Review: Kruger's Korps - H.W. Crocker III

I’m just the right age to have been a big fan of the TV series THE RAT PATROL when I was a kid, and I read all the paperback tie-in novels based on the show, too. Plus, the first issue of SGT. FURY AND HIS HOWLING COMMANDOS I bought brand-new off the spinner rack was #6, featuring the classic story “The Fangs of the Desert Fox”. Since those days, I’ve read a lot about the North African Campaign in World War II and have even written about it some in my series THE LAST GOOD WAR.

However, I’ve never read anything about it quite like H.W. Crocker III’s new novel KRUGER’S KORPS.

This yarn has a great set-up: Rolf Kruger, a young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, looks enough like a German aristocrat and officer that he’s recruited into Wild Bill Donovan’s newly formed Office of Strategic Services and sent to North Africa to take the place of that German officer and infiltrate a special unit in the Afrika Korps. OSS spies have gotten wind of some top-secret German operation about to be launched, and they want to know what it is.

This plot strikes me as just the sort of thing you might find in a novel by Jack Higgins, Alistair Maclean, or W.E.B. Griffin, and for the first third or so, that’s what KRUGER’S KORPS reminds me of. But then Crocker veers off in another direction entirely, and wherever you might guess this novel is going . . . that ain’t it.

I can’t go into too much detail without ruining the surprises, but I will say that there are plenty of the things I love about World War II espionage novels: a stalwart but not infallible hero, some dastardly villains, murders, double-crosses, double identities, and of course, a beautiful woman who may or may not be trustworthy. Those elements are put in service of a plot reminiscent of those authors I mentioned above, but with a considerable amount of Sax Rohmer and Robert Kanigher thrown in.

This might be the first book of a series, or it might not be, but either way, KRUGER’S KORPS is a heck of a lot of fun, with plenty of action and a surprising amount of wry humor. Crocker is known primarily for his non-fiction books about war, leadership, and religion, but he’s written several novels as well, including a series of alternate history adventures starring George Armstrong Custer. I think I’m going to have to check those out. KRUGER’S KORPS is available on Amazon in hardcover and e-book editions.

Review: Pendergast: The Beginning - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

I know a number of people who are fans of the long-running series by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child about eccentric FBI agent A.X.L. Pendergast, but I’d never read any of the books and with more than twenty entries in the series, it was another one it looked like I might never get around to trying.

But then while I was at the library I came across a large print edition of the latest novel, PENDERGAST: THE BEGINNING, which is obviously a prequel to the rest of the books. So I thought, as I often do, sure, why not?

This novel is set in the Eighties and Nineties and centers around Pendergast’s early days working in the FBI’s local field office in New Orleans, which happens to be Pendergast’s home town. He’s teamed with veteran agent Dwight Chambers, who serves as Pendergast’s mentor. He tries to, anyway. Pendergast, with his mysterious, somewhat sinister background and seeming mastery of just about everything, is not one to take a back seat to anybody.

They investigate a cold case that winds up leading them to a number of murders carried out by a serial killer who has the odd tendency of amputating his victims’ right arms. By the middle of the book, they’ve tracked down the killer and are barreling toward a showdown with him, when suddenly the whole thrust of the book shifts dramatically and what seems at first like a bizarre but relatively simple case takes on a whole new layer.

First of all, Pendergast is a great character. Not having read the rest of the series, I don’t know how much of the stuff that’s hinted at in this book is fully revealed later on, but I’m intrigued by him, that’s for sure. Preston and Child do a good job with all the characters, in fact, and their dialogue is pretty good. My only complaint about their writing is that it’s so slick and smooth it becomes a little bland at times, which is the same thing I’ve found in a lot of current thriller writers. Too many of the books sound like they could’ve been written by anybody, with nothing distinctive about the author’s voice. I don’t think Preston and Child fall victim to this sameness as much as some, but it’s there.

That wasn’t enough to keep me from enjoying this book quite a bit. I really raced through the second half to find out what was going to happen. And it’s a nice touch that the epilogue is taken from the novel RELIC, the first published book in the Pendergast series, firmly establishing the series’ continuity.

I liked this one enough I think I’m going to have to read more. Whether I’ll ever make my way through the entire series is pretty debatable, especially at my age, but you never know. If you’re already a fan, I’m sure you’ll want to read PENDERGAST. If you’re just starting the series, well, if I’m any indication, it works just fine as an introduction. It's available in e-book, hardcover, and audio editions. Recommended.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Sandstorm - James Rollins

Talk about your mixed emotions. I was predisposed to not like this book: it’s too long, and the author is too successful. (Writers are just as prone to sour grapes as anybody else.) On the other hand, James Rollins is a veterinarian in real life, or at least used to be, and seems like a nice guy, so it’s hard to envy him for his success. And he’s admitted in interviews that he’s a big fan of the Doc Savage novels, my all-time favorite pulp series, so in that respect I was predisposed to like the book. The verdict: I liked it. Quite a bit, actually.

It opens with an explosion at the British Museum that destroys a display of Arabian artifacts, but it’s not the terrorist attack you might expect. Instead, it’s a natural occurrence caused by the convergence of an electrical storm and something hidden inside one of the artifacts. This sends a large and varied cast of scientists, explorers, billionaires, and spies racing off to Oman in a quest to find a lost city buried under the sands before the natural catastrophe that’s developing threatens the continued existence of the entire world. Of course there’s action aplenty along the way, as well as a smidgen of soap opera.

