Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 44

A Haunting at Dixie House by M. L. Bullock

A Haunting at Dixie House by M. L. Bullock

Trouble from the past appears again in this novel as Midas’ ex-best friend, who cheated on him with his girlfriend of the time, returns trying to kick his alcoholism just as the team gets involved in investigating a new haunting. A young boy disappeared on his birthday while swimming in a pool and everyone blamed his great aunt who was his caretaker. To make matters worse, a medium in the Netherlands with abilities similar to Cassidy’s had painted a picture of him being attacked. And now Cassidy is finding wet footprints in her apartment as she continues to find links to the spirits through her paintings.

 

So the Gulf Coast Paranormal team investigates the site where the boy disappeared and learns that there are a lot of spirits lingering in the old house that used to be a speak easy in the 1920s. At least one of the ghosts is very angry and powerful enough to inflict some serious wounds on Midas. Like all the other stories in the series, this is a tale of love gone wrong and the team struggling to make things right a great many decades after the initial crime. As they do so, Cassidy begins to realize that she is having a lot of visits from ghosts in her own apartment and they are scaring her.

 

I think the best part of the story was the chapter in which Cassidy’s uncle visits her again. This really opens up Cassidy’s past as a source of future storylines for the series (as if her past wasn’t already fertile ground for ghost stories). Midas also has a death in his past that looks like it could turn into another problem with the spirit world.

 

Elfslayer by Nathan Long

Gotrek and Felix 10 Elfslayer by Nathan Long

Gotrek and Felix arrive in Altdorf where Felix’s father is dying. Let’s be clear. Felix’s dad is a jerk, condemning Felix’s accomplishments and then trying to bribe him with a portion of his inheritance if Felix will help him out of a jam. Felix wants to simply walk away, but in the final analysis can’t help himself from trying to pull his father’s bacon out of the fire.

 

The problem is that Felix’s father is being blackmailed for a controlling interest in his company over a letter that he wrote in his youth admitting to smuggling. One would think that a man who has spent the last few decades killing every problem that confronted him would have just gone in and done a Gotrek on the blackmailer, but civilization holds his hand creating a problem that lasts the entire book as an interesting subplot.

 

The main plot is an attempt to recover a magical harp from a group of dark elves who plan to use it to drown all of the human (and elfish) coastal lands. This is an often-exciting adventure punctuated by the large number of times that Felix and Gotrek manage to get themselves captured (or trapped) by the bad guys. As you would expect, they are not the kind to stay imprisoned for long and make pretty short work of all the evils confronting them. The only problem for Gotrek is that none are powerful enough to actually be his doom.

 

Wearing the Cape 9 Joyeuse Guard by Marion G. Harmon

Wearing the Cape 9 Joyeuse Guard

After two long years, Astra returns and Harmon does not disappoint. Having “left” the Sentinels due to problems in the previous book, Astra now has to lead a larger team as she attempts to stymie the bad guys on a global scale. Rather than present a single problem, the book stretches over months and consists of several novella (including the separately published, A Christmas Carol). The structure is more like book 6, Team Ups and Crossovers, which is the only thing I didn’t like about the novel. This is clearly a transitional work with many storylines (Astra’s marriage, Ozma’s problems with Oz) making significant advances even as Harmon brings the team to a better platform for global adventures.

 

As we venture out into the larger world, Harmon gets to share with the reader his vision of the problems and limitations of the supers in his world. Sometimes the politics of global situations makes it hard to identify the good guys from the bad guys, so what can heroes do to make a situation better? Harmon has clearly given these issues a lot of thought, bringing a little more reality to the globe by showing how the superhero dynamic plays out elsewhere. All in all, it’s another fine novel in the series.

 

The History and Archaeology of the Bible by Jean-Pierre Isbouts

The History and Archaeology of the Bible by Jean-Pierre Isbouts

I was very excited to start this book. A lot of the histories I have been reading lately have had moments in which they shed light on biblical events and I really looked forward to having someone take me through the bible, adding historical context to major stories, but while Isbouts did do that, it never felt like it was his primary purpose as I listened to this audiobook.

 

Isbouts really just tells the biblical story. For the first six lectures (25% of the course) he does little more than make reference to other ancient stories with similar themes as he walks the listener through Genesis and Exodus. I would recommend simply skipping these first six lectures.

 

After that, matters improved somewhat, especially when Isbouts gets into discussion of the northern and southern Jewish kingdoms, their origins, and to what extent they were truly united under Saul, David, and Solomon. I also found his section on Pontius Pilate and King Herod and the extent of their various authorities quite fascinating. But overall, I felt like the lectures were heavy on the story and light on the historical context.

