Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett

1987; 254 pages. Book #3 in the Discworld Series. Genre : Comedic Fantasy. Overall Rating : B-.

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There are two immutable truths in Discworld : 1.) Wizards are men, and 2.) Witches are women. That is, until a dying wizard bequeaths his magic staff to the about-to-be-born eighth son of an eighth son (which we all know will become a sourceror), and that son instead turns out to be a first daughter. The village witch, Granny Weatherwax, tries to set things right again, but eventually has to admit that it will take some assistance from the stuffy old wizards at the Unseen University.

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What's To Like...

The realms of witches and wizards are introduced into the Discworld saga. There are also some great new "concepts", such as Borrowing (where a witch enters the body of an animal such as a bird, and uses it for a time while coexisting with the animal's mind), and Headology (wherein, if you act like a witch, talk like a witch, and dress like a witch; people will see you as a witch without you having to perform any witchcraft). Finally, Pratchett adopts a new strategy - writing stories with themes and object lessons.

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Where's Waldo?

Waldo isn't here. Neither are Rincewind, Twoflower, the Luggage, and Cohen the Barbarian. All of whom were major characters in the first two books. There are dwarves and humans here, but no golems, werewolves, dragons, or vampires. This is also before any of the Night Watch show up, and there's no sign of the Patrician.

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Granny Weatherwax becomes a major character, and the banana-loving librarian is here. But the two other major figures in Equal Rites - Eskarina and Simon - are once and done. And ANAICT, the major lesson here (Equal Rights) doesn't stick either. In subsequent books the wizards are all men, and the witches are all women.

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New/Kewl Words...

Pratchett books are always vocabulary-builders.

Inglenook : a corner by the fireplace. Jollop : a strong liquor or medicine. Tannoy : a type of public-address system. Heterodyne : having alternating currents of two different frequencies that combine to make two new frequencies. Alembic : an obsolete piece of labware that once was used for distillations. Souk : the open-air market in an Arabian city. Incunable : Ancient books produced in the earliest days of printing. Topiaric : concerning the art of clipping trees or shrubbery into recognizable shapes, such as animals. Pillion : the seat behind the rider of a horse or motorbike (or in this case, a broomstick). Cowin : Some sort of term of familiarity. Evidently a Pratchettism, as googling it didn't help.

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Excerpt...

She let the animal go and looked out at the scenery again for a long time - the barge was passing between high orange cliffs now, banded with so many colours of rock it looked as though some hungry God had made the all-time record club sandwich - and tried to avoid the next thought. But it persisted, arriving in her mind like the unexpected limbo dancer under the lavatory door of Life. (pg. 103)

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"There's no such thing as a female wizard!"

Equal Rites seems like both a once-only tangent and a pivotal book in the Discworld series. Most of the characters won't be seen again. Yet there is direction here - Pratchett seems to be saying the focus will be on Discworld itself, not on a particular character, such as, say, Rand al'Thor in the Wheel Of Time saga. And the zaniness already present will be supplemented by themes and morals.

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Equal Rites will probably never be anyone's favorite Discworld volume, and I don't suggest it as the first-read for anyone new to the series. But it's still an entertaining read. We'll give it a "B-", and recommend it to all geeky readers (such as me) who like to watch the Discworld universe as it gradually adds new personalities, places, and species.

Storm Front - Jim Butcher

2000; 322 pages. Genre : Urban Fantasy (so sez Wikipedia), or Semiautomagic (so sez Butcher). I like Butcher's choice better. Book #1 (out of 11, I think) in the "Dresden Files" series. Overall Rating : B-.

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Harry Dresden is a Wizard. He's in the Yellow Pages, where his ad reads : "Harry Dresden - WIZARD. Lost items found. Paranormal investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment."

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Harry's main activity is finding enough money to pay the monthly rent. Today's his lucky day. A woman wants to pay him to find her husband. And the Chicago police want his professional opinion as to whether any magic was used in a double homicide. Where the hearts of two lovers exploded out of their chests (shattering ribs on the way out) and splotched all over the ceiling. Yeah, there might be a tad bit of paranormalcy involved here.

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What's To Like...

There's a vampire or two. There are black mages and white wizards. There are pizza-loving fairies, and a wise-cracking spirit caged in a skull on Harry's desk. There are slow-witted demons, 6-foot-tall scorpions, some hookers, and some mobsters. There's a strong female police detective named Karrin Murphy.

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It's a murder-mystery, but with AD&D-ish magic blended in. Spells are cast, but one is never quite sure what they'll do and how effective they'll be.

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Buzzword for this book : "Thaumaturgy" (pg. 19).

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Magic. It can get a guy killed.

