Fatal Shadows: A Jaded Mystery Reader's Review

I'm not a big fan of mysteries. I get frustrated when the sleuth follows a lead off screen (or off page) and discovers a clue that breaks the case wide open. I always feel cheated when the 'big reveal' happens at the climax and clues are exposed that if I'd known about I could have figured out who done it too. Having been burned more than once, I shy away from most mysteries. But I'm glad I didn't let past experience cause me to avoid Josh Lanyon's Fatal Shadows.

Mystery author and used book store owner Adrien English is a fun protagonist with an appealing quick wit, which Lanyon wisely avoids sending over the top. The mystery surrounding the murder of his best friend was fast-paced and intriguing. Laynon did a good job of layering the mystery with enough twists that, while I had an idea of who the murderer might be, I kept second-guessing myself till the climax.

The nice thing was: all the clues were there for me to put together. Presto! A mystery I can enjoy. Thanks for that.

The other thing I really appreciated is Lanyon's knowledge of the genre. Since his protagonist was a mystery author himself, he could allude to authors and their style, sometimes critically. Then with a wink Lanyon proceeded to duplicate their style in a clever, subtle way that didn't smack the reader across the face.

Fatal Shadows is a fast paced, engrossing mystery. It's well worth the avid mystery reader's time.

Not mention the jaded mystery reader's time, as well.

Now, we see through a glass, darkly...

Jeffrey Ricker scares me.

It seems like any time I pick up his work these days, I find he’s tapped into my brain (The Unwanted: the answer to my teenage fantasies; Fool for Love’s “At the End of the Leash” feeds my love of dogs and my secret voyeuristic streak; Riding the Rails’ “Mount Olympus” brought back memories of the television miniseries of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles from my childhood, while also reminding me of Burroughs’ John Carter series, and a smidge of my favorite show from the late ‘70s Buck Rogers; and Night Shadows' “Blackout”: if Ricker knows about that night back in Pennsylvania with the Voodoo book – well, then I really am freaking scared). See, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear his fingers were clamped on my face in a Vulcan mind meld.

But with Detours, that connection became a bit uncomfortable.

In the novel, Joel returns from a trip to London, where he might just have met the man of his dreams, only to learn that his mother has unexpectedly died. To fulfill her final wish, Joel drives his parents’ RV cross country to its new owner on the west coast. Along the way, he quits his job, somehow picks up the brother of an ex-girlfriend, makes a lot of food, dumps the same brother of the same ex-girlfriend, visits and gets drunk with his mother’s childhood friends, makes a lot more food, and–oh, yeah–talks to the ghost of his mother, like a lot. All of which made for an entertaining (albeit somewhat detour-laden) road trip. In the midst of all of this it became clear just how directionless Joel actually was.

Earlier in his life, he had had a vision for his future, a plan in mind for what he wanted to accomplish. Dreams. But somewhere along the way all of that evaporated. Nothing tragic caused it. No great turn of events brought it about. It simply…was. And it was in that quiet dissolution of Joel’s life that Ricker’s talents truly shone.

I kept waiting for the big reveal, the explanation of why Joel was allowing life to happen to him rather than making life happen for him. The further I read, the more frustrated I became waiting for some explanation of where Joel had gotten so off track, why his life was such a mess—anything that might justify the pointlessness of his existence. But it didn’t come, and ultimately I realized it didn’t matter. What did matter was stepping out of that rut and finding a new path.

And it was those first tentative steps Joel took at the end of the book that made all my questions and frustrations worthwhile. And it was there, toward the end, that I found the line that best sums up this book for me:

Maybe it’s a mercy we can only see ourselves through a reflection.

Detours is a witty, entertaining, romantic road trip. It’s also an insightful exploration of what happens when our lives become static and what it takes to get us back on track. Nicely done, Jeffrey.

Now, stay out of my head.

Children of the Knight - A Selfish S.O.B.'s Review

I’m a selfish S.O.B. No, it’s true. I am.

I know this because of the barometer by which I gauge myself: my partner.

Like countless others we have those conversations about what we would do if we won the lottery. Tom wants to open a privately-funded homeless shelter that doesn’t get mired in all the bureaucratic red tape. Or maybe it’s a senior citizen home? See, I’m too selfish to remember.

Me? I want to quit my job and focus entirely on writing. Priorities: gotta have 'em.

I’m not proud of this fact. Nor have I resigned myself to my nature either. Often times, I’ll volunteer to help out with projects at church or I'll hear of initiatives taken up by my employer or close friends that inspire me to be involved. The thing is, once the time rolls around to step up and count myself in, I find a million and one excuses to not participate. See what I mean? S.E.L.F.I.S.H. S.O.B.

So when I come across someone like Michael J. Bowler, I realize just how out of my depth I am. This guy deserves to be canonized. Seriously, look him up; you’ll see what I mean. His passion for runaways and homeless kids and the juveniles already trapped in a legal system that dooms them to failure from the get-go is awe inspiring. Reading Children of the Knight was like being head-jacked directly to Bowler and his 30-years of life experience with countless young people who our system has marginalized and failed to protect.

Into the midst of their despair and struggle, Bowler drops King Arthur, who has returned just as the prophecy foretold he would when his country needed him most. Apparently, since the United States began as a British Colony, it counts as his country as well.

