Author: Werner Lind

Certain Prey, by John Sandford

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

certainpreyThis tenth novel in Sandford’s popular Lucas Davenport series was my first experience with his work. Usually, I prefer to read a series in order, but this installment can be read just as well out of sequence. Series sleuth Lucas Davenport, a Minneapolis homicide detective (who, by the time of this novel, is actually a deputy police chief) isn’t really the protagonist here; structurally, at least for much of the book, the two pistol-packing female villains are really the co-protagonists, and Davenport the antagonist (albeit one who’s on the side of good). And although I classified it as a mystery, the who-done-it, why and how of the contract killing here isn’t a mystery to the reader; we’re shown the personae, planning, and execution (literally) of the crime at the outset. The element of detection is in seeing how the forces of justice will prove what we already know. And this time, it won’t be easy.

On the plus side, Sandford does a very effective job of creating a really involving, page-turning read, with excellent plotting that throws curves into the story which you often don’t see coming, but which are completely logical outgrowths of the situation and never forced. He hooked me early and hard, to the point where I knew I would finish the book no matter what; and while the adjectives “thriller” and “pulse-pounding” are advertising hype, there genuinely are places with a good deal of suspense and tension here. (Readers familiar with the Twin Cities would probably also say that he does a good job of incorporating their real-life geography into the book; but though I was born in Minneapolis, I wasn’t raised there and have hardly ever been back, so that element was pretty much lost on me.)

His other outstanding feat here is the sheer virtuosity with which he creates professional hit woman Clara Rinker and her employer, millionaire criminal-defense attorney Carmel Loan, who’s hired the former to kill the wife of a fellow lawyer for whom she’s in lust. In keeping with the necessities of a good mystery plot, they’re very worthy opponents for any detective. They’re both smart, cunning, and pretty ruthless (Carmel totally so); Clara’s had years of practice covering her tracks, having started killing for hire when she was 16, while Carmel knows rules of evidence and police procedure from the inside and her wealth and political connections make her almost untouchable.

Obviously, neither of these women are one bit likable as characters (a likable villain is pretty much an oxymoron, anyway). “Don’t worry, I’m just a sociopath. Like you. I’m not a psychopath or anything,” Carmel assures Clara at one point, but her claim to the contrary, she’s both: she not only has a fixed determination to have anything she wants when she wants it, regardless of how much harm she has to do to anybody else in the process, but she derives a warped excitement and enjoyment from inflicting pain and death. Clara doesn’t, as such; for her, killing is just a good-paying job, and some of Carmel’s actions bother even her. But she’s almost (though not quite) without a conscience or normal human empathy, like one of Philip K. Dick’s androids. But both are fully alive, vital, three-dimensional and understandable as characters, and come across as (very flawed) human beings, not just cardboard incarnations of evil –though they are both evil, in their different ways, or capable of doing very evil things. And they’re strong, dominating, formidable characters, who hold your full attention and stay in your memory; like all well-drawn villains, they fascinate, in various ways and at various psychological levels. Sandford also excels at depicting the nuanced, fragile bond that grows between the pair, whose misguided life choices and defective personalities have prevented them from ever knowing real friendship, though there’s a buried part of their psyches that’s starving for it.

Grading just on the strength of his plotting and sharp characterizations of these two women, I’d give Sandford four or five stars here. There are negatives to the book, though, that drag its rating down. I don’t expect villains to be likable; but very few of the characters here are particularly so, including Davenport. Many aren’t drawn in enough depth to be either likable or unlikable, as if the author exhausted his resources on his protagonists. We don’t even get much sense of knowing Davenport from the inside, though Sandford does bring out his phobia of flying in planes, and his liking for escaping job stress by fishing in the North Woods. (Of course, his character is probably developed more in the earlier novels of the series.) He has some unappealing traits, though, including a willingness to cut corners on legal restraints (he was temporarily kicked off the force for brutality some years before). I also don’t think he’s outstanding as a detective –he can be intuitive, and has a good memory for details, but he often doesn’t recognize verbal clues or faces until long after the optimum time for doing so has passed, and he blabs one detail of the investigation to a civilian in a way that even I (with no police training!) recognized as really irresponsible. I got enough entertainment out of the book that I don’t regret reading it, and it earned its stars fairly. But there are other heroes in the genre that I find more congenial than Davenport, and I always prefer action heroines over action villainesses.