Storm Front is Butcher's debut effort, and it shows. There are some trite metaphors, some "roll your eyes" scenes, and some telegraphed plot twists (is that an oxymoron?). For example - he concocts two potions - an Escape Potion (which he plans to use), and a Love Potion (which he has no discernible plans for). Things go awry during a battle with a demon, and he calls for his female companion to drink the Escape Potion. Yeah, guess which one she drinks.

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Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.

You can nitpick the storyline to death, but that misses the point that it is meant to be a light-hearted read with an entertaining stream of humor running throughout. Several reviewers say that Butcher gets a lot more polished with each book, so I'm looking forward to reading more from this series.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits - Dave Barry

1988; 289 pages. Genre : Waiting Room Filler. Overall Rating : B-..

    I've had occasion to spend a lot of time in doctors' waiting rooms these past three months. I learned quickly to take something to read with me, as waiting rooms have the worst magazines : Belly-Button Lint Illustrated; Oil Filter Digest; Healthy Yawning; etc. You get the idea.

.I never knew if my wait was going to be 2 minutes or 2 hours, so Dave Barry's Greatest Hits was an ideal book to take with me. Consisting of 81 of his 1980's newspaper columns for the Miami Herald, and at an average of 2 pages in length; there was always a convenient place to stop when finally called.

What's To Like...
Dave Barry is kind of an urbanized Bill Bryson. He is laugh-out-loud funny, and covers all sort of themes - current events, sports, politics, TV, history, etc. If you think he can only write about humorous absurdisms, think again. His column about the loss of his father ("A Million Words") will put a lump in your throat.
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The only drawback to this book is that it's dated. If you remember the 80's it's NBD. But if you don't, then his cracks about people like Gary Hart, Liberace, Caspar Weinberger, Chuck Colson, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band may have you scratching your head. I recommend DBGH for the next time you have to get a physical. Everybody else in the waiting room will be jealous of you when you keep chuckling as you read.

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Excerpts...
As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am anyway, but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don't trust her. They know that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, deep in her soul, she would probably elect to save the infant's life, without even considering whether there were men on base. (218-19)

.So I go in for my last words, because I have to go back home, and my mother and I agree I probably won't see him again. I sit next to him on the bed, hoping he can't see that I'm crying. "I love you, Dad," I say. He says : "I love you too. I'd like some oatmeal."
So I go back out to the living room. where my mother and my wife and my son are sitting on the sofa, in a line, waiting for the outcome, and I say, "He wants some oatmeal." I am laughing and crying about this, My mother thinks maybe I should go back in and have a more meaningful last talk, but I don't.
Driving home, I'm glad I didn't. I think : He and I have been talking ever since I learned how. A million words. All of them final, now. I don't need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs. I think : Let me not define his death on my terms. Let him have his oatmeal. I can hardly see the road. (145)

Talking Man - Terry Bisson

1986; 192 pages. Genre : Science Fantasy. Overall Rating : B-.
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Talking Man is a wizard. But he is also a dreamer. Along with his soulmate, Dgene, they dreamed this universe into existence. Then Talking Man fell in love with his creation. So he hid in it, and lived in a small housetrailer in the hills of Kentucky with his 16-year-old daughter, Crystal. But the cosmos hath no fury like a Soulmate spurned, and Dgene is out to un-make the dream.
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What's To Like...
Bisson is a different sort of Sci-Fi writer. His forte lies in creating fabulous, vivid worlds. The back-cover blurbs describe this one thusly :
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"The geography shimmers and melts, catfish as big as boats are pulled from the Mississippi, the moon crumbles into luminous rings and refugees from burning cities choke the highways." (snip) "Kentucky back roads, junkyards, fast food and magic..."
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Crystal and a boy named Williams find themselves driving a borrowed Mustang from Kentucky to New Mexico to the North Pole in order to help Talking Man keep his dream (and their world) alive. However, like one of my recurring dreams, the "real" is shifting almost constantly. Whole states disappear, the Mississippi River now runs through a Grand Canyon-like channel, the US-Canadian border is heavily mined, and the names of cigarette and candy brands keep changing.
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Bisson is kind of the antithesis of Tolkien. He presents his universes as is and without ever addressing the whys. Denver burns, but we never find out what caused this. An owl figurine is an artifact of monumental importance, but the reason is never detailed. Tolkien would obsess over the causes of such things; Bisson ignores them.
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Excerpt...
"There are two ways to tell a wizard. One is by the blue light that plays around his tires when he is heading north on a wet pavement under the northern lights, his headlights pointed toward the top of the world that so many talk about but so few have actually seen."The other is by his singing."
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I give Talking Man a B-. It's an engaging story, but in the end I was left with too many unanswered questions. For a change, I wouldn't've minded another 100 pages added to the book, in order to delve into the reasons for everything.
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Postscript...
Oh look! My good friend Thursday Next from Jasper Fforde's series hopped into this book, and brought me back a photo of the aforementioned "Catfish as big as boats". Thanks, Thursday!

