We're offering something a little different this month. Rather than our usual fare of undiscovered authors who deserve to be read, we've selected an old hand who deserves to be remembered. To be honest, as Bill searched the Web for a newly published book calling out to be read, he just didn't find it.
Instead he came across Robert Daley's The Enemy of God, first published in 2006 and recently out as an ebook. If you don't know Daley, he's mainly written about the New York Police Department, most notably in Prince of the City, a non-fiction work about police corruption upon which a popular movie was based.
In reviewing The Enemy of God, we have exchanged the freshness of a new novelist for the highly developed craft of an older one. It's also $.95 more than our usual criteria, but we think it's worth it.
Scroll down to read this and other recent reviews, and see previous recommendations on the right side of this page. Click on the appropriate month in the Blog Archive to navigate to the review.
Please help us spread the word about these books by becoming a blog "follower" and linking our blog to yours. The more activity we have, the more readers will find and enjoy these outstanding books. And for the record, no books we work on as editors are listed on the blog.
Happy reading!
Showing posts with label Bill Furlow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Furlow. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Death at Pullman
By Frances McNamara
$4.99 at Smashwords and Amazon
One of America’s first great labor struggles provides the setting for Death at Pullman, Frances McNamara’s historical novel about a murder in Pullman, Illinois, during the 1894 strike against the railway car company of that name.
The murder occurs during a strike/lockout in which the nascent labor movement is taking on the powerful manufacturer of luxury passenger cars. A young Pullman worker is found hanging in a shed with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Spy.” The discovery sets off the kind of finger-pointing and conspiracy theorizing that often follows anonymous violence occurring in the midst of bitter conflicts. Did the young man’s striking colleagues really discover that he was spying on them for the Pullman Company? Did George Pullman’s goons stage the murder to create suspicion and threaten the workers’ solidarity? Could the cause have been another, more personal reason?
Emily Cabot, a protégé of the great reformer Jane Addams, whose Hull House sits in a Chicago slum, is the book’s protagonist and voice. Robber baron George Pullman, who owns the town and controls the local police and the dreaded Pinkertons, is the villain of the tale. His counterpart is labor founding father Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union. Pullman workers technically were not railway men, but the union sought to organize them and supported their strike.
George Pullman had built what appeared to be an idyllic town for his workers, and he was full of righteous indignation that mere working men, even women, would challenge his absolute right to set both the wages paid his employees and the rents charged for their housing.
Though McNamara – and probably any other right-thinking person – is sympathetic to the striking workers who were less interested in building a labor movement than in trying to survive and feed their families, she gives a balanced account of the economic realities Pullman faced. Orders for his cars had fallen sharply, dragging down his revenues with them.
Emily Cabot and Dr. Stephen Chapman have been sent to Pullman by Jane Addams to help feed and attend to the striking workers and their families. Emily has an on-again-off-again love interest in Chapman, and the book includes enough light romance to offset the brawny action.
As a murder mystery, Death at Pullman is serviceable. But it is its well-researched descriptions of people and places and its depiction of the ground-breaking struggle between management and labor that set it apart. A reader who would never pick up a history book on the subject will enjoy the story and consider the educational factor an added, even subliminal bonus.
I have not read the other books in McNamara’s Emily Cabot series, Death at Hull House and Death at the Fair, which also are set in the Chicago area of the late 19th century. But if they are on par with this one, their value proposition more than justifies inclusion on our Great Books Under $5 blog.
Click here to link to Death at Pullman.
Bill Furlow
$4.99 at Smashwords and Amazon
One of America’s first great labor struggles provides the setting for Death at Pullman, Frances McNamara’s historical novel about a murder in Pullman, Illinois, during the 1894 strike against the railway car company of that name.
The murder occurs during a strike/lockout in which the nascent labor movement is taking on the powerful manufacturer of luxury passenger cars. A young Pullman worker is found hanging in a shed with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Spy.” The discovery sets off the kind of finger-pointing and conspiracy theorizing that often follows anonymous violence occurring in the midst of bitter conflicts. Did the young man’s striking colleagues really discover that he was spying on them for the Pullman Company? Did George Pullman’s goons stage the murder to create suspicion and threaten the workers’ solidarity? Could the cause have been another, more personal reason?
Emily Cabot, a protégé of the great reformer Jane Addams, whose Hull House sits in a Chicago slum, is the book’s protagonist and voice. Robber baron George Pullman, who owns the town and controls the local police and the dreaded Pinkertons, is the villain of the tale. His counterpart is labor founding father Eugene V. Debs, leader of the American Railway Union. Pullman workers technically were not railway men, but the union sought to organize them and supported their strike.
George Pullman had built what appeared to be an idyllic town for his workers, and he was full of righteous indignation that mere working men, even women, would challenge his absolute right to set both the wages paid his employees and the rents charged for their housing.
Though McNamara – and probably any other right-thinking person – is sympathetic to the striking workers who were less interested in building a labor movement than in trying to survive and feed their families, she gives a balanced account of the economic realities Pullman faced. Orders for his cars had fallen sharply, dragging down his revenues with them.
Emily Cabot and Dr. Stephen Chapman have been sent to Pullman by Jane Addams to help feed and attend to the striking workers and their families. Emily has an on-again-off-again love interest in Chapman, and the book includes enough light romance to offset the brawny action.
As a murder mystery, Death at Pullman is serviceable. But it is its well-researched descriptions of people and places and its depiction of the ground-breaking struggle between management and labor that set it apart. A reader who would never pick up a history book on the subject will enjoy the story and consider the educational factor an added, even subliminal bonus.
I have not read the other books in McNamara’s Emily Cabot series, Death at Hull House and Death at the Fair, which also are set in the Chicago area of the late 19th century. But if they are on par with this one, their value proposition more than justifies inclusion on our Great Books Under $5 blog.
Click here to link to Death at Pullman.
Bill Furlow
Friday, April 8, 2011
My Two Years in the Priest Corps
By Joe Novara
$1.99 at www.smashwords.com
Former Roman Catholic priest Joe Novara has written the least angry memoir about leaving the priesthood you’re ever likely to read. If Novara is outraged by the church’s child-abuse scandal, he keeps it to himself. If he felt somehow betrayed by those who educated him in the holy mysteries for a dozen years, he doesn’t let on.
