In reality, the last manned mission to the moon was America’s Apollo 17, but the jumping off point for this story is that there was actually an ApolloIn reality, the last manned mission to the moon was America’s Apollo 17, but the jumping off point for this story is that there was actually an Apollo 18 done as a secret military operation. How do you keep a space mission involving thousands of people a secret?
Look, if you’re gonna read this book, you need to stop asking questions like that.
Kaz Zemickis was a test pilot who was also training to be an astronaut when an unfortunate collision between his plane and a seagull leaves him with one eye. Now Kaz is working as a liaison between Washington and the Apollo 18 mission. This is challenging because he’s essentially changing their whole mission plan at the last minute.
Instead of just going to the moon and collecting some rocks, the astronauts need to photograph and hopefully sabotage a Soviet space station equipped with new cameras that will be able to take high resolution spy pictures of the US once it’s manned. Once that’s accomplished, they’re supposed to go to the moon and check out a previously unexplored site that the Soviets are investigating with a lunar rover, and if possible, the astronauts are supposed to sabotage the rover as well. If they can squeeze in a little science in between all this sabotage, scientists have discovered some weird holes in the moon that they’d like checked if possible.
Unfortunately, one of the astronauts dies in a training accident, and must be replaced with a back-up. Meanwhile, the Soviets have made an interesting discovery on the moon with their rover, that they’d very much like to keep to themselves. The Russians also have some leverage over one of the astronauts on Apollo 18.
This book was written by a former test pilot and astronaut who has a ton of experience in space and in working with the Russian space agency. I am NOT a former test pilot and astronaut, but I am a giant space nerd who has checked out a bunch of books and documentaries about manned space flight. I’ve also seen Apollo 13 like 12 times.
So while not an expert like the author, I’d like to think I know a little more than the average bear about the subject, but I wouldn’t presume to say that the author got any of the technical or historical details wrong about this. In fact, per his notes at the end some of the things I thought were insane were true.
What I will question is the basic premise and way this book is structured just from a thriller standpoint. For starters, we’re told from the jump that Apollo 18 is a military mission that is going to be a secret. Yet, we’re never told what that mission was. (Bear in mind that the stuff about the Soviet spy station and rover comes into the picture when they change their mission at the last minute.) The world knows that the US is going back to the moon, but the details of the mission aren't being revealed. Yet, the training seems to be about doing the standard moon stuff of grabbing some rocks, making some observations, taking some samples, setting up some experiments, and trying to get back to Earth without dying. The story tells us that Nixon paid for this operation by using military funding, but we're never told what they were originally going to do that was different from other moon missions.
I also question that NOBODY in this story ever brings up a legal, political, or ethical concern that the US is essentially going into space to sabotage Soviet property. Since this is the Nixon administration making this call, I’m not saying that they wouldn’t try it, but it seems odd that absolutely nobody ever brings up that we’re essentially using a ultra-expensive Apollo mission that the world still knows about to commit an act of war.
Also, nobody brings up that they're launching a rocket they told the world would be going to the moon to do secret military things. So when a Soviet space station fails immediately after the US capsule hits orbit, and the a Soviet rover fails right after Apollo astronauts land nearby, it's pretty obvious what happened. Maybe Russia couldn't prove it, but it would certainly cause accusations to be made and an international incident.
The next part is where it really gets messy, but I’ll keep it vague to avoid spoilers. Let’s just say that things don’t go well when Apollo 18 tries to sabotage the Soviet station, and there is absolute chaos for a few minutes as well a high probability that the space capsule has been damaged. A bunch of other shit has gone wrong as well, but despite it all, the astronauts go ahead and hit the Go-To-The-Moon button to do their burn for lunar orbit. Even when NASA gets involved again, they learn that the capsule has so many issues that it makes the Apollo 13 mission look like a cakewalk by comparison.
And yet they still decide to land on the fucking moon rather than just orbiting once and coming back immediately.
There’s a lot more that happens and other than the technical details, most of it seems so outlandish that it’s impossible to take any of it seriously. Plus, much like most action movies these days the ending seems way to long and drawn out with even more utterly unbelievable twists and turns with a bunch of events occurring that would most likely result in the US and Soviet Union immediately launching nukes at each other. There’s also some blatant sequel set-up that makes me pretty sure that the author plans for this to be some kind of Tom Clancy style thrillers using spaceflight as the hook with the Kaz character acting as Jack Ryan.
I should be the kind of reader who would go nuts for a historical-fiction/alt-history/conspiracy-thriller/set-in-space kind of book, and I was more than willing to go along with some of it at first. But there’s just too much of everything in this. Too many characters, too much detail, too many plot twists, too many outlandish events, etc. It’s all just too much for me to suspend disbelief and roll with it, and that’s what this kind of story needs for it to really work....more
I received a free copy of this from NetGalley for review.
“There’s murder in them thar hills!”
Mick Hardin is a combat veteran and investigator with theI received a free copy of this from NetGalley for review.
“There’s murder in them thar hills!”
Mick Hardin is a combat veteran and investigator with the Army CID who has returned home on leave to find that his wife is pregnant, and the baby may or may not be his. As he tries to cope with that he’s retreated to the cabin in the Kentucky hills where he was raised by his grandfather to do some serious drinking. His sister is the local sheriff and when a girl is found murdered in the woods, she asks Mick to help her find the killer. Looking into the crime means dealing with the dead woman’s angry relatives, other suspicious hill folk, political intrigue, an FBI agent, and some thugs sent to keep Mick from interfering with the local heroin distribution.
