Books I Read April 2023 (Part Two)
This is the second installment of the books I read, or tried to read, in April 2023. There were nine books altogether in April, seven of which I completed.
Out of Timeby Dave Sinclair B-
I had a reason tohave a look at the top 100 free thriller-espionage books on Amazonthis month – my book, The Girl on the Kerb was as high as #5on the list. So while I was there, I decided to pick up a few, justto see what an actual espionage thriller reads like.This is the first one I read, and surprisingly, it had a SF premise, thatbeing that a black MI6 agent, Atticus Wolfe, from 2024 finds himselfback in 1963 as a result of a “terrorist” that he was attemptingto capture, setting off some sort of time-bomb (a pun) device.
AtticusWolfe is knocked out in the time-blast and awakens in the 1963hospital. Because of his MI6 ID in his wallet, a contemporary MI6agent is called in. Wolfe convinces this agent that he has some how traveled back in time, showing him his cell phone and smartwatch.This agent recruits him for M16, but for fear of disrupting the time lines, keeps his time-traveling aspect secretwith forged paperwork saying that he was a transfer from NavalIntelligence. As I mentioned, Wolfe is a black man, so he faces theprejudices of the day as well as the snotty attitudes of the upperclass employees of the MI6 of that day. Because he is an outsider, he is given the task of finding a possible mole in the organization,and collects a team of similar outcasts, a woman, a gay man (still acrime in England at the time) and a young man who operated theelevator. In addition, Wolfe is still concerned that his appearance ischanging history, as he knows of no incident in the history of theMI6 of his time to explain his appearance or the current mole situation.
I thought it waswell written with an engaging lead character. While the time travelaspect was interesting twist, but the gee wiz, I can’t do thisbecause it hasn’t been invented yet, and all the cultural references struck me, as someone who wasactually alive in 1963, as little too much wikipedian, i.e. cherry pickingfacts of the era from wikipedian articles. Still, there were aspectsof the story I really like, along with others that I felt were a bitover the top, and may not have made sense. Now, having just readRaymond Chandler, where the same thing can be said, I can only saythat I read Chandler for his writing, and can forgive him for hisplots. I can’t say the same for Sinclair, but in his defense, Ihave a feeling that the parts I thought were a bit over the top wereprobably the expected tropes and story beats for this type of story.In any event, we’ll see as I picked up half a dozen freethriller-espionage books, including two more by Sinclair; all thefirst book in a three book series.
Goliath, A RyanMitchell Thriller by Richard Turner DNF 8%
Another free title, this time in the free Thriller-adventure list. By page 14 the body countexceeded the page number. And if that wasn’t enough, in an openingscene set in 1931 he writes “...had ensured that all the majormedia outlets throughout the country…” “Media outlets.”Nothing bumps me out of the story more than using modern lingo instory set in the past. Between the body count and the hokey, tropey writing, DNF.
A Book of Truths,A Mui Thriller Book One by Ty Hutchinson C
Another freethriller-adventure book. A story with a combination of a first personnarrator, Mui, a 14 year old girl who has been trained to be anassassin, combined with a third person parallel story about a bookused as a courier of secret information that people are being killed forwhich all gets tied together near the end. It read like a B grade storyuntil the D grade ending.
The more I think about it, the more I'm disappointed by the book. First because everything was too convenient for theauthor. But I’ll get to that in a moment. The first thing that youneed to know is that this is only the first of seven books featuringthe Mui, a 14 year old assassin in training, so that the mystery ofthe deadly book isn’t solved. The second is that the protagonist,Mui is a cold blooded murderer. Not my cup of tea. But going beyondthat, I found it really hard to suspend my disbelieve about thestory. The narrator, Mui, is supposed to be a 14 year old girl, I guess so that the series can use the boarding school trope. Mui is said tohave spent her first 12 years training to be an assassin in a remoteAzerbaijan mountain with a secret set of assassins, until her mother,also a retried assassin, (who has her own series of books) finds her andtakes her to Greece and a small hotel she now runs. There sheinteracts with the natives until she’s sent to the boarding schoolin California. Everywhere she goes she seems to be speaking, andbeing understood, in English like a native speaker, as does her bestfriend Nanuli, a girl from a small village at the base of themountains in Azerbaijan, (with an internet connection that allowedvideo calls). Really? How did she, and her small village friend learnEnglish? And if the assassins all spoke English, how did her friend,and how did she learn Greek? She shipped off to San Francisco, andseems perfectly at home in a big American city, shopping apparentlywith credit cards… In short, save for the backstory, she’s acting like a like an American girl several years older than her actual years. Itseems to me to be a cheat to give your character an exotic background for astory, and then ignore all the implications of it. Not for me, but ifyou don’t think to hard, and don’t care about rooting for a coldblooded killer – who wants to be a cold blooded killer for hire – then this is not a bad book, and you will have a lot more stories toenjoy.
The Black TonguedThief by Christopher Buehlman B-
Another fantasybook. For someone who doesn’t like fantasy, I’m certainly readingenough of them these days. I forget what inspired me to put this onhold at the library, but when it became available I downloaded it andread it. Not a bad book. It is a first person narrative with anengaging rouge, the title character, and is written with a lot of witand humor. Plus it is a quest story, and though the stakes are high,there is no all-powerful black veil of pure evil threatening theland. It is also the first of a series, but does have a fairly closedplot. So we start with an A rated book. What are its characteristicsthat knocked it down to a B-? First, being a fantasy, you can haveyour magic do anything, and use it for the hero pull some magic out of his or her hat to get out of any situation. And the author did. Idon’t like that, I can’t help but think its sort of cheating.Second, and this one is on me, I’m a rather impatient man, andreader, so that with too much elaborate world-building lore, history,and politics the author includes, I can get a little impatient to get on with thestory. You need that for a fantasy, but a lot thrown in without context, can be a bit overpowering. And, without apology, I tend to skim or skip over battle and fightscenes, songs and poems, which this story had manyinstances of. In some cases, needlessly so, I thought. Indeed, there was oneinstance where one chapter ends before the fight, and the next opens after the fight so that we know theresult, any yet, the author takes us back over the entire fight. I skippedthat entirely. In short, I found the story well written, maybe just alittle too elaborate, too magical, too violent, and simply too long to give it more than a B- I'd also knock off points for that extremely cheap looking and ugly cover, but it wasn't likely the author's fault. I hope.
Next week, yet another book review post; Part One of the Books I Read in May. I'm reading a lot of books these days since I am not writing anything at the moment. When I am writing, I like to keep my head clear of other stories, so I do not read much, if anything, while I am writing my own.
