Review: Poe Dameron: Free Fall

Poe Dameron: Free Fall by Alex Segura
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.

If you’re a Star Wars fan it’s a real best-of-times/worst-of-times situation these days. We’ve gotten some great new stuff, but also a couple of real duds. Plus, much like how the worst thing about capitalism are the capitalists, the worst thing about Star Wars fandom turned out to be Star Wars fans.

So I wasn’t exactly dying to pick up a new young adult tie-in book, but I’d recently read Alex Segura’s first crime novel, and I thought Poe Dameron was an interesting but underused character in the latest movies so decided to give it a shot. And it turned out to be a very fun Star Wars story.

This starts out with teenage Poe living on Yavin 4 with his father. Both his parents fought for the rebels against the Empire, and his mother was a great pilot who taught him to fly before she was killed while on a mission for the New Republic. Now Poe’s father just wants to live a quiet life as a farmer, and he’s kept Poe from leaving for the adventure he craves. Hmmm… a young man dreaming of space adventure who is trapped on the family farm…. I wonder why that sounds familiar..?

Anyhow, after Poe pulls a knucklehead stunt that lands him in hot water with the authorities and leads to a blowout argument with his father, he impulsively takes a piloting job for several shady characters looking to get off Yavin 4 quickly. It turns out that these people are Spice Runners of Kijimi, one of the most dangerous criminal gangs in the galaxy, and a zealous New Republic officer has a personal vendetta against them so she’s hot on their trail. Poe wanted excitement, but he’s uneasy with his new role as a criminal. However, his growing relationship with the mysterious young lady Zorii makes him hesitant to leave.

Segura takes an interesting approach to this one because it plays out in a series of stories that often begin with Poe in the middle of his latest job gone wrong with the Spice Runners that then fills us in on how it came about. The time jumping helps build a complete narrative arc that leaves Poe with some gaps that could be filled in later (Something the Star Wars franchise loves doing.) while also giving us the depth and backstory that the movies never did. One of the few things I liked about Rise of Skywalker was the brief hint of Poe’s past, and this fleshes that out.

Since it’s a short YA novel we’re not getting the kind of deep dive into Star Wars lore that some nerds demand, but overall I found it to be a fast and enjoyable adventure. It’s obvious that Segura is a fan and knows the universe well, and he brings a young Poe to life with energy and enthusiasm.

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Review: The Southland

The Southland by Johnny Shaw
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.

If America keeps going like it has been for the last few years then we won’t have an illegal immigration problem because nobody will want to come to this shithole country anyhow.

U-S-A!! U-S-A!! U-S-A!!

The Southland focuses on three unauthorized Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. Luz works several menial jobs and was able to finally bring her teen-aged son, Eliseo, into the US. Unfortunately, he turns out to be a sullen, angry, lazy kid who just complicates her precarious existence. Nadia had to flee Mexico and she’s got far more dangerous people than ICE agents looking for her so she’s trying to stay off of everybody’s radar. She copes with her situation by drinking heavily with her American friend and roommate, Gillies. Ostelinda was lured to America with the promise of a good job, but she is told that she has a debt to work off. Now she’s essentially a slave in a factory who hasn’t even been outside in over a year.

When Eliseo goes missing after an argument with Luz, she’s desperate to find her son, but since she can’t turn to the authorities she pays Gillies to find him. Gillies doesn’t plan on doing anything other than using Luz’s money to buy more booze, but at Nadia’s insistence they being looking for the missing teen. Meanwhile, Ostelinda is trying to find a way to escape the factory by outwitting the American woman who runs the place.

I’ve been a fan of Johnny Shaw’s for better part of a decade now, and this is undeniably his best book yet. His previous stuff was always entertaining and frequently hilarious, but there’s a real maturity and gravity to this one that makes it feel he tried very hard to get to a next level here. It’s not that his earlier stuff hasn’t featured real world issues, but he’s generally used humorous dialogue and a sense of chaos brought about by various dumbasses doing dumbass things to drive the plots. With the three main characters facing serious consequences for any misstep that could get them deported or worse, there’s no room for buffoonery, and that makes this book feel deadly serious throughout it all.

It’s not just that Shaw took a hot button issue and based a novel on it. He’s always had a feel for creating working class characters, and with his three leading ladies this time he’s outdone himself. Although each one shares the similarity of being an undocumented immigrant, they feel distinctive and real. Luz is a hardworking mother who feels like she’s failed her son. Nadia is a woman with a tragic history trying to outrun her past. Ostelinda is an innocent caught up in a bad situation who somehow finds small moments of grace to keep her spirit from breaking.

