Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 62

Just Released: The Unity 3 Bride

The Unity 3 Bride

The third book in my The Unity series is now available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

Jewel's arranged marriage, designed to bring peace and prosperity to the Hegemony of Armen and the Cartelite Worlds, is instead stoking the furnaces of inter-galactic warfare. From the moment of her marriage, the enemies of her Armenite husband—a stern and rigid man she barely knows—seek to use her to prove that the Cartel Worlds are unworthy of an alliance which monopolizes the fuel that makes faster-than-light travel possible. Complicating Jewel’s efforts to protect herself and her people are disturbing changes in her very cell structure—changes she doesn’t want or understand but that place her squarely in the targeting reticle of the Armenite opposition. Jewel finds herself having to use her wits and her lifelong training in negotiation and intrigue to preserve a marriage she never wanted to be part of in order to prevent a civilization ending war.

Review: Power Play by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 36 Power Play by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Remo and Chiun get the task of protecting Wesley Pruiss, publisher of the aptly named pornographic magazine, Gross. Pruiss has been crippled by a knife wielding assassin shortly after announcing that he was investing his fortune in figuring out how to power a town completely by solar energy. (He actually “bought” the town so that he could make extremely raunchy movies without trouble from the authorities.) For some reason, Harold Smith, the Director of CURE believes that Pruiss will come through on the solar energy and sends Remo and Chiun to keep him alive.

 

This is not the sort of mission Remo excels at. What usually happens is that Remo meets the bad guy early in the book, likes the bad guy, and totally doesn’t understand that the bad guy is moving against him until very late in the novel. Chiun, for his part, usually figures everything out very quickly and just doesn’t tell Remo what’s really going on.

 

To make this book more interesting than most, Murphy and Sapir introduce a group of renegade descendants of Sinanju villagers. (Sinanju is the impoverished North Korean fishing town that Chiun calls home.) These descendants betrayed one of Chiun’s ancestors after he had taught them how to wield a knife effectively and he exiled them. Interestingly enough, the knife-wielding assassin in this book does not believe the myths of the Masters of Sinanju and is in for a big surprise when he runs into Remo.

 

Overall, this is a fun novel despite its weaknesses. The elements that make this series so enjoyable—the legends, the relationship between Remo and Chiun, Chiun’s peculiar way of viewing the world, and the action—are all here.

 

Review: Searching for Extraterrestrial Life by Sarah Rugheimer

Searching for Extraterrestrial Life by Sarah Rugheimer

I got this Great Courses book solely because of the title and imagined reading about Area 51 and other popular stories about secret contact. What I got was much better. Sarah Rugheimer walks us through what we know about the possibilities of life in the universe and how our scientists are trying to discover if it actually exists. I was absolutely fascinated. It’s never bad for a fan of science fiction to indulge in a little genuine science—especially when it’s conveyed by someone as capable as Dr. Rugheimer.

 

Review: Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Canada

Edgar Allan Poe by Mark Canada

When I was in seventh grade, I recited Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart in a speech contest and I’ve had a soft place in my own heart for the author ever since. In high school and college I read a couple more of his stories and I’ve dabbled in his work in the decades since then. Yet, I didn’t know very much about the man himself until I stumbled on this excellent Great Courses book. Put simply, Poe was a mess, yet somehow out of the often-self-created disaster of his life, he transformed world literature creating the detective story and opening up the genre of horror fiction. It’s an amazing story, filled with tragedy and self-abuse, but somehow out of all of this crushing difficulty came works of literature that continue to influence the literary and popular fiction worlds today. This one is well worth your time.

 

Review: Medieval Myths and Mysteries by Dorsey Armstrong

Medieval Myths and Mysteries by Dorsey Armstrong

This is one of the most delightful Great Courses books I’ve yet listened to. At its essence, Armstrong picks up a bunch of images from the Middle Ages that have filtered down to our modern society and explores both the modern story and the actual medieval roots. Some are about famous figures—Robin Hood and King Arthur. Others are about magical creatures like the Questing Beast. Still others are about events like the Black Death or institutions like the Templars. And at each point your understanding of the people who lived during the Middle Ages will grow, your understanding of how stories come into existence will evolve, and your appreciation of this rich and wondrous period of our history will expand.

