King's reincarnation tale needs less stitching and more plot

The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King

I don’t know about you, but I don’t always check the published reviews of a book before buying it or checking it out of the library. Oh, sure, I’ll briefly scan the reviews at “the River,” but I know better than to trust most of those people, anyway. Perhaps had I should have looked more closely at Barnes & Noble’s page for The Dust of 100 Dogs (by A. S. King), though. Instead of glowing reviews from the NYT or even "People," there are blurbs from The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star and "VOYA" (not the financial company – “Voice of Youth America” magazine). The best the site can come up with is the throwaway line from "Booklist," which calls it “An undeniably original book.” When you come right down to it, though, that description might very well have been followed by “that is unfortunately almost unreadable.”

“Stop That!” I Said to Myself

Before It’s Too Late – Sara Driscoll

Ever heard the joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and tells her, “It hurts when I do this”? The punchline, of course, is that she says, “Well, stop doing that!” Ba. Dump. Bump. I could say the same thing of the Sara Driscoll F.B.I. K-9 series: “It hurts when I read this; so maybe I should stop.” But I didn’t…

I read book two, Before It’s Too Late, and I’m… not sure why. It’s probably because I didn’t have anything else to read (the latest Virgil Flowers novel wasn’t out yet), and it might be because I really, really love Labrador Retrievers and the K-9 in question is a black Lab named Hawk. More likely both. But anyway, about the book:

F.B.I. K-9 handler Meg Jennings is obviously the target of a serial whackaloon: he kidnaps women who look like her (“black Irish” features) and then sends a coded message addressed to Meg, a message that consists of cryptic clues to where he’s hidden the kidnapped woman. Oh, and the woman isn’t dead yet; he’s killing her slowly by asphyxiation. Creepy dude…

Maybe the Accounting is Right, but the Plot? Fuhgeddaboudit...

Exit Strategy - Colleen Cross

Every day a list of books shows up in my email inbox from a place called BookBub. Most of these ebooks are available at fire sale prices; a couple a week are even free. I have to admit that I try to avoid any titles accompanies by a blurb bragging about the number of five-star reviews at GoodReads, but every once in a while I pick up one of the freebies just to see if the rest of the series is worth buying (or borrowing from the library).

That’s why I have a copy of Exit Strategy, subtitled “Katerina Carter Fraud Thriller Series 1”: I got it free. And I’m here to tell you, it was worth every penny…

This Geek Girl Adventure Reads More Like Stephanie Plum

No One Lives Twice - Julie Moffet

If you listen to the news at all, you probably know that women are underrepresented in the tech sector (not to mention often subjected to unpleasant working environments). In the literary world, however, a few “geek girls” have made their appearance. One that recently came across my e-reader was Lexi Carmichael, whose first adventure was 2010’s No One Lives Twice.

Lexi, who works for the NSA, first realizes she’s embroiled in something strange when not one but two suspicious dudes demand that she fork over the papers her best friend Basia sent her. "What papers?" she wonders... Well, it turns out that Basia had sent her the papers, she just hadn’t gotten ‘em yet. But all the papers are is a generic contract with a little coded message at the bottom of one page, the word “Acheron” in a simplistic code. Which, of course, geeky Lexi figures out immediately. Those papers start Lexi on a hunt for Basia and her Polish-born cousin that will take her across the Atlantic and force her boyish (i.e., flat-chested) body up against those of not one, not two, but three different hotties.

Capri's Homage to Reacher is a Bit of a Reach

You say you unpublished this because it was flagged as spam. Your definition of spam, per the guidelines, "[May] include unwanted promotional or commercial content, unwanted content that is created by an automated program, unwanted repetitive content, nonsensical content, or anything that appears to be a mass solicitation."

This post 

• Does not include promotional content
• Does not include commercial content
• Was not created by an automated program
• Does not contain repetitive content
• Does not contain Nonsensical content
• Is not a mass solicitation

So why is it "spam"?

Well?

