Review: Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, Vol. 1: Aphra

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra, Vol. 1: Aphra by Kieron Gillen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

Shady space archaeologist Doctor Aphra has finally managed to quit working for Darth Vader without ending up dead. Now along with her two murderous droids and the fierce Wookie bounty hunter Black Krrsantan she’s just trying to find precious artifacts to sell so she can pay off debts she owes. However, her business plan gets delayed when her archaeologist credentials are revoked thanks to a person from her past. To get back in business Aphra will have to outwit Imperial forces and track down the mythical resting place of an ancient sect related to the Jedi.

Aphra is the best new creation in these Star Wars comics, and this title focusing on her was a lot of fun. My major gripe about this line of Marvel comics has been that by setting it between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and concentrating on the major players from the movies that it's impossible to do real drama or tell us a story of importance since we already know how it all ends. By doing this we get to follow exciting new characters in the familiar universe without knowing what comes next.

It’s also liberating to get a story about a genuine scoundrel who has no allegiance to the Rebellion or the Empire. Aphra is solely out for herself doing her own thing which provides the opportunity to introduce other characters and concepts we haven’t seen before. Plus, she’s just an entertaining character as an anti-hero surviving by her wits and stubbornness. And her droids really want to torture and murder people which I continue to find hilarious.

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Review: From Russia with Love

From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If this is love then I’d hate to see the Russian idea of hate.

The Soviets have suffered several espionage losses so they decide to run an elaborate operation in which they’ll kill British agent James Bond in such a way that will embarrass all of English intelligence. The two big pieces of cheese in this mousetrap are a code machine used by the Russians and a beautiful code clerk named Tatiana Romanova who doesn’t realize what kind of pawn she actually is. Will Bond take the bait? Well, he is James Bond, and did I mention that that Tatiana is a beautiful woman? Yeah, take a guess how this goes.

I’m a big fan of Bond on film and generally like those a lot more than the Fleming novels I’ve tried. With this one being the basis for one of the best Bond movies I didn’t find anything to change my mind about that. Bond is usually a bastard in both forms, but there’s something even worse and apt to make me roll my eyes in the way that he’s even more of a privileged sexist bigot on the page then any time on screen.

Plus, the structure of this novel is just weird. It’s only 191 pages, but Bond doesn’t show up until halfway through it. Instead we spend a lot of time getting all the details about how the Soviets came up with this plan. Even when Bond finally appears we get a long segment about how he’s been bored at the office and what his domestic life is like when he's not killing people or having sex. Another problem is that since we’ve been told in detail exactly what trap awaits Bond there’s not a lot of mystery for the reader even when 007 is trying to figure it out.

Although to be fair, the movie also lays out the plan, but there it’s done much more quickly so that Bond gets involved much sooner. In fact, the basic plot beats from the book are used in the film, but the film did a better job of pacing and adding action to the mix. Since I do like the movie a lot I guess that means the basic plot works as long as it moves briskly.

Still, it is one of the classic Bond stories, and there is some charm to this including some spy vs. spy games in Turkey. It also has a top notch thug in the form of Red Grant, a psychopath from the United Kingdom who defected to Russia and became their chief executioner. If there was more of him in here I think I would have liked it more.

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Review: Understudy for Death

Understudy for Death by Charles Willeford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A small Florida community is stunned when a housewife in a seemingly happy marriage murders her two children and then kills herself. Reporter Richard Hudson writes up the story and thinks his work is done, but his managing editor wants an in-depth piece on the rising suicide rates using the dead lady as a local angle.

With that as the starting point and considering that this is a Hard Case Crime reprint of a Charles Willeford novel you might be expecting the book to be about this intrepid reporter uncovering something related to these deaths. I certainly was. Surprise!

This isn’t the first time that HCC has published a book that subverts expectations. Donald Westlake’s Memory isn’t really a crime novel at all. Neither is this. Instead it’s more of a character study of Richard and his own domestic situation. What we learn is that he’s pretty much an enormous jerkface. He’s not much a husband or father who deliberately stays on the night shift so he can avoid domestic responsibility. He’s also content to drift along as an unambitious reporter who has developed a variety of shortcuts to avoid actually doing his job. Richard rationalizes this as being necessary for him to work on his true calling of being a playwright, but it’s quickly apparent that just the dodge he’s using to feel better about being perfectly content to just coast along with minimum effort.