How the Irish Saved Civilization - Thomas Cahill

1995, 218 pages. Full Title : How The Irish Saved Civilization, The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. (Whew!) Genre : Non-Fiction; History. Dewey Decimal Number : 941.501 C119H. Overall Rating : B-.

   .I read about one non-fiction book a year; so this is my 2009 quota. Cahill's premise for the unlikely scenario of Ireland saving Western Civiization goes something like : After the fall of Rome, the barbarians took over all of Europe, plundering and pillaging and destroying libraries. People were more concerned with staying alive than reading Greek and Roman literature, and books were great for kindling a fire to keep warm. Except in far-flung Ireland, where newly converted monks went on a classic literature copying craze, at least until the Vikings showed up a couple hundred years later.

What's To Like...
    Cahill builds his story nicely. He devotes a chapter to the fall of Rome; another to Saint Augustine of Hippo, another to Saint Patrick, another to the development of Irish monastic life, and the final one to those monks evanglizing all over (northern) Europe, all the while copying ancient manuscripts, and dueling to see who could paint the fanciest opening letter in a book.

.If your history teacher was like mine, the Dark Ages got short shrift. Something like : "Rome fell in 476 AD. The Dark Ages hit. Charlemagne was crowned king of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 AD. William the Conqueror defeated Harold the Saxon at Hastings in 1066 AD. "

.600 years, covered in maybe one class period. Really, how much more from these 6 centuries do you remember? So HTISC casts a prolonged and fresh light on a truly under-told period.

.Unfortunately, Cahill never actually proves his hypothesis. The fact that the Irish monks traipsed all over barbarian-ruled Europe seems clear enough. But Cahill's assertion that they had gobs of books hanging from their belts and a passion to share them with the mainlanders requires a leap of faith.
.Cahill's translations of early Irish manuscripts are fascinating. He paints them as wild and wacky folks, quite a contrast to the urbane and Romanized Augustine. OTOH, he gives four pages of Plato's philosophical mish-mosh, and they were sheer tedium.

.A few notes on Thomas Cahill...
    HTISC is one of a series that Cahill calls "Hinges of History", by which he means turning points that no one has ever considered before. Two other books in this series are : "The Gifts of the Jews - How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the way Everyone Thinks and Feels", and "Mysteries of the Middle Ages - The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the cults of Catholic Europe". So if you're looking for "Alternate History" in it's literal sense (not to be confused with the fiction genre with that name), Cahill's 'da man'.

.I give How The Irish Saved Civilization a B-. This is good stuff if you're a History enthusiast (I am) or if you're Irish and/or Catholic (I'm not). But the book does drag in spots, and if you don't fall into any of those categories, you may want to give this a pass.

Dance of Death - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

2005; 560 pages. Genre : Action Thriller. Overall Rating : B-. Notes : Second book in the "Diogenes Trilogy". The first book was Brimstone, reviewed here.
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    Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast receives a message from his younger brother, Diogenes; who informs him of his plan to commit the Perfect Crime. He even tells him the date - 28 January. Alas, even with the "Who" and "When" filled in, the "What" remains a mystery, until one by one, Aloysius' friends and associates start to turn up murdered.
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What's To Like...
    This is "Sherlock Holmes vs. Professor Moriarty" moved up to the present day. Aloysius is Holmes, naturally; and NYPD Detective Vincent D'Agosta plays his Dr. Watson. Diogenes combines the mental acumen of Holmes' brother Mycroft with the pure evil of Moriarty. A most worthy opponent, with an undying hatred of his brother.
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    The book takes a while to get going, with only a grisly killing or three to liven things up in the whole first half. But when it finally kicks into gear, it's a great read, with lots of twists, humor, red herrings and action to keep you turning the pages.

.The characters are great. Aloysius isn't perfect. Indeed, for most of the book, Diogenes runs circles around him. And mention should be made of the reporter Smithback, who'll do anything for a scoop, but nicely is not cast into that Hollywoodian stereotype of being an arrogant stooge.