Note: There’s a lot of bad language here, including a hefty seasoning of obscenities. There’s no explicit sex, but a number of the characters also have (and demonstrate) coarse sexual attitudes.

Author: John Sandford
Publisher: Berkley, available through Amazon in all formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

1632, by Eric Flint

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

1632Veteran science-fiction writer Eric Flint, the author of this opening book in his Ring of Fire series, self-identifies with the political Left; but his is an old- fashioned, Jeffersonian sort of populist liberalism, which embraces democracy, human rights, religious freedom (as opposed to “freedom from religion”), personal moral responsibility, retributive justice, and widespread gun ownership. When the small town of Grantville, West Virginia is transported, through a super-advanced alien race’s meddling with the fabric of space-time, to Germany during the Thirty Years War, the residents are willing to fight for these principles, in the midst of a maelstrom of rampant evil and oppression; and the reader is soon caught up in cheering them on!

As one might expect, there’s a lot of graphic violence here –the real Thirty Years War was no Sunday school picnic either– but Flint’s characters (at least, the good guys and gals) employ violence only as an instrument of moral order, not in opposition to it. The premise here is really original, and it’s worked out in believable detail that brings it vividly to life; there’s a good balance between action and the quieter aspects of life that build our understanding of the characters and their relationships; the pacing is brisk, and the characters are well-rounded and thoroughly life-like. (Grantville’s local UMW leader, Mike Stearnes, is nominally the protagonist, but there’s really no one “main” hero or heroine; Flint follows a number of characters who play important roles.) Well-researched actual history is incorporated seamlessly into the narrative (I learned some fascinating stuff I didn’t know before, and I majored in history!).

For readers who follow this site, one of the main attractions here are three gun-toting ladies (all of them major characters) who earn the stars above for the kick-butt quotient. High school cheerleader Julie Sims becomes the ace sharpshooter for Grantville’s thrown-together army. (She was seriously training to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team in shooting events before the time-travel incident –and my guess is that she’d have not only qualified, but brought home the gold medal.) Sexually-abused camp follower Gretchen Richter, rescued by the Americans, becomes a force to be reckoned with when she learns to use a pistol. And while a young Jewish lady named Rebecca actually isn’t a very good shot, she doesn’t need to be when she’s packing a sawed-off shotgun. If you like your fictional heroines strong, tough, gutsy, and not a bit bothered by using lethal force, you’ll appreciate these gals. (The only ones who don’t are the bad guys –and their opinion doesn’t matter much once they’re pushing up daisies!)

Note: There are a few instances of unmarried sex here, but nothing explicit; the only sex scene that’s dealt with at length takes place on a couple’s wedding night and isn’t treated in a salacious way. There is quite a bit of bad language, which often includes profanity (Flint confuses this several times with “blasphemy;” but there actually isn’t any of the latter) or the f-word.

Author: Eric Flint
Publisher: Baen Books, available through Amazon in all formats.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

All Souls: A Gatehouse Thriller, by Karin T. Kaufman

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

allsoulsFull disclosure at the outset: Karin Kaufman is a Goodreads friend of mine, and I was one of ten people to claim a free review e-copy of this book. Through much of my reading, I was ready to give it a solid three stars, and the super-strong ending commanded a fourth.

The premise here is that humanity is secretly menaced by a worldwide society of thrill killers, who make the notorious Thugees look like philanthropists, and who are recruited from all walks of normal life, into which they blend anonymously. (Their Gatehouse adversaries call them “Sacks,” short for “Sacks of sh*t”.) By Gatehouse estimates, the society has well over a million members, and has been around for at least 100 years. Organized in hierarchical ranks (members of each rank supposedly don’t cooperate very closely, and hate the other ranks –but they take orders from the higher ranks, and want to advance into them), it has a culture of strange behaviors, like the members taking bizarre secret names and tattooing them on their bodies.

