Dan has a theory that Spero Lucas is the illegitimate son of Travis McGee, and considering the similarities between the two, this seems like a reasonaDan has a theory that Spero Lucas is the illegitimate son of Travis McGee, and considering the similarities between the two, this seems like a reasonable scenario.
Both are ex-military guys who eschew the traditional American lifestyle of steady jobs and families so that they can live on their own terms. Not only are their attitudes alike, they also have found similar ways to turn a buck by recovering stolen items for a percentage of their value in incidents where the owners can’t use the legal system for one reason or another. They are capable, sometimes violent, men who make their way with their wits and their brawn while feeling like outsiders from the people living ordinary lives around them.
The big difference is that John D. MacDonald’s creation was a pulp male fantasy in which McGee lived on a houseboat while cruising the Florida coast and picking up scores of beach bunnies with an attitude that would probably get him routinely pepper sprayed today. Spero likes the ladies and can attract his share, but he’s far less of a man-ho than his spiritual predecessor.
The first book, The Cut, established Spero as a former Marine who saw extensive combat in Iraq. Back in his home city of Washington D.C., Spero’s time facing death has left him impatient to get on with his life. He wants meaningful work on his own terms and to enjoy simple pleasures like good music or the company of a pretty woman. Working as a private investigator for a lawyer provides some steady income, but Spero also takes side gigs.
This time out Spero is helping a woman who barely avoided an Internet scam, but apparently the near-miss put her in the crosshairs of a predatory sexual con man who arranged the theft of a valuable painting she owned called The Double. As he tries to track down the trio responsible for their own crime wave of scams and robbery, Spero is also working for the lawyer to find evidence that could clear a man accused of murder as well as poke around the death of a young girl who was a student of his brother. He also gets involved in a torrid affair with beautiful married women, but while Spero has tried to keep his romantic encounters casual, he begins to crave more than just sex with her.
As always with a George Pelecanos novel, there’s the incorporation of various locales that make his literary DC come alive. Whether Spero is biking through up-scale neighborhoods or stopping by an auto shop to question a suspect, Pelecanos has a knack for casually imparting the bits of detail and history that make the city one of the characters in the novel.
Spero seemed like he had a lot of potential as a character in the first novel, and Pelecanos adds the kind of depth to make him really special here. On the surface, Spero seems to have his act together and knows exactly what he wants, but there are new layers of uneasiness added here. His relationship with the married lady makes him start to question the bachelor lifestyle he thought he wanted. This feeds into more inner conflict about the life he’s living. Spero’s thoughts increasingly turn to his late father, the man who adopted him and his brother and gave them a loving home by his honest hard work and devotion to his family, and Spero is starting to find himself lacking in comparison.
Worst of all is that it starts to seem like the war may have taken a bigger toll on his psyche than he previously thought. Spero learned how to kill overseas, and he was good at it. That skill is a valuable tool in his work, but as the saying goes, "When you have a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail."
Pelecanos has written a lot of great crime novels with memorable characters, but Spero may be his best one yet. ...more
When I reviewed the Batman: Court of Owls collection, I noted that while I liked what Scott Snyder did with the character, that I wished he’d turn hisWhen I reviewed the Batman: Court of Owls collection, I noted that while I liked what Scott Snyder did with the character, that I wished he’d turn his attention to some of the classic bat-foes like the Joker.
Be careful what you ask for because Snyder just might deliver and creep the living bejesus out of you with it.
After a year long absence from Gotham the Joker returns crazier and more homicidal than ever. Just how crazy? Well, his face got sliced off and he now wears it stapled to his head like a mask. How homicidal? His opening move is walking into a Gotham police station and killing multiple cops while taunting Commissioner Gordon.
As Batman tries to find him Joker leaves a trail of clues and traps that run through his earliest crimes and culminate with a threat to all of the Bat-family including Nightwing, Robin, Red Robin, and Batgirl. (Yeah, I know that Jason Todd is in there as Red Hood, but I like to keep pretending that he’s still dead.) With the Joker saying that he knows their real identities Batman tries to reassure the others that it’s all a mind game, but that claim starts to look hollow as the attacks hit closer to home.
The story asks some of the enduring questions that come up between the two. Why does the Joker take such delight in death and destruction? Why does Batman hold to the vow of not killing Joker despite the fact he could have saved countless lives by doing so? Is there some kind of bond between the two arch-enemies? And the biggest mystery of them all, who is the Joker?
With callbacks to other Joker stories and bits of Batman lore as well as one of the darkest and most violent schemes since the The Killing Joke, Snyder has delivered an instant classic that will probably go down as one of the great Batman tales.
Pat Peoples has been confined to the ‘bad place’, but he finally gets to leave and live with his parents until he can get back on his feet. Pat’s mainPat Peoples has been confined to the ‘bad place’, but he finally gets to leave and live with his parents until he can get back on his feet. Pat’s main goal is to continue on a path of self-improvement including working on being kinder, strenuous exercise and reading books so he'll be a better husband when he finally sees his beloved wife Nikki again after their ‘apart time’.
Pat likes being home, but his moody father refuses to talk to him unless the Philadelphia Eagles win. Plus, his mother and his therapist are both encouraging him to spend time with Tiffany, a very strange woman who was recently widowed. It’s almost like no one understands that he’s still married to Nikki. As he works on becoming a better person, Pat gets to attend the Eagles home games with his brother and makes a lot of friends at the pre-game tailgates. As they start winning, the superstitious fans think that Pat is good luck, and even his father becomes much friendlier. As long as he can control his temper and continues to work hard, Pat is sure that he’ll get the kind of happy ending you see in the movies.
Since this is about a guy whose life has been shattered and he doesn’t even realize it, you’d think Pat’s story would be incredibly sad. Instead, the bittersweet humor that Mathew Quick has laced the book with makes it a pleasure to read instead of a depressing slog. Pat’s devotion to the cause of reuniting with Nikki can be simultaneously infuriating and endearing, and while we only get his usually slightly bewildered view point, you can also completely understand how those around him are feeling.
