By Linda L. Richards
$0.99 at Smashwords.com
In Mad Money, author Linda L. Richards has done what I didn’t think was possible—interest me in a novel in which the stock market and day trading have a prominent role.
Mad Money is really two mysteries, very different and yet with eerie similarities, and somehow former Manhattan stockbroker turned Los Angeles day trader Madeline Carter ends up in the middle of both.
The novel is so cleverly plotted that the tragedy that unfolds in the first pages, a seemingly stand-alone event serving as the catalyst for Madeline’s change of careers and cross-country move, ends up being central to the solution of the primary mystery.
Madeline moves into a tiny Malibu guest house/apartment on the grounds of the home of movie director Tyler Beckett and his new actress wife.
On her first night in residence, the Becketts invite her to a party they are hosting and she meets Emily, a fledgling assistant movie director who becomes her best friend and to whom she turns for help in solving the mysteries.
The next week she’s at a nightspot having a drink with Emily when, to her chagrin, her Harvard beau of 12 years earlier shows up at her table. The relationship between Ernest Carmichael Billings and Madeline had not ended well, and Madeline has no tender feelings toward him.
However, he’s become a wunderkind in the business world bailing out public companies and turning them around in record time. He’s recently moved to Los Angeles to become CEO of a company called Langton Regional Group. His appointment is a secret, though, until the public announcement is made the following Monday.
Over the weekend, Madeline does something she shouldn’t have: Decides to buy a lot of LRG stock with her nest egg. Presumably, because of Billings’ previous success, the stock price will go up with the announcement of his hiring. What she’s doing is called insider trading since she got a tip from the “inside” and buys her stock before the average investor learns that Billings has come on board at LRG—and that’s not legal.
Madeline makes her initial buy. LRG announces that Billings is the new CEO. The stock starts to go up as expected. Madeline buys more. She starts calculating her profit and thinking about at what price she’ll sell.
Just a few hours later, however, trading of LRG stock is “halted pending announcement.”
It turns out that Billings, the new CEO, never showed at Langton’s headquarters Monday morning. Madeline senses some funny stock business has taken place and wants to find Billings. He’s been kidnapped, but that is no deterrent to her.
What follows is her amateur, yet clever, investigation into Billings’ disappearance. Meanwhile, her landlord’s 17-year-old daughter goes missing and is also believed kidnapped. Madeline adds this disappearance to her investigative load and works leads on both at the same time.
The development of the story, the characters, the dialogue and the twists along the way put this e-book in the same category with mysteries from the big publishing houses that are sold in bookstores across the country. Richards has written a good book.
And, by the way, she has in the works two more Madeline Carter novels. I’m ready.
Click here to link to Mad Money.
--Davilynn Furlow
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
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Gabby...All About Me
By Lee Carey
$3.99 at Smashwords.com
Okay, I admit it. I’m a sucker for dogs, for books about dogs, for magazines that sell dog stuff, for just about anything doggie.
Lee Carey’s novel, Gabby . . . All About Me, fits the dog-lover profile perfectly. Scooter, an aspiring novelist, lives on the beach in Virginia Beach, Florida. He’s single and decides he wants a dog. Like a good citizen, he goes to the local SPCA to adopt his new pet.
Only we’re not sure that Scooter does the adopting. An eight-month-old Lab-Chow mix starts talking to Scooter from his cage to make sure that Scooter knows she’s the one. Yes, that’s right, the puppy starts talking. She understands Scooter, too--his words as well as his thoughts.
Scooter’s a bit freaked out, but what choice does he have. He tells the SPCA lady that he wants this cute black puppy with white fur on her chest. Her name is Gabriella, but Scooter, in his macho beach guy best, tells the pup (yes, the pup herself) that he can’t have a dog named Gabriella and dubs her Gabby. Get it? Short for Gabriella but descriptive as well.
That first day you would think it was “all about Gabby.” She gets a romp on the beach, she gets grilled burgers for dinner as requested, and she gets to nap to her heart’s content.
Scooter is working on a novel, but it’s no better than the many others he’s written and received rejection letters for. Gabby offers to help. Scooter is skeptical, but he listens patiently. Before you know it, Gabby has given him some plot points and he’s on a writing roll.
