Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 24

When Christmas Comes by Debbie Macomber

When Christmas Comes by Debbie Macomber

Families—they can be a joy and they can be a pain and holidays like Christmas bring out the best and worst in them. That’s really what this story is about. Emily lives on the west coast and wants desperately to spend Christmas with Heather, her college-student daughter, so when Heather says she can’t come home because she has to work, Emily swaps houses with a Harvard professor for the holiday and goes to be with her daughter instead. As you’ve already guessed, Heather isn’t working, she’s hanging out with her bad-news boyfriend road-tripping to Florida. Meanwhile, Charles, the Harvard professor Emily swapped houses with, is seeking to get away from his mother so he can enjoy some peace and quiet for a holiday filled with bad memories, but Mom isn’t going to let him get away with it. When she phones his house and a strange woman answers, she bullies her other bachelor son into going up to Boston to find out what’s happened to her little Charles. I bet you caught the adjective “bachelor” in front of “son” and yes, it's obvious from moment one that he isn’t going to be a bachelor by New Years.

 

While all of this is happening, Emily’s best friend Faith has decided to drop everything and go to visit Emily in her west coast home—but Emily isn’t there, is she? No, Charles who hates Christmas is there and Faith can’t find a hotel room or get a flight back out to go home so we can all guess that those two aren’t going to be single very much longer either.

 

And less we forget, Heather is still off with her biker bad-boy boyfriend and it isn’t going so well. That’s really the only question in this novel—what the heck is going to happen to Heather?

 

So, you have three relationships (plus Charles’ mom) waiting for the Christmas spirit to turn them into Christmas romances (or Christmas sanity, in the case of Heather) and it’s frankly a tremendous amount of fun. Very little in the way of surprises, but it’s got all the makings of a Hallmark Christmas special. Can our various players find true happiness in each other’s arms? Can Heather dump her bad boy boyfriend? And can Charles possibly learn to love Christmas again?

 

I wrote the first draft of this review before I was halfway through the story and I already knew the answer to all of those questions would be a resounding “yes”. The point to a book like this is not the solution, it’s the journey. And this madcap, wild, slay ride will put you in the Christmas spirit.

 

You Can Thank Me Later by Kelly Harms

You Can Thank Me Later by Kelly Harms

If you’re looking to get into the mood for Thanksgiving this year, this short novel by Kelly Harms is a great way to start. It traces a family through several Thanksgiving dinners, moving from tragedy to anger and finally to healing. The great strength is that Harms has created a family you will feel that you know. They’re instantly likable and very empathetic—which is important since you’re about to spend three Thanksgiving dinners with them.

 

The tragedy of the novel is the death by cancer of the protagonist/narrator’s best friend, who also happens to be her sister-in-law. When her brother begins to move on, the narrator is not ready to let him do so. This must have been the toughest part of the book to write because the new girlfriend (who admittedly has a laundry basket full of problems) is clearly trying hard to make a good impression and everything she does becomes another stroke against her in the eyes of our heroine.

 

Rather than make things come to an easy conclusion, Harms ratchets up the tension considerably, even as she cleverly lays the groundwork for the eventual coming together of the once-happy clan. It’s quite likely I’ll read this book again next November.

 

Her Forbidden Knight by Rex Stout

Her Forbidden Knight by Rex Stout

Rex Stout is best known for his Nero Wolfe mysteries, but he has some other novels out there and this was a good one. I wouldn’t actually term this a mystery although at times it almost felt like one. Back in the 1890s in New York City, several men have taken it upon themselves to protect a young woman employed as a telegraph operator. She didn’t ask them to do this, but they have devoted themselves to her in a somewhat chivalric fashion and look out for her. She sees them as friends but gets annoyed when they interfere with her life as they do when they decide that a man who is romantically interested in her is not good enough for her. On the surface, they appear correct. They learn through one of their number that he is a counterfeiter. But they don’t know the whole story and they don’t know that one of their own has evil designs on the woman.

