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Another excellent Brad and Karen thriller. In this one, a case of academic misconduct escalates to murder and corruption. As always, Cooper does a great job using the political machinations of academia as a starting point to weave a tale of deception and crime.

If you’ve read previous books in the series, you already are familiar with the dynamic between Brad and Karen, and together they once again form an effective crime-solving partnership. I don’t want spoil anything here, but I think the ending of this one is my favorite in the series. (So far.)

I’ve been reading some traditionally-published thrillers by big name authors lately, and I have to say, many of them have over-the-top, superhero-like characters, which makes them hard to relate to. I prefer a book like this, where the characters are people you would like to meet in real life. That’s the big draw of the Brad and Karen books for me; I just like these two, and they make for pleasant company while venturing into the darker side of the academy.

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Weird westerns are so cool, don’t you think? Well, I think so. Cowboys and six shooters and ghosts and horses and vampires and steam engines… yes, there’s something about the marriage of the American southwest and supernatural beings that just produces some very interesting offspring.

Speaking of interesting offspring, that’s what the titular character of this book is. A young woman named Mary Anne O’Sullivan had a child with a supernatural being, and this child was then spirited away by a mysterious witch. Anne’s husband sought the child, but… well, that’s how she became a widow.

Not to be deterred, she asks Zarahemla Two Crows, a Federal lawman who specializes in the occult, to track down her son. But, despite the Marshal’s reservations, she insists on accompanying him. And so, this unlikely duo sets off across a haunted land of vampires, witches, zombies, giant mechanical golem cavalry, and a whole host of interesting characters.

I feel like I don’t need to say any more, and already, you should be hooked. But, just in case you’re not, let me say a little more. I loved this book. The pacing, the characters, the atmosphere; all of it is great. Anne is my favorite character, and I enjoyed seeing her growth over the course of the story. Like Zarahemla himself, we watch her transform from being merely a “confounded woman” into a confident, capable, and relatable character.

One thing I should mention is that the story is chock full of Catholic motifs. Faith is a major theme that informs the characters. This might give some readers pause, but I want to emphasize that this isn’t done in the preachy way that you get in some religious fiction. Rather, the discussions about faith feel like a natural part of the characters’ evolution.

There are also plenty of cool action sequences; big battles, with infantry, airships, and especially those great steampunk cavalry golems I mentioned earlier. How can you not want to read a book that has a scene with zombies attacking a huge spider-tank?

In summary, I really, really enjoyed this novel. It was everything I hoped it would be and then some. If you like westerns at all, and especially weird westerns, you’ve got to check it out.

Oh… and one last thing. There are a number of sly cultural references sprinkled throughout the book. At first, I wasn’t sure if that’s really what these were, or if I was just imagining things. I won’t spoil them for you, but after I read a description of a certain weapon devised in Antioch, I was sure I knew what was going on. These are fun little Easter eggs to discover as you read.

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This is a mystery about a detective tracking down a clown who is scheduled to perform at a local boy’s birthday party. The clown, who is also the boy’s uncle, has suddenly vanished with no explanation, and the boy hires Detective McKeever to find him.

Of course, Detective McKeever is only 8 years old, so this makes it hard for her to conduct an investigation. But she’s resourceful and plucky and, like any kid, doesn’t know any better. So, naturally, she finds herself involved in all sorts of comic misadventures, from infiltrating clown meetings to spying on cheating air hockey players. It’s full of all the zaniness we’ve come to expect from Shatzer’s books.

What really makes the story work is McKeever’s seriousness and her annoyance at the refusal of adults to ever take her seriously, which as often as not she turns to her advantage. It’s a fun story that captures how the world seems to a kid.

Remember McGorgol and Hockney at the Guano Island Hotel? That book was a fun take-off on mystery tropes with bird detectives. There’s something similar going on here, with kids acting out the roles of a noir mystery. Having incongruous characters enacting a familiar set of tropes is a good recipe for comedy, and Shatzer, master of humor that he is, uses it well.

Devoted Shatzer fans, of which I am one, and hopefully I’ve managed to persuade a few more, will no doubt enjoy this latest addition to his body of work.

