In All Honesty, Smith Should Stick to Diet Books

The Ancient Nine - Ian K. Smith, MD

Spenser Q. Collins made his way from the mean streets of South Chicago to the ivy-covered halls of Harvard on the strength of his valedictory address and his jump shot. Now in his sophomore year, the young African-American premed student is flabbergasted to be “punched”¹ by a “final club”² - in fact, the finest of them all, Delphic. Upon hearing he’d been punched, Spenser’s best bud, filthy-rich Dalton Winthrop some number-or-other, informed him that Delphic is not just the best Harvard club, it’s also the most mysterious: some kid disappeared into their palatial clubhouse one night in 1927 and has never been heard from again. Ooooh: a mystery.

SciFi for the MBA

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach - Kelly Robson

It used to be that libraries had a section they called “Fantasy and Science Fiction,” but most libraries and bookstores now separate the two. I don’t know the official difference (Wikipedia probably does), but in my world, fantasy is derived from “sword and sorcery” and Science Fiction involves speculation about how the scientific advances will change humanity’s future. Ignore Steampunk and VampRom for now – that’s what I do. Fantasy demands the willing suspension of disbelief; good SciFi is a prediction. We aren’t likely to develop into sorcerers and magicians any time soon, but progress marches on: that’s why we have more computing power on our wrists these days than could be developed in a middle-sized room in the era of punch cards. That may be why the best science fiction authors are scientists themselves… not people with English and “multimedia” degrees like Kelly Robson.

The Cult of Pain

Halcyon - Rio Youers

You’re such a pain… playing through the pain… what a pain in the neck… no pain, no gain… Pain, it seems, is an integral part of everyone’s existence. For Valerie Kemp (aka Mother Moon), pain is her pathway, a bridge of sorts to the… place? dimension? existence? she calls Glam Moon. Kemp’s mantra is, “The end of pleasure is pain.” Halcyon, the tiny colony Kemp has founded on a remote Lake Ontario island, is supposed to become one end of her “bridge.” The only qualification for joining the population of Halcyon is that a candidate must have suffered immeasurable pain in his or her life.

Martin Lovegrove knows about pain. His daughters Edith and Shirley know about it, too: the fourth Lovegrove, wife and mother Lauren, died in a hail of bullets; yet another victim of a school shooting. Sixteen-year-old Shirley has descended into teenage angst complete with dyed-black hair, slamming doors, and curfew-busting nights. As for Edith, she’s retreated into her world… You see, Edith has a “condition.”  Some might call it a gift, but would you really want a gift that – for lack of a better analogy – lets her sense “disturbances in the force”? a condition that allowed her to watch her mother die from miles away, before it even happened? No, that’s no gift: it’s a condition.

When Martin and the girls arrive on Halcyon, Mother Moon senses that her long and arduous quest for the final piece of the puzzle, her bridge to Glam Moon, lies within her grasp. All she needs is another great burst of psychic pain; a burst like the ones she has already caused…and Edith and Shirley are the key pieces of her puzzle.

Martin Lovegrove has come to Halcyon ignorant of the dark evil that wreathes the island, unaware of the secrets Valerie Kemp keeps concealed from her followers. On the other hand, Valerie Kemp has not counted on the strength of love.

It’s been a while since I read a book that held my interest like Rio Youers’ Halcyon has. It’s the British/Canadian author’s fifth standalone novel, following 2017’s The Forgotten Girl – a novel I immediately sought out and placed in the to-be-read stack. Yeah: this was that good…

There’s no other way to say it: Youers’ premise in Halcyon is fascinating. Oh, the characters aren’t all that unusual – we’ve seen a lot of these people before. Edith might as well be Charlie from Stephen King’s Firestarter. Mother Moon is any silver-tongued cult leader from Jim Jones to Marshall Applewhite¹. The Lovegrove marriage is the stuff of golden-age sitcoms (before every sitcom featured a fat husband with a foxy wife). Heck, even the horrors of mass murder are no longer unfamiliar to American readers.


It’s not the pieces-parts that make this novel, though, it’s the way that Youers assembled those parts. It’s the dark secret of the colony called Halcyon and the back-story of its charismatic leader he plays out over many chapters that will bring chills to your spine. When you've finished, you will understand, and you will believe: the end of pleasure is pain...

Highly recommended.