Arthur sees the struggle of the abandoned, abused, and homeless children of Los Angeles and begins a new Crusade – a Children’s Crusade meant to better their lives and, by proxy, the deteriorating neighborhoods they call home. He begins a new Round Table made up of runaways, juvenile delinquents, members from dueling gangs, and teen prostitutes. It’s a daunting and impressive dream, but Arthur repeatedly proves he’s up to the task.

And therein lies my problem.

I felt as if Bowler loved these children and his vision for their utopia so much that they were unstoppable. No task seemed too great, no adversity too difficult for them to overcome. They all seemed to have hearts of gold and virtuous cores, no matter how difficult or challenging their upbringing. Gangbangers, prostitutes, drug addicts, the children of privilege, everyone's heart of stone seemed to melt almost immediately under Arthur's love and guidance.

Similarly, most of the adults in positions of power (government heads, drug dealers, etc.) seemed to be nothing more than maniacal villains out to thwart Arthur and his young knights at every turn. While I'm not suggesting that a drug dealer would necessarily have a heart of gold, some nuance to their characters would have rounded them out and allowed them to be more interesting people. Instead, most of the characters felt more like types to me rather than living, breathing human beings, and the book read more as an agitprop piece instead of a novel.

I've read numerous reviews of this book in which the reviewer comments on how moved they were by the current plight of homeless children in our society, thanks to Bowler's book. Unfortunately, for me, though the lives of these characters might turn dire, even deadly at times, I didn't feel the connection with them to make me care (selfish S.O.B., remember?). Instead, the book came across as heavy-handed. There were so many speeches concerning the current state of affairs and the steps that should be taken to rectify them that, to be honest, had I not received a free copy of the book for review, I wouldn't have finished it.

Until we came to the climax, that is.

At the end of the book I felt Bowler found his stride and brought everything to an intense close. For the first time, I wanted to know what would happen next and found myself caring about these characters. In fact, rather than ride my bike to work, I took the metro just so I could keep reading and find out what happened. And I'll admit that this old selfish S.O.B.'s eyes did start to burn and get a bit teary a couple of times near the end.

Bowler also managed to keep a lot of balls in the air throughout the novel. He did an admirable job of keeping numerous storylines going without letting them fall to the wayside.

This left me believing that Bowler does have some stories to tell that I would like to read. In this case, however, I felt as if he was so close to his subject matter that he couldn't get the kind of perspective needed to flesh out his characters and make them relatable and, in turn, make me care.

Dickinstein: Emily Dickinson - Mad Scientist

There’s something about a book that doesn’t live up to your expectations – especially when that book and its author have expectations of their own that blow yours out of the water.

I originally heard of Shannon Yarbrough’s Dickinstein: Emily Dickinson – Mad Scientist from Jerry Wheeler of Out In Print: Queer Book Reviews. He ranked it as one of his top 13 for 2013. Intrigued, I marked it as a To Read on Goodreads. Surprisingly, Mr. Yarbrough contacted me, offering me a copy of the book for an honest review. So note to self: you never know who’s looking at what you post!

Other than watching the movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I’ve had little experience with the monster mash-ups released over the last few years. While they seemed right up my alley, I just hadn’t gotten around to reading them yet. I envisioned campy, tongue-in-cheek narrative where, in a fit of machismo, Mr. Darcy pulls out a weed whacker and goes to town on a bunch of the walking dead. That’s what I expected from Yarbrough’s Dickinstein, too. Well, not so much Mr. Darcy, but maybe Emily Dickinson running around like Madeline Kahn at the end of Young Frankenstein. Instead, what I got was a thoughtful, intelligent, and beautiful exploration of life and death, and faith and science.

In the book, a young Emily Dickinson receives a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and is fascinated by its premise. She decides to make a machine of her own – a “second life apparatus” as she calls it – to bring back the small, dead creatures she finds in her regular walks through nature. Successful with her experiments, she confides in a few close acquaintances. A couple of these confidants suggest that, with the help of her device, she might bring back a human being, something she’d not really considered before. This was her gift to nature; she’d not given much thought to playing God. But when a close friend dies unexpectedly, she finds herself willing to do anything to save them.

Yarbrough wrote Dickinson like he knew the woman – intelligent, witty, peculiar, and reclusive. I could easily envision the Dickinson in this novel as the prolific woman of letters history has shown her to be. Her love of nature, her fascination with death, her idiosyncrasies – they are all deftly handled by Yarbrough in his eloquent and poetic prose. His writing made me feel as if I was one of the fortunate few that Dickinson let in to her small circle of friends, walking the garden paths of the Dickinson Homestead with her and exploring the town of Amherst, Massachusetts by her side. It had the feel of a very private memoir. And each time I opened its pages, I felt as if I’d been given admission to her personal world. Dickinson’s joys and fears, her insecurities and secret desires all played out beautifully on its pages.

Not satisfied with one style of prose, Mr. Yarbrough threw in a second, something more in the vein of Shelley’s Frankenstein. I was surprised when he went all gothic on me for several chapters toward the end of the book as the plan to bring a human being back to life unfolded. It felt as if he was channeling one of the romantics for several thousand words. Then he finished the novel by returning to the quieter, more contemplative style from earlier in the book.

All in all, a highly enjoyable and thoughtful read, one that I strongly recommend.