Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 39

Destroyer 55 Master???s Challenge by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 55 Master’s Challenge by Warren Murphy

This is one of the storylines that stands out most clearly in my memory from my first reading of this series more than 20 years ago. It’s also one of the best all around Destroyer novels. In it, Remo discovers he has peers—men and women from rival houses whose superior skills make them capable of killing even the Masters of Sinanju. As if that is not enough, the reader is also introduced to the master who trained Chiun as Chiun initiates an ancient Sinanju tradition, The Master’s Challenge—a coming of age ceremony in which the coming master proves himself in battles to the death with the scions of these rival houses. As if that isn’t enough, the Dutchman returns, even more insane than when we last saw him, still determined to fulfill his vow to Chiun’s first student and kill the reigning master.

 

Murphy is at the top of his form in this one. The rival masters are all at least respectable and most are genuinely likeable, and Remo doesn’t want to fight them. But honor and tradition are part of the life’s blood of all of these ancient houses and Remo’s desires do not seem to matter. So this is a great problem with a lot of raw emotion as Remo faces off against the other masters and Chiun confronts the Dutchman, but that still isn’t everything that Murphy has to offer in this book. While Remo is MIA dealing with Sinanju’s business, Harold Smith has to run CURE all by himself and he has uncovered a doozy of a problem. Someone is planning to assassinate the president and they have found a way to bypass the Secret Service to get at him. Smith has never seemed to think too highly of Remo, but having to do everything himself gives him a new appreciation for the talents of his enforcement arm, and the reader a new appreciation for Smith’s own dedication to duty and his own impeccable sense of honor.

 

Murphy brilliantly balances all of these storylines as he steadily guides Remo to the most important fight of his life. And the consequences of this novel continue to reverberate in all the remaining books including the legacy series about Remo’s children. If you have never read a Destroyer novel, I would not start with this book. But if you’ve read even a handful, this novel is a must read.

 

The Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 15 The Harlequin by Laurell K. Hamilton

There’s a lot of setup to this Anita Blake novel. New bad guys are in town—vampires so threatening that the good guys are afraid to mention their name—and for once it appears that they are not after Anita, Jean Claude, and friends. Instead, they’ve come for Malcom and his vampire church and Malcolm needs help—help that our heroes feel pressured to give when the bad guys start messing with them too despite having “promised” not to. As the story goes on, it turns out that the bad guys are not all united and many of them are very scared that the mother of all darkness is returning to claim them again.

 

As a plot goes, this was pretty good for this series—especially in comparison to the last few books. As has become par for the course lately, there is too much sex and relationship talk, but it didn’t seem quite as overbearing as it has recently, and it was more “useful” in the story as opposed to simply being unnecessary decoration. Hopefully this means Hamilton is getting interested in plot again.

 

The Dutch Shoe Mystery by Ellery Queen

The Dutch Shoe Mystery by Ellery Queen

This was the most complicated Ellery Queen story yet and despite focusing correctly on the right clue, I came nowhere close to solving it. When Abigail Doorn, wealthy supporter of New York City charities, is murdered in the hospital she founded, the demand that her murderer be caught rises up from powerful men and women across America. The woman was strangled with a wire while unconscious waiting for surgery and the culprit appears to be a man posing as her surgeon. And everyone had a reason to kill the beloved woman because they needed the money she was leaving them in her will. It’s a perplexing case and it almost slips up even Ellery Queen.

 

Honestly, this was not one I ever had any chance to solve. The clues are subtle—way too much so for me. But this is a well written adventure and I thoroughly enjoyed watching Ellery sift through the clues and eventually explain them to me. I’m not so certain that this case would have resulted in convictions in court without the all-important confessions at the end of the book. I’m sure a defense attorney would have loved trying to confuse the jury to make it harder to follow Ellery’s chain of logic. But then again, maybe not. The very last clue we discover after Ellery has solved the crime makes the case seem pretty rock solid.

 

Let Me Be Your Motivation by Tay Mo'Nae

Let Me Be Your Motivation by Tay Mo’Nae

Let me start out by saying that I know that I'm not the target audience for this novel. Yet, the blurb about a woman (Jordyn) finding out at the altar that her fiancé (Mason) is already married and his wife is pregnant was such an emotionally powerful premise that I decided I had to read it. I think we can all imagine that scene playing out in a half dozen ways and I really wanted to see how Mo'Nae handled it.

 

The answer--it was all right--not great, but all right. Mason (the already-married-dirt-bag) is looking uncomfortable as the minister guides them through the ceremony and then his wife stands up and--you guessed it--gets mad at the poor woman he's just made a fool of, not him.

