Review: The Sentry

The Sentry by Robert Crais
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you can’t stop to put air in your tires without having to prevent some thugs from beating up somebody then you just might be the hero of an action/crime novel.

Professional bad-ass Joe Pike keeps a sandwich shop owner from getting pummeled by some local gangsters running a protection racket, and as a bonus he meets the owner’s good looking niece, Dru, who seems interested in him. Unfortunately, the punks seem intent on getting revenge, and when Joe can’t locate Dru or her uncle following some gruesome vandalism at the restaurant he fears the worst. Joe enlists the help of his detective partner Elvis Cole to help him find the missing people. What looks to be a simple case of payback by a street gang soon turns out to be a tangled mess involving murder, the FBI, and a psychotic hitman whose deadly skills are more than a match for Pike’s.

This series started out with Elvis as the main character who was your pretty typical smart-ass private detective with Joe as the trusty violent friend who always wore sunglasses and rarely spoke. Elvis got better when Robert Crais toned down his smart mouth and gave him some feelings, and by switching Pike to the lead character in some of the later novels we learned that he’s actually more a tragic and damaged figure than the typical ‘80s macho action type he seemed at the start. That shift continues to pay off in this book, and one of the selling points for me is the odd couple friendship the two men share with the outgoing and friendly Cole completely understanding the closed off Pike to the point where almost no conversation is necessary between the two.

While the set-up sounds like a straight ahead action thriller there’s also a lot of solid twists and turns to the plot that constantly subvert expectations and make some detective work necessary. So we get Pike in full hunter mode as he keeps pushing to find the missing people. That keeps the story momentum going while Cole does some of the leg work that uncovers that Pike’s potential new snuggle bunny isn’t quite who she said she was. Which also adds some emotion to the Pike part of the equation while Cole has to worry about how his friend is dealing with all of it. So it’s a nice blend of tension with enough character stuff to make it feel like it has some emotional stakes to it.

The only thing I found lacking was the sadistic killer. He’s genuinely scary at times as well as a former mercenary like Pike so that gives us a worthy foe. However, he’s just a little too crazy town banana pants to be believable. It’s hard to accept that a guy who actually hears voices in his head and believes that zombies are real can be operating at such a high level and also capable of staying ahead of the law for years.

Still, that’s a minor complaint, and overall I really enjoyed this one as another solid piece of work from Crais.

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Review: So Many Doors

So Many Doors by Oakley Hall
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Did you ever hear the one about the farmer’s daughter and the bulldozer driver?

He ends up on Death Row for her murder! Ha! That’s a real knee-slapper, isn’t it?

Jack Ward is awaiting execution for the murder of his lover, Vassillia Baird a/k/a V. Even with an eager lawyer showing up to try and save his life Jack refuses to help and wants his death sentence carried out as soon as possible. The book then proceeds to tell us the long and tangled history of Jack and V. that led them both to their horrible fates.

The story of their doomed romance is related to us from the perspective of a series of people like V.’s father who hires the handsome Jack to remove some stumps from his farm, and then completely freaks out when he catches the two having sexy times together. Then Jack’s friend Ben details the early days of their relationship, and his own crush on V. complicates his feelings about how Jack treats her. We follow this pattern with several other people they cross paths with over the years to see how they become a self-destructive pair that manage to do tremendous damage to each other and almost everyone around them over time.

That structure is the really intriguing part of this with Oakley Hall spending as much time on the characters telling us the tale as he does on Jack and V. By building up the supporting players and then having them watch the evolution of Jack and V.’s love affair it gives a reader the experience of starting from the perspective of an outsider looking into their relationship. Yet over time since we know history that others don’t we begin to understand how they both end up where they do and why they keep coming together even though they often make each other desperately unhappy.

Another element I liked is that this story is mainly set among a nomadic group of heavy equipment operators as they roam from job to job through the Great Depression, during World War II, and then beyond. Following a bunch of blue collar guys driving bulldozers and graders doesn’t sound that interesting, but the routine details of their work and lives reminded me of Steinbeck while the settings of run down farms, cheap rooming houses, noisy bars, and various job sites came fully alive while reading.