Diane Capri - Don't Know Jack

For Special Agent Kim Otto, the hunt begins with a phone call in the wee small hours of the morning. Actually, it began earlier with the delivery of a “burner” cell phone and a slim file on her target… but the real action starts with that phone call. She’s ordered onto a flight from Detroit to Atlanta, where she will meet her “second,” Special Agent Carlos Gaspar out of Miami. Their orders are to head to the town of Margrave, Georgia, to pick up the long-cold trail of their target… Jack (no middle) Reacher.

Just why the two are looking for Reacher isn’t readily apparent. As far as Otto can tell, he’s a paranoid killer who’s been off the grid for fifteen years now, and her unnamed “boss” has decided it’s time to bring him to justice. The notion that he’s a bad guy just goes to show you that these two feebs Don’t Know Jack.

Otto and Gaspar stumble into a bizarre murder scene and cryptic clues about counterfeiting and a high-level DC coverup involving hookers, mistresses, or both. They’re helped, albeit reluctantly, by superfox MILF Chief of Police Beverly Roscoe Trent, who just happens to have a gorgeous – and tall – 15-year-old daughter named Jacqueline, or Jack for short. The “boss” continues to send them willy-nilly around the mid-Atlantic region to talk to people, and – for some unknown reason – they end up in Washington’s most renowned brothel where Otto – for some unknown reason – has an unstated relationship with the madam. They solve the murder, of course, but their target stays just out of reach…

Diane Capri’s first fan-fiction novel in homage to Jack Reacher, Don’t Know Jack is filled with references to Killing Floor (the first novel in Lee Child’s 22-episode Reacher series), including references to “Kliner” counterfeit C-notes and an interview with the detective who originally arrested Reacher, Lamont Finlay. Child himself wrote the afterword for the novel (at least the ePub version I read). Capri’s style is similar, although – unlike Reacher – Otto doesn't ever get around to doin' the nasty with the male lead.

Capri’s novel progresses nicely, especially if you’re a fan of the Reacher series, for about thirty-six chapters. At that point, Otto has tracked a missing woman into Marion Wallace’s DC “party house,” where suddenly it’s as if you’ve shifted into a different book. Sure, the two are still looking for Reacher, but all of a sudden they’re referring to the mysterious voice on the telephone by his surname, instead of as “the boss.” Otto seems surprised that Wallace doesn’t seem to recognize her, even though they have some unstated history that appears to involve Otto’s ex-husband (who’d only been mentioned once or twice before). The shifts are, quite frankly, puzzling.

As a mystery, the novel is pretty pedestrian, and seems mainly interesting for its tie-in to the Reacher series; not to mention the Tom Cruise movie that was released later in the year. The shift from an omniscient, omnipotent boss to “Cooper on the top floor of the FBI building” is unsettling, in particular because in subsequent “Hunt for Reacher” short stories the boss becomes once again anonymous. Were it not for that flaw, I’d have rated this slightly above average, but that’s too glaring for my tastes.

copyright © 2017-2023 scmrak

Graham and Land Pen a Stealth YA-SciFi-Romance-Thriller

The Rising - Heather Graham and Jon Land

Perhaps the most interesting thing about 18-year-old Alex Chin is that he’s blue-eyed and blonde, unlike his mainland Chinese parents. The official reason’s simple – he’s adopted. The real reason is a little more complicated…

…and that complication is the reason football star-slash-stone fox Alex and his tutor Sam (short for Samantha) are on the run, pursued by oily-smelling cyborgs and an ashy-gray something that just ain't quite real. Oh, yeah, and Alex has a protector guy that he never knew about with a super-neat weapon; a good thing since the pseudo-people chasing him murdered his parents and are heck-bent on taking him back. Somewhere.

Fortunately for Alex (if you can say “fortunately” about a freshly-orphaned teenager), with her dying breath his mom provided the key to his real back-story. Yup, Alex isn’t a normal red-blooded teenage boy (though his appraisal of Sam seems to suggest otherwise). Alex is – tada! an alien! He’s an alien who, his protector says, holds  the key to Earth’s survival; though just what that key might be and what it might unlock are complete mysteries. If you thought things were already complicated, an angry billionaire is also hunting for Alex, and as far as Langston Marsh is concerned, the only good alien is a dead alien – and his storm troopers are closing in.

