Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 69

Review: Destroyer 4 Mafia Fix by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

4 Mafia Fix by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Murphy and Sapir continue to catch their stride in this fourth book in the series, bringing it closer to the feel of the series as a whole. Remo and Chiun banter (or is that bicker?) humorously, and Remo’s fighting skills are building into the superhuman Sinanju abilities that help to make these books so distinctive. Yet the best thing about this book is the first of many times that the bad guys make the mistake of interrupting Chiun’s beloved soap operas. Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, is in his eighties and believes the soap opera to be the greatest expression of American art. Nothing can be permitted to interrupt them. Therefore, it is always with humor that the reader watches some poor fool intending to do Chiun harm make the mistake of coming between him and his beloved programs.

 

The plot is rather straightforward with very little genuine mystery. The mafia has managed to import four tanker truck loads of pure heroine into the country—a six-year supply at current U.S. usage rates—and Remo and Chiun must find the drugs before they are dispersed across the country. Not being much of a detective, Remo takes a very direct approach designed to make the criminals come to him. There’s no heavy thought in this book, but it’s still a lot of fun.

 

Review: Destroyer 3 Chinese Puzzle by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 3 Chinese Puzzle by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

In the third Destroyer novel Murphy and Sapir finally began to figure out the magic that would make the series work. Chiun travels with Remo through the whole book and their back-and-forth banter brings some wonderful levity to the novel. Plus we learn important things about Remo and Chiun. Remo is a patriot (a change from Chiun’s initial assessment of him) and while Remo is becoming brilliant in the practice of Sinanju (sun source of all martial arts) he is actually not very intelligent. Oh, and Remo really enjoys teasing his boss, Harold Smith.

 

For his part, Chiun, gets his first serious development. He loves American soap operas (and the occasional updates on what is happening in his favorite television show are always hilarious). We also learn that Chiun really hates everyone with the possible exception of Remo. (This comes off at racism at first, until it becomes clear that it’s more akin to universal misanthropy.) Chiun can also be as temperamental as a child, which always causes additional problems for Remo—because this child can kill with a single finger and has no compunction against doing so.

 

The authors also recognize (perhaps after their experience with Death Check) that there is a lot of room for satire in this series. Sometimes this comes off as stereotyping, but it’s really satire. And while the satire is rarely sophisticated, it is almost always fun.

 

Review: Destroyer 2 Death Check by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 2 Death Check by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

The second volume of the Destroyer series occurs eight years after the first. Remo’s training has greatly advanced, but the authors still don’t have the full understanding of what Sinanju is and the book still does not have Chiun enjoying a major role in the story. So in many ways, this book still does not feel like a Destroyer novel.

 

Yet, it does fit the genre of action novels pretty well. Remo has been brought to a training peak in readiness for a job and held there so long that by the time the job finally appears, his skills are starting to deteriorate. He has to infiltrate a brain trust which is developing a plan to conquer the world. Technically it is doing this for the U.S. government, but there’s evidence that all is not well in the trust and Remo’s work is cut out for him.

 

There’s a lot of fun in this novel as Remo verbally spars with pompous academics and physically spars with a biker gang and others. This book may not be the Destroyer “proper” yet, but it’s still a fun read.

 

Review: The Day Remo Died by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

The Day Remo Died by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

A couple of decades after the start of the series, Murphy and Sapir wrote a companion book called The Assassins Handbook which included this novella—a brilliant rewrite of the first book of the series from the perspective of Chiun, the Master of Sinanju. Forty or so books in, the authors had a much clearer idea of what it meant to be a Master of Sinanju and how one became one, and they took advantage of that knowledge to retcon the origin of the series. It’s an extremely clever reworking that all fans of the series will want to read—but it’s better if you’ve read the original book, Created, the Destroyer, first.

 

 

Review: Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Destroyer 1 Created, the Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

I’ve decided to reread the Destroyer series, which has over 150 books and a daughter series. I picked up this first novel in Hole in the Wall Books in Falls Church (or was it Arlington) Virginia in the early 1980s and then stumbled across the series on a Kmart bookrack some twenty years later and ended up reading the whole series. They are nothing close to high literature, and if memory serves, some were really bad, but overall I remember them as a lot of fun.

 

This first novel is essential reading for anyone truly interested in the Destroyer series, but be forewarned that it also represents a time before the authors understood what they are writing about. Remo Williams is a NJ cop who is framed for murder and “killed” in the electric chair so that his identity can be wiped away and he can be trained to become a government assassin for a secret unconstitutional agency called CURE. Their job is to protect America and its constitution by eliminating threats that are two big to handle through the existing legal mechanisms. In this first book, that threat is organized crime.

 

The recruiting and training of Remo is pretty well done. Chiun, Master of the Glorious House of Sinanju, is introduced, although neither Murphy nor Sapir realized what they had created in the Master of Sinanju yet, so he has a very small role. The mystery is also fairly good. The New York City crime syndicates are run and protected by a man named Maxwell and Remo has to infiltrate, identify Maxwell, and kill him, before a congressional committee investigating organized crime reaches NYC.

 

One of the things that Murphy and Sapir do very well is bring the chief villain to life. At times, we are learning so much about his past that he takes over the novel, all of which adds to the credibility of the story.