 

So, this is a crime story, but not the crime the counterfeiting may lead you to think it is. And it leads to an exciting courtroom drama in which the young and extremely honest woman is expected to be the lead witness against the man who has captured her heart. There are a couple of nice twists and turns in the story and the ending feels like a solution Nero Wolfe would have come up with. I really enjoyed it.

 

Murder in E-Minor by Robert Goldsborough

Murder in E-Minor by Robert Goldsborough

I’ve been reading (and in some cases rereading) the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout and decided to try one of Robert Goldsborough’s continuations of the series. I started with his first book, Murder in E-Minor. It’s well written and almost feels like Stout wrote it. Goldsborough’s mastery of the characters is absolute and I got all the enjoyment out of this book that I get from a genuine Rex Stout Nero Wolfe story. At the start of the story, Wolfe’s been in “retirement” for two years due to events in the last of Stout’s full novels (more on that later) and a case has finally arisen that Archie Goodwin is desperately hoping can pull Wolfe back into the detective business. It’s a good mystery and lets Wolfe do his thing, although I would suggest that perhaps the true “joy” of the book is getting the cast back together, letting Cramer yell at Wolfe, seeing Saul Panzer make his contributions, getting Archie and Fritz back into their respective grooves.

 

My complaint may not be a fair one. I have not yet read the last of Stout’s Nero Wolfe books, but, thanks to this novel I now know who the killer is and how shocking that was for Wolfe and Archie. I really regret that. I feel like I’ve had that book spoiled for me, although I think that it was not unreasonable for Goldsborough to expect that those choosing to read his new series would be familiar with Stout’s old one. So, unfortunate, but not something I can in good conscious hold against Goldsborough.

 

The Ghosts of Phoenix No 7 by M. L. Bullock

The Ghosts of Phoenix No 7 by M. L. Bullock

This book had the potential to become one of the best novels in this series, but ended up squandering the opportunity. The basic plot—ghosts in a fire station—was fine and pretty much what we’ve come to expect from the series. The team is called in to investigate paranormal activity, have a couple of encounters with ghosts, and finally figure everything out. It was even touching at the end. But it was the subplots that offered the chance to turn this into an extraordinary novel, so let me take a moment to talk about them.

 

First, Midas, team founder, is not dealing well with the death of a teammate in the last book. He drops out of contact with his team and his girlfriend, Cassidy, and then disappears with an ex-girlfriend to return to the Leaf Academy where his teammate died. This move on his part was stupid on so many levels, but totally believable. And it sets the stage for a great adventure reminiscent of the beginning of the series. Midas is driven by guilt to face the Maelstrom again and goading him on is his self-absorbed ex-girlfriend who is looking for ratings for her new paranormal show. Not only does it give at least the appearance of cheating, we’ve seen in book after book that when the emotional state of the investigators is messed up, it impacts the investigation. This would have been a great story, worthy of a novel itself, but it all happens off screen and ends up being a great big dud.

 

Second, Sierra’s mother-in-law, who has hated her from book one and totally disrespects her interest in the supernatural is now having a supernatural problem of her own. This may be the focus of a future novel. It’s set up nicely here, but again, at least for now, nothing happens with it.

 

This is a good series and I hate to see moments lost that could make it great.

 

Great Mythologies of the World by Grant L. Voth, Julius H. Bailey, Kathryn McClymond, and Robert Andre LaFleur

Great Mythologies of the World by Grant L. Voth, Julius H. Bailey, Kathryn McClymond, and Robert Andre LaFleur

I broke with my usual practice of listening to a Great Courses book straight through and listened to this volume a few lectures at a time over the course of a year. The reason for that is that this book actually manages to give an overview of the basic myths of several dozen cultures, breaking them up mostly by geographic region, and the similarities between so many of the myths made them tend to blur together when I listened to too many at a time. It’s really quite remarkable how similar so many of the world’s myths are at their root. And in the same vein, it is also remarkable that there are so many distinctive differences.

