Last Song Sung by David A Poulsen - Book Review

David A. Poulsen has written Last Song Sung: A Cullen and Cobb Mystery (Dundern, 2018, 352 pp., $17.99/5.38) the third volume in a detective series set in Calgary, British Columbia. The lead characters, journalist Adam Cullen and private detective Mike Cobb seek to solve a fifty year old mystery set in the world of 1960’s folk revival and political chaos. Their back story involves the still unsolved murder of Cullen’s wife Donna in a fire set by an arsonist. When the police cannot identify the killer, Cullen hires Cobb, who also fails. Two books later, the two have become partners in detecting and solving crimes, with Cullen serving as researcher and co-investigator. He has also gone on with his life, developing a relationship with Jill Sawley and her daughter Kyla, both of whom he loves and is deeply involved with.

In Last Song Sung, the duo is hired by Monica Brill to discover the fate of her grandmother, Ellie Foster, a folksinger who was abducted from The Depression, a coffee house in Calgary fifty years earlier during an incident in which two of her fellow musicians were killed in an adjoining alley as Ellie was forced into a car and driven away. Recently, a CD has been mysteriously placed in Monica’s car. On listening to it, she has become convinced it’s the voice of her grandmother singing a previously unknown song containing elusive language she thinks might prove to be clues to what happened to Ellie and perhaps to help find her, if she’s still alive.

Meanwhile, Cullen has been requested by Marlon Kennedy to take on a surveillance task undertaken twenty-four years before when Faith Unruh was brutally murdered. Kennedy has quit the police force to obsessively video and maintain surveillance of the former Unruh home where he believes the killer will one day return to the scene of the crime, leading to his identification and capture or death. Kennedy must be absent for a few days to tend to his dying ex-wife. Cullen, who Kennedy had almost killed several years before thinking he might be the killer, has been asked to camera-sit while Kennedy travels to his ex-wife’s side.

A third plot line is introduced that, at least at first, makes no sense. The rescue mission where Cullen’s lover Jill works is in financial distress, with their funding running out. Cullen arranges to meet with the leader of a motorcyle gang called MF to seek, for some unknown reason, a donation from them to the mission. At the end of the meeting a threatening suggestion that if they decide to donate might put Cullen, Jill, and even Kyla in jeopardy is introduced, but never fully developed. The connections between the three plot lines are tenuous at best.

I found this book to be ploddingly slow, without much happening as Cullen and Cobb pursue their slender clues eventually leading deep into the Canadian coffee house scene of the 1960’s and the political radicalism of that era. Eventually they travel to to Canada’s capitol Ottawa for the resolution. The dialogue is plodding at best, barely substituting for more extensive description, which would have been worse. The action sequences are few, far between and unconvincing. There’s never a moment in the novel where the action is heart stopping or the dialogue snappy and lively. Poulsen’s insertion after the climax of a cliff hanger designed to get me to read the next volume is transparent, while taking away from a potential for a more immediate and interesting ending to the current volume. The end is more than unsatisfying without succeeding in being seductive.

David A. Poulsen

David A. Poulsen has been a teacher, actor, cowboy, high school football coach and, most of all, a writer. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including YA titles and the current novel, the third outing of Cullen & Cobb. According to his online profile, he is also a noted rodeo competitor, announcer, and former rodeo clown, with over 1500 performances to his credit.

Last Song Sung: A Cullen and Cobb Mystery (Dundern, 2018, 352 pp., $17.99/5.38) by David A. Poulsen leaves too many balls in the air without raising the heat enough to make any of them really interesting, breathtaking, or satisfying. Set in a period still of interest to people because of the folk music era it tries to evoke and the time of political disruption not unfamiliar to us today, this should be an intriguing and involving story. Sadly, it falls way short of the mark. The plot is plodding, the dialogue lacking spark, and finally, through the device of a nakedly obvious concluding cliff hanger, dishonest. I received the book as a pre-publication electronic galley from the publisher through Edelwiess. I read it on my Kindle.

Loser's Bracket by Chris Crutcher - Book Review

I met Chris Crutcher at a National Council of Teachers of English convention in Orlando (could have been Anaheim) in the late 1980’s where he was giving a presentation on Young Adult fiction. He was a trim, handsome, athletic looking man who was a school counselor and an athlete. Someone asked him what set young adult fiction aside from other fiction works. He responded, “The length.” I was intrigued, bought a couple of his books and devoured them avidly. I was teaching English at the time and chair of a large English Department in a Pennsylvania school district. I enjoyed the books, thought them useful for non-readers and less able students in our district, and encountered strong resistance to using them as assigned reading when I suggested it to my colleagues. Since heading in other directions, I rarely read Young Adult (also called Adolescent Literature) these days, but when I do, I usually enjoy a good read dealing with the problems of developing young people whose feelings are close to the surface and whose experience is limited, to be interesting and arresting reads while not demanding too much of me. They deal with the real problems adolescents encounter: popularity, over-weight, dis-functional family life, adjustment to sexuality, and maturation, and more. These are all real problems that young people often find it difficult to discuss with adults. Thus the novels can provide help to them, or a platform for such discussions. As such, reading them can be crucial to helping with problems young people are encountering in their real life in ways that can displace the problem onto others they encounter in the pages of a book. They can discuss these issues with other kids or adults who know how to listen in constructive and useful ways. English teachers who say, “I’m a teacher, not a therapist” are missing the point as well as a chance to involve their students in literature which can turn them into lifelong readers.

