At the urgings of my b-in-l Gavin, I have finally started reading Dennis Lehane's first effort at historical fiction: The Given Day. Set in the early part of the 20th Century, this book includes real-life historical figures like Babe Ruth, the famous baseball player, as well as political figures of the day. I haven't gotten very far yet but Lehane's description of the Babe watching a negro-league baseball game (complete with the historically accurate but now considered offensive terminology to describe the black ball-players) is quite exceptional.

I am looking forward to reading more but have so many other projects on the go (including Christmas, of course, and other related tasks) that it may take me some time to finish the book. I'm hopeful that it will be more about the history and less about blood and gore than some of his other books but we'll see.

In the meantime, of course, I continue work on the Harry Potter Concordance. It's slow work but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I've set up a table and computer downstairs in what we call our "White Room" so that I can leave the stuff out, ready for me to come back to it whenever I have a chance. Our dog likes that room too since it's nice and cool and she has plenty of space to lie down and sleep.

I have also finished another Abigail Massey at McAdam Station story — The Circus Comes to Town — available through the McAdam link to the left. Right now, it's still a bit of a draft since I'm not entirely sure I like the relationship between Miss Pierce and her brother. I'm awaiting feedback from my sister, mother and partner to see what they think.

And I really have to get back to the Phillip Gold short stories I've been working on; they've kind of gotten left behind but one is ready to be sent out for consideration. I think that's a worthwhile cause upon which to focus in the coming weeks.

Especially with snow falling and Christmas looming!

Tags: Lehane, Harry Potter, McAdam Station, Abigail Massey

I guess I'm just bitter. I'm not sure why but I'm bitter. I detested the last Lehane book I read and now it's Canadian mystery-maven Peter Robinson who has tumbled into my sights. My friend James lent me his copy of Robinson's 2007 novel, Friend of the Devil, with a strong recommendation. My sister Lynn, whose opinion I also value, commended Robinson as well but warned me that this book was not his best.

Reading Friend of the Devil was a tough slog. Truth be told, the book was boring. I didn't care about the victims; I didn't care about the "coppers". I actually stopped reading the book several times and let it sit for several days. The last time I did that was with just 60 pages left. That's right — in the middle of the rising action, I put the book down. And left it down. I finally finished it only because I'm funny that way. And I felt I had to finish it before I could move on to something new.

One of my major beefs is that Friend of the Devil spends as much time on the personal lives of the three major police investigators (Banks, Annie and Winsome — someone please explain to me why Robinson calls everyone by their last names except Annie?) as it does on the mystery itself. Not having read Robinson's previous 16 novels, I came into this one cold, with no prior history with his characters. I did not know them nor did I care about them. And this book is simply not good enough to stand on its own.

So when Annie obsesses about a one-night stand she's had with a young lad and about her own battles with the bottle, I yawn and want to flip ahead. While Winsome spends pages struggling with her recently discovered prudish streak, I battle the urge to take up knitting instead. And when Inspector Banks finds love in the final 100 pages and spends much of rising action and, indeed, the climax of the book pondering the potential for this new romance, I want to put the book down and never pick it up again. In fact, I do put the book down and walk away from it. Robinson's dedication to the private lives of his coppers is so strong, he actually leaves Banks' romance open ended — I trust that dedicated readers of the Banks series are actually anxious for the next book to come out so they can find out if the Inspector has found true love at last!

The mystery, the reason I picked the book up in the first place, takes a back seat to the soap opera of the characters' lives. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill mystery anyway. It's all about — surprise surprise — serial killers who rape and torture young women. That's innovative and fresh, isn't it?

In style, it's reminiscent of PD James' Dalgliesh novels, though without James' consummate skill and fascinating "guest characters". The main character, Banks, appears to be a watered down combination of Dalgliesh and Inspector Rebus but he lacks the charm and intellect of the former and the overpowering melancholy of the latter. Like Robert B. Parker, Robinson attempts to instill his own personal passions into his character but, whereas Parker weaves Spenser's culinary flair fairly subtly into each narrative, Robinson overwhelms us with his own musical expertise on almost every page of this book. A character can't go into a cafe without Robinson indulging himself with a half-page exploration not just of the song that happens to be playing on the cafe's sound system but also of the system itself (Banks has an iPod that he can plug into the stereo of his Porsche, donchaknow!), the CD upon which the song is featured as well as where the character first heard the song and how it's stayed with him all his life.