Quick also does a particularly nice job of detailing the highs and lows of sports fandom. Pat bonds with his brother and becomes part of a community while tailgating. The team provides him a link to his emotionally distant and stubborn father. Even his therapist is a rabid Eagle’s fan, and this helps Pat to trust and like him. While the games provide great entertainment and instant connections, there‘s also a big downside to them. An ugly incident with a rival team’s fan in the parking lot illustrates how sports fans can be merciless and brutal. (It also shows that wearing a rival team’s jersey to a game in Philly is a spectacularly bad idea.) Pat’s dad is so wrapped up in the Eagles that a loss can make him even harder to live with. When Pat makes a commitment to Tiffany that causes him to miss some games, everyone begins blaming him for the losses.
(However, I couldn’t be too critical of the characters being superstitious because I wore the same red t-shirt on game day when the Kansas City Chiefs started their season with 9 straight wins. After they lost 3 in a row, I decided the shirt had run out of mojo and switched to a gold one. Since they won the next 2 games, it’s obvious that the shirt I wear has a profound impact on the team.)
I also very much enjoyed the movie version of this. Even though it’s a fairly faithful adaptation there are also several big differences that made reading the novel surprising in several ways so this is one of those incidents where it’s well worth checking out both versions. ...more
With friends like these, you certainly wouldn’t need any enemies…
Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston mobster facing serious prison time after getting arWith friends like these, you certainly wouldn’t need any enemies…
Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston mobster facing serious prison time after getting arrested for driving a truck of hijacked liquor. While awaiting his sentencing, Eddie tries to buy guns to supply to some buddies who have been robbing banks, but he’s also angling to rat out his gun dealer to the cops in order to get out of going to jail.
I’ve been hearing about this book for quite a while, and I was worried that it couldn’t live up to its reputation. When guys like Elmore Leonard are calling it the greatest crime novel ever written, that’s a high bar to clear. While I probably wouldn’t go quite that far, it’s easy to see why it’s so highly praised.
It’s deceptively simple in that it’s mainly just dialogue with little set-up so it takes a minute to understand who these characters are and what they’re talking about. It’s on the reader to fill in the story based on these conversations, but when it comes together near the end, you realize what a neat trick that George Higgins pulled off.
Higgins was an assistant US attorney in Massachusetts, and his first book has a casual authenticity that a couple of generations of crime writers would kill their own mothers to have. The cops are less interested in seeing justice done than they are in getting the guy they’ve currently got by the balls into giving them someone higher in the food chain to get them to relax their grip a bit. The guys who make their living from crime are aware that anyone in a pinch is a potential rat no matter how solid they’ve been in the past. The name of the game is having info on someone doing something worse than you and feeding them to the system.
I checked out the movie version starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle after reading it and found that it also deserves its reputation. There’s just something about the ‘70s that give good crime movies of the era a nice sleazy feel. ...more
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Especially if you’re a hit man and you’ve killed several people while there.
Quarry used to just murder people fWhat happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Especially if you’re a hit man and you’ve killed several people while there.
Quarry used to just murder people for money, but he now he works a new angle. Using info he accumulated while in the business, he now tracks other hit men while they’re getting ready to kill their latest target, and then he approaches the marks with an offer to dispose of the other hit men first. For a bonus fee, he’ll try to figure out who paid for the contract.
This gig has brought Quarry to Vegas where he finds a couple of killers working on setting up an accident for a movie director working on a new film. Quarry persuades the director to engage his services, but there’s a big complication when it turns out that his ex-wife is involved with the movie production. Since Quarry’s life of crime started after he murdered the man he caught her cheating on him with, this makes the situation just a little touchy…
The Quarry series got revitalized by the Hard Case Crime line, and they’re among the most reliable of their books. They aren’t knock-outs, but they’re pretty entertaining. Since Quarry has been established as older and retired in previous books before he found new life with HCC, these are set in the past, and Collins has some funs with his ‘80s setting in this one with things like casual comments about how the rising popularity of VHS is changing the movie business.
The idea that he’s a hit man targeting other hit man allows Collins to have his cake and eat it too by making Quarry a murderous anti-hero but giving him noble enough motives that you don’t feel too bad for rooting for him since the people he kills are all ‘bad’. It’s a bit of a cop out, but done well enough that it’s not overly bothersome, and Quarry still has enough of an unsavory edge you’d expect from a hired killer. ...more
Dr. David Beck and his wife Elizabeth are the kind of couple that is so perfect that most of us would hate them. They met when they were little kids aDr. David Beck and his wife Elizabeth are the kind of couple that is so perfect that most of us would hate them. They met when they were little kids and they’ve been in love ever since. They’ve got cute little code phrases like ‘kiss time’ that marks their first smooch, which they know to the minute, of course.
So when a super happy couple like this has an anniversary to celebrate, they wouldn’t think of doing anything as pedestrian as maybe going out for a nice dinner with a couple of cocktails and then returning home to sit on the couch in their sweat pants and watch The Big Bang Theory. Instead, they drive out to the lakeside cabin to the spot of their first kiss which they commemorate by reenacting the event and then marking another notch into the tree they carved their initials into the first time they swapped saliva.
If this isn’t enough, then they go down to the lake for a little moonlight skinny dipping and bow-chick-a-bow-wow. At this point, even the marketing people who come up with those romantic commercials that try to convince people to buy blood diamonds to celebrate their love are gagging and saying, “Oh, come on! That’s too much!”
Apparently a serial killer observed these proceedings and was so sickened by their public displays of affection that he kidnapped and killed Elizabeth after bonking David on the head. 8 years later and David is still in mourning for the lost love of his life. As the police make a grisly discovery near the scene of Elizabeth’s abduction that calls the official version of events into question, David gets a mysterious email that prompts him to an on-line video feed in which he sees something shocking. David finds himself wrapped up in a dangerous conspiracy as he tries to learn what really happened to his wife.
