The Smartest Guy In The Room

The Fold
by Peter Clines
Crown

3 1/2 out of 5 chocolate croissants.

Mike Erikson might be the smartest person on Earth, but he’s content to use his high IQ and eidetic memory as a small town school teacher. However, his friend Reggie is a big deal at DARPA and has been trying to hire Mike for years, and now he finally finds a job that Mike can’t resist because of its groundbreaking nature. 

DARPA has been funding a top secret project called the Albuquerque Door* in which a small group of scientists have successfully been able to fold space-time so that a long distance could be traveled by a person taking a single step. The scientists claim that the Door is working perfectly but want more testing, and they have insisted on not providing any of the work behind their discovery until it’s ready to be taken public. Reggie thinks that there’s something not quite right with the project and sends Mike out to investigate in the hopes that he can use his unique talents to sniff out what’s wrong. 

*(Is it just me or does an Albuquerque Door sound like the kind of thing you’d be scared to look up on Urban Dictionary at work?)

I’m tempted to say that this is like Sherlock Holmes showing up on an episode of Fringe, but Mike is a lot nicer than Sherlock and there isn’t a cow in the lab. Mike himself is one of the biggest selling points of this story because the way that his mind works is well done and fascinating in its own right. There’s also some really compelling reasons as to why he’s downplayed his gifts and stuck to being a school teacher. Putting a unique character like this in a situation with a huge scientific breakthrough and a group of people who seem to be hiding something makes for an entertaining story that eventually makes the most of its premise.

While Mike makes for a sympathetic guy that you want to root for, the scientists he deals with are a bunch of jerkfaces. The way that they act for most of the book is one of the things that irked me about it. For quite a while every question or statement that Mike makes is usually met with a hostile question or snarky challenge even as he’s being as polite and accommodating as possible. In fact, I thought Mike was being just a little too nice because as the government guy who is determining whether their new budget will get approved, he should be throwing a little weight around instead of just eating all the crap sandwiches that get flung at him regularly.

There is an argument to be made that since Mike is essentially a rookie and that the scientists have reasons for acting this way that it makes sense for the plot. However, just the way that they respond to almost everything Mike says becomes a bit tiresome. For a bunch of people tearing a hole in the fabric of reality, there are a lot of arrogant and dismissive comments along the lines of “That’s unpossible!” even after Mike has been shown to be right time after time. 

Despite those irritations with the secondary characters, this is still a fun and kinda kooky sci-fi thriller with an intriguing main character that mostly delivers on the potential of its main premise. There’s an indication that this may not be the last we see of Mike, and I’ll be willing to check out more. 

Also posted on Goodreads.

Losers Weepers

Finders Keepers
by Stephen King
Scribner

3 out of 5 Moleskine notebooks

The good news is that it isn’t as bad as Mr. Mercedes, and that there’s actually a halfway decent plot lurking in here. The bad news is that this makes it more clear than ever that Stephen King does horror a helluva lot better than he does crime thrillers.

The story starts out with an acclaimed author named John Rothstein who pulled a J.D. Salinger and hasn’t published anything in decades. Morris Bellamy is a huge fan of Rothstein’s most famous creation, a disaffected rebel without a cause named Jimmy Gold, but he thinks that Rothstein ruined the character in the final book of a trilogy by having him become just another suburbanite working in advertising. Since this is occurring in the ‘70s, Morris can’t go on Goodreads to complain about it so instead he breaks into Rothstein’s house and murders him. He also takes over 160 notebooks filled with all the writing that Rothstein has done since quitting public life as well as over $20,000. Before Morris can read the notebooks, which include new material about his favorite character, he gets waylaid on another charge and sent to prison. For 35 years Morris dreams of getting out and reading the notebooks that he had hidden before being arrested.

