The Last Moriarty - Charles Veley

   2015; 292 pages.  Book 1 (out of 36) in the “Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Historical Mystery; Thriller; Sherlock Holmes.  Overall Rating: 9*/10.

 

    Frederick Foster fell to his death from the Westminster Bridge last night.  Or maybe he jumped.  Or maybe someone pushed him.  Mr. Foster was an American.  A business card found on his body identifies him as an employee of the Standard Oil Corporation.

 

    Sherlock Holmes has been summoned rather early in the morning to come to St. Thomas Hospital to examine the corpse.  His faithful aide, Dr. Watson, is invited to come along.

 

     Several important people have also journeyed to the hospital to hear what Holmes has to say about whether this was an accident, a suicide, or a murder.  They include England’s First Lord of the Admiralty, the Lord Chancellor of Her Majesty’s courts, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner of London, and the Secretary of State for War’s chief of staff.  Oh yeah, and the Prime Minister himself, Lord Salisbury.

 

    Now why would such a bunch of high muckamucks be interested about the death of an American businessman?

 

What’s To Like...

    The Last Moriarty is set in November, 1895 in the classic setting for Sherlock Holmes stories: the greater London area.  The tale is presented the traditional way: via Dr. Watson’s journal.  A number of characters from the Arthur Conan Doyle series also show up here, including Inspector Lestrade, the Baker Street Irregulars, and my personal favorite, Mycroft Holmes.

 

    There are also lots of new people introduced: some good guys, others baddies, but all of them interesting to meet.  Two of them, Zoe Rosario and Lucy James, I feel certain will be sharing the spotlight with Holmes and Watson in future tales.

 

    I was impressed with how adeptly Charles Veley can spin a story in “Watson-esque” style.  The storyline quickly gets more complicated, and plot twists abound.  There are even several instances of Sherlock making those incredible deductions when meeting someone, with onlookers gasping at how he could do that, and Holmes then explaining what observations clued him in.  I loved those interludes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories.

 

    Everything builds to an exciting ending.  The bad guys’ ultimate intentions are revealed and seemingly have things completely in their control.  Their nefarious plans will fail, of course, but the fun is seeing just how that somehow transpires.

    The chapters are short, with 66 of them covering 292 pages, and The Last Moriarty is both a standalone novel and part of a series.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 5,461 ratings and 761 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 4,030 ratings and 312 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Moriarty was both physically unattractive—‘reptilian,’ as you have described him, Dr. Watson—and also entirely lacking in ability to perform a musical composition in the spirit intended by the composer.  Due to his mathematical gifts he was able to grasp the theoretical aspects of a composition instantly, that much is true.  But he had no feel, no heart, to understand and project the emotion of the composer, which is, of course, the sole reason for the existence of any musical performance.”  (loc. 1482)

 

    Holmes would be accused of placing a personal relationship above matters of national importance.  I recalled an ironic poem by Mr. Kipling, the gist of which was that we ordinary people frequently take an attitude of superiority to soldiers, until the shooting starts and we need them to protect us.  The critics of Holmes, I thought, would not hesitate to turn on him if he failed in his mission.  (loc. 2294)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Last Moriarty sells for $3.99 at Amazon right now.  The other e-books in this 36-book series are all priced within the $2.99-$4.99 range.

 

She appeared to be in radiant health, possibly due to the beneficial effects of frequent exposure to music.  (loc. 577)

      I didn’t note any cusswords at all in The Last Moriarty, and that always impresses me.  There’s action and intrigue aplenty, yet I don’t recall any "adult situations."

 

    A number of Sherlock Holmes series have cropped up over the last couple decades, due to the copyrights expiring on the characters in the series.  I’ve sampled several of them, and their quality ranges from “pretty good” (including one co-written by Kareem Abdul Jabbar) to “downright amateurish” (we’ll not name names).

 

    The Last Moriarty comes closer to duplicating Arthur Conan Doyle’s style of writing and storytelling than any other series I’ve read, and that's a giant plus.  Book Two, The Wilhelm Conspiracy, is on my Kindle and I’m eager to see how it compares to Book One.  Stay tuned.

 

    9 Stars.  One last thing.  I loved seeing chemistry play an important part of the storyline.  White phosphorus, chloroform, and hyoscine all crop up, much to my delight.  Okay, full disclosure, I am a career chemist, so I’m a bit prejudiced about this.  But still, when chemicals are involved in the tale, it means that the author has done a bunch of research.

Graves' End - Sean Patrick Traver

   2012; 353 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: Graves’ End: A Magical Thriller.  Genres: Paranormal Fantasy; Thriller; Pulp Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    They make for an odd trio.  Tomas Delgado, aka “Black Tom” is a former necromancer.  Nowadays his specialty is entering as a spirit into cats of all sizes, from alley cat to panther.

