The Con Man by Ed McBain

11Jul. Kindle.

Okay, so I finished the Dick Francis book earlier today. What can I say - McBain's 87th Precinct books are short - and tense. This one was actually under 200 pages. You can't fault the action, though.

There are actually three con men in the story, a pair who work doubles cons strictly for the money and a really nasty guy who cons unattractive spinsters out of their savings then feeds them a dinner well-laced with arsenic and dumps their bodies in the river.

Several of the cops we are getting acquainted with at the 87th are featured and I think Arthur Brown is a new addition to the cast. He has the distinction of being a black cop in a city in a time where the desk clerk can inform him that they don't rent rooms to niggers. Since the first call for their attention to the cash con guys is from a young black girl, he feels a particular interest in the case.

Detective Carella is the main point man on the other case, and his wife, Teddy, gets into the act in a big way.

I am slightly annoyed by the images of police files. I suppose it is nice that Kindle now supports images, but they are too small for me to read even with the scale as big as I have it. I suppose I could try increasing it even more, but that would slow me down so - even if it works on the images. So, I tried it, the scaling does work on the images, but if I continue to read at that scale I get 10 to 15 words on a page by actual count. I don't think I can click fast enough to read comfortably at that rate. What a gift it would have been for Grandmother, who was nearly blind. Before her death, my sister and I spent hours scanning the pages of a book that she wanted to reread and blowing them up and printing them so she could read them. Oh well, I just checked and that book is not available in a Kindle edition.

Wild Horses by Dick Francis

11Jul. Kindle.

Film again. This time the hero, Thomas Lyon, is a director. Although based in California, he is on location in England near his childhood home to make a film based on a book about an unsolved death that occurred when he was a small child. One level of conflict is between Thomas and the novelist who (silly man) signed a contract which basically gave the film company the right to do whatever they wanted to do. The writer, of course, is committed to his ethereal and inconclusive novel, and Thomas is charged with making a film that will draw crowds, that is, neither ethereal nor inconclusive.

In spite of the vagueness of the novel and the interference of the writer, bits and pieces start coming out and it becomes clear that someone is determined to prevent the completion of the film - if it means killing the star, the director, or a harmless little old lady who just might hold the critical piece of evidence. It should not need saying that the original crime occurred at a training stable.

It seems to be all about knives - but in characteristic style, Francis does tie in the wild horses. I was impressed by the visual images that he produced. The hero thinks in images, certainly appropriate for a film director. Francis made me see the images in Thomas's mind - and want to see the film.

Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos by Donna Andrews

10Jul. Kindle.

What a relief! This one is far better than the first two (peacocks and puffins). I was sure I remembered that from having read it some time ago, but it was worth the rereading to verify my memory which, as we all know, is faulty at best.

Andrews managed that satisfying feat - neither the murderer nor the murdered is anyone we mind seeing either dead with a knife in his back or carted away by the constabulary in handcuffs. My current thinking is that this may be one of the defining elements of the cozy mystery (I'm trying to write that without quotation marks, but it is difficult - it is just such a precious little phrase).

Flamingos flaunts all the silliness of the earlier two, but somehow doesn't quite sink to the level of utter ridiculous stupidity. Tall, dark and handsome Michael's mother has returned; she managed to be absent for the first two books, and she is an absolute monster. She is shaping up into the mother-in-law from hell - a reliable source has informed me that he and Meg actually marry and commit parenthood in future volumes. The reader should not be surprised by Michael's mother's monsterness since we all know that dogs grow to resemble their owners (or vice versa - dogs in personality and owners in appearance, maybe) and we know that she is the owner of the dog from hell. Yes, the infamous Spike of the earlier books is fully present in this one.

The setting is a craft fair and revolutionary war battle re-enactment chaired by Michael's mother, to the disgust of all and sundry since she is a newcomer to the area. I won't even attempt to explain how the flamingos figure into that.

Terms of Enlistment by Marko Kloos

9Jul. Kindle.

Mr. Kloos made excellent use of his study of the classics - Heinlein, in particular. He didn't wrap it up as cleanly as Heinlein did Starship Troopers, but he did manage an ending that made the book complete enough to stand alone. I know he didn't intend it to stand alone because the next book is in my queue already, and there are two heavy-duty lines trailing out of the end of it - the competition for land in the form of liveable planets with the aliens and the parting with his sweetie. The girlfriend aspect is one that Heinlein left strictly alone - no girls allowed in the Mobile Infantry. And as for aliens, Heinlein's world was already fully engaged in a war with the "bugs" when the book began.