What evolves through Richard’s skewed perspective is a pretty interesting snapshot of life in the early ‘60s. It’s no shock that it’s filled with casual sexism and women are treated as second class citizens. Yet as Richard considers why a woman who had everything that American society said she needs to make her happy would kill herself, he finds himself increasingly thinking about his own life and marriage.

Some readers might complain that this is bait-and-switch since it’s not technically a crime novel, but I found it well-written and somewhat compelling. There’s nothing fantastic or groundbreaking to it, but it’s like a time capsule that gives you a sense of the time and place as well as a glimpse of white male entitlement at its peak.

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Review: Forever and a Day

Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s the early ‘50s and British intelligence is worried about unusual activity in Marseille’s underworld so they send one of their elite agents to check it out, but 007 is murdered. His replacement? A young man named Bond. James Bond.

Anthony Horowitz already wrote one retro Bond novel based on some unused Ian Fleming material with Trigger Mortis. Here, he takes us even further back to give us the story of Bond’s first mission after earning his license to kill. Bond finds himself trying to unravel a dastardly scheme as he encounters colorful characters like a morbidly obese Corsican mob leader, a wealthy American businessman, and beautiful ex-British agent who has become a major player by running her own freelance espionage business. Along the way Bond does a little gambling while wearing a tuxedo, drinks some martinis, has a bunch of sex, and kills some people. So Bond got a pretty good idea of what his job would be like early on.

Bond fans will find a lot to like here, especially those whose favorite film version is Sean Connery because that’s the vibe Horowitz is going for. As in Trigger Mortis he cleverly skirts the problem of Bond coming across as a dated jerk by leaning into it and actually having Bond be a dated jerk in many ways. The thing that makes it tolerable is that he’s usually called out for it so it still lets Bond be the classic bastard he usually is without feeling like his behavior is being excused.

So you’ve got all the classic elements in an action filled story that provides an old school origin story. It’s a good dose of Bond to fill the time until the next movie finally gets made.

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Review: November Road

November Road by Lou Berney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If someone offered me the choice between taking a long road trip with a couple of kids or being murdered by the mob, I’d have to really think it over.

It’s November 1963, and Frank Guidry is living well in New Orleans thanks to his top position with Carlos Marcello’s mob outfit. However, one of Frank’s recent chores was leaving a car in a parking garage in Dallas very near the spot where President Kennedy would be assassinated just days later. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection especially when several other people on Carlos’ payroll start turning up dead. Frank just became a loose end, and he flees west with lethal hit man Paul Barone hot on his trail.

Meanwhile, Charlotte Roy has been trying to raise her two daughters in a small Oklahoma town which isn’t easy thanks to her drunken loser of a husband. When Charlotte has enough she takes the girls and starts heading to California, but she’s consumed by guilt and uncertain if she's done the right thing. After Frank meets Charlotte at a motel he realizes that traveling with a lady and two kids would make him a lot less conspicuous so he engineers circumstances so that they all go together. Frank is surprised when what started as a con to help him get away begins to turn into a real relationship with Charlotte and the kids. But that pesky hit man is still right behind them…

I read Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone earlier this year and enjoyed it quite a bit. Then I heard a tremendous amount of good buzz about this one before it released, and I’m pleased to report that it lives up to the hype.

In the wrong hands this concept could be just some cheesy tale about a ‘bad man’ who sees the error of his ways after becoming part of a family, but the strong character work done with Frank, Charlotte, and deadly Paul Barone is where this really shines. You thoroughly understand all of them, and despite the historical backdrop it all feels grounded and realistic with Frank and Charlotte struggling to deal with how their lives have been forever changed while Barone has to deal with a variety of setbacks as he just tries to complete his mission.

I particularly liked how Berney used the JFK assassination as the jumping off point, not the center of the story. It’s obviously the thing driving the plot, but what’s presented comes across as a believable scheme by one pissed off mobster instead of some vast shadowy tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory. So we’re not dragged into some Oliver Stone style fever dream.