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I’m a sucker for stories with amnesiac protagonists. Mostly, this is because of video games like Planescape: Torment which uses this device to create a sprawling, philosophical tale of self-discovery. After that, I was hooked on the idea of a story about someone who can’t remember their own past, and so I was happy to see that this novel, by the great Kevin Brennan, uses this device.

Jack, the protagonist of Yesterday Road, suffers from a form of memory loss that causes him to forget almost everything he knows each day. All he really remembers is that he’s looking for his daughter, who he thinks is named Linda, and that he needs to head “back east.” Other than that, it’s pretty much a blank slate for him after a day or two.

Along his odyssey, Jack meets plenty of interesting characters who help him on his vague quest, from a 31 year-old man with Down Syndrome to a middle-aged diner waitress. He also meets some less than savory characters as well, including drug dealers and carjackers. All of it leads to a wild road trip–there’s always a road trip in Brennan tales–that goes to a lot of places, both physically and spiritually. There is plenty of humor and plenty of tragedy in these pages; and Brennan’s gorgeous prose evokes all the emotions flawlessly.

Whenever people ask me to define literary fiction, I point to Brennan’s works. To me, he captures what it means to tell a story that fits no specific genre, but instead lets the reader meet people and learn their stories, almost like reading an account of something that really happened. He is a master of the craft, pure and simple. And Yesterday Road contains some of his finest work. A story that asks us to empathize with and understand some deeply wounded but resilient people, to get to know them, and to share in their world.

It’s all fiction, of course. But Brennan makes it feel real. It’s like magic, and when you read Yesterday Road, and follow Jack as he tries to recover some of his memories, you’ll find some of your own bubbling to the surface. Like Warren Zevon once sang, “We had to take that long, hard road / to see where it would go.” Every book really is the reader’s as much as it is the writer’s, but it’s the writer’s job to know what words to use to draw the emotions out of us. And Kevin Brennan can do it with the best of them. Yesterday Road is unforgettable and deserves to be widely read.

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I heard about this book via Chuck Litka’s blog, I’ve been reading thrillers lately and it was free on Kindle, so I figured I would check it out.

I have to say, I liked the beginning: instead of the standard “starting with a bang,” as authors are advised, it opens in the most mundane way possible: with the protagonist, Prof. Reid Lawson, giving a lecture on history to a class of sleepy students.

It proceeds calmly enough, with Prof. Lawson then heading home to his two daughters for game night. Only after that does the plot kick into gear, when the professor is kidnapped by a couple of thugs, demanding to know who he is.

I like this style. I appreciate getting to know characters, seeing them at ease, before we dive right into the action. So, credit to the author for starting off this way.

This is a thriller, though, so there’s plenty of action. It soon becomes clear that Lawson has been implanted with an experimental memory-altering chip. Once it is removed, memories of his past as an uber-lethal CIA field operative begin to come back to him, along with glimpses and hints of a massive conspiracy he had been on the brink of unraveling before his mind was wiped.

This sets up a globe-trotting and violent adventure, as Lawson is forced to try to uncover his own identity as well as the massive terror ring he’d been about to foil.

None of this is super-original, and I can think of a number of instances where all the tropes in this book have been used before.  But, you know what? It didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story. Like George Lucas once said, “They’re clichés because they work!”

The basic concept that Lawson, despite seemingly being a mild-mannered college professor, is actually a trained professional killer, reminded me of something Kingsley Amis said in the James Bond Dossier I reviewed the other week. He said that part of the appeal of Bond was the idea that he looked like an everyman; that beneath the unremarkable features of any average accountant or shop clerk there lurks a Heinleinian “Competent Man.”

Granted, the book isn’t perfect. I know it’s said to add realism, but I really don’t think it’s plausible that anyone, even a trained special operative, will be able to instantly tell the exact model of weapon every single one of his enemies is wielding at a glance. Obviously, a working knowledge of weapons is a requirement for the job, but this seemed a little extreme.

Reid took up the AK. How many rounds were fired? Five? Six. It was a thirty two-round magazine. If the clip was full, he still had twenty-six rounds.

