Gilbert M. Stack's Blog

Into Thin Air by Franklin W. Dixon

Into Thin Air by Franklin W. Dixon

This is easily the best book in the new Hardy Boys Adventures series thus far. In the previous novel, Frank and Joe sifted through the clues to discover who was behind the disappearance of two teenagers riding G-Force, the star attraction of the amusement park, Fun Land. They identified the villains and got the police to lock them up. So how is it that a third teenager, Daisy, the daughter of Fun Land’s new owner and the girl who just broke up with Joe, has disappeared on the same ride?

 

This is a great story. Frank and Joe are highly motivated to rescue Daisy and even their sometimes enemy, Chief Olaf of the Bayport Police, is acting human toward them out of compassion for the obvious stress they are feeling because of Daisy’s disappearance. His compassion turns to truly well-meaning concern when two efforts are made to either kill or seriously injure the boys and three clear warnings to back off the case are also delivered. But Frank and Joe are persistent and this time it was totally believable. They aren’t going to let their friend down.

 

Now this is where the book leaps up to a new level for these stories. We actually were given a lot of information about Fun Land, Daisy and her family, the villains of the last piece, and the G-Force in the previous book and all of it can be used in this novel to help the reader shortcut to the ending. The two books were clearly planned together and that makes the outcome of this novel one that everyone should predict (but probably didn’t). It certainly will make the reader who didn’t figure out what happened kick themselves for having overlooked important clues.

 

There really is only one thing that seriously detracts from this novel and the author gets away with it because it actually happened between the two books. The Hardy Boys already exposed how a person can disappear on G-Force, but apparently the authorities (and the Hardy Boys themselves) were slow to investigate that method. If they had done so, this novel wouldn’t have been necessary.

 

Hunting Werewolves and Other Bad Dates by Kel Carpenter and Meg Anne

Hunting Werewolves and Other Bad Dates by Kel Carpenter and Meg Anne

This story is a mixed bag. On the good side, it presents an interesting world of supernatural creatures who are working their way toward a civil war with each other. There’s a mystery regarding who murdered the heroine’s twin brother. There are family secrets as well, all of which should have made for a compelling tale. The opening sequence is pretty good as well.

 

The problems begin as we get to know the main character. She’s just not likable and goes out of her way to be annoying and offensive. And just when you think you can’t take any more, she gets worse. This is a strategy authors sometimes use to ease the reader in to discovering the heroine is actually vulnerable and sympathetic, but I never had that reaction in this book. She just became worse and worse, and if there was a choice between a good decision and a bad decision to be made, you could count on her to make the bad one every time.

 

It's very hard to overcome a thoroughly dislikeable main character. Usually, the love interest helps, but he was a mess also, if for different reasons. While I’m quite certain that these two are destined to fall deeply and totally in love, it makes no sense because they irritate each other completely. He simply does not have the patience to deal with her. But to make matters worse, for no discernible reason I could determine, he immediately goes out on a big limb for the woman which puts him in serious trouble with the other supernatural creatures and doesn’t actually help her.

 

As if all of this poor characterization and poor plotting weren’t enough of a problem, the book ends on a genuine cliffhanger which resolves none of the story elements. This one is pure frustration.

 

The Mourning Sun by S. G. Tasz

The Mourning Sun by S. G. Tasz

When you’re reading about a demonic attempt to initiate the apocalypse, it’s hard to argue that things can get more serious, but in The Mourning Sun they certainly get a lot more personal. At the end of the last book, Cari attempted to kill her mother’s abusive lover. In this novel, we learn that he’s among the possessed and it may not be possible to terminate him at all. As if that isn’t bad enough, he’s implanted a sort of demonic seed into Cari’s mother and it’s highly unlikely that anything can help her.

 

This is the most emotionally depressing of the books thus far. We didn’t like Cari’s mother at all—nor did Cari—but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants demons to possess and damn her. And there’s also the very serious problem of what to do with her regenerating lover. He can’t be allowed to go free, but he also can’t be kept under lock and key as he’s one of the few people left in Halcyon who would be missed.