 

    Lia is a child of the streets.  She picks locks and scrounges dumpsters for food and shelter.  She’s going to learn how to be a witch, with Black Tom as her mentor.

 

    Dexter Graves is a Hollywood detective.  Or more accurately, was one.  Sixty years ago, someone put a bullet through his skull.  He’s been dead and buried since then.  Until now.

 

    Their paths have crossed, and somebody’s noticed.  Mictlantecuhtli.  Aztec king of the Dead.  That name’s a doozy, so let’s call him Mickey Hardface.  He’s sending some of his cohorts their way.

 

    It won’t be a social call.

 

What’s To Like...

    Graves’ End is set in the greater northern Los Angeles area, primarily in the San Fernando and Hollywood neighborhoods.  That resonated with me, since I lived close to there for three summers many years ago.  The story's world is slightly paranormal.  You may encounter skeletons, witches, crouchers, archons, or a tzitzimime or two, but only on rare occasions.  And of course, there’s at least one ancient Aztec deity running around.

 

    The “present day” storyline takes place over a Halloween holiday weekend, starting on Halloween night, then on into All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, and the all-important Dia de los Muertos.  There are also flashbacks to 1910, 1950, and 2000 CE, plus a brief stop in 1949 in the Epilogue.

 

    I loved the character-building.  Lia, Tom, and Dex are as diverse as a trio of protagonists can be.  The secondary characters and Mickey’s minions all have their own personality, and even the God of the Dead Himself has some redeeming qualities.

 

    You’ll learn a bunch of Spanish slang, including one or two a cuss-phrases, the oft-used “brujachica”, and the ultra-colloquial “esé”. The party-dance was way-cool, and I liked the artistic nods to Tolkien and Jackson Pollock.  I chuckled at the way palindromes and the value “pi” got worked into the storyline.

 

    The ending was suitably exciting, twisty, and heartwarming.  The climactic fight scene was appropriately epic.  Not everyone lives to fright another day (pun intended), yet all the plotlines get tied up and a new day dawns for the world outside.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Entoptic (adj.) : (of visual images) occurring or originating inside the eye.

Others: Melanistic (adj.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 107 ratings and 65 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.74*/5, based on 186 ratings and 25 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Graves looked down at his own fleshless phalanges.  “I keep forgettin’ I’m not as pretty as I used to be,” he said quietly, by way of apology.

    Lia felt guilty enough about her discourtesy to a guest that she began to protest automatically, in spite of her genuine consternation.  “No, no, it isn’t that,” she said, groping for words even though she wasn’t sure what she meant to say.  The man was a walking cadaver, after all, and Miss Manners was sure to be silent on subjects like these.  No index entry for ‘undeadiquette’,’ Lia would’ve wagered.  (pg. 84).

 

    There was nowhere left for him to go.  He held up his hands to fend them off, and he got them to pause before pouncing on him, which Lia found surprising.

    “Whoa, now—” he said.  Who the hell are you two?  What happened to those other ones, Hannah and Miss Lia?”

    “You will call me Lady Night,” the nightsky outline told him.  She indicated her static-filled friend, who was standing there beside her.  “This, my sister-daughter, is Lady Madness.”

    “Sister-daughter, huh?  That must make for some weird Thanksgivings.”  (pg. 122)

 

Kindle Details…

    Graves’ End costs $2.99 at Amazon right now.  A sequel, Red Witch: The Tales of Ingrid Redstone, which I gather is actually three novellas (364 pages total), is available for $2.99 as well.  Sean Patrick Traver offers three other novellas, unrelated to this setting, one for $2.99, the other two for $0.99 apiece.

 

 “After dark, all cats are leopards.”  (pg. 293)

    The profanity in Graves’ End wasn’t excessive—I counted just 12 instances in the first 10% of the e-book, albeit two of those were f-bombs.  The smidgens of Spanish profanity came later on in the story, and at one point there’s a brief reference to a “bag of mota” which brought back memories.  I don’t recall any "adult situations".

 

    At least one reviewer was turned off by the author’s use of “big” words (such as the two listed above) and sometimes “made-up” ones (such as “nightsky” used in the second excerpt).  I noticed that too, but I thought it worked rather well.  Other reviewers thought there weren't action scenes and thrills in the early going.  Maybe so, but I thought all the aim of the storytelling was for the reader to follow the characters around in their befuddlement, trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and which gets revealed nicely in the ending.