In 2009 a teenage boy named Peter Saubers and his family move into Morris’ old house. The Saubers have fallen on hard times after his father lost his real estate job in the market crash of ‘08 and then had the bad luck to get run over and badly injured while standing in line at a job fair. Pete stumbles across the notebooks and the cash, and he uses the money to help his family through their financial crisis. He also reads the notebooks which turn him into a nut for literature and another fan of Jimmy Gold. Several years pass, and Morris is released from prison which puts him on a collision course with Pete. That’s when retired police detective Bill Hodges gets involved along with his trusty assistants, Holly and Jerome.

One thing that Stephen King knows how to do very well (Other than spoiling major character deaths on Game of Thrones via Twitter. Thanks again, Uncle Stevie…) is writing about books. He’s often examined them from both sides in his work: as the act of writing/creating and from the standpoint of being a fan of reading. King knows there something magical in both aspects, but in his world there’s also black magic so he's also looked into that from both angles as well. 

With Morris Bellamy, King has created what’s probably his own worst nightmare, the fan who feels an ownership of a character and becomes violently angry when he feels like the author is mistreating him. There are shades of Annie Wilkes in this although the key difference is that Annie understood that her favorite character was a creation and wanted to control what happened to her while Morris sees Jimmy Gold as a real person that Rothstein has been a poor guardian of. This contrasts with Pete, the reader who is content to fall under the spell of an author and admire well-written things, and who feels guilty that he’s had to hide this literary treasure from the world in order to help his family.

The book is at it’s best when it’s about these two as polar opposites because it isn’t just about the conflict and tension of who possesses the notebooks, it’s King writing about the love of reading, and that’s a subject he does very well. I did question the coincidence of Morris and Pete both growing up in the same house years apart and both being the kind of guys who will absolutely fall in love with a literary character like Jimmy Gold, but that’s a minor quibble. 

The real issues come when King tries to take this story and make it part of his on-going trilogy featuring Bill Hodges. I found Mr. Mercedes to be a mess, and Hodges was a big part of that as a hodge-podge (Pun intended.) of poorly conceived motivations and plot twists that made the character seem irresponsible and reckless. (Something that King even acknowledges in this one when Hodges reflects on his backstory and admits that he nearly got a bunch of people killed “by going Lone Ranger”.) He doesn’t do anything that egregious here, but the problem is that he is completely unnecessary.

Hodges doesn’t even appear in the story until almost halfway through the book, and when he does the main plot comes to a screeching halt as King has to explain exactly who he and his friends are as well as the backstory of Mr. Mercedes. Then his only real contribution comes at the very end and could have easily been done by a new character. The main reason that Hodges is in this book at all seems to be to set up the third book, and there’s even an element at the end that feels like the bonus post-credits scene in a Marvel movie. 

In fact, the appearance of Hodges underlines that King, for all his vast storytelling talents, just really doesn’t have a handle on the kind of plotting and pacing required for a tense crime thriller. I’ve joked before that King has two speeds: dead slow and all-hell-breaks-loose. He very often can make that work, but it’s telling that a lot of his books take place over extended periods of time from weeks to months to years. King is at his best doing a slow burn, and there’s no question that he knows how to do suspense and a sense of dread in his usual kind of stories, However, he just has no natural feel for making that work in crime fiction.

For example, this plot is structured around two characters, Morris and Pete, and the readers know their whole story and can see where the trains are going to collide. However, once he brings Hodges and his friends into the story, he tries to turn it into a mystery with them trying to solve the riddle of what Pete has been doing. As the action ramps up at the end, a big chunk of the story is Hodges trying to figure out what we already read so there’s absolutely no tension to it. A good thriller often has the hero trying to figure out something the reader knows, but there should be some kind of climatic pay off. Like some bit of info held back, the revelation of which should provide a satisfying A-HA! kind of breakthrough that is critical to driving the plot forward. (The pivotal clue in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon is a great example of making this work.) But here we’ve just got Hodges putting together what we already know and trailing uselessly in the wake of the real action.