Wait.

Wait just a damn minute.

I’m sorry to do this to you. I really am. If this book weren’t so intent on giving us the details about what weapons everyone is carrying at all times, I would probably just let it go. But seriously, if you’re going to write about weapons with great specificity, watch this video first.

Now, why am I so hung up on this, you ask? Well, the fact is that I used to use the terms interchangeably too, until one day someone explained the difference to me, and pointed out that ten seconds of searching the internet would have saved me from such a sloppy error.

“But ‘magazine’ is such a mouthful,” you object. “No one is gonna say, ‘where’s my magazine’ in the heat of battle!”

True enough. In that case, use the abbreviation “mag.”

IRL, it probably will never matter for most people. But, if you’re going to write a thriller that leans heavily on talking about the details of weapons, you should probably go ahead and look up the relevant terminology.

Incidentally, this provides me a great chance to rebut another of Amis’s points about description. Once you start down the path of describing everything in great detail, you are under more and more pressure to get things right. And if you get something wrong, then irritating pedants like me will start whining about it in our reviews.

Whereas, if you leave things vague, there’s more leeway for things like this. You could just say, “he put a clip in the rifle.” Some rifles do use clips. Admittedly not many, and especially not many made in the last 50 years or so. But still.

I’m not actually saying that everything can be left vague. But when you describe something in detail, make sure you know what you’re talking about, or you will defeat your purpose.

Still, these petty complaints aside, this is an enjoyable thriller. I recommend it, clips and all.

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This is a military sci-fi novel that follows a combat programmer named Kerry Sevvers. Sevvers is an elite technical specialist, who controls multiple AIs at once, including one that is illegally modified to remove normal safety restrictions. This one he keeps secret from his superiors, since revealing it would result in his discharge.

In order to keep his secret, Sevvers volunteers for a high-risk mission with a Marine unit fighting “raiders”; which are alien beings that attack human colonies. Although he is a master of AI drones, Sevvers has not faced front-line combat before; though he does have personal trauma from his childhood that drives him to hate the aliens they are fighting.

Sevvers struggles to get along with some members of the unit, and also to keep his unrestricted AI secret. As the mission grows increasingly dire, he is forced to take more and more risks, putting both his job and his life in jeopardy.

The book is well-written and fast-paced. At times, I struggled to conceptualize clearly how Sevvers’ AIs work. This, though, is probably an accurate depiction of how such a strange mixture of man and machine would feel. It’s more than a little creepy, but I think it’s supposed to be.

The book made me think of Halo, Mass Effect, and the Star Wars: Republic Commando series. Anyone who enjoys military sci-fi should check it out.

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How many people today know who Kingsley Amis was? He is, or at least was, widely considered one of the greatest English novelists, but you rarely hear him mentioned much these days. Probably most readers know him only as Martin’s father.

Besides being a novelist, Amis was also a big fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, and he wrote this book as a defense of 007’s adventures against a variety of literary critics. In it, he goes through the entirety of Fleming’s Bond books, analyzing different aspects in each chapter: Bond himself, his allies, his love interests, his enemies, and so on.

I admit it; I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. There’s just nothing like reading what what one superstar thought of another. Like reading Napoleon’s commentaries on Caesar, learning what the great English comic novelist thought of the great English thriller novelist is just unpassupable.

In a way, I felt a kinship with Amis right off the bat. He’s writing to defend his preferred entertainment from critics’ charges that they are not serious, or in some sense artistically illegitimate. I have often been in this same position vis-à-vis video games.

Amis is out to prove there is more depth and complexity to Fleming’s novels than one would think at first, and with his light touch and plenty of witty footnotes, he makes his case. Seriously, this book is worth reading for his footnotes alone, as when he makes passing reference to Catherine Earnshaw and then adds a note saying, “just to save you looking, she’s the heroine of Wuthering Heights.”

Even better is when Amis takes pains to establish points about Bond’s character: such as that he has to train intensively for certain missions, or that while he is certainly a crack shot, his marksmanship is inferior to the marksmanship trainer. Amis is defending Bond against charges of being too good; of being what in modern lingo we call a “Mary Sue.” The language is different, but the concept is the same.