The action is fairly clear. The bootcamp sequence is fairly well done, we are told about the high drop- out rate, but don't really experience it. Kloos's world is far more dystopic than Heinlein's. A large portion of the population of Earth resides in Public Residence Clusters - nowadays we call them "the projects." They collect minimal rations and simply exist - killing each other and taking drugs. The occasional full- scale riot is addressed by the army and the military is the only avenue of escape. Our hero, Andrew, makes the cut and has no intention of returning to a PRC.

That does bring up a minor point - Kloos may be a little heavy on acronyms. I suppose it is partly to reinforce the military setting of the major part of the book. I find that I tend to "read fast" through battles and passages heavy in quasi-military babble whether the context is medieval knights in armor or space aliens. It generally doesn't make much difference to my understanding of the story. And, in all fairness, I suppose there are readers (my imagination conjures hordes of adolescent boys) who really enjoy that stuff.

Crooked Man by Tony Dunbar

8Jul. Kindle.

Tubby Dubonnet is not a good guy hero type like A. Scott Fenney in Accused. Of course, he isn't exactly investigating a homicide either. There was a murder, the genre does rather require it, but the murder was none of his business. His main problem is how to get rid of the million in cash that the murder victim placed in his keeping - before becoming the murder victim, of course. He tries spending it, but decided that was too difficult. He tried spliting up and banking it, but found that the feds track large deposits. Poor guy - such problems he has.

The case he is actually working is a malpractice action for a transvestite stripper against a plastic surgeon who failed spectacularly to darken his skin.

The unsettling thing is that the people who should be good guys turn out to be bad, sometimes really bad, and the bad guys are just trying to make their way and keep milk and wheaties on the table for the kids. Maybe that's what I found uncomfortable about the second one of these - which was the first that I read.

Dunbar is developing a running cast of characters - Adrian of Monster Mudbug fame, the venial sheriff (I won't give you his name because I can't figure out how to make a French accent in Notepad), his greedy ex-wife and their three daughters, not to mention his secretary, CherryLynn. Most of them are characters in the sense that goes beyond mere people who populate the story. We are even introduced to Jerome and his godmother, the praline lady, who figure largely in the second story. An entertaining bunch.

Vicky Peterwald: Target by Mike Shepherd

7Jul. Kindle.

Let me see, what was most annoying about this book? Hard to say - lots of annoying things. Ending in the middle is always annoying. The thread of near porn running throughout was annoying. It seemed to me that killing the first male sex object was unnecessary, except that it gave Vicky the opportunity to kill a bunch of people. His replacement was essentially a clone - minus the duelling scar. The whole situation is utterly assinine. Maybe the "emperor" is being drugged by his trophy wife. Even that makes it difficult to understand how someone raised to rule could allow his empire to be systematically destroyed around him.

And then there is Vicky. Who/what is Vicky? There seem to be several versions of her that switch in and out without warning. Is she the slut with one thing only on her mind, calculating wardrobe malfunctions for maximum effect? Is she the naval officer having difficulty with her dual role as Lieutenant and Grand Duchess? Is she the woman concerned about the fate of the populations of the planets that her stepmother is destroying economically? Is she jealous of Kris Longknife or worshipful?

And when Vicky is smuggled off the homeworld - what happens to her faithful staff? I don't believe Miss Vicky spared them a thought. I suppose they were simply left behind to be tortured and murdered by the Empress's myrmidons. Granted, they had never developed the character status that Kris's entourage has.

I have been known to complain that the Kris Longknife stories all seemed to have the same plot. Maybe the plot of this one was supposed to be "Vicky Peterwald grows up," but he didn't do much of a job of it. I suspect that he was much to fond of the spoiled slutty bad girl to enjoy making her into a strong thinking woman. Of course, he never gave her a chance. How could she possibly measure up to the amazing Kris Longknife, and he compares them continually - usually through Vicky's own words and thoughts. I think it is appropriate for an author to like his/her character - but there are limits. This was supposed to be about Vicky - and it was still just a Kris showcase. At least he didn't have one of her sex partners accidentally call her Kris - he did slip and call the main character in another book Kris.

Lord of the Isles by David Drake

6Jul. Kindle.

