Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 31

The End of the Game by Warren Murphy

The End of the Game by Warren Murphy

It doesn’t seem like it should, but this novel actually worked. The villain is a young genius game designer who is totally bored with life. The only enjoyment he gets is in manipulating people (or nations) into doing things out of character. He is ridiculously wealthy and he uses his money first to addict people to spending and then (with the threat of removing that money) to get them to do inappropriate (or even horrible) things. When he decides to end his boredom by getting the Soviets and the U.S. to launch their nuclear missiles at each other and start World War III, CURE becomes involved.

 

This is a very quick moving, very light-hearted, Destroyer adventure. The villain can never quite be taken seriously and the threats are never quite severe enough to make us genuinely worry about Remo, but the story works anyway.

 

Tenth Planet 3 Final Assault by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Tenth Planet 3 Final Assault by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The final book of The Tenth Planet trilogy breaks cleanly into two sections. The first, occurring roughly a month before the orbit of the Tenth Planet brings the aliens back in reach of the earth, is focused primarily on getting the human race ready for one last titanic clash with the aliens. Its culmination is a speech by the president of the U.S. that is viewed as critical to get people to stop rioting in terror and start working constructively to save the planet. It’s a good speech, I just wonder why the president waited six months to give it.

 

The second half focuses on the assault of the aliens and all of those preparations that humanity has been making for the last book and a half. There’s a lot of tension, made more so by getting into the head of the alien leader who is frankly a very sympathetic figure. He’s trapped too. If he can’t harvest energy from the earth (which he does through a nanotech that destroys all biological material in a massive region (the first pass took out most of the Amazon jungle) and converts it into energy) his whole race will die. This is a nice touch to the story, because this isn’t good versus bad, it’s two “goods” clashing here with neither side having any choice but to fight.

 

I won’t give away the ending other than to say that both sides show they are flexible and creative in their tactics. I will also point out that the aliens don’t seem nearly worried enough about humans sending missiles after them after the Tenth Planet passes the earth. With 2006 years before the next pass, I would put my money on humanity finishing off the aliens while they are all in cold sleep waiting for their planet to come near the sun again. But had they realized it, it probably wouldn’t have greatly altered their tactics. Their window of opportunity to fight the humans was simply too short.

 

All in all, it’s a very fun trilogy.

 

The Black Mountain by Rex Stout

The Black Mountain by Rex Stout

This novel opens with a shocking and truly sad murder. The victim is one of Nero Wolfe’s genuine friends, Marko Vukcic. Marko either appeared or was mentioned in just about every Nero Wolfe novel to this point. He was a world class chef who was one of the few people that Wolfe would leave his house for. He could also motivate Wolfe to take on tasks Wolfe didn’t want to. They were genuinely friends and Stout open the novel by having Marko killed in what is essentially a drive by shooting. Wolfe is so upset that he both goes to the morgue to see the body and actually visits the crime scene. He then vows to bring the killer to justice starting what should have been the best and most powerful of Nero Wolfe stories.

 

Should have been, but didn’t quite make it. Wolfe does things that one would never have believed based on the rest of the series. He and Archie sneak into Montenegro in search of the murderer (and the murderer of yet another victim close to Wolfe) and frankly it just didn’t feel like a Wolfe mystery. The whole middle of the book, Archie and Wolfe stumble from one event to another and don’t seem to have to do any detecting to learn the identity of the murderer. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable. But then, Stout remembers what makes Wolfe great. Rather than have Wolfe kill his friend’s murderer, Wolfe decides to find a way to get him back to New York City where he can face justice. Seeing as the killer is an agent of a communist government and is in that communist country, this seems a very tall order to fill. But it’s Nero Wolfe we’re talking about. And just as he solves his case, he saves the story.

 

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 20 Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 20 Hit List by Laurell K. Hamilton

This novel is a big step up from the recent one in this series—a welcome return to the sort of problems that made the early books so great. Anita and everyone’s favorite assassin, Edward, in their roles as Preternatural Branch U.S. Marshals are trying to track down a supernatural bad guy (or guys) who is ripping weretigers to pieces. They can’t share all of their knowledge about who the bad guys are (they’re the Harlequin—supernatural vampire and lycanthrope assassins introduced in book 15) because the Harlequin have a long history of killing all normal humans who find out they exist. There’s a little bit of law enforcement politics and one jerk of a marshal determined to belittle Anita and besmirch her reputation (we never do find out why) but mostly what we have are some really scary bad guys who have a personal issue with Anita.