 

    Sean Patrick Traver calls Graves’ End a Magical Thriller; Amazon calls it Paranormal & Urban Fantasy, and I’d label it Pulp Fiction.  All are equally valid.  The book kept my interest from beginning to end, and that’s what matters.  Plus I loved the attention given to Mesoamerican mythology throughout the tale.

 

    8 Stars.  One last thing.  In the “Retrospective #2” section, Sean Patrick Traver gives a vivid description of the early beginnings of Los Angeles.  I was absolutely blown away by the “feel” of his research.  Maybe someday he’ll write a full-length novel set in that place and time-period.

You Only Live Once - Haris Orkin

   2018; 256 pages.  Book 1 (out of 5) in the “A James Flynn Escapade” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Humorous Crime Fiction; Thriller; Spy Spoof.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

     My name’s Flynn.  James Flynn.  I like my vodka martinis shaken, not stirred.  I’m an agent of HMSS, which stands for “Her Majesty’s Secret Service”.  I’m one of the “Double Zero” agents, which means I have a license to kill.

 

    I answer to the Queen & Country only, so please don’t interfere in anything you see me doing..

 

    His name’s Flynn.  James Flynn.  He’s forbidden to have any alcohol.  He’s a resident here at City of Roses Psychiatric.  It’s an asylum, part of the HMSS, which stands for “Health Management System Services”.  He has severe delusional issues.  I should know.  My name’s Sancho, and I’m an orderly here.

 

    Flynn’s our most troublesome patient by far.  He routinely leaves the asylum without permission.  If you see him, please contact HMSS immediately.

 

What’s To Like...

    You Only Live Once was my introduction to a entertaining four-book (soon to be five) spy spoof series by Haris Orkin.  As given above, our hero is Flynn, James Flynn, an inmate at a mental hospital here in the US who’s convinced he’s a British super spy.  Most of the story takes place in the greater Los Angeles area, with jaunts/flashbacks to Nevada (Laughlin), Arizona (Mesa), and south of the border (Baja, California).

 

    Haris Orkin did a really good job of creating a unique protagonist.  Flynn may be nutso, but he's handsome, charismatic, and knows some slick and evasive fighting moves which allow him to escape the clutches of orderlies and shrinks.  But he’s not a superhero; thugs, such as bikers and bodyguards, usually beat the crap out of him.

 

    Several of the chapters start with a short excerpt detailing the history and/or geography of whatever and/or wherever Flynn is about to wreak havoc.  I especially liked the brief biography of Tiburcio Vasquez, a California bandit I’d never heard of.  Wiki him.

 

    I loved the abundant use of what I call “conversational Spanish”.  I had several Hispanic roommates back in my single days, and they taught me all sorts of phrases with which to order a beer, or get into a fight at any local Latino bar.  Some of the phrases are everyday slang, such as ese and vato.  A lot more of them are pejorative, the sort of words that college language professors are forbidden to teach you.

 

    As you’d expect in any thriller, everything builds to a tense showdown between the bad guys and Flynn, with his faithful pal Sancho helping him out.  After the dust settles, we reach an epilogue where Flynn has to choose where he’ll spend his foreseeable future.  Despite all the spoofery, this left a lump in my throat.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 792 ratings and 154 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.18/5 based on 582 ratings and 104 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Tsantsa (n.) : a shrunken head (Ecuadoran).

 

Excerpts...

    James moved into a fighting stance, slicing his hands through the air like Bruce Lee.  “Mr. Flynn, please,” said Grossfarber.  “We’re all here to help you.”

    “Help me what?”

    “Get well.”

    O’Malley and Barker stepped closer.  Flynn gracefully backed away.  “Gentlemen, I must warn you, I know thirty-seven different ways to kill a man with my bare hands, five of which only require the use of my right middle finger.”  Flynn flipped the orderlies the bird with both hands.  (loc. 403)

 

    A magnum of champagne exploded against Mendoza’s skull.  The big man slumped forward, his hair covered with glass and champagne bubbles.  Flynn used whatever strength he had left to push the big man to one side.  He saw Sancho standing over him, his nose bloody, and the broken neck of the champagne bottle still in his hand.  Flynn glanced at the label decorating Mendoza’s head.  “A 1990 Dom Perignon?  Are you out of your mind?”  (loc. 3372)

 

Kindle Details…

    You Only Live Once costs $4.99 at Amazon right now.  The other books in the series range in price from 2.99, to $5.99.  Haris Orkin also has two instructional e-books on the subject of Video Game Writing, something he does when he’s not penning James Flynn novels.  Those will run you $40.18 and $56.96.  Wowza.

 

When it came to boats, Flynn didn’t know his ass from a poop deck.  (loc. 2447)

    There are a couple of nits to pick.