Did I mention I was feeling bitter?

My sister Lynn told me this is Robinson's weakest book. I hope to goodness it is because I simply cannot imagine reading anything worse. Even my own books. Okay, maybe that's pushing it.

Tags: Peter Robinson, Inspector Banks, Friend of The Devil

I've given up trying to write a review for Sacred, Dennis Lehane's third novel featuring the detective duo of Kenzie and Gennaro. Why? Because I am so disappointed with it I find it hard to think clearly.

With apologies to Gavin, this book is a real let down. The plot is so convoluted that, once you figure out what is actually going on, the stuff that happened at the start no longer makes any sense. The theme appears to be that, in this bad old world, you can trust no one. Only K&G can trust each other and they are falling rapidly and everlastingly in love, surrendering to the inevitable. So Kenzie spends much of his time mooning over Gennaro rather than dealing with the case they've taken on. Blah blah blah.

What really bothers me is that Lehane resorts to some pretty shaky strategies in this book. He knows readers want action right from page one but he also knows that, in first-person detective novels that involve searching for a missing person (as this book does), it's really difficult to find a way to start the action before you spend 20 pages or so setting up the case. So he has the client attack and kidnap K&G before hiring them. And we, as readers, are supposed to buy 1) that K&G would be so stupid as to fall into the trap and 2) that after being attacked, drugged and dragged against their will to a remote mansion on the coast, they would actually agree to work for the rich dude and NOT suspect that he might be lying to them.

Lehane also uses Bubba as a way to incorporate ultra-violent scenes without bloodying the hands of his protagonists, with whom we the readers are supposed to identify. Bubba actually tortures people on behalf of K&G and we are supposed to see K&G as a sweet, innocent couple, falling in love while ridding the world of evil. It's ridiculous. K&G are every bit as culpable for the horrific acts Bubba and his buddies perpetrate as they are. K&G are no better than the villains they pursue. Lehane goes to great lengths to show Kenzie lamenting over the fact that, in book one, he actually pulled the trigger in the cold-blooded murder of a defenseless gang-banger, yet then has Kenzie sitting watching Bubba torture K&G's enemies in order to gain information from them.

Lehane's a great writer, don't get me wrong, but he's heading in directions that I find hard to accept. Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe was a solitary knight who took on evil according to his particular code of honour. K&G are just as evil as the people they fight.

And I can't help but draw a parallel between Lehane's new type of anti-hero and the current culture in the US. Just as Bush and his colleagues attempt to justify torture and killing and corruption on the basis that the enemy is even more evil than we are, so too do K&G. What happened to living by your principles no matter what? What happened to honour? How can you justify taking another person to task for their evil deeds when you yourself commit the same evil deeds in pursuing them?

I am frankly scared by what I'm seeing, frightened by how far we have gone as a society towards accepting the argument that the ends justify the means, that as long as what we are seeking fits in with our own biased sense of what's right and what's wrong, we are entitled to take whatever steps we wish, no matter how ugly or morally reprehensible, to accomplish those ends.

Lehane's characters certainly seem to have accepted that. I don't think I can.

Tags: Lehane, Kenzie

Dennis Lehane is my hero. Not only does he write fantastic mysteries — he's now managed to bring Star Trek into the mix. I just started Sacred, his third book, and what do I find on pages three and four of the paperback version? The following dialogue, with the exposition taken out:

"He could be an alien," Angie said. ...

"An alien," I said. "From where exactly? France?" ...

"No, stupid. From the future. Didn't you ever see that old Star Trek where Kirk and Spock ended up on earth in the thirties and were hopelessly out of step?"

"I hate Star Trek." ...

"How can you hate Star Trek?"

Not only does Lehane mention Star Trek, his characters talk about an actual episode of the original series and get it close to right! Amazing.

So Lehane is officially my new hero. Of course, what Kenzie's problem is, I don't know. How can anyone hate Star Trek?

