What Fiction Book (other than Science Fiction or Fantasy) have you recently finished?

[csyphrett]

16 hours ago, Spence said:

Thx, good to hear. 

The Tom Cruz movies were lacking.

Plus Cruz just didn't have the stature to carry the part.

Odd, but I have not read them all.

 

The ones I read were all real world.

I think he is talking about running blind. The villain was a profiler who had come in contact with these women, or had targeted them through their files from the Army. She had decided that she wanted to kill her sister and set up a false serial killer profile/MO and essentially got close enough to put these women to sleep and drowned them with paint. In some of the cases, the victims brought the paint into the house for their own murder.

 

Reacher was dragged into this because he knew the women, and because of the false profile. I can't remember how he figured out what was going on now.

CES    

[Sundog]

That's the one

 

[csyphrett]

Read two Atlee Pine books by David Baldacci.

 

A minute to midnight has Pine searching for her missing sister in her home town just as someone decides to get revenge.

 

Daylight leads Pine to New Jersey where her search leads her to a conspiracy and to what had happened to her sister years before.

CES   

[csyphrett]

Mercy by Baldacci is the last of the Atlee Pine set where the Pine Sisters are reunited with each other and their other relatives after thirty years.

CES

[csyphrett]

Read Wrecked as Isiah and Dodson try to help a woman find her mother and stop mercenaries from getting away with murder

CES

[death tribble]

The Scarlet Pimpernel by the Baroness Orczy

Read this for the first time. An unknown Englishman is rescuing French aristocrats from the French revolutionary authorities helping them to safety in Britain. It is entertaining as husband and wife spar and the sinister Chauvelin tries to catch the elusive Englishman.

 

[Tech]

I've read The Hiders in Darkness and The Hiders in Darkness 2: The Great Forests

[csyphrett]

Read No Plan B by Child and Child and Long Shadows by Baldacci.

 

No Plan B has Jack Reacher investigating why a woman was pushed under a bus.

 

Long Shadows brings back Amos Decker, the Memory Man, to solve why a federal judge and her private bodyguard were killed.

CES   

[csyphrett]

Read Sierra Six by Greany. Courtland Gentry, the Gray Man, uncovers an old enemy who plans to nuke Mumbai.

CES 

[Twilight]

Recently, as in a few moments before this post was made, I finished reading The Fort by Gordon Korman.  It's his 100th book and it's about a group of five young teenagers who find a hidden bunker while exploring after a hurricane.  The trap door was revealed when the storm blew away a bunch of top soil.  Anyway the boys claim the bunker as their own, it was made by some eccentric billionaire so it's well stocked and has a record player a TV and VCR with lots of records and movies, declaring it to be their fort and spend as much time there as possible.  For some of the boys this is to escape the realities of their lives, like the boy who's being abused by his stepfather.  Or the boy who's parents abandoned him and his brother, who is now being raised by his grandparents and who's brother is falling in with a bad crowd much as their parents had.

 

Anyway it's a really good book, like most of Korman's stuff.  I recommend it.

[death tribble]

Reversible Errors by Scott Turow

A man is due to be executed for murders committed a decade ago. An ex-prosecutor and his young assistant begin to go through the process of stopping the execution while the prosecutor and detective check to see if they can stop it. The story goes back to the original investigation and then the prospect of new evidence. You don't find out what actually happened and why until close to the end and then will the lawyers be able to save the man. The judge in the original case is out due to addiction but she and the defending lawyer start a relationship.

If you like legal work then this is a book for you.

[Christopher R Taylor]

"Some Danger Involved" by Will Thomas

Victorian era mystery, involving a brilliant detective hiring an assistant and the case they become involved in.  Its not Sherlock Holmes, the detective is clever and capable but not a "reasoning machine" and there are no "gotcha" deduction tricks.  Barker (the detective) is more like Doc Savage, he's big and tough and fights well but is also brilliant and learned.  The case is about anti semitism and goes deep into the history of Jews in London.

[Joe Walsh]

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

 

This is the first book by Doctorow that I've read.

 

Set in and around present-day San Francisco, the book starts out as a pretty standard mystery story, then morphs into something of a techno-thriller. The characters are strongly drawn. Early on some of the character interactions reminded me of Heinlein's awkward handling of masculine characters, but thankfully that wasn't continued in the rest of the novel.