Where it gets really interesting is when we get to the social commentary aspects of 007. For example, the chapters on Bond’s treatment of women. These chapters are simply incredible. I can’t even quote from them. Let it suffice to say, I don’t think Amis’s defense is successful. But why not? Is it because Bond the character is a chauvinist? Is it because Fleming the author was a chauvinist? Or is it because Amis himself was? Or is it all three?

Honestly, it’s really hard to tell. And note that just because I think Amis’s thinking in this chapter is misguided does not at all mean I don’t think it’s worth reading. It’s absolutely worth reading. Indeed, literary critics are often at their most valuable when they are wrong.

Speaking of wrongness, in passing, Amis gives his opinion on the Bond films:

“Sean Connery’s total wrongness for the film part of Bond is nowhere better demonstrated than [in his lack of aristocratic bearing.] Mr Connery could put up a show as a Scottish businessman all right, but a Scottish baronet never.”

Wonder what he’d have made of Daniel Craig?

If you can’t tell, I like Amis’s style, if not always his opinions. He writes in a light-hearted, breezy way, as if you’ve just sat down next to him after he’s had a few drinks and asked him “So, Kingsley, what do you think of James Bond anyhow?” Sure, his takes can be rambling and he often will drop obscure references to things that are only tangentially related… but do you seriously think I am going to knock anyone for that?

But the real reason to read this book is for Amis’s tips to writers. The guy is considered one of the great English novelists for a reason. Here he is talking about the many excellent meals Bond dines upon:

More than anything in fiction, the detailed descriptions of meals generates a sympathetic warmth, a close and ready feeling of identification with the people doing the eating and drinking. All those gigantic feasts in Dickens achieve this triumphantly: we’re never more there, in the story with the characters, than when the roast goose and the plum pudding are going down. The trick is still effective when–as here with Bond–conviviality is miles away.

As someone who is generally bored by writing descriptions of anything, but especially of food, I have to believe he’s on to something here. I am forced to look at myself in the mirror and ask, “Have you, Berthold, sold as many books as Fleming and Dickens have just since they have been dead?” And the answer comes back a resounding “no.” In my next book, I will include “six page descriptions of every last meal.”

Oh, yes; Amis launches some brutal assaults on the minimalist school of description that I tend to favor:

We suspend our disbelief in SPECTRE and its designs while we’re believing heartily in Petacchi’s earlier history, in his surrender to the Allies in World War II with his Focke-Wulf 200, one of the few of its type in the Italian air force (not just ‘with his plane’), and its load of the latest German pressure mines charged with the new Hexogen explosive (not just ‘a new type of mine’).

I feel attacked. 

At the end of the book, Amis includes a table that briefly summarizes each Bond book with the following categories:

TitlePlacesGirlVillainVillain’s ProjectVillain’s EmployerMinor VillainsBond’s FriendsHighlightsRemarks

Maybe it’s just because I make Excel tables for a living, but this struck me as an interesting way of breaking down the elements of a story. Then again, if a series can be easily categorized like this, doesn’t that mean it’s a bit formulaic? And in these days, doesn’t this kind of systematic approach seem like it could lead to writers making a career of entering new data under these headers and letting an AI do the rest?

At this point, you might be asking, do you need to be a James Bond fan to enjoy this book? Well, I don’t really consider myself a Bond fan, and I’ve only read two Bond books, (Casino Royale and Moonraker) but I enjoyed it. Just as a work of criticism, or as an instruction manual for writers, it’s fascinating to read. 

Now that I’ve got you all pumped up about how fantastic it is, I must deliver the bad news: it’s really rare. You can get a physical copy on Amazon, but it costs big bucks. Much as I enjoyed it, I wouldn’t pay the prices they’re asking for it. I got lucky, and was able to get a copy from a library. This is partly why I transcribed those bits quoted above; they’re the most critical parts for writers.

So, what I’m saying is, whoever owns the rights to this should put the thing on Kindle. Re-release it when they make a new Bond film or something like that.

