Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 35

The Corps 8 In Danger's Path by W.E.B. Griffin

The Corps 8 In Danger’s Path by W.E.B. Griffin

This is another stellar volume in W.E.B. Griffin’s The Corps series and it wraps up the World War II storyline by reviving plot threads from the very first book in the series. What happened to Banning’s wife and Zimmerman’s wife and kids when they were forced to leave them behind when the Fourth Marines were pulled out of China to reinforce the Philippines just before World War II began?

 

In Danger’s Path also spotlights those things that W.E.B. Griffin does better than anyone else in the business—show the planning of operations and the problems that come from interservice and even inter-officer rivalries. In an organic and always interesting manner, Griffin shows how different groups (Banning and Zimmerman’s wives, retired marines and Yangtze River patrol men living in China, and a few marines left on station in China who don’t want to surrender to the Japanese) plan separate efforts to get the heck out of China, across the Gobi and into India. Later, he’s going to show how plans evolve to locate those marines and use them to help set up a weather station in the Gobi that will help the navy plan its operations as it advances on Japan. This is truly fascinating stuff, made much more complex by the lack of cooperation and outright interference that various self-interested groups within the U.S. military and OSS bring to the table.

 

Yet the best part of the novel is the threat that Banning uncovers to the secret of Magic—the codename for everything connected with the U.S. government’s ability to intercept and decipher Japan’s supposedly unbreakable codes. It’s a secret that is giving the U.S. the edge it needs to combat the Empire of Japan and it may have been compromised. And in the process of investigating that, our hero General Pickering finally comes to the internal understanding of how stupidly cavalier he has been with the same secret. His attitude toward secret information has bothered me though out this series and it was nice that he finally came to understand how unacceptable some of his actions have been.

 

This is a great novel that wraps up the storylines of all of the major and most of the minor characters. I suspect that Griffin had considered closing the series with it, but fortunately he decided to return to The Corps and usher them into the Korean War in the next two volumes.

 

The Last Physicist by Dominic Stal

The Last Physicist by Dominic Stal

I have mixed feeling regarding this novel. On the one hand it’s a fairly standard adventure story in which our hero, Will, has to learn to master his power to save a world. On this level, it’s a bit slow moving, but is still entertaining. It’s also a LitRPG in which Will learns to master his powers as if he’s in a game, guided by his AI (more on the AI later). This was quite well done, but isn’t exciting in and of itself. And while on some levels the author tried to make this about truly understanding the way magic works, it kept coming back to how many levels Will accumulated. On yet another level, it’s an interesting story about what AIs will do after the end of the world. I think that’s the tale that future stories in this series will illuminate more fully, but we meet at least three of them in this novel and they are by far the most interesting thing going on.

 

So why mixed feelings when each thread of the story was by itself entertaining? The novel as a whole never quite came together for me. In the first two chapters, the earth is destroyed and with it every person on it except our hero and it never felt real to me, perhaps because Will’s bouncy personality never really seemed to try to come to grips with what happened. I realize that the destruction of the earth was just a plot device to explain how a physicist got involved in a fantasy world, but if you’re going to include it, it needs to matter, and I never felt like it did. I also had a hard time liking Will. I did, eventually, but it took a while. Mostly he annoyed me for a great many chapters and that’s obviously not a great thing when he’s the hero of the story.

 

The Ghost of Harrington Farm by M. L. Bullock

The Ghost of Harrington Farm by M. L. Bullock

Traveling to a Civil War reenactment, Midas and Cassidy get pulled into an investigation into paranormal activity involving an old house where four southern prisoners were murdered during the war. This novel crystalized for me something that has been troubling me for several books now. Cassidy’s ability to see the past is actually damaging the mysterious elements of the story. This whole book centers on the question of who actually murdered the prisoners—a lieutenant or a private—and yet the reader knows from moment one who really did the crime. There is no mystery. And it hurts the story. The investigation needs to bring up the evidence that leads to the solution, not be spoon fed it by Cassidy’s visions.

 

That being said, it’s still a good yarn. One of the team has cancer and it’s hard for the group to come to grips with that. And there’s a ghost dog that adds some warmth and humanity to the tale. I just wish that we could have a little less of Cassidy’s visions telling us what actually happened in the past.

 

Behind the Lines by W.E.B. Griffin

The Corps 7 Behind the Lines by W.E.B. Griffin

I really like this series. I think the gritty detail that Griffin gets into with planning and infighting between the services and what should be mind-numbing bureaucracy but is actually quite fascinating looks into how our military operates makes this series intensely exciting and highly realistic.

 

This book is my favorite since the opening novel, Semper Fi. It takes the readers back to the Philippines as the Japanese conquer it and focuses upon a small handful of American marines and soldiers who decided they were going to violate their orders and refuse to surrender. It then focuses upon their successful efforts to set up a guerilla operation in the Philippines and their struggle to get the U.S. to support their efforts. Getting that help is complicated by politics—Douglas MacArthur has declared that guerilla operations in the Philippines are impossible, so naturally there can be none there to support.

 

Enter our band of heroes in a small intelligence office in the Marine Corps who decide to make contact with the guerillas anyway. Throw in “Wild Bill” Donovan and the young OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and his driving need to control all intelligence services run by the U.S. and you have plenty of room for infighting as political needs get in the way of the practical reason for launching the mission.