 

The protagonist is a freelance forensic accountant who, nearing retirement, gets one last job that kicks off the story. A cliche start to be sure, and as I mentioned the first part could have been written by anyone familiar with the standard conventions of mystery stories. Don't get me wrong, it's competently-written, but there's nothing really surprising going on until the initial mystery is resolved. From there, it gets a lot more interesting. The book spends time with various interesting characters and the plot sometimes zigs where others would zag.

 

Overall, I found it to be an enjoyable read/listen. Thanks to a recent Kickstarter, I have both the physical book and the audio book. I read the first few and last few chapters, listening to the rest on my way to/from work. For those interested in audiobooks, I can recommend this one. Wil Wheaton did a good job on the audiobook.

 

Overall, I'd say this one is worth checking out if you're into mysteries, techno-thrillers, and/or the intersection of cryptocurrencies, organized crime, the legitimate accounting world, and government.

 

Edited May 21, 2023 by Joe Walsh

[csyphrett]

Read the Gray Man by Greaney. After killing a relative of foreign power's president, Courtland Gentry is hunted by the company in business with that president. Against all odds, he shows why he is rightfully feared.

CES  

[csyphrett]

Read Burner by Greany. The Gray Man has been offered a job to strike at Russian intelligence finances. The result is a chase for a banker and his cell phone

CES

[death tribble]

The Continental Op by Dasniell Hammett

A collection of short stories about a detective working for the Continental detective agency. Crime most certainly does not pay and end up with the ultimate punishment. Life is not nice in this slice of Americana. Well worth a look.

[csyphrett]

Read the Runaway by Petrie. Peter Ash tries to help a woman running from her serial killer husband

CES

[death tribble]

The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology

This is a collection of short stories that Boris Karloff curated. There are stories by Poe, Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg and Roald Dahl among others. There is one that I don't think is scary but perhaps I don't understand it ? That is about reading a grave. Poe's story has a sequel written by another writer and both of these are good. Lovecraft and August Derleth have Cthulhu Mythos stories. There is another good one called the Mind Worm by C M Kornbluth who I had not heard of before.

[csyphrett]

On 9/19/2023 at 4:24 PM, death tribble said:

The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology

This is a collection of short stories that Boris Karloff curated. There are stories by Poe, Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg and Roald Dahl among others. There is one that I don't think is scary but perhaps I don't understand it ? That is about reading a grave. Poe's story has a sequel written by another writer and both of these are good. Lovecraft and August Derleth have Cthulhu Mythos stories. There is another good one called the Mind Worm by C M Kornbluth who I had not heard of before.

Kornbluth was a pulp writer in with Howard, Lovecraft, Ashton and the rest. I don't know if he was in that circle but he was in that era along with Silver John's Wellman, De Grandin's Quinn, and Street and Smith, the publishers of the Shadow and Doc Savage.

CES   

[death tribble]

The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

Three men come together in Los Angeles in 1950. One is an ex-police officer and is a fixer for Howard Hughes. One is a young police officer detective who finds a dead body that nobody wants to investigate because there are implications that it is a homosexual killing. The other is a police lieutenant brought in to investigate communist influence in a union working for the movie studios. The fixer and Lt know each other and do not like each other. The detective is assigned to help look into the leadership of the UAES union and its left leaning backers. Throw in Mickey Cohen and more killings plus the attempted infiltration into the Communist union circles and you have a very absorbing and nasty look at the past.

This is not for everyone as the violence is graphic but it is brilliant

[Rich McGee]

On 9/19/2023 at 4:24 PM, death tribble said:

There is another good one called the Mind Worm by C M Kornbluth who I had not heard of before.

 

On 9/20/2023 at 11:32 PM, csyphrett said:

Kornbluth was a pulp writer in with Howard, Lovecraft, Ashton and the rest. I don't know if he was in that circle but he was in that era along with Silver John's Wellman, De Grandin's Quinn, and Street and Smith, the publishers of the Shadow and Doc Savage.