 

    I counted 29 instances of cussing in the first 10% of the book, which seemed a lot.  Later on, there were multiple terms, in both Spanish and English, used to describe genitalia of both genders, and what to do with them.  This didn’t offend me, but I was a bit surprised since the series is a parody of Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, which IIRC, is quite clean with regard to R-rated stuff.

 

    There were also a lot of typos.  Things like Mongol’s/Mongols, clue/cue, homes/Holmes, poured/pored, and hair brush/hairbrush.  Another round of editing might have taken care of this.

 

    But these are quibbles.  I found You Only Live Once to be entertaining from beginning to end, with just the right balance between thrills-&-spills, intrigue, humor, and human drama.  Writing a spoof a well-known series is always a risky affair, but kudos to Haris Orkin for chancing it, because here it worked marvelously.

 

    8½ Stars.  If conversational Spanish is not your cup of tequila, be of good cheer.  You will also learn how to say the f-bomb in three other foreign languages while reading this book!

Beyond The Ice Limit - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

   2016; 371 pages.  Book 4 (out of 5) in the “Gideon Crew” series.  New Authors? : No.  Genres : Thriller; Suspense; Save The World.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    Eli Glinn has a score to settle.  With a meteorite.

 

    Five years ago the two of them crossed paths and the meteorite won.  It sank Eli’s boat, and more than a hundred people perished.  Eli was one of the survivors.

 

    You probably visualize a big blazing rock falling from the sky and slamming into the boat, but that’s not the way it happened.  Eli had hauled it up from the bottom of the ocean and stowed it in his ship.  When it slipped from its cradle, it caused an explosion and sank again to the bottom of the sea.

 

    Eli is going back to destroy it.  He’s not leaving anything to chance—he’s going to blow it up with a nuclear bomb he’s acquired.  He just needs to find someone who knows how to set up, and set off, an atomic bomb when it’s two miles deep in salt water.

 

    Hello, Gideon Crew.

 

What’s To Like...

    Beyond The Ice Limit is the penultimate book in Preston & Child’s Gideon Crew series, as well as the sequel to one of their other standalone thrillers, The Ice Limit.  As they mention in a short section titled “A Note to Our Readers”, they wrote this as a standalone story, which is important, since I hadn’t read The Ice Limit..

 

    The main storyline is whether Glinn, aided by Gideon, will carry out his mission to destroy the meteorite.  Sounds straightforward and easy, right?  Nope.  Things rapidly get more complicated.  In the five years that have passed since Encounter #1, the alien rock seems to have taken root and grown into a huge, treelike monstrosity.  Is it alive?  Is it sentient?  Is it a plant, an animal, or a machine?  Is it capable of communicating?  And perhaps most importantly, can it defend itself?

 

    The “human” plot threads are equally complex.  When crew members start dying, there is understandably more than a little discontent among their ranks., especially when Glinn seems determined to continue on regardless of how many of the rank-and-file members perish.  And since the whole excursion is a hush-hush affair, national navies cannot be called upon for support.

 

    I liked the “whale-speak” angle; it is a fascinating take on communicating with them.  There was also an “Alien” moment, if you remember that flick, and it scared me just as much this time around as it did when I watched the movie.  The titular “Ice Limit” is explained early on.  And Gideon will remember the phrase “let me touch your face” for the rest of his life.

 

    The ending is over-the-top, which is okay in a Thriller-genre tale.  It wasn’t particularly twisty, but the world is saved, thanks to Gideon’s valor, and he survives despite his computer simulation predicting his demise.  I don’t think a sequel will be penned, but there’s already an additional book in Gideon’s own series after this.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Stochastic (adj.) : randomly determined.

    Others: Rugose (adj.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5 based on 6,244 ratings and 1,024 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.37*/5 based on 1,743 ratings and 183 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Four months ago, back when Garza first walked up to my fishing spot on Chihuahueños Creek and offered me a hundred thousand dollars for a week’s work, stealing the plans for some new kind of weapon off a defecting Chinese scientist—it was really this moment, this job, that you had in mind.”

    Glinn nodded.

    “And you want to use the nuke to kill a gigantic alien plant that is supposedly growing on the bottom of the ocean.”

    “In a nutshell.”

    “Forget it.”

    “Gideon,” said Glinn, “we’ve been through this tiresome dance several times before: your heated refusals, your storming out, and then your eventual return once you’ve thought it through.  Can we please skip all that?”  (pg. 19)

 

    “If there was no glitch, then obviously there was some sort of delay in the transmission, some kind of time lag.”

    “No delay.”

    “Come on.  What are you saying?”