And yet Novara has written a most pleasant account of being sent to seminary in high school, remaining there through college and then going off among a select few for further theological training in Rome. Over the course of the narrative, he goes from being “totally engaged” with the church to having an “arm-length indifference” to it.
The tale doesn’t spool out in chronological sequence but is told via a collection of stories – sort of a “Then-there-was-the-time” approach, which works fine. He doesn’t say it straight out, but if I had to guess, I’d bet Novara at least occasionally wishes it had worked out differently. He wouldn’t give up his wife and child from his post-priesthood life, of course, but I think he wishes he were still in love with the church.
Married now and with a grown daughter, he takes a nostalgic tour of the churches in his former precincts. He runs into an old friend, an admirable, aging priest who still puts effort into his homilies for weekday evening liturgies for a congregation too small to justify use of the sanctuary. A nun who had been the principal of Joe’s high school still serves with the priest as “missionaries to Detroit’s East Side, urban-renewed wasteland.” She was now trying to establish and run an experimental high school.
As he leaves the church and his former mentors, Novara wonders whether he had “skipped out too soon – had left right after the bloom went off the romance of priestly work. Theirs has been a lifelong commitment. Mine was a kind of ‘living together’ arrangement – fine as long as it worked.”
Novara doesn’t ignore the priest child-abuse scandal. He writes of a seminary classmate who was great with kids. “Is my memory of Dave naïve? Would he have been the kind of priest to commit these awful crimes? All my instincts shout no. But I’ve learned I never can know for sure.” It’s one more thing that’s changed from the church he thought he once had committed himself to.
One reason Novara’s edges aren’t sharper may simply be the passage of time. He became a priest in the ‘60s, a tumultuous time in the world and an exciting time for the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. He served two years in a Detroit parish before making his exit.
After ordination and his Michigan homecoming, he began to learn the realities of being a priest, that it’s the ultimate 24/7 job, and you never get to leave the burdens at home. He also saw the relationship between priest and parishioner in a different light. “I thought I was going to be a personal trainer for a leaner, enlightened Catholicism,” he writes. “The majority of my congregation simply wanted a massage therapist.”
Despite any yearning for or curiosity about the road not taken, Novara ultimately is content with his choice to leave the church. “I so wanted to serve God and humanity on the macrocosmic, supernatural level. I came to find that atmosphere too rarefied. The scale of one on one friendship; the microcosm of my family has proved a more gratifying and seemingly successful strategy.”
Click here to link to My Two Years in the Priest Corps.
$1.99 at www.smashwords.com
Former Roman Catholic priest Joe Novara has written the least angry memoir about leaving the priesthood you’re ever likely to read. If Novara is outraged by the church’s child-abuse scandal, he keeps it to himself. If he felt somehow betrayed by those who educated him in the holy mysteries for a dozen years, he doesn’t let on.
And yet Novara has written a most pleasant account of being sent to seminary in high school, remaining there through college and then going off among a select few for further theological training in Rome. Over the course of the narrative, he goes from being “totally engaged” with the church to having an “arm-length indifference” to it.
The tale doesn’t spool out in chronological sequence but is told via a collection of stories – sort of a “Then-there-was-the-time” approach, which works fine. He doesn’t say it straight out, but if I had to guess, I’d bet Novara at least occasionally wishes it had worked out differently. He wouldn’t give up his wife and child from his post-priesthood life, of course, but I think he wishes he were still in love with the church.
Married now and with a grown daughter, he takes a nostalgic tour of the churches in his former precincts. He runs into an old friend, an admirable, aging priest who still puts effort into his homilies for weekday evening liturgies for a congregation too small to justify use of the sanctuary. A nun who had been the principal of Joe’s high school still serves with the priest as “missionaries to Detroit’s East Side, urban-renewed wasteland.” She was now trying to establish and run an experimental high school.
As he leaves the church and his former mentors, Novara wonders whether he had “skipped out too soon – had left right after the bloom went off the romance of priestly work. Theirs has been a lifelong commitment. Mine was a kind of ‘living together’ arrangement – fine as long as it worked.”
Novara doesn’t ignore the priest child-abuse scandal. He writes of a seminary classmate who was great with kids. “Is my memory of Dave naïve? Would he have been the kind of priest to commit these awful crimes? All my instincts shout no. But I’ve learned I never can know for sure.” It’s one more thing that’s changed from the church he thought he once had committed himself to.
One reason Novara’s edges aren’t sharper may simply be the passage of time. He became a priest in the ‘60s, a tumultuous time in the world and an exciting time for the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. He served two years in a Detroit parish before making his exit.
After ordination and his Michigan homecoming, he began to learn the realities of being a priest, that it’s the ultimate 24/7 job, and you never get to leave the burdens at home. He also saw the relationship between priest and parishioner in a different light. “I thought I was going to be a personal trainer for a leaner, enlightened Catholicism,” he writes. “The majority of my congregation simply wanted a massage therapist.”
Despite any yearning for or curiosity about the road not taken, Novara ultimately is content with his choice to leave the church. “I so wanted to serve God and humanity on the macrocosmic, supernatural level. I came to find that atmosphere too rarefied. The scale of one on one friendship; the microcosm of my family has proved a more gratifying and seemingly successful strategy.”
Click here to link to My Two Years in the Priest Corps.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Game 7: Dead Ball
By Allen Schatz
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
There may be other novels featuring baseball umpires as lead characters, but I haven’t read one. It sounds almost like an exercise in a creative writing class: Set the person who is supposed to remain invisible at the center of a story involving love and hate, success and failure, excitement and tragedy. Author Allen Schatz has done that and done it well.
For a good portion of Game 7: Dead Ball, protagonist Marshall Connors knows he’s in the middle of a life-or-death situation. He just doesn’t know whose or what to do about it.
Chosen to umpire the World Series as a surprise replacement for the crew chief who apparently suffered a heart attack, Connors must call balls and strikes on his boyhood friend Terry O’Hara, the ace of the Philadelphia Phillies pitching staff, and Terry’s former USC teammate Nik Sanchez, catcher for the Tampa Bay Rays.