More on Stephen Whitfield's 1968 documentary book, The Making Of Star Trek, soon.

Tags: Lehane, Star Trek

Dick Francis teamed up with his youngest son, Felix, to write Dead Heat, 2007's installment in the long-running series of horse-race-industy thrillers by the former jump-jockey champion from England. It's a savvy bit of marketing: have Felix co-author a couple of books to get us used to his name on the cover, then fade old dad out and leave it to Felix to continue to churn out a book a year with no loss in readership nor profit.

And I was determined not to fall for it.

I love the first 40 or so novels in the series, when ol' Dick's name was alone on the cover. So I wasn't about to take the marketing ploy lying down. I read Dead Heat with every intention of hating it, of finding every little fault and every little divergence from dad's original formula and holding young Felix to account for it.

And it worked for a while. The book starts off slowly, with a lot of long, clumsy sentences and banal dialogue. Even the plot seems to lack flavour at the outset — Max Moreton, a gourmet chef with a successful restaurant on the outskirts of Newmarket, is thrown for a loop when a catering job goes horribly wrong and dozens of his clients contract serious food poisoning. Big deal. So what? Who cares!

But then a bomb blows up a part of the grandstand at the Newmarket track, blasting to bloody bits the luncheon party that Moreton is in the process of feeding, and Moreton is swept up in a spellbinding tale of violence and villainy. From that point on, it's pure Francis (Dick or Felix, it doesn't seem to matter), with likable characters, high tension and galloping action that carries you through the 400 pages it takes to get you to the climax.

Just as in the best of Francis, there is also a love story and, as usual, it's told with a happy innocence and joie de vivre that someone like me, who loves a good romcom, can't help but enjoy it.

We may never know how much of this book is Dick and how much is Felix but it certainly is a fine addition to the Dick-Francis line of thoroughbred mysteries. And it's a nice touch that the title, Dead Heat, harkens quietly back to the title of the book that started it all for Dick Francis, Dead Cert. It's a nice way to launch Felix's career as a writer.

Tags: Dick Francis, Felix Francis, Dead Heat

Darkness, Take My Hand is a horrific book. It's bloody, it's nasty but it's a hell of a read.

Dennis Lehane delivers another mind-blowing story featuring detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. I'll admit it right now — I don't entirely understand what Lehane is trying to do here. There is a level of myth and self-reflexiveness to this book that I can't penetrate. The villains are driven by something deep and psychological but, even after reading the ending twice, I still can't quite figure out what it is. Maybe it's too deep for me. I have enough faith in Lehane as a writer not to doubt him, not to question whether he ever really knew the answer himself. I just can't work it out from what's given in the book.

I can't figure out the link between the villains and the two mobsters, Jack Rouse and Kevin Hurlihy, either.

Oh well.

Kenzie and Gennaro agree to help a beautiful psychiatrist who has been receiving threats, even though they know from the beginning that the case will lead them right into the laps of the nastiest of the nasty from Boston's mob scene. When the mobsters claim innocence, however, our heroes are at a loss for where to turn next. Cruxifictions and other sorts of sadistic, ritualistic murders follow and suddenly Kenzie finds that all the leads connect to him. No, he's not a suspect, but he certainly seems to be at the centre of it all.

Kenzie, now in love with a beautiful doctor and her four-year-old daughter, struggles to protect the innocence of his new family from the violence of his chosen profession. Gennaro, finally divorced from her abusive husband, is spinning, lost. Together, they take on evil forces of the like they never in their wildest nightmares contemplated facing, aided by a flotilla of police and FBI agents.

There's blood on almost every page. And savagery. And sadism. And a little bit of sex thrown in.

Lehane starts with the briefest of chapters, a Prologue that serves as something of a frame for the story. It takes place after the story is over, as Kenzie sits alone on his balcony, watching the snow fall on a cold Christmas Eve. In this three-page passage, Lehane dials up the tension and suspense and, over the following 330 pages, he never lets up. Here are the key paragraphs from that Prologue:

The office — Kenzie/Gennaro Investigations — is closed, gathering dust, I assume, maybe the first stray cobweb in a corner behind my desk, maybe one behind Angie's too. Angie's been gone since the end of November, and I try not to think about her. Or Grace Cole. Or Grace's daughter, Mae. Or anything at all.