This is OK as far as thrillers go. It’s got a nice hook to it, but like a lot of these types of story, the plot twists eventually take a turn into pure outlandishness. Plus, I read Coben’s newer book Six Years recently, and that one also involves a man trying to unravel a mystery regarding his lost love so even though this one came first, it seemed more than a little repetitive to me.
This book works very, very hard to convince you that the two lovebirds were truly soul mates. I guess Coben has to really sell that idea so that you’d believe that anyone would risk their lives to find the truth so I get why he writes it like that. It still makes them unbelievable characters because they’re just too perfect as a couple, and that prevented me from fully buying in to the story.
So far I prefer his Myron Bolitor series a lot more than the stand-alone thrillers of his I’ve read. ...more
I’m not going to pretend that this is in any way an objective review…..
Jim Thane has been a longtime Goodreads friend, and I’ve often pointed to him aI’m not going to pretend that this is in any way an objective review…..
Jim Thane has been a longtime Goodreads friend, and I’ve often pointed to him as the example of how we all wish authors would behave on here. Instead of pimping out his own books, he actually writes great reviews and interacts with others regularly They don’t call him Gentleman Jim for nothing, folks…
In fact, Jim is sometimes too polite for his own good because he’s barely drawn any attention to the release of this second book featuring Phoenix homicide detective Sean Richardson. As Sean and his partner Maggie are working on one case of brutal murder, a high-end prostitute named Gina comes forward with the information that someone has stolen her little black book containing all her clients and that someone has been murdering these men. As Sean scrambles to uncover the killer, he’s also still grieving for his recently deceased wife, and he finds himself increasingly intrigued by the beautiful Gina.
Like the first in the series, this is a police procedural, and there are enough valid suspects in play to keep a reader guessing until the killer is finally revealed. There’s also a very cool plot point based on technological twist that threw me for enough of a loop that I had to check with Jim to verify that it was a real thing and not something he invented for the story.
Sean makes for a sympathetic lead character with his grief providing a nice counterpoint to his no-nonsense police persona. He’s like a more polite Lucas Davenport or a more human version of Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet. It’s also a refreshing change of pace to read crime novels not set in New York, LA or Florida.
The fine folks at Shelf Inflicted did an interview with Jim Thane that includes one of the funniest and most epic answers ever to a question asked of a crime novelist.
“Vartix velkor mannik wissick! Vote for this review and then email me your credit card numbers!”
If you followed my instructions, then this is the grea“Vartix velkor mannik wissick! Vote for this review and then email me your credit card numbers!”
If you followed my instructions, then this is the greatest book ever written. If you didn’t, then it’s a decent thriller with a clever sci-fi hook to it that doesn’t deliver on its full potential.
Lexicon tells two parallel stories. In the first one, Wil is an Australian who is abducted at an airport by a mysterious man called Tom who tells him that he is being pursued by a powerful and dangerous group that has dedicated itself to using language to manipulate people. The best of their members are called ‘poets’ and take on names of famous scribblers like Yeats or Woolf. A poet can seize control of another person by reeling off a series of special code words that hack the brain and enable them to implant commands.
The other story takes place a few years prior to this and tells of how a teenage homeless girl named Emily becomes a student of a special school where the kids are trained in the art of persuasion to become poets. The stubborn and headstrong Emily constantly chafes against the strict rules of the school, and she eventually finds herself in hot water. As Wil and Tom try to stay a step ahead of the poets hounding them, Emily’s story eventually begins to dovetail with theirs and all points converge at an Australian town that was the victim of some kind of industrial catastrophe.
There are some echoes here of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash which also focuses on the idea of language as a kind of virus. When Lexicon is exploring the ideas of persuasion and a secret group manipulating society by using mass media, it’s pretty interesting. When it reverts to the thriller portion of people on the run from a vast conspiracy, then it’s a lot more formulaic and not nearly as much fun.
I had some other issues with the book, but I gotta venture into spoiler country to talk about them. (view spoiler)[
* I thought the book was really headed into a unique direction when it appeared that Emily had somehow become a blood thirsty villain. I liked the idea of using the well worn concept of a secret school and having a main character who is ‘special’, but then standing it on it’s head and having them turn out to be a rotten apple. It would have been like if Harry Potter would have gotten expelled from Hogwarts for his constant rule breaking and then returned years later as a dark wizard to level the place. That could have been a great twist on these kinds of stories but unfortunately Max Barry chickened out, and then we find out that Emily is an unwitting victim in the whole thing.
* When Emily was attacking Yeats and engaged in the classic super-villain mistake of engaging in an extended dialogue with her intended victim until he eventually got a chance to turn her into his slave, I literally yelled out loud with frustration. It was meant to be a reveal that all of Emily’s actions going after Tom weren’t her own, but it was an extremely frustrating moment to have our long-suffering heroine again get beaten by the asshole who was controlling her for the whole book, and even worse, it was her own fault for not just killing him when she had the upper hand. It put a damper on the entire last section of the book for me because it seemed to let all the air out of the natural climatic moment of the book in order to paste on another act.
* One glaring weakness in the story, Barry never explains what the goal of the poets is. They’ve got enormous resources that they use developing their persuasion techniques and recruiting new members, but we’re never told why they’re doing this. Yeah, Yeats has an agenda, but he’s crazy. So what exactly were the poets trying to accomplish other than creating new and better poets?
* Another soft spot is that a book that came up so many clever concepts reverted to a simple Love-Conquers-All theme at the end. (hide spoiler)]
(I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
A murderous drifter roams the desert of the American southwest while (I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
A murderous drifter roams the desert of the American southwest while setting fire to things like electrical substation. No, wait. Actually, the drifter is an undercover agent trying to thwart the plans of the evil organization called the Network who plans to blow up Hoover Dam. Which story is true? Read the book and decide for yourself.