¹ Jonestown (1978) to Heaven’s Gate (1997) 
Confidential to RY: it’s highly unlikely that there’s granite on an island in Lake Ontario west of Oswego. Maybe limestone?

copyright © 2017-2019 scmrak

Strange Title, Big Book, Long Reach

Noumenon - Marina J. Lostetter

You’d think I’d know by now, wouldn’t you. Yep, the more superlatives heaped on a debut novel, the less I’m going to like it. Who knows: it might have something to do with the way literature has changed since my debut novel (the first one I read, anyway). Whatever. The reviews for Marina J. Lostetter and her (alleged) first novel, Noumenon, were glowing. They compared it to Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (a comparison obviously made by someone who hadn’t read that novel) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. They also compared it to Hugh Howey’s Wool, but I haven’t read it – my one exposure to Howey was unsatisfactory. But we’re not here to talk about Howey (or Stephenson), we’re here to talk about Noumenon…

Anderson Harp's "Retribution": The Spy Novel Comes in from the Cold

Retribution - Anderson Harp

When the Cold War sputtered and came to a halt, espionage thriller writers found themselves scrambling for new plotlines. A few ignored the change and some began writing historical fiction, but many moved the spying from politics to corporate espionage. The problem was simple: a Russian and an American (or Brit) pretty much look the same; but modern conflicts pit westerners against Asian enemies and natives of the Middle East. It’s tough to write a part for Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise as an Arab or Korean without invoking plastic surgery.

But then along came Bosnians and Chechens – Moslems who look less like Osama bin Laden and more like Zorba the Greek; some even with pale(-ish) complexions and light hair. A new breed of spies was born – and Anderson Harp’s man William Parker is at the vanguard.

Kill Game: definitive proof that quantity is not the same thing as quality

Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery - Dean Wesley Smith

The blurbs for Dean Wesley Smith’s Kill Game: A Cold Poker Gang Mystery include one that describes it as an “exhilarating political poker thriller.” If you know who Harriett Klausner was you’re probably laughing at her grandiose description of yet another book she'd never read (she wrote dozens of book reviews a day). If you’ve read this particular book, well, you realize that not one word of her four is actually true.

Meet the Cold Poker Gang. Or perhaps not: supposedly a group of ex-Vegas cops who solve homicide cases while playing a weekly poker game, in reality only three appear in Kill Game (aren’t poker games usually among six or more players?). Two have strong connections to the cold case they’ve chosen to work on this time, however. Former Reno cop Julia Rogers is the widow of the man killed in Sin City twenty-two years ago; Stan Rocha was now-retired cop Bayard Lott’s first-ever homicide case. His murder remains unsolved all these years later.

It Ain't Carter Ross, and I Don't Care

Closer Than You Know - Brad Parks

Meet Melanie Barrick, a woman whose life is quite frankly a mess. Like many a fictional heroine, she’s been through “the system” and pulled herself up by her bootstraps. But wait, she managed to go through college on scholarship money, but combine her graduation year (2009) with her utterly ridiculous choice of major (English Lit? what good is an English Lit degree?), and yet she’s been able to work her way up from homeless Starbucks barista to dispatcher at a trucking, errr, logistics company. On top of that, Barrick was raped in her little apartment a year ago…

Maybe the first Davie Richards mystery should've been the last...

Pacific Homicide - Patricia Smiley

I happen to be someone who devours mystery-thriller novels, and if you’re going to read somewhere between fifty and 100 of them a year, you tend to have fairly loose standards. I know that not every writer can be Michael Connelly; but I certainly hope that not every writer is Tim Downs, either. My most recent read, sadly, is closer to the latter: that’s why I’m assigning a mere two stars to Pacific Homicide, the first Davie Richards mystery.

Richards, the newest detective of LAPD’s Pacific Division homicide squad, is a second-generation cop. Her dad, however, was unceremoniously drummed out of the department after he shot a teenager and paralyzed him. Unfortunately for Davie, the lawyer who lost the civil case is the newly appointed head of the police oversight board.

Not that this has anything to do with Davie’s current case, which is that of the beautiful teenaged Russian blonde whose mangled body was found in the LA sewer system. The diminutive (of course) but gorgeous (likewise) redhead with a streak of rebellion (I’m seeing a pattern here) will get the job done, though. That’s regardless of her recent officer-involved shooting (duh) while saving the life of the partner with whom she was having a fling (…). Never mind the complication of her ex's sudden reassignment to Davie's division.

You see where I’m getting to, right? Pacific Homicide is so full of tropes that it’s hard not to trip over a new one every page or so. Author Patricia Smiley (back in print seven years after the fourth Tucker Sinclair mystery) definitely didn’t go out on any creative limbs for her police procedural. Even Davie’s domicile is a trope of the female detective subgenre: she lives in a converted garage behind the house of a non-threatening older man: Kinsey Milhone, anyone?

All that derivative prose makes it hard to concentrate on the mystery aspect of Pacific Homicide, but to be truthful it’s not particularly well done, either. While the villain’s identity does come as a surprise, Smiley commits the sin of not providing clues to his identity for her readers to attempt to out-detect the detective. The bad guy’s tipoff? He’s a creep… not that being a creep is actionable in real police work.

There's also an ancillary plot: the aforementioned lawyer bears a grudge against Richards because, after he lost the case against her dad, the foxy mama of the paralyzed kid didn't spread her luscious legs for him. Give us a break, Patty! the guy hasn't managed to get laid in the past fifteen years? and he thinks it's the hero's fault?

Smiley’s pumped out a couple more books in the series, but given the snore-fest I encountered in Pacific Homicide, I’m gonna give ‘em a pass. I’d suggest you do the same.

copyright © 2018 scmrak