Grave Diggers & Wild Hogs

The Thicket
by Joe R. Lansdale

4 out of 5 stars

(I received a free copy of this from NetGalley.)

At the tail end of the cowboy days in East Texas, sixteen year old Jack Parker and his sister Lula have a helluva bad week.  After their parents die in a smallpox epidemic, their grandfather is murdered by a gang of bank robbers who kidnap Lula.  The only help that Jack can find is a grave digging black man with a drinking problem named Eustace and the midget bounty hunter Shorty.  Along with a giant hog, they set out to rescue Lula.   Jack tries to hold to his Christian beliefs that the gang should be caught and tried, and he is horrified at Shorty and Eustace’s willingness to kill and ignore common decency in the name of a greater good, namely their own.

As they meet more victims of the gang along the trail and see how cruel they truly are, Jack starts to realize that there’s no way to get Lula back without getting blood on his hands and that his traveling companions may have a better understanding of the world than he does.  His young puritan ways are also tested when he meets Jimmie Sue, a hooker with a heart of gold who takes a liking to him.

There are elements of this story that will probably sound familiar to anyone who has read or seen one of the two film versions of True Grit with a young person venturing into a hostile wilderness with some salty frontier types, but Lansdale also adds some bizarre and violent turns that feel more like Django Unchained at times.

My favorite part was the character of Shorty.   He may be the smallest member of the posse, but he’s the smartest and hell on wheels with a gun in his hand.  He’s also a misanthrope who came by it honestly after a lifetime of dealing with people who treat him like a freak or a child, and he gets most of the best lines in the book.

It’s also got all the hallmarks of Joe Lansdale with a profane sense of humor that provides plenty of action but with a sense of responsibility about the damage done by all the violence.  In fact, my one complaint about the novel is that it’s a little too Joe Lansdale.

If you’ve read his Hap & Leonard series, then a lot of this will seem somewhat familiar in that you’ve got some characters who while being ‘the good guys’ are perfectly content to dish out punishment if they feel it’s been earned while someone provides a softer hearted conscience that urges some compassion.  In fact, this isn’t even the first Lansdale book to feature a midget involved in a vicious pistol whipping along with a strange wild animal bonding with people since he worked similar stuff into Rumble Tumble.

However, if the worst thing I can say about it is that it’s a typical Joe Lansdale story, then you know you’re still getting an entertaining tale.

Didn't These Guys Ever See Fargo?

Out of the Black
John Rector

4 out of 5 kidnapped stars.

(I received a free ARC of this from NetGalley.)

Matt Caine must have crossed a black cat’s path before walking under a ladder and opening an umbrella indoors while breaking a couple of mirrors because he is one unlucky son-of-a-bitch.

His wife was killed in a car crash that badly injured and traumatized their daughter, and Matt had to take out loans against his house to pay the medical bills.  When the banks threaten to foreclose, Matt borrows money from his old buddy Murphy who dabbles in loan sharking, but he can’t find steady work and the interest on the debt is piling up.   Murphy doesn’t want to hassle Matt, but it’s bad for business to let someone slide and his partners are getting antsy.

Matt’s in-laws are making noises about taking his daughter away because his grief and a case of PTSD from his time in the Marines have left him unfit and unable to provide for his daughter.  When his friend Jay starts talking about a foolproof plan to kidnap the wife of a wealthy man for a payday that would solve all his problems, Matt knows that it’s a bad idea, especially since Jay is an untrustworthy junkie.  As his options dwindle, he eventually convinces himself that it’s his only way he can keep his daughter.  The kidnapping plan goes about as well as you’d expect as Matt’s lucky streak continues.

In John Rector’s The Cold Kiss, he took the old crime story scenario of someone finding a bag of money and trying to get away with it and made a fresh story out of it.  He does a similar thing here with the idea of a decent guy forced by circumstances into taking part in a crime in which things go screwy.  It’s a fast-paced story with a relatable main character and some good twists and turns along the way.