King also sometimes has trouble with plotting when he can’t say that some supernatural force is helping push things along. There’s a great illustration of that here when Morris is trying to clean up a particularly nasty mess he’s made at one point, and he has every reason to remove a certain item. He even thinks that he should take it with him, but then he leaves it only because of a powerful hunch. Sure enough, he later has an opportunity to use that object to his advantage through events he could not have predicted, but the mere fact that it’s in the room shows that King decided to disregard the logic of the crime genre which dictate that you should always get rid of the evidence just to use it as a plot point later. Then to add insult to injury that object almost immediately become irrelevant after this twist which highlights how it wasn’t really necessary to begin with. So King introduced an element that he knew didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t bother to come up with a convincing reason that it could have been logically kept in play, and then immediately dropped the whole thing so it was pointless anyhow.

King himself has even gone on record in a recent interview about how he’s had a hard time with these books and doesn’t understand how mystery writers do it regularly. While I like that he gave something new a try, I also think that he’s just not suited to doing this genre, and that he’s usually at his best when he has some kind of fantastic element to lean on.

WARNING:  SPOILERS FOLLOW!

"What We Got Here Is Failure To Communicate....."

Robert B. Parker's Kickback

by Ace Atkins

G.P. Putnam's Sons

4 out of 5 bottles of Sam Adams.

“On the first day of February, the coldest day of the year so far, I took it as a very good omen that a woman I’d never met brought me a sandwich.”

This may be the smartest client that Spenser has ever had because one sure way to motivate the private detective is to offer him food.  It also helps if you’re hiring him to help an innocent person who got royally screwed over by powerful people because Spenser enjoys sinking his teeth into a case like that almost as much as biting into a free sandwich.

In a rundown old mill town a judge has sentenced a young man to nine months in a juvenile detention facility for making fun of a school official on Twitter.  (And if making fun of people on Twitter is a jailable offense then I’m in a lot of trouble because my mocking of former Chiefs general manager Scott Pioli would probably have been enough to get me the death penalty.)  

Spenser investigates and finds a pattern of the judge throwing every kid he can into jail for minor infractions, and some more digging reveals ties between the judge and the private company getting paid by the government to run the prison as well as a dangerous mobster. Spenser soon finds himself threatened by both the local cops and thugs.  

This is the fourth Spenser novel that Ace Atkins has done after being hired by the estate of Robert B. Parker to carry on the series, and he’s done an exceptional job of writing these in a way that feels like his own style while still being true to the character.  This one has scenes and dialogue that really feel reminiscent of the early Spenser, and I especially like how Hawk has regained some of the rougher edges he used to have that had gotten sanded off in the later RBP books.

One of the more interesting changes is that while the Atkins books are still self-contained stories that he’s been leaving plot threads hanging to be addressed later, and this gives the series more of a sense of on-going serialized continuity than it typically had before.  Spenser still exists in a kind of ageless limbo, but there’s been changes to his world since Atkins took over that are adding layers to the stories.  

So we’ve got all those elements along with the kind of plot in which Spenser can really shine as he takes on corrupt officials and criminals with his usual mix of tough guy stubbornness and smart ass comments. That makes for a great read that any fan of the private eye genre should enjoy.

Also reviewed at Goodreads.

On the Road Again

Gathering Prey
by John Sandford
G.P. Putnam's Son

4 out of 5 bottles of Faygo

Lucas Davenport relentlessly tracks down a murderous gang of hippies?!?  It’s not even my birthday!

Davenport’s adopted daughter Letty befriends a young woman, Skye, who is part of a subculture called Travelers  who wander around the country living like hoboes.  After her  friend is murdered Skye contacts Letty for help and tells her that the people responsible are a pack of jackals led by a guy named Pilate.  Skye is convinced that Pilate’s gang roams around in an RV torturing and killing people.

