Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 4

The Beast of Brenton Woods by Jackson R. Thomas

The Beast of Brenton Woods by Jackson R. Thomas

There’s not a lot of buildup to this short novel. Almost from page one, the werewolf makes its intensely bloody appearance, and the bodies start piling up as the creature begins a rampage that appears to be intended to depopulate the entire town.

 

That being said, Thomas still manages to create a lot of likeable dinners-in-waiting in this book and a lot of jerks we can’t wait for the werewolf to munch upon. There are two elements that really complicate the story. The first is the suspicion that one of the young teens in the story is somehow related to the werewolf. The other is a couple of corrupt cops whose violent tendencies get mixed up with the werewolf’s predations.

 

While the race to get into the action prevents any real buildup of tension early in the novel, there is still concern over which characters will survive. My major complaint is that I never felt an adequate reason was given to explain why the werewolf suddenly returned to Brenton Woods, just as there was no hint at where it has been for the past generation. Given its full moon body count and endless appetite, it seems likely that this creature has left thousands dead in the generation that has just passed (dozens each full moon). So where are those bodies? And why doesn’t law enforcement (national? global?) seem to have any idea that it exists? This creature has been gorging itself for at least a generation. You just can’t lose a dozen or two dozen people from a random town every month in extremely gruesome manners without someone noticing a pattern.

 

Still, if you don’t think very hard, it’s a lot of fun.

 

Nancy Drew 1 Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

Nancy Drew 1 Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene

I have been rereading the Hardy Boy series that I read as a young boy fiftyish years ago, and I decided to read the first Nancy Drew book to see how it compared. First off, The Secret of the Old Clock may be a better mystery than the first Hardy Boys book. The story opens with Nancy meeting two nice elderly women who are taking care of a young girl. They are of very modest means and it comes up in conversation that they had a wealthy relative who had promised to look after them in his will, and then didn’t. He left all of his money to a family that Nancy reluctantly admits are not her favorite people. That reluctance is an important part of Nancy’s character. She is an extremely nice and caring individual, and she does not like to speak ill of anyone.

 

Over the next days, Nancy meets other people whom the wealthy relative had been helping and had promised to take care of when he died, and finally one of them mentions having seen a will—a will that is different than the one about to be probated. This leads Nancy to start investigating what happened to that will and she wonders if some furniture thieves that keep showing up might have something to do with its disappearance. The title lets the reader know from the beginning where the will is. It’s just a question of whether Nancy can find it.

 

Nancy is empowered by a father who trusts her, much as the Hardy Boys’ parents trust them. Yet she is also more restricted in her actions and behavior, in keeping with what Harriet Adams, daughter of Edward Stratemeyer who created Nancy Drew, believed was the proper attitude of young women when she rewrote several of the books in 1950s and 1960s. In both versions, Nancy saves the day and provides a pretty good story.

 

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WInterhaven for 99 cents

My novel Winterhaven is on sale for 99 cents for the next 3 weeks on Amazon, and it’s still free on Kindle Unlimited.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Winterhaven-Gi...

 

Fantasy novels tend to revolve around a very small cast of characters whose actions move mountains and determine the fate of worlds. The scale tends to be grandiose right from the beginning—destroy the one ring or find the Sword of Shannara. Even if the heroes are men or women of modest birth, the action often depends on the decisions of a few great individuals. I had been wondering for years if there wasn’t a different formula on which to build a fantasy epic. I wanted the grandiose scale, but I wanted to take my time to build up to the world-shattering challenges. Phrased a little differently, I always wondered why the entire universe had to be at stake in every Doctor Who episode. So, I invented my Duchy of Winterhaven with two main goals in mind—crafting a tremendously exciting story on a less than global scale and adding a touch of realism by showing how great deeds depended on a large cast of people doing their small but pivotal part. In doing so, I hoped to bring to life not a trio of intrepid adventurers but a duchy’s worth of players.

 

So Winterhaven became the tale of a massive political struggle to pull the reins of power away from the lord-constable who rules the city and into the hands of the conniving Lord Maldon. Both men depend upon a host of great and minor lords to maintain themselves, and Maldon appears to have subverted a great many of them. Yet, every man and woman acts in their own perceived interests, and many are just as cunning as Maldon as he leads the duchy into its first major war in a generation.

 

At the same time, and equally important, Winterhaven is the story of a young knight and his brothers and sister trying to make their way in a world that doesn’t quite fit them. The knight is investigating a horrific crime that has the potential to shake the city to its core. The siblings are caught in the center of the political struggle, trying to support their uncle, the lord-constable, while slowly uncovering evidence that the threat facing them is far graver than the political struggle everyone else thinks they’re fighting.

