Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 37

Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 17 Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton

Hamilton is back in her old form in this novel. The opening chaptermilton sees Anita receive a package containing a severed head with a return address in the city of Las Vegas. (Talk about opening with a bang!) Shortly thereafter she learns that the head belongs to a vampire executioner and that several members of the SWAT team backing him up were also killed. Oh, and there’s a note painted in blood inviting Anita to Vegas.

 

So this is a good beginning and it’s followed by the sort of action that Hamilton used to give us. She has to make contact with the police many of whom do not like her because she’s a woman and has gotten a reputation for sleeping with any and everyone who moves. (Hamilton tries to make this look like an undeserved reputation and it’s certainly exaggerated a bit, but thanks to the ardeur, Anita does sleep with a lot of people. The better question which Hamilton asks is why should her sleeping habits impact her ability to do her job? After all, she has the highest number of vampire kills in the country.) There’s also lycanthrope politics and some interesting metaphysics coming both from the vampire serial killer she’s tracking, plus the Mother of All Darkness, plus a lot of the cops. And the focus of the book does mostly stay on trying to catch the killer.

 

All of this is to the good. In addition, Hamilton mostly avoided doing the things that have been annoying me for most of the last six books. Sex is not dominating the vast majority of the pages and sometimes the sex that is there serves a clear plot purpose. (Hamilton even does one of the major sex scenes off screen, which is where most of them belong.) This book also downplays the endless relationship talk that has overtaken so many of the novels, letting the reader focus on figuring out what is going on and how Anita is going to end the threat.

 

So lots of good, not so much bad, and a major storyline that has been building for many books is seriously advanced.

 

Murder by the Book by Rex Stout

Murder by the Book by Rex Stout

Stout does it again! Police in two different jurisdictions each have a murder victim that—unknown to them—are linked by the most fragile of threads. Fortunately, Nero Wolfe is around to make the connections for them. But what a fragile connection it is! Both victims had contact with an unpublished book and that contact seems to be the motivating force behind their murder. Why? How? Not even Nero Wolfe seems to have a clue, but that doesn’t stop him from working the very slight angles he can find nor from performing his magic to make the murderer act again.

 

I figured out a tremendous amount of the mystery and—like Homicide Detective Cramer—it got me nowhere. Each new clue fit snugly into my developing idea of the crime and I still couldn’t get to the solution. Nero Wolfe then gave a huge hint, and I still didn’t identify the criminal. And yet, I thought that Stout was fairer with the reader than he usually is. Wolfe wasn’t hiding his clues this time. All the information is there for a reader sharp enough to put the clues together to solve the mystery.

 

Date with Death by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 57 Date with Death By Warren Murphy

Someone is murdering Mexicans and dumping their bodies in a canyon in New Mexico and Smith sends Remo and Chiun in to find out what’s going on and put an end to it. This is a surprisingly straightforward adventure for the pair of assassins. There really isn’t any investigating needed. Most of the book involves them penetrating a fortress in New Mexico and killing everyone in their spectacular way. (It’s always fun to see proof of just how amazing Remo and Chiun’s physical abilities are.) A little extra interest is generated by one of the bad guys being an army officer Remo despised back in Vietnam. So nothing groundbreaking here, but still a lot of fun.

 

Conquistadors by Michael Wood

Conquistadors by Michael Wood

Here’s a book that takes a fairly in depth look at the actions of four conquistadors—invaders Cortez, Pizzaro and another Pizzaro, and shipwrecked De Vaca. The accounts are all fascinating, drawing on both Spanish and native sources. The aspect that impressed me the most was Wood’s attempts to show how each group was viewed by the other—a clash of cultures in addition to the military conflicts.

 

The most interesting account if of De Vaca who, together with three companions, was shipwrecked on what was probably Galveston Island off the coast of Texas. After a period of enslavement, he and his companions journeyed for years across what would eventually become the American Southwest. His writings about the peoples he met and the clear respect he held for them makes him a highly valuable source for modern historians—even if the Spaniards of his time were not interested in what he had to tell them other than as a guide for new people to conquer.