Oh no! It's The Two Towers Malaise...
    In the end, however, the book is drawn down by the fact that it's #2 in a 3-part series. So you know that, while Good must prevail, Diogenes is going to live to fight another day.
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    And while the Aloysius-vs-Diogenes storyline would get an approving nod from Conan Doyle, there's a Preston-Child omission here - the "Is It Natural Or Is It Supernatural" issue that came up in each of the other three books I've read by these guys. Sometimes it's the former; sometimes it's the latter. The fact that it could be either one is one of the real hooks in a Preston-Child story. In Dance Of Death, we get teased by the possibility of one of these, but like a morning Phoenician thundercloud, it gradually dissipates into nothing.
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    So we'll give this a B-, with the understanding that a mediocre effort by these two authors is still above-average when it comes to a killer-thriller novel. And advise potential readers of Dance Of Death to read Brimstone first.

One for the Money - Janet Evanovich

1994; 320 pages. Genre : Crime Fiction. Overall Rating : B-..

    Stephanie Plum needs a job, so she schmoozes her cousin Vinnie and gets hired on as a bounty hunter. Unfortunately, she knows nothing about the vocation, so she needs a gun, needs to learn how to shoot it, and needs to figure out how to haul someone in. Most of all, she needs the $10,000 finders fee for bringing in Joe Morelli; who's a cop accused of murder, a hunk, and who as a kid, conned Stephanie into playing the New Jersey equivalent of "doctor".

What's To Like...
    Evanovich has created a strong, female protagonist in Plum. She can use her brain, which comes in handy as she learns her new profession. Indeed, it was refreshing to see her outfox Joe Morelli in order to bring him in, instead of having to resort to her feminine wiles or (worse yet) romance.

.   There is vein of light humor that runs throughout the book, and wonder of wonders, we're not dealing with someone who suffers from job burn-out. It's also a nice change to follow a bounty hunter instead of a cop or detective in a crime novel. Morelli is another good character study, although it is evident early on that he's not really a murderer.

   .Unfortunately, the great character studies come at the expense of a humdrum storyline. Stephanie gads about, searching for Morelli and bringing in easy, but low-paying bail-jumpers. Meanwhile, no progress is made on the main murder until the tail-end, when the real killer of course blabs all the details to Stephanie right before he intends to kill her. Don't bad guys ever watch Austin Powers movies?

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    There are believability issues. The entire New Jersey police force can't find Morelli, but Stephanie manages to do so - not once, not twice, but four times. Then there's her visit to a boxing gym, where the "champ" decides to attempt to sexually assault her for no particular reason and in front of everyone else working out at the gym. Yeah, like that happens all the time.

Cogito, ergo Plum...
    The Stephanie Plum series has been highly successful for Evanovich, and I noted that the latest one (something like #15 or so), "Plum Spooky" was #1 on the NY Times best seller list last week. It may be interesting to see how her character develops along the line. Presumably, she gets more adept at bounty-hunting with time.
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    If you're looking for an entertaining story, with a bit of humor and a good, strong, thinking female lead, One For The Money may be your cup of tea. OTOH, this isn't the book to read when you're wanting spine-tingling suspense or wish to solve a whodunit alongside the protagonist. As long as you're more interested in what happens to Stephanie and her bounty-hunting than who-killed-who and why, this is a pleasant read.

A Thief of Time - Tony Hillerman

1988; 325 pages. Genre : Murder Mystery. Made into a movie for the PBS series Mystery!. Overall Rating : B-.

   .An anthropologist vanishes among Anasazi ruins. A flatbed trailer and backhoe are stolen. Three murders rock the remote 4-Corners area of the Southwest. Navajo Tribal police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and officer Jim Chee have to find the connection in all this, find the killer(s), and find the missing anthropologist.
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What's To Like...
    The list of suspects are all "gray"; none jump out as the obvious bad guys. The solving of the case comes from dogged and determined detective work, not from some too-good-to-be-true stroke of luck.
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Hillerman uses real-world settings, usually in the Native American regions in the Southwest. Since I live in Phoenix, this was a close-to-home story. He also focuses heavily on the daily lives of the Native Americans, and their sturggle to maintain their cultural identity. Chee and Leaphorn are a nice study in contrasts. Leaphorn is modernized - Navajo traditions don't bother him, and he doesn't believe in witches. Chee is a "singer" - kind of a junior shaman for his clan. Finding bodies calls for a ritualistic cleansing just as soon as the policework is done.

   .That being said, there is a bit too much emphasis on the cultural issues here. A bit more time might have been spent on smoothing out the storyline. The ending seems contrived and just a bit abrupt. Oh yeah, and we have yet another burnt-out cop here (Leaphorn). Is it too much to ask just once to have the main cop be well-adjusted and happy to go to work each day?