Terry and Nik’s relationship was ruined long ago and now is defined only by animus. A third Trojan teammate, AJ Singer, had an affair with Terry’s mother, and when her husband discovered it, things got very ugly for all involved.
As the Series bounces between Florida and Pennsylvania, millions of fans watch the games on television unaware of the real drama swirling around Marshall Connors. Notes are surreptitiously delivered to him at home plate; meaningful looks are thrown by league security men, and an old-fashioned baseball “message” is delivered by catcher Sanchez – a fastball allowed to blast Marshall in the facemask.
Between games, though, Marshall manages to work in a little romance and tries to help his friend Thomas Hillsborough, an ex-CIA spook who is sort of a law-enforcement-stud-without-portfolio, figure out what’s going on.
You might expect a mystery involving a baseball umpire in the World Series to center on fixing games. Schatz happily has chosen to go in a less obvious direction.
Without giving away the plot, the crimes here include serial murder, kidnapping, extortion, and felony battery. Throw in the inter-generational adultery and some unpaid gambling debts, and you’ve got lots of reasons for people not to like each other.
Game 7 has a huge cast of characters – FBI agents, Major League Baseball officials, ball players, bad guys, innocent victims, and umpires among them. It is to Schatz’s credit as a writer that they’re reasonably easy to keep straight.
If you like baseball and thrillers, Game 7: Dead Ball is a must read. Even those who are only so-so on the national pastime but enjoy complicated plots with well-drawn characters will find Game 7 most satisfying.
Click here to link to Game 7: Dead Ball.
Bill Furlow
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
There may be other novels featuring baseball umpires as lead characters, but I haven’t read one. It sounds almost like an exercise in a creative writing class: Set the person who is supposed to remain invisible at the center of a story involving love and hate, success and failure, excitement and tragedy. Author Allen Schatz has done that and done it well.
For a good portion of Game 7: Dead Ball, protagonist Marshall Connors knows he’s in the middle of a life-or-death situation. He just doesn’t know whose or what to do about it.
Chosen to umpire the World Series as a surprise replacement for the crew chief who apparently suffered a heart attack, Connors must call balls and strikes on his boyhood friend Terry O’Hara, the ace of the Philadelphia Phillies pitching staff, and Terry’s former USC teammate Nik Sanchez, catcher for the Tampa Bay Rays.
Terry and Nik’s relationship was ruined long ago and now is defined only by animus. A third Trojan teammate, AJ Singer, had an affair with Terry’s mother, and when her husband discovered it, things got very ugly for all involved.
As the Series bounces between Florida and Pennsylvania, millions of fans watch the games on television unaware of the real drama swirling around Marshall Connors. Notes are surreptitiously delivered to him at home plate; meaningful looks are thrown by league security men, and an old-fashioned baseball “message” is delivered by catcher Sanchez – a fastball allowed to blast Marshall in the facemask.
Between games, though, Marshall manages to work in a little romance and tries to help his friend Thomas Hillsborough, an ex-CIA spook who is sort of a law-enforcement-stud-without-portfolio, figure out what’s going on.
You might expect a mystery involving a baseball umpire in the World Series to center on fixing games. Schatz happily has chosen to go in a less obvious direction.
Without giving away the plot, the crimes here include serial murder, kidnapping, extortion, and felony battery. Throw in the inter-generational adultery and some unpaid gambling debts, and you’ve got lots of reasons for people not to like each other.
Game 7 has a huge cast of characters – FBI agents, Major League Baseball officials, ball players, bad guys, innocent victims, and umpires among them. It is to Schatz’s credit as a writer that they’re reasonably easy to keep straight.
If you like baseball and thrillers, Game 7: Dead Ball is a must read. Even those who are only so-so on the national pastime but enjoy complicated plots with well-drawn characters will find Game 7 most satisfying.
Click here to link to Game 7: Dead Ball.
Bill Furlow
Dragon Lady
By Gary Alexander
Available in early April at www.istoriabooks.com
In Gary Alexander’s vision of The Great Beyond, the big questions about life never get fully answered.
Joseph Josiah Joe IV doesn’t know whether he’s in Heaven or Hell, and he doesn’t waste time trying to figure it out, simply referring to it as The Great Beyond. “Thanks to the psychological games They play with me,” he tells us in the satirical Vietnam War book Dragon Lady, “one day it’s one, the next day the other.” Wherever he is, it’s got San Diego weather and non-stop elevator music.
Important to the reader is the perspective that living in The Great Beyond gives our storyteller, who long ago was Private Joe of the U.S. Army, serving in the relative safety of Saigon. The year is 1965, a time when big-wig Americans (at least fictional ones) were naïve enough to think they could pinpoint the very day the North Vietnamese would be forced to capitulate, sending home the relative handful of GIs in-country before too many were killed.
Private Joe’s youth had not been dominated by worship of baseball players, rock stars or astronauts. Rather he was fascinated by the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and his lingering boyhood crush had been on its mysterious femme fatale, the Dragon Lady. In Saigon, Joe comes across a beautiful woman who, in his still-boyish mind, becomes his real-life Dragon Lady.
Positioning the narrator in the afterlife gives Dragon Lady a third dimension that lifts it above a simple boy-meets-girl story. Mai is a prostitute and possible Viet Cong spy who consorts with Joe’s superior officers. Whatever she is, Joe is smitten with her and, all logic aside, wants to take her home. We know from the biography he’s given us from The Great Beyond, that’s not going to happen. But his love-sick pursuit of his impossible dream is entertaining.
Along the way, Joe and his sidekick Pvt. Zbitgysz lead a life of high-jinks, performing “alternative materiel” requisitions for their incompetent bosses. In that way and others, Dragon Lady aspires to be the Catch-22 of Vietnam. But it’s less ironic, and it’s no put-down to say its humor is more like that of the movie Good Morning, Vietnam or the TV version of M*A*S*H.
As a mortal, it takes Joe a long time and considerable growing up to learn the apparent truth about Mai. In The Great Beyond, new questions about her arise, enlivening Joe’s hum-drum existence and giving him something to live (?) for.