Loser’s Bracket by Chris Crutcher (Greenwillow Books, 2018, 256 pp, $17.99/9.99) is told in first person narrative by Annie Boots, both a gifted athlete and student, whose life has been fractured. Her mother Nancy is over-weight, an alcoholic and drug abuser. Her sister Sheila a drug abuser in and out of rehab, an absent father, and Sheila’s son, who has his own problems. Nancy has been removed from custody, and Annie has been fostered by an upper middle-class family named Howard, which has its own problems, but, despite the father’s controlling needs to make her a star athlete, which she is anyway, Annie’s in a good situation while yearning to stay connected to her biological family. The story revolves around the interactions between and within these two families and the custody system. Annie describes the situation in breezy, accessible language with a degree of understanding and anxious good humor. She comes across as likable and insightful while trying to deal with her own problems.

In the guise of a book club held at the local library, and definitely not in school, Crutcher includes a chapter about the writing process that, for any student struggling with writing anything contains some of the best advice I’ve ever read about how to achieve a desired outcome, no matter what emerges and how surprising it might be. Annie, carrying all her load of Nancy, her mother, Sheilla, her sister and Sheila’s missing son, as well as her foster parents and all the talents and skills she has remains, as she has been throughout the book, an open conduit to experience with a blockage for internalizing what she learns. As the story moves along, the characters learn that unlike in the books they read to each other, they are the authors of their own stories. Thus, the novel moves the characters and the reader toward an understanding of each of our capabilities for taking charge of our own lives. The disappearance of her brother creates dramatic tension, keeping the story moving forward as does the tension between Annie’s foster parents and within her biological family.

Chris Crutcher

Chris Crutcher is the critically acclaimed author of twelve novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award. Drawing on his experience as an athlete, teacher, family therapist, and child-protection specialist, he unflinchingly writes about real and often-ignored issues that face teenagers today. He lives in Spokane. (Amazon profile)

Chris Crutcher writes stories that address issues not unlike similar issues dealt with in any novel focused on adults, but revolving around the lives, concerns, and developmental problems of teenagers. Telling this story in first person put the reader inside the skin of an adolescent girl facing and surmounting problems that would be difficult for anyone. He uses lively dialogue bringing the kids to life while the adults are not the adult stereotypes often found on television and in lesser books. These are real people living real lives. Loser’s Bracket is not just a good young adult novel, it’s a good novel. I was supplied a digital copy of the book by the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it using my Amazon Fire tablet.

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A-List by D.P. Lyle - Book Review

A-List by D.P. Lyle (Oceanview Publishing, 2017, Oceanview Publishing, $14.95/$9.99) is a lively, detective procedural set in New Orleans, which always provides lots of local colorful characters to story lines. Kirk Ford, a movie star with a “pretty” face has woken up in his hotel room with the dead body of his current girl friend lying beside him. That’s the entry to the plot of the second outing of the Jake Longley Novel by D.P. Lyle, a veteran writer of crime fiction and real crime books. Jake Longley, something of a slacker son ex-baseball player son of P.I. Ray Longley, proprietor of Longley Investigations, is eyeing the beautiful, lithe, Nicole Jemison as she exercises and he fantasizes, when the phone rings, providing an entry into the fast-paced, intriguing world of this second book in a new series set in New Orleans, where the death occurred. In strong, hard-boiled detective writing, A-List starts off with plenty of snappy dialogue, strong place-setting description, and driving plot to capture the reader and propel the story forward with these two likable problem solvers whose looks and tastes for life and each other make them both attractive and the nutrient for the pleasant diversion to come.

While Jake seems to be a reluctant detective and Nicole a willing and talented apprentice, the chemistry between the two jumps off the page. They often appear, almost, as willing, attractive sex kittens eager to roll around in the hay or luxuriate in the shower before getting on with the business of solving the crime. However, considering the present climate, this might not be an auspicious theme for a contemporary who-done-it’s interpersonal plot line. Nevertheless the setting and situation are made for a good story. The murdered girl is the niece of Tony Guidry, identified as a local mobster well connected with the political and law enforcement authorities. The initial bail hearing with its gawking crowd in the background sets the hierarchy of power in notoriously corrupt New Orleans. It’s up to Jake and Nicole to find the keys to this very promising romp.

Lyle uses well-wrought, fast-paced dialogue to reveal character and plot. He is a real pro at this, combining punchy, brief description with dialogue to make the book a consistent page turner. This combination often differentiates the newcomer to genre fiction from more experienced writers. Early in this reading, the first with this writer for me, I couldn’t tell whether the dramatic tension resulting from these strong story telling traits would continue. His continued precise, vignette descriptions of characters and settings throughout the book display his ability to sustain the tone. Such sparse immediacy is often the work of very careful paring down to essentials found in good popular writers of contemporary fiction, where readers insist on getting on with it.

As the story proceeds, it develops that both Kirk and the dead Kristi had Ketamine in their systems, suggesting the possibility that a third party has somehow entered the locked room to strangle Kristi. The book is flawed, with a guilty suspect emerging too soon, as the trick in a who-done-it is to introduce the character, yet keep guilt hidden as long as possible, allowing the guilty person to emerge as a surprise. This separates it from a procedural, where we may know the guilty party but find intrigue in the process of discovering who it is. Let me know if you find the same issue.