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Come with me, and together we shall flee from this humdrum world of endless reboots and sequels, of the same petty outrages and tired memes of a worn-out culture. Let us escape instead into the pages of Mr. Shatzer’s new collection of stories.

Here we will find a mysterious man, in equal parts whimsical and sinister; much as if Willy Wonka formed a partnership with Cooger & Dark. Here also we find the misadventures of a man called Crumley, and of Melville’s Scrivener, reimagined as a tough cop working the mean streets.

Here, now, we see the mad onion dip thief who recounts his strange proclivity in excruciating detail, and here a spy, obsessed with hot dogs, and here a cyberpunk dystopian tale of a boy and his squirrel.

Do these things sound strange to you? I bet they do. They should. Our world is a strange one best filtered, as it is by Shatzer, through the lens of humor. The humor of the absurd, the bizarre, and the ridiculous.

The best books, I heard someone say once, are like windows into the universe that exists within the author’s brain. Every brain holds a universe, but alas, we can only really experience the one that exists in our own. In that sense, we might as well already be in the pods as depicted in The Matrix. But art gives us a glimpse at what goes on in other brains, and the patterns that run through Shatzer’s work echo other books of his. There’s a little of the Beach Wizard in Cal, the man who runs a mysterious diner, and a little of Percival Pettletwixt in Cornelius Mysterious.

How Shatzer manages to be so effortlessly, and unselfconsciously, funny is something I still can’t quite understand. For instance, in one story, passing reference is made to fires started by a character called “Howard Arson, a local moron.”

This is hilarious. I laughed out loud. Why is this so funny? I do not know. If I knew, perhaps I’d be as funny as Shatzer. But I’m not.

Yes, all told, I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who enjoys a good funny story. It’s wild and zany and goofy and bizarre, and I enjoyed each and every story, and when I had finished, I could only wish there were more.

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This book is about what we would today call a “conspiracy theory,” although the events in question actually predate the use of the term “conspiracy theory” by several decades. It’s based on the idea that Marshal Michel Ney, one of Napoleon’s greatest officers, faked his execution and fled to America, where he lived under the name Peter Stuart Ney until his real death in 1846.

The book examines, in great detail, how this might have happened and what it would have required in order to be true. In broad outlines, it paints Ney’s supposed escape as a slap in the face to the restored Bourbon King by the Duke of Wellington, in retaliation for the king’s ingratitude to England’s Iron Duke.

Ney is portrayed as brave and heroic, unafraid to repeatedly face death. Which, by all accounts he was; with some saying he actively hoped to be killed on the field at Waterloo, only to somehow, by some devilishly ironic miracle, survive the carnage.

I have to admit, the notion that Ney’s execution was faked undercuts one of the most hardcore stories of his bravery: that he gave the orders to his firing squad himself. What kind of courage it would take for a man to look down the barrels of loaded rifles and order them to be fired! Obviously, if it was all a sham, this lessens Ney’s mystique.

Speaking of lessening mystique, I want to discuss how this book portrays the Duke of Wellington. Wellington is kind of a divisive figure. The British, of course, love him and say he’s one of the greatest commanders in history. Bonapartists, on the other hand, tend to view him as a merely mediocre fighter who happened to get lucky against a vastly superior opponent.

There are plenty of facts one can cite to support either viewpoint. But the way this book portrays him, despite the fact that his actions help the heroic Ney, Wellington seems cold, aloof, snobbish and arrogant. Admittedly, you can see how someone called “the Iron Duke” is probably not a warm fuzzy guy, but nothing about him says “great leader.” He seems tough and smart, but without any great vision or charisma.

I guess the easiest way to say it is, imagine Wellington in a situation analogous to Napoleon on the road to Grenoble. (See dramatization here.) I wonder if a British infantryman, hauled from some workhouse and flogged into obeying the regulations of His Majesty, might not have tried a shot?

But, I’m going off-topic. Wellington and Napoleon aside, Ney is certainly a fascinating historical figure, and the mystery of his possible escape is an interesting one. If you forced me to offer an opinion, my guess is that it probably didn’t happen, and he really did die by firing squad. But I can’t say it with certainty.