Until recently, I had not read a Vietnam book in decades. Now I’ve read two this year, the gripping Matterhorn, which takes us into the brutal world of a Marine combat unit, and the wistfully humorous Dragon Lady. Other than sharing a complete disdain for the mid-level officers whose egos and ambitions cost many American lives, the two couldn’t be more different. But both have something to say about the folly of war and, particularly, our Vietnam misadventure.
Click here to link to Dragon Lady.
Bill Furlow
Available in early April at www.istoriabooks.com
In Gary Alexander’s vision of The Great Beyond, the big questions about life never get fully answered.
Joseph Josiah Joe IV doesn’t know whether he’s in Heaven or Hell, and he doesn’t waste time trying to figure it out, simply referring to it as The Great Beyond. “Thanks to the psychological games They play with me,” he tells us in the satirical Vietnam War book Dragon Lady, “one day it’s one, the next day the other.” Wherever he is, it’s got San Diego weather and non-stop elevator music.
Important to the reader is the perspective that living in The Great Beyond gives our storyteller, who long ago was Private Joe of the U.S. Army, serving in the relative safety of Saigon. The year is 1965, a time when big-wig Americans (at least fictional ones) were naïve enough to think they could pinpoint the very day the North Vietnamese would be forced to capitulate, sending home the relative handful of GIs in-country before too many were killed.
Private Joe’s youth had not been dominated by worship of baseball players, rock stars or astronauts. Rather he was fascinated by the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and his lingering boyhood crush had been on its mysterious femme fatale, the Dragon Lady. In Saigon, Joe comes across a beautiful woman who, in his still-boyish mind, becomes his real-life Dragon Lady.
Positioning the narrator in the afterlife gives Dragon Lady a third dimension that lifts it above a simple boy-meets-girl story. Mai is a prostitute and possible Viet Cong spy who consorts with Joe’s superior officers. Whatever she is, Joe is smitten with her and, all logic aside, wants to take her home. We know from the biography he’s given us from The Great Beyond, that’s not going to happen. But his love-sick pursuit of his impossible dream is entertaining.
Along the way, Joe and his sidekick Pvt. Zbitgysz lead a life of high-jinks, performing “alternative materiel” requisitions for their incompetent bosses. In that way and others, Dragon Lady aspires to be the Catch-22 of Vietnam. But it’s less ironic, and it’s no put-down to say its humor is more like that of the movie Good Morning, Vietnam or the TV version of M*A*S*H.
As a mortal, it takes Joe a long time and considerable growing up to learn the apparent truth about Mai. In The Great Beyond, new questions about her arise, enlivening Joe’s hum-drum existence and giving him something to live (?) for.
Until recently, I had not read a Vietnam book in decades. Now I’ve read two this year, the gripping Matterhorn, which takes us into the brutal world of a Marine combat unit, and the wistfully humorous Dragon Lady. Other than sharing a complete disdain for the mid-level officers whose egos and ambitions cost many American lives, the two couldn’t be more different. But both have something to say about the folly of war and, particularly, our Vietnam misadventure.
Click here to link to Dragon Lady.
Bill Furlow
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Lethal Play
By Loretta Giacoletto
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
Francesca Canelli never was the stereotypical soccer mom, even though the center of family life was son Matt’s aspiration to play for the top club team in St. Louis. She had zero feel for the game and, if possible, even less interest in schmoozing with the other parents.
But when Matt’s soccer-nut father Ben is fatally struck by a van on an early morning jog, Francesca tries to pick up the slack, doing everything she can – and that turns out to be an outrageously big “everything” – to support her son.
The team, Pegasi, is coached by Rex Meredith, and no more loathsome individual ever walked a sideline. He uses his team’s success to extort everything from medical services to appliances to sex from the soccer parents, and even players.
When Rex’s body is found hanging from the soccer goal crossbar, naked but for socks, not even his widow is heartbroken. Was it suicide? It’s possible but unlikely. Francesca Canelli, who may have had ample reason to murder Rex, certainly couldn’t have put him in that position by herself. But with an accomplice…? Disaffected players cannot be overlooked. And what about the Canelli family friend who took over the team after Meredith’s death?
Det. Guy Winchester and Lt. Sam Reardan, assisted by Juvenile Officer Quinella Armstrong, are on the case but seem to find no one who has a credible story. (I don’t know whether Giacoletto thought through the fact that Armstrong is typically referred to by her first name, while the male detectives are identified by their last.)
Eventually the case appears to be nicely wrapped up, ending a little more cleanly than one might desire. Thankfully, though, that conclusion is no more satisfying to Reardan and Winchester, so they continue to probe.
Lethal Play has plenty of complexity to keep readers off-guard. Giacoletto has created characters the reader can pull for or against and also recognize. It’s a good read, and we look forward to seeing other books from her.
Click here to link to Lethal Play.
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
Francesca Canelli never was the stereotypical soccer mom, even though the center of family life was son Matt’s aspiration to play for the top club team in St. Louis. She had zero feel for the game and, if possible, even less interest in schmoozing with the other parents.
But when Matt’s soccer-nut father Ben is fatally struck by a van on an early morning jog, Francesca tries to pick up the slack, doing everything she can – and that turns out to be an outrageously big “everything” – to support her son.
The team, Pegasi, is coached by Rex Meredith, and no more loathsome individual ever walked a sideline. He uses his team’s success to extort everything from medical services to appliances to sex from the soccer parents, and even players.
When Rex’s body is found hanging from the soccer goal crossbar, naked but for socks, not even his widow is heartbroken. Was it suicide? It’s possible but unlikely. Francesca Canelli, who may have had ample reason to murder Rex, certainly couldn’t have put him in that position by herself. But with an accomplice…? Disaffected players cannot be overlooked. And what about the Canelli family friend who took over the team after Meredith’s death?
Det. Guy Winchester and Lt. Sam Reardan, assisted by Juvenile Officer Quinella Armstrong, are on the case but seem to find no one who has a credible story. (I don’t know whether Giacoletto thought through the fact that Armstrong is typically referred to by her first name, while the male detectives are identified by their last.)