On writing Murder-Mysteries...
    I have a feeling this is a tough genre to write. Somebody gets killed early on. Somebody else spends most of the book searching for clues and trying not to be offed or fired as he/she closes in on solving the case. At the end, there needs to be an exciting climax, with the perpetrators getting their just desserts. There's not much room for variation in this format, and how many thousands of murder-mystery books are there out there?
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Adieu, Tony Hillerman...
    Tony Hillerman put his unique stamp on the murder-mystery format by imbuing his books with a heavy dose of Southwestern Native American history & culture. I've read that among the Hopis, Navajos, etc., he is held in high esteem for this. Tony Hillerman passed away last October 26, at the age of 83. While I'm not a big fan of this genre, it seemed appropriate to read one of his books.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself - Bill Bryson

1999; 288 pages. Genre : Comedic Narrative. Overall Rating : B-.

    Bill Bryson returns to the USA after spending 20 years in England. He buys a house in rustic, Newhartesque New Hampshire, and shortly thereafter, a journalist friend talks him into writing a weekly article for a British magazine called Night & Day; loosely themed around readjusting to American life. IASHM is a collection of 70 of those articles.

What's To Like...
    It has the typical Bryson dry, self-deprecating humor. Since they are weekly articles, all 70 chapters are essentially the same length - about 4 pages each. The topics vary widely, so if one doesn't float your boat, be of good cheer, you'll shortly be reading about something completely different.

    .It is obvious that Bryson reads a lot, and oftentimes that spawns the weekly topic. You will learn things like the origin of Drive-In Theaters, and that computer hackers successfully breached the Pentagon's security systems 161,000 times in 1996. He's possibly the only person I know that can write four pages about cup-holders (in the car and on the PC) and keep you interested. To appreciate that, try putting out four witty pages on that subject yourself.

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What's meh...
    While you'll catch yourself laughing out loud at times while reading IASHM, this is an easy book to put down. The problem isn't Bryson; it's the format. Being limited to four pages means none of the articles have any depth. One of the chapters deals with inherently good- and lousy-sounding words.

     Kewl beans and something I'd really enjoy, but just as soon as the chapter got rolling, it was done.
.The other format problem is the weekly deadline. It must be difficult to be newsworthily witty once a week, every week, for several years. What do you do when your Muse takes a couple weeks vacation? Some of the topics seem to suffer in this manner.
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Uncle John, you have competition...
    It took me a lot longer to get through IASHM than I anticipated. After reading a half-dozen chapters in one sitting, they all start to blur together. I think it would be better to use this book as a Bathroom Reader. We'll give it a B-, and recommend that this not be your introduction to Bryson.

Whiskey Sour - J.A. Konrath

2004; 289 pages. Genre : Murder Mystery. Overall Rating : B-

    .A serial killer is abducting young women, playing Operation on their torsos, and dumping their naked bodies butt-cheek-upwards into local 7-11 dumpsters. Police Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels tries to find the common link, and catch the self-dubbed Gingerbread Man before all of Chicago goes into a panic.

What's To Like...
    If you like James Patterson's "Alex Cross" detective novels (that's before he went all sucky with his "Maximum Ride" stuff), you'll like J.A. Konrath. The killings are tastefully lurid (which is probably an oxymoron), and Konrath also mixes in a bit of punnish humor. Jack Daniels is non-stereotypically middle-aged and average-looking.

Excerpt...
    An example of the Whiskey Sour wit :

"He may be disfigured or disabled. He might have severe acne scars, or scoliosis."
"That's a curvature of the spine," Dailey added.
"Is that a hunch?" I asked.
"Just an educated guess."
I thought about explaining the joke to them, but it would be wasted.

On the other hand...
    There are several places where you just go, "Am I expected to believe that?" For instance, our protagonist's police car is broken into, and a bag of candy is left on the seat. Suspicious? Nah. Daniels' partner tears into the bag without any hesitation and falls for the old razor-blade-in-the-candy-bar trick.

   .Then there's the "lucky break" itself. Interviews of the victims' family and friends get the usual response : "So-and-so was just the sweetest person around. We can't think of anyone who would want to kill her." Yet when the connecting link is finally found, it's something that even a remote acquaintance would recall and instantly think of as a motive for murder.

Then there's the clichés...
    The books is riddled with them. Some, such as the two clueless FBI agents with their computer-generated profiling, are obviously deliberate. Ditto for the doughnut-loving partner of Daniels, who IMHO is ripe for killing or severe-hospitalization is some sequel.

