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.

Killers Beware: Waterman and Stark are on the Scene

The Girl in the Woods – Gregg Olsen

When it comes to mysteries, the people who investigate crimes for a living pretty much break down into three categories: cops (think Harry Bosch), medical examiners (Kay Scarpetta) and criminalists (Lincoln Rhyme). Those are the protagonists whose investigations are lumped together as police procedurals. Scarpetta and her fellow Quincys now have a new colleague: Birdy Waterman of Kitsap County, Washington. Birdy’s a member of the Makah, a Native American tribe local to the area. Birdy and Detective Kendall Stark make up the investigative team of Waterman and Stark, featured in Gregg Olsen’s series of the same name. The Girl in the Woods (2014) is the first of three, so far, novels in the series.

The eponymous girl’s first appearance is a bit part – the bit being one of her feet. Birdy’s investigation of the found foot is only just underway when a dirt biker comes across the remainder of the body. The girl was only sixteen, and to make matters worse, she and her mother were the only survivors of a traffic accident that killed her father and brother. As a result, Mom became a hoarder.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, a young nurse’s aide is certain that the once-handsome and –vital former naval officer next door has been murdered by his new wife. As luck would have it, Birdy quickly realizes that the gorgeous young widow and her equally gorgeous daughter (but less-gorgeous son) are hiding something. Sure enough, he’d been poisoned. Is there a “black widow” on the loose? Wonder of wonders, the two murders are revealed to be connected by a tenuous thread – they’re tangentially related to convicted murderer Brenda Nevins, the “most beautiful prisoner in America.” That means Kendall will have to interview the woman in a scene right out of “Orange Is the New Black”… and, of course, there will be the usual heart-pounding climactic showdown with the murderous villain. Of course.

Olsen’s red herrings are pretty faded (more of pink herrings) and his plot twist so hackneyed that I could see it a couple hundred pages in advance. The mechanism by which the two killings are connected is so clumsy that it’s almost laughable. Considering that Waterman is a coroner / medical examiner, there’s surprisingly little about the science of the autopsy suite (the text doesn’t even mention instars when talking about “maggots”). On the other hand, the characters – including the dead girl’s mother and the protagonists – are fairly well-crafted, although Olsen seems to lay the family drama on a little thick when it comes to Waterman.

As far as mysteries are concerned, The Girl in the Woods would only merit two stars – especially since the character of Brenda Nevins owes her very existence to Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell – but Olsen manages to drag it up to average with a fairly good sense of place and some interesting characters. In reality, though, the novel is about what you’d expect for a debut novel. The only problem with this observation is, according to the “other works by the author” list, that it’s his eighteenth.

copyright © 2016 scmrak

Gibson blends technology, politics and espionage in a cyberpunk melange

Spook Country - William Gibson

That William Gibson is about as geeky as the average suburban housewife probably comes as a surprise to most familiar with Gibson. He is, after all, the man who coined “cyberspace” two decades ago in Neuromancer, the first book ever to win all three science fiction awards (Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K Dick). Yet Gibson freely admits that he’s no more in tune with what’s inside his monitor or his keyboard than you or I. That’s pretty much on a par with learning that A-Rod has never heard of Cooperstown or that Norm Abram can’t tell walnut paneling from wood-grain wallpaper.