Letty gets Lucas involved, and his initial skepticism fades as they find evidence that indicates that Pilate and his people have left a trail of bodies in their wake.  Davenport starts tracking them across the upper Midwest through small towns and the weirdness of Juggalo gatherings.  (You can do a Google image search if you want to an idea of what that looks like, but don‘t say I didn't warn you.) Things get messy as usually happens when Lucas starts trying to run down killers, and he also has to deal with a nagging middle manager who wants to know why he’s wasting the taxpayer money trying to stop murderers who aren’t killing anyone in their state?

OK, so I guess they’re not technically hippies although there is a certain Charles Manson family type vibe going on here.  I still like to think of them as murderous hippies although even Manson would probably hesitate to sign up with this crew considering how crazily blood thirsty they are.

While most Prey novels generally feature Lucas trying to figure out who the bad guy is for at least part of the book, this plays out a little differently in that Lucas almost immediately knows who he’s looking for and what they've done.  The challenge here is in trying to find a group of people living off the grid as they roam around.  Things soon escalate and since the majority of the book is a straight up manhunt that allows Sandford to play to his strength of building the sense of momentum and tension that make his books such page turners.

The one slightly off-key note in this is Letty.  Sandford has made her an increasing part of the story in some of the recent novels, and she does make for a great smart-ass foil for Lucas.  However, it seems like she’s being set up to star in her own series at some point soon, and sometimes the ways she’s inserted into the plot feel forced.  She makes for a fun sidekick generally, but it’s always more fun to read about Batman than Robin. So it was a bit of relief when she fades into the background when the story really gets rolling, and Lucas becomes the center of the book’s attention.

There’s also a sense of Lucas getting fed up with his position in a government agency.  While he’s always had a natural feel for helping out his bosses with the media, Lucas has never had much patience with office politics or bureaucratic rules, and he’s seriously frustrated at the current American institutional mentality of being more concerned with the budget than in actually doing the job.  Throw in him dealing with turning 50, and Lucas is one grumpy individual at the start of this one.  All of this gives the book the feeling that it’s about to boil over, and that Davenport will have to consider making some changes in his life.

But whenever Lucas is in a funk, he can always count on the adrenaline rush of hunting bad guys to cheer him up, and he’s certainly one cheerful bastard by the end of this one.

Also posted at Goodreads.

Making Crime Pay

The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

4 out of 5 rejection letters with suggestions on how to improve the plot.

Lawrence Block is one of those authors that I’ve often wished I could spend some time with just to hear him reminisce  about his long career as well as get his opinions on other crime writers. I haven’t gotten a dinner invitation yet (Although I did get to meet him when he was touring for Hope to Die.), but until that day reading The Crime of Our Lives is damn fine substitute.

Through this collection of introductions and essays he’s done over the years, you get a sense of what Block thinks about the mystery genre as a whole as well as specific things about various writers including some very humorous stories like the time Charles Willeford asked him if he had ever eaten cat.

Some of the more interesting stories come from the early days of his career when Block was working for a shady literary agent where he’d read submissions all day and write up rejections that would encourage the suckers to submit more work for a fee.  Block believes that slogging through that much bad fiction was a better education than reading masterpieces of literature because it taught him what not to do rather to admire what most everyone already agreed was great.

The most moving parts come in several things Block wrote about his late friend Donald Westlake.  (It’s probably a safe bet that Block was inspired to do this by the similar collection of Westlake material in the posthumously published The Getaway Car.  Block also wrote  that the introduction for that is reprinted here.)  Through the various pieces you get a real sense of the long friendship between the two writers as well as the deep respect that Block holds for his work. There’s also some intriguing musings as to how he thinks Westlake’s career and legacy might have been different if his early book Memory would have been published at the beginning of his career.  The story of how Block helped get it into print after Westlake’s death that he relates here shows just how much Block thought of that particular work.

Because there are some different pieces on the same subject, there’s a little bit of repetition, but even that becomes interesting if you pay attention to the different ways that Block can relate the same story.  Fans of Block or of the crime genre in general will find a lot of interesting tidbits as well as probably adding a few writers to their To-Read lists.

(Also posted at Goodreads.)