I hardly ever even attempt to read a book that’s almost 600 pages long anymore, and when I do I usually make it thirty or forty pages and then decide that I don’t like it well enough to stick with it for the five or six days it’ll take me to read it. Usually there’s nothing really wrong with the book; it just doesn’t compel me to make that investment of time. That never happened with SANDSTORM, though. I was able to stay with it without any problem . . . although it wouldn’t have broken my heart if it had been a hundred pages shorter. Still, there’s a lot of plot in it, and Rollins seems to be very good about planting things that don’t pay off until two or three hundred pages later. He also writes decent action scenes and has good characters. Things get a little far-fetched now and then; Rollins leads the reader right up to the edge of saying, “Oh, come on!”, but doesn’t quite get there. And he winds up with at least semi-plausible scientific explanations for everything.

I liked this one enough so that I’ll certainly read more by Rollins, and if you like big, epic adventure novels, I think his books are worth a try.

(This post originally appeared on June 24, 2008. SANDSTORM is the first novel in James Rollins' Sigma Force series, and despite the good things I say about it, I haven't read any of the others. I own several of them, however, and still intend to get back to the series. Whether I will or not . . . Well, I wouldn't bet a hat on it, but it could happen. SANDSTORM is still available in an e-book edition, but not in print, as far as I can tell.)

Review: The Gun Man Jackson Swagger - Stephen Hunter

These days, I’m always a little leery when a big name in some other genre decides to write a Western. It’s not like the old pulp and paperback days when writers moved back and forth between genres all the time. On the one hand, any very successful author who writes a Western almost has to have a genuine fondness for them. You can bet the publishers aren’t clamoring for Westerns from their big-name thriller writers. On the other hand, whether they really like Westerns or not, that doesn’t mean they’re suited to write them. Maybe that’s just a skill set they don’t have.

But if any modern-day thriller author seems cut out to write a Western, it would be Stephen Hunter, who has made a career out of writing books about laconic heroes who are capable of great violence, usually with guns. And that’s just what he’s done in THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER.

This novel goes back another generation in the Swagger family, the fictional clan that has starred in most of his novels over the years. It’s 1897, and a grizzled old cowboy who just calls himself Jack shows up at the Crazy R ranch in southern Arizona, not far from the Mexican border. The owner of the spread, Colonel Callahan, is no more honest than he has to be, and he employs a group of hired gunmen to take care of any dirty work benefiting the ranch or the railroad that’s building a line through the region. The colonel and the railroad are in cahoots, and he also has a connection with a corrupt Federale officer below the border. Once Jack demonstrates his skill at handling a rifle, the colonel hires him, but Jack’s not really looking for a job. He has another reason for coming to the Crazy R.

And you’ll figure out what that reason is pretty easily as Jack navigates through all the danger and treachery surrounding him. I mean, we know who he really is, it’s right there in the title. But it’s still very entertaining to watch him go about it, manipulating people and events to uncover the information he needs and then taking action to achieve his ends. Nobody these days writes as well about guns and gunfights as Hunter, and Jack is a very sympathetic protagonist, managing the neat trick of being mythic and realistic at the same time.

My only real complaint is that Hunter is maybe just a little too leisurely in getting where he’s going. The best way I can think of to put this is to say that THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER is probably around 70,000 words long (actually a little on the short side for a New York-published hardback by a big name), while Ben Haas would have written the exact same story at about 50,000 words. It’s easier to forgive such an ambling pace when an author writes as well as Hunter does.

I’m also not that fond of the ending, but hey, that’s just me.

I suspect this may be a one-and-done for Hunter when it comes to writing Westerns, but I could be wrong about that. I’d certainly be willing to read more if he ever decides to write them. I think he loves and respects the Western, and overall he does a very good job, with some top-notch action scenes and great dialogue. I give THE GUN MAN JACKSON SWAGGER a high recommendation. It’s available on Amazon in e-book and hardcover editions.

Review: Overboard - George F. Worts

I have a bit of a history with this book. I first saw it in the Nineties, in the dealers’ room at ClueFest, the fondly remembered mystery convention in Dallas. My attention was drawn to that great cover by Rudolph Belarski, and although I’d never heard of the novel, I knew that the author, George F. Worts, was a well-regarded writer for the pulps. Since that copy wasn’t too expensive, I bought it.

And then it sat on my shelves, unread, until it went up in smoke in the Fire of ’08.

Time went by and I didn’t replace that copy of OVERBOARD, but then one day somebody posted the cover on Facebook in one of the paperback groups, and that prompted me to look around and see if I could find an affordable copy on-line (an option I didn’t have back in the Nineties when I bought it for the first time). I had checked a few times before that and found that generally, copies cost more than I wanted to pay. But this time, I found one that wasn’t cheap, but it was within my price range. So I snapped it up, and when it arrived I took it out of the plastic bag, figuring I would read it at last.

The first 60 pages were missing. Which hadn’t been mentioned at all in the listing for it.

Well, I got my money back, but I still couldn’t read the book. If it had been just the first page or two, maybe I would have plowed ahead. But not with that big a chunk of the novel gone. I wasn’t even going to attempt it. Maybe, I thought, maybe I just wasn’t meant to read OVERBOARD. So more time passed.

And then somebody posted that cover again, and I went and checked and found a decently priced copy and took the plunge again. The cover was printed slightly off register (you can see it in the scan, which is my copy), but I didn’t care all that much as long as the book was intact and readable. By now I was determined to read OVERBOARD.

