An unforgettable page-turner of a crime novel

When I read Rags Daniels Lallapaloosa I knew that this man is a major new crime and thriller writer. Having just finished his newest novel, Foxy Lady, I know he is. 

Corrupt politicians, meddling bureaucrats, financial shenanigans, murder, rape and plenty of intrigue; add a beautiful young woman named Lady Carolyne Dryden who runs the family’s London policy auction house, and D.I. Reid, one of the most delightfully irascible police detectives in fiction; stir in revenge, sex and Inspector Reid who is determined to get to the bottom of all this mayhem in spite of his interfering superiors, and you have one of the best can’t-put-it down novels I have read in a while. On top of that, foxy lady Carolyne is foxy in every sense of the word: sexy, smart, not someone to be trifled with, and very, very deadly. Each of the characters is very well drawn, the action fast-paced and believable, and the story pulls you along until the very end.

Foxy Lady almost demands a sequel, and I hope Mr. Daniels writes one. If he does, I’ll be sure to read it.

An unqualified 5 star read.

A magical tale of intrigue, danger, magic and young love

The House of Sapphire Magic: Breaking Glass, the second novel in John Booth’s Magic Series, focuses on an evil project of Max Drexel, a powerful business tycoon. On the surface, the project looks respectable; after all, it is presented to the public as an orphanage for children who have no relatives who could care for them. Under the surface, the project is much more sinister: the orphans are guinea pigs in an experiment.

It isn’t long before the two eldest Grange children, Mandy and William become involved, as Max Drexel is out to buy their property and tear down their house. Glass, one of the  magical house guardians, uncovers the plot when she accidentally stumbles into the real world, thus discovering the magic powers of the sapphire ring that Mrs. Grange gifted her.

This is a fast-paced, action-packed little novel. If you enjoyed John Booth’s The House of Silver Magic, you are sure to love this one. I understand his Gold Magic: Terror in Mind  has recently been published, so give that one a look also. 

John Booth is a magical writer, with several series of novels, all very much worth reading, and all involving magic in one way or another.

The House of Sapphire Magic is a definite 5 star read.

A magical thriller

One reviewer writes that The Prodigal’s Foole is “X-men plus Harry Potter for adults”, which I think is pretty accurate. Instead of Potter, we have Symon Bryson, Father Bill, the twins Eden and Eve, Symon’s friend Aaron, a native American shaman named Janice, Father Peter, and Monsignor Charles DuBarry as the good guys, Symon’s old nemesis Cardinal Maguire as questionable, and a host of demons on the other side who have kidnapped the Monsignor, bringing Symon back from a ten year self-imposed exile in Dublin. To top it off, the FBI is involved.

What has caused all this havoc? That takes us back ten years to .... you’ll have to read the rest of this fascinating, fast-paced novel to find out. There is plenty of magic here, spells to cast and zombies and devils to dispose of. And a sequel in the works that I’ll be looking for. 

R. B. Wood is an excellent story-teller, and this is a wonderfully fast-paced read.

A clear 5 start for this one.

An honest cop with an attitude, a young woman in trouble, the mob, the feds, a dash of romance -- a winner!

I enjoy a good detective novel, and B. A. Morton’s “Mrs. Jones” is a gem. Detective Connell is an honest cop with an attitude about authority, a smart mouth and Irish charm.  Lizzie, aka Mrs. Jones is a young British woman in New York City on a mission she doesn’t understand who witnesses a hit-and-run her first day in town. When she and Connell connect with each other and the bad guys, a bought cop and the Feds, well, the story quickly becomes one I couldn’t put down until I’d finished it. I can see that B. A. Morton is going to become one of my favorite crime writers. I do like good crime novels with mouthy detectives.

I can hardly wait for the next one in the series, Molly Brown, which is due out sometime in 2012.

A very definite 5 star read.

"Taylor Takes Charge", A delightfully comic tale of intrigue in a boy's prep school.

Take a shopworn setting like Portland Court Preparatory School for Boys, an eighteen year old, newly-minted school master named Ben Glossop, a lovely young Under-Matron named Sarah Wilton, mix in a loopy band of kidnappers, a tipsy collection of senior school master’s, a Matron nicknamed “The Elephant” and a 12 year old boy named Taylor who is the real Head Master, and you have the recipe for one of the funniest comic adventures I’ve had the pleasure of reading since P. G. Wodehouse laid down his pen in 1975. From start to finish, it is marvelous fun.