Alex and Sam, however, are about to have a rip-roarin’ good time as they flee marauding aliens and a cadre of mercenaries – but have no fear, they’ll be fine.

They’ll be fine because 1) The Rising is a YA novel (albeit rather stealthy about it) and 2) if the kids don’t survive, authors Heather Graham and Jon Land won’t be able to attempt to spin the novel into a series. Not that it’s really worth it…

Now I’m not opposed to YA novels; I rather like them. I realize they’re supposed to appeal to people the age of my grandkids, and should be expected to touch on all the themes familiar to fans of Harry and Katniss. No doubt about it, the classic tropes about “coming of age under fire” and “recognizing her beauty once she takes off her glasses” figure prominently. Just as common these days, regardless of the target audience, is that “evil billionaire” plot thread Graham and Land shoehorn into the plot, presumably to make the kids’ flight even more perilous – it’s like the Fellowship being attacked simultaneously by Sauron and Saruman…

Like I said, I’m OK with YA novels (see my multitudinous Pittacus Lore reviews). I’m not OK with sloppy pseudoscience – in an era when kids are pounded relentlessly with STEM, I suspect that rubbish like “It had been formed of subatomic, programmable particles based on nanotechnological principles” will make them retch like it did me - -both times it appeared. And then there’s the notion that a particle accelerator acts as a power source: “once activated, a particle accelerator of this size and magnitude [sic] would generate power on the millisecond level equal to that powering an entire city or even a state.” Geez, guys, instead of just throwing science-y words on the page, why not call the local university and ask for help?! On a side note, it’s interesting that one author thinks the phrase is “honed in on,” while the other prefers “home in on” (for the record, it’s home…). Sloppy editing, I guess.

All in all, it’s just a YA thriller with a little young love (super-chaste – just one little kiss) and a heaping helping of pseudo-science. The thing is, in the Harry Potter stories kids know the fantastic stuff is magic. Here, they’re supposed to think it’s present-day Earth and all this stuff is based on real science and technology.

But it’s not, and that isn’t a good thing for The Rising – not at all.

copyright © 2015-2017 scmrak

Johnson's Subgenre Novel may only be Interesting to her Subgenre

Cold Flash - Carrie H. Johnson

The world of mystery fiction seems to be becoming more and more fragmented. Once there were mostly police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and PI mysteries; then along came a slew of new genres like cozy, romantic, profession-based, and supernatural tales. Next came the sub-genres and sub-sub genres and maybe even sub-sub-sub-genres. It seems that somewhere out there, an author has concocted a mystery with a hero(ine) exactly like the reader – no matter whether that reader is male, female, Anglo, Latino, African-American, gay, straight, vampire, alien… you get the picture. In the rush to fill every available niche, however, quality seems to have taken a back seat to quality. I hate to say it, but Carrie H. Johnson and Cold Flash are a perfect example.

Nothing's Worse that a Know-Nothing Know-it-All, Right?

The Death of Expertise - Tom Nichols

If the statisticians are right – and there’s a good chance that they are – half the people out there are of below-average intelligence. So why is it that everyone thinks he or she knows everything? Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise, says it’s because of the Dunning-Kroger effect: the dumber you are, the less likely you are to know how dumb you are. Makes sense to me…

Love Dogs or Only Like 'Em, "Just Life" Will Disappoint

Just Life - Neil Abramson

Some say that man’s greatest invention is the wheel, some say it is fire. Personally, I’d like to make a case for the domestic canine: I love my dogs and firmly believe that there are no bad dogs (only bad owners). Lawyer-author Neil Abramsom would probably agree, and perhaps that’s why his latest novel, Just Life, so clearly outlines the difference between humans and dogs. I just wish he’d done it better…

Samantha Lewis, DVM, operates on the edge of insolvency: her tiny no-kill shelter in NYC’s Riverside neighborhood has managed to scrape by for years, but time has run out for the Finally Home Animal Shelter. In thirty days, the shelter must place all 24 of its dogs and close the doors -- forever. That’d be bad enough, but suddenly there’s a mysterious killer virus striking local children and rumor has it that the CDC thinks pooches are the carriers. Sam’s charges number almost 100 as her neighbors entrust their animals to her care while fleeing the specter of disease.