And so I have, probably thirty years after I bought it the first time. Other than that printing glitch, the copy I got is in very nice shape. But is the book actually any good, you might ask?

It absolutely is.

The protagonist is a young woman with the odd name Zorie Corey. (The reason for the name does get an explanation of sorts in the novel.) She lives in a university town in the Midwest and makes a living typing theses, dissertations, and research papers for students and professors at the school. She’s engaged to a somewhat dull and controlling professor of psychology. She lives a meek little life (Worts actually goes a little overboard, no pun intended, on her meekness, but ultimately there’s a reason for that, too) and would like to experience some actual romance and adventure before she settles down to married life.

Well, you know where this is going, don’t you? Her fiancé’s grandfather, a retired admiral, blows into town and wants Zorie’s help writing a book about his life. Her fiancé’s rakehell older brother, who’s been kicked out of the Navy because he’s a Nazi sympathizer, shows up, too, as well as a couple of sinister strangers.

Before you know it, Zorie is whisked off onto a ship bound for Hawaii, where the admiral owns a beautiful estate. Her fiancé and the fiancé’s brother are on board, too, as are the sinister strangers and a beautiful young woman who seems to think that Zorie is actually someone else. Despite the brother being a Nazi sympathizer, Zorie is falling for him, anyway. Then, while taking a stroll on deck on a dark night, someone grabs her and throws her overboard. Through a stroke of luck, she survives that murder attempt, but then, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor . . . 

That’s the first half of the book, and up to then, it’s been a lighthearted but very well written romantic suspense yarn. Things turn a lot more serious after the ship reaches Hawaii and the scene shifts to the admiral’s plantation. Intrigue and danger continue to swirl around Zorie, but the stakes are higher now. There’s still some romance, but suspense dominates the second half of the book, and it’s pretty doggoned nerve-wracking in places.

The big twist that shows up late probably won’t come as much of a surprise, but Worts’ prose is so smooth and entertaining that it doesn’t really matter. OVERBOARD is colorful, humorous, exciting, and just plain fun to read. I stayed up after midnight to finish it, and that hardly ever happens these days and hasn’t for years.

Worts is best remembered for three series he wrote for the pulps: adventure yarns featuring wireless operator Peter Moore, a.k.a. Peter the Brazen; two-fisted Singapore Sammy Shay; and mysteries featuring lawyer Gillian Hazeltine. I’ve read the Singapore Sammy stories and loved them. I have all the Peter the Brazen stories and need to get to them soon, and I have some of the Gillian Hazeltine stories, too.

But this stand-alone mystery novel, which was published in hardcover by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1943 and reprinted in that iconic paperback by Popular Library in 1950, is superb and well worth reading, too. I’m very glad I finally got around to it. I have a hunch that OVERBOARD will be on my Top Ten list at the end of the year.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Altar of Eden - James Rollins

A while back I read James Rollins’ novel SANDSTORM and liked it quite a bit. Since then I’ve been meaning to read something else by him, but his new books have been entries in his Sigma Force series and I’m a little obsessive about reading series novels in order, and also many of them have been longer than I wanted to tackle. I could backtrack to his earlier stand-alone novels, and I still intend to, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

However, his most recent book, ALTAR OF EDEN, is not only a stand-alone, but it comes in just short of 400 pages, which is my entirely arbitrary and often violated limit for how long a book I’ll read these days. So I gave it a try and was glad I did.

As Rollins (whose real name is James Czajkowski) explains in an introductory note, he was a veterinarian before he became a best-selling thriller writer and wanted to write a book with a protagonist who’s a vet. Dr. Lorna Polk works at an animal medical research center in Louisiana and is called on to examine the cargo of a mysterious freighter that runs aground during a hurricane. This throws her back in contact with Border Patrol agent Jack Menard, with whom she shares a tragic past. They discover that there’s plenty that’s odd – and dangerous – about the animals on the wrecked freighter, and that discovery plunges them into an international conspiracy that threatens their lives and the lives of several of their friends.

The real strength of this book is its speed. Nearly the entire book takes place in a span of about twenty-four hours, with the action racing along through three distinct set-pieces. The way Rollins paces the book and cuts back and forth between the characters is very effective. The compressed time-frame means that some things happen maybe just a hair too quickly to be believable, but that didn’t really bother me. I’m not enough of a science buff to say whether or not all the cutting-edge science in the book is plausible, but Rollins certainly makes it sound like it is.

I really enjoyed ALTAR OF EDEN. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a big fan of a lot of modern thrillers, but based on what I’ve read so far, Rollins’ books are fine adventure novels. I’ll definitely be reading more.

(You're waiting for me to say that I haven't read anything else by James Rollins since this post appeared originally on June 1, 2010, aren't you? But I actually have. I read the novella TRACKER, which was the start of a new series related to his Sigma Force series. But I haven't read any of the full-length novels that followed it. In the meantime, ALTAR OF EDEN is still available in e-book, hardcover, and paperback editions.)

Review: Lost Empire (Sam and Remi Fargo #2) - Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

A while back I reran the review I posted 15 years ago for SPARTAN GOLD, the first novel in Clive Cussler’s series about married treasure hunters and adventurers Sam and Remi Fargo. I never got back to the series, but reading that review again prompted me to do so. I picked up the second book, LOST EMPIRE, once again written by Cussler and Grant Blackwood and available on Amazon in e-book, audio, paperback, and hardcover editions. Cussler had several collaborators on the Fargo series, and I’m assuming they did the bulk of the actual writing, with Cussler contributing to the plots.