 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek by Dave Marinaccio

All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek by Dave Marinaccio

This is one of those delightful books you read—not to learn something—but to reminisce about a great television series and to ponder why it has had the impact it has. I think it spawned a whole bunch of similar books that deal with the philosophy, the science, the ethics, the economy, etc. of Star Trek and other series. This one doesn’t pretend to be that profound. Instead it simply notices how the series has impacted a great many aspects of the author’s life and how it’s characters can serve as role models to help you figure out what to do in just about any situation. Mostly it is just a lot of fun.

 

 

Champagne for One by Rex Stout

Champagne for One by Rex Stout

One of the very impressive things about Rex Stout is the truly wide assortment of ways he comes up with for people to murder each other in his stories, In Champagne for One, it’s poison, but no one can figure out how the poison was administered—no one but Nero Wolfe, that is.

 

The setting is a little bit complicated. Archie Goodwin is asked to attend an annual event to honor the deceased first husband of a fabulously rich New Yorker. The deceased husband had done a lot of work with helping unmarried women who find themselves in a family way give birth and restart their lives. Once a year, four of those women are invited to his (now his wife’s) home for a sort of society affair in which they are paired with men of good birth for an evening of civil conversation. Archie doesn’t fit the description but gets dragged into the affair at the last moment when one of the intended guests gets laryngitis. One of the women dies by cyanide poisoning when drinking a glass of champagne. Because she was known to be contemplating suicide, everyone wants to believe that she killed herself. But Archie saw her take the drink and knew she had not added anything to it.

 

That’s the set up—tremendous political pressure for Archie to change his statement and Wolfe getting dragged in half against his will. Add to that a secret client who needs to keep his own relationship with the dead woman from becoming public knowledge and a whole host of suspects who are rather angry that this whole difficult affair won’t just go away.

 

And then Wolfe pulls the first of two cats out of his bag—he thinks of an angle that no one else is pursuing that surprised me even though we’ve had all the same information paraded before us that Wolfe has had. The second act is how he catches the murderer.

 

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I would never have figured this out if Wolfe/Stout hadn’t told me, but after he revealed the secret I certainly felt like I should have.

 

Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz

Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz

I first read this novel when I was in high school or college—one of the first of Koontz books I encountered. Like many of his novels, many of the images have stayed strongly in my memory for the interceding thirty-plus years and I wanted to know if the novel was as good as I remembered it being. So I picked it up again in audio format and thoroughly enjoyed getting back into the carnival that is the focus of the first half of the book.

 

Twilight Eyes is the story of a young man (Slim) who has discovered (due to a minor psychic ability) that monsters masquerading as humans (he calls them goblins) live among us and while they pretend to be very concerned about their families and neighbors, they actually revel in torturing (both physically and emotionally) everyone around them. Over the course of the novel, we learn that Slim has come to this carnival seeking work because he has murdered his uncle (a goblin) to keep him from killing his cousin—but Slim does occasionally doubt his own sanity, which makes him an even more empathetic character.

 

The carnival is the heart of the first half of this story. It’s set in 1963 and unlike a modern preference to make the carnival a place of horrors, Koontz has made it a refuge from the horrible world dominated by the goblins. We travel with Slim as he fits into the community and begins to really like his new neighbors. And we feel for him as he tries and fails to protect the carnival from the goblins. There are triumphs and betrayals in the first half of this story as Slim tries to figure out how he and his new friends can get by.

 

The second half of the novel was fascinatingly motivated by news of the murder Kitty Genovese, a young New York City woman who was stabbed to death to death in a New York City parking lot over a 30-minute period while 38 of her neighbors watched or listened and didn’t call the police or intervene to help her. Slim, and his girlfriend, decide that they can’t be like those neighbors and ignore the goblins and so they go on the attack in the very tense and exciting second half of the book.

 

While not one of Koontz best novels, it has a lot of the characteristics that make his stories so great. There are compelling characters struggling with issues of morality—when is it necessary to intervene and how much do concerns for one’s personal safety counter that necessity. It also deals with the strength that comes from a healthy loving relationship. If you want a good adventure yarn in a horror setting, or if you just like Dean Koontz’ other books, you’ll like Twilight Eyes.

 

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout

It’s a truism about Nero Wolf that he doesn’t like to leave his house even though he does leave it in two of the first four novels. This time, the whole book takes place outside the Brownstone and the reader gets to see just how strong a phobia being out of his own controlled environment is for the detective. We also get to see the extra burden this places on Archie Goodwin.

 

This is one of the very best Nero Wolfe novels. The event that gets Wolfe out of his house is the invitation to give a speech to the fifteen greatest chef’s in the world on the wonders of American cooking. But that’s just the excuse, the real reason—and it so Wolfe—is that one of the chefs has cooked a dish of sausages that was one of the great culinary treats of Wolfe’s life and he wants to try and get the recipe out of him so he can enjoy it in his own home. Keep that motivation in mind, because his desire for that recipe—plus his absolute need to get back on the scheduled train to return to NYC as soon as his speech is finished, is Wolfe’s driving motivation throughout the whole story.