And later:

Sometimes Bubba or Richie or Devin or Oscar drop by... We don't talk about this past autumn or Grace and Mae. We don't talk about Angie. And we never talk about him. He's done his damage, and there's nothing left to say.

The words seem mild, simply gentle declarations of loss, of pain. But they haunt the entire book. We as readers carry Kenzie's loss with us as we read the story that led to that scene on the balcony and we know: nothing can't happen in this book. We know that Kenzie survives (as do the more minor characters Bubba, Richie, Devin and Oscar) but we can't be certain of just about anything else.

And the book throws so much at us that it's hard to catch our breath. We bounce from one horrific scene to the next, from one terrifying character to another. Lehane succeeds in creating a claustrophobic climate dominated by the unknown, unseen villains. They are everywhere yet nowhere.

To their credit, Kenzie and Gennaro are smart enough and human enough to be afraid. Very afraid.

Darkness, Take My Hand is a dense, suspenseful, gripping book that engulfs its reader. It picks us up and tosses us around and overwhelms our senses.

My brother-in-law Gavin tells me Lehane's books get better and better — this, his second novel, is so good I'm not sure that's possible.

Tags: Lehane, Mystery, Darkness, Take My Hand

Robert B. Parker rebounds with Stranger in Paradise, the best of the three novels I picked up for a buck at the library sale. After turning off my filters, I sat back and enjoyed a good read, a happy reminder of the kind of panache Parker used to produce in his heyday. Yes, it's still merely a novella and, yes, all of the objections I've recited in relation to earlier Parker novellas still apply, but this book has a sort of happy elan to it, a strong pace and a commitment to action that the other two distinctly lacked.

Published this year (2008), Stranger in Paradise features our friend, small-town police chief Jesse Stone, as the protagonist and, thankfully, there is absolutely no sign of Sunny Randall in the book, other than a single brief mention along the way. When an old friend, cold-blooded killer Wilson Cromartie ("Crow"), comes to town with a mysterious mission to perform, Stone and his force go on immediate alert. They tangled with Crow ten years ago, you see, and, before the self-described Apache warrior left town the last time, a lot of people died, including two of the town's boys in blue. Forced by circumstances and their own personality parallels, Stone and Crow soon find themselves working together toward a common goal: saving a rebellious 14-year-old girl from her gangster father and her gangbanger boyfriend while keeping as many other people alive as possible.

Woven into the fabric of this violent storyline are two interesting subplots: a wealthy white neighbourhood's desperate battle to stop a school for underprivileged Hispanic kids from opening in their midsts and Stone's own on-going effort to work out his relationship with his ex-wife Jenn, a beautiful TV investigative reporter who moves back in with him as part of the attempt to take care of the 14-year-old.

This is a violent book — Crow guns down a gangbanger early on in order to prove his own machismo, then picks off two gangster types in cold blood later in the novella while the gangbanger executes the 14-year-old's mother in a brutal development that Stone and his crew treat as a minor inconvenience — but Parker ultimately chickens out when push comes to shove. The climax, once again, is a disappointment, a well-plotted set up where Stone and his force sweep in to arrest all (and I mean ALL) of the perps and their comrades before anything too nasty happens. Even the enigmatic Crow, who loves nothing better than a gun battle, simply fades away into the background during that epic scene, uncharacteristically using the confusion of the developing fire fight between the gangbangers and the gangsters to disappear, rather than to indulge himself in some gratuitous killing.

It's as if Parker got to that point in the writing process and thought: well, I've almost reached my 40,000-word limit and I really don't think I can handle writing such a complicated scene so maybe I won't bother; I'll make it clean and easy, even if it doesn't suit the personalities of the characters I've so carefully created.

Again, I liked this book but with many reservations. I think the plot is stronger and more interesting than the last two Parker novellas I've read but it still plays out as a series of superior, independent men moving effortlessly through a world where no-one else matters. Crow, though interesting in some respects, ultimately fails as nothing more than a negative version of Stone himself. Parker indulges in numerous explications of how and why these two strong, self-contained men can know, understand and respect each other without ever having to spend any time together. They know each other because they are cut from the same cloth; they are each other. Violent, witty, uber-capable, utterly independent, sharing a strong moral code that says, while men are for killin', women are for protectin' and lovin'.