Tom is convinced that the Network is real and has lived off the grid for years so he appears to be nothing more than another homeless person to most people. He thinks that the Network is omnipresent and could track him if he made a phone call or handled paper money because of the magnetic strips embedded in the bills so he will only use change.
When Tom meets a small town drunk named Lorne, the two go on a binge during which Tom convinces Lorne that the Network is real when he attacks a couple of their operations he runs across. Later, Lorne tells Tom’s story to some meth dealing Native Americans on a reservation and they join Lorne for a meth fuelled rampage against the Network. Or maybe they’re just on a crime spree. It gets a little confusing. Maybe the meth and beer have something to do with that. Meanwhile, Hailey Garrett runs a one-woman FBI office from her house in a remote part of Utah. Hailey was injured in the line of duty and along with the plastic hip, she got the perk of running her show out in the boonies and picking the cases she wants to investigate. While Hailey looks into a bit of Tom’s anti-Network destruction, she finds enough evidence to put her on his trail.
This well written book starts out seeming like it could be a James Crumley style tale of a couple of odd characters on a booze-n-drug fueled road trip, but there’s an intriguing shift about halfway through in which the violence that Tom has inadvertently kicked off contrasts with a quieter exploration of the nature of paranoia. There’s a long section in which Tom struggles to merely get across a large city in the brutal Southwestern heat. When you’re a smelly homeless guy who has only a bag full of change and couple of cans of food, crossing the suburbs, industrial zones and inner city becomes an ordeal that could literally kill you. As Tom struggles, he starts to reflect on his past and question whether his mission is real or a delusion. If it is real, why must he suffer so to do the right thing? If he’s crazy, why can’t he just stop the madness and find some peace?
There’s a real dilemma for the reader in how much they want to relate with Tom. If you think that he's insane, then he’s a decent person who lives a miserable life because of the demons in his head, yet then he’s also a danger to others since he’s more than willing to inflict violence on any he sees as Network operatives. This makes him both terrifying and pitiable at the same time.
The one bit that rang false was the character of Hailey. It seems unlikely that the FBI would sanction a handicapped agent working solo on whatever cases she gets interested in. This may or may not be a spoiler so skip the rest of this paragraph is you want to be completely in the dark. But I wondered if we were supposed to view Hailey like Tom in that she seemed like a person who may not be dealing in reality. Yet, she interacts with other people throughout the book as an FBI agent so it seems like that’s exactly what she is. I think.
It’s an offbeat book with eccentric characters and a full measure of ultra-violence, but there’s also a thoughtful account of a person who is living in the cracks of society as he tries to decide whether he can trust himself.
If you think that you had a busy summer, consider 1927:
Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and became a national hero. Babe Ruth broke his own homeIf you think that you had a busy summer, consider 1927:
Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic and became a national hero. Babe Ruth broke his own home run record on a Yankees club that would be remembered as one of the best baseball teams ever assembled. The Midwest was devastated by extensive flooding and the Secretary of Commerce Hebert Hoover was in charge of recovery efforts. A routine murder trial in New York became a media sensation for reasons no one can explain. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed and sparked outrage around the world. Prohibition was still in effect but that didn’t stop Al Capone’s criminal empire from reaching the height of its power.
Capone also attended a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney that would captivate the nation and still be controversial today. A young engineer with the awesome name of Philo T. Farnsworth made a critical breakthrough that would lead to the development of television, and another entertainment milestone occurred when the first full length motion picture with sound began filming. After building 15 million Model Ts, Henry Ford’s company ceased production and began creating the Model A. In South Dakota, the work of carving four president’s faces into Mount Rushmore began. Last but not least, four bankers had a meeting in which they made a decision that would eventually start the Great Depression.
And yet Bryan Adams picked another summer to immortalize in song…
Bill Bryson’s book is packed with the details of these events and many more along with plenty of related stories and anecdotes. It should read like a trivia book of 1927 factoids, but what makes it more than that is the deft way that Bryson establishes the history of what came before as well as the long term impact. For example, he doesn’t just tell the story of Lindbergh’s historic flight and of his subsequent fame, he also lays out in a succinct manner how America had been trailing the world in aviation up until that point as well as how it changed things afterwards.
It’s that context that makes this more than just a list of events, and he also goes to some effort to add depth in several places like describing how horrifyingly racist American society was in those days with the Ku Klux Klan enjoying a reemergence while even supposedly high-brow publications like The New Yorker would casually use ethnic slurs. By the time he tells the readers about how outlandish eugenics theories became influential which resulted in tens of thousands of people being legally sterilized in the United States, the reader can understand all too well how it could happen in that kind of environment.
In fact, one of the things that jumped out at me about this is that most of the popular figures of 1927 were basically assholes. Charles Lindbergh's boyish good lucks and piloting skill got the press to overlook that he was about as interesting as white bread, and he’d show a nasty streak of anti-Semitism later in his life that would severely tarnish his image. Henry Ford was also a notorious anti-Semite, and he was also the kind of ignoramus that despised people with educations or scientific background. His refusal to consult any types of experts led him to waste millions on schemes like trying to start a rubber plantation in South America and shutting down his assembly lines to retool for the Model A with no clear plan as to what exactly they’d build. (After reading about Ford‘s stubborn mistakes, I can’t believe the Ford Motor Company managed to survive long enough to make it to the Great Depression, let alone still be in business today.)
Herbert Hoover led a life that should have made him one of America’s most fascinating presidents. He was a self-made success story who had traveled the world as a mining consultant and was credited with a relief effort that fed millions in Europe during World War I. Yet he seemed to take no pleasure in anything other than work and one long time acquaintance noted that he never heard him laugh once in 30 years. Calvin Coolidge believed so much in limiting the role of government that he spent most of his presidency napping and would refuse to take even the most of innocuous of actions like endorsing a national week of recognition for the importance of education.