 

And what a story it is. Just about every chef in attendance has a reason to hate one of their number—a truly despicable man who has stolen one’s wife, one’s job, and one’s assistant, plus a recipe from just about everyone else. So it’s a cinch that he’s going to be killed because there are so many possible murderers. And when that happens, it’s both a pleasure and a horror, because the men most likely to be the killer are people we like. Wolfe is trying hard to stay out of it (remember, he wants nothing to interfere with his train ride home to NYC) but when the chef with the sausage recipe gets charged with the murder, Wolfe sees a chance to obtain a treasure money literally cannot buy.

 

So Wolfe takes on the task of clearing the chef and this leads to the single best chapter I have read to date in all of Rex Stout’s books. In chapter eleven, he works with a—let’s call them a skeptical audience of African American waiters and chefs’ assistants—and slowly draws out startling revelations that totally break all of the reader’s preconceived notions of the case. Any one of these revelations would have been wonderful, but the totality is awesome. After which, Wolfe, having achieved his objective of clearing the chef, is ready to quit the case again without discovering the murderer, because staying on might cause him to miss his ride home. But then the murderer makes a particularly egregious error and this excellent novel gets kicked up another notch as we barrel toward the conclusion.

 

A final note about this book, it seems impossible to not mention the extraordinary and intricate planning Stout must have undertaken to make this book work. First there is the food. I’m not a foodie—pizza or hamburgers generally keep me happy—but Stout knows his cuisine and as the reader, you will believe that the greatest chefs in the world are preparing these meals. But what is even more impressive, Stout must have mapped out what every waiter and assistant cook did in bringing these meals to life as well, because the details just keep flowing at appropriate moments, that so-and-so served this, and so-and-so prepared that, in a way that makes the entire environment both mystifying and totally believable.

 

This may well be Stout’s single best Nero Wolfe novel.

 

Miss Frost Says I Do and Spider Too by Kristen Painter

Miss Frost Says I Do and Spider Too by Kristen Painter

In this final novel of the Jayne Frost series, Ms. Painter brings her heroine to her fairy tale wedding, with one last mystery to solve along the way. The mystery itself quickly becomes transparent, but I think that it was never really more than a subplot for the author. This is a book about wedding dresses and dreams and how much her heroine and her boyfriend really care about each other. For good measure, she throws in a lot of cutesy cat stuff as well.

 

There isn’t much of substance in this last book, but I think that Painter can be forgiven for putting so many pages into the preparation for the wedding. After all, she’s spent seven books and a short story getting to this point and it certainly sounds like she’s planning to end the series with this happily ever after.

 

 

Book 25 Boundary Formation Alpha by Mike Adams

Book 25 Boundary Formation Alpha by Mike Adams

For the second book in a row, the humans are acting as if the war with the aliens over New Hope Colony is over even though there are more than a hundred thousand of the enemy still in the field. By the end of the book, it begins to look like that bit of overconfidence is going to really cost them in the final novel of the series. In the meantime, the humans, especially the young women of Jack’s Company, have two more conflicts—both minor in scale but important tactically—to engage in. That action, and the prep for that action is really important to keeping this novel going because there is also a lot of reminiscing and telling the tales of earlier books in this story. Telling those tales makes sense in the storyline, but as someone who has read and enjoyed the other twenty-four books in the series, it did seem like we were covering the same territory again and again.

 

All of that being said, two things really stood out to me in this novel. For the first time, thanks to intelligence gathered in the previous novel, the humans begin to really analyze the Rift aliens. They’ve been trying to do so based on their actions, but now, finally, we have the chance to peer into their culture and I found that very satisfying. The other thing that stood out is a small complaint. Mallory, a villain of earlier novels, is rehabilitated in this book and I thought it was a very rare breaking of character for Adams. Frankly, I have never understood how he keeps his cast of hundreds straight from novel to novel. It’s an impressive feat, and if you go back to look at the same characters in earlier books, they read true throughout the series—except for the self-absorbed bureaucrat from Winter Haven who got a man killed in an earlier novel and caused such trouble for the Jacks after they rescued her. I didn’t think—and still don’t think—she had it in her character to laugh at herself. She is too small, self-important, and mean. But that’s a very small complaint after twenty-five novels of first-rate characterization and adventure.

 

It looks like we have one more book. Serious human reinforcements are almost here which will effectively end the alien threat—but I predict they will be just a little too late to save the colony from the aliens’ last great push. That means that once again the Jacks and the Colonial Rangers are going to have to pull off a miracle to keep from being overrun. And as it’s right at the end, I think it’s a legitimate concern that Adams may kill off significant numbers of our heroines as he proved he was willing to do earlier in the series.

 

I can’t wait to read it.