Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 8

The Hawks of Kamalon by Mike Reisig

The Hawks of Kamalon by Mike Reisig

This is the second time I have read this novel. I read it the first time shortly after it came out some twenty-two years ago and had fond memories of it. The second time I was somewhat less impressed. It’s overly long and very slow getting started, but if you stick with it, there is a lot of enjoyable action and a couple of very powerful scenes.

 

The basic plot is that a fantasy world where a basically peaceful people is fighting a technologically superior and extremely aggressive foe recruits (read—kidnaps) a squadron of pilots flying out of England against Germany in World War II. The pilots are unhappy about being kidnapped, but end up doing what the peaceful folk need without putting up any real argument. First, they defeat a major arial attack and second carry out a successful assault on the enemy only to find out that a feared invasion is very close to being launched.

 

What follows is a rather complicated plan to bolster the war-making ability of the peaceful kingdom in time to defend against the invasion. It involves raiding Nazi Germany to steal weapons with which the peaceful folk can fight back against their enemies. From this point forward the book starts to pick up speed toward an increasingly more effective pace. The actual final battle which takes place over approximately the last hundred pages of the book is well done. There are exciting tricks, heroic stands, and an important betrayal.

 

I’m glad I read the book a second time.

 

Local Library Book Sale

I had the extraordinary pleasure of going with my wife and son to the local library book sale where we could fill a bag of books for $10. I must confess that we filled more than one bag. Hopefully you will see the fruits of our little shopping spree on this page in the coming months. We got a little of everything from mysteries, to adventure, to science fiction, to manga, to classics, to a ton of children's books which we will donate to our local school classrooms after we decide which ones we want to read and review. Maybe I can even convince my lovely life to post a guest review or two right here on my Facebook page and blog.

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys by Peggy Herz

Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys by Peggy Herz

When I dug out the box of my old blue hardback Hardy Boys series, I found this small paperback in the box. While it’s really about the television series starring Sean Cassidy, Parker Stevenson, and Pamela Sue Martin, the first two chapters are all about the books. The Hardy Boys were invented by a man named Edward Stratemeyer who also invented Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and a host of other adventure series for young boys and girls. His ideas were bigger than his ability to get the stories written so he created a company, The Stratemeyer Syndicate, in 1906 to farm out the work according to what is now called the Stratemeyer Formula. He built outlines for his stories and hired ghost writers to fill in the pages. Each chapter had a tense point in the middle and ended on a sort of cliffhanger to keep the reader turning pages. By the 1970s, when Peggy Herz wrote this little book, Nancy Drew books had sold more than 60 million copies and the Hardy Boys 50 million more.

 

The rest of the book is about the creation of the television series—which my sister and I watched religiously as long as it aired. It includes interviews with the three stars and ends with a discussion of the production of the series, fan reaction, and an exploration of why these three characters continue to be cherished by people around the world.

 

This is a very quick read but if you have any interest in literature’s three most famous “kid” detectives, it’s worth reading.

 

Sue Me by Warren Murphy

Sue Me by Warren Murphy

Lawyers are the big bad guys of the sixty-sixth Destroyer novel. These are the sorts of lawyers that are disparagingly referred to as “ambulance chasers”. In this case, however, the lawyers are not content to wait for accidents to happen, they create incidents in which dozen, hundreds, or even thousands of people are killed so that they can step in and represent them earning millions for themselves with each case. Remo and Chiun get the task of stopping them from doing this, but Smith won’t simply let them kill the lawyers. He wants evidence of their wrong doing so he can prosecute them to try and dissuade others from emulating their misdeeds.

 

This novel didn’t really work for me. I never believed in the threat these men’s fixer presented to Remo and Chiun and the effort to satirize the legal profession fell short. Sometimes these books feel like Murphy was going through the motions and this was one of them.

 

Honor Bound 2 Blood and Honor by W.E.B. Griffin

Honor Bound 2 Blood and Honor by W.E.B. Griffin

Blood and Honor opens with the assassination of Clete’s father, which is really unfortunate because he was the most interesting character in the first novel with tremendous unplumbed depths. He was also the leading figure in a coming military coup that planned to remove the president of Argentina (who was apparently not planning to permit his future in office to be determined by democratic elections) and put himself in office (also undemocratically). With him dead (probably by German agents) a whole host of problems confronts Clete and most of the players in the first book—and most of the problems revolve around his father’s safe which holds, among other things, a written operations plan for the coming revolution, money needed to carry out the revolution, and banking and other incriminating documents that could get Clete’s German (but anti-Nazi) friend executed. The problem—no one seems to have the combination to the safe. As if that weren’t enough trouble, Clete’s secret Argentine girlfriend is pregnant and he needs to figure out how to get her parents, and the Roman Catholic Church, to agree to him marrying her in very short order. Oh, and the Nazis have put a contract out to kill one of the men on Clete’s OSS team.

 

So, there are no shortage of problems confronting Clete in the first half of the book (and I haven’t mentioned them all) when he returns to Argentina to inherit his father’s vast estates. Griffin handles his re-introduction to the wealth and social status of his father quite well and slowly transitions the problem to keeping the Germans from replacing the “neutral” ship that keeps its submarines supplied. To do this, Clete needs a new airplane which isn’t easy to get into neutral Argentina. He also is having trouble with his OSS superiors wanting information on his informants that he isn’t willing to give them. As if all of that isn’t enough, the coup is launched by the end of the novel causing even more trouble.