First he makes us care about these women, and then Shaw shows us how screwed they really are. They’ve all become part of a system that is happy to exploit them for their labor even as the people in charge vilify them. They are powerless against any random white asshole who gets irked at them. So Luz has to sit quietly on a bus as a man screams racist slurs at her. Nadia doesn’t dare complain when a boss cheats her on the amount of a promised wage. Ostelinda is told that she’s lucky to have a safe place to live and work while being a slave.

This also shows up in the plot of the story. Luz can’t afford to drop everything and look for her son so she has to do her sleuthing around her work schedule. Nadia doesn’t dare make too many waves when she’s investigating either lest she draw the wrong kind of attention. This is a far cry from the usual crime story where it’s the detective throwing their weight around and causing trouble as a way of drawing out the bad guys. It’s a lot harder to find someone when you don’t want anyone to notice that you’re looking, and when you don’t dare call the cops even when you’re dealing with real criminals.

It’s a crime story that also provides emphatic insight into what undocumented workers face in America these days. It’s not pretty. It’s not a lot of fun. But it’s an important story, and Johnny Shaw has told it about as well as it could be done.

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Review: Silent City

Silent City by Alex Segura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is why I don’t do favors for people at work. First, it’s just loaning them a pen, and the next thing you know you’re trying to find somebody’s missing daughter which pisses off a mysterious killer.

Pete Fernandez is a guy who once had a lot of promise, but he’s been on the skids since the death of his father. His drinking is out of control, his wife left him, and he’s barely clinging to his job on the sports page of the Miami newspaper. That’s when a coworker asks him to look for his missing daughter, Kate. She also works for the paper and Is an acquaintance of Pete’s so he agrees to take a look to see if Kate may be in trouble or if she is just ignoring her estranged father. However, after finding her apartment ransacked and learning that Kate was researching a story about a legendary hit man nicknamed The Silent Death, Pete has plenty of reasons to regret that decision.

This first book in the Pete Fernandez series is enough to get me hooked. Alex Segura is a writer who has been on my radar for a while, and after seeing him at Bouchercon last year I made a point of moving up my to-read list. He had a lot of interesting things to say, and I thought it was cool that he splits time between writing crime novels and working on Archie comics.

I’m particularly impressed with the way that Pete is depicted. This is a character who is a flat out mess. In the wrong hands Pete could be an insufferable loser who wallows in self-pity, but Segura makes him a tragedy. He knows he’s screwing up, but he can’t figure out a way to change his circumstances so he just goes to the bar every night without realizing that’s a big part of his problems. He’s not the kind of character you hate, he’s the kind you root for even as you want to tell him to get his shit together.

The plotting does some zigging and zagging so that it doesn’t play out in typical fashion. Another nice aspect is how it manages to keep Pete in the midst of this mess without coming across as him being overly stupid or seeming contrived. What looks like a simple favor becomes quicksand that Pete can’t escape from once he dips a toe in even though he is not trying to play the hero.

Overall, it reminded me a lot of the ‘90s crime novels I loved, and it was no surprise to see Segura credit writers like Pelecanos, Lehand, and Ellroy in the acknowledgements because you can see the influence even as he is finding his own voice. It’s a great start to a promising series.

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Review: Babylon's Ashes

Babylon's Ashes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“My life has become a single on-going revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”

This is the kind of cheery thought one is apt to have when facing a narcissistic megalomaniac who has gained power by convincing some people that all their problems can be blamed on other groups while setting humanity on a self-destructive path it may not be able to recover from.

Geez, I thought I read science-fiction to escape reality.

The Expanse series took an epic dark turn in the last one, and this book is mainly about dealing with the fall-out from that as well as trying to resolve the new threat that arose. The short term stakes involve a fight to control the outposts outside of Earth and Mars, but the longer view will determine nothing less than the fate of humanity itself.

Like the other books this has a self-contained story that features all kinds of political intrigue and strategy as well as a healthy dose of interesting characters riding around in spaceships being all Pew-Pew!. Which is what The Expanse does really well as a general rule. The new wrinkle here is that because this is the aftermath of catastrophic events that there’s a tone of shock and even a certain wistfulness in this one. Things will never be what they once where and everyone knows it. This makes the conflict here literally a fight for the future, and all the characters are under enormous amounts of pressure because of it.