A-List contains an interesting emerging father/son relationship between the seemingly shiftless Jake, a former major league pitcher whose career was shortened by injury, and his father Ray, the head of Longley Investigations and a smart, hard-working guy who always puts work first. It adds some depth to Jake who turns out to be less of a slacker than he tries to appear.

D.P. Lyle

Lyle is at his best when revealing plot and character through dialogue. Setting becomes the backdrop for the revealing dialogues he creates between his people. He has a clear idea of what motivates each one as characters emerge in their discussions with others, each one letting the reader in on important details. He is an experienced writer who has written several other series as well as several books about how to write detective fiction. After many years practicing medicine as a cardiologist, he now writes non-fiction about forensic medicine with an eye toward supporting other crime writers. He also maintains The Crime Writer’s Forensics Blog.

A-List by D.P. Lyle (Oceanview Publishing, 2017, Oceanview Publishing, $14.95/$9.99) resonates with skill, insight, and the plain hard work of good writing. But, about ¾ of the way through the book, I think I solved the crime. This is a disappointment in a book with fairly intriguing characters, lots of excellent dialogue, and the always intriguing setting in New Orleans, to discover a plotting flaw that may give away the doer through a plotting error. Nevertheless I enjoyed this book while discovering a new, to me, writer who has the added attractiveness of having written several other series as well as books designed to help aspiring and practicing mystery writers cope with technical details about writing. I read A-List as a pre-publication electronic book provided by the publisher through Edelweiss on my Kindle app.

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The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash - Book Review

Wiley Cash’s new novel The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017, 389 pages, $26.99/$12.99) tells the story of the largely failed 1929 strike at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, North Carolina through the eyes of Ella May Wiggins, who became a heroine of the American labor movement after her death. Narrated as a detailed flashback by her grand daughter, and seen through the eyes of a number of fictional or fictionalized characters, whose lives in various elements of society brought them together at the mill during this fateful period of industrial vs. labor strife as well as during the beginnings of the civil rights struggle in its nascent years. Told in leisurely, often poetic, prose, Cash takes his time in revealing these stories as the roots of contemporary North Carolina, where the rifts still affect not only the local elements of this geographically and culturally crucial state, but the nation as a whole.

As Ella Mae sits in the back of a pickup truck with Pittsburgh-based labor organizer Sophia, her life history from Tennessee subsistence farming, to logging camps, to working in the mills mirrors the early history of North Carolina’s southern Piedmont as it moved from mid-nineteenth century rural bootlegging to an area using the region’s resources of running water, cotton, and available labor to build a burgeoning mill industry. The growth of mill culture as rural people heard the empty promises of recruiters offering the secure life of mill villages where, in fact, grinding poverty and constant debt kept them indentured in a manner not too different from the slaves, who had been released from bondage only a few decades before, using Gaston County, NC at the center.

Based on the actual happenings at the Loray Mill strike of 1929, representing an elemental moment in the development of the American labor movement, the story is intriguing, nuanced, and lyrically told through the eyes of a variety of participants. The novel brings to life the non-fiction book Linthead Stomp by Patrick Huber, which describes life and music in the mill towns of the early twentieth century. The strike and riots soon inspired a series of novels, now referred to as the “Gastonia Novels,” which extolled the virtues of class struggle and left wing politics.

Ella Mae Wiggins

As the story, told in vignettes from the perspective of people coming in contact with Ella May Wiggins unwinds, Cash captures the spirit of rural Gaston County, the rise of the mills, the influences on the development of the mill culture as the insatiable need for thread and cloth in rapidly industrializing America is fulfilled against the poverty of white and black workers. Names like evangelist Amy Semple McPherson, Belmont Abbey College, and towns like Lincolnton, Cherryville, Spartanburg, leading to Gastonia give the setting of labor unrest, the communist menace portrayed during the red scare, incipient deep-seated racial animus, and the fight against grinding poverty a living sense of reality. These elements come together in the struggle between the mill owners, their hired thugs, and the northern agitators eager to organize, free, and exploit the workers in a toxic, and ultimately tragic mix. Cash’s rich, lyrical language combines with lively portrayal of the characters who emerge to create a story that touches the imagination while portraying a reality built on facts and extending beyond them.

In two families, the McAdams and the Lytles, Cash describes another aspect of the duality of North Carolina’s aristocracy, pitting the lowland remnants of ante-bellum aristocracy against the post-war growth sparked by the industrialization of the South. Contrasting these two cultures of wealth and privilege to the white and black poverty of workers, Cash creates a rich soup of tension, distrust, and fear. Into this mix, racial, social, and economic politics help create a friction that still can be seen in the mystery that North Carolina presents to the country and the world. Slowly the lives of the characters cross and merge as the coming tragedy begins to take shape. The structure of the novel features a large range of characters from different walks of life – worker, factory owner, labor organizer, plantation owner, railroad porter, and others - whose lives come together in Gastonia, NC in the summer and fall of 1929.

Wiley Cash

Wiley Cash is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home. A native of North Carolina, he has held residency positions at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University. He and his wife live in Wilmington, North Carolina.

In The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017, 389 pages, $26.99/$12.99), Wiley Cash shows the ability to take characters who might easily become stereotyped, flesh them out, bring them to life, and place them in settings where their intersection with the other characters becomes believable while taking on a life of their own, leading inevitably to the playing out of The Last Ballad. While the story is a tragic one, it nevertheless points to a hopeful time where both conditions and relationships are improved, while the deep history of these events continues to influence the present. I was provided a digital edition of The Last Ballad by the publisher through Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle app. Highly recommended!