Fairly standard fantasy quest. Instead of a hapless hero who has been raised ignorant of his destiny, we have three hapless heroes (okay, one is a girl) who have been raised ignorant of their destinies. They all grew up in the same backwater hamlet and within a period of weeks they are all trotted off on their quest(s). Unfortunately, their quests never become particularly clear to the reader. There must be more volumes - after all, he committed that crime of series fiction and left things hanging over the cliff. Maybe that is just tradition. Tolkien did it, so it must be the way it is done.

The prologue was very engaging - the backlash from a great working of magic wipes out the center of civilization and a minor wizard survives and is washed up on the shore near the aforementioned hamlet. Gradually, we discover that not only was she swept across the sea from destroyed Yole, she was swept a thousand years out of time. Unfortunately, she remains a fairly minor character. She does become the quest guardian for one of the three; the local hermit accompanies another; and the third picks up a six- inch tall redheaded invisible (to everyone else) sprite for his companion.

This went off into "Volume II" mode fairly early on - switching precipitously among the three crisis-rich quests. It wasn't particularly difficult to follow the three threads; there was just that jolt at the beginning of each and every chapter - okay, where are we now?

Drake produced some fairly nasty bads, including some insectile zombies, revived by a careless wizard. My biggest problem with it is that at the end of volume one we really don't know where he is headed.

Accused by Mark Gimenez

4Jul. Kindle.

About time somebody took on Texas for a murder mystery venue. I enjoyed this, seemed slowish at times - but I guess I have gotten conditioned to cop action and this was lawyer not so much action. He did get beaten up, but since he had stirred up the cartels and the mob and sundry local bad guys it seemed inevitable.

The setting was Galveston although the guy is actually based in the Dallas area. I never knew that Galveston is actually an island. I have heard "Galveston island" but always assumed that it was one of those coastal islands that was off Galveston. Nope - the city itself is on the island. Seems like lunacy to me, my father worked for the Corps of Engineers out of New Orleans and I know that all those gulf islands get scrubbed down to the sand by hurricanes periodically. Seems a lot like building a subdivision in the arroyo that runs through the middle of town - except that builder sold them to flatland furriners who didn't know any better, and on those gulf islands the same fools come back and rebuild time after time after time ... .

The hero, Atticus Scott Fenney, addressed by his eleven-year-old daughter, Boo, as "A. Scott," is a lawyer and a total good guy - almost too good. His wife walked out and left him - and Boo. He won a high-profile murder case for a black prostitute who promptly died of an overdose - so he adopted her eleven-year-old daughter, Pajamae. (That name has got to be for real somewhere - couldn't make that up.) He walked out of a partnership in a major law firm because he was fed up with making money for people who already had too much money. Now he has taken his daughters and the rest of his crew to Galveston to defend his ex-wife who is charged with the murder of her lover, a professional golfer. Maybe it is the name; Atticus Finch is the prototype good lawyer. I wonder if the mothers of the two infants that I know named Atticus are trying to program their sons to be lawyers.

The future of the whole bunch of them hangs on the outcome of this trial. His practice is not making enough to support them. And he has two offers hanging - one is a return to his old law firm with a corner office and a cool million a year, the other is a seat on the federal bench at a much more modest salary - although more than I would make in about ten years. Guess which one he wants - and stands to lose if he loses the case.

Sun on Fire by Victor Amar Ingolfsson

3Jul. Kindle.

The title is, to put it mildly, unsubtle once you find out that there was a person named Sun and she died in a fire. It certainly points in big neon letters to the provacation behind the primary plot. And once the convoluted connections among the initially unrelated characters began to emerge, I started thinking about the Orient Express which was pretty much on point. Still, there were a couple of major twists, and he is certainly not the first to appropriate what is possibly Agatha's most stunning plot - unless you consider And Then There Were None, which is sort of the reverse of the Orient Express plot. I'll have to think about that when I get to them in my Agatha reread.

There were a few things which I figured were translation artifacts - odd word choices: a formal word when a casual one would have been more appropriate, and a one or two the other way around - but then the afternotes identify an Icelandic/British couple as the translators. Maybe British English really is that different from American English.

The story fits right in with the other Scandinavian mysteries that I have read - depressing, every single character had an appalling back story. It was a good read and kept me at it, in spite of the chaos of the past week. The most frustrating thing to me was that he created a really interesting detective team - a Vietnamese raised by an Icelandic couple and the usual drunk - who still lives at home with his mother - and an incredibly neurotic crime scene tech, but I didn't feel that he let me get to know any of them well - just hints ... .