There’s two immediate and easy comparisons that spring to mind when discussing this one. The first is the excellent TV series Justified, and the second are the great Quinn Colson novels by Ace Atkins. If you’re a fan of either or both of those then I think it’s safe to say that you’ll probably like this book.
However, while there are similarities in story and setting to those other works, Chris Offutt has carved out his own unique niche here. There’s a real sense of the place and people that comes up in various gritty details. For example, at one point Mick knows he’ll have to go up some steep muddy roads in an old pick-up so he haggles with a local mechanic to get an old scrap engine to use for weight in the back of his truck. (That brought back a memory from my own youth of how my dad had a couple of old tire inner tubes filled with sand to put the back of his truck for weight in the winner.)
Offutt also establishes a complex web of the kind of personal relationships you find in small towns where everybody has some kind of history or blood connection to everybody else. Generational grudges are held and judgements are made depending on your lineage. It’s also the kind of place where time seems to stand still in some ways, and the progress that does come just seems designed to screw over the locals.
It’s a solid crime story with a great rural vibe to it....more
I can’t believe I drank 8 whiskey sours while reading this book!
It’s 1969 and former TV star Rick Dalton’s career is on a downhill slide while his neI can’t believe I drank 8 whiskey sours while reading this book!
It’s 1969 and former TV star Rick Dalton’s career is on a downhill slide while his next door neighbors, Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, are the new cool kids of Hollywood. Meanwhile, Rick’s stuntman/driver Cliff Booth has a run in with some freaky hippies who keep talking about their leader, Charlie.
This one is a real oddity. You’ve got the writer/director of a successful movie releasing a novel based on it, but the book doesn’t exactly follow the film. In fact, the climax of the movie is casually revealed about one-third of the way through the book as something that eventually happens without going into details or mentioning it again.
I’ve often thought that Quentin Tarantino’s films are kind of Rorschach tests in that people can and will read into them what they want. While he certainly deserves criticism for several things, and I often find his personality tiresome, his movies fascinate me. Particularly this one which I thought was one of his best and had really interesting themes about a time when Hollywood was both changing and remaining the same. I also thought it had a lot of intriguing things regarding movie violence vs. violence in reality. Since I had a lot of theories about what QT was actually saying about it, I enjoyed finding more details in the book that seemed to confirm that. Especially about Cliff Booth.
If you’re into the movie, it’s worth a look, but you’re also not really missing out on anything if you just want to stick to the film version. If you don’t like QT or the film, it’s not gonna change your mind. Overall, it’s kind of like a literary version of deleted scenes. They can be interesting, but were most likely cut for a reason....more
I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
In these troubled and complicated times, it’s nice to be able to read a book set in aI received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
In these troubled and complicated times, it’s nice to be able to read a book set in a small town in Mississippi where the people still have old time family values and the problems of the modern world never intrude on them.
And if you actually believe that I can tell you don’t really know anything about American small towns at all.
As usual, there’s big trouble in Tibbehah County, and Sheriff Quinn Colson has to deal with it. The most pressing problem is that a barfly named Gina Byrd has vanished, and when evidence of foul play turns up, her troubled teenage daughter TJ is the prime suspect. TJ is the kind of tough-as-nails poor kid who has no use or respect for the law so despite her claims that she’s innocent, TJ goes on the run with her boyfriend, her best friend, and her younger brother. When they encounter a rich girl with her own problems and a very active Instagram account, TJ’s crime spree goes viral while she continues to claim that her mother’s boyfriend is the real guilty party.
Quinn has a further complication because his former deputy turned US Marshal, Lillie Virgil, was a friend to the missing woman who automatically believes the worst about TJ, and she goes on a personally motivated hunt for the girl and her half-assed gang despite Quinn’s belief that their might be some truth to TJ’s story. Meanwhile, an old enemy of Quinn’s has returned and is quietly rebuilding his criminal empire as he tries to use the media firestorm around TJ to his own advantage. Adding to the mess are the utterly disgusting and psychotic father & son house painters who also moonlight as thugs for hire.
Ace Atkins spent several of the previous books bringing several plots to a head which culminated nicely in the last one so this seems like a turning point in the series. There’s still a lot of the same characters, and previous events still have on-going consequences, but this feels like a new phase in the adventures of Quinn Colson is beginning. It’s a helluva good start, too.
Atkins continues to nail the whole vibe of a small town from its low key charms and the complex relationships among people who know each other all too well. He also shows clear vision when exploring the flaws of some folks like the stomach turning hypocrisy or stubborn nostalgia for times that weren’t really all that great.
There’s another interesting factor in play here. Atkins sometimes likes to slyly play off other fiction. For example, in one of his Spenser books he recreated a scene from True Grit, and he also used a darker version of The Dukes of Hazard as a template for another Quinn Colson novel. Here, I get the distinct impression that the inspiration may have been an ‘80s movie called The Legend of Billie Jean although it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen that one so take this observation with a grain of salt.
Overall, it’s Atkins doing his usual thing of telling a rural crime story with social commentary mixed in, and there's damn few writers who can do it as well as he does....more
It’s too bad that this book has been so forgotten. If only somebody would do a really good TV adaptation of it then….What’s that? Oh. Never mind.