Charles Utley, a London barrister, is a wonderful story teller, and Taylor Takes Charge is a wonderful book that you will read over and over again. Watch for the sequel, which I am told, will appear ‘soon’. Is Charles Utley starting a series of Portland Court novels? Oh, I hope he is.

A definite 5-star read 

A good book that needs some work

The story opens on 23 October 1935 as hard-boiled private eye Errol Black is tucking into a nice, bloody porterhouse steak. Then someone walks into the restaurant and begins shooting and his dinner with partners Dyke Spanner and Terry Shadow is blown all to Hell. So are Terry Shadow and the two intended victims, notorious mob boss Dutch Schulz (who lives for 23 hours) and one of his henchmen.

The story then shifts to 1945 and the mid-town Manhattan offices of Black and Wentz Detective Agency where we find Errol Black alone in the office doing paperwork. The door opens and a beautiful young woman named Claudia walks in seeking help. She suspects her fiancé of cheating on her. Is she trouble, or isn’t she? Young, beautiful, flirtatious and naive, she’s just the kind of gal hard-boiled detectives fall for. I kept warning him off, but of course he didn’t listen, In spite of his personal failings, he’s good at his craft of detecting, the case is an interesting, convoluted one, and he finally solves it after many convoluted twists and turns. Living happily ever after is a different matter for a hard-boiled,PI, but we already knew that when we started. The many-splendored thing called love is something that eludes hard-boiled guys. Black Shadows is an enjoyable read and I’m glad I read it.

That said, would benefit greatly from some further editing. The story Begins in 1935 with the shoot-out, then shifts to 1945. Though it appears to remain in that year, it isn’t clear: reference is made to an article written in the 1960s; a two-foot thick solid steel door is opened by touching a red button on a keypad on the wall; Errol Black takes Claudia out to celebrate her birthday on July 3,1940; and soft rock is heard on a radio. And I am confused.

Other problems are as follows: A South American man can’t understand a man who is talking to him because he has a poor grasp of Guatemalan. (There is no such language.) In several places the names of two Chinese characters -- Wang and Ping -- are mixed up, once in the same paragraph. As Black is talking with Ping, Ping’s name suddenly changes to Wang. In another place Weeny Jung Ping is called “Weeny Wang”; this should to have been caught (or explained), but wasn’t.

One of the more interesting characters in the novel is Dutch Schultz’s half-brother, “known colloquially as The Portly Gangster,” a cultured, hugely overweight, vain, and greedy man who has spent his life looking for a blue diamond, said to have been Dutch Schultz’s. No matter how hard I try, “the portly gangster” isn’t a likely colloquialism in Big Apple or New Jersey criminal or popular culture of that day. “Fats”, “Fatty” or “Fatso” yes, but “The Portly Gangster”? I can see someone like Margery Allingham using it, as it fits the upper middle class British culture she wrote about back in the 40s, 50s an 60s.

So ... as good a novel as I think Black Shadows is, I can only give it 3 *** . If someone can show me that I’ve gone terribly wrong, I’ll be happy to change my rating. I look forward to seeing some more of Simon Swift’s work.

A fast-paced tale of vengeance and courage

C. J. Martin has written a thriller of a story about vengeance with a long memory, a man's checkered past revealed, and his daughter's life threatened. Fast-paced and loaded with action and very believable characters including Kazuo Tanaka (if that is his real name) and his daughter, this short story is a teaser for what is sure to come: a full-length novel that, if it is anything like this story, is sure to keep readers awake at night.

Having spent time in Japan, C. J. Martin knows Japanese culture and its players very well. Available in Kindle format. I look forward to reading the novel when it's out.

A definite ***** effort.

Living inside a maelstrom haunted by ghosts

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. His prose is eloquent, quotable, and graphic. He views the world from the perspective of the marginalized and maimed and forgotten, some of whom struggle to escape an ugly karma and live lives that are happy and relatively tranquil. Some of them make it, some of them don't, and some of them are left with questions that are never really answered.