This is yet another Hard Case Crime novel that isn’t exactly a hard case crime novel. Yeah, there’s a murder and a guy on Death Row, but it’s really a tragic love story filled with great writing and solid character work. So it feels a little bit like a bait-and-switch although I still liked it quite a bit.

I’d give it 3.5 stars if Goodreads let us, but….well, you know.

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Review: King Suckerman

King Suckerman by George Pelecanos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the summer of ‘76 best buddies Marcus Clay and Demetri Karras are spending their free time playing pick-up basketball games while everyone in Washington DC is buzzing about the upcoming bicentennial celebration and a new blaxplotation flick called King Suckerman. As a Vietnam veteran and owner of a record shop Marcus is the more grown-up of the two while Demetri has no ambition beyond being a small time pot dealer. When Marcus accompanies Demetri to buy some weed the two end up in confrontation that makes them instant enemies of the dangerous Wilton Cooper and his gang of killers.

The two main characters are the strongest part with Marcus being the hard worker who has a sense of responsibility that doesn’t allow him to let things slide. Demetri is the flip side of this as the slacker who despite being a decent guy deep down can always find an excuse to take the easy way out. Despite their differences Pelecanos creates a believable bond between the two, and he often uses similar types of people in his other novels. He also builds up a great cast of supporting players around them including the murderous Wilton Cooper.

The other great aspect is Pelecanos’ ability to evoke the setting of Washington DC of a certain time. By using a mix of local history and geography combined with vivid descriptions of cars, clothes, food, and especially music, Pelecanos makes you feel like you’re driving in an Dodge Charger with the 8-track cranked up on your way to catch a late showing of King Suckerman.

It’s also incredibly patient novel that isn’t filled with action. It’s very easy to get caught up with Marcus and Demetri as well as the other characters as they just go about their lives with nothing huge happening. You can even forget that this is a crime novel at heart which makes the violence that much more shocking and awful when it does come.

This is the first novel by George Pelecanos I ever bought, and I got my old 1998 paperback copy of it signed a few months back when I got to meet him at a book singing. That prompted this long overdue reread, and it gave me a new appreciation for what he does in these books.

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Review: The Feral Detective

The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I first saw the title The Feral Detective I imagined Humphrey Bogart as a werewolf. I guess if I want that book I’ll have to write it myself.

Phoebe Siegler is a lady from New York who quits her media job after the election of 2016. To distract herself from thinking about the living nightmare that America is about to become she heads west to California looking for the daughter of a friend of hers who dropped out of a school and hasn’t been in touch with her mother. The trail leads to the desert areas of Inland Empire and Phoebe enlists the aid of a local detective with a reputation for being able to find people. Phoebe expects to meet the kind of low rent PI you usually see in pop culture, but she gets something very different in Charlie Heist whose eccentric ways both intrigue and infuriate her. It appears that the missing girl has gone to live among some of the outcasts that populate the area, and she also learns that Charlie’s strange history includes links to some of those people.

I know that Jonathan Lethem is a Very Serious Author who does Lit-A-Chur known for ‘fusing genres’. Which I think essentially means he puts tropes in a blender and then gets nominated for lots of awards unlike those rubes who just write straight genre fiction. That shows here with a plot set-up that kind of sounds like it could be a big studio movie trailer, but then things get weird.

I enjoyed parts of this quite a bit. Especially Phoebe’s shell-shocked reactions to the election of an orange nightmare to the supposed highest office in the land. This is the first book I’ve read that had some serious reflection on that whole stunned WTF-just-happened? thing some of us went through in the immediate aftermath as well as the creeping dread of wondering just how bad it would get. (So bad. So very bad.)

The plot also fooled me in the same way that it sets up expectations much like how Phoebe thinks she’s starting her own personal mystery story by going to hire a detective. I’ve consumed plenty of stories about young women going missing, and I was expecting Charlie to lead us through seedy bars to a serial killer’s lair or a sex trafficking ring or something similar. Instead we go out to the desert and start meeting all those weird characters living an existence entirely off the grid. That’s interesting as is Charlie himself who comes across as a complete enigma that neither Phoebe nor the reader can get a handle on until late in the book.