The work done on the settings and time is top notch, too. We get an authentic sense of the places like New Orleans, Las Vegas, crappy motels, and roadside tourist traps. It all builds the mood of what it must have been like back then. There’s nice touches of how the mob operated at the time, too.

It’s a damn fine piece of crime fiction, and I’ll be tracking down more of Berney’s work.

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Review: Fatal Blow

Fatal Blow by James L. Thane
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s another brutally hot summer day in Phoenix, and homicide detective Sean Richardson has to spend it fishing a headless and armless torso out of a canal. The only good news is that it still has the feet including a toe ring, and this clue leads Sean and his partner to suspect that a missing housewife, Becky Miller, is probably the victim and her cheating husband looks awfully guilty.

In the interest of full disclosure I need to note that James Thane is a longtime friend of mine here on Goodreads so I’m not even gonna try to pretend that this is an objective review. Please take my word that if it stank I’d just quietly ignore it, but fortunately it’s pretty good so I can talk about it.

There’s two parallel stories at work in this. One is the first person narration from Richardson which mixes a straight-up realistic police procedural with some on-going developments in his personal life which has been built up over the last couple of books. The other third-person story focuses on Becky in the weeks leading up to the discovery of the body in the canal. Regular readers of crime fiction can probably guess where the story is going yet there’s a couple of good twists and turns in there, and the ending was a nice surprise.

Overall, it’s a solid piece of crime fiction that has a good page turning vibe to it, and while it’s obviously a little gory with the whole chopped up body in the canal thing it doesn’t wallow in that like some books would. It’s also got an interesting shifting tone to it. The police stuff is a straight line narrative that you might see on something like Law & Order, but the Becky plot dealing with the crime has a much messier and emotional feel to it. It’s an unusual way to play it, but I particularly enjoyed Becky’s story which had a lot of clever crime elements. There’s also some nice detail work done that makes the reader really feel the desert heat as the characters roam around the city.

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Review: The Banker’s Wife

The Banker’s Wife by Cristina Alger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Is money the root of all evil or does it make the world go round?

The answer to that is yes.

Annabel is American living in Geneva with husband Matthew whose job with a secretive Swiss bank keeps him away from her too much, but the trade off is the wealthy lifestyle they’re living. Marina is journalist engaged to Grant who comes from a very rich family, and his father is about to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States. It might seem like both these ladies won the trophy husband lottery, but Annabel is bored and lonely while Marina feels like she’s have to have to give up the job she loves to really be part of Grant’s family. Yeah, I know. Rich people problems.

However, things take a turn for both women. Annabel’s husband is killed in a small plane crash with home of his wealthy clients, and she starts questioning exactly what he was doing at the bank. While on a vacation trip to Paris, Marina does a favor for her old friend and editor by picking up a USB drive with encrypted data, but this errand leads to her ending up with information on money laundering done for international criminal types. Both Annabel and Marina quickly find out that these are not the kind of people who like you asking questions about their business.

This is a solid thriller whose biggest strength is in the idea that there’s a vast ocean of blood money being hidden and utilized by some of the world’s most powerful people. If you’ve been paying attention to current events that’s a story with the ring of authenticity to it. I mean, a rich asshole with presidential aspirations and shady international business connections isn’t much of a stretch these days, and it gives the whole book an honest hook to it.

It’s well written by airport thriller standards, and the presentation of the lives that Annabel and Marina are leading is very well done. There’s some interesting thematic stuff in that Annabel truly loves her husband is now filled with regrets about the independent lifestyle she gave up even if she is living in the lap of luxury. It fits nicely with Marina’s story since she’s on the verge of essentially making that same choice.

Unfortunately, the weaker side comes with the thriller stuff. There’s a few scenes with characters being followed and some lightweight chase scenes, but this isn’t an action story. It’s more about paranoia and dread which is fitting for a book about the money and power lurking behind world events, but I could have used more of a sense of danger to it.

And frankly it seems like a book that real world has outpaced in terms of how much trouble we’re all in. The characters here have faith that a free press and government oversight can ultimately stop and punish people who break the law like this. It doesn’t take into account that the evil rich doing this stuff are now the ones in power, and that institutions we counted on to protect us have been corrupted or neutered.

So it’s a decent read with an interesting idea and above average characterization, but it comes across as too naive a story to really accomplish what it might have just a few years ago.

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