I enjoyed this book very much, and am grateful to Pat Prescott for recommending this author, which is how I learned about it. Mace has a number of other intriguing historical novels as well, which I plan to read in the future.

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I read somewhere about Richard Harding Davis, who was a journalist during the Spanish-American War and a major supporter of Theodore Roosevelt’s political career. He was one of those rough and tumble, vigorous living types, and so when I read he’d written an adventure novel, I had to check it out. What could be better than a tale of adventure and combat and danger, written by a man who had experienced same? I settled in for a rollicking story of action and thrills.

What I got was not that, but something much more interesting.

Oh, to be sure, there are plenty of battles in this book. The hero of the story, Robert Clay, is an engineer for a mining company in South America. He just wants to build mines, but local politics keep it from being so simple. President Alvarez and his wife are plotting to dissolve the small republic and reign as monarchs. Meanwhile, the ambitious General Mendoza is plotting to oust them in a coup and establish himself as dictator. All the while, the people prefer the Vice President, the gallant General Rojas.

In this volatile mix, Clay finds himself trying to run a lucrative mining operation sure to be disrupted by a political revolution. When the mine’s owner, Mr. Langham, comes to visit, he brings his daughter Alice, the star of the New York social scene, with whom Clay has been obsessed for years.

As an aside, there is all this talk early on about “debutantes” and “seasons” and whole social structures which I don’t understand at all. This is kind of embarrassing, but I still don’t really have a handle on what a woman making her “debut” is. I felt like I was reading about an alien civilization.

And this leads me to what was surprising about this book: there is far, far more focus on relationships and conversations than I was expecting. For an adventure book, it has a great many dances and conversations about feelings.

For instance, at one point, after a visit to the mines, Clay is disappointed Alice doesn’t show more interest in his work, and she is disappointed he didn’t take a more active role in showing her around:

“I wanted to hear about it from you, because you did it. I wasn’t interested so much in what had been done, as I was in the man who accomplished it.”

To which Clay replies:

“But that’s just what I don’t want,” he said. “Can’t you see? These mines and other mines like them are all I have in the world. They are my only excuse for having lived in it so long. I want to feel that I’ve done something outside of myself.”

This is the sort of honest conversation about feelings that is important in all relationships. The fact that these two are able to talk things out this way clarifies things and saves much heartache down the line.

That’s what impressed me most about the book: how straightforward everyone is, particularly Clay. I know that I, the master of the long-winded, rambling, convoluted blog post, am a fine one to talk, but when it comes to serious matters of interpersonal relationships, directness is quite valuable.

The book places a much heavier emphasis on relationship details like this than I expected, and you know what? That’s a good thing. It makes the characters feel interesting and alive. True, those expecting non-stop action will be a little disappointed, although there is one big battle sequence at the end that is really well done.

Now, a word about covers. The one pictured above is the cover for the edition I read. I hate it. It looks like a Warren Zevon album. It’s got guns and money; all that’s missing is the lawyers. And while both this book and the Zevon song are indeed about danger and crime in South America, this is just the wrong vibe for a book written in 1897.

Then we have this cover for a paperback. It is… odd. Clearly, it depicts a modern soldier, but in the style of Classical artwork. It’s a striking image, but unfortunately this book is from neither the modern nor classical periods.

Next we come to the hardcover version. This is probably the best at capturing the book accurately. We have a handsome soldier, his young girlfriend, a plausibly South American setting… it’s not bad. A solid B+ entry, I’d say. Alas, this version costs $22.

And finally, there is the Classics Illustrated comic book edition. This, I admit, is tempting. From glancing at the Amazon preview, it’s clear they have taken many liberties with Davis’s story, but still, it looks interesting all the same. Doesn’t the central figure look a bit like David Niven as Phileas Fogg?

As a final note, just to reiterate, the book was written in 1897, and therefore has some language and depictions of characters that may disturb some readers. It’s actually pretty mild by the standards of the day, but nevertheless, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that.