Eventually the case appears to be nicely wrapped up, ending a little more cleanly than one might desire. Thankfully, though, that conclusion is no more satisfying to Reardan and Winchester, so they continue to probe.
Lethal Play has plenty of complexity to keep readers off-guard. Giacoletto has created characters the reader can pull for or against and also recognize. It’s a good read, and we look forward to seeing other books from her.
Click here to link to Lethal Play.
Off Track
By Michael J. Hultquist
$3.99 at www.smashwords.com
Off Track is a classic story of a guy getting out of the joint and trying to go straight in the face of circumstances and people who conspire against him.
In this case, though, the ex-con is only 16 years old. Gary Sanderson had been in an Illinois juvenile facility called Radcliffe for four years after having killed his father in a morally justifiable, if illegal, shooting.
Now he wants nothing more than to make a decent life with the nice young foster parents whose decision to take him in shaved two years off his sentence. Oh, and he also wants a relationship with the neighbor girl whose father has forbidden him from coming anywhere near her.
Gary’s legal status leaves him vulnerable to those who enjoy preying on the weak, from an over-familiar male guidance counselor, to schoolyard bullies and an arrogant, tone-deaf cop.
Inevitably, Gary must make a decision that – again, even if morally defensible – could land him back in juvenile detention or worse. Readers may think they understand the alternative ways the situation could be resolved, but author Michael J. Hultquist has thought of a few more.
Hultquist lets the book unfold in its own time. He said he was seeking “a slow boil that bubbled to the surface in one final crescendo.” And that’s pretty much what it does. It’s a good story for readers who don’t require instant gratification and can find satisfaction in considering Gary’s various ethical and practical dilemmas along the way.
Click here to link to Off Track.
$3.99 at www.smashwords.com
Off Track is a classic story of a guy getting out of the joint and trying to go straight in the face of circumstances and people who conspire against him.
In this case, though, the ex-con is only 16 years old. Gary Sanderson had been in an Illinois juvenile facility called Radcliffe for four years after having killed his father in a morally justifiable, if illegal, shooting.
Now he wants nothing more than to make a decent life with the nice young foster parents whose decision to take him in shaved two years off his sentence. Oh, and he also wants a relationship with the neighbor girl whose father has forbidden him from coming anywhere near her.
Gary’s legal status leaves him vulnerable to those who enjoy preying on the weak, from an over-familiar male guidance counselor, to schoolyard bullies and an arrogant, tone-deaf cop.
Inevitably, Gary must make a decision that – again, even if morally defensible – could land him back in juvenile detention or worse. Readers may think they understand the alternative ways the situation could be resolved, but author Michael J. Hultquist has thought of a few more.
Hultquist lets the book unfold in its own time. He said he was seeking “a slow boil that bubbled to the surface in one final crescendo.” And that’s pretty much what it does. It’s a good story for readers who don’t require instant gratification and can find satisfaction in considering Gary’s various ethical and practical dilemmas along the way.
Click here to link to Off Track.
Make a Move
By Stephen Gaskin
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
Freddy Mossman is too young to be washed up as a British SIS agent, but that’s essentially the situation he’s in because of a major screw-up on an assignment in Mexico. As a way to stay in the agency, he’s agreed to manage a safe house lodged in a small-time Parisian porn theater.
While Freddy ponders whether he’s got the right moral code for his chosen career, across town his former girlfriend Holly Henderson tries to fit in with the French company that acquired her former employer and moved her to the home office.
Stirring the pot is Freddy’s friend Jay McFarlane, a talented but not over-ambitious photographer who already has found his niche in life – causing as much trouble as possible for those he thinks deserve it. Invited to Paris to lighten his friend’s mood, Jay has attracted his own set of government operatives.
Jay’s idea of fun is to steal the neighborhood pimp’s classic car or to put Freddy in a position in which he must fight a celebrity’s two bodyguards. He’s not even above insulting the wife of Holly’s boss at the party she hopes to use to salvage her career. In a way, this is a high-jinks book. There is lots of violence, but most of it takes place off-stage.
As expected in a well-written thriller, it’s usually unclear who’s doing what to whom and why. When Freddy’s former mentor Thomas Veil shows up to offer him a way out of his dead-beat job, all the loose ends – Mexico, the spy shot dead in the theater by a gunman wearing a clown mask, and the head and hands of another spook left in Freddy’s fridge – all come together in a very satisfying denouement.
Make a Move is breezy, well-crafted and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Click here to link to Make a Move.
$2.99 at www.smashwords.com
Freddy Mossman is too young to be washed up as a British SIS agent, but that’s essentially the situation he’s in because of a major screw-up on an assignment in Mexico. As a way to stay in the agency, he’s agreed to manage a safe house lodged in a small-time Parisian porn theater.
While Freddy ponders whether he’s got the right moral code for his chosen career, across town his former girlfriend Holly Henderson tries to fit in with the French company that acquired her former employer and moved her to the home office.
Stirring the pot is Freddy’s friend Jay McFarlane, a talented but not over-ambitious photographer who already has found his niche in life – causing as much trouble as possible for those he thinks deserve it. Invited to Paris to lighten his friend’s mood, Jay has attracted his own set of government operatives.
Jay’s idea of fun is to steal the neighborhood pimp’s classic car or to put Freddy in a position in which he must fight a celebrity’s two bodyguards. He’s not even above insulting the wife of Holly’s boss at the party she hopes to use to salvage her career. In a way, this is a high-jinks book. There is lots of violence, but most of it takes place off-stage.
As expected in a well-written thriller, it’s usually unclear who’s doing what to whom and why. When Freddy’s former mentor Thomas Veil shows up to offer him a way out of his dead-beat job, all the loose ends – Mexico, the spy shot dead in the theater by a gunman wearing a clown mask, and the head and hands of another spook left in Freddy’s fridge – all come together in a very satisfying denouement.
Make a Move is breezy, well-crafted and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Click here to link to Make a Move.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Polly!
By Stephen Goldin
$4.99 at Smashwords.com
Stephen Goldin describes himself as a professional fantasy and science fiction writer and an atheist.