The Good Old Days

World Gone By
by Dennis Lehane
William Morrow & Company

3 out of 5 stars.

I like crime stories set back in the days of fedoras and trench coats, and I’m a big fan of Dennis Lehane’s. So this should be perfect, right? Sadly, the best I can say is that it isn’t bad.

Set 10 years after the previous book, Live By Night, Joe Coughlin has left behind his days of building a criminal empire based on bootlegging to the more respectable position of being a prominent man in Tampa. Joe runs several successful businesses but his real job is to work as an adviser and fixer for the Mob. As World War II rages, the same shortages of men and resources have hit even organized crime. Thanks in part to Joe’s help the drugs, gambling, prostitution, and various other criminal enterprises are still doing well as he splits time between Florida and Cuba.

As a man who makes no enemies and is a cash cow for the Mob, Joe’s days of danger seem to be behind him so he’s shocked to get a tip that a contract has been put out on his life. As Joe tries to find out if there’s any truth to the rumor he also has to deal with an escalating conflict between a white mobster trying to muscle in on the turf controlled by a black man as well as being leaned on by the war department to help them try to root out spies on the docks.

I wanted to love this one, and I found Joe a fascinating character in a lot of ways, this really comes across as kind of a generic gangster story. The last book was Joe’s rise to power and made for the more interesting of the two as he fought to build a bootlegging empire, and this one just didn’t do anything that adds anything new or different to the genre.

The whole trilogy is a little weird because the first one, The Given Day, was more of a look at post-World War I Boston from a social and economic perspective with elements of a crime story that focused on Joe’s family when he was supporting character as a kid. Shifting from that to Joe as a reckless bootlegger and then into the older, wiser counselor was a good story, but didn’t really seem to match up to the first book.

Also posted at Goodreads.

Shaken, Not Stirred

The Martini Shot: A Novella and Stories
by George Pelecanos
Little, Brown and Company

3 out of 5 stars.

I might have liked this martini more if it came with some blue cheese olives.

One of the things I love about Pelecanos is that he creates a great sense of time and place which makes his characters come alive, and I was slightly worried about reading this collection because I wasn’t sure how well he could pull that off in short stories rather than novels. The way he builds a character by describing the streets they walk, the liquor they drink, the music they hear, and the restaurants they eat in didn’t seem like seemed like something that he could condense down easily. 

However, I was pleasantly surprised at just how well he was able to almost instantly create characters you felt like you understood whether it was a middle-aged loser in an inner city trying to get his father’s respect by turning into a confidential informant to the cops or a ruthless insurance investigator chasing a lead to South America.

My favorite aspect was The Martini Shot novella which is the first person account of a TV writer working on a cop show in a rundown city who feels the need to get some justice for a friend who has been murdered. Pelecanos’ has done some TV and film work (Most notably his time as a producer and writer on The Wire.), and he made the whole day-to-day routine of working on a show interesting. He also does some clever stuff with the main character blending the real and fictional together while giving us the idea that he kind of sees himself as the lead in a crime story he’s writing. I’d be more than happy to read an entire book with this setting and character. My only complaint is that the sex scenes provided a graphic amount of detail that seem to cross over into soft core porn. Maybe he was going for some of those50 Shades of Grey readers.

The short story I liked most provided the background of one Pelecanos' lead characters in a series, Spero Lucas, by telling us how he came to be adopted by his parents and what their family was like when he was a kid. Those are things that have been touched on in the Lucas books, but this added a lot of details that I enjoyed. However, the problem is that like the rest of this collection, it really just made hungry for another Spero Lucas novel.

So while Pelecanos has the ability to write short stories, what I really wanted from almost everything I read here was more. (Except for those sex scenes. Then less would have been better.) It’s like Pelecanos is great chef who makes entrees that make my mouth water, but here he’s only offering a tray of appetizers. They’re great to pop in your mouth with that martini, but they don’t make for a full meal. 

Also posted at Goodreads.