He travelled in somewhat different circles than the pulp "weird tales" authors you cited, and was a member of the more politically-minded Futurians clique.  He's best known for predictive or humorous scifi, particularly the collaborative novels he did with Frederick Pohl and Judith Merrill and his large body of short stories.  I've enjoyed what I've read of him over the years, although some of it was unexpectedly dark for someone who also did humor as well as Keith Laumer when he felt like it.  Almost all his stuff was written between 1940 and 1958, and he died of a heart attack very young at age 34.  If I had to pick a favorite, I'd recommend either the Space Merchants or Gladiator-At-Law, but I've never read a real dud from the man.  verything he's written has been compiled several times, and he should be easy to find in the US inter-library loan system if you go looking.

 

You may very well have seen one of his short stories "Little Black Bag" on Night Gallery, which has Burgess Meredith as a washed-up alcoholic doctor who stumbles across a medical kit from the future with self-operating tools that let him start on a road to recovery.  It's rather touching, and also a stealthy prequel to another short story of his called the Marching Morons, which (in a very non-PC fashion) dwells on some of the same issues the much more modern and better known Idiocracy did.

 

On topic, I just finished re-reading Rex Stout's Too Many Cooks, one of my favorites of his Nero Wolfe series.  This is probably my fourth or fifth re-read in the last 50+ years, but of course the novel's only 190 pages in mass market format, so that represent less actual reading time than many modern 1000+ page behemoths that still fail to finish in one volume.  Originally published in 1938, it offers an insight into Stout's own progressive-for-the-time attitudes toward the way law enforcement (in West Virginia, no less) treated Black Americans, with Nero Wolfe soundly rejecting race-based bigotry (albeit remaining predictably silent on the subject of sexism) and solving the murder (by a killer in blackface, no less) because of it. 

 

It's also one of very few Wolfe stories to get a proper sequel, as the 1964 novel A Right To Die features the return of a much-older Paul Whipple (one of the Black spa staff members and the key witness in Too Man Cooks) asking Nero (whose own age remains nebulous and unchanging) to save his adult son from an unjust charge of murdering the (White) woman he was living with.  It's another window in Stout's attitudes toward racial relations and discrimination, and comparing the two books shows how much had changed in public standards over a quarter-century of time passing.

 

Highly recommend both if you're a Stout fan and have somehow missed them, or if you just enjoy well-written mysteries with extremely clever dialog in general.  There are undeniably artifacts of period racism in both, but the worst of it is soundly condemned rather than being a casual background element as is often the case.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Cop Hater, the first 87th precinct book by Ed McBain.  Its of historical interest as the first police procedural book but isn't particularly gripping as a book.  Its not bad, but it is far from the best of the series, and McBain while inventing this genre is learning his way through what does and does not need to be explained or described.

[Rich McGee]

13 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Its of historical interest as the first police procedural book...

It might be his first procedural, but the subgenre predates the 87th Precinct stuff by years.  Lawrence Treat tends to get credit for kicking things off with the 1945 "V As In Victim" novel, but there are some pretty clear prototypes being written by former policemen back into the 1920s and 30s - even farther if you really want to stretch the definition.  Most of the really early stuff is nearly forgotten for good reason - I've tracked down a few over the years and found them pretty awkward - but the popularity of fictionalized "realistic crime" films, radio and eventually TV in the 40s and 50s drove a huge boom going forward that helped really put procedurals on the map.  McBain, Waugh, and the versatile Creasey were part of that boom but they weren't breaking entirely new ground, more refining the style in the literary end of the pool.

[Rich McGee]

On 9/20/2023 at 11:32 PM, csyphrett said:

Kornbluth was a pulp writer in with Howard, Lovecraft, Ashton and the rest. I don't know if he was in that circle but he was in that era along with Silver John's Wellman, De Grandin's Quinn, and Street and Smith, the publishers of the Shadow and Doc Savage.

CES   

Heh.  In an odd coincidence, I discovered today he also write limericks.  A sample of his work:

 

A burlesque dancer, a pip
Named Virginia, could peel in a zip;
	But she read science fiction
	And died of constriction
Attempting a Moebius strip.
		-- Cyril Kornbluth, "The Unfortunate Topology"

[death tribble]

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Short and to the point. A British journalist is covering the French war against the Viet Minh in Vietnam when he meets an American who is interested in a third way for the country and how this tragically fails.

Less than 200 pages and some claim it points how the American involvement would ultimately fail. Worth a read.