I wish a bit more about Matt’s history as a Marine had been explained because other than a comment from his mother-in-law about his wife had told him about his nightmares, we don’t get much more than that.  While he knows his way around a gun, there’s nothing in the action stuff to suggest that he’s been in combat before.  There’s also a cute neighbor who is a little too good to be true that loves his daughter and is always available to babysit when he needs her to.  Of course, she’s also attracted to Matt who is too conflicted about his dead wife to act on it.

I’m focusing too much on the flaws here and nitpicking this more than I meant to. It really is a solid story with good action and a fast pace to it that should make any crime fan happy.

Also posted at Goodreads.

Light My Fire

Clean Burn
by Karen Sandler
Published by Exhibit A
Available Aug. 27

3 out of 5 burning stars.


(I received an ARC of this from NetGalley.)

Janelle Watkins sure is a HOT mess!

Get it?  Because this book is called Clean BURN and it has about fire and arson?

Oh, never mind.  I don’t know why I even bother trying to entertain you people.

Anyhow, Janelle used to be a cop in San Francisco who had a knack for finding abducted children, but a freak injury ended her career and left her with a bad leg.  She also has personal issues like being haunted by visions of a boy she failed to save and an unhealthy fascination with fire that includes a habit of burning herself with matches for funsies.

Janelle now works as a private investigator who gimps around handing cases involving cheating spouses, and she wants nothing to do with missing kids until a personal plea leads her back to her old hometown of Greenville where her former partner and lover Ken is now the sheriff.  Being in Greenville triggers a lot of unpleasant memories of her childhood as well as the awkwardness of dealing with Ken.  At first Janelle just wants to leave as soon as possible, but a series of fires and several missing kids draw her into an investigation that has her working with Ken again.

Since this is a crime novel featuring a damaged main character, it’s going to work or fail depending on how much you sympathize with Janelle.  Overall, I found her pretty compelling.  She’s messed up, but she doesn’t wallow in self-pity and generally she’s still trying to do something worthwhile even though her own life is a disaster.

However, giving Janelle the quadruple whammy of being an abused kid, having an old case that haunts her, dealing with a painful physical injury and an unhealthy obsession with fire was a little over the top.  Her level of self-loathing and insistence that something is wrong with her seemed a bit much at times considering that the worst thing she does is burn herself with matches, but self-hatred often doesn’t need a logical reason so this didn’t hurt the book much.

The rest of the story is a pretty standard thriller, but it’s competently done.  The crazy character Mama makes for a decent enough villain, and the kids in jeopardy angle adds tension to it.

The plot contained a few elements that had me nitpicking.  Despite being a small town with a near constant string of arsons and a missing kid, Ken seems to be able to just deal with all of this via a few radio calls and able to knock off work or chauffer Janelle around whenever he feels like it when it seems like a county sheriff would be living at the office and crime scenes.

There was also an odd scene where Ken takes Janelle to a dance that is being done to raise money for the funeral expenses of a kid who drowned in a river.  I’ve seen small town fund raising for tragedies that have included pancake breakfasts, auctions, bake sales and just donation cans placed around local businesses.  However, I’ve never heard of a having a dance where the people going into drink and party drop a couple of bucks on the parents of a dead kid sitting at a table by the door.  Maybe someone would do a concert of some kind to raise money, but the idea of having a full-on dance in front of the parents who just lost their son the day before seemed insane to me.

Aside from the minor gripes, this was a solid thriller with a main character I’d be interested in reading more about.

A Revolution For Couch Potatoes

The Revolution Was Televised: 
The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever
by Alan Sepinwall

4 out 5 stars in HD.

Last Tuesday, I was reading the chapter about The Sopranos in which the author highly praises James Gandolfini’s performance as Tony.  The next day, Galdolfini died.  That’s one of those odd coincidences that I could really do without.