 

Griffin gives plenty of action in this novel, but once again, it’s the preparation, the infighting, the rivalries, and the human factor that makes this novel so enjoyable.

 

The Agency: A History of the CIA by Hugh Wilford

 

The Agency: A History of the CIA by Hugh Wilford

This Great Courses book provides an overview of the CIA and manages to strike a fairly neutral tone. It recognizes both its failures and its successes, and its successes that later turned into failures. It also is very good at getting into the basic contradiction of a government agency that needs to be covert in much of its activities in a democracy that needs the government to be transparent in order to maintain itself. Perhaps its best contribution is getting into the context of the CIA’s actions and understanding why they took the steps they took before they get into judgements on whether or not in the long term these actions benefitted the U.S. Overall, it’s a very interesting read.

 

New Legionnaire Novel Will Be Coming Soon

I'm very pleased to report that after far too long a hiatus, I have finished the first draft of the thirteenth Legionnaire novel, The Seduction of Malaquita. Malaquita is a city ruled by Diamonte that is strategically positioned on Diamonte's side of the Angosto Pass where the action was focused in the previous novel. Can Marcus and his legionnaires steal it away from their enemies? I hope you'll be able to find out in September or October.

The Ghost of Gabrielle Bonet by M. L. Bullock

The Ghost of Gabrielle Bonet by M. L. Bullock

Gulf Coast Paranormal is back looking into a haunting in a museum—several hauntings actually. The ghosts of many women shipped into the region to be brides of the settlers that preceded them are restless, and as our heroes investigate they learn that there was both a murder and a coverup in the past that is the root of the problem.

 

The aspect that makes this series so enjoyable is the tensions and interactions within the group of investigators. There was less of that this time around, but the fundamental question they have to deal with is an important one. Cassie’s paranormal talents have led the team down the path to many a solution, but they aren’t scientific evidence and the whole purpose of the group is to find evidence. It’s an interesting problem handled well by the author.

 

Luke Skywalker Can't Read by Ryan Britt

Luke Skywalker Can’t Read by Ryan Britt

This was an eclectic and somewhat random series of essays on scifi topics. The best and most memorable was the title essay in which Britt puts forth the premise that the citizens of the Star Wars universe are all functionally illiterate. The surprising thing is that I was convinced he was right by the end and that part of the dark side of the force is ignorance. If you’re looking for some light reading on a handful (Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien, Back to the Future) of sf series, this is a pretty good one.

 

The Joy of Murder by Gloria Oliver

The Joy of Murder by Gloria Oliver

This novel promises something I’d never encountered in a mystery before. The detective is blind. Think about that for a moment. The detective is blind. She’s also Chinese living in Dallas, Texas in 1930. That’s a very unusual lead character and I wanted to see what Oliver did with her.

 

The mystery itself is quite good. A wealthy bigoted socialite is accused of murdering a Hispanic woman in an area of town it’s difficult to imagine her going to and with evidence of her involvement that even the most dense individual has to believe screams “set up”.

 

Dai, the blind detective, gets involved because the son of the socialite, who is clearly interested in her, comes and asks for her help. He’s desperate. His father is afraid that the charges against his wife will screw up a business deal he is trying to finalize and so he’s not racing to the woman’s defense with high priced attorneys and the like. That leaves Dai and her brother Jacques to save the day.

 

Dai’s family is also quite wealthy having built a highly successful laundry business. She appears well educated and is, of course, incredibly smart. She follows the clues with the help of Jacques and brings the mystery to a successful conclusion by the last page of the novel.

 

My complaint with the story is one of point-of-view. Having created a fascinating detective that could make her mysteries totally unique, Oliver doesn’t take advantage of this. Instead of telling the story through Dai’s “eyes”, she tells everything through Jacques’ point-of-view and this, in my opinion, is a terrible lost opportunity. This novel had the potential to be a fantastically unique experience. Instead, it’s just another mystery.

 

I hope that Oliver fixes this problem in the next book.

 

Close Combat by W.E.B. Griffin

The Corps 6 Close Combat by W.E.B. Griffin

This is another excellent volume in The Corp series, following marine aviators, infantry, and press corps as they return to the states from the fighting on Guadalcanal. On the one hand, this book is clearly setting up the next which will focus on contacting guerillas in the Philippines and the tension between the intelligence services and especially the OSS and General MacArthur. Yet it also shows other aspects of life for servicemen and women during the war—especially the press corps—and ends with a tremendously emotional moment between a very young photographer and a medal of honor winner with an attitude problem.

 

This series is not high on actual combat. Griffin’s gift is to make the bureaucratic operations of the war intensely exciting. He makes it look as if the war has to be first fought with the bureaucrats in the military and in Washington before guns can actually be turned upon the enemy combatants.

 

My first complaint, and it’s a small one, is that Griffin is extremely interested in the romantic endeavors of his cast of characters. A lot of pages get spent on these endeavors which at first appearance does not seem to be directed toward chronicling the deeds of the marines in the war. However, upon consideration, it occurred to me that the men and women in harms way probably did indeed spend a lot of time thinking about potential romantic escapades that they could pursue when off the front, and so I think that in the broader view of the lives of these men and women these pages were probably right on target.

 

My second complaint, again a small one, is how many of the characters are extremely wealthy. That seems improbable, but I don’t know that it is. I’ve noticed in these sorts of series that authors love to focus on officers of tremendous financial resources.