They develop a routine of going to the beach (Scooter surfs and Gabby visits all the beachgoers), eating, writing and napping.
Gabby’s true calling, however, soon asserts itself. I won’t go into detail because it would spoil the story. Suffice it to say that amazing things happen with Gabby around. And her presence is life-changing for Scooter.
This is an uplifting novel that can bring a tear to your eye, a laugh from your belly and memories of our own dogs when they were puppies. This is an excellent book for 11- or 12-year-olds through the teen years and for anyone who loves a dog story—including this grandmother.
Click here to link to Gabby...All About Me.
Davilynn Furlow
$3.99 at Smashwords.com
Okay, I admit it. I’m a sucker for dogs, for books about dogs, for magazines that sell dog stuff, for just about anything doggie.
Lee Carey’s novel, Gabby . . . All About Me, fits the dog-lover profile perfectly. Scooter, an aspiring novelist, lives on the beach in Virginia Beach, Florida. He’s single and decides he wants a dog. Like a good citizen, he goes to the local SPCA to adopt his new pet.
Only we’re not sure that Scooter does the adopting. An eight-month-old Lab-Chow mix starts talking to Scooter from his cage to make sure that Scooter knows she’s the one. Yes, that’s right, the puppy starts talking. She understands Scooter, too--his words as well as his thoughts.
Scooter’s a bit freaked out, but what choice does he have. He tells the SPCA lady that he wants this cute black puppy with white fur on her chest. Her name is Gabriella, but Scooter, in his macho beach guy best, tells the pup (yes, the pup herself) that he can’t have a dog named Gabriella and dubs her Gabby. Get it? Short for Gabriella but descriptive as well.
That first day you would think it was “all about Gabby.” She gets a romp on the beach, she gets grilled burgers for dinner as requested, and she gets to nap to her heart’s content.
Scooter is working on a novel, but it’s no better than the many others he’s written and received rejection letters for. Gabby offers to help. Scooter is skeptical, but he listens patiently. Before you know it, Gabby has given him some plot points and he’s on a writing roll.
They develop a routine of going to the beach (Scooter surfs and Gabby visits all the beachgoers), eating, writing and napping.
Gabby’s true calling, however, soon asserts itself. I won’t go into detail because it would spoil the story. Suffice it to say that amazing things happen with Gabby around. And her presence is life-changing for Scooter.
This is an uplifting novel that can bring a tear to your eye, a laugh from your belly and memories of our own dogs when they were puppies. This is an excellent book for 11- or 12-year-olds through the teen years and for anyone who loves a dog story—including this grandmother.
Click here to link to Gabby...All About Me.
Davilynn Furlow
Friday, April 15, 2011
The Magpie's Secret
By G.J. Lau
$0.99 at Smashwords.com
G.J. Lau has written a thriller with romance, politics, family complications, and, of course, secrets.
Frank Martinelli is an ordinary guy, if you take into account the effects a tour in Vietnam in his 20s and the disappearance of his daughter on her way back to college 20 years ago will have on a man. He lives in a pleasant town not far from Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Office of Management and Budget until he retired. His inability to get past the disappearance of their daughter resulted in divorce, although he and his ex-wife are still friendly.
Frank lives above a bar, and the bar’s owner and one of the bartenders are like family to him. He makes extra spending money by helping out at a funeral home when they need an extra usher, parking attendant, or pallbearer, and at a car dealer shuttling vehicles from one dealership to another.
All in all, his life is pretty mundane, and his schedule is predictable. Until one afternoon when a man asks to join him as he’s eating lunch outside at a neighborhood restaurant. That conversation turns Frank’s well-ordered life upside down.
The “stranger” turns out to be Thomas Clayton, who served briefly with Frank in Vietnam. When Thomas left the Army, he took what he had learned and became an assassin for hire. Thomas is essentially retired now and only takes special assignments. He tells Frank that someone tried to hire him to kill him. Thomas declined (seeing as how they had been Army buddies and Frank had done him a good turn), but the contract is still being shopped, and someone without Thomas’s scruples could easily take it up.
Although at first Frank can’t imagine why someone would to have him killed, paranoia becomes a constant companion, particularly after his ex-wife Emily’s condo is broken into.