    “What your hydrophone picked up was a direct acoustic sound coming through the water, at that moment.”

    “Impossible.”

    A shrug from Prothero, some scratching of his arm.

    “So you’re saying a dead person spoke,” Gideon pressed on.

    “All I’m saying is, there was no glitch.”

    “Jesus Christ, of course there was a glitch!”

    “Ignorance combined with vehemence doesn’t make it so.”  (pg. 132)

 

“Dr. McFarlane . . . is going to be our very own Cassandra.”  (pg. 213)

    I counted 13 cusswords in the first 20% of the book, which is reasonable for a Thriller novel, plus one roll-in-the-hay.  Amphetamines have a minor impact on the story, but drug-prudes will be happy to know they’re presented in a negative light.  That’s about it for R-rated stuff.

 

    I only saw two typos: image/imagine and Hcl/HCl.  That second one will only bug readers who are also chemists by trade, which includes me.

 

    My biggest issue was the pacing, which is a rare quibble for a Preston-&-Child novel.  The first quarter of the book, roughly 100 pages, just plods along as Gideon gets extensive training in properly manipulating a DSV (Deep Submergence Vehicle).  It got tiresome, but once that gets out of the way, the pace picks up nicely, and action abounds.

 

    Beyond The Ice Limit had lots of thrills to keep your interest, lots of scientific issues to contemplate, and even a bit of romance for the ladies.  I wouldn’t call it one of Preston & Child’s top novels, but it did meet my expectations for a Gideon Crew tale.

 

    7½ Stars.  Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child collaborate on at least three Thriller series: Agent Pendergast, Nora Kelly, and Gideon Crew.  Of those, the latter one is the only one that doesn’t blow me away.  Its most recent book, The Pharaoh Key, was published in 2018, six years ago.  Maybe Gideon Crew doesn’t blow Preston and Child away either.

Six Days of the Condor - James Grady

   1974; 311 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Espionage; Conspiracy Thriller; Suspense; Movie Tie-in.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Welcome to the Washington D.C. branch of the American Literary Historical Society!  You can tell by its name that its purpose in life is . . . um . . . something literary, I suppose.  Or historical, maybe.  That name seems a bit vague.

 

    Actually, the Society is a CIA front for one of its very unimportant branches.  Its function is to “keep track of all espionage and related acts recorded in literature.”  In other words, its agents sit around and read spy thrillers and murder mysteries, checking to see if any author out there has written a plot with details about espionage that are too close for comfort to how the CIA conducts its business.

 

    All in all, it’s a pretty tame assignment.  Yet today, some person or persons walked in through the front doors of the American Literary Historical Society and shot everybody in the department to death.

 

     Well, not quite everybody.  One member of the group had the good fortune of being out of the office, picking up lunch for the rest of his coworkers.  Ronald Malcolm.  Now all sorts of people, some CIA, others of unknown loyalties, would like to bring Malcom in for questioning.

 

    Or kill him.

 

What’s To Like...

    James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor is the basis for the 1975 blockbuster political-thriller film Three Days of the Condor, although “loosely based” would be a more apt description, as evidenced by the length of the book’s titular chase scene being cut in half.

 

    Malcolm’s chances of staying alive are slim.  The reader may know that Malcolm has had a narrow escape from death, but his employer, the CIA, doesn’t.  They quickly realize they have a turncoat in their midst, and the Number One suspect is that oh-so-lucky employee who just happened to be out of the office when the assassins struck.  Meanwhile, the baddies too learn they’ve overlooked a victim, and are determined to correct that oversight.  Tell me, Malcolm, where do you hide when everybody is after you?

 

    The storytelling is spellbinding.  The reader knows that everything is going to turn out okay, but the bad guys are just as resourceful as the good guys, and logic tells us that a bookish nerd will not fare well against well-armed and highly-trained gunmen.  The technical details felt well-researched, especially when it came to lethal firearms.

 

    Six Days of the Condor was published in 1974, and it was fun to re-experience that era.  At one point, Malcom avails himself to a “battered Corvair”, which I happened to have one of back then, and in battered condition as well.  Later, Malcolm hides out at a “homosexual hangout”, which the author informs us can also be called a “gay” bar.  Soon afterward, he hitches a ride with a driver looking for nubile girls who will do anything, and he means anything for some marijuana.  Even later, the action takes place at an airport, where security is so lax that evidently anyone and everyone can enter with a handgun hidden under their jackets.