 

That personal issue is enough to up the stakes considerably, because the Harlequin work for the mother of all vampires and even though her body was destroyed in a previous book, she’s still around and determined to possess Anita and take over her body. With the Harlequin trying to kidnap Anita to facilitate the possession, the world is literally at stake.

 

Throw in a nice subplot about a female marshal who is going to lose her job because she gets infected with lycanthropy and the return of serial killer Olaf who is absolutely certain that Anita wants to be his girlfriend, and you have a ton of problems keeping the plot boiling.

 

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer is a formative novel, perhaps creating and certainly popularizing the cyber punk genre. It has an excellent opening line which decades later people can’t stop talking about, and it’s also the key to the novel. Visuals are Gibson’s bread and butter. Everything we encounter is described in beautiful and excruciating detail—except of course for the main character through whose eyes we experience everything. Description of the environment is much more important to Gibson than plot or characterization (which is not to say that there isn’t a plot or character development or mystery).

 

I’ve read the book several times now and even though I know where we’re going to end up, I still find the journey remarkably fresh and often don’t really know how we’re getting between points in the story. It’s an experience that’s worth having, not only because it’s one of the modern classics that has really influenced the way the cyberpunk genre developed but because it is a beautiful, thought provoking, piece of literature.

 

Now I’ll have to reread Count Zero.

 

Curtains for Three by Rex Stout

Curtains for Three by Rex Stout

The thing I like most about Rex Stout’s collections of novellas is that you can easily read each story in one sitting. No chance to forget a key detail. You digest the story as you go and hopefully come up with the villain before Nero Wolfe tells you who it is. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t guess the villains this time, but I felt like I should have which is a credit to Stout’s writing.

 

My favorite of the three was the first in which a woman and her lover find her husband’s body after he’s committed suicide—except, maybe it wasn’t suicide. Maybe one of them did it. And they have to know the truth before they go ahead and marry each other. The problem? The gun that was lying by her husband’s side when they brought the police in wasn’t there when they discovered the body. So, who moved the gun?

 

What makes this novella so much fun is what happens after Nero Wolfe proves who moved the gun, and of course, his solution to the crime is absolutely outstanding.

 

The other stories are also a lot of fun, but didn’t stand out to me as strongly as the first.

 

Malevolent Nevers by Tom Rimer

Malevolent Nevers by Tom Rimer

I have to start this review with a confession. I misunderstood the opening sentences of the blurb and it led me to expect a very different kind of book that the one Mr. Rimer wrote. The lines are: “Abel Ward just wants to reconnect with his son. After being a ghost for seventeen years, he’s returned and trying to be a parent again.” I don’t know about you, but when I see a horror novel talking about ghosts, I expect to see ghosts. And what a cool premise—ghost dad trying to connect with his boy. Alas, that’s not the kind of ghost Rimer intended us to think about, but the mix up messed up the first fifteen or twenty chapters of the book for me as I started thinking, maybe I misread and Abel is going to become a ghost.

 

Anyway, mix up or not, the novel starts a bit slow, Abel is a mess trying to straighten himself out. His son is an annoying teenager with sometimes difficult to follow speech patterns and who somehow has a cool girlfriend who is left behind when Abel learns that his 105 year old great aunt is dying and he is apparently guilted in to coming to visit her with his boy.

 

It takes a few more chapters, but things finally start to click. It’s a spooky old house on marshy land. The aunt is insane. The neighbors and people of the town all know something bad about the aunt (and apparently Abel) and clearly fear something terrible is about to happen, but they aren’t talking about it. Abel’s also being manipulated by his first crush who is now a housekeeper for his dying aunt.

 

So things are bad and the reader, the aunt, and the neighbors clearly think something supernatural is going to go down, but Abel, realistically I would judge, isn’t willing to even think about such a possibility. And when his aunt insists she not be buried in the family plot but be left out to be gathered up (by what she doesn’t say), Abel won’t even try to comprehend what she’s talking about. And he certainly isn’t ready to believe that none of his ancestors are in the family plot either.

 

Then the aunt dies and things get progressively worse until Abel and his son (and the girlfriend who took the bus to join them) have to fight for their lives to survive the problem at the aunt’s home.