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Act of Betrayal by Mathew Dunn - Book Review

Act of Betrayal: A Will Cochrane Novel by Matthew Dunn (William Morrow, 2017, 320 Pages, $18.35/12.99) is a spy thriller from the macho, uber male, perspective of super-spy Will Cochrane, who, for reasons I can't understand, has reached the seventh volume of an apparently popular series. After reading the first few chapters of this book, I decided it wasn't for me. I don't generally read thrillers heavy on the U.S. spy system, special forces, or other gung-ho, macho adventures featuring shooters, shooting, and graphic violence. Nevertheless, I asked myself, why don't you consider continuing to read, mostly in order to affirm your preconceived ideas about this kind of novel. Surprise! While still not finished and having reached the "desire to see how this all works out" stage, I started to became really engaged by the ambivalence and complexity of this novel, so that around 25%, the beginning of Chapter 11, into the book, I decided to stay to the end. However, by the time I finished, I was sorry to have given so much time and credability to a world view I abhor.

Act of Betrayal is filled with action, lots of heroics, and, particularly lots of spy, CIA, and FBI talk. Also, featuring unlikely heroics, and an increasingly awkward convoluted plot that becomes too garbled with characters and too violent to approach plausibility, the novel begins to drag. Never having read a novel focused on this particular audience before, I wished better to understand the appeal beyond the action. It seems to engage the orientation towards conspiracy, admiration for doomed assassins working for “truth” and willing to use huge amounts of violence to achieve it. Also, the character of Will Cochrane stands beyond any sort of verisimilitude. Alliances extend to men (and women) of achievement beyond reasonable alliances, as a secret power within the CIA, a former Israeli agent, and a Russian, combine their efforts to stop the villain(s). The evil encountered rises all the way to the oval office.

The story opens as Will Cochrane, the finest shot of any assassin in the world, undertakes, successfully, to shoot at 3000 yards,a mysterious, but certainly evil, uber spy traveling along the autobahn at high speed. Of course, his head shot obliterates with one shot the man identified to him, and then he disappears. Three years later he appears to have committed suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge after having murdered a number of “innocent” people. The top agents of both the FBI and the CIA have long since stopped seeking him, until certain familiar habits begin to re-assert themselves, and it becomes obvious that Cochrane is, indeed, alive and back at work. There follow 300 pages of twists and turns as Cochrane seeks to set matters right with little concern for his own life, committed to exposing the “truth.”

In the world of Act of Betrayal the ends always justify the means, even when they include the violent death of ill doers without anything approaching due process. The hero, no... protagonist, is the purest of the pure. Comments about him by others point to his always doing “what's right.” Will Cochrane is beyond competent, a deadly killer with a perfect body, super reflexes, and completely under his own control. He never hesitates to instantly obliterate every person he concludes is guilty. His actions are justified because they are “right.” Legality has little or nothing to do with his choices, because his own motives are “pure.” He's accountable to no one but himself.

Matthew Dunn

The following profile of Matthew Dunn is provided by the publisher: “As an MI6 field officer, Matthew Dunn recruited and ran agents, coordinated and participated in special operations, and acted in deep-cover roles throughout the world. He operated in highly hostile environments, where, if compromised and captured, he would have been executed. Dunn was trained in all aspects of intelligence collection, deep-cover deployments, small-arms, explosives, military unarmed combat, surveillance, and infiltration. Medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers, but Dunn was the recipient of a very rare personal commendation from the secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs for work he did on one mission, which was deemed so significant that it directly influenced the successful conclusion of a major international incident. During his time in MI6, Dunn conducted approximately seventy missions. All of them were successful. He lives in England.” Wikipedia, however, places this description into doubt by preceding it with,  “according to his publicity agents,” casting the entire bio into question.

Act of Betrayal: A Will Cochrane Novel by Matthew Dunn (William Morrow, 2017, 320 Pages, $18.35/12.99) portrays a perfectly corrupt government salvaged only by a few hidden “true” rebels who, deeply embedded in various agencies, manage to save us from our own self-destruction. In this fictional world, there are a few “good” men and women with incomparable skills willing to endure the privation and suffering necessary to save the rest of us from the worst of us. I cannot recommend this novel to any reader save those already addicted to such tripe. I read the book in digital format supplied to me by the publisher through Edelweiss on my Kindle app. 

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The Meating Room by T. Frank Muir - Book Review

The Meating Room: A DCI Gilchrist Investigation by T. Frank Muir (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2017, 366 pages, $10.39/9.87) is the fifth in a series of police procedurals set in St. Andrews, Scotland, featuring Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Gilchrist. These stories always seem to take place on the dark, cold, winter heaths surrounding the ancient city of St. Andrews, where the fabled Old Course, the most hallowed place in golf, is merely a part of the map while the gritty nature of Scottish criminal existence if foregrounded. The crimes are gruesome, the police officials and on-the-ground grunts are working people with their own problems, flaws, and strengths, the plots complex, and the story-telling superb.