LOST EMPIRE is actually kind of a hard book to describe because it really has a kitchen sink plot. It opens with a ship sailing from London in 1864, jumps to Sam and Remi finding the bell from a sunken ship off the coast of Zanzibar, then back around the world to Mexico where the newly elected president of the country sends a sinister assassin after the Fargos. From there, the action bounces back and forth from California to Madagascar to Krakatoa (which is actually west of Java, not east, no matter what the movie title says). We get a bunch of running, jumping, swimming, car chases, fighting, and an underground encounter with a den of crocodiles that’s a pretty good scene. Not surprisingly, there’s even a cameo appearance by Clive Cussler his own self as he gives Sam and Remi a hand in their adventure. The whole thing revolves around a 19^th Century British secret agent, cryptography, a lost Confederate ship, and the origins of the Aztec Empire.

As I’ve mentioned before, Livia and I have a saying whenever we’re watching a movie or TV show where the plot gets so convoluted and silly that you have to just accept it for it is: “Sure. Why not?” LOST EMPIRE is a “Sure. Why not?” book. I guess the plot makes sense, but I don’t really know because eventually I stopped trying to keep up with it and just went along for the ride. The action scenes are well-done, the settings are colorful, Sam and Remi are very likable protagonists, and the villains are suitably despicable.

I’ve been told by several friends that the entries where Cussler collaborated with Thomas Perry are the best books in the series. Maybe I’ll skip ahead to them. The next book appears to be a direct sequel to this one, though, and I have just enough OCD to feel like I ought to read it. We’ll see. For now, I enjoyed LOST EMPIRE and am glad I read it, but it didn’t win me over completely. Take that for what it’s worth.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood

Every so often I get in the mood for a big, globe-trotting thriller with a lot of historical background. SPARTAN GOLD, the first book in a new series by Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood, fits the bill quite nicely.

Almost like a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, this one starts out with a lot of seemingly unconnected elements – Napolean making a startling discovery in an ice cave in 1800; a German mini-sub sunk for sixty years in a Delaware river; a Ukrainian gangster originally from Turkmenistan who believes himself to be a direct descendant of the ancient Persian emperor Xerxes the Great – and weaves them all together into a coherent story. The protagonists responsible for untangling all of this and staying alive through an assortment of dangers are husband-and-wife scientists and treasure hunters Sam and Remi Fargo.

If you’re thinking this sounds a little like a Gabriel Hunt novel, you’re not far wrong in some respects, that is, if Gabriel were married. Sam and Remi are even independently wealthy and have the Fargo Foundation to finance their adventures. SPARTAN GOLD is much longer than a Gabriel Hunt novel, though, and lacks the breakneck pace. Which is not to say that it doesn’t have considerable appeal of its own.

Whoever did the bulk of the writing in this book (I suspect Blackwood, although I should stress that I have absolutely no knowledge of whether that’s correct) does a good job of making Sam and Remi very likeable characters who are easy to root for. Likewise, the frequent infodumps are easy to follow and not obtrusive. The plot is complex but winds up making perfect sense, at least as far as I could tell. My biggest complaint is that the ending doesn’t quite reach the dramatic heights I would have preferred. Anybody who’s read very many of my books knows my motto: If you’re going over the top anyway, you might as well go ’way over.

I get bored easily with long books, but I didn’t have any trouble staying with SPARTAN GOLD. It’s worth reading, and I won’t hesitate to pick up the next one in the series when it comes out.

(Good intentions, road to hell, etc., etc. When this post originally appeared on May 18, 2010, I had every intention of reading the next Fargo novel from Clive Cussler and Grant Blackwood. But you guessed it, I never did. And when I looked it up, I was surprised to see that the series is still going on, with the 13th book due to be released next winter. Blackwood wrote a couple more after this, then Thomas Perry took over for two books, Russell Blake wrote two, and Robin Burcell has done all of them since then, including the one in the pipeline. I'm tempted to read the two that Thomas Perry wrote since I know his work is pretty good. But good intentions . . .)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: A Great Day for Dying - Jack Dillon

As far as I know, this is the author’s only crime novel, although he wrote a few other novels about the advertising business. Jack Dillon was a successful ad executive, responsible for, among others, the series of TV commercials for Polaroid that featured James Garner and Mariette Hartley. Those of you of a certain age are bound to remember those commercials, since Garner was so affable and charming and Hartley was, well, so beautiful.

But to get back to A GREAT DAY FOR DYING. Don’t pay any attention to that Hemingway comparison on the cover. The only similarity I see is that the protagonist of this novel, Jimmy O’Niel, reminded me a little of Harry Morgan from TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. Jimmy is a friend and former associate of mobster Red Christian, but he’s trying to live a respectable life and start a charter boat business in Puerto Rico. People don’t want to believe that he’s no longer involved in anything crooked, though, but the only shady thing Jimmy’s mixed up in is running guns to anti-Castro revolutionaries in Cuba.

Unfortunately for Jimmy, he gets drawn into one of his former boss’s schemes and winds up on the wrong side of the Syndicate. From there, things just get worse for Jimmy, up to and including several murders and a hurricane.