 

Review: Moving Target by Jude Hardin

Moving Target by Jude Hardin

A rogue group within the army is still trying to clean up a probably illegal experiment they conducted which resulted in the cloning of Jack Reacher. In this very short novel, they hire a new hitman to kill Rock Whalman (the clone) and in so doing remove the “evidence” of their crime. Hardin takes the time to develop the idea that this is happening decades into the future (something that is not immediately obvious from any of the ongoing interactions in either of the first two books).

 

While the action is fast moving and enjoyable, the whole plot depends upon two very big coincidences. The first is that one of the army officers chasing Rock is the ex-husband of a woman Rock is romantically interested in. The second is that the hitman coincidentally saw Rock (who has given the army the slip) the morning he takes on this assignment. The second was necessary to the plot, but it’s not clear that the first was. Taken together these “coincidences” are more astounding then getting struck by lightning on the same afternoon.

 

Final analysis, this was another fun one and I’m looking forward to book three.

 

Review: Dead Ringer by Jude Hardin

Dead Ringer by Jude Hardin

Jack Reacher is the protagonist of a phenomenally successful series by Lee Child. He’s likeable, interesting, and very different than everyone you know. So it’s not surprising that other authors would like to play in Lee Child’s sandbox. What is surprising is that this spinoff series has such a strong first book.

 

Rock Whalman is a clone of Jack Reacher, created in a black book army program that they now wish to pretend never happened. So they are killing off the clones, including Rock. This gives Rock the chance to do all the fascinating things Reacher does in his books as he tries to survive a group of assassins who are tracking him down.

 

It’s a concept that could have fallen on its face, but it doesn’t. The book is exciting from beginning to end. It’s almost like you’re reading an adventure about Jack Reacher.

 

Review: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi

Scalzi has a gift of coming up with some great ideas to hang a novel on. In Agent to the Stars a super-capable Hollywood agent gets the crazy job of figuring out how to get the world to accept with open arms the arrival of a race of alien creatures who look like the blob from the old horror movie (only smaller). It’s an impossible job, and that’s really the only problem with this delightful, funny, and thoroughly enjoyable novel. Our agent never really spends any time working on the problem. Most of the novel reads like the adventures of a Hollywood agent who just happens to know an alien creature. Much of the tension and excitement derives from our hero dealing with the clients that he was supposed to have passed off once he took on the alien race. And in fact, he only stumbles into his solution late in the book, rather than strategically planning it out. That being said, I enjoyed every word of this novel. Will Wheaton reads it with great feeling, maximizing the humor, the tension, and the occasional very touching scene.

 

Review: Stay Fit and Healthy until You???re Dead by Dave Barry

Stay Fit and Healthy until You’re Dead by Dave Barry

I’ve been wanting to read a Dave Barry book for a long time now, but humor can be a peculiar thing so I decided to start with a short one on a theme everyone can relate to. Barry is funny, no doubt about it, but it wasn’t the “drop to the ground trying to hold your stomach in while you bellow uncontrollably” sort of humor I had frankly expected. What you get instead is a quirky little examination of our nation’s obsession with wanting to stay fit (often without actually working out). There are a lot of very funny lines in this book and if you’re looking for a quick and amusing read about physical fitness, you’ll probably enjoy it.

 

Review: The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw by Patrick McManus

The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw by Patrick McManus

I rarely remember the specifics of a Patrick McManus essay because I’m too busy laughing for my long-term memory to catch hold of the contents of each story. And honestly, that’s all you really need to know about Patrick McManus. He’s really funny. And he tells his stories in a folksy manner in which he makes himself the butt of every joke with his certainty that he is an absolute expert on all matters—especially the great outdoors—and then goes on to show that he’s not without ever admitting that. He is utterly hilarious.