    .But the not-so-deliberate clichés can be annoying. The oh-so-confident psychopath decides to also include our heroine on his hit-list. Gee, that's worked what - zero percent of the time - in the past? This naturally results in our heroine being pulled off the case. Which of course never stops any cop from staying involved one bit. Then there's the poor schluck who goes out on an arranged date with Daniels. Yeah, that's a ironclad guarantee for bodily harm by the jealous stalker.
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    Finally, there's Daniels herself. She's a burnt-out, workaholic, insomniac whose marriage was ruined by her devotion to the job, and who drinks way too much. Sometimes I think that is de rigeur for fictional detectives .
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A little bit about J.A. Konrath...
    Konrath's website is at http://www.jakonrath.com/. His bio claims he wrote nine novels and received more than 500 rejections for them before #10 (Whiskey Sour) was finally accepted/published. He has done 612 book-signings in 28 states, and has sent 7,000 letters to libraries touting his books. I'd say he paid his dues.
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    If you visit his website, you'll be able to read the first seven chapters of most of the books in his Jack Daniels series (5 of them, I think). Except for Whiskey Sour itself, whch you can download in its entirety as a pdf file. Gotta love that.

    .In conclusion, this was a bit of enjoyable light reading. It doesn't strive to be anything more than an entertaining story, and to that end, it succeeds. We'll give it a B- and hope that the sequels have a few more twists and a few less stereotypes.

The Dogs of Riga - Henning Mankell

1992 (Swedish); 2001 (English). 324 pages. Genre : Murder-Mystery. Overall Rating : B-.

    A life-raft floats up onto the Swedish shore. Inside are the bodies of two men, shot through the heart after being tortured and then dapperly dressed. There's no ID on either man, and no markings of the origin of the life-raft. With almost nothing to go on, Swedish detective Kurt Wallander tries to solve the case, which sudsequently leads him to Latvia, which is enduring the last throes of the Soviet Union.

.What's To Like...
    The emphasis here is on Wallander's (and several of his coworkers') plodding perseverence. No brilliancies; just dogged detective work. The plot unfolds beautifully as they try to determine the nationalities of the victims and the origin of the life-raft. It (naturally) quickly becomes clear that the two murders are simply a small part of a more complex plot.

.The Swedish ambiance is a welcome relief from that "bubbly buxom blonde girls skiing around as ABBA music plays in the background" scenario. Swedish winters are gray, cold, and like our Phoenix summers, seemingly never-ending. When Wallander travels to Riga, everything only gets grayer, colder, gloomier, poorer, and darker. Kewlness.

.Best of all, Wallander is a polar-opposite to a literary "Mary Sue". See here for Wikipedia's offering on Mary Sues. More about this in a bit.

.What's Not To Like...
    The plot unfolds nicely, but its resolution seems hurried and forced. For 200+ pages the sleuthing creeps along, then suddenly there's a 007 shoot-em-up, where a bunch of good guys get offed, while our hero amazingly gets neither a scratch nor caught. Kinda reminds me of The Last Samurai, where a couple hundred Japanese warriors get chopped into hamburger meat by machine guns, while Tom Cruise somehow handsomely survives.

.    While the Latvian ambiance is great, Mankell doesn't seem to have done much detailed research. For instance, when Wallander has to flee beyond Riga's city limits, all Mankell says is that he goes into various unnamed towns that Wallander never learns the names of. Sloppy, sloppy.

.    Finally, the translation (which Mankell had nothing nothing to do with) just sucks. There are spelling and grammar errors, and some clunky sentence structures. One wonders if this is a much better read in the native tongue.

.Mary Sue, Where Are You...
    If you're tired of too-perfect heroes, Kurt Wallander is for you. He's middle-aged, somewhat overweight, and average-looking. He drinks too much alcohol, even by Scnadinavian standards. He smokes too much and is addicted to lousy coffee. He's divorced, and frankly his ex is doing better without him. His father lays guilt trips on him, and thinks Wallander made a dumb mistake by joining the police force. So far, there's nothing to prove that wrong. His (grown) daughter barely tolerates him. He hates his job, but finds that he doesn't have any alternatives. His romantic charms are non-existent. In the previous book, he threw himself at the beautiful female lead, only to have her threaten to bring a sexual harassment charge against him. Here, he falls for a murdered-Latvian-detective's widow, and while she appreciates his solving the case and saving her life, she prefers to remain "just friends".

.    Nevertheless, I've enjoyed both Kurt Wallander books that I've read. I think Mankell is more concerned about giving you a gritty, true-to-life picture of Sweden (and in this case, Latvia as well), letting you know of some of the serious social issues there, and having you become friends with Wallander, his family, and his fellow detectives. Now if he'd just pay more attention to the plot itself...

What's So Funny? - Donald Westlake

2007, 401 pages. Genre : Crime Comedy. Overall Rating : B-.