 

    The ending is both exciting and twisty.  All the plot threads get tied up, the good guys prevail, and the bad guys are foiled.  There are some sequels, but they appear to be limited to six short stories and a novella.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 1,853 ratings and 328 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.09/5 based on 16,761 ratings and 448 reviews

 

Things That Sound Dirty, But Aren’t…

    [The man], slightly wounded in the neck, desperately reached for the gun in his back pocket, but his pants were around his ankles.  (loc. 2714)

 

Excerpts...

    That morning at 3:15 Heidegger unlocked his door to the knock of police officers.  When he opened the door he found two men in ordinary clothes smiling at him.  One was very tall and painfully thin.  The other was quite distinguished, but if you looked in his eyes you could tell he wasn’t a banker.

    The two men shut the door behind them.  (loc. 688)

 

    The terminal was beginning to fill with the bustling people who would pass through it during the day.  A wheezing janitor swept cigarette butts off the red rug.  A mother tried to coax a bored infant into submission.  A nervous coed sat wondering if her roommate’s half-fare card would work.  Three young Marines headed home to Michigan wondered if she would work.  A retired wealthy executive and a penniless wino slept in adjoining chairs, both waiting for daughters to fly in from Detroit.  A Fuller Brush executive sat perfectly still, bracing himself for the effects of a jet flight on a gin hangover.  (loc. 2672)

 

Kindle Details…

    Six Days of the Condor sells for $8.99 at Amazon right now.  James Grady has seven other e-books available at Amazon, including two that have tie-ins to Six Days of the Condor.  They range in price from $1.99 to $11.99.

 

“I Imagine there are many who frown on the U.S. government pushing dope.”  (loc. 2560)

    The quibbles are minor.  The cussing, frankly, was a lot less than I expected, just 12 instances in the first 25%.  OTOH, there were also a half dozen rolls-in-the-hay.

 

    Each of the twelve chapters starts out with a quote.  Some are by US presidents about the CIA, and those were quite applicable.  Others were from Fred Reinfeld’s The Complete Chess Course and left me scratching my head, despite the fact that I’m an avid chessplayer.

 

    Last of all, it surprised me that in the one or two gunfights betwixt nerdy Malcolm and the ruthless killers, our hero fares rather well.  Of course, I admit it would’ve been a short, forgettable tale if the Malcolm had been blown away in the first hour of the chase.

 

    But I pick at nits.  For me, Six Days of the Condor was an intense, exciting, fingernails-biting story, and it’s easy to see why it was picked up and developed into a big-budget movie featuring big-budget stars like Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow.  Despite all the changes they made to James Grady’s original story, including renaming most of the characters (Ronald Malcolm becomes Joe Turner) and relocating the setting (Washington DC is replaced by New York City), I may have to see if Netflix carries this movie.

 

    8½ Stars.  At the beginning of the e-book is a “Confession” section wherein James Grady gives the background to his writing Six Days of the Condor, a short biography of his life pre- and post- the book being published, and his experience as a technical adviser on the movie.  This takes up 15% of the e-book.  I suggest reading it after you’ve read the story, not before.

Cold Storage - David Koepp

   2019; 369 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Thriller; Cri-Fi; Horror.  Overall Rating: 7*/10.

 

    Forty years ago, Death fell from the sky and nobody realized it.  It was attached to the first US Space Station, “Skylab”, which, after its orbit decayed far enough, fell out of orbit and broke up over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.

 

    The piece carrying Death landed near the little town of Kiwirrkurra (a real place!  Wiki it.), where it remained undetected and almost completely dormant for a decade.  But it grew, slowly and surely, began to spread, until what started out as a plague-carrying fungus infected the entire community.

 

    Major Roberto Diaz and Lieutenant Colonel Trini Romano were dispatched to Kiwirrkura to resolve the situation.  They did it in spectacular and effective fashion – a plague/fungus may be tenacious and lethal, but it’s no match against a nuclear bomb.

 

    Before the detonation, a small sample of the fungus was collected, sealed in tube, and brought back to the US where it was “put to sleep” by deep-freezing it, and placed in a deep underground military repository, where it was then monitored round-the-clock.  Take that, killer fungus!  Nothing can go wrong.  Those safeguards are foolproof.

 

    Yeah, that’s what they always say, right before disaster strikes.

 

What’s To Like...

    The overall plotline of Cold Storage is similar to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, so if you liked that book, you’ll enjoy this one.  Here however, David Koepp fleshes out Crichton’s premise: the characters are more fully developed, the fungus attains a certain degree of sentience, and a subtle strand of humor is deftly instilled into the tale.