On a chilly morning along the seaside, Maggie Ferguson, out walking her dog, discovers a car sitting on the heath with its motor running and a hose running from the exhaust pipe through the driver's side window. A second look reveals a neatly dressed man in the front seat, apparently dead. In due course, DCI Gilchrist, accompanied by fellow officer, DS Jessie Strange, arrives. After a cursory inspection, awaiting further detailed inspection by the SOCO's, they begin to suspect the death is not a result of a simple suicide. (One of the problems raised by British police procedurals is the abundance of acronyms involved in police rankings. For those interested in decoding them, here's a link. Be warned – there are 271 of them: https://www.allacronyms.com/uk_police/abbreviations/_d

As the somewhat convoluted plot emerges, it appears that the body is one Brian McCormack, who, along with his partner Thomas Magner, owns an apparently prosperous holding company. In the early stages of the investigation, McCormack's wife and children are found at home, dead in their beds, with the wife gruesomely dissected. Instinct points towards Magner,but he is well covered with a seemingly unbreakable alibi. Nevertheless, as the police look further, more suspicious deaths are uncovered and unusual relationships emerge.

Muir's novels operate on three levels. The crime is at the forefront, but vying for attention are the complex personal lives of Andy Gilchrist, Jessie Strange, and other members of the St. Andrews investigative team. They all spend significant amounts of time in local pubs, where they consume a good deal of alcohol and interact. Andy's secret lover is the police pathologist, while Jessie tries to avoid the advances of a former boss in a different jurisdiction. Political and bureaucratic issues form the third leg of Muir's stories. The personal costs of a career in police work are always present, and well represented as issues confounding the investigations. Meanwhile, Andy Gilchrist emerges as a canny, insightful, and often impulsively action oriented officer whose instincts often overcome his good sense. As the solution to the crime approaches, the situation becomes more dangerous, tense, and driving. Muir is a master at building tension with the three strands running parallel to each other, wherein lies much of the intense interest and delight in reading his novels.

T. Frank Muir

Born in Glasgow, Frank Muir was plagued from a young age with the urge to see more of the world than the rain sodden slopes of the Campsie Fells. Thirty-plus years of living and working overseas helped him appreciate the raw beauty of his home country. Now a dual US/UK citizen, Frank makes his home in the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, from where he visits St. Andrews regularly to research in the town’s many pubs and restaurants. (From Soho Press Web site)

With The Meating Room: A DCI Gilchrist Investigation (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2017, 366 pages, $10.39/9.87). T. Frank Muir has produced the most persuasive and thought provoking of his DCI Gilchrist books. Gilchrist has become deeper and more human, always struggling with his own problems with women, his children, and alcohol while providing nurture and instruction to his subordinates. I received the book as an Advanced Readers Copy through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline. I read it on my Kindle app.

Miguel's Gift by Bruce Kading – Book Review

Set in the shadowy world of illegal immigration in Chicago, Miguel's Gift by Bruce Kading (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2017, 276 pages, $10.39, $9.87) tells the story of agent Nicholas Hayden's joining the INS, his probationary, year, and the progress of his career, beginning in 1987, spends nearly the first third of the book in a listless narrative, without seeming character development or real action of any kind. The book opens with a 1974 prologue resulting in the death of agent Tom Kelso. Hayden, unusually well educated for a novice INS agent, is, for some reason burrowing into the INS for undisclosed reasons. Descriptions of “wets,” undocumented aliens from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, who seem to dominate the world of tortilla factories and pork slaughter houses is unpleasant, and cold sounding. As the book is introduced, it's difficult to tell what direction the story might take.

Slowly the story of Frank Kelso emerges as Hayden, now deeply buried in the day-to-day business of an INS investigator, becomes what his mentor had described as a “gladiator” only four years before. When, at a retirement bash, the Kelso story arises, Hayden is reminded why he joined the INS and buried himself within it bureaucracy. At this point, about 40% into the book, there still has not been any writing that would take the story above pedestrian narrative, nor hint at the direction or perspective the author wishes to assume. Hayden has broken the law in order to obtain an unwarranted conviction and deportation, while rationalizing it all to himself and seemingly losing track of his, so far, hidden motives for joining in the first place. The story emerges as an exploration of the problem of illegal immigration and casual official enforcement which can never halt the progress of illegal immigration.

However, as Nicholas Hayden progresses in his career in the INS, he becomes an investigator and as such, is involved the recruitment of an informant, who he begins to know on a personal basis. As both case and the relationship develop, the reader sees the role of working in the INS as being more nuanced and the problems of working in an entrenched bureaucracy increasingly complex. Senior agents have almost all advanced from early experiences along the border, and many come from the Southwest. They tend to believe that such experiences are necessary for an agent to be effective. College educated agents, like Hayden, are not an asset. Careerism is rampant, with older agents either ambitious for promotion or merely doing their time until retirement at age fifty-seven. The environment is poisoned with racism, cynicism, ant outright laziness. Meanwhile, Hayden has an issue of his own. And the illegal immigrants begin to take on a human face for both good and evil. The plot, built on Hayden's search for evidence about dissolution of his father's career becomes secondary to gaining an understanding of life inside this difficult and broken bureaucracy.

Bruce Kading

After graduating from the University of Oklahoma, Bruce Kading began a twenty-six year career in federal law enforcement that included twenty-two years as a Special Agent with INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), four years as a Special Agent with the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and a brief stint with the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation). Much of his career with INS was devoted to targeting criminals who trafficked in counterfeit immigration documents, birth certificates, and other identity documents. While assigned to the Chicago and San Francisco field offices, he received several awards and commendations for leading undercover investigations into criminal organizations involved in counterfeiting activities. For four years he was assigned to the OCDETF (Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force) in Chicago, working closely with agents of other federal and local law enforcement agencies, including DEA, FBI, and the Illinois State Police. On numerous occasions Kading went “undercover” to purchase narcotics from drug dealers, many of whom were undocumented aliens involved in counterfeiting activities. When he retired, Kading was Chief of the Fraud Investigations Branch at the Chicago office.