The clipped style of the prose and the realistic dialogue remind me more of Elmore Leonard, although Leonard started writing crime novels about the same time as this book came out, so I don’t think his work was any influence on Dillon. A GREAT DAY FOR DYING also reminds me a little of a James Patterson novel, because the chapters are short and there’s a mixture of first person chapters from Jimmy’s point of view and third person chapters featuring other characters. That’s a technique I normally don’t care for, but Dillon makes it work fairly well. I don’t know if he was the first to do it, probably not, but this novel surely has to be one of the early examples of it. The pace is fast, even though there’s really not a lot of action except for an occasional short burst, and there are a lot of good lines.

A GREAT DAY FOR DYING is a fine book, worth seeking out, and it’s certainly good enough to make it a shame Jack Dillon didn’t write any other crime novels. Recommended.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 7, 2010. I was surprised then that A GREAT DAY FOR DYING had never been reprinted, and it still hasn't. It seems like a prime candidate for somebody to bring back into print.)

Review: Downstate - Jeffery Deaver

Not long ago, I read and enjoyed the first novel by Jeffery Deaver to feature Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations agent Constant Marlowe, THE RULE OF THREES. Amazon calls it a novella, but it’s actually a novel. (Yes, I’m still harping on that.)

Deaver’s second Constant Marlowe novel, DOWNSTATE, is shorter but still the length of, say, an Ace Double. (Probably not too many people who work at Amazon are familiar with Ace Doubles, I’m guessing.) In this one, Marlowe travels to a small, agricultural town in pursuit of an information broker with ties to the mob. But while she’s there, she foils an attempted armed robbery at a convenience store and stumbles into what may be an even more sinister case. It’s a dangerous case, too, but Marlowe, who is smart and tough—a former professional boxer, in fact—is a match for the people who want her dead.

As always in a Deaver novel, there are plot twists galore. In these yarns, seldom is anything what it appears to be at first. If the twists in DOWNSTATE aren’t quite as sharp and clever as they are in most of Deaver’s work—and they’re not—they’re still surprising enough to be entertaining.

It helps that Deaver is a good writer who knows how to keep things moving along at a brisk pace. The criminal schemes in this book reminded me of the sort of things Jack Reacher usually stumbles into, but I much prefer Deaver’s writing. Also, Constant Marlowe is an engaging protagonist, even if she’s not all that likable at times. I hope Deaver continues writing these short novels about her because I’ll certainly continue reading them. For now, this one is available only in e-book and audio editions.

Review: Sara and the Mad Dog - Stephen Mertz

Music was very important to Steve Mertz. Along with writing, it was really one of his passions. He was an accomplished musician, too, and it showed in his work. His novels that feature a music industry background have a real sense of authenticity to them.

So it’s fitting that his final novel is a thriller based on the music business. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a wonderful amalgam of music history, gangster history, and fiction as the Carter Family, the First Family of Country Music, travels to New York City for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 1932, arriving just in time for Sara Carter, the group’s vocalist and wife of A.P. Carter, to get involved with Vince “Mad Dog” Coll, a ruthless Irish mobster who’s engaged in a gang war with Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano. That’s a great concept for a novel!

Mertz does it justice, too, with a fast-paced narrative in which the action takes place in less than 24 hours. The story moves back and forth between Sara, A.P., Maybelle Carter (the third member of the group), Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) assorted gangsters, and a fictional police detective named Tom Devlin. Mertz weaves all their storylines together very skillfully and creates a real sense of momentum and suspense. Great storyteller that he was, he really had me flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen.

The historical elements of the plot are well-researched and accurate, too, as Mertz explains in an afterword detailing what was fact and what was fiction. All of it comes together in a superb novel that’s the best thing I’ve read so far this year and maybe my favorite of all the Mertz novels I’ve read. I’d hate to have to pick between this one and HANK AND MUDDY, a fantastic yarn about Hank Williams and Muddy Waters. SARA AND THE MAD DOG is a fitting conclusion to a legendary career, and it gets my highest recommendation. You can find it on Amazon in e-book and paperback editions from Wolfpack Publishing.

And on a personal note, damn, I hate to think the phone’s never going to ring again with Steve on the other end, eager to tell me about some book or writer or the project he was planning to work on next. There was nobody else in this business like him. Nobody. He was, as they say, the Genuine Article, and I expect I’ll miss him from now on.

Review: The Rule of Threes - Jeffery Deaver

Amazon calls THE RULE OF THREES by Jeffery Deaver a novella, but hey, where I come from, a book that’s 260 pages long is a novel, and a fairly substantial one, at that. The protagonist, former professional boxer and currently investigator for the Illinois Department of Criminal Investigations Constant Marlowe (not Constance, Constant—and there’s a reason for that) was introduced a couple of years ago in a series of actual novellas called THE BROKEN DOLL, which I read but apparently wasn’t impressed enough with to review. But I was in the mood for a thriller and thought THE RULE OF THREES might fill the bill.

Now, I’m not a big fan of current thrillers in general and I don’t much care for serial killer novels, so this one might not have seemed too promising. But Deaver is probably my favorite contemporary thriller author. He writes well, but his prose isn’t as slick and bland as most current authors in the genre, many of whom have no real voice at all. His characters are interesting, and his plots always have some intriguing and surprising twists. All of that is true in THE RULE OF THREES. Two young women have been murdered only days apart and Constant is called in to try to help the local sheriff find the killer before he strikes again. There’s also a land dispute and a Neo-Nazi group in the mix, and it looks like the killer may be targeting potential witnesses to his earlier crimes, adding more innocent targets.