 

As horror story plots go, this one is pretty good, but I do have some major frustrations with it. First off, while I can understand Abel getting all worked up and driving a thousand miles to be with his aunt when she died (she raised him and he ran away from home thirty years earlier and feels guilty) I just can’t understand why he stayed on afterward. The excuse it to get the home ready to sell, but frankly, it’s not clear anyone would ever buy it, and certainly two weeks of work around the house wasn’t going to add any value. And his son is desperate to go back home. It just made no sense and it makes less sense every single day as things get worse and worse.

 

I also don’t understand why no one would just sit Abel down and explain why they thought his house was cursed and that the whole town would die if he didn’t do exactly what they told him to do. He might still have said no, but they keep telling him he knows what he has to do, and he keeps saying he has no idea what they’re talking about, and they are afraid of dying but won’t tell him what’s going on. That made no sense.

 

My last big problem with the book is that we never find out how Abel’s family became keepers of this curse of the Malevolent Nevers. We learn just enough to survive the current problem, but not enough to understand why they got into this arrangement in the first place. Despite the big house, they aren’t wealthy. They aren’t powerful or influential. In a classic deal with the devil, you expect people to get something out of the deal but I don’t see what they got. The only thing I can imagine is that they made the deal to protect their neighbors, but if that’s the case I would have liked Rimer to tell us.

 

I don’t want to end the review on a negative note. Once the mystery of the aunt started to unfold, the story became quite gripping and I read the last three-quarters in one sitting. Rimer can really build suspense and I’m glad I read the book.

 

The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman

The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman

Every year, a startling number of people go missing in the U.S. wilderness never to be heard from again. Jon Billman spotlights a large number of these cases and showcases inept government bureaucracies that often impede the searches they are trying to help facilitate. He also goes into a large number of possible causes for the lost people from natural possibilities (drowning and the body being washed down river) to criminal acts like serial killers or drug deals gone bad to bizarre conspiracy theories (bigfoot, UFOs). The sad truth is that these are unsolved cases and no one really knows what happened. It’s that not knowing what happens that makes this book so terribly depressing, but it’s still an interesting read.

 

We Are Saul by Richard Dee

We Are Saul by Richard Dee

Saul is a pretty good guy who is paralyzed from the neck down after being hit by a vehicle. With absolutely no hope of every regaining the use of his arms and legs, Saul is tempted into an experiment which might make him feel useful again but has to agree to participate without knowing any pertinent details about what he will be doing. I expected the novel to veer into the realm of LitRPGS at this point with Saul being wired into some sort of gaming world, but Richard Dee had a much more interesting direction planned for his hero.

 

The experiment (or “the project” as it is called) is run by a Dr. Tendral who will immediately strike the reader as having shady ethics. It’s not just that he is keeping almost all of the elements of his project secret. He has inserted a nurse into Saul’s original hospital to influence him to agree to join Tendral’s project. And he is clearly cutting Saul off from all real contact with the outside world at least for the first stages of the experiment.

 

Tendral also has a sort of childish pique, getting angry when Saul acts like a human being with reasonable questions rather than serving as an automaton who simply unquestionably does everything Tendral wants. But what does Tendral want? It’s as difficult for the reader as it is for Saul to tell at times. About the only certainty is that Saul will undoubtedly choose wrong again and again (just as I think the reader would in Saul’s place).

 

I’m trying really hard to write this review without giving away the central surprise of the story (i.e. the key to the project). That being said, Tendral and his lack of ethics becomes an increasingly disturbing force in the story and Saul (as a quadriplegic) is really in a vulnerable position when they confront each other.

 

This is one of Dee’s best stories. The problems Saul has are easy to relate to, as are the hard choices he is forced to make—especially the last two. All of this results in one of Dee’s best novels with an ending that really took me by surprise.

 

A Speck in the Sea by John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinsky

A Speck in the Sea by John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinsky

This book gave me chills. John Aldridge, in a moment of carelessness, falls off a fishing boat in the middle of the night sixty or so miles off the coast of the U.S. in the Atlantic Ocean. By all rights, he should have drowned. The chances of finding him before he did drown—especially since it wasn’t noticed that he had fallen for several hours—brings the needle-in-a-haystack analogy to mind. But a combination of his own stubbornness and the hard work of the coastguard rescued him. It’s an amazing story.