 

Unfortunately, I find that believable. I would have preferred a little more build up and I was shocked to find out that Mason had married the other woman only two weeks before, but the scene definitely succeeded in creating the emotionally damaged heroine that Mo'Nae needed for the rest of her story--but it's that story that really makes me question this author's idea of the perfect man.

 

Jordyn, our heroine, reeling from this horrible betrayal and being humiliated in front of family and friends, goes on her honeymoon without Mason where the very first night she gets blackout drunk. She's not a drinker to begin with and she's staggering when the "perfect man", professional wide receiver, Amir, encounters her, and feeds her more drinks. He then brings her back to his room where she sprawls her signature on a nondisclosure agreement she never reads, has very graphic sex with him, and then wakes up in the morning not remembering who Amir is or how she got there or really anything except drinking the night before.

 

She flees from the perfect man in shame. Wait a minute? The perfect man? The perfect man takes advantage of totally drunk women? I don't think that fits most of our definitions of perfection.

 

Jordyn, of course, ends up having sex with him again, and I feared that this novel was going to go the route of good sex equals fantastic relationship, but Mo'Nae finally got her author's feet beneath her and started developing a nice vacation-relationship with give and take between woman and man and some genuinely fun times. It was good to read and actually worked to make me believe that this couple had a chance despite tremendous differences in personality.

 

Then the two exes (Amir had just broken up with his longtime girlfriend) reenter the picture to cause more trouble. I thought that Amir's ex was well handled, but frankly I did not for a moment find Mason (Jordyn's ex) credible at all and can't understand why Mo’Nae didn't embrace the fact that she had successfully sold him to the reader as a Grade A Jerk. Trying to make him nice in the end was jarring, not credible, and not needed.

 

Overall, I think this story could have been truly great, but only comes out being okay.

 

A Troll Walks into a Bar by Douglas Lumsden

A Troll Walks into a Bar by Douglas Lumsden

The human detective in a fantasy world has become a very popular trope since Glen Cook published Sweet Silver Blues back in 1990. This novel looked like more of the same, but proved to be a richer experience than I first expected. The fantasy world is more of an urban fantasy world in that it appears technology-wise to be twenty-first century Earth with all the bureaucracy that goes with it. Where Cook's Garrett is based on Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin (with the Deadman playing Nero Wolfe), Lumsden's Alexander Southerland is more in line with Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, going from one beating to the next until he finally figures out who committed the crime.

 

The mystery—which ends up being who committed a murder—revolves around a mysterious box that must be kept cold and is boobytrapped so the wrong party can't open it. What is in that box proves to be both very interesting and a credible motivator for everything that happens in the story. It also depends heavily on some excellent worldbuilding that forms the foundation of this novel and presumably the series.

 

If you're a fan of the detective-in-a-fantasy-world style of story, you will definitely want to check this one out.

 

Destroyer 54 Last Drop by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 54 Last Drop by Warren Murphy

This one will pull you right in. The novel begins with a rather typical Destroyer problem. Someone has found a way to infuse pure heroine into coffee and coffee fanatics across the country are dying in droves from the resulting (and unexpected) drug overdose. CURE begins to investigate and discovers that something far more troubling to them personally is going on. Everyone that Remo has contact with ends up dead by an unknown assassin’s hand suggesting someone knows about CURE and also putting Smith in great danger.

 

As Remo continues to try and track down the source of the tainted coffee, Chiun races off to protect Smith who is already in trouble. And then things get really exciting. Remo is facing off against a master of the mechanical trap and while the reader knows he has to survive to star in the next 100+ books in the series, the threats seem genuine as he encounters them. Remo is also going through a sort of existential crisis (again) about his profession (i.e. killing people) and I thought that his resolution was the best one they have come up with yet for his periodic distaste for his profession.

 

Let me add that the ultimate villain should have been obvious but wasn’t. I’m embarrassed I didn’t catch on earlier. Murphy actually used the tropes of the series against me, and I loved it. This is four books in a row that the author has found his mojo again, giving me a lot of hope for the next novel.

 

Whispering Nickel Idols by Glen Cook

Whispering Nickel Idols (Garrett Files #11) by Glen Cook

This is the best motivation for Garrett to get involved in a problem since Sweet Silver Blues. In that one, he was asked to locate his first great love. In this one, he is asked to pay his debt to very scary mob boss Chodo Contague by helping to find out if he’s really in a poison-induced coma (with the poisoner being Chodo’s equally scary daughter who is a sometime Garrett-love-interest. What makes this so good is that Garrett always fought not to become Chodo’s man, and yet the genius crime lord succeeded in using Garrett’s own code to reel him in.