   .This is the latest (#13) in Westlake's Dortmunder series. John Dortmunder is a lovable galoot of a burglar, who here is blackmailed by a retired detective into masterminding a heist of a jeweled chess set, originally earmarked for the Czar of Russia.
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What's To Like...
    WSF? is a fast and fun read. Dortmunder and his associates are slow-witted but persistent, true-blue to each other, and lovable New Yorkers through-and-through. They are all proficient at their purloining profession, and take great pains to plot each caper carefully. But their best-laid plans inevitably go awry.

What's Not To Like...
    According to Wiki, the books are formulaic. The heists are always ethically-justified (the chess set here was already stolen property); meticulous plans are laid; things always go wrong; the gang is nevertheless muddly successful; yet in the end the goods somehow elude their grasp, ending up in some noble and charitable person's unwitting possession. Oh, and no one ever gets killed.

.I'd probably go batty if I had to read all 13 of these, but since this is only my 2nd Dortmunder book, the "formula" is still interesting.
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Less interesting is the first third of this book. The ex-cop forces Dortmunder to take the job by means of an incriminating photo of him at an earlier burglary scene. Okay, that's a plot device, and I can accept that. But the chess set is in a heavily-guarded vault, and for the first 150 pages, all Dortmunder does is sit, think, meditate, and conclude that a break-in is impossible. It would've been a better pace to spend the first 125 pages detailing the circumstances of Dortmunder getting caught on camera, allow 25 pages for "It can't be done", then move into the "Oh, things have changed. Here's how we're going to do it" stage.
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Overall Rating : B-.
    We'll call What's So Funny? cotton-candy for the mind. There's nothing heavy or substantive here; it's all-too-soon done and gone; yet in the end you're happy for having partaken of it. It's a good choice for when all you want is some "Lit Lite".

Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell

Overall Rating : B-.

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Henning Mankell is a Swedish crime fiction author. Faceless Killers is the first in a series featuring Kurt Wallander, a burnt-out detective whose life's a mess, and who needs to solve several high-profile murders before anti-immigrant hysteria grips the area.

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Faceless Killers was written in Swedish in 1991, and translated into English in 1997. The Kurt Wallander books are Mankell's most popular series, but he also writes children's stories.

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What's To Like...

It's nice to have an anti-hero for a change. Wallander is recently-divorced, drinks too much, has lousy dietary habits, and has to cope with a father and a daughter who frankly don't like him. He makes a pass at the comely (and married) prosecutor, who rebuffs him; then has to worry about her filing a complaint.

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You also get a look at the "real" Sweden. Most of us think the essence of Sweden is ABBA, Volvo, prime ministers who get assassinated while walking home from the movies, and svelte blonde ski chicks who all have silicone implants.

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The Sweden that Mankell presents is a place overrun with immigrants, where everyone drinks too much, and the only change in the long winter months is whether or not you'll have to deal with snow in addition to the ever-present harsh, windy cold.

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Finally, Mankell strews a bunch of red herrings in amongst the "Cold Case Clichés". Wallander has to sort the false leads from the real clues, and this is mostly a matter of tracking them all down and seeing which ones pan out.

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What's Not To Like...

Although FK has the feel of "true" detective work in solving the murders, not everyone is going to like the unspectacular storyline. The gruesome murders of an elderly couple on a farm takes up the first 25 pages. The rest is plodding and dogged investigation.

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This isn't the kind of story where you try to guess the "who" of the whodunit. And the ending leaves a lot of loose ends dangling out there. Is this "real" detective life, or a sloppy ending to a novel?

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WTF is a Cold Case Cliché?

Cold Case is among the better TV series on today (when the writers aren't on strike), but it's very formulaic, and once you realize this, you can solve each case in the first 10 minutes.

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It always hinges on one seemingly irrelevant sidetrack (SIS) that usually occurs early in the story. The Cold Case team will spend the next hour interviewing all sorts of people and unearthing all sorts long covered-up dirty laundry. Then at the end, they rediscover the SIS, tie it to one of the suspects, and voila!, the case gets solved.

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Example #1. A girl gets murdered a long time ago. The case is re-opened; the chief briefs the CC team on the details, then adds parenthetically, "Oh yeah. Forensics found some black powder at the murder scene way back when. They couldn't identify it then. See if yooze can get somebody to analyze it again".

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Solution #1. After 50 minutes, the lab report comes back. The mysterious powder is ID'd as a friction-minimizer used by people in wheelchairs, and of course one of the suspects is a paraplegic.

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Example #2. Two young boys get murdered. While interviewing one of the suspects, a junk peddler; one of the detectives asks if she can buy a small bling dangling on the peddler's cart. "Oh no," says he, "that's my special key to happiness".

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Solution #2. The bling of course turns out to have belonged to one of the boys, thus tying the peddler to the crime.