 

This is another fantastic novel making me wish I knew more about Argentinian history. I may have to do some reading on the subject.

 

Perry Mason 70 The Case of the Stepdaughter???s Secret

Perry Mason 70 The Case of the Stepdaughter’s Secret

A wealthy businessman comes to Perry Mason because his stepdaughter is being blackmailed with what he believes to be a sin from his past. The stepdaughter is engaged to marry a socially prominent man and the businessman is worried about the marriage being spoiled. He hires Mason to handle the problem for him and the lawyer goes to work with his normal flair. It’s a creative solution made more complicated by the hostility of the stepdaughter and the discovery that there are more secrets out there that are the subject of blackmail.

 

Then one of the blackmailers is murdered and the businessman’s wife is charged with the crime and the book moves into the typical Perry Mason courtroom drama. There’s a lot of snappy cross examination and a classic Mason gambit—all leading up to a very satisfying solution.

 

Digger 3 Dead Letter by Warren Murphy

Digger 3 Dead Letter by Warren Murphy

This is easily the best of the Digger novels yet. Digger is asked by his boss to check in on his college-aged daughter when he travels to Boston. Digger does so only to discover two things – the daughter is not the sheltered young near-nun that her father thinks she is, and someone is trying to frighten her and just possibly murder her. The mechanism for scaring her is a chain letter which has a list of people who are going to die. The first name on the list is someone that the girl had, herself, put on a dorm joke-list of people the world would be better off without—a person who has just died in an alleged accident. But more people on the list die and then the girl’s name appears on it too.

 

There’s a lot of tension in this fast-moving mystery, but the clues are all there for anyone paying enough attention to figure them out. (I did figure it out, which of course, makes me think even more highly of the mystery.)

 

My biggest concern with the novel was that Digger’s girlfriend, Koko, wouldn’t appear since she and he live in Las Vegas and the story is in Boston, but fortunately she does get to contribute to both the mystery and the story.

 

The Secret of the Red Arrow by Franklin W. Dixon

The Secret of the Red Arrow by Franklin W. Dixon

This novel launches a new Hardy Boys series. While growing up, I read the original “blue hardback” series and was surprised and pleased by many of the changes in this new book. First, in the original series, Frank and Joe are all American boys. They play every sport, are loved and respected by all of their classmates, the chief of the Bayport police respects them, and so on. The only problems they have come from criminals. In this novel, Frank and Joe are not clones of each other. Frank is more of a geek, Joe somewhat more athletic. Neither is in the running for most popular kid in their school and the police find them annoying. In fact, their propensity for investigating mysteries has gotten them into a lot of trouble in the past resulting in the “deal” in which they stop all investigations or go to reform school. They don’t stop, of course, but this is a very different setup than that of the original series.

 

There is also a new cast of friends and classmates in this book. Chet, Tony, Biff, and the girlfriends, Callie and Iola, are gone. There are new friends and classmates in their place, but it made me wonder why they needed to get rid of all the trappings of the original series.

 

The book opens with a bang with Joe Hardy helping to rob a bank. And while, no, it is not what it appears, it is a great opening and the first chapters of the book are involved in figuring out what was really going on at the bank. Then they get pulled into helping a school bully who has a truly disturbing problem, and they slowly uncover a Bayport urban legend, the Red Arrow. The Red Arrow appears to be a master criminal involved in extortion and blackmail. It was unrealistic that Frank and Joe had never heard of this urban legend, but it was fun to watch everyone clam up when they started asking about it. Clearly there was truth to the legend, and no one wanted to deal with it.

 

The resolution of the mystery was way too quick and easy. I think the Red Arrow should have been much smarter and not given himself away. The way I think of it, this was more of an “establish the basics” book, putting the basic pieces in place for a new series. I enjoyed it, but much of the enjoyment came from comparing the new series to the old.

 

Night of the Ice Storm by David Stout

Night of the Ice Storm by David Stout

In the midst of a terrible ice storm, a homosexual priest makes a clumsy and totally unexpected pass at a young man and ends up dead. Twenty years later, a clue to the murderer is uncovered at an office party at the small-town newspaper setting the killer in motion to protect himself.

 

The plot is a good idea, but the novel never quite came together for me. Part of the problem was the dialogue. The characters also felt flat. In the mystery itself, there was good misdirection and it held my attention wanting to find out who the murderer was. That was enough for me to be glad I read it.

 

Destroyer 65 Lost Yesterday by Warren Murphy

Destroyer 65 Lost Yesterday by Warren Murphy

Murphy has invented a new type of problem for Remo and Chiun—a mysterious poison that causes amnesia. It’s being used by a cult to protect its paying members from witnesses against them in court. And it’s obvious from moment one that Remo is going to encounter that poison and have his Sinanju training pitted against a chemical danger. The result was very interesting.

 

The wrap up to the novel is also peculiar as Chiun and Remo disagree about the proper way to confront the danger. To make matters worse, the president and Smith begin to interfere with Remo’s plans to end the danger as well for reasons they don’t share with Remo. This causes a lot of tension at the end of the story.

 

Frankly, I liked this plot a lot, but the story needed to be much shorter. It felt padded as if it was being stretched to make an artificial word count.