Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Full disclosure: when I moved from a nice suburb and good school district to the trailer park in the middle of my seventh grade year, “R.P.” was the kid assigned to be my friend to help me get around North Jefferson Middle School in Murphy, Missouri. He was a smart kid. I was a smart kid. I’d like to think we were numbers 1 and 2 in the smarts for our seventh grade class, but I might be giving myself far too much credit. By the time we finished high school, I certainly dropped a couple points in the rankings because I didn’t put any effort into my schooling, and he did. But I digress. We go way back, and when I saw he had a book, I ordered it.

This is a young adult novel about a boy (about my kids’ age) who gets to go hunting with his father, uncles, and cousins for the first time. While he’s there, he finds one of his cousins stealing from other family members, and the book deals with the fallout of that including a run in with a local hood. It’s a short book (120 pages) with none of the cartoons that are rife in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid or “James Patterson”‘s Middle School series. I’m not sure how much the book captures the zeitgeist of contemporary middle schoolers, but my oldest has expressed interest in the book, so I suppose he’ll let me know. The questions the lad has about honoring your word and doing what’s right in spite of your word are real and tangible concerns for a young man, and thematically the book works.

So I enjoyed it well enough. But I’m probably giving some weight to being pleased that someone I knew wrote a pretty good book. And, quite likely, has sold more copies of this one book than I’ve sold of all three of my books. Curses, R.P. wins again!

If you only read one Australian spy thriller featuring a Mongolian mad scientist’s plot to take over the world with a metal-melting satellite, this should be it! Of course, I’m not sure where you would be if you wanted to read two such books, as this probably is the only one. But it’s a series book, so you could easily find other things like it to read.

Well, I’ve pretty much given it all away here: Mark Hood, an operative for a trans-national spy agency (which operates freely in the Soviet Union as well as the West because all parties agree to give this group, Intertrust, the ability to ferret out nuclear proliferation concerns). In this book, a strange phenomenon–weapon?–destroys a Japanese fishing fleet and damages a U.S. destroyer, drawing the attention of Intertrust and its dashing hero. Additionally, scientists are disappearing–being kidnapped?–, and hero travels to the Soviet Union to protect a similar scientist only to find the scientist has been snatched away just before Hood and his associate arrive. The agency provides them cover to travel to China, and they discover the kidnapped scientist aboard a train with a beautiful young Asian woman who’s delivering the scientist to Mongolia and her father, a distant descendant of Genghis Khan, who has discovered the treasure of Khan and used it to finance a solar-lensing satellite that can target anywhere on the planet with a heat ray.

Yeah, it’s complicated.

The book is written in a British style. The prose is polished and the story moves along, but it’s a little dry and at a distance. So it’s not that thrilling. The plot, though–outlandish. Somehow the combination of the outlandish plot with the sedate language doesn’t work for me. But it is definitely the best Australian spy thriller I’ll read this year.

(For a review on the first book in the series, Come Die with Me, see Glorious Trash.)

After reading a book about magickal cats who solve crimes, it only seemed fitting to turn to this book, which I just bought in March, which features a private investigator (Rachel Alexander) and her pit bull (Dash) who solve crimes. Dash, it should be noted, does not talk. Also, note I read an omnibus edition of a couple earlier books in this series in 2009.

At any rate. In this book, Rachel is hired by a trio of transvestite hookers to investigate the murder of one of their colleagues in the meat-packing district of New York City. She finds that a manager of a local meat plant was murdered around the same time, so she wants a look into the files of the plant. She spends many pages teaching a dachshund belonging to one of the prostitutes to unlock a bathroom window so she can break in and fax files to her home line. The meat plant might be tied up in mob activity. The plant’s assistant manager, who was passed over for the job when the murdered manager was hired, is a frequent client of the prostitutes, including the one who was murdered.

Much of the book is spent in chasing down or set pieces that don’t really amount to much. The whole plant break in thing takes a long time, and then Rachel is outfitted as a hooker and spends a couple nights on the streets for no real reason other than to explore the experience, and then in the last third of the book, she finds out not so much that family secrets are involved and a couple of failed police stings, and then the book wraps up in a rather abbreviated and confusing climax.

Still, it was an enjoyable read. The pacing was good, even when it was going nowhere. I liked it enough to maybe pick up another the next time I find it for a buck.