Every woman in the book swoons over Crow, in ways that they wish they could swoon over Stone. Even Molly Crane, the Catholic, mother-of-four, devoted wife who serves as Jesse's right hand on the police force, ends up sleeping with the cold-blooded assassin and convincing herself that this little indulgence of her primal female urges is acceptable since it apparently hurt no one and won't change her relationship with her family. It's a not-too-subtle way for Parker to consummate the erotically charged relationship between Molly and Jesse (Crow's positive alter-ego) without sullying Stone's moral standing.

As in the other Parker books, all characters speak with one voice, in one style, with a similar wit and morality. In fact, Parker appears so incapable of creating anything new in the way of character that the parallels between Stone and Spenser (the protagonist in Parker's earlier books) are blatantly and painfully obvious. Add in Crow, the ultra-capable, cold-blooded, member of a racialised community and Parker has recreated the Spenser/Hawk relationship to the point of idiocy. The one major difference — Spenser was a private eye and Stone is a police officer — actually represents one of the major weaknesses of this new series: whereas Spenser could credibly flout the law when his personal morality required it, Stone either cannot (since he is a cop) or must go to extreme lengths to get around it, leaving the reader shaking her head in disbelief.

Sex is, again, a game to be played and not to be confused with love or intimacy or commitment. Women are objects, littered around the city so that men can either protect them as fragile things of beauty, have sex with them in the on-going game or ignore them and their lives and deaths as unimportant.

it is ironic that, at the centre of this tale is the 14-year-old, Amber, who has already been molested by her father's posse, ignored by her obese, alcohol-abusing mother and forced to have sex with every member of her boyfriend's gang, which boyfriend is then ready and willing to sell her back to her father for $10,000. Stone goes through all this rigamarole to save her from that terrible life and escape into... into... what? A world where women are nothing more than the possessions and sexual playthings of powerful men.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Stranger In Paradise

I had an epiphany as I read High Profile, Robert B. Parker's 2007 Jesse Stone "novel".

The first inkling I had came when I got confused as to who was speaking in a long passage of dialogue between two characters. This shouldn't be so confusing, I thought to myself. It's just two characters. So I started trying to figure out why. I read the passage over again, then a third time. I got confused each time. And then it hit me. It's the paragraphing that is throwing me off. Parker starts a new paragraph every line. Here's what I mean (and I'm making up this passage since I can't be bothered to track down a real example).

Sunny smiled.

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know."

"You've got to have a reason."

Jesse looked over her shoulder at the lake.

"I don't have a reason."

"But you have to. People don't do things for no reason."

Sunny checked over her shoulder in case a bird was about to land on her.

"I guess I had a reason."

Jesse nodded.

"But I don't know what it is."

Did you see it? Parker puts the line of dialogue in a separate paragraph from the speaking character's physical action. Whereas most writers would, as my friend John would say, do an SPSP (same person, same paragraph), Parker separates action from dialogue. And it's confusing.

Why does he do it?

I didn't know. But then I registered how little text there is on each page. And how short his chapters are. And how little exposition there is as opposed to dialogue.

And it hit me. Parker's writing short stories —novellas at best —and passing them off to his unsuspecting readers as real life novels. I mean, the book is 290 pages long. That's fairly substantial, you would think.

So, my curiosity piqued, I decided to do a little test. First, I chose a similar book to which to compare Parker's tome: Dick Francis' Break In, a 272-page novel of which I have a hard-cover copy. The books seem to be about the same size. In fact, once I measured them (yes, I'm that anal), I realised that they are exactly the same size and that Francis' book has just 18 fewer pages than Parker's.

A good set to compare.