The first of those descriptors is readily apparent in Polly!, but a surprise turn makes the last relevant as well.
I know I risk turning off some readers if I let on that the book’s protagonist, Herodotus, has the greatest sex of his life with a beautiful woman who may actually be God. But reviews are supposed to warn readers away from books they won’t like, so perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Most readers, though, would lose out if they let a little thing like that deter them from reading this unusual little novel.
As the book opens, Herodotus has just awakened in terror to find his bookstore on fire and smoke billowing upward into his second-floor apartment. His wife has left him, and the IRS claims he owes $8,000, which he doesn’t have. Now this.
Short on good options, he sets out in his decrepit Corolla to pay an unannounced call on his brother, who lives on a ranch in Nevada. On the way, the car breaks down in the grueling desert heat right in front of a mansion. Polly is its owner.
It must be said that Goldin is an atheist with a great sense of humor who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is well grounded in the Bible and theology – and the Marx Brothers. The verbal sparring that takes place between Herodotus and Polly, whoever she may actually be, is brilliant from beginning to end.
In brief, Polly is a lion-owning, acrobatic, Japanese-speaking, gourmet-cooking nuclear physicist who hosts a houseful of friendly people whose lives she has touched with her kindness and generosity. Not that she always seems so kind to Herodotus, who is understandably confused by such oddities as an elevator in a two-story mansion that ascends for 13 floors.
The book is an allegory of self-discovery – or perhaps, universe discovery – by Herodotus, who can’t possibly match wits with the wise-cracking, teasing Polly. Without giving away more, let’s just say the conversation, which is laced with hundreds of puns and one-liners, eventually works its way around to the Supreme Being.
Whether she is or isn’t literally divine, Polly’s organizing principle is that entropy – the constant tendency of the universe to run down – is unstoppable, even by her, but nevertheless must be resisted.
Overwhelmed with Polly’s seeming omniscience, Herodotus presses for answers to the big questions about life and thereafter. Eventually he asks, “So fighting entropy is the point?” “No,” Polly replies, “Fighting entropy is what I choose to do.”
She wages the battle on an incalculable number of fronts, including helping a group of protesters save a polluted river, teaching illiterate adults to read and befriending a child with leukemia.
Polly! is the kind of book aspiring writers should read just to study the craft. Goldin’s writing is fastidious. And he seemingly has the gift (Would that be a theological term?) of calling on everything he knows from the silly to the profound to create a story that starts out being entertaining and winds up being interesting, even thought-provoking.
Click here to link to Polly.
Bill Furlow
$4.99 at Smashwords.com
Stephen Goldin describes himself as a professional fantasy and science fiction writer and an atheist.
The first of those descriptors is readily apparent in Polly!, but a surprise turn makes the last relevant as well.
I know I risk turning off some readers if I let on that the book’s protagonist, Herodotus, has the greatest sex of his life with a beautiful woman who may actually be God. But reviews are supposed to warn readers away from books they won’t like, so perhaps that’s not a bad thing. Most readers, though, would lose out if they let a little thing like that deter them from reading this unusual little novel.
As the book opens, Herodotus has just awakened in terror to find his bookstore on fire and smoke billowing upward into his second-floor apartment. His wife has left him, and the IRS claims he owes $8,000, which he doesn’t have. Now this.
Short on good options, he sets out in his decrepit Corolla to pay an unannounced call on his brother, who lives on a ranch in Nevada. On the way, the car breaks down in the grueling desert heat right in front of a mansion. Polly is its owner.
It must be said that Goldin is an atheist with a great sense of humor who doesn’t take himself too seriously. He is well grounded in the Bible and theology – and the Marx Brothers. The verbal sparring that takes place between Herodotus and Polly, whoever she may actually be, is brilliant from beginning to end.
In brief, Polly is a lion-owning, acrobatic, Japanese-speaking, gourmet-cooking nuclear physicist who hosts a houseful of friendly people whose lives she has touched with her kindness and generosity. Not that she always seems so kind to Herodotus, who is understandably confused by such oddities as an elevator in a two-story mansion that ascends for 13 floors.
The book is an allegory of self-discovery – or perhaps, universe discovery – by Herodotus, who can’t possibly match wits with the wise-cracking, teasing Polly. Without giving away more, let’s just say the conversation, which is laced with hundreds of puns and one-liners, eventually works its way around to the Supreme Being.
Whether she is or isn’t literally divine, Polly’s organizing principle is that entropy – the constant tendency of the universe to run down – is unstoppable, even by her, but nevertheless must be resisted.
Overwhelmed with Polly’s seeming omniscience, Herodotus presses for answers to the big questions about life and thereafter. Eventually he asks, “So fighting entropy is the point?” “No,” Polly replies, “Fighting entropy is what I choose to do.”
She wages the battle on an incalculable number of fronts, including helping a group of protesters save a polluted river, teaching illiterate adults to read and befriending a child with leukemia.
Polly! is the kind of book aspiring writers should read just to study the craft. Goldin’s writing is fastidious. And he seemingly has the gift (Would that be a theological term?) of calling on everything he knows from the silly to the profound to create a story that starts out being entertaining and winds up being interesting, even thought-provoking.
Click here to link to Polly.
Bill Furlow
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Fools Club
By Craig Mallery
Free at www.smashwords.com
What an intelligent, taut thriller this is.
Set in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, the “club” of the title is made up of four geeks who failed when they had the chance to profit from their high-flying (for awhile) software startup, Defiance.
Jacob Miller, the engineering genius behind Defiance, never sold a single share of stock, so when the bubble burst and Defiance’s market cap fell from $15 billion to zero, he earned the title King of Fools.
Not part of the club, living large and planning a run for the U.S. Senate, is Jacob’s stepbrother and former Defiance front man Colin Schaeffer. Why is Colin rich and Jacob broke? The feds have been asking the same question but have failed to come up with evidence to indict Colin for any kind of wrongdoing.