TV critic Alan Sepinwall writes the popular HitFix blog What's Alan Watching? and here he takes a look at a dozen shows that revolutionized television since the late ‘90s.  Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men and Breaking Bad were all groundbreaking in their own ways and proved that there were audiences for well-made shows that pushed boundaries and revolutionized the way TV got made and watched.

Each show gets it’s own chapter in which Sepinwall gives the history of how the show came about, summarizes it’s storylines, relays behind-the-scenes tidbits and anecdotes and then examines the elements that made the show special and how it pushed the medium forward.  Interviews with creators, producers, writers and network executives provide background and thoughts from inside the industry as to how these shows changed the business.

Many of the stories behind the creation of the shows would make for interesting books just by themselves.  Lost came from one ABC executive who figured he was about to be fired and rushed the most expensive pilot in TV history into production, and Mad Men was the result of AMC’s desire to get some kind of critically acclaimed show that would generate buzz on the air because the network feared some cable providers were going to drop them. The universal theme for most of these shows is that creative people who had felt stifled by their experiences in Hollywood delivered when circumstances finally gave them an opportunity to do something different.

Sepinwall keeps his critic’s hat on though and gives frank appraisals of mistakes like the Friday Night Lights train wreck of a second season or 24's frequent lapses into stories involving amnesia, cougars or torture.  He also details how fan dissatisfaction with of some of the finales like Lost, Battlestar Galactica and The Sopranos can affect their feelings towards the series as a whole.

Since he gives the broad story details, and there are plenty of spoilers so if there’s a show you've been meaning to watch but haven’t gotten around to yet, it’d be best to skip those sections, but since each chapter is pretty much self-contained when it comes to those points, it’d still be possible to read around that and not lose the overall theme of what Sepinwall is looking at here.

This isn’t just some dry analysis either.  Sepinwall has a good sense of humor and has been writing about TV long enough to come up with interesting ways to translate what we see on a screen into words.  Here’s what he has to say about one show's breakneck pacing:

"You didn’t so much watch The Shield as get beat up by it for an hour before it went off to grab a few beers and find a pimp to hassle."

If you’ve read Sepinwall’s blog, a lot of these stories and themes will seem somewhat familiar because they’re points he’s touched on when he’s written about these shows before, but this was a chance for him to do an overview on an era of TV that came as many circumstances changed the old model of doing business and helped fuel a wave of creativity.   Sepinwall’s enthusiasm for good TV is contagious and thanks to this book, I’m sure I’ll be cracking open some DVD sets and hitting HBO Go in the near future to revisit a lot of these myself.

Also posted on Goodreads.

Action!

The third book of Duane Swierczynski's Charlie Hardie trilogy was recently released.  Here's the three reviews I wrote as each one came out.

#1 - Fun & Games 


One reason I never bought into any of the conspiracy theories that swirl around celebrity deaths like Princess Di or Marilyn Monroe is that they always seem to be based on the notion that there are these shadowy figures that can orchestrate murder on demand and cover it up without leaving a trace. Hell, when Nixon wanted the Watergate black bagged, he had to use incompetent bastards like G. Gordon Liddy and a ragtag group of Cuban exiles, and he was president of the United States. If there really was a network of efficient criminals to do some dirty deeds, you’d think Nixon would have had them on speed dial.

However, while I don’t believe in the idea of vast conspiracies with armies of hired killers, that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy stories about them. Duane Swierczynski  has come up with a highly entertaining spin on the whole conspiracy theory thriller genre.

Charlie Hardie used to work for the cops but these days he’s a professional house sitter. The job lets him indulge in his hobby, binge drinking. When Charlie shows up for a gig in LA, he doesn’t even get his bottle of bourbon open when he’s attacked by a woman hiding in the house. Even more shocking is that she is Lane Madden, a B list actress who frantically claims that people are trying to kill her. Charlie thinks he’s just dealing with another drugged out celebrity until some very bizarre and dangerous shit starts to happen very quickly. It turns out that Charlie has interrupted the Accident People as they were in the midst of their latest project, killing Lane Madden.