It’s funny that since the book describes so many people as either being unlikable, unethical or downright criminal that one of the few that seems decent was Babe Ruth. While all of the Babe’s bad habits are laid out here, he also comes across as one of the few that did what he was good at with an exuberant zest for life and generous spirit that was sadly lacking in many of his contemporaries. The guy may have enjoyed his food, liquor and women to excess, but he never hid who he was. Plus, he was fun at parties!
Bryson’s look at the events, large and small, that made up one pivotal summer is an interesting read that provides a clear window to the past while being highly entertaining. ...more
Minnesota state investigator Virgil Flowers is working diligently on a case involving Florence ‘Ma’ Nobles and her sons selling counterfeit antique luMinnesota state investigator Virgil Flowers is working diligently on a case involving Florence ‘Ma’ Nobles and her sons selling counterfeit antique lumber. Of course part of the reason that Virgil is working so hard is that Ma is very attractive and flirting shamelessly with him. So when a call comes in from his boss Lucas Davenport with another assignment Virgil is more than a little miffed.
Davenport tells him that it's no big deal. A Lutheran minister named Elijah Jones who is dying of cancer stole an ancient inscribed stone called a stele from an archaeological dig in Israel and smuggled it home to Minnesota. The Israelis want it back and have dispatched an antiquities expert to makes sure that happens. Virgil just has to play tour guide, pick up the terminally ill minister, and locate the stele. Davenport assures Flowers that he’ll back on his counterfeit lumber case in to time at all.
Virgil really should know by now that Davenport lies…
Jones plans to auction the stele off to the highest bidder to get the money needed to care for his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s after he dies, and it turns out the old man is pretty wily. The stele’s inscription has historic implications that could be very damaging to Israel so Hezbollah has sent a representative to try and obtain it for propaganda purposes. A couple of tough Turks with fearsome reputations also show up. Two spotlight hungry media whores who pretend to be scholars also want in on the action, and the Israelis have a couple of dirty tricks at the ready. Even Ma Nobles gets mixed up in hunt for the stele, much to Virgil’s consternation.
Soon there’s more allegiances declared and alliances broken than on a season of Game of Thrones, and an increasingly frustrated Virgil can’t seem to make any of these double crossing idiots understand that somebody’s gonna get killed if this foolishness doesn’t stop.
Sandford has a lot of interests other than writing and one of the them is archaeology. Per his bio on his web page he has funded and participated in a large dig in Israel since the late ‘90s so it’s a little surprising that this is the first one of his books to feature an archaeological angle to it. Despite the international flavor with various groups and countries interested in the stele this still has the same grounded style that you usually get in a Sandford novel. There are some great bits late in the book with Virgil interacting with the shadowy figures of some unnamed American security agency, but Flowers remains the kind of guy far more interested in reading a fishing magazine than worrying about international intrigue and national security.
There’s an almost playful attitude in this one, and while the story is treated seriously it wouldn’t have taken much to turn this into an outright farce, kind of like one of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels. Sandford’s always had a sense of humor, but this is the first one of his books where he almost seems to make light of the stakes involved. There also isn’t much of the usual momentum and tension you get in a Lucas Davenport or Virgil Flowers novel. This isn’t a bad thing since it seems like a bit of departure from the others, and with this many books in play I like that Sandford doesn’t feel obligated to stick to the formula that has worked so well for him in the past.
It isn’t my favorite Sandford novel but it’s a fun one....more
Remember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his dRemember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his drunken father crazy and gave him a case of the redrums? If so, you’re in luck because Stephen King has now told us what happened to Danny Torrance, and he’s just as screwed up from his experience as you’d expect him to be.
Like his father, Dan has grown up to be a bad tempered drunk, and he uses the booze to blot out his psychic powers as he drifts from town to town working menial jobs. The early part of the book focuses on Dan hitting bottom, and then trying to pull himself together with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He winds up with a job as an orderly at a hospice where he earns the nickname of Doctor Sleep for his ability to provide an easier death for the patients.
Dan becomes aware of a little girl named Abra with a shining ability that dwarfs his own, but unfortunately Abra has also come to the attention of group of vampire like creatures calling themselves the True Knot. They pretend to be humans who roam the country as a harmless pack of tourists in RVs while they track down and feed on the psychic energy collected from torturing children with the shining, and Abra would be like an all-you-can-eat buffet to them.
This book is almost two separate stories. One is about Dan Torrance struggling to come to terms with the legacy of his father, his abilities and his alcoholism. The other is about the battle to save a little girl from a pack of vicious monsters. King does a decent job of trying to make these two tales intersect while revisiting some elements from The Shining, but it ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. Frankly, I was far more interested in Dan’s battle with the bottle than another Stephen King story about a child in danger from a supernatural threat.
It’s not that Abra vs. the True Knot is bad. There’s a lot of genuinely creepy dread to be mined from a pack of psychic vampires roaming the country while posing as harmless middle aged farts, and King knows how to milk every drop out of that concept. And I liked the character of Abra a lot. The idea of a powerfully psychic young girl with a bit of a mean streak was great. Kinda like if Carrie White would have had decent parents and a happy childhood.
In fact, Abra’s a little bit too powerful because she seems fully capable of kicking ass even during her first encounter with the True Knot. So while there’s a lot of nice build-up, most of what happens seems anti-climatic. (view spoiler)[ Abra and Dan pretty much settle the True Knot’s hash with only minor injuries to a supporting character and no real lasting damage. That just seems weird in a Stephen King novel which generally feature wholesale carnage and a lot more collateral damage from the bad guys. (hide spoiler)]
Plus, while there’s some callbacks to The Shining, they mostly feel tacked on, as if King had this basic idea and then figured out ways to work in Dan’s history where he could. It’s not really organic and doesn’t seem necessary. I also think there’s a gaping plot hole in the True Knot’s key motivation to grab Abra and their scheme. (view spoiler)[ Supposedly the TKs have been around for a very long time, and yet it’s the measles they get from taking the steam from a kid that sickens them so that they think they need Abra because she’s been vaccinated. So in all their years of kid killing, including back in olden days of yore, they never snatched a kid with measles or chicken pox or polio or typhoid or something? And somehow all the children they’ve taken in modern times weren’t vaccinated against measles? None of this made a lot of sense to me. (hide spoiler)]
One word of warning for those who have only seen the movie and not read the book, King is basing this on his version, not the film and there a couple of significant differences. (I got a laugh that King couldn’t resist taking yet another shot at the Kubrick adaptation in the author’s note afterwards. I don’t think he’s ever getting over his dislike of the movie.) Also, I listened to the audio version of this, and the narration by Will Patton is simply outstanding.