Yet it has apparently no belief system or ideology except conscious embrace of evil and chaotic destruction for its own sake; Sacks apparently have no agenda beyond picking off as many individual innocents as they can without being exposed. The U.S. government –and possibly other governments, but our setting is the U.S.– knows about them and preserves their secrecy. But it combats them with an unofficial arm, the Gatehouse organization, which commands a small army of “hunters” who periodically assassinate individual identified Sacks (as opposed to, say, dealing with them through law enforcement and the court system) at the direction of contacts called “porters.”

Our action-heroine protagonist here is Gatehouse assassin Jane Piper, who’s very competent at what she does, and very motivated –her only sister was butchered by a Sack. She’s as lethal a woman as you’ll ever meet in fiction –but at the same time,one of the most compassionate (the two qualities aren’t incompatible), a decent person who’s kept her humanity and moral compass in a blast furnace of trial. I never had any trouble liking her, nor any doubt of her butt-kicking capabilities.

Early on, Jane reflects that if she stood up and shouted all of the above information in public, nobody would believe her anyway. Apparently, she thinks that the general populace might find this premise far-fetched. Readers might have the same difficulty. The idea is definitely original, but it’s rather hard to suspend disbelief here. While many people do embrace very evil agendas, including the killing of the innocent, hardly any do so while openly and consciously telling themselves that they’re doing so. The vast majority of them have to have some ideological belief system that justifies the evil by telling them that in reality it’s “good,” or for a greater good. I may be naive, but I don’t think Sack recruitment on the basis of “embrace homicidal evil just because it’s fun” would gain as many adherents as they have here. And while I see how Sacks have an interest in keeping their activities secret, I don’t buy the explanation that the government tacitly agrees to cooperate in letting them do so, lest they unleash an even greater blood bath if they’re forced into the open. Credibility is also strained by some individual characters’ motivations. Granted, action-heroine fiction writers often do stretch strict credibility a bit in their premises, and sometimes the tone is sufficiently tongue-in-cheek that the reader doesn’t take such lapses very seriously. Here, though, the tone is pretty serious.

It’s all the more a credit to Kaufman’s ability as a writer, and the strength of this book, that she took that kind of premise and made a four-star book out of it. Her command of language is impeccable –professional, literate, with the kind of painstaking craftsmanship that makes the flow of words seem easy. A Colorado native, she sets her tale in her home state, and the neighboring parts of New Mexico and Wyoming; she’s obviously at home on the ground, with real locations and a sense of place. The plotting is very taut in terms of time, compressed into just seven days –Oct. 27-Nov. 2, All Souls Day. Jane’s a first-person narrator for all but the first chapter, and hers is the perfect voice for the tale. She and the other major characters are all well-drawn. “Gripping” doesn’t begin to describe this book; it grabs you and pulls you along from the starting gate, and I’d have read it in one sitting if I could have.

That’s not to say it’s all action; but the waiting intervals in between are as tense as harp strings. When action comes, it comes quick, realistic, and bloody, with a high body count by the time you get to the last page; Kaufman knows her guns, and she writes action scenes clearly and credibly. Jane’s colleagues tend to be as combat-skilled as she is; and some of their adversaries are extremely deadly and crafty as well. (Generally speaking, in real life I have a problem with governments violating their own laws by sponsoring programs for extrajudicial killing. But I don’t hold operatives like Jane and Nathan responsible for acting in the situational context they’re in. They don’t make the policy; all they can do is protect the innocent and take care to kill only the guilty.) And Kaufman’s plot is a roller-coaster of surprises.

Ultimately, though, this is more than a novel of slam-bang action. It becomes a serious exploration of the possibilities of moral conversion, from great evil to willing embrace of good; of guilt and atonement; of the limits of forgiveness –in short, the kinds of serious moral questions that occupy the great literature of the Western tradition; underneath the smell of gun smoke and blood, we’re in the same realm here that Hawthorne and Dostoevsky, Undset and Graham Greene have visited before. Since this is a series opener, it’ll be interesting to see where Karin takes this theme in future books. And I’ll find out; because I definitely want to follow the series!

Note: there’s not only no sex here, but no romantic sub-plot. Gatehouse doesn’t encourage its operatives to marry, and doesn’t allow them to stay in the organization if they conceive a child. (If Jane ever decides that she wants a man in her life, I think that she deserves a good one, and that she’d be a great wife; but for now, she’s content to be alone, and doesn’t obsess about men and sex.) There is a fair amount of bad language, including some use of the f-word.