Robert B. Parker created the Sunny Randall series to be adapted by Hollywood for Helen Hunt, or so I heard. I wonder why this series hasn’t been optioned?

Also, as a side note, the topic matter and discussion of transvestite and pre-operative transgenders: Although this book is sensitive for 2001, how insensitive is it in 2018? If the chronically offended read old books, perhaps we would know. And the answer, likely: INTOLERABLY!

(Also, if you’re interested, here’s my book report on the book whose title is the source of this book’s title: The Long Goodbye.)

What a mean-spirited, insipid little book this is.

Of course, with a title like I Hate Ann Coulter!, what would I expect? Probably something akin to Rush Limbaugh Is A Big, Fat Idiot by Al Franken, which is also floating around on the shelves somewhere here.

I’ve not been a fan of Coulter. The only book of hers I’ve reviewed here was Godless, although I might have read one of her earlier books before this blog–although it’s hard to imagine any life before this blog. I know she was kind of popular with the early blogosphere, but I don’t think I’ve seen anything linking to her in quite some time. Her books are quite incendiary, with a bunch of name calling and near-nastiness that’s supposed to be humorous as she makes her points.

But that differs from this book, where nastiness is the point, and the author or authors do nothing but lay into Coulter’s looks and whatnot. They insinuate she’s a man. You know, the kind of thing that in the year 2018 would be doubleplus ungoodthink, but only if not targeted to Ann Coulter, apparently.

The times when they bother to attack her credibility as a commentator, they mock Coulter’s points that time has borne out. Such as:

Ann makes the wonderfully deranged contention in Godless that a liberal, when questioned, “might turn violent–much like the practicioners of Islam, the Religion of Peace, who ransacked Danish embassies worldwide because a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Mohammed.”

Well, we’ve seen an uptick in political violence from the left in the intervening years, ainna?

Or the stunning ignorance on offhanded display, such as an assertion in a quiz to see if you’re like Ann:

6. Does it bother you as a Christian that Jesus never kicked anyone’s ass?

Seriously, kids? Have you never heard this story?

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

You’re refuting Coulter’s point about liberals being, well, Godless by demonstrating a relatively common story from the Bible.

My goodness, I cannot believe I read this. Well, no, I can. I read anything, and this little stroll through the gutter did not take me very long, fortunately, and my book count this year needs some padding.

I would recommend you not bother. Go visit Twitter if this is your thing. No doubt the author(s) of this book have a sweet feed somewhere over there where they DESTROY and OWN conservative commentators all day long.

I read an earlier fantasy novel (The Catswold Portal) wherein a portal leads to a world of shapeshifters who can turn into cats and their relatives above ground. In researching the author, I learned she also had a mystery series with a talking cat. The Joe Grey series. This is one of the books, the ninth in the series, published 12 years after The Catswold Portal. And instead of looking like the latter was a standalone book, some of the mythos from it are creeping in.

At any rate: Joe Grey nominally belonds to a guy who lives in a small town in California, and Joe has been helping the police solve crimes because he and a couple other cats in the area can talk and reason like humans. In this case, they look into a case of identity theft and some very particular burglaries up and down the coast where a specific collectible item was taken while many other valuables are left behind. Then, a bad cat from previous books comes around without his former human accomplice. With whom is the giant black tom working now?

That’s the setup, and as the book goes on, we discover there’s a shapeshifting cat woman in the stories as well as lore, mysterious jewelry, and research done at the Cat Museum. So perhaps the series started out independent of the fantastic elements from The Catswold Portal, but by book 9, they’re working into the mythos.

The book carries a lot of series business, with subplots unrelated to the main plot of this book but continuing the story arcs of people in the books. And the writing is not high fantastic as the pure fantasy novel, but it has tendencies to be especially lush in places. Particularly in the description of what everyone is wearing in every scene.

There’s a lot of jump cutting and time shifting in the book, where one scene picks up a little earlier from the last but from a different person’s perspective. This narrative style combined with the series business and the overdone descriptions and conversations make this book longer than it should be, but if you’re really into the series and the characters, perhaps it’s just what you want.

But it’s not really what I’m looking for in genre fiction, so I’ll probably leave it alone. Unless I find a trove of them at a book sale, cheap. In which case I will forget my reservations and buy them for a time when I don’t remember that I didn’t like book 9. Maybe reading them in order would build it up more. I dunno.