So then I opened High Profile at a random page — page 146, in fact — and counted the words on the page. Page 146 of the hard cover version of High Profile in my possession has 213 words on it. Then I counted the words on the next 9 pages in order to establish a reasonable sample from which to draw an average. 76, 66, 176, 185, 188, 182, 66, 94 and 166. The total over 10 pages was 1412, for an average per page of 141.2 words. Multiply that by 290 pages and the book contains 40,948 words in total. Yikes. I've been taught that a novel MUST be at least 60,000 words to be considered for publication and that 80,000 or more is a much safer bet. But Robert B. Parker's High Stakes is only 40,948 words long. No wonder I could read it so fast!

What about my comparison book, Break In? In order to be as fair as possible, I counted the words on the same ten pages —146 to 155 — to get my average and total. 307, 363, 394, 388, 372, 157, 254, 374, 356, and 370, for a total of 3335. That's an average of 333.5 words per page. Multiply by 272 pages and the Francis book includes 90,712 words in total.

Aha.

I can't help but feel that Parker and/or his publisher is/are playing fast and loose with his readers' money. They're charging us regular book prices for half a book and using every trick in the... ahem, book to fool us into thinking we're getting a full-length novel: breaking single paragraphs in two to create more lines, putting more space between lines of type, breaking the book into more chapters so that more pages are half empty, and such like.

And, of course, in counting Francis' words, I couldn't help but read them as well. And I realised that Parker couldn't hold a candle to "Dick Francis" (whether it's actually Dick who did the writing or his wife or somebody else) as a writer, no matter how much I seem to enjoy Parker's novellas. Francis' plots are more intricate and creative, his villains more complex and his action sequences much more breathtaking. I still have one more Parker on my Bed-Side Table but I swear, when that's done, I'm going to go back and enjoy Francis' entire run of novels again.

After all that, how was High Profile, you ask. Witty writing. All the characters are the same (as in other books and as each other) and the portrayal of women is just as bad as in the last book. The plot is paper thin and you can't even bank on Parker for riveting action sequences any more. In this book, there is no action. Sure, Stone attacks one man and beats him senseless. But it's not much of a fight. The man had just opened the door when Stone attacked him. And the climax of the book comes when Stone shoots the villain three times in the chest in what he rightly refers to as a "suicide by cop". All in the last 27 pages. The rest of the book is talk, talk, talk and half the time you have no idea who's doing the talking.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, High Profile

I blew through Blue Screen in less than two days, a credit to the readability of Robert B. Parker’s prose. This man is a very good writer. His plots are clean and compelling, his characters reasonably fully realized, his writing clear and inviting.

And, amazingly enough, this book is as much a love story (or perhaps the better phrase would be “story about love”) as it is a mystery.

I enjoyed Blue Screen a lot. Unfortunately, in order to do so, I had to force myself to turn off a couple of my built-in filters and just accept that it is what it is.

The novel offers two plots: the murder plot and the love story. In the murder plot, Sunny Randall is hired first to protect movie star Erin Flint, and then, when Erin’s personal assistant, Misty, is found dead of a broken neck, to investigate her murder. This latter investigation introduces Sunny to Jesse Stone, handsome Chief of the local police force (and sometime protagonist in another line of Parker novels), creating fertile ground for the love story to spring to life.

Parker spends approximately equal time on each plot, which might please some readers more than others. With little in the way of physical evidence, Sunny and Jesse follow the people trail to Hollywood, where they discover that Erin has a sordid secret past, that Misty has a closer relationship to Erin than was at first disclosed and that criminal figures in both Los Angeles and Boston all seem to have a hand in the situation.

Meanwhile, Sunny and Jesse discover they share an intense mutual attraction, far too many personal and emotional similarities and matching attitudes towards sex. By the end of it all, these two intensely defensive and careful individuals admit that they “might love” each other. They also discover who killed Misty but, as too often happens in mystery novels these days, decide not to push the matter and let the perpetrators go free.

It’s a decent story. It’s told with wit and humour and a fair dose of tension, both of the character-in-physical- and character-in-emotional-danger kinds. I smiled a lot at Parker’s clever turns of phrase and the snappy dialogue. I even laughed out loud on two occasions. And I finished the book in a very brief period of time.

All good.

But what about those nagging built-in filters? You remember, the ones I had to turn off?

