Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 59

Review of Alan Brenham’s Game Piece…

Game Piece. Alan Brenham, author. This mystery/thriller novel won a Readers Favorite award, so I thought it had to be good. Right? Wrong! It’s an excellent addition to the crime fiction literature. It reminded me of the early Bosch books—they were even mentioned as reading material in the novel.

Barry Marshall is a detective in the police department of Temple, Texas. People he’s had problems with in that job are turning up dead. The serial killer always phones Barry to gloat after murdering a...

Punctuation choices…

I learned something new a few weeks ago from editor Bobbie Christmas’s newsletter—rather the official name of something I haven’t liked for a long time. Consider: Judy’s the section head, Bill’s the IT guy. I never have liked that construction. Now I have a name for it: the comma splice. I’ll accept a conjunction or a semicolon in place of that comma, but a comma splice stops me in my tracks when I’m reading or reviewing. And too many authors are using it. Maybe they think it’s cool; it’s not...

Movie Reviews #80…

Angel Has Fallen. Ric Waugh, dir. Gerard Butler. Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is set to become the next Secret Service director. He saves President Allan Trumball (Morgan Freeman) from an overwhelming attack that puts the president in a coma. The Rambo-like security man is framed for the attack, so much of the film is dedicated to his discovering those responsible for the frame and hunting them down. I soon picked out the sniveling jerk in the White House responsible for everything, so there’...

Anthologies and collections…

They don’t sell well. That’s not just my perception. I’ve stopped publishing my own short fiction collections. I’m giving away a companion volume to Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape, which was published six years ago and is now one of my “evergreen books” (books that are as current in plots and themes as they were when I wrote them). You can download Volume Two as a free PDF—see the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page at this website. I’m preparing Volume Three, which will also be...

Review of Carole Lawrence’s Edinburgh Twilight…

Edinburgh Twilight. Carole Lawrence, author.* Talk about satisfying two of my reading preferences at once! Hmm…maybe three: this novel’s setting is Ian Rankin’s dark Edinburgh underbelly, only in 1880; it’s a British-style mystery, with a Glasgow-born inspector playing the major role; and it’s first-rate historical fiction in addition to being an excellent mystery/crime story. I could hardly put this one down long enough to sip my Jameson!

Inspector Hamilton is a complex character with as muc...

The three R’s…

Reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic are now taught poorly in schools, so this post isn’t about those three R’s. In fact, I often denote this post’s theme by R&R&R, a new kind of three R’s that signify “rest and relaxation and reading.” Many people don’t include that third R often enough with R&R, thinking that reading is more a chore than rest or relaxation. (Some schools, in fact, make it into a chore!)

It used to be that parents read to their kids to start them early in a lifetime of reading e...

News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #173…

Friday the 13th! The origins come from the Middle Ages. If you’re afraid of the day as being unlucky, curl up and read a good book…especially if the weather no longer looks like summer! (Obviously I don’t believe in the bad luck–I wouldn’t offer my newsletter otherwise.)

School time! It’s here again: School buses, kids on the streets, walking or in bicycles…Every driver must expect the unexpected now, because, as Art Linkletter used to say, “Kids do the darnedst things” (okay, he actually sai...

Guns…

I kill people with them…in my books! My detectives Chen and Castilblanco have guns because the lowlifes they face in their cases have them. Guns are among the “props” in many of my stories. I write mysteries, thrillers, and sci-fi, and I use these props when writing in all those genres.

Although I’m against automatic and semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines being available to the general public—they belong in the military and not in John Q. Public’s hands—I think reasonable gun...

Best sci-fi short fiction…

Let’s never forget the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks on the WTC. Terrorism came to America in a disastrous way, killing nearly 3000 innocent victims, along with first responders–the latter are still dying. Terrorism is evil in any shape or form, no matter who the perpetrators are! Let’s stamp this blight on innocent humanity.

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[Note: This article forms a trilogy with my article about best sci-fi novels and best mysteries and thrillers.]

Sci-fi novels tend to be long…or they become trilogi...

Technical jargon…

When someone asks me for an explanation of some esoteric physics topic—say, “What’s dark matter?”—I know I can’t go on very long before I lose the person, because I’m that way too! (That’s why I subscribe to Science News. Asimov did too, so I’m in good company.) The reasons for this vary from not really caring (that someone…or me…is just trying to make conversation, at a cocktail, for example) to lack of attention (cocktails start having effect…or Jameson whiskey, in my case).

Most people are...