Author: Karin T. Kaufman
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, only for Kindle or as an audio book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Real Dangerous Job, by K. W. Jeter

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

kimoh2I was graciously given a free review e-copy of this second series installment by the author, with no strings attached. As in the case of the first one, I blazed through it; it’s compulsively readable, and I made every opportunity I could to log on to it. Had time permitted, I’d have read it in one sitting –it’s that compelling.

Much of the evaluation and background material in my review of Real Dangerous Girl applies to this sequel as well. Here, Jeter brings the immediate story arc begun there to a close, while leaving the future open. The themes of coming-of-age, “primitivism,” and darkness vs. light begun in the first book are also explored further here, to serious effect. Kim has to really grapple here with the significance of what she’s decided to do, and face the fact that it’s changing her into a person who’s less innocent and less gentle, and that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. But that’s set against other psychological factors of self-actualization and self-determination that aren’t wholly negative either. This isn’t the story of a good girl changing to a bad one. It’s the story of an essentially decent girl learning to balance who she is with a world that’s far from decent, with no other guides (besides a very dubious mentor) than her heart and her conscience. And this will be reflected in the real moral choices that come her way.

We get to know Kim better here, as a person as well as the fact that she’s only 17 (as an “emancipated minor” –though we already knew she was pretty young). Other supporting characters are back and developed in more depth as well –not surprisingly, Cole, Donnie, Monica, McIntire and his chief goon Michael (and more surprisingly, TV newswoman Karen Ibanez). Also, we learn that our setting is a city in upstate New York (a character comes “up from Albany,” an expression that wouldn’t apply to New York City, which is down the Hudson from there, but would to cities built in the higher ground above the river valley). Jeter has kept his moral vision and standards of literary quality here. Again, there’s no sex, and bad language is restrained. Action fans who felt that the first novel was light on violence (several people die there, but in only two parts of the book) will get more of it here, and Kim will be an active participant in more of it. Her development into someone who can both psychologically and physically handle that, as Jeter presents it over the course of the two books (rather than overnight) is believable. But again, the violence is handled tastefully, with no wallowing in gore for its own sake.

I didn’t have any issues with plot credibility here, and the pacing and developments are excellently crafted to keep a high level of suspense and tension, again building to a very powerful climax. Jeter imparts a lot of obviously well-researched information about guns and ammo, explosives, body armor and other technical equipment that adds verisimilitude without being info-dumped in in such large doses that it takes away from the movement of the story.

Kim’s a heroine I think many characters can relate to in her moral quandaries, even though they involve extreme situations most people don’t face –because, as she muses at one point, everybody, or just about everybody, at times has people who, at one level, they might like to kill, and figure the world would be better off without. The moral possibilities Jeter is using action-adventure fiction to explore are possibilities, or temptations, that confront us all.

One of the greatest strengths of these books, IMO, is the brother-sister relationship between Kim and Donnie, which is genuinely beautiful and touching (and a two-way street of caring and emotional support). As an only child, I never had a sister; but if I’d had a big sister like Kim, I think I’d have counted it an enormous blessing!

Author: K. W. Jeter
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, only as a Kindle e-book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Geneva Decision, by Seeley James

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

genevaThis fast-paced action novel opens the author’s Pia Sabel series, about an international women’s soccer star who takes over the management of her father’s world-class security firm. My read of it flew pretty quickly; the narrative drive and suspense kept me turning pages as fast as I could. It’s easy to imagine some readers finishing it in a few days –less time if they’re able to read it nonstop, and many might want to.

Brave, principled action heroines are an enormous draw for me in fiction, and Pia Sabel is an outstanding example of the type. Seeley’s skill in bringing her to life is the key to the novel’s success; she’s an intriguing, fully round character with a complex past that shapes her. (Not all of this past is revealed here, and what is revealed is exposed gradually, sometimes in a way that can create a bit of confusion; but stay with it.) Even as a young child, her life was impacted by violence. Her adoptive father is an enormously wealthy business tycoon with a drive and determination that he’s passed on to her. She’s rich in her own right from stocks he settled on her, gifted with a tall, strong physique developed as an athlete, and highly trained as a boxer.