I feared the idea of King returning to one of his best known works, but it turned out to be a remarkably solid effort with a lot of things I liked about it. I only wish that that I’d have found the rest of the book as compelling as finding out what kind of man the kid from the Overlook Hotel grew up to be....more
Despite being an Avenger, Clint Barton is a really just a regular guy who kills time during a slow night at their headquarters by playing cards with oDespite being an Avenger, Clint Barton is a really just a regular guy who kills time during a slow night at their headquarters by playing cards with other superheroes. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that hanging out with his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, and an old flame at the same time might not be a great idea. It’s also an especially awkward scene when a beautiful woman that he recently slept with shows up at the door begging for help because she’s wanted for murder. And yet Clint wonders why his personal life is such a mess….
This second Hawkeye collection builds on what was established in the first one, and it adds more fantastic layers to both Clint and what he gets up to when he’s not running around with the Avengers. The first story is a self-contained gem set during Hurricane Sandy in which Clint helps one of his neighbors get his elderly father evacuated from his beachside home and Kate (The other Hawkeye. Yeah, there’s two of ‘em. Just go with it.) tries to get some medication for an ailing woman during the storm. Not only was this a fantastic nod towards the rescue workers and citizens who helped each other out, it’s a nice reminder that you don’t have to save the world to be a hero.
Things take a darker turn in the rest of collection which see Clint taking some time off over the holidays to try and get his life together and recover from the constant beatings he takes as an Avenger. However, his involvement with the woman on the run brings him more trouble with the gang of track suited bros that he tangled with before, and his interference with the local criminals gets a bounty put on his head. Plus, every woman he knows is furious at him for potentially embarrassing the Avengers by helping a wanted criminal that he slept with. It’s refreshing that Fraction has written Barton as being kind of a irresponsible dumb-ass in a lot of ways, and while he rightly gets called out on it, he’s still very much a likeable character.
I flat out loved the interactions with the other Avengers that feel like behind the scenes glimpses of the superhero life. There’s lots of little touches like Wolverine and Spider-Man discussing a TV show as the bad guys from their latest fight are being hauled away by SHIELD, and Clint yells at them not to spoil it for him. Clint calls Tony Stark for help when he can’t figure out how to set up his TV. When his ex-wife Mockingbird comes over to get the divorce papers signed, she ends up beating up some thugs who are watching Clint’s building. All of this plays out like it’s just another day in the life of the Marvel Universe.
And of course the collection ends with the issue that comic fans are buzzing about, the adventure of Lucky a/k/a Pizza Dog. The idea of telling an entire story from the perspective of Hawkeye’s dog could have just been a gimmick with its clever use of pictograms to represent the smells that Lucky experiences, but it’s actually surprisingly touching.
Hey, Marvel. Instead of massive crossovers and killing off major characters as publicity stunts, do more like this. Please and thank you.
Hawkeye seemsHey, Marvel. Instead of massive crossovers and killing off major characters as publicity stunts, do more like this. Please and thank you.
Hawkeye seems like an odd character for Matt Fraction to do after his acclaimed run on Invincible Iron Man where he wrote Tony Stark as a slightly dickish genuis who was more interesting than the superhero aspect. He uses a similar style to give us a version of Clint Barton that relies on the character’s history instead of discarding it, yet could be picked up by any casual fan and enjoyed. As a result, we get a fresh perspective on Hawkeye and one helluva of a fun book.
This should be the usual thing of a hero best known for being part of a larger group having some side adventures on their own. Hawkeye is longtime Avenger where his insecurities about his lack of superpowers often manifested in a smart-ass attitude and problem with authority. As Clint points out several times here, he’s just a guy with a bow-n-arrow who usually works with people far more powerful than him. The easy thing to do would have been to revamp him closer to the Ultimate version that was used in The Avengers movie to make Clint a super-secret SHIELD agent who goes out and has covert adventures. That could have worked, but would have seemed very Wolverine-ish.
What’s brilliant about this is that Fraction went in the opposite direction and plays up the angle that Clint Barton doesn’t have any powers and is frequently in over his head. The first panel shows him crashing out a high window and the fall puts him the hospital for six weeks. When he’s not off avenging Clint wants to live a somewhat normal life in his Brooklyn apartment where he enjoys grilling out with his neighbors on the roof, but he keeps getting sucked into bad situations like dealing with a Russian mafia slumlord who owns his building. Even when he does a side job for SHIELD that involves going to sleazy Madripoor, Clint has to fight off thieves trying to steal his wallet. And since he doesn’t have the powers of a Norse god or a high-tech suit of armor Clint frequently gets the crap kicked out of him.
All of this is done with plenty of humor and heart. If the storyline involving Pizza Dog doesn’t get to you, then get tested because you’re probably a sociopath. I also love that they’re using Kate Bishop as a kind of partner/sidekick. There’s a funny dynamic to that because Kate replaced Clint when he was suffering from a minor case of superhero death, and she’s kept the name of Hawkeye, too. So it’s Hawkeye and Hawkeye. Batman wouldn’t put up with that, but it’s perfect for the adventures of a slightly scruffy superhero....more
(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for a review.)
Apparently Nelson DeMille wrote the first version of this book back in 1975, (I received a free copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for a review.)