 

Maple Mayhem by Jessie Crockett

Sugar Grove Mysteries 2 Maple Mayhem by Jessie Crockett

Dani Greene is back for another mystery together with her cast of zany neighbors and crazy family members (or is that zany family members and crazy neighbors). This time, she’s trying to set up a syrup cooperative so that she and her syrup producing neighbors can buy their supplies at a discount, but someone is out to stop them.

 

For the first half of the novel, the villain restricts him or herself to simple vandalism and warnings, but things take a turn for the far more serious when Dani’s number one suspect is murdered. Dani, naturally, is one of the acting police chief’s top suspects, but the reader never has to take this too seriously. After all, this is the same ex-boyfriend who ticketed Dani for broken taillights when he discovered her car with the tires slashed, the paint keyed, the lights broken out, and a warning to stop the cooperative scratched into the paint.

 

Overall, this is another solid mystery in the delightful New England setting of Sugar Grove.

 

 

Cruel Zing Melodies by Glen Cook

Cruel Zinc Melodies (Garrett Files #12) by Glen Cook

Cook has found another great problem for everyone’s favorite fantasy detective to tackle in this twelfth volume of the Garrett Files. Beer magnate Max Weider is trying to build a theater to keep his daughter and her friends happy and it is being plagued by vandalism, giant bugs, and ghosts. Enter Garrett to save the day. The only problem? Whatever is really happening in the theater has attracted the attention of some of the biggest powerhouses on the Hill, meaning that the movers and shakers of his kingdom are going to make solving this one a lot harder than it has to be.

 

The underlying problems (there are more than one) are good ones and it’s always fun to watch Garrett pull the layers off the mysteries to get to the bad stuff at the core. There’s also a side plot of interest to long term readers of the series. Garrett and his on-again off-again girlfriend are trying to decide if it’s time for them to stop playing game with each other and get serious. At the same time, the ghost angle permits Garrett to get some unexpectedly sweet closure with Eleanor, the ghost in his painting.

 

Overall, this is a good addition to the series—not the absolute best but a very credible read.

 

 

Target Pendergast Uncovered by Ian Welch

Target Pendergast Uncovered by Ian Welch

I picked up this story as a free book when I first started reading novels electronically and I recently reread it. It’s a fun little tale of a surfer dude who gets pulled into an effort to stop thousands of people from being murdered in a terrorist attack.

 

The story opens with a rather chilling scene of a former IRA terrorist murdering a police inspector with VX nerve toxin, setting up the threat. The action then switches to introduce the totally likable surfer dude, Brad Pendergast, who prevents a robbery and in so doing comes to the attention of the CIA and British MI6. They rather unethically recruit him to penetrate a group of ex-IRA (now called RIRA) terrorists by using his charms with the ladies to win the heart of the head terrorist’s daughter, Cara. The problem—Brad is really not a devious sort. He wears his heart on his sleeve and very quickly, the two actually fall in love.

 

This greatly disappoints her father and one of his men (Liam) who wants Cara for himself and they move to break the two apart. Then the story takes a turn for the worst. Brad, having learned just a little of the terrorist’s efforts to buy more of the nerve toxin, goes all James Bond and pretends to be a rival arms dealer trying to buy the toxin himself. This is really unfortunate. Brad as a persistent love-interest of the daughter was believable. Having him play arms dealer just didn’t work for me. And it takes up most of the book. It’s enjoyable, but in no way credible, if that makes sense.

 

Then the bad guys get the toxin and Brad gets sent to Ireland by MI6 to try and lean from Cara what the plan is. That was slightly more credible than the last part, but still not as well done as the first third or so of the book.