Not a superwoman, she isn’t without her inner demons; she also lacks experience with security and combat, despite growing up around security operatives, and she can be dangerously brash and impulsive. But she has believable strengths that counterbalance these weaknesses. (One is native smarts, which she’s used to applying in competitive situations, and an ability to read people –though she doesn’t always realize when she needs to let these skills kick in.) Above all, she’s a caring, highly ethical person who genuinely wants to help others, whether it’s with her money or with her fighting ability.

Around her, the author has created an edge-of-the-seat plot which opens with a man’s head being blown off on the second page, and keeps up the pace until the end. Piracy and money laundering are the engines that drive the action (though Seeley doesn’t dwell on the intricacies of the latter), which includes life-and-death jeopardies for our heroine, along with plenty of gun fighting and hand-to-hand combat on land and water. The violence isn’t as bloody as it could be, however –while Pia packs bullets as a last resort, her Glock, like other Sabel Security firearms, is equipped to shoot quick-acting tranquilizer darts, and one of her first acts as head of the company is to require these to be the first resort in all cases. Pia’s also not the only strong female character in an action role here; Sabel Security’s Major Jonelle Jackson and Agent Tania are also well-drawn characters whom I expect to see more of in the later books.

I’d characterize the book primarily as action-adventure, but it has elements of the mystery genre too, with a criminal mastermind whose identity is hidden through much of the book, and will take some twists and turns to reveal. (I guessed one of Seeley’s secrets early on, but not all of them.) He develops the geographical settings –Geneva, Cameroon, Lyon, Vienna– with an assurance and vividness that suggests that he’s actually been to these places; and there’s none of the awkwardness here in handling language that’s so often associated with first-time, self-published novelists. He also knows soccer, and knows about guns, high-tech communication equipment, etc. IMO, most of the plot developments and motivations stand up well to examination.

What flaws did I find in the book? First, the descriptions of action scenes were often, for me, hard to follow visually; that is, from the language used, I couldn’t always exactly picture the action in my mind without it seeming awkward (that may be because I haven’t engaged in that sort of fighting, and don’t have the experience to picture it with), or because I couldn’t get the physical layout of the setting, as in the floor plan, etc. Second, Seeley sometimes suddenly drops bits of information that Pia or other characters have known before (but we haven’t) into the mix at moments when they can be useful, in a way that sometimes makes them come across as confusing, or as a Deus ex machina, or both. It would have made the narrative smoother, IMO, to introduce these earlier, and I don’t think it would have required info-dumps to do so.

There’s also a basic credibility problem; under the circumstances, I don’t think Alan Sabel would realistically have sold her the control of his security firm, and I don’t think it’s realistic to imagine the top leadership of the firm being involved in field operations with nobody minding the store at headquarters. (Of course, the author’s purpose demands that Pia be in the field; and the premises of action heroine fiction not infrequently do strain believability a bit.) But these weren’t deal-breakers!

Pia’s a stellar action heroine for the 21st century, and I’m already a committed fan who wants to read every book she ever stars in. My recommendation doesn’t carry the weight that genre author Zoe Sharp’s does; but nevertheless, I’m proud to add my endorsement to hers.

Note: There’s no sex in the book; and though some characters do at times use profanity and obscenity in their speech, the author does exercise a degree of restraint with this.

Author: Seeley James
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Jirel of Joiry, by C. L. Moore

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

jirelOriginally published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the late 1930s, Moore’s five stories featuring beautiful swordswoman Jirel, lady ruler of a feudal fiefdom in medieval France, were as germinal in the development of sword-and-sorcery fantasy as the work of her contemporary, Robert E. Howard. Jirel is a strong and complex character, the first in prose fantasy’s long and honorable list of butt-kicking heroines; tough but not brutal, proud and hot-tempered, but possessing a gentle side, too. Like most people in her time, she’s a loyal daughter of the Church –but she’s not especially religious and wouldn’t make any claims to sainthood! Though she’s a veteran fighter of conventional battles, these stories involve her mostly in adventures of another sort, confrontations with dark sorcery, usually in otherworldly, extra-dimensional realms.