In this book, and in many others he has written, the protagonists are two friends, New Iberia, Louisiana cop Dave Robicheaux and his best friend and compatriot Clete (Cletus) Purcel, ex-New Orleans cop, private investigator, decorated Vietnam veteran and alcoholic. I like both of these men ... and they are not easy men to like because of the ghosts that haunt them both, ghosts of their upbringing and Vietnam and alcohol. 

Over the past several novels, Dave has been working on getting his act together -- he has quit drinking, joined AA, and married Molly, a wonderful ex-nun who loves him and refuses to get enmeshed in his torments. Clete is like watching a runaway eighteen wheeler careening down a mountain highway with bad brakes and a lunatic at the wheel. You know there's an awful crash waiting somewhere, but you don't know just where. The guy has an amazing ability to right himself, but you know he's ultimately going off a cliff if he doesn't stop drinking. 

Most of the Dave Robicheaux novels take place in Louisiana. This one takes place in Montana, where Dave and Molly have gone on a fishing vacation, taking Clete along to give him a break,.

"Clete Purcel had heard of people who sleep without dreaming, but either because of the era and neighborhood in which he had grown up, or the later experiences that had come to define his life, he could not think of sleep as anything other than an uncontrolled descent into a basement where the gargoyles turned somersaults like circus midgets .. His dreams clung to his skin like cobweb and followed him into the day... But on this particular morning Clete was determined to leave his past in the past and live in the sunlight from dawn until nightfall and then sleep the sleep of the dead."

But for Clete, there are no breaks, and trouble finds him on the banks of a pristine river, fishing when two men in a bright red diesel extended cab truck pull up and spoil the idyllic scene. It isn't surprising. From there events descend into the dark regions of the soul where hobgoblins dwell and hurting people struggle to live fulfilling lives and try to stay out of the way of greedy, wealthy elites who use evil as a tool to possess more. "When people talk about class war," Dave muses, "they're dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all." Which, I'd say, is pretty close to the truth.

I found Swan Peak a hypnotic read. It's plot is many-layered, its mood dark and heavy, with glimmers of hope for some of the hopeless characters that one least expects will make it out of the maelstrom that, Burke muses, in which we all live, "an era that is so intense and fierce in its inception ans denouement that it can only be seen correctly inside the mind of a deity."

Yet, in spite of all this, the story ends on a not of hope. Looking at fingerling salmon in a cold stream, Dave knows that when spring comes, the adult salmon will work their way into the main stream and on down to the sea. "All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them, and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact."

A fine novel, if not, like life, always a pleasant one. 

The Dance of The Pheasodile

 

Tim Roux: The Dance of the Pheasodile. Night Publishing (UK) through CreateSpace, May 2010. Paperback and Kindle editions.

In the opening scene, architect Keith McGuire wakes up to find himself swinging upside down outside the plate glass window that wraps around the lawyer’s office where his wife is a partner. It is freezing cold and he’s bumping up against the glass. His wife and her coworkers, aghast, are staring at him and snapping photos. He has no idea how he got here, who is flying the chopper, who his tormentors are, or why they are tormenting him. He is, as he says in the opening sentence “in a bit of a predicament.” Dangling upside down and naked under a helicopter flown by unknown maniacs is only part of the story. Looking up at his body, he sees the body of a stranger. His body is long, lean and well-muscled; this one is stubby, hairy and out of shape.

I was hooked. I couldn’t put the book down.

Successful architect Keith McGuire has a happy life with wife Chrissie and their two children Ella and Mark for fourteen years … until he goes in for a hypnotherapy session to try and recover some childhood memories. Then the fun begins. Emerging from his hypnotherapy session, he finds himself in the office of a therapist named Brenda Starbright in Hull, a northern city where he’s never been. Worse, he is no longer Keith McGuire; he is Harry Walker, a thug, ne’er-do-well, con man and nemesis to his wife Fran, son Tommy and sister Kathy. What has happened to Keith? And the real Harry? Has Harry …? The thought of Harry inhabiting his body and his home and job gives him the chills.

Part romance, part paranormal crime thriller, it is a wonderful read. There are laugh-out-loud scenes in this book, some chilling ones and some very poignant ones. I won’t say more, because I don’t want to give too much away in this intriguing, funny and well-told story.

 I give it a AAA+