This is, in many senses, a police procedural, and Deaver does a great job following the investigation and keeping things racing along. Then, as I knew would happen, a Big Twist pops up. To say that it comes from left field is an understatement. This one is a long, long throw from the warning track. But if it makes sense and doesn’t strain credibility too far, that’s fine, and for the most part, this one doesn’t.  Some of it requires you to squint your eyes and hold your mouth just right to believe it, but in the end, I did.

I whipped right through THE RULE OF THREES and had a good time reading it. There’s another Constant Marlowe “novella” available called DOWNSTATE, and I already have it on my Kindle. You can get THE RULE OF THREES as an e-book or audio book on Amazon; there’s no print edition although Amazon does say it would be 260 pages long if there was. That makes this a novel as far as I’m concerned, and a pretty darned good one.

Review: One Man's Treasure - Terrance Layhew

Terrance Layhew is an author, a fan of adventure fiction (we’re acquainted through the Men’s Adventure Paperbacks of the 20^th Century group on Facebook), and the host of a popular podcast called Suit Up!, which is devoted to the kind of fiction he likes to read. And write, as it turns out.

Layhew’s first adventure novel, ONE MAN’S TREASURE, is available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions, with an excellent cover, by the way. The protagonists are two brothers from Chicago, Dixon and Sam Hastings. Dix is a lawyer, a somewhat cold-blooded, calculating sort who lives for work and gambling. Sam is an engineer, a more happy-go-lucky fellow who loves tinkering with things and is recently engaged to a beautiful reporter named Amy. Dix turns all their lives upside down when, in a high-stakes poker game, he wins what’s reputed to be a map to a fabulous treasure buried by a famous pirate on a Caribbean island several hundred years ago. Such a thing couldn’t actually be real, could it? Sam, with his quixotic nature, thinks it could be, and he persuades Dix that they should find out—an effort that leads to swordfights, modern-day pirates, shootouts, harrowing adventures, and romance for both brothers.

Layhew takes a big risk in the very structure of this novel: he tells his story in first-person chapters that alternate between the Hastings brothers. I may be too much of a traditionalist, but I’m not fond of multiple first-person POVs. However, I won’t let that keep me from giving a book a fair try, and in this case, Layhew doesn’t just pull it off, he makes it work very well. Dix and Sam are two very different personalities, and that comes through effectively in the writing. I was never thrown by it.

He also does a fine job with the pacing and action, and while there are some serious moments, the novel also has a very appealing light-hearted tone most of the time. ONE MAN’S TREASURE has the feel of an Eighties action movie, and I mean that in the best possible way. I had a really good time reading it. It’s set up for a sequel, too, and I’m looking forward to it. In the meantime, if you’re a fan of well-written, entertaining adventure novels, ONE MAN’S TREASURE gets a solid recommendation from me.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Long Midnight - Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)

We all know that Daniel Ransom is really Ed Gorman. This novel was published originally by Dell in 1992 and went unreprinted for many years, but it's available now in e-book and trade paperback editions.

The prologue takes place in the 1940s, an era which Gorman recreates well, much as he does the Fifties and Sixties in some of his other books. Richard Candlemas is a lonely high school student with some sort of mysterious special powers that are vaguely sinister. Jump ahead to the Nineties, and Candlemas is the former director of the Perpetual Light Orphanage, an establishment that closed down years earlier after a tragic car wreck claimed the lives of one of its staffers and several students. I use the word “students” because Perpetual Light, ostensibly an orphanage, was actually a school where Richard Candlemas and the people who worked for him tried to find children with psychic powers and help them develop those powers.

When one of Perpetual Light’s instructors is murdered in Chicago, a former student (the sister of one of the girls killed in the car crash) is drawn into the investigation and develops a romance with the police detective handling the case. Someone starts stalking the woman, there are more murders, the scope of the case expands to include some shadowy operatives who claim to be working for the government, and the woman finds evidence that her sister may still be alive after all, as impossible as that seems.

Gorman weaves all these plot strands together with an expert hand, bringing in a number of surprising twists along the way, but as usual in one of his novels, the characters and the little touches of humanity are the real highlights. Everybody in THE LONG MIDNIGHT seems to be carrying his or her own load of melancholy, which is not to say that the book is without hope or even an occasional bit of humor. This is a novel that’s difficult to classify. It’s part thriller, part horror, part science fiction. Mainly, though, it’s a great yarn that races along, inhabited by characters the reader cares about. That makes it well worth seeking out and reading. Highly recommended.

(This post was published in a somewhat different form on January 15, 2010. My admiration for Ed Gorman and his work remain unchanged since that time. I miss the guy and always will.)

Down Range - Taylor Moore

I don’t read many modern thrillers, but I’d seen enough good comments about Taylor Moore’s debut novel DOWN RANGE that I decided I’d give it a try. Plus, it’s set in Texas which is always a nice bonus as far as I’m concerned.

The protagonist is Garrett Kohl, a DEA agent who’s working for the CIA in Afghanistan. That’s where this novel begins, but the setting switches quickly, and logically, to the Texas Panhandle, where it remains for the rest of the book. Garrett, who grew up on a ranch near the town of Canadian, is tasked with protecting the life of a little Afghan boy who witnessed a massacre. He figures going home will be the best way to do that.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t figured on landing up to his neck in an even worse mess that will threaten the life not only of the boy he’s charged with protecting but also everybody else in Garrett’s family.