Moore’s prose style here was influenced by Poe and Lovecraft (and she’s fully their equal); her plotting and her creation of vivid fantasy worlds, all significantly different from the others, are highly original, and she excels at evoking a mood of strangeness and menace –Jirel’s approach to Hellsgarde castle is a masterpiece of this sort. Some critics have found fault with Jirel’s having romantic feelings toward her enemy in the first story, Guillaume, considering this a betrayal of feminist orthodoxy; but I think her complex feelings are quite plausible psychologically, and lend the story a depth and tension that it wouldn’t have otherwise.

In the first story, “Black God’s Kiss,” searching for an instrument of vengeance and victory over an invader who’s conquered her domain, Jirel dares to explore a dark tunnel underneath Joiry Castle, that leads to what proves to be a dimensional portal. The sequel, “Black God’s Shadow, finds her undertaking the same path, ut with a very different mission. “Jirel Meets Magic” pits her against a malevolent wizard responsible for the deaths of ten of her men. Sinister sorcery brings her from what everybody expects to be her deathbed into a fantasy world beyond this one in “The Dark Land” –but the move may be from the frying pan to the fire. Finally, in “Hellesgarde,” she goes to seek a small leather casket in an ill-omened castle, demanded as the ransom for some of her soldiers held prisoner by a villainous warlord; but small packeges can contain very potent and dangerous things.

The late Marion Zimmer Bradley dedicated her first Sword and Sorceress anthology to “every girl who grew up wanting to be Jirel.” When all’s said and done, those girls didn’t pick a bad role model!

Note: Jirel (who’s single) remarks in passing at one point that she’s “no stranger to the ways of light loving,” and she can cuss a blue streak when circumstances provoke it. But there are no direct references to sexual activity in the stories, and no directly quoted bad language.

Author: C. L. Moore
Publisher: Ace Books, available through Amazon, only as a printed book at this time.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Pirate Vortex, by Deborah Cannon

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Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆

pirate vortex“Calico Jack” Rackham, a Caribbean pirate hanged soon after his capture in 1720, his lover and fellow pirate Anne Bonny (b. ca. 1700) and a few other characters in this series-opening novel were real-life people, who left behind an historical record in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), by one Capt. Charles Johnson. (Johnson is otherwise unknown; many scholars surmise, as Cannon assumes in her novel, that this was a pen name used by Daniel Defoe.) That book forms our main historical source for piracy in that era, and Cannon’s portrayal here seems to be basically very faithful to the historical data as far as it goes, including the fact that we know nothing of Bonny’s ultimate fate (so we’re free to speculate about any descendants she may have had…) –but that data is very embellished here, with time-traveling SF elements.

The author and I are Goodreads friends, but I checked a copy of the book out from the library where I work (so, it wasn’t a review copy). My rating correctly indicates that I liked the read. For me personally, a few factors kept it from a higher rating; but it’s quite possible that other readers wouldn’t weigh those as much, and would rate it higher. (In fact, several already have!)

Our heroine, Elizabeth Latimer, is an 18-year-old college student at the Univ. of Victoria near Vancouver in British Columbia, Cannon’s own stamping grounds. We’re not told her exact age until a few chapters in, and many American readers wouldn’t know there’s a Victoria, Canada; I confused it with the Australian state of Victoria for the first couple of chapters. Liz’s mom, Tess Rackham kept her maiden name and formerly taught an Archaeology of Piracy class at the university; but when her husband John Latimer was lost at sea in a sailing accident four years earlier, she quit that job and went into marine salvage with her business partner, Cal Sorensen. Though her dad taught her to sail proficiently, Liz hasn’t since that day.

She has some issues from her dad’s death and her mother’s not very hands-on parenting of herself and her 14-year-old sister, and mixed feelings about her parents’ obsession with pirate history: she aspires to go into business and make a prosaic career on dry land –but she’s the self-styled “queen” of her school’s competitive fencing program, and taking the same class her mother once taught. Then on a spring morning, two things happen: she meets mystery youth Daniel Corker, and learns that her mom is presumed lost at sea, in the Bermuda Triangle area. This sets us up for a time-traveling adventure.