Maybe he has intentions of making these people a series and background will be dropped in along the way.

Paper Towns by John Green

2 Jul. Paper.

I apologize, darling daughter, for not having read this sooner. It has been on the shelf in the bathroom for a number of years. It has been quite some time, but I think I enjoyed it more than the other books of his that I have read.

YA is a tricky genre. The teenage angst has both greater depth and more limitations than most adults recognize. Green is certainly the master of that mind.

Here, a girl in the struggle to become herself drags a group of friends into her quest. Perhaps inadvertently setting them a more concrete quest when she disappears and they feel compelled to find her. Her guide and their clue is Whitman's "Song of Myself," a multi-layered metaphor for almost everything that is or happens in the story.

Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes

1Jul. Kindle.

Nice. Not much in the way of plot - it is a memoir rather than a novel. A little (maybe a lot) repetitious, but not unbearably so. A bit pretentious, perhaps: she is a university professor - and she coyly never reveals to which of the universities in the San Francisco area she is attached (SF State - it's in her wiki. Did she want me to guess that it was Berkeley?) or what is her discipline (creative writing - gotta love wiki). She is a southern country girl by birth and upbringing, perhaps that accounts for what seems to me a bit of an ego trip.

Part of my enjoyment was pure unadulterated green-eyed envy, I would so love to do what she has done: buy a falling down farmhouse in northern Italy and turn it into a showplace like the ones that some of my friends lived in. Personally, I would choose the Friuli instead of Tuscany, Tuscany is SO cliche! (How's that for a little pretentiousness?)

A minor irritation: it was not always clear when the English word or phrase that followed an Italian word or phrase was a translation and when it was simply another item in the list. Mechanics. And the one word that made me twitch each of the many times I encountered it was "siesta" - in five years, I never heard that word spoken in Italy by an Italian. Over in the Friuli, it was "riposo," a lovely evocative word when considered with its English cognate. "Siesta" is Spanish, "riposo" is the Italian word for exactly the same thing; siesta is unquestionably more commonly understood in the States, but in my experience, native speakers of Spanish and Italian are very defensive of the differences between their languages.

Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers

27Jun. Kindle.

Talk about taking it home. The setting is Duke's Denver and the suspect arrested by the dependably incorrect Inspector Suggs is the Duke himself, Lord Peter's older brother. In spite of having little in common with his brother, Lord Peter does love him, if only because his removal would make Lord Peter, himself, the duke - and that is a fate he is committed to avoiding.

Again, as in Whose Body, the plot is terribly convoluted. Coincidence piled on coincidence piled on coincidence, but Sayers makes it all work. We even get a flying trip to the States thrown in for good measure. Lord Peter makes the return in a two-seater in foul weather with a daredevil pilot - Lindbergh had already broken the ice on that sort of thing. But from this trip Lord Peter brings the critical piece of evidence - arriving just moments before the jury retires to consider its verdict, thereby saving his brother from the hangman's noose, and himself from the House of Lords.

In addition, Lord Peter's good friend, Charles Parker - a good cop from Scotland Yard - meets the girl of his dreams.

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

26Jun. Kindle.

Okay, THIS is the first of the Lord Peter books - and a complex and gruesome crime it is. The opening event is the appearance of an unidentified body in a bath. The bath happens to belong to the architect hired by the dowager duchess to manage repairs on the church at Denver, the ancestral home of the Wimseys. She naturally calls Lord Peter to counsel and console the poor fellow and to see what he can do for him.

He arrives to find Sayers' caricature cop, Inspector Suggs, hauling the architect and his housemaid off to jail, an utter absurdity, of course. If the architect had done the murder, would he have left the body in his own bath? and called the constabulary?

At about the same time, an important financier has simply disappeared (a Jewish financier, we are frequently reminded). One might guess -- but no, nothing so simple or obvious. In spite of a superficial physical resemblance, the body is definitely not that of the missing businessman.

I reread these first three back to back to back - without commentary - so incidents extraneous to the actual stories have slipped a bit. It may have been in this first one that Sayers fills us in on some important back story. The inimitable Bunter is far, far more than even Bertie Wooster's Jeeves, and Lord Peter is a far deeper character than Bertie Wooster. Bunter was Lt. Wimsey's sergeant - he is sometimes referred to as his batman - during the war (WWI, of course) and led the team that dug him out when he was buried by the collapsing wall of a trench. In which ever of these books it is, Lord Peter has a flashback - easily recognizable to us today as a symptom of PTSD, which hadn't been "invented" yet. They called it shell-shock. Bunter nurses him through it. Lord Peter's vulnerability to Bunter is totally different from the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Jeeves quite blatantly manipulates Bertie while rescuing him from his various stupidities. Maybe I should start taking notes on "Master/Man relationships in British detective fiction" or some such thing.