 

What results from these two major plot threads is a standalone novel that launches my Winterhaven series. It’s packed with intrigue, military clashes, betrayals, fell magics, and a few men and women who find themselves on the sharp end making choices that will determine the fate of the entire duchy.

 

The Hardy Boys 5 Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon

The Hardy Boys 5 Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon

This review refers to the blue hardback edition of the novel. For the first time in the series, Frank and Joe travel out of the Bayport Area to investigate a mystery. Their father is investigating criminals who robbed an armored car in the west and Frank and Joe are called out to assist him. While changing planes in Chicago, there is an attempt to kidnap them to put pressure on their father to back off, but they escape.

 

Running alongside the current mystery is an historical one involving the theft of gold years before when criminals attempted to rob a group of miners. One of the miners escaped with the gold and disappeared, presumably running off with the treasure, but the action was outside the man’s character and the idea that he is a thief doesn’t sit well with his surviving partner. So, while Frank and Joe are looking for the bad guys out in the Rockies, they are also looking for some sign of what happened to the missing miner and the gold.

 

The boys make a lot of mistakes in this book. Some are quite understandable like believing a man who says he has a message from their father. Others, prying at the walls of a mineshaft with a crowbar and causing a cave in made the young men seem a lot stupider than their detective exploits would make credible.

 

By midway through the book there have been multiple attempts to kill Frank and Joe—a serious level of danger that doesn’t seem to cause their father (who is laid up with broken ribs) to do anything more than advise them to be careful. I have to admit that this bothers me. Yes, they are the heroes of the story, but Fenton Hardy really must be cold to not be more concerned about the safety of his sons.

 

In many ways, the plot of this novel doesn’t make sense except to give the Hardy boys a chance to have an adventure that feels like an old western. There are pistols and rifles (not in the hands of the Hardys), horses, rugged terrain, an old gold mine (or two), etc. The question is: Why is the armored-car-robbing gang here? Yes, they have a connection to the 25-year-old gold robbery, but there really was no reason for them to hang out in this area while Fenton Hardy was looking for them—other than to give the Hardy boys a chance to investigate in the west.

 

Paradise Club by Tim Meyers

Paradise Club by Tim Meyers

Ever since Stephen King’s The Running Man, it seems like people have been fascinated by the idea of a game show where the stakes are literally life and death and Tim Meyers is clearly playing with that theme in his book Paradise Club. There are only two catches. First, the players, thousands of guests at a new island resort, don’t know that they are entering a kill or be killed game. And second, they aren’t really in a game show—the situation is much bleaker than that.

 

The set up is fairly quick. Thousands of people have won a free stay at a new resort which insists they leave all cell phones and other ways to contact the outside world behind. Oh, and, almost immediately, FBI criminal profiler Elliot Harper witnesses an actual murder carried out by the staff which causes the club to advance their timeline and start the “skirmish” early.

 

What follows for about half the novel is what is often referred to as “slaughter porn”—people being killed in large numbers in grotesque ways as the initially large cast gets cut down to a more manageable size. While this is happening, the reader will be struggling with how unbelievable it is to think that even a rich billionaire can get away with murdering thousands of people in a weekend, but Meyers actually has a couple of solutions to that problem which come down to—he’s crazy and doesn’t believe anyone can stop him.

 

Slowly but surely, the survivors start trying to fight back, leading to the first thing that really bothered me about this novel. The bad guys are using axes, swords, hammers, and stuff like that—not guns for the most part. I think in a resort that has kitchens, bar stools, etc., even the least creative person would find something they could use as a weapon. It might not be a good weapon, but it’s better than your bare hands.

 

The second is that many people never seem to be able to deal with the fact that hundreds of other people have been killed in front of them and the bad guys chasing them want them to be the next victims. Repeatedly, they maneuver themselves into positions of minor advantage and squander their chances. They stop to talk to the bad guys. They decide that it is wrong to kill the blood-soaked individual who just murdered the other three people with them. Or they decide that what they really need is a captive they can use as a hostage despite ample evidence that the villains find each other totally disposable. It's mindboggling and I’d like to think that it’s not realistic, but maybe I’m wrong.

 

The final thing that really bothered me about the book was the author’s decision to turn it into something with a supernatural (or at least scifi/horror) twist. This detracted dramatically from the already established plot, and to my mind, added nothing positive except to help explain the cultlike fanaticism of many of the staff.