 

Overall, I enjoyed the story, although I really don’t understand why Cara kept telling her father she wanted to talk about Liam’s advances towards her (a conversation her father didn’t want to have) instead of saying—Dad, Liam raped me—which I believe would have gotten Liam doused with nerve toxin in about two-and-a-half seconds. Then again, perhaps that’s why she never used the direct approach. The author would have lost one of his most important bad guys.

 

The Aeneid of Virgil by Elizabeth Vandiver

The Aeneid of Virgil by Elizabeth Vandiver

Elizabeth Vandiver has fast become one of my favorite Great Courses lecturers. She has a gift for walking the reader through very complex subjects and bringing out the richness of great works of literature. This time she looks at Virgil’s Aeneid, one of the most important epic poems in the western canon. She not only shows the brilliance of the poem and its tributes to the great epics of Homer, she helps the reader understand just why it was so important to Romans and to the societies that follow them. She makes me want to reread the epic thirty plus years after I first enjoyed it.

 

The Unity Series on Sale for 99 Cents Each

For the month of July, the four books of my The Unity series will be 99 cents apiece on Amazon. The books are:

Fugitive only 99 cents or free on Kindle Unlimited

Prisoner only 99 cents or free on Kindle Unlimited

Bride only 99 cents or free on Kindle Unlimited

Empyreal only 99 cents or free on Kindle Unlimited

 

Here’s what the series is all about:

An arranged marriage bridging two nations that loathe each other…A galaxy tumbling toward galactic recession and war…Jewel doesn’t want to be part of any of this, but she’s still the only person who can possibly avert an apocalypse on a galactic scale.

 

Armenium is the rarest, most valuable, resource in the galaxy, making faster-than-light travel possible. Its only known source is controlled by the militant Hegemony of Armen, a brutal and uncivilized people who maintain their monopoly through blunt force and intimidation. The ultrasophisticated, intensely capitalistic, Cartel Worlds, have built their fortunes refining and distributing the armenium for the Armenites, but the alliance between the two peoples is not a match made in heaven. The two cultures are vastly different, held tenuously together by marriage alliances between the leading Houses of Armen and the mightiest of the Cartels. Now a second source of armenium has been discovered, threatening the tenuous relationship between the two powers as forces within the hegemony fight over the implications of the find for themselves and their pseudo-religious Unity. For the Armenites have a far more intense relationship with the armenium than the rest of the galaxy could possibly understand. Now the future stability of all human space depends upon one young Cartelite woman’s ability to use her arranged marriage to penetrate the mysteries of the Hegemony and find a path that preserves the peace for everyone.

 

I hope you’ll give it a try!

Gilbert M. Stack

 

War of the Worlds by Wade Wellman

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: War of the Worlds by Manly Wade Wellman

All of the enjoyment in this novel is based on the idea of bringing Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger together in the same volume to deal with a crisis—in this case, H. G. Wells’ famous War of the Worlds. We get a little added joy when we see other characters from the two series (John Watson, Edward Malone, and Sir John Roxton) make appearances, although Malone’s is only as an author. It’s quite possible that a couple of the other characters were people I should have (but didn’t) recognize as well.

 

The novel opens with Holmes coming into possession of an unusual crystal which shows images of somewhere else. He brings it to Challenger and the two study it together, ultimately deducing that it shows Mars. They discover the life on Mars and are still watching when the invasion of earth is launched. The two then split into their own stories—both men taking it on themselves to observe the invaders to gain precious knowledge for the defense of the planet, before eventually teaming up again toward the end of the book.

 

Overall, I enjoyed the novel, although I didn’t feel like Sherlock Holmes quoting Keats seemed to be in character. (Perhaps I’m misremembering, it’s been a while since I’ve read original Holmes stories.) I also didn’t think that Holmes and Mrs. Hudson being longtime lovers was a plausible addition. I always thought of Doyle’s Holmes as pretty much asexual, but I guess reasonable people could come to different conclusions.

 

If you like the idea of mixing Holmes, Challenger, and Martians, you should definitely give this book a try.