AfterIt’s too bad that this book has been so forgotten. If only somebody would do a really good TV adaptation of it then….What’s that? Oh. Never mind.
After her mother dies Beth Harmon is sent to an orphanage, and it’s just as much fun as that sounds. However, she manages to get by thanks to daily doses of tranquilizers they give to all the girls, and she discovers a natural talent for chess thanks to a gruff janitor who reluctantly teaches her the game. Beth is eventually adopted by a less than ideal couple, but she finally manages to make her way to chess tournaments where she’s an instant sensation despite her fondness for her little green pills and a growing taste for booze. As she grows into adulthood she tries to become a player capable of beating the Soviet grand master who is the world champion, but Beth’s personal demons always threaten to overwhelm her as she struggles to live up to her full potential.
The amazing thing about this story is that it sounds like it could be pure misery porn, but it really isn’t. Yes, the lead is an orphan who has a very hard life in many ways including coping with addictions. Yet author Walter Tevis manages to keep the story from feeling grim, even when the circumstances really are.
I think this is because he’s more interested in how Beth reacts and copes with her problems rather than just dwelling on the ugliness of them. Even when she hits rock bottom and goes on an extended bender, we don’t wallow in the seedy picture of a young lady doing her best to drink herself into oblivion. Instead, by being in her head we see how she slides into this pattern because she doesn’t know how to deal with her issues rather than being some kind of narcissistic exercise in self-destruction.
Another thing Beth has to resolve is that the very nature of chess and studying it often means she spends a lot of time alone and in her own head which as a socially awkward person is how she often likes it, but she also has abandonment issues and also doesn’t really want to be alone. Since she’s her own worst enemy this is often a recipe for disaster. Plus, there’s been some chess masters who had mental health problems so for a woman who has her own issues, she’s uneasy about how going deep into the game might not be the best thing for her.
At the heart of the entire story is what it means to be a genius at anything. Beth has a natural talent that allows her to achieve a lot without much training, but because it’s all been easy for her she has to learn how to apply herself if she wants to become the world champion. When it’s been easy to be the best, it’s often hard to dig in and take the next step because talent will only get you so far in any field. When things get tougher, failure is always a possibility, and if there’s one thing Beth is frightened of, it’s failure.
Tevis also manages to make chess interesting in this. Like a lot of people, I know how to play, but I have no particular talent for it. His accounts of Beth’s games and study of it provide a glimpse into what it must be like to be a player at that level, and I actually found myself looking up some famous chess games and finding them fascinating.
It’s an extremely well written and sympathetic portrait of a woman struggling with her past and her talent. I’d already seen the Netflix show based on it, and it’s pretty faithful so there were no real surprises. Yet, I still found myself getting anxious about Beth and how she was doing both in her chess matches and in her life all over again....more
A lot of crime novels start with things like a gorgeous dame walking into a hard boiled private detective’s office or a world weary cop being called tA lot of crime novels start with things like a gorgeous dame walking into a hard boiled private detective’s office or a world weary cop being called to a brutal crime scene. This one kicks off with a guy thinking his dick has exploded and then later throwing a tray of human feces into another man’s face at a MacDonald’s.
Hey, it’s called Whoop! Whoop!, and the lead character is a Juggalo. It isn’t like I was expecting it to be The Maltese Falcon going into it.
Magnetz is a guy living in Phoenix who can’t hold a job, and he’s pretty much a professional dumbass. The only things he’s got going for him is his adorable young daughter, and his love of the band Insane Clown Posse has given him a family among their dedicated fans, the Juggalos. After a lifetime of bad choices, Magnetz tops himself when he tries to pull a revenge prank and accidentally throws his own crap into another man’s face. Unfortunately, Magnetz got the wrong guy, and the person he shit spackled turns out to be a blood thirsty ex-cop nicknamed Murda Killa who just got out of prison, and now Magnetz has to flee for his life and try to find a way out of the mess he created as Murda Killa hunts him.
I’m not a fan of ICP, and I’d generally agree with the idea that a person who throws a bunch of feces on another person pretty much deserves whatever they get. So why read a book that asks me to sympathize with a Juggalo poop flinger? A little bird told me that the author Icy Thug Nutz is actually Johnny Shaw, and that’s a guy I actually trust to tell a story like this and make it funny instead of just gross. Although in fairness, it is pretty gross.
Still Shaw has the knack of writing stupid people doing stupid, disgusting things and making it entertaining. That’s exactly what he’s done here with this fast paced farce, and at a time when I needed some laughs it hit the spot. Even with all the gross insanity going on in this book, Shaw manages to give Magnetz some emotional depth so that you actually do feel bad for the big doofus even if the whole situation was his own fault.
It’s a little odd to read this after Shaw’s last book The Southland, which was a very serious and mature novel that dug into the world of undocumented Mexican workers being exploited in the US. It shows that he’s the kind of writer who can a lot of different things, and he does them all well.
Public Service Announcement: I got a free copy of this for review, and I'm told that it isn't for sale on Amazon. If anyone is interested it can be found on the publisher's website....more
I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley.
Spenser tries to bring down a rich pedophile who has been protected for years by his wealth and I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley.
Spenser tries to bring down a rich pedophile who has been protected for years by his wealth and influence. This guy also has a partner in a woman who helps him lure the girls in, and they are often taken to a private island where other powerful men come to party.
That’s just such a disturbing and creepy premise that I’m glad this is a work of fiction and that nothing like that could happen in real life….