After retiring from law enforcement, Kading became a licensed private investigator and a freelance writer, his articles appearing in numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune and the Taos News. He received the E.H. Shaffer Award for Investigative Reporting from the New Mexico Press Association for a series of articles about the problem of DUI in New Mexico.

Kading continues writing and lives in St. Augustine, Florida with his wife, Lucy. (from profile on Amazon)

Miguel's Gift by Bruce Kading (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2017, 276 pages, $10.39, $9.87) is a police procedural with something of a twist. It seeks to follow an investigation into providing illegal documentation distributed to Mexican and other Latin American immigrants in Chicago. The action follows Nick Hayden as he joins the Immigration and Naturalization Service and moves through the ranks over a period of a few years before being assigned to a investigative unit, all the time secretly seeking information about his father's failure a generation earlier in the Service. Kading's narrative relies too heavily on exposition rather than revealing character through action and dialogue. Therefore, it lacks the narrative drive and engagement that many more experienced writers provide. The book seems to be as much an exploration of Kading's own life working within a tired, overburdened, and too challenged bureaucracy, thus leading the reader too much toward his own problems encountered in a long career with the INS. I finished the novel more to find out how the writer resolved his own problems than for the resolution of the mystery. I received the book as a pre-publication digital edition from the publisher through Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle App

Without Mercy: A Body Farm Novel by Jefferson Bass: Book Review

Without Mercy: A Body Farm Novel by Jefferson Bass (William Morrow, Oct. 2016, 352 pages, $21.87/12.99) is a workmanlike detective procedural from the point of view of a forensic anthropologist named Bill Brockton, who teaches at the University of Tennessee. It surprises me that it's the tenth in a series, as it lacks spark and drive, although there's enough veracity in the story and goriness in the details to have kept me reading.

Dr. Bill Brockton, middle-aged Chairman of the UT Anthropology department, long widowed and, apparently, surrounded by younger, attractive, people who keep him socially and intellectually alive, introducing him to new technology as he mentors them in negotiating the halls of academia. He's an amiable, smart, sometime funny sometimes stodgy good man with the right inclinations but not fully up -to-date with the latest technology in his field or the world. As such, he's a person who benefits from the learning of others as he mentors them. Brockton comes across as slightly out of date, but always up to learning, filled with curiosity and broad experience.

Dr. Brockton (almost always using his title as a shield and a billboard) along with his graduate assistant Miranda, who's also his tutor in the ways of the modern world, is called to drive east from Knoxville into Smoky Mountain hollers to investigate a body found by the local sheriff. They discover a badly marred skeleton (the stuff of forensic anthropologists) chained to a tree where a worn path littered with empty food tins marks the torture that must have taken place there. As they examine the scene and the desiccated skeleton, the possibility emerges that there may have been a hate crime here.

Forensic evidence leads Brockton and Miranda to Montgomery Alabama where they visit with Laurie Wood at the Southern Poverty Law Cente who introduces them to white supremacist people and organizations using real people and incidents as examples. I googled a few, just to check, but spent little time in research, because I didn't want to get connected to this particular craziness in Google's mind. It may be too late, which raises the question of whether there can be too much verisimilitude in background info for a crime novel. Sadly, but truly, it also made the book suddenly more intriguing as a mystery and as regards character development. Meanwhile, a convict, imprisoned for twenty years because of evidence Brockton developed, engineers a spectacular and gory escape.

Whether the tone is generally stuffy because that's who Bill Brockton is or because it reflects the writers themselves and their approach to cooperating in writing, I cannot say. Nevertheless, Brockton remains somewhat distanced from the events surrounding him, despite his being central to the plot and the tension the authors seek to develop. At times the narrative seems poised to take off, but as often as not it deflates. When I read thrillers, there often comes a time when I simply can't stop reading because the tension drives me forward. Or, sometimes, I need to put the book down for a few minutes or hours just to maintain some sort of equilibrium, allowing the tension to recede. Neither response was triggered by this novel for me.

Jon Jefferson & Dr. Bill Bass

Jefferson Bass

Jonathan Bass is the pseudonym for the collaboration between professional writer Jon Jefferson and forensic anthropologist Bill Bass, who is a longtime professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee (as is the Dr. Bill Brockton character), and the developer of the real-life laboratory there which has become known as the Body Farm, featured in novels by other writers and a non-fiction book by Jefferson.

I found Without Mercy: A Body Farm Novel by Jefferson Bass (William Morrow, Oct. 2016, 352 pages, $21.87/12.99) to have an intriguing premise which somehow failed to fully live up to the possibilities it suggested. While the villain was sufficiently villainous, he didn't scare me as much as I felt he should, leading to my disappointment in the novel. Perhaps this series has worn out its welcome, as it is the tenth in a series I had never before encountered. Apparently, the authors agree with me, because, in their afterward, they announce a hiatus of undesignated duration for the series. I read the book on my Kindle App as an Advanced Readers Copy supplied by the publisher through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline.