The night the U.S. Attorney announces an end to the investigation, clearing the way for Colin’s entry into politics, the Fools gather to literally cry in their beer and bemoan the unfairness of life. After sufficient pitchers are consumed, they come up with the un-Mensa-like idea of egging Colin’s beautiful gated mansion. This childish prank sets in motion events that will reveal the source of Colin’s wealth, threaten his family and career and lock the stepbrothers into a violent dance with a Melissa Etheridge-obsessed lesbian assassin.
Though Jacob is bitter about Colin’s good fortune in the face of his own failure – not the least of that good fortune being his marriage to Jacob’s classy former girlfriend – when he has the opportunity to wreck Colin’s life, he cannot do it. The bonds of childhood and the gratitude for the golden boy who protected him from bullies and tried to teach him about sports are too strong.
Colin suffers no such pangs of loyalty, to Jacob or anyone else. When his campaign manager offers to put him in touch with the one person who can make any lingering concerns about law enforcement go away, he scarcely hesitates before reaching out to the anonymous pimpmyride8@hushmail.com.
A soulless phony who somehow imagines himself as a cross between Bobby Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt, Colin is quickly out of his depth in dealing with the woman who calls herself “Mel” and whose only ambitions are to work as a bodyguard for Etheridge and to become a single mother.
In the end, of course, at least one of the three must go down, and it becomes a question of whose bad judgment will turn out to be the most catastrophic.
We don’t find any bio information on Craig Mallery and don’t know why the book is available for free. Based on his easy descriptions of the Silicon Valley, he apparently is or was part of that world of dot.coms, venture capitalists, fast fortunes and equally fast collapses.
The writing in Fools Club is crisp and clean. The plot moves quickly but not at the expense of the players’ depth. Each character is believable and recognizable except perhaps Patrini, the beautiful female Fool who secretly has the hots for Jacob. The techie/geeky stuff serves the story well and doesn’t compete with it.
Like the other books we recommend on this blog, if Fools Club were published under the name of a well-known writer and you paid $25 for it, you would not be disappointed. If you compared it to a David Baldacci novel – a fair comparison for the genre – you’d find the writing much better, the plot more interesting and the characters more believable.
Click here to link to Fools Club.
Free at www.smashwords.com
What an intelligent, taut thriller this is.
Set in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, the “club” of the title is made up of four geeks who failed when they had the chance to profit from their high-flying (for awhile) software startup, Defiance.
Jacob Miller, the engineering genius behind Defiance, never sold a single share of stock, so when the bubble burst and Defiance’s market cap fell from $15 billion to zero, he earned the title King of Fools.
Not part of the club, living large and planning a run for the U.S. Senate, is Jacob’s stepbrother and former Defiance front man Colin Schaeffer. Why is Colin rich and Jacob broke? The feds have been asking the same question but have failed to come up with evidence to indict Colin for any kind of wrongdoing.
The night the U.S. Attorney announces an end to the investigation, clearing the way for Colin’s entry into politics, the Fools gather to literally cry in their beer and bemoan the unfairness of life. After sufficient pitchers are consumed, they come up with the un-Mensa-like idea of egging Colin’s beautiful gated mansion. This childish prank sets in motion events that will reveal the source of Colin’s wealth, threaten his family and career and lock the stepbrothers into a violent dance with a Melissa Etheridge-obsessed lesbian assassin.
Though Jacob is bitter about Colin’s good fortune in the face of his own failure – not the least of that good fortune being his marriage to Jacob’s classy former girlfriend – when he has the opportunity to wreck Colin’s life, he cannot do it. The bonds of childhood and the gratitude for the golden boy who protected him from bullies and tried to teach him about sports are too strong.
Colin suffers no such pangs of loyalty, to Jacob or anyone else. When his campaign manager offers to put him in touch with the one person who can make any lingering concerns about law enforcement go away, he scarcely hesitates before reaching out to the anonymous pimpmyride8@hushmail.com.
A soulless phony who somehow imagines himself as a cross between Bobby Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt, Colin is quickly out of his depth in dealing with the woman who calls herself “Mel” and whose only ambitions are to work as a bodyguard for Etheridge and to become a single mother.
In the end, of course, at least one of the three must go down, and it becomes a question of whose bad judgment will turn out to be the most catastrophic.
We don’t find any bio information on Craig Mallery and don’t know why the book is available for free. Based on his easy descriptions of the Silicon Valley, he apparently is or was part of that world of dot.coms, venture capitalists, fast fortunes and equally fast collapses.
The writing in Fools Club is crisp and clean. The plot moves quickly but not at the expense of the players’ depth. Each character is believable and recognizable except perhaps Patrini, the beautiful female Fool who secretly has the hots for Jacob. The techie/geeky stuff serves the story well and doesn’t compete with it.
Like the other books we recommend on this blog, if Fools Club were published under the name of a well-known writer and you paid $25 for it, you would not be disappointed. If you compared it to a David Baldacci novel – a fair comparison for the genre – you’d find the writing much better, the plot more interesting and the characters more believable.
Click here to link to Fools Club.
Where the Bones Rest
By Roger Pavey
$3.99 at Smashwords.com
British scholar Eric Anderson wrote that “the classical historical novel – as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy – gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment.”
In Where the Bones Rest, Roger Pavey tells the stories of ordinary people caught up in the drama of the last Indian war fought east of the Mississippi River. The “unexpected viewpoint” is ground level with a young Indian wife and mother, an opportunistic physician/newspaperman/soldier and a teenage white girl who survived the slaughter of her parents and most of her family by marauders of the Saukie Nation.
The novel has the tone of a sweeping saga that could go on for generations. But it largely confines itself to the period from 1828 to 1833, in which 1,500 Native Americans led by the old warrior they called Black Sparrow Hawk were harassed and then pursued by a ragtag army of mainly volunteer soldiers in the inevitable clash of corn vs. railroad.
In its structure and its detailed descriptions of the suffering experienced by those on both sides, Where the Bones Rest is akin to GI-focused war novels such as World War II’s The Naked and the Dead and the current Vietnam book Matterhorn. It doesn’t draw any large lessons from the Black Hawk War, and, though it treats Namesa, the leading character, and her people with great sympathy the brutality the Native Americans perpetrated against innocent white civilians is not ignored. Nor is the deprivation suffered by the underfed, ill-equipped soldiers.