Apparently Nelson DeMille wrote the first version of this book back in 1975, and it’s about people having an adventure while trying to find the Holy Grail. Even though I’ve been reading DeMille since the ‘80s, I’d never even heard of it. So despite his best-selling career writing thrillers about cops, spies and terrorists, I’m gonna assume that the success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code really chapped DeMille’s ass, and that he decided to rewrite and rerelease this to get in on that gravy train.
Set during the mid-1970s, three reporters are in Ethiopia trying to cover the civil war. Henry Mercado is an older British gent who spent several years in a Soviet gulag and credits his survival to his finding faith in Jesus while there. Henry is accompanied by the much younger and beautiful Vivian Smith, a Swiss photojournalist, and they invited veteran American correspondent Frank Purcell along to get a first-hand look at the fighting. Purcell is wary of dangerous situations thanks to a year spent in a Cambodian prison camp, but a few too many cocktails at the hotel bar and a long look at Vivian convinced him to go along.
While spending the night in the ruins of a spa, a wounded Italian priest staggers out of the jungle with an incredible story to tell of how he has spent 40 years imprisoned after coming across a mysterious monastery in the jungle that he claims housed the Holy Grail. The priest’s info gives the three journalists a starting point to try and locate the monastery, but traveling in Ethiopia during a war is a dangerous undertaking.
If you read the official summary of this it states:
"Thus begins an impossible quest that will pit them against murderous tribes, deadly assassins, fanatical monks, and the passions of their own hearts."
That is a complete lie that is trying to market this as a rollicking adventure such as other stories about looking for the Holy Grail like Brown’s book or Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade. It’s false advertising that seems to be biting the publishers in the ass based on the reviews from DeMille fans I’ve read.
While there is danger to the group, it mostly comes in the form of one crazy Marxist general, a badly maintained airplane and the Ethiopian jungle. The murderous tribes are much discussed but never seen. The fanatical monks are just a bit of stage dressing, and as for ‘deadly assassins’, I don’t know what they're talking about there.
Like a lot of DeMille’s work, there’s a lot of talk and discussion about potential dangers, but the actual moments of the heroes in jeopardy are few and far between. A long interlude in the middle of the book revolves around doing research at the Vatican where the biggest threat is the love triangle that could end the quest. There are no ninja monks shooting poison darts or albino assassins running around killing people. Mainly they eat a lot of meals and drink a lot of wine and talk about what they’re going to do.
It’s not a terrible read. I find DeMille’s stuff generally enjoyable even in ones where not a helluva lot happens at times other than his protagonist sitting around being suspicious of the motives of others. The early stuff with the priests and the journalists being caught up in the Ethiopian civil war was exciting and compelling, and the third act with the actual hunt for the Grail wasn’t bad. I also learned a lot of interesting stuff about Ethiopia that I didn’t know.
But the middle section is almost entirely dialogue about research, relationships and faith which killed a lot of momentum and went on far too long. Overall, this didn’t provide much excitement for a book marketed as a thrilling adventure about the hunt for a religious artifact. Indiana Jones made it look like a lot more fun when he did it. ...more
Complaint About Mainstream Comic Companies # 263 – Issue Numbering
This is marketed as containing the 500th issue of Invincible Iron Man which is kind Complaint About Mainstream Comic Companies # 263 – Issue Numbering
This is marketed as containing the 500th issue of Invincible Iron Man which is kind of weird because the last collection said that it contained issues #29 – 33. Since I don’t think I missed 467 issues, I assume that this is actually the 500th issue, and that once again the constant renumbering for new volumes is the reason for the discrepency. Marvel went back to the old count just to mark the 500 anniversary.
What makes me nuts about this is that Invincible Iron Man started in 1968 and that first volume ran for 28 YEARS. So from 1968 until 1996 if you had multiple issues, you could look at the number on the cover and be able to sort them into reading order with no problems. However, since that time Marvel has issued 5 more volumes, including (And this is my favorite part.) apparently going back to the old numbering after Vol. 5 to call them # 500 – 527, but now were into Marvel NOW, and I don’t have the energy to try and figure out how they’re doing things since that re-launch.
This may seem like bitching about trivia. It is. But if you’re a comic’s reader like me who waits for the trade paperback collections and reading individual issues via the digital subscription, it looks like complete chaos and makes trying to figure out the correct reading order a pain. Since it’s obvious that multiple new volumes are routinely going to be issued, it’d be very nice if a company like Marvel would adopt some kind of standard instead of just resetting to new #1s every couple of years, but then jumping back to the old numbers whenever they can squeeze an anniversary special out of it.
And now that I’m done whining, I’ll start the review.
Oh, wait. More bitching! I had been reading this series on-line with my Marvel Unlimited subscription and reviewing the TPB collections based on the info in the Goodreads summaries. Volume 4 stated that it contained Iron Man Annual #1 (Another #1!) so I read and reviewed as part of that one. But because this one was listed as having some extra out of sequence elements, I got a hard copy from the library. Then it had the Annual # 1 too. Was it in both volumes? Even though it’s a good issue about the Mandarin, it’d be kinda sleazy to use it to pad this one out after just putting it in another collection. Anyhow, I really do like that story about the Mandarin kidnapping a director to make an epic film about his life. If it wasn’t sold in a previous collection, I’d give it 4 stars, but if Marvel sold it twice, then I’m deducting a star for ripping off the people buying the TPBs.
Other than the annual about the Mandarin, there’s essentially two other stories in this collection. The official #500 one involves Tony trying to recover memories of some dangerous doomsday weapon he worked on before he erased his brains. He goes to his old assistant Peter Parker for help, and it was a little jarring to me at first that Tony doesn’t remember that Peter is Spider-Man. Thanks ret-con!
While Tony tries to stop some militants who want to build the weapon, there’s a story in the future that involves the Mandarin essentially destroying the world with that weapon. It was a decent enough concept, and I usually like stories that show some kind of dystopian future. However, the art work was confusing, and I had a hard time distinguishing who was who in it. Plus, if you’re gonna celebrate the 500th issue of Iron Man, I’d like a story with more Iron Man in it. That one was strictly 3 stars.