 

So, if you’re looking for mindless action with an incredibly high death count, this is a good book. I did enjoy it. But I enjoy it a lot more when I stop thinking about the serious and totally avoidable problems that permeate two-thirds of the story.

 

A Mystic Murder by Kennedy Chase

A Mystic Murder by Kennedy Chase

This is a short mystery about a retired detective who also happens to be a member of a family of witches. The book starts with the detective discovering a dead body stuffed into her oven. Naturally, she finds this disturbing and unusual and worries a bit about how the small town will react to the news. (Her ancestors helped establish the town after fleeing Salem Massachusetts, and there are those who still think poorly of her and her family.)

 

What follows is a pretty typical investigation story. The heroine is taken on as a consultant to her old police force despite the body being found in her home. She then questions everyone possibly involved with the dead man as if she were still a cop. For about the first two-thirds of the novel, I wondered why the author bothered to make her heroine a witch. For the last third, I wished she hadn’t as suddenly magic becomes the cause of everything, diverting from an interesting investigation.

 

That being said, the inclusion of magic does make sense by the end and I suspect gives a clue to how this series will progress.

 

X-Men: Days of Future Past by Alex Irvine

X-Men: Days of Future Past by Alex Irvine

This is one of the most iconic X-Men tales. I read the original comics back in high school and it captured the imagination of my friends and me at the time and remains a favored X-Men story decades later. The basic plot is that an assassination of a U.S. senator by mutant terrorists triggered the creation of a police state in the U.S. that is enforced by robot sentinels. Those sentinels took over and have practically exterminated all mutants in the U.S. plus anyone with the genes for making mutants. Now they are getting ready to expand their anti-mutant program to the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is preparing to stop them from doing this with nuclear weapons. The only hope for stopping the apocalypse part 2 are the handful of surviving X-Men, Magneto, and Franklin Richards. Their plan is twofold. First, they send the psyche of Kate Pride (adult version of brand new X-Men Kitty Pride) back into the past to try and stop the assassination of Senator Kelly. At the same time, the rest of the X-Men stage a breakout from their concentration camp to try and bring the Sentinels down. It’s an exciting story that features the gruesome deaths of many of the future X-Men.

 

This fully dramatized audio version of the tale was very well done. The voice acting was great. The sound effects were high quality. And the expanded tale (from the two issues of the original comic book) was particularly well done. Perhaps the best addition was having 13-year-old Kitty Pride be conscious in the future and have to deal with what is in many ways the end of the world. The author also tweaked some of those storylines giving Magneto a much larger role. (Too bad that wasn’t also done for Franklin Richards.) Overall, it’s a great retelling of a classic story.

 

Trio for Blunt Instruments by Rex Stout

Trio for Blunt Instruments by Rex Stout

Here are three more wonderful novellas featuring Nero Wolfe. In Kill Now Pay Later the man who shines Wolfe’s shoes three times a week is first suspected of murder and then believed to have committed suicide, but Wolfe will have none of it. After three years of discussing Ancient Greece with the man, he is prepared to suffer inconvenience and work without pay to find that man who murdered him.

 

In Murder Is Corny, Inspector Cramer actually brings Wolfe a case—sort of. He brings Wolfe a carton of corn found at a murder site because the carton has Wolfe’s name on it. Then he practically accuses Archie of murder and drags him off for questioning. Why does he think Archie is a killer? Because a pretty young model of Archie’s acquaintance sort of fingered him for the crime (while arguing that she never dreamed the police would think Archie did it). So, Wolfe is forced to get involved or potentially lose Archie’s services forever.

 

The final story, Blood Will Tell, starts with a bloody tie being sent to Archie in the mail. From there, Wolfe and Archie get dragged into a murder that apparently hasn’t happened yet. It’s another thoroughly enjoyable tale.

 

Serpent by Michael Cole

Serpent by Michael Cole

As in his exciting novel, Thresher, Michael Cole presents an action-packed yarn exploring what happens when a sea creature is fed growth drugs that make it evolve to many times its normal size. In this case, it is also a prehistoric creature brought back to life through a lab-cloning process. The result is non-stop action as the monster of the title eats its way through just about every living thing it can get its humongous mouth around.

 

To make this book even more exciting, Cole introduces a cast of very likeable characters including two newly romantic couples—all four of whom get caught up in the effort to kill the giant serpent. These sorts of books often feel like the Towering Inferno or the Poseidon Adventure as we try to figure out who’s going to survive. Adding two sets of likeable couples to the mix really ups the ante as they try to find a way to stop a serpent that acts like it could give Godzilla a run for his money.