Sam and her helpers – a couple of employees, a teenaged volunteer and a defrocked shrink doing court-ordered service – find themselves at the center of a whirlwind, as the mayor and NYPD protect the shelter’s occupants against the governor and the National Guard. There are, of course, the expected villains – soulless politicians, soulless business types, and soulless rednecks – but nevertheless we expect Sam’s band of misfits to prevail (spoiler alert: not one dog dies in this book)…

Abramson’s second novel (after 2012’s Unsaid) is perhaps most memorable for the heart-rending cover photo of a hooded figure, facing a phalanx of uniformed cops, while clutching a precious pup to his chest. Research reveals that Unsaid has a handsome weimaraner on the cover – I see a trend here… Sadly, the cover photograph is the best part of Just Life (the survival of every dog mentioned notwithstanding). Abramson’s writing is from the “kitchen-sink” school, a style in which every known trope that might be the slightest bit related makes an appearance. We have a healthy dollop of religion, far too much gratuitous mysticism, and enough redemption of sins to populate a shelf full of syrupy young-adult fiction books at the local Christian bookstore.

Abramson’s writing is clunky and clumsy, the pacing is uneven, the characters are thin, and an overreliance on tropes of good and evil makes the plot as predictable as a “Wild Kratz” short. I had high hopes for a plot with so interesting a premise, but Just Life did not deliver.

copyright © 2017 scmrak

The Pot Thief Who Couldn't Spell "Chile"

The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras - J. Michael Orenduff

Meet Hubert Schuze (pronounced, I believe, “shoes”). Hubert runs a pot shop in Albuquerque’s Old Town – no, New Mexico hasn’t legalized marijuana, he sells Native American pottery. Hubert’s a pot thief, at least according to the Feds, since he has no problem with digging up old pottery on public land and selling it in his shop. That’s not legal, but since he thinks the law is wrong, he engages in civil disobedience that just happens to fatten his bank account. Hubert’s forty-something, was kicked out of UNM’s archaeology program for – you guessed it – stealing artifacts, and keeps a great deal of company with a lovely Basque by the name of Susannah.

Hubert also likes to read non-fiction… and while he’s reading a collection of essays on Pythagoras (the eponymous theorem guy), he becomes embroiled in a bit of theater involving the theft of not one but two valuable pots. In fact, they’re the only two known complete pots attributed to the Mogollon culture – and both are (or were) in museums. Weirdly enough, two people end up dead over this caper, which means one per pot.

Of course, Hubert’s up to his bolo tie in the mess, since some guy offered him a tidy sum to steal one of the pots – and the other one turned up stolen just hours later. Add in a couple of dead bodies, and the pot’s… errr, the plot’s afoot. It’s a good thing Schuze is smarter than the average museum curator, or he’d be in a lot of trouble! When all is said and done and Hubert’s Miss Marple-style lecture to the suspects is over, he’s left a hero and had picked up enough to pay his quarterly taxes to boot. Not bad for a margarita-swilling slacker, eh? The first in J. Michael Orenduff’s series, The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras was first published in 2007 by the former president of the University of New Mexico. Orenduff draws on his personal knowledge of his native city for this entry in the series, although he has precious little to say about anything beyond restaurants and shops except for an occasional reference to sunrise over the Sandia Mountains. More’s the pity, since the landscape deserves far more attention. But I digress…

As a mystery, The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras is no great shakes, mainly because Orenduff fails to leave the clues necessary for a reader to track along with the amateur sleuth. Hubert solves one of the two murders via a series of deductions in which the crucial deduction is decidedly weak, while the second murder is completely lacking in motivation. I hope that the author improves in this sense through the next six books in the series – it was interesting enough that I will probably take a look at a second installment some day.

I might not, though: I found the character of Hubert to be rather unsympathetic. For one, there’s the endless rationalization of his law-breaking; for another there’s his constant companionship (and heavy drinking) with his friend Susannah. And while he bitches constantly about being broke, he eats almost every meal in restaurants and drinks four or five margaritas each night. And he listens to jazz… of course.