To be frank, my problems almost all revolve around Parker’s portrayal of women. Most women in Parker’s books are cast in a negative light: they are either irrational man-haters, brainless eye-candy, helpless victims or ambitious graspers who don’t understand their place in the world and need to be reminded.

Erin Flint, this book's "client" is the perfect example. She is, in Blue Screen, all of the above. Early in the novel, she is branded a “feminist”, which in Parker’s world means “man-hater”. Stunningly beautiful and remarkably athletic, she even went to college, yet she is consistently portrayed as stupid and self-centred, unable to follow even the simplest concepts discussed by the other characters. Despite all of that, she is also completely dependent on the two major male characters in her life – a glorified pimp in LA, who turned her and Misty into prostitutes when they were just teenage orphans, and her megalomaniac boyfriend in Boston, who is using her to enhance his own power and prestige and also to indulge in his personal sexual perversions. If that’s not enough, Erin also plays the role of the over-ambitious grasper: encouraged by the Boston boyfriend, she actually believes she might be able to become the first woman to play baseball in the major leagues. A significant part of the plot recounts the effort by all parties (except the boyfriend) to show her that her baseball ambitions are ridiculous, that as a woman she is incapable of competing.

The women who are portrayed in a positive light – most especially Sunny, herself, and Susan, Sunny’s psychiatrist (borrowed from the Spenser series) – are merely what a man like Parker would consider to be the ideal woman. These are women who share common characteristics:
• While intelligent, they are still willing to recognize that the men in their lives have a natural leadership role;
• While physically capable, they still depend entirely on the men in their lives for their physical safety;
• Their attitudes toward sex and love are remarkably close to the masculine stereotype: sex is a physical activity to be enjoyed with anyone who is attractive, available and willing; sex is something that should be enjoyed without emotional or psychological implications; sex should always be in the forefront of your mind, even if it interferes with more serious commitments; all members of the opposite sex should first be assessed in sexual terms before anything else; love is something to be feared, to be hidden – it is a sign of weakness;
• Their social interactions with others are indistinguishable from those of Parker’s male characters;
• They love dogs.

Other than the fact that she defers to men in all things, that she never takes on a physical challenge herself and that she has breasts, Sunny Randall IS Jesse Stone (who is, of course, Spenser). If you took a page of dialogue between Sunny and Jesse and took out the tags, you would have no idea who said what. Their ideas, beliefs, attitudes, approaches, even their language and speaking style, are exactly the same.

I don’t know if Parker hates women or simply has no clue. I also don’t know what it says about me that I can actually turn off the filters and enjoy his books. Next up on my bedside table is High Profile, a Jesse Stone novel, so we’ll see if that provides any further clues.

Tags: Parker, Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone, Mystery, Blue Screen

Now that I'm finally finished with Engel's book, I am launching myself into three by Robert B. Parker. The first, Blue Screen, hit the bookstore shelves in 2006 and features his female protagonist, Sunny Randall. This is the first of the Randall books that I've read — it is apparently the fifth Parker's written (by the way, have you seen how many books this guy's published? holy cow!) — and I am enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. It makes for a nice break from painting my office, my other weekend task.

As I think I've mentioned in an earlier blog, I am a big fan of Parker's original series, featuring Spenser and his buddy Hawk. At least, I'm a big fan of the early books in the series; I started to lose interest about five years ago when Parker felt his detective had to start tackling international issues and not just good ol' Boston crimes. So I wasn't sure I'd like Blue Screen, even though it introduces me to a new detective. What I had forgotten is how good a writer Parker is when he is on. And in this book, he is definitely on. No, it's not a classic of the detective genre; it's just a well-written story that clicks right along, sweeping you up into it.

I'm more than a third of the way through after only one real sitting and I'm looking forward to getting back to it soon. The writing is so smooth, so polished, you just can't resist it.

The depiction of women, on the other hand? Well, I'll have more on that issue when I post my review.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Blue Screen

I've finally finished reading Howard Engel's 1990 Cooperman novel, Dead and Buried. I promised everyone a review but now I'm not sure what to say. No, I don't believe in that old adage: If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything. I'm just at a loss for what to say.

I didn't enjoy this book. It was a tough slog for me every page of the way. I literally had to force myself to sit down to read it and it was a relief when I finally turned the last page.