 

    The book’s back-cover blurb implies that Roberto Diaz is the primary protagonist, and he certainly plays a key part.  But the main characters are a pair of coworkers at Atchison Storage where the fungus is still stored: a nerdy 34-year-old nicknamed “Teacake” and his aloof romantic interest, Naomi.  There aren’t a ton of characters to keep track of, but they include a challenging number of bad guys and losers, plus a couple of neat animals in the form of a cat named Mr. Scroggins, the Rat King, a deer that can use the elevator, and a cockroach.  Yeah, try working those into a storyline sometime.

 

    Chemistry works its way into the story several times, which is always a plus for me since I’m a chemist by profession.  I can’t tell you much about the reaction of polysaccharides and sodium palmitate, nor what the properties of fluoroantimonic acid are, but I can tell you that the part about sulfites being added to wine coolers is spot on.

 

    I liked the musical nod to Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper, and chuckled at Mooney’s views about God and where/how he got that nickname.  Roberto is a married man, but not immune to at least one bout of flirting and Teacake is a bit of a peeping-tom.  I'm partial to slightly-flawed heroes.

 

    The ending is appropriately exciting, but not very twisty, and a bit over-the-top.  Most of the bad guys get whacked, most of the good guys survive, the fungus gets funged.  Naomi and Teacake ride off into the sunset, and Roberto moves contentedly into retirement.  Cold Storage is a standalone story and I would be surprised if a sequel or series was made from it.

 

Ratings…
Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 936 ratings.

Goodreads: 3.66*/5, based on 7,601 ratings and 1,455 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Endosymbiont (n.) : an organism that forms a symbiotic relationship with another cell or organism.

Others: Fulminations (n., plural).

 

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “Don’t put your fingers in there,” she said, but he didn’t answer, because they were this far, and there was no other obvious, easy way.”  (pg. 57)

 

Excerpts...

    Armillaria solidipes spreads across the landscape at a rate of one to three feet per year and can take thirty to fifty years to kill an average-sized tree.  If it could move significantly faster, 90 percent of all botanic growth on Earth would die, the atmosphere would turn to poison gas, and human and animal life would end.  But it is a slow-moving fungus.

    Other fungi are faster.

    Much faster.  (pg. 1)

 

    Headless, dehydrated, and dying, it had climbed 323 feet, straight up, on a slick surface.  Given its tiny size, this feat was the human equivalent of climbing Kilimanjaro on your knees right after going to the guillotine.  The tiny roach had performed perhaps the greatest act of physical conquest in the history of earthly life.

    Then a car parked on top of it.

    C-nRoach1 died with a squishy pop beneath the right rear tire.  (pg. 205)

 

“You can’t leave a dead deer by the side of the road with three broken legs, a bullet in its stomach, and four more in its head.”  (pg. 117)

    The quibbles are minor.  The pacing felt slow, but perhaps that’s inherent when you’re dealing with a sentient zombie fungus.  Similarly, the “trapped with a monster in a confined space” trope has been done to death, but how else can you keep the protagonists from simply running away from the slow-moving danger?

 

    There’s a fair amount of cussing – 32 instances in the first 20% of the book – but I thought it fit the tone of this type of tale.  Unsurprisingly, there were also references to several adult situations.

 

    The big problem were the WTFs.  There are some incredible coincidences that get our heroes to out of hopeless jams, including a timely appearance of a pistol-packing grandma and a jaw-dropping door-dropping desperation gunshot by Roberto.

 

    Still, I have a vague memory of a James Bond movie where he (Roger Moore, IIRC) jumps parachute-less out of a plane about to crash, lands on some flat, movable object, and snowboards down an alpine mountain (or maybe Mt. Everest), coming to a stop just in time to catch a toddy at a trendy outdoor coffeeshop.  Somehow, that daredevilry didn’t bother me a whit, and I think it was because it was in a movie, not a book.

 

    So perhaps it would be best if Cold Storage were made into a film.  I have a sneaking suspicion that's the author’s ultimate intent.  See below.

 

    7 Stars.  This is David Koepp’s first published novel, but, per Wikipedia and the book’s “About the Author” blurb, he is a celebrated screenwriter, credited with writing the films Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Mission Impossible, War of the Worlds, Angels & Demons, and many more.  I'm impressed, and I think that’s why Cold Storage reads like a movie script.

Inferno - Dan Brown

2013, 611 pages. Book 4 (out of 5) in the Robert Langdon series. New Author? : No. Genres: Thriller, Historical Fiction, Puzzle Solving. Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

It's great to be in Italy! Robert Langdon has visited here a couple of times in years past, and he has thoroughly enjoyed sightseeing in Florence, his present location. There are all sorts of museums, cathedrals, and palaces to explore, many dating back to the 13th century, when city-stares like Florence and Venice were at the height of their power.

Alas, Langdon is currently in a hospital room, under medical observation. The nurses and doctors tell him a bullet grazed his head and he's lucky to be alive.