It takes a while to get everything in the plot set up, and consequently the first half of DOWN RANGE is a little slow despite a few bursts of action. But then the second half is almost all action, and Moore does a great job with it. I know from experience as both a writer and a reader that it’s hard to do lengthy firefights without them getting boring, but Moore pulls that off and kept me flipping the pages with enthusiasm and eagerness to find out what was going to happen. However, as much as I enjoy action in my reading, that’s not the main appeal of this book for me.

I said up in the first paragraph that I don’t read many modern thrillers, and here’s the reason for that: they all sound alike. Too many of them read as if they could have been written by any of a hundred different contemporary thriller authors. My theory—and this is only a theory—is that many of these authors haven’t read extensively among older thriller authors and mostly read the work of their peers. They’ve had so many rules hammered into their heads that they don’t know any other way to write. And so everything they produce reads the same.

To be honest, there’s some of that in DOWN RANGE, too. There are scenes that could have come out of any of a thousand other books. But then . . . ah, but then . . . there’s a bit of description, or a line of dialogue, or an interaction between characters, or even a throwaway moment of transition, and a grin appears on my face as I think that nobody else in the world would have written this particular thing this particular way. Only Taylor Moore. And that’s what makes DOWN RANGE an excellent novel. He knows the place and he knows the people and he writes about all of it in his own voice.

Now, there are a couple of quibbles I can make. I don’t think it takes two and a half hours to drive from the Joint Reserve Base in west Fort Worth to Possum Kingdom Lake (but I’m thrilled that a contemporary thriller even mentions Possum Kingdom Lake). I think I could make it in an hour and a half, two tops. But you know what, I could be wrong about that, especially since Moore doesn’t specify exactly where on Possum Kingdom Lake Garrett is going. The other thing (and I’ll die on this hill) is that y’all is spelled y’all, not ya’ll.

You see why I called them quibbles.

Anyway, all in all, DOWN RANGE is an absolutely superb book, and if you enjoy thrillers, I give it a very high recommendation. It's available in e-book, hardback, paperback, and audio editions. I don’t know if I’ll become a fan and read everything Taylor Moore writes, but I’ll definitely read the next book in this series.

One Good Deed - David Baldacci

Aloysius Archer is a combat veteran of World War II and also an ex-con who was sent to prison for a crime he was tricked into. When he’s released on parole in 1949, he winds up in Poca City, a small city in an unidentified Western state that’s probably Colorado, based on geographic clues in David Baldacci’s novel ONE GOOD DEED. Although Archer is supposed to stay out of trouble, he soon finds himself working for a rich local businessman, hired to collect a debt from the guy’s mortal enemy. Not only that, but Archer gets involved with the rich man’s beautiful mistress, who just happens to be the daughter of the man who owes the debt. Add a beautiful female parole officer with a deadly background of her own into the mix, and then a murder where it looks like Archer has been set up to be the fall guy, and you have the makings of a tough, terse Gold Medal-type novel, which is exactly what I think perennial bestseller Baldacci was trying to write in ONE GOOD DEED.

This trend continues with more murders, convoluted criminal schemes, the spectre of past crimes haunting the present, and some excellent action scenes. The problem is that Harry Whittington or Day Keene or Charles Williams would have spun this same yarn in 160 or 144 or even 128 pages, and David Baldacci takes 464 pages to tell his story.

I suspect there are two reasons for this: Baldacci’s publishers would have balked if he’d turned in a 40,000-50,000 word manuscript, and Baldacci, who has been writing fat contemporary thrillers for more than two decades (and very successfully, I might add) just doesn’t know how to write shorter books. This one could have been trimmed considerably by just not describing in detail every item of clothing and every piece of furniture, sometimes more than once.

But other than the length, which I really shouldn’t be complaining about because I knew it was that long when I started it—and it’s really not fair to judge books written today by the standards of books written 70 or more years ago (and vice versa)—how was it? Well, I read the whole thing and didn’t consider stopping (skimming did enter my mind a time or two, but I didn’t do it), so I’d have to say I liked it fairly well. Yes, it’s too long. Yes, there are some anachronisms. No, Baldacci doesn’t even come close to playing fair with the reader where the solution to the mystery is concerned. But the plot is interesting, the characters are good, and Archer is a great protagonist, smart and tough enough to untangle everything but far from a superman like Jack Reacher. I really liked the guy. Everything wraps up in a long, effective courtroom scene a little reminiscent of a Perry Mason novel.

There are two more novels, so far, about Aloysius Archer. Did I enjoy ONE GOOD DEED enough to read them, too? The jury is still out on that (no pun intended), but honestly, I’m leaning toward giving the second one a try. If I do, I’m sure you’ll read about it here.

ONE GOOD DEED Kindle Hardcover Paperback

Under the Lake - Stuart Woods

Quite a while back, prompted by a recommendation from Bill Crider (I think), I went on a little Stuart Woods binge and read maybe a dozen of his novels over a couple of years. I would read one from time to time after that, but Woods began concentrating most of his efforts on lawyer Stone Barrington, a character I really didn’t care for, so I stopped reading him altogether.

But I remember always intending to get around to one of Woods’ early novels I’d heard quite a bit about, the Southern Gothic/thriller UNDER THE LAKE. The e-book edition of it was on sale recently, so I thought, why not?

The protagonist of this novel, first published in 1987, is journalist/columnist John Howell, who has left the newspaper business after winning the Pulitzer Prize for a true crime book he wrote. Against his better judgment, he takes on the job of ghostwriting the autobiography of an ambitious businessman/politician. To accomplish this task, he holes up in a rustic cabin owned by his brother-in-law on a picturesque lake in the north Georgia mountains.