 

This one is heart-wrenching from start to finish.

 

Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks

Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks

I read this book the first time some thirty years ago and had fond memories of it. It’s the story of Nest Freemark, a fourteen-year-old girl with a wild magic inside her that she does not understand. It’s also the story of John Ross, Knight of the Word, who is attempting to avert the apocalypse which he dreams about every night. He has come to the aptly named town of Hopewell where something pivotal in the battle between the Word and the Void will happen. It is obvious to the reader from moment one that the pivotal incident will involve Nest, but it takes a very long time to figure out just what her test will be.

 

Unusually for me, I did not remember very much about the plot as I read the novel this second time. I think the reason for that is that it is so tediously slow in developing. The contrarian within me thinks that that is also the great strength of the novel. By taking his time in developing the story, Brooks lets the mystery of the town take root. Who is the demon? How is he connected to Nest? What the heck really happened to Nest’s mother? And what happened to Gran’s magic? And those are just the really big questions. If Brooks had rushed to the ending, we would lose a lot of really good detail, and yet, the story dragged for me through all of that detail. It’s not really until the ending that Brooks resuscitated his tale and made me glad I was rereading it.

 

Blood Ties by Gilbert M. Stack

My novel Blood Ties is on sale for 99 cents for the next two weeks on Amazon and it’s always free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ties-Gil...

 

I don’t usually tell people this, but when I first started thinking about the plot for my novel, Blood Ties, I was considering writing a horror comedy. I’ve read several and I thought it might be quite amusing to have my protagonists attracting the romantic interest of a number of supernatural creatures—the werewolf, the vampire, even a zombie. Naturally, the true nature of these creatures would scare the heck out of them, but I could envision a lot of potentially hilarious scenes where the reader knew what was really going on and the protagonist didn’t as things moved toward the hot and heavy. Unfortunately, when I actually considered writing those scenes, I rediscovered one really big problem. I’m not actually very funny. What I am very good at is creating realistic characters and building great suspense and all the actual plotting led to an increasingly tense story that might have a moment of levity or two, but wasn’t anything like the horror comedy I first envisioned.

 

That’s not a bad thing. I find that most horror comedies I read aren’t actually all that funny and I’d hate to think that I was rolling on the floor laughing at a scene which made everyone else roll their eyes and scratch their heads. So, I doubled down on the serious plot and created a spooky tribute to the archetypes of horror and urban fantasy—vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and even a touch of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. Throw in an ancient castle on the border of Transylvania and a previously unknown relative with nothing good on his mind and you have all the elements you need to stay up late at night reading with all the lights on as you struggle to determine just why it is that a relative is a terrible thing to waste.

 

 

The Father Hunt by Rex Stout

The Father Hunt by Rex Stout

This is a complicated one. First, Nero Wolfe’s client wants him to find her father—a man she has never known but who she just discovered has paid $250,000 toward her upkeep over the course of her life. Normally, locating the unknown dad would involve questioning the mother as to the possibilities, but in this case, the mother has died a few months ago—victim of an automobile accident (as if any reader of Rex Stout mysteries could possibly believe it was an accident). The one clue that Wolfe has is the bank checks by which the quarter million dollars was paid—except, they lead to a dead end. Or do they?

 

It takes quite a bit of time to get going, but this book turns into a pretty good murder investigation and I always enjoy watching Wolfe going after his man.

 

A Study in Brimstone by G. S. Denning

A Study in Brimstone by G. S. Denning

What if Sherlock Homes were really dim and had really powerful magical abilities? That’s the premise of this clever novel about “Warlock” Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Watson is down and out financially and joins Holmes at Baker Street for very cheap rent. He finds that Holmes needs a lot of looking after and every time there is a magical crime of some sort in London, Scotland Yard basically gives Holmes the choice of solving the crime or being blamed for it. It’s fun to see the characters from the original books in a different light, and Denning puts on a nice twist on classic stories. The problem—it gets old very quickly and I found it difficult to sustain my interest for the whole book. I did sustain my interest, but just barely. However, the ending was just a brilliant surprise and it was worth reading the whole novel just to get that last shock.