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This happens in every Cold Case episode. Just look for that SIS written into the script, then match it up with one of the suspects. The writers only have 60 minutes (minus lots of commercials) to present an interesting, complex case. They don't have time for irrelevancies. Anything that looks like a tangent, isn't.

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But I digress. Faceless Killers is a good book. There may be a Cold Case Cliché in there, but you have to separate it from the other half-dozen false trails. The glimpse of the real Sweden, and a detective with all sorts of character flaws are the real strong points of the book. Alas, it feels sometimes like Mankell put more thought into the setting and Kurt Wallander, than into the plot itself. We'll give it a B-, and hope that the next seven books in the series have better storylines, and aren't just rehashes of Sweden's social problems and Wallander's personal ones.

1812 - The Rivers of War - Eric Flint

Overall Rating : B-..

Eric Flint has a bunch of Alternate History books out, the majority of which deal with a 20th-century West Virginia town transported back in time to 1632 Germany. 1812RoW is the first in his next AH series, this one dealing with how a minor change in a battle (Sam Houston receiving a small wound instead of a major one) alters the rest of the War of 1812.
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The only problem is - not much history is changed. Yeah, Sam Houston becomes the hero of the battles of Washington DC and New Orleans, but the outcomes remain the same. So if you're looking for some tangential history line, you're going to be sorely disappointed. True, this book serves mostly as a set-up for the second book in this series - where Arkansas becomes a free territory right after the end of the war - where blacks and Indians can live on their own terms. But 535 pages of non-alternate history is a lot to read just for a set-up.
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OTOH, is you read this book as a historical novel, then its quite good. Most people's knowledge of the War of 1812 can be distilled down to four vague facts :

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1.) It started cuz the British kept stealing our navy men.
2.) John Paul Jones said something about not giving up the ship.
3.) Two years into the war, the British burned Washington D.C. (normally, this means "game over; we win!". but for some reason, they decided to play on.)
4.) We won the Battle of New Orleans, which is important because without that Johnny Horton would've had one less hit song. (Everybody sing now - "In 1814, we took a little trip...").This book does a great job of fleshing out the details of the war - particularly how the roles of the Indians (Choctaw, Chickashaw, Creek, and Cherokee) and Blacks (both slaves and freedmen) interplayed with the British, American (and to a lesser degree the French and Spanish) sides.

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So if you like History, then by all means get this book. But if you want to read some Alternate History, then pick up his novel 1632 (which is on my bookcase waiting in line to be read), or wait for 1824 The Arkansas War - which is out in hardback, but who wants to shell out 4x the $$$ instead of waiting for the paperback?

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As for me, I'm now starting into Robert Jordan's Knife of Dreams - Book 11 in the Wheel of Time series. I'll have 837 pages to see whether the plot advances one iota, something that hasn't happened in 4 or 5 volumes.

Dune - Battle of Corrin - Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson

Overall Rating : B- .

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A sequel in a prequel to Frank Herbert's "Dune" Trilogy. Written by his son Brian, and Kevin Anderson. Tell me, how do two authors write one story? Does one of them write the nouns, and the other one the verbs? Methinks Brian Herbert is here mostly so the family name is on the cover.

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As in any prequel, the main raison d'etre for this book is to line up everything for the original Dune episode. But the basic plot is the overused "humans versus machines" line. Gee, where have we seen that before? Terminator, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and so on. Is it now politically incorrect to slay any living beings? Can't anyone come up with a storyline that doesn't involve the evils of Artificial Intelligence?

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Literature-wise, this is "Dune Lite". Which is not necessarily a bad thing. The original Dune was an awesome book, but Dune Messiah and Children Of Dune were each a new level of tediousness and obscurity compared to their predecessors. Reading CoD was (for me at least) more of a labor than a pleasure.

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This decline in quality seems to be inherent in Trilogies. Clan of the Cave Bear is a masterpiece, interweaving a captivating storyline with a bunch of great archaeology. But its sequels go downhill quickly. Valley of Horses slowed to a crawl, and The Mammoth Hunters is nothing more than a 600-page Harlequin Romance set in caveman times. Pee-Yoo!

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And don't even get me started about Robert Jordan's Dragon Reborn series. We're on what, Book 11 now? And the plot hasn't progressed one bit since about Book 5. But I will still buy and read the newest one - out just in time for Christmas.

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But back to Dune Battle of Corrin. Overall, it keeps one's interest despite the trite storyline. Papa Herbert's chapter-beginning quotes are better (and of course, more esoteric), but at least there's less mysticism and more action in DBoC. And none of the characters (including the Bots) are the essence of pure evil and/or pure good. So we'll give it a B-, and go dust-off and re-read Dune.