 

What you don’t get in this novel is the trademark banter between Remo and Chiun and the superhuman abilities that Sinanju imparts upon Remo, but it’s still a very important start to a very fun series.

 

Review: The Door to December by Dean Koontz

The Door to December by Dean Koontz

Dean Koontz has a gift for generating unease in his readers. A woman is awakened in the middle of the night because her ex-husband has been found gruesomely murdered along with two associates. She comes running, because her ex had stolen her then three-year-old daughter when he ran out on her and she’s hoping to find her little girl. What she finds is much worse than even her darkest fears. Her ex has spent the last six years experimenting on their child—forcing her for days into a sensory deprivation tank and electrocuting her as a corrective measure to encourage right thinking. It was a quick and sudden reminder to the reader that humans can be the biggest monster of them all. It also made me wonder if maybe the now nine-year-old girl was the killer who had beaten the men so thoroughly they weren’t recognizable anymore. Then the girl is found a few blocks away, naked, in a daze, and NOT covered in blood as she would have been if she’d killed the men, and things get so much more mysterious.

 

Even as the girl is put in the hospital, a hit man is hired to murder her and all the while the mysterious killer keeps bludgeoning new people to death. And who was paying for the experiments? The Russians? The Iranians? Or even the U.S. government? The story moves forward at a rapid pace in two general directions. The first is the detective discovering who was involved in harming the girl to begin with. The second is the girl’s mother trying to help her daughter recover from this horror. And all the while something inhuman keeps murdering everyone involved, getting closer and closer to the little girl.

 

Just what did she unlock when she opened The Door to December? As with so many of Koontz’s novels, you won’t want to put this one down after you start it.

 

Review: Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 11Cerulean Sins by Laurell K. Hamilton

This series went off the rails with this book. It starts out well, with Anita agreeing to raise a dead man for a contract killer but quickly devolves into several hundred pages of vampire politics and sex that frankly bored me to tears. It felt like we’d seen the politics before and there was nothing new in them. And the sex did nothing to advance the plot while doing everything to finish demolishing one of the things that made Anita Blake such an interesting person. Sex and the relationships she wanted to go with it were very important to her through most of this series—so much so that it was a driving force / obstacle in her love triangle with Jean Claude and Richard. But Hamilton apparently wants to write big sex scenes and since this is a first-person narrative, that means she has had to fundamentally change Anita’s personality. To justify this Hamilton introduced the ardeur—a vampiric need to feed through sex—but I don’t believe that it improved the storyline at all. What’s more, Anita’s need for sex takes up a ton of pages that would have been far better spent developing a more traditional Anita Blake mystery.

 

That being said, there are some good things about this book. About halfway through the novel, the emphasis returns to plot and the story improves rapidly. There is a new vampire threat in the person of the vampire who made Jean Claude and there is a new serial killer in town that proved to be an interesting challenge.

 

Even better, Anita’s relationship with policeman, Dolph, finally collapses as his personal problems combined with Anita’s intimacy with a growing number of “monsters” drive him into a breakdown. I’ve always liked Dolph and watching Anita and Detective Zebrowski work their way through this Dolph problem was often touching. The serial killer and Dolph storylines save the novel.

 

Review: The Battle for Saipan by Daniel Wrinn

The Battle for Saipan by Daniel Wrinn

You can always count on Daniel Wrinn to write a stirring, yet accurate, account of World War II battles. The Battle for Saipan is no different, continuing Wrinn’s chronicle of the U.S. Marines’ battle across the Pacific Ocean. With an extremely well-balanced mixture of narrative and quotations from personal accounts, he lays out what was at stake at Saipan, why the battle was different and much more difficult than those which had come before, and what the consequences were for the conflict with Japan. (Hint: Saipan was one of the critical turning points in the War in the Pacific.) I always find myself sad when I come to the end of a Wrinn book and I look forward to reading his next chapter of the war.

 

Review: The Sword and the Gun by John J. Law

The Sword and the Gun by John J. Law

This was a pleasant short story about the old west in the vein of Louis L’Amour’s westerns. The central plot revolves around a young man’s quest for justice and his need to grow up first if he’s to obtain it. Being a western of the classic variety, his quest for justice is of the eye-for-an-eye sort, but, true to the great western writers it is also “justice” not simply vengeance.

 

Law’s twist to make the genre his own is his decision to add an eastern element. The villain is a Japanese man and to defeat him, the hero has to learn something of the Japanese culture and fighting style. I would have liked to see this emphasized even more as it is the most unique aspect of the story.

 

If you’re looking for a quick and enjoyable story set in the old west, I think this one will please you.

 

Review: Day of the Vikings by J.F. Penn

Day of the Vikings by J.F. Penn

Day of the Vikings is a fastmoving introduction to J.F. Penn’s ARKANE series. The plot revolves around a plan by some neo-Vikings to bring about Ragnarok by getting their hands on ancient Viking artifacts one of which is held in the British Museum. Mixed into the plot is a pleasant amount of history around the artifacts in question. There is some genuinely wonderful imagery like the rippling of the Midgard Serpent’s coils off the coastline, and the story moves fast enough to keep a casual reader interested. I was unfamiliar with the series when I picked up this book, but feel confident that I would enjoy another.