There was one element I wasn’t entirely happy about. (view spoiler)[ I absolutely loved the set up at the end that the Rocinante crew is essentially facing an Alamo situation where their best option is to die well while taking as many of their enemies with them as they can. However, it seemed like more than a little bit of cheat that they simply manage to make the Free Navy ships vanish via the ring gates, and it seems way too easy of an end for Marcos Inaros. (hide spoiler)] On the other hand there’s still story to be told so I’m trying to set aside any feelings of mild disappointment I have about the ending here because it’s likely that there is more pay-off coming.

As always after finishing one of these I’m left wanting more and am already counting the days until the next book releases. It helps that we’ve got the second season of the TV show coming to fill the gap between books.

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Review: The Revelators

The Revelators by Ace Atkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a free advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.

A completely immoral man has taken charge of the government, and the wave of corruption and racism he unleashed is completely undermining the rule of law. Welcome to America. Oops. I meant – Welcome to Tibbehah County, Mississippi.

I can’t imagine how I mixed that up…

As Sheriff Quinn Colson is recovering after being shot, the new shithead governor is cutting deals with criminals and the filthy rich while blaming everything wrong with the world on immigrants and liberals. So Quinn is sidelined while the new local crime boss, Fannie Hathcock, expands her operation with the assistance of the crooked temporary sheriff appointed by the gov. If that’s not enough to worry about, Quinn also has a pregnant wife about to deliver a baby, the old friend he sent to prison for selling automatic weapons just got released, and he’s getting a touch too fond of the painkillers he’s been taking…

Ace Atkins has been working up to this point for several books, and while current events were certainly a big influence on it, he never loses the story threads and themes he’s developed over the course of the series. As always, while Quinn is the focus there’s a lot of time spent with other people so that Tibbehah County is a complete world in which every character has their own story. Whether it’s Quinn’s nephew struggling to help a young immigrant girl whose mother has been arrested and is about to be deported, or Fannie Hathcock ruthlessly running her small empire, it all feels like this is a bunch of real people whose lives get tangled up in various ways as they pursue their own agendas.

The structure of the series has been to tell a fairly self-contained story in each one while leaving some threads dangling to pick up in the next book, but this has more of a wrap-up feel to it with Atkins delivering some definite conclusions to several of the plots that have been on the boil for a while now. The payoffs are well done overall, and as usual, nothing in Tibbehah County goes exactly according to plan.

The only problem is one I’ve seen in other books based on the political events of the last few years. Essentially, I think crime writers tend to do stories about justice being done in some fashion, and they just couldn’t imagine how bad things would actually get when they were working on these books a year or two ago. (Life comes at you fast these days.) So in this current hellscape when it often feels like the entire justice system has broken down, and there’s no scandal that can’t be spun on Fox News, a book like this can end up feeling kind of naïve and simplistic.

As I’ve noted in other reviews with similar problems, I don’t blame the authors for this because think about what I’m really saying here. – The problem with a book in which a criminal governor takes over a state and fills it with corrupt officials is that it isn't cynical enough because reality has proven to be so much worse.

That’s pretty fucked up.

So again, I don’t really count it as a strike against the books or Atkins’ plotting. It’s just that it’s really tough for creators to come up with stories that could have imagined the depths we’d sink to so fast with little hope of the good guys winning.

Setting that aside, it’s always a pleasure to check in with Quinn and what’s going on in Tibbehah, and it was nice to get some satisfying conclusions to several of the on-going stories with the prospect of a doozy of a new one now hanging out there.

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Review: Nut Jobs: Cracking California's Strangest $10 Million Dollar Heist

Nut Jobs: Cracking California's Strangest $10 Million Dollar Heist by Marc Fennell
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I thought I was getting an offbeat crime story about the clever theft of millions of dollar worth of nuts that were stolen from various California farmers via an elaborate scheme in which the legitimate shipping process was used to swipe truckloads of almonds. What I got instead was 4 hours of irritation.

I’ve noted before that the Audible Originals that I’ve listened to aren’t really audio books, they’re podcasts. Apparently the folks at Audible got my memo because Marc Fennell flatly refers to it as “a podcast for Audible Originals” in his introduction. However, while the structure and style are trying to rip off that Serial style it's still delivered in one big chunk so I’m not sure why that intro was repeated multiple times as if these were episodes delivered week to week. Yeah, it has different chapters, but you could do some kind of break indicating that instead of having Fennell reintroduce himself and the show with the full musical theme several times.