Most of all, though, Schuze peeves this reader because he keeps talking about “chilies.” I sure hope that he got stuck with that spelling by an editor, because a real New Mexican knows there’s only one I in “chiles” – and the proper spelling is preserved in The Congressional Record…

copyright © 2017 scmrak

The Blight Way: McManus Makes a Better Humorist than Mystery Writer

The Blight Way: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery - Patrick McManus

I have to admit that I’ve probably never read a Patrick McManus column – “Field and Stream” ain’t in my wheelhouse when it comes to outdoor fun.  They say he’s a humorist, which careful reading of The Blight Way: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery seems to support, assuming you like that kind of humor. His idea of “funny” is a lot closer to mine than the likes of Louie C K, so I’ll buy that. What I won’t buy, however, is that he’s a mystery writer – and The Blight Way is exhibit A in my case.

The Long Read With Little in the Way of Results

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

When I was just a teenaged science fiction fan, my parents gave me a short story collection titled Bullard of the Space Patrol -- yes, it’s still available, even though originally printed (posthumously) in 1951. The stories are pure space opera, all about life aboard a human-crewed spaceship called either the Castor or the Pollux, I forget which. Whatever the case, the stories follow the same set of characters on the same spaceship in more or less chronological order.

The point, I suppose, is that the book in question was sold to readers as a collection of short stories. That’s honest: what isn’t is anyone's pretending that The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a novel, because it’s not – instead, it’s a collection of short space opera stories following the same characters on the same space ship in more or less chronological order. The debut effort of Becky Chambers, The Long Way… describes life on The Wayfarer, a “tunneling ship” in a distant future in which mankind has destroyed the Earth and is now a second-class member of a galactic confederation of sorts. The crew includes four humans, a reptile, a strange many-legged critter, a humanoid with a symbiont, and an AI.

In other words, Captain Picard, Mr. Spock, Seven of Nine, Jadzia Dax, Commander Data, Doctor Flox… and any of dozens of other characters in the Star Trek universe, Firefly, the Star Wars series, and all the other by-now hackneyed and semi-hackneyed science fiction tropes like space folds, galactic alliances, and the like. Each chapter (short story, actually) is self-contained except for the introduction of characters and scene setting, and most of them are standard set pieces: the bizarre market (think Mos Isley in “Star Wars IV”); the argument over the rights of an AI (think Isaac Asimov’s I Robot); the crew members with deep, dark secrets (about a million movies and novels). One of the only two things original, as far as I can tell, to Chambers’ version of the space opera is the idea that wormholes (“gates,” “trans-space tunnels” or whatever a scifi author calls them) are constructs instead of natural (c.f. Niven and Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye).

The other thing is that Chambers is apparently fixated on interspecies sex. Not only do we have two humanoids of different species coupling, we also have a lesbian relationship between a human and a reptile and the obvious desire of a human for the AI. Weird, if you ask me – perhaps she didn’t recognize it at the time.

When push comes to shove, however, I find that the greatest failing of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is its lack of a real plot. There’s no buildup of tension and conflict, just one installment that’s more hectic than all the ones before it put together. The stories read like a series of episodes of a soap-operaish sitcom (on cable, perhaps, given the sex). Of course, if it had been sold as a collection of short stories, I might have been okay with it. To be sure, the characters are nicely drawn, if a bit on the derivative side – Kizzy, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to Abby Sciuto on “N.C.I.S.” When all is said and done, the lack of originality and the lack of an actual plot mean it just doesn’t measure up. Two and a half stars…

copyright © 2017-2022 scmrak

Love the Dog, but the Novel's Pretty Much Meh

Lone Wolf - Sara Driscoll

There are a lot of pet mysteries on the market, ranging from the childish – Spencer Quinn’s dog Chet talks, though like a hyperactive toddler with ADD – to more adult fare like Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy series, in which dogs and cats (among other animals) speak like guests at the Algonquin Round Table. A few mysteries have dogs who act like dogs: Robert Crais writes one that features rescued bomb-sniffer Maggie. To the more noble vein of the latter, you can add Sara Driscoll’s new FBI K-9 series featuring Hawk and his handler Meg, beginning with Lone Wolf.