In the first Spenser book that Ace Atkins wrote the detective helped a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie find her mother’s killer. Now Mattie is old enough to legally drink, and she’s been working for Spenser and training as a junior PI. It’s Mattie who is asked by a young girl from her neighborhood for help after she had an icky encounter with a rich pervert at an exclusive club. It soon becomes apparent that there’s some very twisted and rotten stuff going on, and that the guy behind it all will use all of his wealth and power to do anything possible to stop any of his victims from going public.
There are several interesting things going on in this one. The main plot was obviously inspired by a true story although Atkins changes things up so that just because we know what happened in real life doesn’t mean you know how this book will end. The idea of a guy like this with a private island and a stunning list of powerful friends who are involved would probably seem too over-the-top to work in a Spenser novel if it hadn’t happened. So you’ve got Spenser going up against people that you really want to see get kicked in the teeth which makes it satisfying when the detective starts rattling their cages.
Another satisfying thing is that we get a lot of Hawk in this one. Atkins has been judicious in his use of everybody’s favorite bad ass best friend character so that he could explore and expand the roles of other supporting players in recent books, and he’s done a great job of it. Still, it’s always comforting to know that Hawk is around, and it was nice to get a little insight into what Hawk does when he isn’t saving Spenser’s ass in Boston.
Bringing back Mattie was another nice touch. Spenser has taken in other people like his surrogate son Paul and his former PI apprentice Z. Sixkill so this follows a pattern. However, Mattie is an incredibly independent woman who doesn’t always see things the way Spenser does, and while the two have a real bond, she also isn’t afraid to start finding her own way versus just following in Spenser’s footsteps.
The one thing I wasn’t crazy about was the subplot of Spenser getting a new puppy after his dog Pearl has passed away. As the series has done in the past, Spenser gets another dog of the same exact breed and again names her Pearl. This always seemed like a cheat by Robert B. Parker to keep Spenser in a timeless limbo, but Atkins does explore why Spenser does this as a coping mechanism. It makes some sense, but at this point Spenser is essentially ageless so why not just make it the same Pearl vs. periodically killing one off and getting another one?
Aside from that minor nitpicking, I enjoyed this one from start to finish. Mattie’s part of the plot gave it the kind of freshness that Ace Atkins has been bringing to the series from the start while the stuff with Spenser and Hawk felt very old school, like some of the earliest RBP books. It was a nice combination that appealed to me as a long time Spenser fan while still feeling new and modern....more
I'm having a lot of fun going through these collections. The '80s tone where a lot of characters and costumes still had old school goofiness to them eI'm having a lot of fun going through these collections. The '80s tone where a lot of characters and costumes still had old school goofiness to them even as the plots started orienting around real world political and social issues is an interesting era that makes for some wild stories....more
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me thatI’ve been very confused about Perry Mason lately.
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me that Mason was a defense lawyer whose clients were always innocent, and that he’d get them acquitted by figuring out the true guilty party who Mason would then get to confess on the stand. So I was a little shocked when I watched the new HBO series in which Mason as played by Matthew Rhys wasn’t even a lawyer at the start, but rather a small-time drunken private investigator who gets embroiled in the case of a murdered infant and has to navigate a web of crime and corruption to try and find some shred of justice.
I decided to go to the source to try and figure out what the real skinny is on this Perry Mason guy, and I checked out the book that started it all way back in 1933. What’s the verdict? It seems like Mason was a lot closer to the HBO version.
Mason gets hired by a woman who needs his help to keep her name out of a tabloid newspaper after she and a politically connected male friend who wasn’t her husband have gotten caught up in a situation that could turn into a scandal. Even though the lady is lying about who she is, Perry takes the case, but when he starts digging and finds out who really owns the paper things get messy in a hurry.
What’s really interesting to me is Mason’s role at the start of this. Although he is an attorney he also comes across as a fixer/bag man/detective. His opening move is to try and bribe and bully the editor of the paper into silence, but then he shifts tactics immediately to using the opportunity to track down the owner of the paper. Along the way he does things like bribe hotel phone operators and a cop, he pretty much extorts extra cash out of the male companion who was with the woman to keep his name out of it, he hides from the police at one point, he coaches a person at a crime scene on what part of their story to lie about, and he pretends to be somebody else so that he can accept a legally executed subpoena to that person in order to get information. I’m not an attorney, but I think those kinds of things are generally frowned upon.
The amusing part is that Mason comes across as a real sonofabitch. He’s all bluster and bullying while doing everything he can to dominate every conversation, and most of his conversations with his assistant Della Street and his investigator Paul Drake consists of him barking orders. It doesn’t make him the most likable protagonist, but he is probably what you’d want from your lawyer when your ass was in a crack because his one core belief is that he owes his client his full efforts no matter what they’ve done.
There’s some distinctly dated elements to it with Mason’s attitude towards the women in the story being horrid by today’s standards, and there’s an outright racial slur at one point by one of the characters that nobody seems bothered by.
Despite that and Mason not exactly being a guy who I’d like to hang out with, it’s a pretty solid mystery that has the hard boiled atmosphere of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. ...more
I'm having a lot of fun with this Ostrander run. It's a great example of that late '80s stuff where they were sometimes mixing more serious political I'm having a lot of fun with this Ostrander run. It's a great example of that late '80s stuff where they were sometimes mixing more serious political topics with full on superhero silliness so Ronald Reagan is a supporting character as the Suicide Squad gets missions like trying to kill the leader of a South American drug cartel, but then there's another story that involves going to another dimension and battling weird demonic creatures.
