists Jan to go to a small village in Verona to look for the young sir-to-be who is suspected of murdering a local. When Jan gets to town, he meets a young researcher who is not who she claims she is and some local toughs.

It’s a pretty good read, a slower paced book than an American detective book even of that era, but it moves along nevertheless. Of course, Jan uncovers conspiracies and cover-ups that go all the way back to The War (World War II), a partisan plan to recover a religious statue stolen by the Nazis that goes missing when the Nazis burn the house where the partisans hole up after the raid, and a plot to arm a new revolutionary group planning attacks in the modern day. It gets a little convoluted at the end, but a lot of other detective books do get into their plots.

A fun read, and certainly worth a dollar twenty years ago, although in contemporary dollars, that’s probably like $20. Probably still worth a dollar, and you could probably find it for that.

Apparently, this author wrote three books in the 1990s, of which this book is the last, and only recently returned to novels with a couple of historical thrillers set in Italy. Which probably means I won’t find a vast catalog of his other work in book sales here in town, but I will certainly keep an eye out for them.

I bought this book in April because I’ve been trying to get my head around higher physics. I’ve picked up, over the last year, a couple books that discuss quantum theory (The Physics of Christianity) and relativity (The ABC of Relativity). I nod along through several chapters, generally less than a third of the book (maybe just the title page and table of contents, come to think of it), and think, “I get this.” And then I come to a certain point in the book, and I am suddenly off the rails and have no idea what the author is talking about.

So I thought maybe this book would help me.

Little did I know this is just a comic book Communist biography of Einstein/indictment of the capitalist system of science and engineering.

Continue reading “Book Report: Einstein for Beginners by Joseph Schwartz and Michael McGuinness (1979)” →