I'm wondering if I've missed something, if Engel (a writer whom I admire) is up to something that I'm not quite catching. For a while, I tried to convince myself this book is a parody of the genre, that Engel deliberately builds towards hard-boiled standards, then goes in other (often, sorry Howard, silly) directions. If that's what he was trying to do, it didn't work for me. If he was writing this as another serious entry in the Cooperman series, that didn't work for me either.

The stage is set for the story when Cooperman receives a visit from a prospective new client, the wife of a truck driver who died in an "accident" on the job. The wife is unsympathetic and uninteresting and Cooper doesn't trust her from the start. He makes the usual references to his empty bank account to explain why he accepts the job in spite of his own reservations, then finds out very quickly the wife had lied to him about a key fact. What follows is a bizarre ramble through environmental issues, corporate realities and the lives of a warped leading local family. The original client all but disappears from the story and the resolution of her husband's death is both incomplete and an afterthought.

Despite Engel's best efforts, there is practically no tension in the book. At one point, an attempted kidnapping of our hero is spoiled when the three gun-toting nasties inexplicably choose the parking lot of a local restaurant to unload their terrified human cargo and run into, of all people, Cooperman's parents and their best friends. Five pages of build-up lead to a quick, "Hey Benny, are you going to join us for dinner?" and the tension disappears.

The "climax" of the story occurs when Cooperman is, yet again, dragged unwillingly into a mysterious car and driven off. This time, however, the kidnapping is merely a friend's "fun" way to get Cooperman to attend a wake for another friend.

Parody? I'm not sure.

The mystery is solved while Cooperman, his new girlfriend and two cops sit eating a feast at an all-night local spot. Our hero spins out for the mesmerised group (and for the reader) what actually happened and who killed whom. The police are convinced of the amazing outcome even though we, the readers, aren't.

Again, I'm at a loss. This book is a complete surprise for me. Engel is usually a sure-handed, effective mystery writer and Cooperman a grumblingly attractive, enjoyable hero. This book is a mess, to be honest (unless I'm really missing something), filled with sloppy writing that would have benefited from a very strong editor.

The plot makes no sense and Cooperman's motivations grow more questionable with each passing page. There is little suspense and what does come into play is undermined even further by the fact that we don't get to know the client, the victim nor any of the other people whose lives are trashed along the way. In other words, we don't care. And Cooperman comes across as such a slug in this book that we really don't care about him either.

As a result, I would urge you to read any one of Engel's excellent Cooperman novels, except this one.

Unless I'm missing something.

Tags: Engel, cooperman, Mystery

Introduced to the works of Dennis Lehane by my brother-in-law, who thinks the world of him. So I picked up A Drink Before the War, his first novel. Very impressive. I like to read hard-boiled-detective novels by newly successful writers to see what's missing from my writing and, judging by this first effort by Mr. Lehane, the answer is: a lot. Lehane's characters are deep and fully developed, even in this his first novel, and the plot is broad and sweeping, filled with violence. Reading this book, I wonder if he's written three or four prequels that were never published but allowed him to develop both his style and his characters.

Certainly, there were some bits that just seemed a little too trite — like how the protagonist, Patrick, just happens to have friends who can provide him with everything he needs at just the right time (the best lawyer, the buddy with access to an arsenal, the newspaper reporter, etc.) — and certainly the ending is telegraphed but the writing is crisp and impressive.

I have to admit, it does disappoint me that every successful writer I read tends to add credence to the argument that your book has to be bloody and explicit in order to sell. There's no room for a well-written mystery about smaller issues (like a single murder, or a kidnapped child) — you've got to throw in lots of gunfire and fistfights, gang wars and brutal cops. It's sad. I had hoped that there would be a market for plots that are more in line with the writers of the first half of the 20th century whom I so admire.

On the other hand, Lehane is masterful at building suspense. I'm usually quite analytical when I read these kinds of books but he really swept me up. I'm looking forward to picking up the next book in the series. And the next. And the next. And my brother-in-law tells me I just have to see the movie version of Gone Baby Gone.

If I spend so much time reading, when will I have time to hone my own writing?

Tags: Lehane, A Drink Before The War