Watch Your Back by Donald Westlake - Book Review

Donald Westlake takes his time. One of the mos renowned contemporary American crime writers, Westlake slowly but surely builds his plot, introduces his characters, and brings them together in a riotous, enjoyable, comic crime novel that concludes driving the reader right to the end, after wondering, for a while, if reading this book would be worth the time and effort. In Watch Your Back!, Westlake introduces Dortmunder, the central character in this series of fourteen novels and eleven short stories running from from 1970 - 2009 (published posthumously). Watch Your Back! (Grand Cenntral Publishing, 2006, 360 Pages, $27.00/6.99), is the twelfth, first published in 2005, leaving me with plenty of room to get caught up.

With practically the same sentence book-ending Chapter 1 and final chapter, number 55, Westlake manages to weave one of the most complex plots I've ever read while bringing the whole construction to a completely satisfying ending and leaving me, as the reader, hungering for more. With most of the story built on character and plot rather than action, containing almost a complete absence of violence, and with numerous chuckles and a few outright laughs, Donald Westlake, though he's been deceased for nearly a decade, has promised me hours of further reading, and many opportunities to tap the local libraries and used book web sites for further grist.

John Dortmunder, the central character among this unlikely crew of small-time crooks, enters the O.J. Bar & Grill one day in July for a meeting with his associates in the back room, only to discover the back room is closed, the bar-stool regulars quiet, Rollo, the bartender, behaving unlike his usual welcoming self, and two threatening thugs overseeing it all from a booth in the rear. The back room is no longer available. Soon there emerges an unlikely crew of thieves, mobsters, a billionaire hiding from his many wives at a Club Med in the Caribbean, a fence who's identified a likely site for a heist, and a young wannabe crook named Judson. How the sad closing of the back room at the O.J. brings this unlikely cast of characters together and into conflict creates the sense of fun and suspense. Dortmunder appeared in Westlake's writing when a Parker novel he was writing (under the pseudonym of Richard Starke) seemed too funny to fit Parker's darker, more violent persona.

Most of the crew of small-time crooks who are recurring characters in the series, are involved in the intricate Watch Your Back!. Andy Kelp, a resourceful crook and Stan Murch, a cab driver, are the only two characters besides Dortmunder appearing in the entire series. Tiny, the muscle of the crew, and the fence , Andy Albright, appear in this novel, too, along with a number of other semi-regulars. It's a testament to Westlake's skill as a writer, that the characters are sharply enough etched that they need no particular back story to be included. Even though this is the twelfth novel in the series, I came to know the essentials of the characters quickly. I'm sure they'll be filled in for me as I read further books in the series, a task I look forward to undertaking. I won't, however, be exploring the plot of this novel any more here, since Westlake's work is so strongly plot driven. Have fun!

Donald Westlake

Donald Westlake (1933 – 2009) was a prolific and highly regarded writer of genre fiction, mostly crime, who won nearly every award available to crime and thriller writers. According to his son, Paul, who's the caretaker of the extensive Donald Westlake web site, Westlake wrote more than 100 books under a variety of pen names as well as numerous articles, film scripts, and too much more to mention. He wrote in a variety of genres, including crime, science fiction, biography, history, and children's stories. For further information about prolific and interesting writer, check out the web site.

I heard about Donald Westlake when his name was mentioned in an Amazon.com review comparing Timothy Hallinan's writing to Westlake's. Every writer develops a different and, if they're good, idiosyncratic style. Westlake's writing, at least in the Dortmunder series, seems somewhat emotionally detached as he adopts a light, unhurried, but crisp and compact style. As the setup begins to clarify the relationships and coincidences which comprise the bulk of this book, it takes on an increasing drive while never sacrificing the wry good humor hovering over this gang which never seems to get things quite right. I bought Watch Your Back! (Grand Central Publishing, 2006, 360 Pages, $27.00/6.99) from Thriftbooks, which has become my go-to web site for used paper back books. They deliver quickly, and almost every book I've bought from them has arrived in good condition with no shipping costs. I highly recommend Watch Your Back!

Summerland by Michael Chabon - Book Review

Soon after I started reading the re-issue of Michael Chabon's 2002 fantasy novel Summerland (Harper Perennial reissue, 2016, 528 pages, $11.10/10.99) I was captured by this story of Ethan Feld, characterized as “the worst ball player in the history of Clam Island,” a nine or ten year old boy who has lost his mother and lives with his inventor father on an island off the coast of Washington. As the novel opens, Ethan's father is taking him to pick up his friend Jennifer T. Rideout, a super player, to go to Summerland, a baseball field on Clam Island where it never rains, and local residents have played baseball for generations. As I approach three-fourths of a century, I have come to the point in life where a suggested age range of 10 – 13 years with a grade range of fifth to eighth is no longer threatening to me. Chabon opens this lengthy, involving, intriguing trip into the world of baseball, magic, strange creatures, and the ultimate battle between good and evil with a rather lengthy forward detailing the geneses of this book in his own losses coupled with his desire to marry a book about baseball with the world of fantasy and coming of age. He succeeds on all fronts.

It turns out that the Summerland baseball field lies at a crucial crossing point of various strands of the universe, a place where worlds that seem to be different interconnect. Various peoples and creatures viewed by those of us who are limited to our own world come together and interact in semi-conscious and mystical ways. So creatures familiar to all of us in our mythological and imaginary lives, come alive in Summerland. Werewolves, fairies, giants, abominable snowmen (or women), Paul Bunyan, Pecos Pete, and many more we know as well as others that, as far as I can tell, Chabon invents criss-cross through the pages of the book as Ethan and his friend Jennifer T. fight a battle for what turns out to be the future of all the worlds of the universe. The forces of evil, commanded by the shapeshifter Coyote, wage a desperate, dirty, unsportsmanlike (remember the baseball metaphor) battle to subdue light, goodness, and fair play. Throughout, a reader, depending upon such factors as age, openness to to fantasy worlds, curiousity, and such, will be delighted, intrigued, and beguiled. The book creates a new universe, as all good fantasy does, which captures just enough verisimilitude to keep the world familiar...and strange. The tension and suspense are effective enough to keep one reading, never quite certain that a good ending is, indeed, possible.