That probably explains why he doesn't remember how he got to Italy, nor why he even decided to travel here. According to the medical people, the trauma of a brain injury from being shot in the head often induces amnesia, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent.

But it doesn't explain why someone is trying to kill him. Nor why someone, presumably the same gunman, has just burst into his hospital room and shot one of the doctors dead, simply because he made the mistake of getting between Langdon and the shooter.

What’s To Like...

Inferno is the fourth book in Dan Brown's fantastic thriller series featuring lecturer and historian Robert Langdon. Book 2 in the series is the mega-bestseller The Da Vinci Code, the book that got me hooked on Dan Brown. Here, as always, the action starts immediately, the thrills are non-stop, and our hero has to solve a bunch of riddles and save the world, all the while avoiding getting killed by one or more trained hitmen.

You can tell that the author meticulously researched the three settings in the story: Florence, Venice, and Istanbul. I felt like if ever I found myself lost in any of those cities, I could use this book as a map.

The book's title is of course a reference to Dante's Inferno, which I've never read. A lot of the puzzles that Langdon has to unravel are based on that classic, and the author works a synopsis into the storyline via a backstory and one of Langdon's lectures. You'll learn a little bit of Italian along the way, and a smattering of Turkish. I found the etymology of Purgatory and quarantine to be quite fascinating, so too my discovery that "H+" has a second meaning besides the chemist's "hydrogen ion".

The 611 pages are divided into a whopping 104 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue, so there's always a good place to stop for the night. I found it to be a fast read, but not necessarily an easy one since there's a lot "tour guide" type of descriptions of the settings.

There are plenty of plot twists over the last quarter of the book, which is something I think Dan Brown is a master of. The ending is a mixed bag. On one hand it's unconventional, and it was refreshing to read something other than the usual "just in the nick of time" thriller ending. OTOH, a lot of the plot threads are left dangling, and unless Book 5 in this series resolves those threads, the ending here leaves you wondering what happens next.

Kewlest New Word ...

Quatrefoil (n.) : an ornamental design of four lobes or leaves, as used in architectural tracery, resembling a flower or four-leaf clover. (Google-image it.)

Ratings…

Amazon: 4.1/5 based on 30,644 ratings.

Goodreads: 3.85/5 based on 475,002 ratings and 37,222 reviews

Excerpts...

When Langdon arrived at the event, he was met by the conference director and ushered inside. As they crossed the lobby, Langdon couldn't help but notice the five words painted in gargantuan letters across the back wall: WHAT IF GOD WAS WRONG?

"It's a Lukas Troberg," the director whispered. "Our newest art installation. What do you think?"

Langdon eyed the massive text, uncertain how to respond. "Um ... his brushstrokes are lavish, but his command of the subjunctive seems sparse. (pg. 104)

“I'm in some trouble, Jonas, and I need a favor." Langdon's voice sounded tense. "It involves your corporate NetJets card."

"NetJets?" Faukman gave an incredulous laugh. "Robert, we're in book publishing. We don't have access to private jets."

"We both know you're lying, my friend."

Faukman sighed. "Okay, let me rephrase that. We don't have access to private jets for authors of tomes about religious history. If you want to write Fifty Shades of Iconography, we can talk." (pg. 344)

“I've heard of denial ... but I don't think it exists." (pg. 279)

There are a couple quibbles, but no show stoppers. First off, you'd better love chase scenes, because the one here goes on for the first 450 pages, and that's literally 3/4 of the book. Similarly, you'd better like info dumps, because there are a slew of them here about the three settings, their history, their buildings, and the various artists who lived there in the Middle Ages.

The R-rated stuff is pretty much limited to a smattering of cusswords. I counted ten in the first 20% of the book, and these are of the milder ilk.

Lastly and leastly, the main storyline is about a plague and this being 2020, the last thing I wanted was a story that would increase my pandemic hysteria. But this book was published in 2013, long before the term "Covid-19" existed, so Dan Brown can hardly be blamed for my bad timing in reading this.

If you can make it through the seemingly never-ending chase scene, you are rewarded with 250 pages of as good of a thriller as anyone can write. And even if Inferno doesn't quite measure up to The da Vinci Code, well, so what? I for one am glad Dan Brown made the attempt.

7½ Stars. Dan Brown endures a lot of flak spouted by people who consider him a hack writer. A smidgen of it might be justified, but it's more than offset by his abundant talent for penning exciting stories. More than 475,000 readers have left a rating on this book at Goodreads, and more than 37,000 of those took the time to leave a review. He may not be Shakespeare, but there are lots of people, including me, who are drawn to his books.