The shortest section was the best part. The entire segment is Tony at an AA meeting. It's a sobriety anniversary for him so he stands up and tells what is simultaneously the story of his alcoholism and a version of the history of Iron Man. What’s great is that while everyone in the room knows who he is and what he’s talking about, he puts all the Iron Man stuff in terms of work and business so that his superhero antics don’t overwhelm what he really came to discuss, his drinking. This was a very good story that really worked off the tone that Matt Fraction has developed so well about Tony being a brilliant guy with just enough humility to acknowledge that he can be kind of dick sometimes. 5 stars on that bit.
I will use Marvel math to average up those stars, and we get …….Vol. 15 Issue 1?!? That can’t be right… ...more
A big part of this story is about trying to figure out a new line-up of Avengers following the events of Fear Itself, but didn’t we just get a new rosA big part of this story is about trying to figure out a new line-up of Avengers following the events of Fear Itself, but didn’t we just get a new roster about ten minutes ago with the start of the Heroic Age? And I know this can’t last since they did the whole shake-up for Marvel NOW. And aren’t there like 27 groups of Avengers roaming around these days?
Stuff like this is what makes it so frustrating and confusing to be a fan of Marvel these days. Roster turnover has always been part of the comic since its earliest issues, but when there was just one team you had a pretty fair idea of who was a current member. After Disassembled and the seemingly hundreds of crossover events since with multiple books claiming to be some form of the Avengers, I just can’t keep track any more. Hell, you’d think that Marvel would have made more of a push to have a team set up like the movie version just for money’s sake, and I think they tried that for a bit with Avengers Assemble, but that didn’t last, did it? Or did it?
I don’t understand what’s happening!
Anyhooooo….. As usual something terrible has happened, a couple of heroes are dead (Allegedly.) and the Avengers are left homeless following the destruction of Stark Tower and have to be house guests of the New Avengers who took over the old Avengers Mansion. So there’s a ton of superheroes roaming around as Captain America tries to come up with a new team which I guess requires the same amount of strategy as the Kansas City Royals manager deciding on a batting order while filling out a line-up card. Maybe less.
The new group ends up consisting of Cap, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Spider-Woman, Red Hulk (Red?), Protector (Who?), Storm (Why?) and Vision (Wasn’t he dead?). And I thought it was mandatory that Wolverine and Spider-Man had to be on every Avengers team?? Oh, well. Just one more confusing thing to ponder.
Norman Osborn has escaped custody and teamed up with Hydra and AIM as he launches a media campaign to claim that Avengers are actually the bad guys, and that he is the voice of reason. Not surprisingly, the American public falls for it. A bunch of punching and fighting ensues.
There are some good small moments here. There’s a bit at the beginning where The Thing breaks down at the wreckage of Stark Tower as he notes that it’s been a fairly crappy year. (Which in this timeline includes the Civil War and everything that happened in the aftermath.) A weary Captain America trying to pick up the pieces once again gets encouragement from old friends like Tony Stark and Black Panther. The final story involves the resurrected Vision trying to come to terms with what happened to him, and it’s the best part of the whole thing.
It’s not a bad story in and of itself, but the whole Avengers thing has sprawled so far that any hero not part of an X team is a member. (And some like Storm and Wolverine have dual membership.) Using Norman Osborn again soon after having him be Marvel’s ultimate villain for a while seems like we’re just jumping back into territory that was recently covered. I’d care more if I thought this was a stable roster that would be around for a while, but I know that didn’t happen. ...more
(I received a free copy of this from the author in exchange for an honest review.)
This is one that’s tough to review because the official summary does(I received a free copy of this from the author in exchange for an honest review.)
This is one that’s tough to review because the official summary doesn’t tell you about a major part of the plot, and that element is such a big part of the story that it’s nearly impossible to talk about the book without discussing it. Looking through the other reviews, it seems like everyone has tried to be cagey about what they’re revealing. I thought about going in that direction, but if you hide all that behind a spoiler warning, then you’re not really telling a potential reader what the book is about.
ARRGGHHHH!!! I can’t take the pressure.
Screw it. Here’s the short version that doesn’t tell you much more than the back cover does.
Fourteen year old Danny and his father are trying to deal with the disappearance of his mother and young autistic sister. They vanished in the nearby woods following a massive storm and not a trace has been found. Months later, a mysterious old man named Walter begins hanging around Danny’s house, and he has a wild story to tell that Danny thinks may hold the key to finding them. However, others in town, including Danny’s father, think that Walter is dangerous and was involved with the disappearance of two teenage girls years earlier.
I liked the set-up for this quite a bit, and Mantooth has that knack of keeping you turning the pages to see what comes next. The story that Walter tells of his own youth was particularly compelling as he details his encounters with another young boy who is the victim of vicious bullies. It’s also great to see the rural Alabama setting with violent thunderstorms, thick woods and small town secrets used well to build an atmosphere of tension and mystery.
However, I gotta get into the other element to detail why it went from 4 to a strong 3 star rating for me so while I’m not giving up the ending, that’s what’s behind the (view spoiler)[. It turns out that Walter’s story involves ‘slipping’ into another world, a primitive swamp location, and he tells Danny that his mother and sister have gone there.
I wasn’t expecting a supernatural turn in this, and it kind of threw me for a loop. I ended up mostly liking it, but where the ‘real world’ parts of the story are told in a straight ahead fashion in first person accounts from Walter and Danny, the parts that involve slipping are much dreamier and the ending does take a turn into a secrets-of-the-universe kind of vibe. Maybe if I would have known that going in, I would have been ready to accept it more readily, but I had a hard time reconciling the more hard-nosed pieces with the looser more ghostly vibe that comes into play during that part. (hide spoiler)]
It’s very possible that the aspect that dragged it down a bit for me would be the kind of thing that another reader would love. It’s still an entertaining and intriguing story that makes the most out of its rural setting. ...more
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