Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 9

Digger 2 Fool's Flight by Warren Murphy

Digger 2 Fool’s Flight by Warren Murphy

A private plane goes down with forty people and its pilot—each of whom had just taken out a $250,000 insurance policy at an airport vending machine. Digger is asked to find out if there’s any reason at all his insurance company could refuse to pay the money. Once again, Murphy has put together a fascinating case with great little clues. But the best part of the book is that Digger’s Japanese girlfriend, a genius-IQ blackjack dealer (and sometimes prostitute) gets a lot more screen time in this novel than she did in the first. She’s a fabulous character who is smarter than Digger. Her relationship with him is at times troubling and at times very cute. Neither are particularly faithful, both clearly care deeply about each other, but are too personally messed up to commit to a normal relationship.

 

Once again, a great story with a great solution.

 

A Savage from Atlantis by Chris L. Adams

A Savage from Atlantis by Chris L. Adams

I based this review on a beta read of A Savage from Atlantis. The book is now available for pre-order at the greatly discounted price of 99 cents. I review a lot of books each year so you can take it from me when I say what a bargain this novel is. It could well be the best buck you spend on a book this year. You can find it on Amazon right here: https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Atlanti...

 

Chris L. Adams has produced his finest novel to date in this worthy sequel to his wonderful The Hunter and the Sorcerer. Set when Atlantis still exists but is suffering from the continuing attacks of its more primitive neighbors, Adams paints a beautiful story of a young native girl trying to return home to her people with the help of a tired old Atlantean. The only things standing between them and their goal are a savage horde bent on the destruction of Atlantis, the government of Atlantis which has reason to want both old man and young woman brought back to their city, and worst of all, the savage untamed wilderness of the Stone Age. The resulting story manages to combine gripping action, thought-provoking situations, and touchingly emotional scenes.

 

The macro storylines are superb as the reader gets into the heads of heroes and villains alike, but it is the surprisingly nuanced relationship between the old man and the young woman that Adams proves his worth as an author. There is great beauty here as each comes to respect the other’s knowledge, experience, and expertise. I was frankly surprised by how touching this relationship becomes as the story progresses.

 

As if everything I’ve laid out above wasn’t enough, Adams also mixes in some exciting science fiction elements that reminded me of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian Tales and some equally amazing magic that made me think of Conan. This is not the simple world of our past…or is it?

 

Gambit by Rex Stout

Gambit by Rex Stout

Once again, Rex Stout has created an intriguing murder mystery where the murderer was so clever that there is literally no evidence for Nero Wolfe to discover that will expose the villain. And yet, that’s when Nero Wolfe is at his best. The crime occurs at a chess club and at the start of the story, the man Wolfe is hired to clear is already in jail—and not cooperating with Wolfe. But there is that chess tournament which gets Wolfe thinking along the line of chess strategies, leading both to his first important insight into the case and the title of the novel.

 

A ‘gambit’ is a chess strategy in which a pawn is sacrificed in order to get a more powerful piece, and Wolfe makes the deductive leap that it was not the dead man who was the intended victim, but the man accused of the crime. From then on, it’s a matter of looking for the proper suspect. I did not guess right, but neither did I go after the obvious red herring. As I think back on it now, I think I should have figured this one out. The clues were there, but I just didn’t do it.

 

This is a very fast read and a very interesting mystery.

 

Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

Mortal Stakes by Robert B. Parker

A pitcher may be losing games on purpose to help a gambler and Spenser is brought in to very quietly learn if it is true. It’s one of those tasks where you wonder how on earth he’s going to do that. In the course of his early investigation, he gets told a very simple lie and uses that lie to uncover the sad and scandalous past of the pitcher’s wife. That discovery takes up half the novel and shows Spenser why the pitcher is doing what he’s doing—he’s being blackmailed—and now Spenser has to go to work to get a couple of very nasty people to leave the pitcher alone.

 

This is a good story without any simple solutions. Blackmail works because the victim can’t afford for the information the criminal has to become public. This puts Spenser in a very difficult ethical position as the only solutions he (and I) could think of are definitely on the wrong side of the law.

 

The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin

The Frame-Up by Meghan Scott Molin

A vigilante, inspired by a comic book character called The Hooded Falcon, appears to be fighting crime in the real world. Heroine wannabe, MG, is a writer of comics and an expert on the Hooded Falcon and she is made a consultant to the police to help them catch not only the vigilante but to uncover the crime the vigilante is trying to expose. The investigation is complicated by a double agent (who was immediately identifiable to the reader). Most of the action of the book involves MG taking her “consultant” status as an excuse to become a vigilante herself and investigate the crime while hiding details from the detective she is supposed to be advising. It’s a mess.

 

All of the above would be forgivable. It wasn’t great, but it was at least par for the course. Unfortunately, MG is also very concerned about her position as a woman in the comic book industry and her need to be taken seriously as a professional woman. That should have been great, but from the very first chapter of the book when she first sees her soon-to-be sort-of-partner detective, all she can think about are his beautiful eyes and cute butt. These constant musings about how attractive the detective is feels like they come every third sentence from start to finish and they really undercut the character. It just doesn’t work well to have a sentence on how she’s a focused professional be followed every time by distracted fantasizing about the detective’s eyes. About a third of the way through the novel, events lead to a place where MG could have legitimately started to think about the possibility of a relationship between the two of them, but the fantasizing starts right away and negatively impacts the story. It wasn’t necessary and it hurt a not particularly strong book a lot.