Captain Boomerang continues to be both the most ridiculous and annoying character. I'm pretty sure that Amanda Waller just keeps sending him out on every mission hoping that he'll be killed someday. Fingers crossed.
There's also a couple of appearances by Batman, and the way he's portrayed here reminded me that DC was in the middle of that phase where he had to be an absolute asshole to everybody. Because it's gritty and mature!...more
I received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.
Ocean Spray? What kind of a name is that for a book? What’s it about? The history of the drinI received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.
Ocean Spray? What kind of a name is that for a book? What’s it about? The history of the drink? Or is it a biography of the guy who made the viral video of him skateboarding and drinking Ocean Spray while he lip synced that Fleetwood Mac song? I mean, that was cool and all, but how are you gonnna do a whole book about… What’s that? It’s not Ocean SPRAY, but instead it’s Ocean PREY? Well, that sounds like a John Sandford title. Oh. It is a John Sandford novel.
That makes a lot more sense.
A Coast Guard patrol runs across what appears to be drug runners doing a pick-up of previously submerged dope out of the ocean using a scuba diver off the coast of Miami. A shootout ensues that leaves several Coast Guard guys dead while the bad guys got away. Months later the FBI and local cops still have no clue as to who was behind it, and the prevailing theory is that there’s still a fortune in drugs waiting to be picked up once the heat dies down.
US Marshal Lucas Davenport gets asked to join the investigation by one of his political patrons in DC, and he quickly starts leaning on local dealers trying to get a lead on who might have been involved with the drug ring. As usual in a Davenport case, things start to get sticky, and when Lucas needs more help he turns to his old buddy, Virgil Flowers (a/k/a That fuckin’ Flowers.) to help him crack the case.
I’ve written so many Sandford reviews that I can’t think of a single new thing to say about why this one is another great crime thriller from one of my favorites in the genre. As usual, there’s solid plotting and tension mixed with just enough real world verisimilitude regarding police work and the political factors behind it to make it feel grounded and believable despite a plot that could easily turn into an action movie from the ‘80s. All the things I love about Sandford’s novels are on display here.
However, there are some very different things in this one. For one, ever since Sandford shifted Davenport from a Minnesota state cop to a US Marshal, he’s been sending Lucas on assignments across the country, and that has enabled him to do some different things with this series while still sticking to the parts that made it popular to begin with. Moving from typically land locked Midwestern settings to a Florida one that has a lot to do with boats and scuba diving makes it feel like Sandford is doing new things rather than just repeating himself.
That’s just the window dressing though, and the biggest difference from previous Prey novels comes in the structure itself. In the past, Lucas was the star of the these books, and then there was the spin-off series featuring Virgil Flowers as the lead. They existed in the same universe with some crossover between them, but generally one of the characters was the focus with the other being a supporting player. However, in this Lucas is the focus in the first third with Virgil taking over the next part, and the last act shifts between them both.
I assume that this is because Sandford has said that he’s only going to do one book a year from now on*, and it seems like he folded Virgil into Davenport’s story much like Robert Crais began splitting time between Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in his novels. That gives this book a hybrid feel in that it doesn’t entirely seem like a Davenport novel, and yet it’s not exactly Virgil’s book either.
It’s a little odd. Not bad, just different. Sandford is in his late 70s now, and he’s written about 50 novels after a career as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. If he had decided to retire completely, he’d have more than earned the right to do so at this point. So if I can get some more of his stories because he’s cutting his work load and figuring out a way to combine his two most popular characters, you won’t hear me complaining about it.
Aside from all that, if someone had never read another Sandford book and just picked this one up, I think they’d find it an entertaining crime novel with some great twists as well as an interesting premise with the angle of the bad guys trying to find a way to retrieve a fortune in drugs from the ocean.
*Correction: I originally said that Sandford would only be doing the Davenport series from now on, but apparently plan is for him to scale book to one book a year while alternating the Prey and Virgil Flowers books....more
Alan Grofield is laying in a hotel bed in Mexico City trying to recover from a gunshot wound in the back with a suitcase full of stolen money in the cAlan Grofield is laying in a hotel bed in Mexico City trying to recover from a gunshot wound in the back with a suitcase full of stolen money in the closet when a strange woman looking to escape some thugs comes into his room though the window.
We’ve all been there, right?
This is a series spun off of Richard Stark’s (a/k/a Donald Westlake’s) better known Parker novels about a professional thief. Grofield started out as a supporting player in those books, and the story of how he ended up in in that Mexican hotel room is part of a Parker novel. While the two characters are both criminals written by the same man, they don’t have much in common. Whereas Parker is a humorless pro who is all about getting the job done, Grofield’s career as a criminal is a side gig while he pursues his true calling, acting. As such, while Grofield is smart and has some devious moves, he’s also more funny and whimsical, and he has a tendency to fantasize that the actions he’s taking are part of a movie.
The novel follows the structure of most Parker ones. We get the set-up and spend time with the lead character, but then there’s a shift so that we get the bad guys’ point of view. In this case that involves a plot involving a wealthy politician who is making a power play. That’s where the book slowed down for me. I was into the first part with Grofield and his new female friend on the run, but the machinations of the politician weren’t a lot of fun. A bit too close to reality these days for my taste.