However, this a man writing in first person about a very privileged white woman leaving her East Coast bubble and going on a kind of journey of self-discovery. Which sounds like a really bad blog that would get turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. That’s problematic at times although to be fair Letham writes Phoebe to be painfully self-aware of this. Yet she also can’t stop acting like a whining ninny despite often knowing better. That gets pretty annoying after a while although it seems designed to be that way so I feel silly complaining. It’s still annoying though.

I’m left scratching my head over the whole thing. It was interesting with some very good writing, but I kinda wish that Megan Abbott would have done this book instead of Jonathan Lethem.

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Review: Star Wars, Vol. 6: Out Among the Stars

Star Wars, Vol. 6: Out Among the Stars by Jason Aaron
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a set of pretty good Star Wars stories that was completely ruined for me by the art. It’s not even all the art, it’s just one particular aspect of it. So more’s the pity.

Apparently Salvador Larocca used photorealistic style on the major character’s faces so he did some kind of tracing off actual pictures of the actors and then these were colored in tones to make them look more like photographs, not drawings. The results at times look like a child scissored out the faces of the actors from magazine photos and then glued them into Star Wars comics.

What’s even weirder is that I could at least understand why it’s done for people like Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams. But at one point the same thing is used for a random Imperial officer who is in a few panels so then I’ve got some strange dude’s face stuck into my Star Wars comic. Why was this necessary?

It looks sooooo awful that it immediately took me out of all the stories it was used in which was too bad because there was some interesting plots here, especially the one about R2-D2 going on a one-droid rescue mission to save C-3PO after he’s been captured. That’s the only reason I didn’t give this one star.

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Review: 2018 on Goodreads

2018 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My overall number of books read was down again this year. (Thanks, Netflix!) However, what I lacked in quantity I made up for in quality because it was a fantastic year for crime fiction. Here's the best of those in the order I read them.

Old Black Magic by Ace Atkins

The Lonely Witness by William Boyle

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

The Upper Hand by Johnny Shaw

The Sinners by Ace Atkins

The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

Some Die Nameless by Wallace Stroby

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos

Holy Ghost by John Sandford

Fatal Blow by James Thane

November Road by Lou Berney

In addition to great crime fiction I also read one of the best and most bittersweet true crime books imaginable. Michelle McNamara died before finishing this and without knowing who the Golden State Killer was. However, she predicted exactly how he'd be identified and arrested just months after the book was published. That should help anyone who reads this sleep better at night.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

The trend of fantastic crime fiction continued into my comic book reading, and it's no surprise that it was Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips delivering another top notch installment in their Criminal series as well as wrapping up the Kill or be Killed story.

Criminal Vol. 7: Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Kill or be Killed Vol. 3

Kill or be Killed Vol. 4

With all the great crime novels I didn't read much sci-fi this year, but this one was a winner. And now that I think about it also had some mystery elements to it. Bonus points for the best cover of the year, too.

Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira

Hopefully, I'll read some more books that were as good as these in 2019.

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Review: Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel

Star Wars: The Screaming Citadel by Kieron Gillen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Luke Skywalker is still trying to find a way to become a Jedi, and rogue archaeologist Doctor Aprhra has a crystal containing the essence of an ancient Jedi Master. Aphra has a plan to see a mysterious queen who receives visitors only once a year and will grant a favor to unique life forms. Since Luke is crazy strong with the Force, Aphra believes he’ll catch the queen’s eye, and she will help them unlock the crystal. Despite Aprhra’s previous employment with Darth Vader and their less than friendly previous encounter Luke is so desperate to gain knowledge about the Jedi that he agrees to go along with her.

Because what could possibly go wrong with teaming up with someone who has a history of double crossing every one she deals with at a place called The Screaming Citadel?

This is another entertaining story that blends the nostalgia of the original Star Wars trilogy with the best of this new Marvel line with Doctor Aphra and her companions. There’s a lots of good action, funny banter, and a pretty creepy storyline about what the queen is actually up to. It's nothing next-level great, but it's a solid Star Wars story.

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