 

Declutter Your Home and Simplify Your Life by Sophie Largen

Declutter Your Home and Simplify Your Life by Sophie Largen

We’re not hoarders, but sometimes it feels like we’re moving in that direction. Stuff just accumulates and there is never time to really sit down and go through it in a systematic way. We make pushes that buy us some time and keep the “public” areas of the house looking okay, but the attic, the shed, the closets, etc. are all overloaded with stuff we’re not even sure we really need.

 

This book details a strategy to fix this problem in our lives. Overall, I felt it was completely unrealistic—laying out a six month plan in which every week involves tackling part of our clutter is just not going to happen. If we were the sort of people who had six months free to clean up our stuff, we would have never gotten over-cluttered in the first place. So—this book is not going to help most people fix their problem. It does, however, have a nice section on the mental changes you need to go through in order to handle your mess and it has a nice ending section on maintenance. (The author sees this as not letting yourself get re-cluttered, but it also applies to not making your mess worse so that you don’t lose ground when you start to gain it.)

 

It’s a very short book so I think it was definitely worth my time (and yours) but it’s not going to fix most peoples’ problems.

 

Earth's Changing Climate by Richard Wolfson

In honor of Earth Day, today's review is:

Earth’s Changing Climate by Richard Wolfson

Most of my life I’ve been hearing about changes in the earth’s climate. It started out with fears of a new ice age which transformed into global warming which transformed to climate change. When I started studying history—especially the ancient and medieval worlds—I learned that the earth’s climate has been changing quite regularly for all of its history. There are a lot of cycles interacting with each other creating the Little Ice Age and the Roman Warming Period and many, many, others. As reports about modern changes to the climate became more prevalent in the press, I would look for any recognition that this happens as part of nature and looked for reports that help to identify what parts of what is happening are caused by human activity. Such assistance was rare.

 

Richard Wolfson’s course finally answered those questions for me in a way that felt grounded in reason and science and not in a new—take it on faith—religion. If you’re a skeptic, this will give you some reasons to credit the global warming narrative. If you’re a true believer, this will help you to understand some of those handy phrases that activists throw around. I strongly recommend it for anyone striving to understand why warming trends are troubling and how we know that these trends are different than those that have gone before. I wish I had discovered this book much earlier.

 

Smoked Out by Warren Murphy

Smoked Out by Warren Murphy

Warren Murphy is best known for his Destroyer series about a five-thousand-year-old House of Assassins, but he is also an award-winning mystery writer. Smoked Out is the first book in a series that would ultimately span two publishers. It’s a little bit slow to get started. Digger is an alcoholic gambler who gets called in by the CEO of an insurance company to investigate strange cases with high payouts. That’s very important. His job isn’t finding a murderer or a thief or protecting someone like a cop or a private investigator might do, it’s looking for insurance fraud or some way to void an insurance claim. And it isn’t often clear that there is fraud—his cases are just peculiar.

 

In this first novel, Digger is asked to look into a case in which a woman drove her car off a hill and died. Nothing actually looks wrong about the case except that the insurance company owes a million dollars on the claim. The police are convinced it’s an accident. And frankly, Digger is leaning that way too, but he starts investigating and he’s interesting to watch, even though things are a little slow moving in the first chapters.

 

He's just about to give up when two guys decide to beat him in an attempted “mugging,” convincing him to look a little more. The story heats up very quickly after that. I love the solution to this case. It’s a lot of little things that build a very convincing picture of a bad guy who did something very wrong.

 

It’s a great mystery.

 

Special Ops by W.E.B. Griffin

Special Ops by W.E.B. Griffin

The first fifteen percent of this novel follows very closely the action that was already related in The New Breed and The Aviators and that was a very sad mistake on the part of Griffin. Many of the lines and descriptions are exactly the same and since I’ve been reading the books in quick succession, that almost deterred to me from finishing this final book in the series. I pushed on because I have an eight-book investment already, and I’m glad I did, but the first chapters tried my patience.

 

The plot of the story is a U.S. special operation to try and deal with Che Guevara by humiliating him and therefore breaking his effectiveness as a communist leader (as opposed to simply killing him and turning him into a martyr). The majority of the focus is on Che Guevara’s attempts to destabilize the Congo. As is usual for Griffin, most of the book is about military politics and the behind-the-scenes actions necessary to support a special operation in the fields. A significant subplot is the need to keep the operation secret, something endangered both by tragic accidents in the field and by self-important military officers who have a hard time accepting that there is something they don’t have a need to know.

 

This is the last of The Brotherhood of War series and it’s significantly longer than the other books. It’s not, unfortunately, the strongest of the novels and the ending very much has an ‘I need to wrap this up’ feel to it.

 

I???m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

My family watched Jeanette McCurdy play her iconic roll on the show iCarly without any thought to what had put the young actress there. This book will tell you everything and it’s a very sad and painful read. McCurdy’s mother dreamed of her daughter being an actress and like a good kid, she tried her best to make Mom happy. Unfortunately, her mother appeared to be emotionally unstable and the extremes she would go to get her daughter into these rolls is highly troubling. The abuse is so glaring and yet, McCurdy does a disturbingly good job of getting into her own head as a child so that we can understand why she didn’t perceive it as abuse. The most horrific bit was when McCurdy hit puberty and started to physically develop in ways that threatened her ability to get children’s roles. Her mother’s solution was “calorie counting” and she turned her daughter into first an anorexic and then a bulimic. It’s really disturbing to read.

 

The title is what pulled me into this autobiography, but the truth is, I don’t believe McCurdy is glad her mother died. She has reached the point where she understands what her mother did to her was wrong. (And her mother did so many horrible things to her.) But she’s still her mom whom McCurdy spent her whole life trying to please. It’s a very sad story.