Grofield himself falls into a kind of odd category for Stark/Westlake thief characters. The Parker series were hard boiled and gritty crime stories while the Dortmunder books were comic capers about a luckless sad-sack of a criminal. Grofield is somewhere in between the two with some darker violent things happening, but at the same time his cheerful demeanor and witticisms make this far lighter than Parker.
It’s a fun read, but Grofield definitely comes in third behind Parker and Dortmunder for me so far. ...more
Even if Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips never published another story together they are still going to go down in comic history as one of the great creaEven if Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips never published another story together they are still going to go down in comic history as one of the great creative partnerships of all time. Fortunately for us all, they keep doing new books, and this short graphic novel is one of their very best.
Elle is an addict at a fancy rehab facility who doesn’t seem all that interested in getting clean as she scoffs at other patients and flaunts the rules. As the title of this indicates she also romanticizes famous drug addicts and seems to have modeled her life on their behavior despite having an upbringing that is one giant cautionary tale.
That’s all I want to say about the plot of this one, and that short summary doesn’t do justice to the genius work that Brubaker & Phillips have done here. It’s just an amazing piece of art that is bigger than any label or genre that some might try to put on a crime comic. Check it out....more
I received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.
It’s like the old gum commercial said about twins: “Double your pleasure, double your fun.”
AtI received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.
It’s like the old gum commercial said about twins: “Double your pleasure, double your fun.”
At least until one of them is brutally murdered.
Maggie and Lilly are estranged twins who had a falling out because Lilly refused to leave her abusive husband Mike. It’s been a year since Lilly and Mike left the girls’ hometown, and the sisters haven’t spoken since then. When Lilly turns up dead, Mike is instantly arrested for the crime. Now Maggie has come to the fading tourist trap of a town they were living in to try and find some personal effects that belonged to their mother that Lilly had taken. However, while Mike admits that he did beat Lilly the night she died he also insists that she was still alive when he left her.
This is one of those plots that sounds like a cheesy Lifetime TV movie when you describe it, but there’s a lot more going on than that. This isn’t just a straight up thriller like it sounds, but instead it’s more of a psychological suspense novel driven by character work. Much of the story comes to us from a the manager of the apartment building where LIlly and Mike were living, and there’s just something off about this guy from the jump that gives the entire narrative an unsettling vibe.
The sequences from Maggie’s POV cover her anger, grief, and loneliness that she she hides behind a veneer of toughness. This is a woman who just wants to do what she came there to do and then get the hell out, but she finds herself drawn to some of the people she meets like a helpful sheriff, a psychic who isn’t stingy with her pot, and an aging private detective.
At less than 300 pages John Rector delivers this with a swift no-nonsense efficiency that still manages to suck you into a moody and atmospheric book that seems seems equal parts crime thriller and tragedy....more
The surprising thing about this for me is that ‘Suicide Squad’ is just the team’s nickname. Officially, it’s supposed to be known as Task Force X. So The surprising thing about this for me is that ‘Suicide Squad’ is just the team’s nickname. Officially, it’s supposed to be known as Task Force X. So this has obviously had to be put out by DC in the days before Marvel apparently got a copyright on the letter X.
I didn’t read this back in my ‘80s teenage comic book nerd days, but I’ve heard good things about this run by Ostrander for a while. James Gunn saying he was using this version as his template for the new movie was enough to finally put some on hold at the library, and I’m glad I did.
There’s a lot of fun to be had with the idea of the government using a bunch second tier super villains as disposable operatives in the DC universe. Sending this motley crew to wipe out a super terror cell or rescue a political prisoner in the Soviet Union has that realistic in a comic book sort of way mentality that I enjoyed in the better stuff of this era.
And that outfit that Captain Boomerang is wearing is something else!...more
Max Winter was a cowboy outlaw in his younger days. As an old man living in New York during the Great Depression he draws on his experiences as a writMax Winter was a cowboy outlaw in his younger days. As an old man living in New York during the Great Depression he draws on his experiences as a writer of pulp westerns. With money getting tighter and his mortality looming, Max decides to return to armed robbery in order to try and leave his wife something before he dies. Next thing you know, Max is part of a scheme to steal from the American Nazi movement.
Honestly, you had me at old outlaw turns pulp writer, but you throw in a scheme to rip-off Nazis, now we're talking about a Shut-Up-And-Take-My-Money scenario.
Brubaker and Phillips score yet again with this quick but powerful tale. The run these guys have been on is nothing short of astounding, and this one has some Unforgiven flavor with the old man trying to live with his violent past thing. First rate stuff all around that combines a cool story with an intriguing character done up with artwork that sets the tone of it all perfectly....more
I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.
If you’re a Star Wars fan it’s a real best-of-times/worst-of-times sI received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.
If you’re a Star Wars fan it’s a real best-of-times/worst-of-times situation these days. We’ve gotten some great new stuff, but also a couple of real duds. Plus, much like how the worst thing about capitalism are the capitalists, the worst thing about Star Wars fandom turned out to be Star Wars fans.
So I wasn’t exactly dying to pick up a new young adult tie-in book, but I’d recently read Alex Segura’s first crime novel, and I thought Poe Dameron was an interesting but underused character in the latest movies so decided to give it a shot. And it turned out to be a fun Star Wars story.