When we meet Namesa, she is a teenage girl playing classic approach-avoidance games with her eventual husband Jumping Fish. Early on she reflects: “All my life
things had been certain before me. The seasons revolved. We planted. We harvested.
We hunted.” But now Jumping Fish tells her the women will not plant corn in the year 1832 because the white settlers have taken over their farm lands. Instead Black Hawk will seek alliances with other tribes and the British in hopes they will supply both food and aid in battle.
Dr. Addison Philleo is the doctor who sees the opportunity to start the first newspaper in Galena, Illinois. He volunteers as an army surgeon, but he also aspires to glory in combat with the Indians. Philleo more or less serves as the villain of the piece, but he’s only an observer not a decision maker.
The least detailed of the three storytellers is Rachel Hall, a 17-year-old, who along with her sister survives the massacre of her family and neighbors, including a baby girl whose head was bashed on a stump to make her stop crying. The sisters are taken prisoner by the raiding party, and their part of the story recounts their mostly decent treatment by their captives and their eventual return to their community.
The writing in Where the Bones Rest is excellent, even if Pavey allows a few anachronistic phrases like “not so much” into the text. The book is filled with colorful descriptions and dialogue. And for a small slice of history most readers will know little about, Pavey really seems to have done his research and created a book that feels credible.
Those who enjoy historical fiction or stories of the westward expansion of the United States will find Where the Bones Rest a most satisfying read.
Click here to link to Where the Bones Rest.
$3.99 at Smashwords.com
British scholar Eric Anderson wrote that “the classical historical novel – as concocted by Walter Scott and perfected by Tolstoy – gives the reader an unexpected viewpoint from which to witness a great historical moment.”
In Where the Bones Rest, Roger Pavey tells the stories of ordinary people caught up in the drama of the last Indian war fought east of the Mississippi River. The “unexpected viewpoint” is ground level with a young Indian wife and mother, an opportunistic physician/newspaperman/soldier and a teenage white girl who survived the slaughter of her parents and most of her family by marauders of the Saukie Nation.
The novel has the tone of a sweeping saga that could go on for generations. But it largely confines itself to the period from 1828 to 1833, in which 1,500 Native Americans led by the old warrior they called Black Sparrow Hawk were harassed and then pursued by a ragtag army of mainly volunteer soldiers in the inevitable clash of corn vs. railroad.
In its structure and its detailed descriptions of the suffering experienced by those on both sides, Where the Bones Rest is akin to GI-focused war novels such as World War II’s The Naked and the Dead and the current Vietnam book Matterhorn. It doesn’t draw any large lessons from the Black Hawk War, and, though it treats Namesa, the leading character, and her people with great sympathy the brutality the Native Americans perpetrated against innocent white civilians is not ignored. Nor is the deprivation suffered by the underfed, ill-equipped soldiers.
When we meet Namesa, she is a teenage girl playing classic approach-avoidance games with her eventual husband Jumping Fish. Early on she reflects: “All my life
things had been certain before me. The seasons revolved. We planted. We harvested.
We hunted.” But now Jumping Fish tells her the women will not plant corn in the year 1832 because the white settlers have taken over their farm lands. Instead Black Hawk will seek alliances with other tribes and the British in hopes they will supply both food and aid in battle.
Dr. Addison Philleo is the doctor who sees the opportunity to start the first newspaper in Galena, Illinois. He volunteers as an army surgeon, but he also aspires to glory in combat with the Indians. Philleo more or less serves as the villain of the piece, but he’s only an observer not a decision maker.
The least detailed of the three storytellers is Rachel Hall, a 17-year-old, who along with her sister survives the massacre of her family and neighbors, including a baby girl whose head was bashed on a stump to make her stop crying. The sisters are taken prisoner by the raiding party, and their part of the story recounts their mostly decent treatment by their captives and their eventual return to their community.
The writing in Where the Bones Rest is excellent, even if Pavey allows a few anachronistic phrases like “not so much” into the text. The book is filled with colorful descriptions and dialogue. And for a small slice of history most readers will know little about, Pavey really seems to have done his research and created a book that feels credible.
Those who enjoy historical fiction or stories of the westward expansion of the United States will find Where the Bones Rest a most satisfying read.
Click here to link to Where the Bones Rest.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
The Defector
By Mark Chisnell
Free at www.smashwords.com
The Prisoner’s Dilemma constructs a theoretical situation in which two prisoners accused of colluding in a crime must decide independently whether to cooperate with the authorities or stonewall. Both prisoners’ fates depend on the combination of the decisions they make.
Mark Chisnell cleverly uses this non-zero-sum “games theory” problem to construct an escalating series of events in which fired currency trader Martin, a brilliant, macho young man who doesn’t always use the best judgment, is forced to play for higher and higher stakes, ultimately his life and that of others.
This is a muscular, plot-driven book with elements of extreme brutality. The characters, including the diabolical villain Janac, are fine but not complex. It doesn’t matter because the action is so good and comes so fast that the reader never loses interest.
This thriller apparently was published in 2009 in the U.K. Why it’s available now for free, we don’t know. We don’t recommend books here based on price – they’re all cheap – but as a freebie, it doesn’t get a lot better than The Defector.
Click here for link
Free at www.smashwords.com
The Prisoner’s Dilemma constructs a theoretical situation in which two prisoners accused of colluding in a crime must decide independently whether to cooperate with the authorities or stonewall. Both prisoners’ fates depend on the combination of the decisions they make.
Mark Chisnell cleverly uses this non-zero-sum “games theory” problem to construct an escalating series of events in which fired currency trader Martin, a brilliant, macho young man who doesn’t always use the best judgment, is forced to play for higher and higher stakes, ultimately his life and that of others.
This is a muscular, plot-driven book with elements of extreme brutality. The characters, including the diabolical villain Janac, are fine but not complex. It doesn’t matter because the action is so good and comes so fast that the reader never loses interest.
This thriller apparently was published in 2009 in the U.K. Why it’s available now for free, we don’t know. We don’t recommend books here based on price – they’re all cheap – but as a freebie, it doesn’t get a lot better than The Defector.
Click here for link
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