Not long after Frank’s daughter disappeared, he had volunteered at a teen hotline and talked frequently with one particular young woman. He sensed that she was being sexually molested, but he had no proof. When he reads in the paper that a teen-ager named Rachel Meadows has been killed in an auto accident on the eve of her 16th birthday, he puts it together with his hotline client. Because he feels guilty, he goes to the funeral, even though he doesn’t know the family. Rachel’s mother, Catherine, thinks it odd that a stranger is at her daughter’s funeral and seeks him out. They talk briefly, and she senses Frank knows something about Rachel he’s not saying.
Twenty years pass; Frank finds out he’s the target of an assassin; Rachel Meadows’ father dies; and Frank is asked to work the parking lot at his funeral. Catherine sees him, remembers him from her daughter’s funeral, and seeks him out. They talk again.
Catherine’s son Adam is running for political office, and Frank volunteers to work on the campaign. He likes politics, but he also wonders if Adam knows about Rachel’s abuse and the contract on him.
Just to make matters complicated, Frank is falling romantically for Catherine; he actually likes Adam, and he’s getting warnings from different sources about the contract on him.
Lau has created believable characters, including our protagonist, who finds himself in an unfathomable position as the target of an assassin. I was engaged from the moment I began reading until the end, which is unexpected and satisfying.
Click here to link to The Magpie's Secret.
Davilynn Furlow
$0.99 at Smashwords.com
G.J. Lau has written a thriller with romance, politics, family complications, and, of course, secrets.
Frank Martinelli is an ordinary guy, if you take into account the effects a tour in Vietnam in his 20s and the disappearance of his daughter on her way back to college 20 years ago will have on a man. He lives in a pleasant town not far from Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Office of Management and Budget until he retired. His inability to get past the disappearance of their daughter resulted in divorce, although he and his ex-wife are still friendly.
Frank lives above a bar, and the bar’s owner and one of the bartenders are like family to him. He makes extra spending money by helping out at a funeral home when they need an extra usher, parking attendant, or pallbearer, and at a car dealer shuttling vehicles from one dealership to another.
All in all, his life is pretty mundane, and his schedule is predictable. Until one afternoon when a man asks to join him as he’s eating lunch outside at a neighborhood restaurant. That conversation turns Frank’s well-ordered life upside down.
The “stranger” turns out to be Thomas Clayton, who served briefly with Frank in Vietnam. When Thomas left the Army, he took what he had learned and became an assassin for hire. Thomas is essentially retired now and only takes special assignments. He tells Frank that someone tried to hire him to kill him. Thomas declined (seeing as how they had been Army buddies and Frank had done him a good turn), but the contract is still being shopped, and someone without Thomas’s scruples could easily take it up.
Although at first Frank can’t imagine why someone would to have him killed, paranoia becomes a constant companion, particularly after his ex-wife Emily’s condo is broken into.
Not long after Frank’s daughter disappeared, he had volunteered at a teen hotline and talked frequently with one particular young woman. He sensed that she was being sexually molested, but he had no proof. When he reads in the paper that a teen-ager named Rachel Meadows has been killed in an auto accident on the eve of her 16th birthday, he puts it together with his hotline client. Because he feels guilty, he goes to the funeral, even though he doesn’t know the family. Rachel’s mother, Catherine, thinks it odd that a stranger is at her daughter’s funeral and seeks him out. They talk briefly, and she senses Frank knows something about Rachel he’s not saying.
Twenty years pass; Frank finds out he’s the target of an assassin; Rachel Meadows’ father dies; and Frank is asked to work the parking lot at his funeral. Catherine sees him, remembers him from her daughter’s funeral, and seeks him out. They talk again.
Catherine’s son Adam is running for political office, and Frank volunteers to work on the campaign. He likes politics, but he also wonders if Adam knows about Rachel’s abuse and the contract on him.
Just to make matters complicated, Frank is falling romantically for Catherine; he actually likes Adam, and he’s getting warnings from different sources about the contract on him.
Lau has created believable characters, including our protagonist, who finds himself in an unfathomable position as the target of an assassin. I was engaged from the moment I began reading until the end, which is unexpected and satisfying.
Click here to link to The Magpie's Secret.
Davilynn 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
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