The Accident People are a group that specialize in killing high profile targets and providing an air tight cover story so that no questions will be asked. In Lane’s case, their plan to off her via a car accident went off the rails when Lane managed to escape and hide. 

Swierczynski  put a unique twist on the shadowy conspiracy operatives in this with the Accident People. They are made up of a lot of former film people with a ’director’ coming up with the narrative about how they want the death to play out, and then using actors and technical people to make it happen. They've also got access to a variety of lethal weapons like poison gas and drugs that induce heart attacks. It’s a little over the top (What conspiracy thriller isn’t?) but it at least puts a thin layer of plausibility and explanation as to just where the hell one would an obtain a covert network of people able to get away with murder.

Fast, dark and fun, this was some high octane reading. Duane S. springs some big surprises in this, and it keeps you guessing throughout. This is the first part of a trilogy so there’s a bit of a cliffhanger at the end. If you’re in the mood for a crime thriller that reads like a good action movie, this fits the bill.

#2 Hell & Gone

Duane Swierczynski has ideas so brilliant and brutal that one day the rest of us will have to tool up and kill him. - Warren Ellis

Swierczynski seems to be making the transition from cult favorite to getting more main stream attention, so Ellis will probably try to make good on this threat in the near future. Since I’m enjoying the hell out of his work, I am volunteering my services as a bodyguard. What I lack in training, experience and competence, I make up for in my utter willingness to pepper spray absolutely anyone (including small children and the elderly) who’d give Mr. Swierczynski any grief.

Hell and Gone is the second part of a trilogy. In the first book, Fun & Games,  ex-cop Charlie Hardie is a house sitting drunk who has a very bad encounter with the Accident People. The AP’s are a branch of a Vast Conspiracy that does a variety of nefarious things, and their specialty is the elimination of high profile targets like politicians or celebrities via untraceable ‘accidents’. Charlie threw a monkey wrench into one of their operations in L.A. but didn’t manage to escape so he figured he’d be dead in about 12 seconds.

But instead of killing him, Charlie is given a weird job offer. The Vast Conspiracy decides to make him the warden of a secret prison instead. With no other options, Charlie plays along hoping to find a way to escape. Unfortunately, the prison is a decaying underground complex at an unknown location that would make a pretty good setting for a video game. The handful of inmates are extremely dangerous and require a Hannibal Lector level of security, and the guards are only slightly more trustworthy than the prisoners. And the special sauce on this shit sandwich is that if any one tries to get out through the original entrance, it’d trigger a ‘death mechanism’ that kills everyone in the prison.

Fun and Games was a fast-n-furious action novel with heaping helpings of ultra-violence and humor. Hell and Gone is less actiony and more of a mind fuck, but it’s still powered by it’s breakneck pace and the sheer awesome insanity of its plot. This is the literary equivalent of taping a bunch of bottle rockets together, lighting the fuses and then tossing them into the middle of your 4th of July barbecue. It’s chaos, but it’s entertaining as hell. And if Swierczynski did what I think he did at the end of this one, the final book is going to be even crazier.

Also, Swierczynski is one of the authors I got to meet at Bouchercon earlier this year, and he seemed like a very nice guy who patiently answered my questions about superheroes. I may even brave the latest DC continuity reboot and pick up his Birds of Prey comics which I’ve heard good things about.

#3 - Point & Shoot

With his Charlie Hardie trilogy, Duane Swierczynski has successfully created a perpetual momentum machine that feeds off it’s own outrageous plot twists and increasingly crazy action to the point where it becomes self-sustaining in defiance of every rule of physics and literature that dictate it should have long ago exploded in the faces of its readers,  killing or maiming them all.