 

Sole Survivor by Warren Murphy

Sole Survivor by Warren Murphy

Mr. Gordons is back in the 72nd Destroyer novel. Mr. Gordons is the survival machine who first appeared in Funny Money (book 18). In his last appearance, Remo thought he’d gotten rid of the android for good when it was launched into outer space, but at the beginning of this novel, Mr. Gordon makes contact with a Russian shuttle in orbit and assimilates it, killing the crew and bringing it back to earth.

 

It takes a long time for Remo and Chiun to discover that Mr. Gordons is the root of their problems. For most of the book, it appears to them that the difficulty is the missing shuttle and Russia’s unhappiness about it landing in the U.S. The Russians are most concerned because they had put a doomsday device that could sterilize all of America onto the shuttle and they don’t want it falling into America’s hands. To this end they send their top spy Anna Chutesov to locate and retrieve it. Anna is one of the only people with knowledge of CURE and has always been extremely competent. She and Remo also have a history that is obviously going to be complicated by Remo’s engagement to Sinanju villager, Mei Li.

 

This is a fun one. Mr. Gordons is a serious opponent—difficult to locate and nearly impossible to destroy. But then, that’s part of the fun. We know Remo and Chiun will triumph by the end of the novel. The question is how will Mr. Gordons escape to trouble them another day.

 

The Hardy Boys 7 The Secret of the Caves by Franklin W. Dixon

The Hardy Boys 7 The Secret of the Caves by Franklin W. Dixon

Frank and Joe are back with their friends to solve another mystery. The major plot, occupying their father, is ongoing sabotage at an important new radar installation. It’s obvious from the beginning that this is going to tie into the smaller mystery that the Hardy’s get involved in. That’s finding a teenager’s missing brother, a college professor who recently returned from a country hostile to the United States. Could his disappearance be connected to his work in that nation?

 

The best part of this novel was a “trick” that gets played on Frank and Joe to scare them away from searching for the missing man. Someone tells a college fraternity that the Hardy’s are planning to pledge and the fraternity is encouraged to play a rather extreme prank on them that involves tying the brothers up and leaving them on the rail road tracks. This looks like an extreme attempt to murder them, but they really weren’t in danger. And while this level of hazing would bring in law enforcement today, it felt believable in the context of the 1960s when this book was rewritten.

 

The brothers also have to figure out how to deal with a person suffering from multiple personalities and this too came off better than I expected. While they find the encounter unsettling, they treat the man with respect and compassion as one would expect of the two.

 

When push comes to shove, the bad guys in this book are all bad and the reader has a pretty good chance to figure out who they are. The boys and their friends have to work around a lot of obstructions, but in the end they figure things out and make the country a little bit safer from its enemies.

 

Dead Mall 3 Long Moon by S. G. Tasz

Dead Mall 3 Long Moon by S. G. Tasz

The first full moon in January is a time of great power for the nefarious entities of the underworld, and this full moon one of the demonic original settlers of Halcyon is making her bid to return to the physical world through a disgusting construct of poisonous centipedes. As if that weren’t bad enough, Cari is in danger of being fired because she can’t find a weapon that doesn’t make her look like a Keystone Cop when she handles it and that makes her a danger both to herself and her comrades in arms. All of that sounds bad and the fighting hasn’t even started yet. Demons can possess as well as poison and kill and that means that at any time the buddies on your right and left could become the enemy going for your throat. The action starts early and doesn’t stop even on the last page of the story.

 

While all of this is going on, Tasz continues to make a valiant effort to humanize and develop backstories for the cast of supporting characters. So, in addition to Cari’s troubles with her alcoholic mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Cooper is having marital problems, and John is wracked with self-doubt, wondering if he should have made his own deal with the devil to save the town. It’s a very good story presented in small digestible bites.