This starts out with teenage Poe living on Yavin 4 with his father. Both his parents fought for the rebels against the Empire, and his mother was a great pilot who taught him to fly before she was killed while on a mission for the New Republic. Now Poe’s father just wants to live a quiet life as a farmer, and he’s kept Poe from leaving for the adventure he craves. Hmmm… a young man dreaming of space adventure who is trapped on the family farm…. I wonder why that sounds familiar..?
Anyhow, after Poe pulls a knuckleheaded stunt that lands him in hot water with the authorities and leads to a blowout argument with his father, he impulsively takes a piloting job for several shady characters looking to get off Yavin 4 quickly. It turns out that these people are Spice Runners of Kijimi, one of the most dangerous criminal gangs in the galaxy, and a zealous New Republic officer with a personal vendetta is hot on their trail. Poe wanted excitement, but he’s uneasy with his new role as a criminal. However, his growing relationship with the mysterious young lady Zorii makes him hesitant to leave.
Segura takes an interesting approach to this one because it plays out in a series of stories that often begin with Poe in the middle of his latest job gone wrong with the Spice Runners that then fills us in on how it came about. The time jumping helps build a complete narrative arc that leaves Poe with some gaps that could be filled in later (Something the Star Wars franchise loves doing.) while also giving us the depth and backstory that the movies never did. One of the few things I liked about Rise of Skywalker was the brief hint of Poe’s past, and this fleshes that out.
Since it’s a short YA novel we’re not getting the kind of deep dive into Star Wars lore that some nerds demand, but overall I found it to be a fast, fun, and enjoyable adventure. It’s obvious that Segura is a fan who knows the universe well, and he brings a young Poe to life with energy and enthusiasm....more
I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
If America keeps going like it has been lately then we won’t have an illegal immigratI received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
If America keeps going like it has been lately then we won’t have an illegal immigration problem because nobody will want to come to this shithole country anyhow.
U-S-A!! U-S-A!! U-S-A!!
The Southland focuses on three unauthorized Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. Luz works several menial jobs and was able to finally bring her teen-aged son, Eliseo, into the US after being separated from him for years. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a sullen, angry, lazy kid who complicates her precarious existence. Nadia had to flee Mexico and she’s got far more dangerous people than ICE agents looking for her so she’s trying to stay off of everybody’s radar. She copes with her situation by drinking heavily with her American friend and roommate, Gillies. Ostelinda was lured to America with the promise of a good job, but she is told that she has a debt to work off. Now she’s essentially a slave in a factory who hasn’t even been outside in over a year.
When Eliseo goes missing after an argument with Luz, she’s desperate to find her son, but since she can’t turn to the authorities she pays Gillies to find him. Gillies doesn’t plan on doing anything other than using Luz’s money to buy more booze, but at Nadia’s insistence they begin looking for the missing teen. Meanwhile, Ostelinda is trying to find a way to escape the factory by outwitting the American woman who runs the place.
I’ve been a fan of Johnny Shaw’s for better part of a decade now, and this is undeniably his best book yet. His previous stuff was always entertaining and frequently hilarious, but there’s a real maturity and gravity to this one that makes it feel he worked very hard to get to a next level. It’s not that his earlier stuff hasn’t featured real world issues, but he’s generally used humorous dialogue and a sense of chaos brought about by various dumbasses doing dumbass things to drive the plots. With the three main characters facing serious consequences for any misstep that could get them deported or worse, there’s no room for buffoonery, and that makes this book feel deadly serious throughout it all.
It’s not just that Shaw took a hot button issue and based a novel on it. He’s always had a feel for creating working class characters, and with his three leading ladies this time he’s outdone himself. Although each one shares the similarity of being an undocumented immigrant, they are distinctive and real. Luz is a hardworking mother who feels like she’s failed her son. Nadia is a woman with a tragic history trying to outrun her past. Ostelinda is an innocent caught up in a bad situation who somehow finds small moments of grace to keep her spirit from breaking.
First he makes us care about these women, and then Shaw shows us how screwed they really are. They’ve all become part of a system that is happy to exploit them for their labor even as the people in charge vilify them. They are also powerless against any random white asshole who gets irked at them. So Luz has to sit quietly on a bus as a man screams racist slurs at her. Nadia doesn’t dare complain when a boss cheats her on the amount of a promised wage. Ostelinda is told that she’s lucky to have a safe place to live and work while being a slave so she's not even sure what she would be able to do if she manages to get out of the factory.
Their circumstances also provide a wrinkle to the traditional mystery style plot. Luz can’t afford to drop everything and look for her son so she has to do her sleuthing around her work schedule. Nadia doesn’t dare make too many waves when she’s investigating either lest she draw the wrong kind of attention. This is a far cry from the usual thing where it’s the detective throwing their weight around and causing trouble as a way of drawing out the bad guys. It’s a lot harder to find someone when you don’t want anyone to notice that you’re looking, and when you don’t dare call the cops even when you’re dealing with real criminals.
It’s a crime story that also provides emphatic insight into what undocumented workers face in America these days. It’s not pretty. It’s not a lot of fun. But it’s an important story, and Johnny Shaw has told it about as well as it could be done....more
Did I once meet Laura Lippman and try to mansplain one of her own characters to her?
Yeah, I did. Sort of. But I swear it was an accident!
More on that Did I once meet Laura Lippman and try to mansplain one of her own characters to her?
Yeah, I did. Sort of. But I swear it was an accident!