 

When you get a book on myths, there is usually a great deal of focus on one particular mythos—Greek, Norse, Celtic, etc. In this book, the most any culture gets are a couple of lectures. The authors keep moving throughout their region, picking up new stories and showing what links them to others and also what makes them distinctive. It’s really a wonderful collection.

 

Cold Planet by Brian Dorsey

Cold Planet by Brian Dorsey

This is a straightforward military adventure. A lieutenant and her platoon from a highly militaristic society (that feels like it has almost made a cult out of dying in battle for the good of the nation) are forced to crash land on a theoretically uninhabited planet when their naval vessel is ambushed. Of course the bad guys (actually two groups of bad guys) are already on the planet and there is a lot of shooting each other up until the good guys win. The action is fine and I enjoyed the discovery that there were two different groups of bad guys on the planet.

 

What prevents this from being a better story is the lieutenant leading the soldiers. She is the only woman in the entire military and she apparently got there by being the absolute best at absolutely everything—athletic competitions, shooting ranges, etc. In fact, the only thing she can’t do well (and to be fair, the author hits us over the head with this) is lead men. She is too driven to be the best and somehow can’t understand that she can’t force her men to be as good as she is and her inability to deal with this is making her men hate her instead of follow her. So she’s a bad leader.

 

In addition to this, she seems to have missed all lessens on military etiquette like not talking back to officers. She’s also never read important military regs like who is in command when you’re in combat and the commanding officer is incapacitated. That problem actually solved another problem with the lieutenant’s character as this icily focused woman got weak knees every time that commanding officer got close to her and just couldn’t understand what was wrong with her. I was relieved when he was injured so she could stop having the schoolgirl crush reactions.

 

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the lieutenant was just not likable. That gets a little better when she starts learning a little bit about how to get her men on her side. (And it helps when she’s killing three or four of the enemy for every one they can take down.) But overall, it is really hard on a book when the lead character is someone you cannot warm up to.

 

Still, there was a lot of action and a decent plot.

 

Three Men Out by Rex Stout

Three Men Out by Rex Stout

Nero Wolfe is at it again, attempting to identify a killer, and at the same time make a lot of money. In two of these cases, he’s out of his house, which always adds to the tension in the story. I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow of the plots here. I’m just going to say that Stout has managed to produce three highly distinctive stories for this collection. No two of them come close to “feeling” the same. So whether it’s in a millionaire’s home, Wolfe’s brownstone, or at the baseball stadium, here are three stories that will test your ability to figure out the killer before Nero Wolfe.

 

The Maelstrom of the Leaf Academy by M. L. Bullock

The Maelstrom of the Leaf Academy by M. L. Bullock

Bullock’s world of the supernatural just got substantially larger as she introduces a malevolent supernatural entity that is definitely not a ghost. In fact, it makes ghosts by feeding on its victims’ souls. And it has taken root in an old boy’s school called the Leaf Academy where it has been preying on people for centuries (actually in the region before the Leaf Academy was built).

 

The Gulf Coast Paranormal team didn’t seem ready for this challenge to me. Midas is disturbed by the coming anniversary of the death of his cousin. Joshua’s temper is out of sorts. And Jocelyn, who recently rejoined the team, has had a bad experience in the Leaf Academy, is frightened of it, and is impulsively failing to follow the rules. At least, for once, the focus was not on Cassidy’s painting talents, and that was good for the story.

 

This one is the most physically threatening installment yet, but the fullest manifestation of that threat really didn’t make sense to me, which in my mind really weakened the story. I just don’t see any reason that things had to (or even should of) end as they did.

 

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline

It’s common for scholars to talk about significant downturns in civilization in the Bronze Age. One of the most famous collapses was that of Mycenean Greece. Empires rise and fall. What Cline does in this book is take a broad look at all the major bronze age cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean in the centuries leading up to 1177 B.C., showing how a combination of climate change (centuries long periods of drought), earthquakes, pestilence, and invasions rocked the increasingly sophisticated international economy leading to a collapse of all the major powers in the years surrounding 1177 B.C. It’s a wonderful work which will teach the reader a lot about the Bronze Age civilizations and why they fell.