 

So Garrett is investigating something he wants no part of and then things get really crazy. Someone is making people spontaneously combust. There is another flock of weird cultists in town and they are not happy with Garrett. There are some magic cats (which I think people should have realized earlier really were magic, but what the heck). And there’s the requisite mysterious woman in the background tied in unclear ways to everything that is happening.

 

Cook is on his game again in the eleventh book of the series, making me anxious to get to book twelve.

 

24/7 Demon Mart 2 Monster Burger by D.M. Guay

24/7 Demon Mart 2 Monster Burger by D.M. Guay

D.M. Guay picks up just where she left off in her awesome novel, The Graveyard Shift. Perennial loser, Lloyd, is still a loser after helping to save the world, but his success and poor judgment has caused him additional problems. For example, paying off all the money he owes his mother just a couple of weeks in to working what she thinks is a minimum wage job has made her suspect that he’s really entered the drug trade. And he’s also horrified to discover that God took him seriously when he made that fervent I’ll-reform-my-life-if-you-get-me-out-of-this prayer (and how many of us haven’t done the same thing on occasion?) and He expects Lloyd not only to keep working in the ultra-dangerous Demon Mart but to get fit so he can do the job better. (And this is not the kindly Jesus God, it’s the fire-and-brimstone Old-Testament-wrath God.)

 

So life is not looking good for Lloyd as he reluctantly returns to his job where the only joy is coworker DeeDee whom he has a crush on and the Monster Burger joint across the street which has just come into new management and become highly weird. Add to that that nothing works properly in the newly rebuilt Demon Mart including the demon portal and their protective charms and life could not be crazier for poor Lloyd. (And if you read the first book, you will realize just how insanely crazy that means things have to be.) There are pixies, carnivorous plants, and more weird demons, plus, as you can tell from the great little image at the beginning of each chapter—zombies, zombies, and more zombie.

 

D.M. Guay is clearly an aficionado of the zombie movie genre, telling us repeatedly in this novel that Dawn of the Dead was a documentary, not a work of fiction. And she brings all of her impressive zombie chops to this novel managing to do so with humor and style as opposed to the typical blood fest. And throughout everything, those crazy pixies keep making things ever more dire and complicated.

 

Guay out did herself in this one. Can’t wait to read the next.

 

The Corps 2 Call to Arms by W.E.B. Griffin

The Corps 2 Call to Arms by W.E.B. Griffin

Ken “Killer” McCoy and his fellow marines return in the second volume of The Corps series as Griffin chronicles the Marine Corps trying to rapidly bring itself up to war footing after Pearl Harbor. All the characters from the last book return. Banning is blind; Pickering is in flight school; and McCoy gets drafted to spy on a fellow marine whom many in the corps believe is either a secret communist, insane, or evilly determined to destroy the corps by transforming the marines into a version of the British Commandos called the Marine Raiders. The problem with this existential threat is that the “evil” commander has the ear of president Franklin Delano Roosevelt—so much so that the president’s own son is a high ranking officer in the raiders.

 

Griffin continues to make the internal marine politics just as exciting as most writers make a battlefield. He also pays some attention to the spouses and girlfriends of active service marines, showing how the war impacts the civilian members of marine families. This touches upon the area where Griffin is weakest—his marines and their girlfriends fall in love at first sight and never look back. He does a better job with relationships that were established before the series began. And of course, he does his best job showing people maneuver and grow within the structures of the corps.

 

If you’re looking for a book that makes the internal operations of the marine corps breathlessly exciting, this is a good series to look at. I’m already anticipating the next novel.

 

Trouble in Triplicate by Rex Stout

Trouble in Triplicate by Rex Stout

Every once in a while, Stout treats Nero Wolfe fans to a group of novellae—stories that are a little bit simpler than his full-length novels but every bit as good. In Before I Die, Wolfe gets one of those problems that I wouldn’t even begin to know how to approach. A gangster has tried to protect his real daughter by hiring a woman to play the role and that woman is now blackmailing him. Wolfe has to call her off without endangering the real daughter. And then of course, everything is complicated by a violent death. (I don’t know why someone has to die in every Nero Wolfe story. The original problem was fascinating without the murder.)

 

In Help Wanted, Male, someone is out to kill Nero Wolfe and he, quite naturally, wants to prevent that from happening. This is a fun little novella and not only because I figured out the bad guy and his motivation. What’s really best about it is that Nero Wolfe makes an embarrassing mistake which is, as readers of the series know, highly unusual.

 

In Instead of Evidence, Wolfe is maneuvered into figuring out who is responsible for killing a man with an exploding cigar. Yes, you read that correctly. The murder weapon is a lethal version of a novelty prank item and the suspects all work for a company that designs such pranks. As one would expect from Stout, it’s another very clever mystery.