I'm thinking this is the story which includes the flashback (I remember it well from the TV series) because of the particularly hideous nature of this crime.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers

25Jun. Kindle.

I'm going to have to start checking before I start reading. I thought this $1.99 book must be the first - wrong again. It is the third Lord Peter Wimsey book.

The Lord Peter Wimsey stories definitely have a continuous back story. So I shall immediately go back and get the two preceding this one.

I am continually surprised on rereading how racial and ethnic references that I never noticed before jump out at me. It leaves me wondering where/when/how I became so sensitive to that sort of thing - maybe I read them all before I started teaching school. That could be it.

This crime deals with a matter that was addressed in a lit course I took one summer - surplus women. WWI changed the face of British society in many ways. An entire generation of young men had been wiped out, leaving a society in which women were expected to marry with a demographic landscape lacking husbands for them.

Decider by Dick Francis

24Jun. Kindle.

I read a pile of excellent mysteries and decided it was time to treat myself to another Dick Francis. I am trying to ration them. All of those others are well-written (well, most of them were) and well-crafted and none of them could begin to compare to "the next Dick Francis."

Lee Morris is a builder. He searches out "ruins" and restores/converts them. His newly completed project was a decrepit barn and is now a uniquely liveable house which suits his family down to the ground (so to speak). Unfortunately, his working pattern has always been to complete a project, sell it, and find another ruin to fix. This time his family has dug in their collective heels (all fourteen of them - heels, that is, if you count the baby - wife and six sons, counting the baby), and are demanding to stay put rather than move on to another wreck to live in - another round of leaking roofs and collapsing walls.

At this point, a representative of his unfamily walks in. Francis has presented his readers with some unusual families before, but this time he has outdone himself. In the near view, Morris and his wife have taken "staying together for the kids" to a whole new level. In the long view, the "family" in question is not his family by blood at all. His mother escaped with her life from a brutally abusive husband, and part of her settlement was eight shares in the Stratton family race course. The patriarch of the clan has died and the family is engaged in a vicious battle over the fate of the race course - one group wants to maintain the tradition, and the other to sell out to a developer for as much as they can get.

These people are individually and collectively as nasty as any bunch Francis has ever put on paper, definitely a clan that needs to die out. Although a couple of them eventually turn out to be somewhat human.

Morris is intrigued by the issue at least in part because the structures of the race course badly need updating - and he was, after all, looking for a new ruin. This one ends up more of a ruin than he anticipated, but in the manner of all Dick Francis heroes, he gets things done.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

23Jun. Paper.

This one has been my bathroom book for several weeks, but even at a few pages each time things do eventually get finished. I was tempted several times to bring it out and read it in chunks instead of nibbles, but I resisted.

This was completely fascinating. Why does this marketing campaign rocket a product to the top and another for an equivalent or even superior or the same product utterly fail? Who are the people who make the difference - and what would history look like if Paul Revere hadn't been who he was and where he was and the kind of person he was at the critical moment? I hadn't known that two fellows set out on similar rides that night: Paul Revere headed one direction and a guy named William Dawes in the other. Why does every school child know about Paul Revere's ride and only a very few revolutionary war buffs are aware of the other? According to Gladwell, it is because Revere was just one of those people who knows everyone - a connector.

He compares an "epidemic" of suicides among the young men in Micronesia to smoking among American young people. Why have all attempts to reduce smoking among teens and preteens failed? It seems that kids who take up smoking are the cool kids and others imitate them. The smoking equation is far more complex, but that seems to be one of the triggers. The suicide epidemic was even sadder. The trigger was the suicide of a very popular young man, and many that followed were much younger boys who just wanted to "try it out," not really wanting to die.

Who of my generation doesn't remember Hush Puppies? They were relegated to the back shelves of staid and boring shoe stores until a bunch of cool people with lots of connections decided that they were "in." I believe the standard Class A uniform pump for women in the Air Force is still black patent leather Hush Puppies.

He discusses at great length the people and mechanisms which make things happen. Cool stuff and well told.