Fennell also comes across as incredibly stupid and/or naïve for repeatedly bringing up how amazed he is that anybody would steal nuts. Then when he learns that some kind of organized crime was involved he’s even more shocked. Which then leads to maybe the most idiotic question I’ve ever heard posed: “Does it surprise you that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of nuts?”

It shouldn’t surprise anybody to hear that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of ANYTHING. Particularly when it’s an untraceable commodity that could then be quickly turned around and sold for full market value. News flash - Where there's an illegal buck to be made, then you can usually count on some kind of organized crime figures to try and get in on it.

I suspect that Fennell is playing up the Gee-Whiz!-This-Is-Crazy! factor for the podcast, and he uses being an Australian in America to put some extra mustard on it. It also doesn’t help that he  hits that same note repeatedly when doing things like freaking out about the guns that some security guards he interviews carry as he does a whole Wow!-America-Is-Crazy! angle. I live here, Fennell, so I’m well aware of it.

My biggest gripe is that this is a perfect example of false advertising. Out of the 4 hours of this, I think there’s probably less than 45 minutes actually talking about the nut heists in detail. Which is too bad because when that’s the focus it’s an interesting account of a complex criminal scheme. Unfortunately, what Fennell really wanted to do was to use that crime story as a Trojan horse to sneak in an audio essay about how our food is grown, transported, marketed, and sold to us.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who knows anything about capitalism, but it turns out that the whole thing is dependent on big money interests using a variety of low paid workers while destroying the environment to provide overpriced items for a market they created. As a famous quote goes, "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find out there's gambling going on in here!"

And that’s an important story, but it’s not what I signed up for when I clicked on something that said it was going to be about stealing nuts. At this point in the hellish year of 2020 I really wasn’t in the mood to hear another yet example of how everything is fucked. I got Twitter for that.

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Review: Nemesis Games

Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”
- Naomi Nagata - Nemesis Games

"Boy, that escalated quickly... I mean, that really got out of hand fast."
- Ron Burgundy - Anchorman: The Legend of Run Burgundy


After their latest misadventure the Rocinante is in need of extensive repairs that will keep the ship sidelined as the crew finds itself with a variety of personal matters that need their attention so they split up and head to different spots all over the solar system. Unfortunately, one of them gets caught up in an elaborate trap that will have a devastating and long-range impact.

The Expanse novels have been about big events potentially changing the future of humanity, but these things have been done against a backdrop that fundamentally hasn’t changed. The political and military organizations have remained mostly stable, and a large part of the story is about the reaction by those powers to what's going on. What happens here is particularly sneaky on the part of the authors who make up the James S.A. Corey name because this is the point where they’ve kicked over the table and upset the entire game.

That makes sense because by their 9 book timeline this is where we cross the halfway point so we’re firmly in the second act which is where things traditionally get dark for the heroes of any kind of story. What’s shocking here is the extent of the damage done, and it’s made even more disturbing that even those who have generally been portrayed as being the most powerful and savviest characters get caught flat-footed.

Once again, that makes sense in the greater context of The Expanse because one of its on-going themes is how short-sighted selfish people can always draw attention away from larger threats and find a way to fight over things even as humanity should be on the brink of a new age of limitless exploration and expansion. This is especially been built up as part of an increasingly good job of developing villains.

At the start of the series the third party subjective nature of shifting the point-of-view around a handful of characters sometimes made the threats seem vague or to come out of nowhere. Since the third book the authors have done a much better job of finding ways to put a face on the bad guys, and they’ve got a knack for creating a particular brand of smug self-absorbed jerkfaces who are masters of developing rationalizations for their actions.

Another selling point here is that at this point in the series we’re fully invested in our main characters. (Or at least I assume that anyone who is reading the 5th book of 500+ page novels cares at least a little bit about these guys.) By scattering the crew of the Roci around and making them the narrators who carry the story, it not only brings a lot of the epic scale down to a more relatable level, it also sets up a near guarantee in emotional investment. Even as they’re going through different trails and tribulations they all have one goal, to get back to their ship and each other. That's the hook that carries off this whole thing because it's what all the readers want, too.

I could nitpick a bit about how some of the coincidences seem a bit much or that the novella The Churn probably should have been boiled down to backstory for this one rather than selling it as a extra by itself. But overall I’m just having too much fun with this series to gripe much other than bitching about how now I gotta wait until the summer of 2016 for the next book. I just hope I don’t get Dark Towered on this thing….

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