More on that in a moment…
Here we’ve got a novelist doing a series of essays, and the topics include family, marriage, motherhood, friendships, aging, accomplishments, tragedies, regrets, sexism, and social media. While those subjects are universal, Ms. Lippman’s perspective on them is unique. After all, I don’t think there are that many former reporters turned award winning crime writers who married the guy who created The Wire.
The most impressive thing about this is by focusing in on her specific circumstances Ms. Lippman can then provide insights that apply to a lot of us. For example, her and her husband had become acquainted with chef Anthony Bourdain, and his death was a hard blow for them. People all over the world mourned Bourdain, yet it’s her personal connection to him that leads to a touching examination of not just losing a friend, but also grieving celebrities we never met.
In Game of Crones Ms. Lippman talks about becoming a mother. Obviously, motherhood is something that many women experience, but she had her child in her fifties so she’s outside the traditional model. She fully admits that doing this was maybe the ultimate example of white privilege. Yet by explaining why she chose to do it and how she balances her writing with raising her daughter even as her husband is absent for months at a time as part of his work, she once again highlights something that many people can relate to even if her specific circumstances are different than most people.
That brings up another interesting aspect which is that despite being well off and telling stories about meeting famous people and traveling the world, Ms. Lippman still comes across as down to earth and not an entitled jerk. It helps that she goes into her middle class background, and how she struggled to find work as a low paid reporter at the start of her career while eventually writing her first books in the early mornings before work. There’s a sense of having paid her dues as well as self-awareness and gratitude about how things worked out that make you happy for her instead of jealous. (OK, I was a little jealous when she talks about being friends with several crime writers I admire.)
The thing that struck me most is that even though a large part of this discusses her fears and what she thinks are her shortcomings is just how remarkably self-assured Ms. Lippman comes across. While she can mock herself and find no shortage of flaws with her own character, she’s a woman who set out to become the very person she is now, and she is pretty pleased with the results. She doesn’t think she has all the answers, and she has the same self-doubts that any sane person does. Yet, while she’ll acknowledge them, they don't paralyze her, and she doesn't let herself be stopped by other people's opinions. This gives her a distinct perspective as someone who has thought a lot about what really matters to her, and that's an oddly rare trait.
Despite this confidence the one observation I might have made before I met her is that Ms. Lippman seems overly harsh in her self-criticism. The title essay about being a villainess comes from a story she tells about how she divorced her first husband, who had supported her novel writing from the start, just as she was about to hit the big time as an author. She admits to ruthlessly exploiting what she knew about him during the divorce as well as not being fully honest about her feelings that the marriage was over when they separated. She also goes on at length about her failings as a friend as well as tendency to hold grudges.
I might have once argued these are just the same kind of things that a lot of people struggle with in their lives, and that doesn’t make her a villain. However, it’s thinking that Ms. Lippman was being needlessly hard on herself that led me to the incident in which I found myself mansplaining her own character to her….
I went to the 2019 Bouchercon in Dallas, and one of the authors I was hoping to meet was Ms. Lippman because I’d just finished her two most recent books and absolutely loved them. I saw her and some other writers on panel about unlikable characters, and the lead from Lady in the Lake came up. The book is set in the ‘60s and involves a woman named Maddie suddenly divorcing her husband and leaving her child with him. She finds work as a reporter and begins to dig into the recent murder of a woman. Over the course of the story Maddie shows a streak of ruthless ambition and willingness to screw anybody over to get what she wants.
As I recall, during the panel Ms. Lippman was the only writer to declare that she thought her character was ‘unlikable’. I found that interesting because I had very mixed feelings about Maddie and went back and forth as to whether she was sympathetic or not. Yes, she does questionable things, but she’s also a woman trying to make it on her own in a time when that was even harder than it is today.
After the panel I went to a signing session, and as Ms. Lippman autographed my books, I told her I was a new fan, and how much I loved her writing. She thanked me, and I had happened to catch her a moment when no one else was in line so we started chatting for a moment. I mentioned that I had heard what she said about Maddie on the panel, and that I was a little surprised that her opinion about the character was so much tougher than my own.
She noted a couple of the specific things that Maddie did in the book that she felt weren’t forgivable, and this is where I went off the rails. I wasn’t trying to be the guy who argues with the woman who created the character. I wasn’t trying to argue at all. I was nervous and excited to have the opportunity to talk to Ms. Lippman, and what I was trying to say was that I thought she had done such a great job in making Maddie a real and complex character that despite her flaws, I still felt real empathy for her.
Almost a year later, I can articulate that pretty well as I write this review. What I did in the moment was to come across as insistent that Maddie wasn’t as bad as her creator was saying, and when I realized I was botching it, I panicked. And dear reader, that’s when it happened.
I interrupted Laura Lippman and started talking over her, and it very much sounded like I was saying that she was wrong.
The only saving grace was that I saw the look in her eyes, realized what I was doing, and I managed to shut my big stupid mouth and say, “I’m sorry, please go on.”
She was incredibly polite, and she finished the thought I’d so rudely tried to talk over. Then another fan came up to get her books signed, and so I thanked Ms. Lippman again. Then I fled in shame. I looked for an opportunity to see her again that weekend so that I could apologize, but unfortunately, I never got a chance. Now I had to read her essay Men Explain The Wire To Me with my fingers crossed hoping that there wasn’t a brief mention of the idiot in Dallas who tried to tell her about her own character. *whew*
So that’s why if Laura Lippman declares that she’s a villainess, I’m just going to nod and agree....more
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