It’s impossible to recap this without spoilers, and spoilers should be avoid at all costs.  So suffice it to say that it’s about a guy named Charlie Hardie who once did some work for the Philadelphia police department before tragedy had him change careers to being a drunken house sitter.  Then fate had him cross paths with a vast conspiracy known as the Accident People.  This is the group behind almost every shady death of a celebrity or politician.

Charlie fouled up one of the AP’s plots and his life has been a hellish nightmare of being used in their increasingly elaborate schemes with interludes of occasionally breaking free to try and stop then and invariably trigging more of their wrath.  Here at the end of the road, Charlie is confronted with yet another mind blowing twist as well as an insane escape situation and then a desperate road trip to try and protect his wife and son.

The thing about these books is that they’re just flat out fun.  The increasingly convoluted conspiracy plot and over-the-top action should make them ridiculous, but Swierczynski makes it work by just showing a relentless balls-out commitment to piling blocks of batshit insanity on top of batshit insanity to the point where there’s this giant pyramid of blocks of batshit insanity standing there.  Yeah, it’s made out of batshit insanity, but it’s still a pyramid.  And it’s glorious.

All three reviews also posted at Goodreads.

Fun & Games
Hell & Gone
Point & Shoot

Shelf Inflicted Updates

Things are humming along at Shelf Inflicted, the joint blog that features a variety of posts from some of us Goodreads hooligans.

I recently reviewed Joe Hill's NOS4A2, Michael Koryta's The Prophet, the latest Spenser Wonderland from Ace Atkins and an account of a road trip I took to see Atkins, Koryta, Megan Abbott and others in St. Louis.  I also took a look at the first seasons of FX's The Americans and CBS's Elementary.

Dirty Politics

Silken Prey
by John Sandford
Putnam Adult
Exit polling indicates this book is 4 out of 5 stars.

Lucas Davenport has faced all kinds of dangerous homicidal maniacs in his long career, but he may have finally met his match when going up against a beautiful billionaire with political ambitions and a couple of ex-military killers on her payroll.

Incumbent Republican Senator Porter Smalls hasn’t let his conservative politics keep him from having a couple of sex scandals, and he just got caught with child pornography on his laptop.  It seems like his challenger, the uber-wealthy heiress Democrat Taryn Grant, will easily win the election.

However, Minnesota’s governor fears that the Smalls has been framed and not only could that kick off an unacceptable escalation of dirty politics, it could also turn into a major scandal that would rock the Democratic party.  So the governor quietly calls in Davenport and asks him to quickly determine if the kiddie porn was planted on Smalls’ computer. Lucas has a long history of dealing with the political and media angles on behalf of his bosses, but this one could be a whole new level of trouble with both political sides just waiting to cry shenanigans at any hint of wrongdoing.  When a missing political operative and a government connection to the porn become part of his investigation, Davenport finds himself in a political minefield.

As usual in a Prey novel, the readers know who the bad guys are from the beginning and in this one Taryn Grant and her bodyguards have the potential to be among the worst that Davenport goes up against.  Taryn is smart, rich, ambitious and completely nuts with a narcissistic personality disorder. One of her ex-special forces henchmen will do anything for money, and the other will do anything for her.

Fortunately, Davenport has a lot of friends to call on like his artist buddy Kidd who is also a computer expert and has a more interesting history than Lucas realizes.  Virgil Flowers also gets called in to lend a hand as Lucas scrambles to learn the truth before election day.

I found this to be one of the more interesting installments in the long-running Prey series.  The political challenges of a case like this added an extra dimension as did a villain who wields a helluva lot of power and influence.  Getting other Sandford main characters like Kidd and that fuckin’ Flowers was a very nice bonus that made Lucas’s world seem a lot larger.

My only complaint is that while the ending provided a satisfactory conclusion, it also left a big element hanging which could be paid off in another Prey novel down the line, but it made me like I'd been left hanging on that element.

Once again Sandford proves himself to be one of the kings of the thriller genre.

Also posted on Goodreads.