Michael Chabon

I haven't read anything by Michael Chabon since the wonderful Amazing Adventures of Kavilier & Clay, written an 2000, which won a Pulitzer prize in 2001. Chabon's career has involved him in writing novels as well as film-scripts. He's also a fairly regular contributor to the New Yorker. Along with novels, he has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children

Summerland by Michael Chabon (Harper Perennial reissue, 2016, 528 pages, $11.10/10.99) is described as children's fantasy fiction, but unless fantasy readers are always children, its appeal is much wider than that, reaching out with humor, nuance, and enormous creative imagination to readers of any age who are not bound by the strictures of reality. I received the book from the publisher as an electronic galley through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline and read it on my Kindle App.

Avenue of Mysteries by John Irving - Book Review

John Irving has written an elegy to a writer's life, perhaps his own, in Avenue of Mysteries (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 480 pages, $28.00/11.99) which revisits many of the themes and concerns that have dominated his work since I first encountered him in The World According to Garp. Issues of the search for a parent, sex and sexuality, sexual ambiguity, as well as religion and faith dominate this wandering novel that follows Juan Diego Guerrero's life from his earliest memories as a child in the burning dump of Oaxaca, Mexico thorough an elegiac literary trip to the Philippines, where he seeks to visit the remains of a dead friend's father. The book's action takes place almost entirely within Juan Diego's mind as memory and imagination merge and twist within him. I wanted to like this book more than I did, as I followed what I will presume to be Irving's most recent and final exploration of his own life and thought in the novel format.

Images of the burning, stinking dump and the Virgin of Guadalupe dominate this reflective meditation on writing and writers, faith and belief, and loss. Juan Diego and his sister Lupe are each damaged, he because his (maybe) father Rivera drives over his foot in childhood, leaving him a limping cripple for life. Meanwhile, he becomes a voracious reader as he salvages books from the dump's burn pile in both English and Spanish. He also becomes the interpreter for Lupe, who, while she cannot produce speech comprehensible to anyone but Juan Diego, can read minds and, perhaps, see the future. She discovers that she must sacrifice her life to make it possible for Juan Diego to develop his own, as he eventually makes his way to the University of Iowa, where he embarks on the life of a writer. The story is told in a series of flashbacks while Juan Diego makes his trip, accompanied at times by the mysterious Dorothy and Miriam, both sexually demanding, controlling, and knowledgeable about his life and writings. The plot is as convoluted as my paragraph, but eventually works itself out without ever losing its mysterious sense of Juan Diego's success and sense of loss.

The book is filled with aphorisms and meditations on the writer's life, perhaps a writerly quirk aging authors must fall into. Juan Diego cannot escape the fussily oppressive ministration of his former student Clark French. He's eternally grateful to Edward Bonshaw and his eventual partner Flo (the sexually ambiguous transvestite). He encounters the life of the circus (or is it the circus of life?), where he learns and grows, but never forsakes his limp. The range of characters will either grab readers or leave them gasping for breath, or both. Each one has a symbolic quality which becomes a ghost in Juan Diego's life until reality and imagination become inseparable. The iconography and symbolism of the book can be confusing, but become increasingly clear as it moves towards its relatively satisfactory conclusion. At one point, Juan Diego comments, “Dreams edit themselves, are ruthless with details. Common sense does not dictate what remains, or is not included in a dream.” Later, Juan Diego considers himself, “Yes, his novels come from his childhood – that's where his fears came from, and his imagination came from everything that he feared. That didn't mean that he wrote about himself.” Oh no?

John Irving

John Irving, at age 73, has written fourteen novels, a screenplay for one of them (for which he won an Academy Award), won lots of acclaim, and wrestled, both literally and literarily, with life and literature throughout it all. Raised in the shelter of New Hampshire's Exeter Academy, he never met his biological father, who, nevertheless, attended many of his wrestling matches (what a wonderful image that is!). During his career as a writer, he has been on the short list for a Pulitzer Prize, but hasn't won one. Nevertheless several of his books have been huge commercial successes and/or have been turned into successful films. Several of his books have been best sellers, but none have achieved number one. Avenue of Mysteries was the first Irving novel I completed reading since Hotel New Hampshire some thirty-five years ago, although I took runs at both Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, both best sellers. In other words, Irving is not always everyone's cup of tea, but is an important American writer and literary figure.

John Irving's Avenue of Mysteries (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 480 pages, $28.00/11.99) turns into an interesting, intriguing meditation on writing and the writer's life. It's tortuous plot demands careful attention. The characters are often mysterious, arresting, and intriguing. It should prove to be a rewarding read for many people who have followed Irving through the years, but I wouldn't recommend it as a first Irving book. This would seem to be more a summation of a career than an opening salvo, so begin somewhere else and then reach out for it when you have become familiar with Irving through his earlier work. I read the book as an e-galley supplied to me by the publisher through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline. I read it using my Kindle app.