In what will come as no surprise to most readers, many of the inhabitants of the local area are eccentric and colorful and some of them are vaguely sinister. Odd things begin to happen. Howell has visions and is visited by what seem to be ghosts. He gets hints of hidden secrets and long-ago crimes that center on the lake next to the cabin. Can Howell uncover the truth without endangering his own life and the lives of people he’s come to care about?

UNDER THE LAKE is a very slow burn, but Woods somehow kept me turning the digital pages anyway. I always thought that his prose was often flat and clumsy in places, but he had that indefinable storytelling ability. This one actually seems a little better written than most of the others of his that I’ve read.

Then, after that lengthy build-up, there’s an avalanche of plot twists and revelations in the last 40 or 50 pages. I’ve mentioned before that when Livia and I are watching some movie or TV show that begins to stretch credibility, one of us usually makes the sarcastic comment, “Sure, why not?” UNDER THE LAKE reaches the “Sure, why not?” point in the late going. And yet, I have to admit I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s different from what I usually read, it’s pretty well-done, and it might be enough to get me to read some of his other early books that I never got around to. We’ll see.

Lust Treasures - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Ben Haas, best known for his Westerns under the names John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and Richard Meade, as well as thrillers and sword and sorcery novels under the Meade name, also wrote a number of soft-core sex novels in the early Sixties for William Hamling’s publishing empire, all of them under the name William Kane. I’ve read a couple of those William Kane books, and they were well-written, entertaining books. But the William Kane novel LUST TREASURES is something different, and it’s very much a precursor to the work that Haas would soon be doing.

The narrator/protagonist of this novel is Len Wolfe (any resemblance to the term “lone wolf” is probably not coincidental), a former Marine who currently works as a rather amoral soldier of fortune, taking any dangerous job that pays enough, anywhere in the world. As this novel opens, he’s recruited by a lawyer representing an American fruit company for a job in a South American country. The company, which has extensive banana plantation holdings in the country, hires Wolfe to deliver a $200,000 bribe to the leader of a rebel army. In exchange for the money, the man will call off the revolution that threatens the fruit company’s holdings. But the rebel leader insists on one condition: the money will be paid in the form of American silver dollars. So Wolfe’s job is to transport 200 grand in silver across a rugged jungle landscape teeming with bandits, while also dealing with the possibility of a double cross from the rebel leader. Not to mention the threat of the cruel dictator who runs the country and his beautiful but possibly unhinged sister, and the complication of the beautiful American girl who is the rebel leader’s mistress.

Now I ask you, move that plot back from the early Sixties to the early days of the Twentieth Century, and does that sound like one of Haas’s Fargo novels or what? That seems like exactly the sort of job Fargo would get mixed up in.

There’s enough sex in this book to justify it being published by Hamling, but LUST TREASURES is definitely more of an action/adventure novel than anything else. The setup is a little slow to develop, but once Wolfe starts through the jungle with a mule train loaded down with silver dollars, the pace ratchets up a notch and things barrel along to a final showdown in a dungeon torture room underneath the Presidential Palace. Haas was a master of colorful settings and great action scenes, and there are plenty of both of those things in this book.

I think anyone who’s a fan of Haas’s work would enjoy this novel, but unfortunately, it’s a little on the rare side and likely to be pricey if you find a copy. If you come across it, though, and it’s in your price range, don’t pass it up. This might be a good candidate for reprinting, one of these days.

Now Available: Kingfisher #3: Tourist Trap - James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn

The search for one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, a swindler who is rumored to have stashed away close to a billion dollars in ill-gotten gains, leads brother and sister private investigators Callista and Joseph Kingfisher to a fabulous, luxurious resort in Mexico. But deep in the jungles of the Yucatan, they discover another secret hidden away, a secret that may mean death for both Kingfishers!

TOURIST TRAP is another lightning-paced, colorful adventure from bestselling authors James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn featuring plenty of thrills, humor, and excitement, with suspense and plot twists that will leave readers breathless.

Working on these books with Livia has been great fun, and I think this is my favorite so far. It's available on Amazon in e-book and print editions and as an e-book on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Smashwords.

Now Available: Kingfisher P.I. #2: Dark Ride - James Reasoner and Livia J. Washburn

Hired to find out who’s been threatening a Texas state senator’s granddaughter, the two triplet sleuths Callista and Joseph Kingfisher find themselves in more trouble than they bargained for as Callie goes undercover at a therapeutic riding center and becomes involved in a dangerous conspiracy with roots on the other side of the world.

Between international criminals who want them dead, an enigmatic former Special Forces operator who can’t be trusted, federal agents who would like to make the Kingfishers disappear in some black site prison, and the shadowy menace who started the whole thing, Callie and Joseph will have their work cut out just trying to survive this case!

KINGFISHER P.I.: DARK RIDE is the second in a new series of thrilling mystery novels from New York Times bestselling author James Reasoner and the creator of the popular Fresh Baked Mystery series Livia J. Washburn. Mount up for these exciting and entertaining tales from two of today’s best storytellers!

(The second novel in the Kingfisher P.I. series is now available on Amazon in trade paperback and e-book editions. You can also find e-book editions on Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, and Smashwords. These books are a little different from anything Livia and I have done before, and considering how many books we've written, that's not easy! But I'm having a great time working on them and I hope the readers enjoy them.)