Cannon handles language capably, without the poor grammar and diction that bedevil so many self-published authors; she’s also written novels before, so this is no freshman effort. Her prose style isn’t of a sort that calls attention to itself; it’s straightforward, with a focus on the story. The pace is fast, and the plot exciting and eventful, with an emphasis on events, action, and snappy dialogue. Young Adult readers affluent enough to be tech-savvy are the main target audience, and there’s a fair amount of tech-talk, texting jargon, and pop culture references that this group would be more at home with than some other demographics; but older readers wouldn’t be lost with these either, since the context usually furnishes clues for any meaning that’s essential to get, and the same goes for nautical terms, though there’s aren’t a lot of those.

Bonney,_Anne_(1697-1720)Liz herself is a well-drawn, likeable but not perfect character, with some depth and complexity to her. As an action heroine, her fencing skills don’t match those of seasoned pirates, she’s not a good shot, and she’s an inexperienced horsewoman; and more often than not, she needs male rescue when in jeopardy. (Considering the situations here, the violence in the book is restrained, and almost never lethal.) Given her background and situation, though, this is only realistic. She’s also got enough guts to fight when necessary, thinks quickly and resourcefully, and is a strong swimmer. Other characters, like Lu, Stevie, Cal and Jerrit Wang, are also quite lifelike.

Time-travel writers divide over the question of how they handle time paradoxes. Some take the position that you can’t change the past – whatever you did there, you’ve already done. Cannon and others treat the past as malleable – you can change it, and you’d better not, or you might erase yourself and your whole bloodline! Personally, I prefer the former approach; but it wasn’t a problem to accept the latter as a literary conceit. I did have some issues with the plotting. In several cases, IMO, characters make decisions that aren’t well explained, or that it doesn’t seem like they would have made in real life, although they’re necessary to move the plot the way the author wants; and some difficult operations/problems are solved too easily or coincidentally. At one point, we’re apparently barely off shore from Nassau, traveling by sail –but are in very short order in swimming distance of Jamaica on the far side of Cuba, a journey that would take days at least.

Liz has unexplained telepathic connections with animals, and sometimes with people: we’re told at one point that she can tell if someone is lying, and Tess can psychically tell if Liz is in danger. In a plot that already demands some suspension of disbelief, this for me was an element that stretched credibility a bit too much. And while CJ the parrot is cute, he and the horse Fancy display a lot more intelligence than parrots and horses really have. (Parrots imitate the sounds of human speech, but in real life they don’t know what they’re saying.)

Romance isn’t really a stressed theme; Liz has always been too focused on her studies and her fencing to have much time for boys and dating (her sister Lu, at 14, is the more boy-crazy of the two). That said, she is a healthy 18-year old who’s aware of attractive unattached males and appreciates their awareness of her, and who wants to someday be married. There’s a triangle of speculative interest here, and there will be a kiss before the book ends; so very romance-phobic readers will want to avoid it. This novel completes its story arc, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions for the sequel(s). Readers who liked this first book will probably want to continue the series; and I definitely plan to set sail with The Jade Pirate myself sometime!

Note: There are a couple of instances of implied sex here, but nothing explicit. There’s some use of d- and h-word language and vulgarisms, but no obscenity and little profanity.

Author: Deborah Cannon
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Pulptress, edited by Tommy Hancock

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

pulptressPro Se Press is a relatively new small press devoted to the tradition of pulp fiction, as exemplified by the U.S. magazines in the earlier part of the 20th century. Through their Pulp Obscura imprint, they rescue older classic stories from undeserved obscurity; and they’re a venue for contemporary “New Pulp” authors, who seek to keep the tradition and its spirit alive. Founding editor Tommy Hancock created the costumed character of the Pulptress as a role for a model to play in representing Pro Se at pulp conventions and other venues (debuting with great success at the first Pulp Ark convention in 2011). It wasn’t long before the idea of using her as a fictional protagonist was born; hence, this first Pulptress story collection of five tales, written by Hancock and four other invited contributors from the Pro Se family.

Our heroine is intentionally something of a mystery woman. As Hancock explains in the short introduction, she’s the orphaned daughter of two pulp era heroes, though we’re not told who (her real first name is Emily, but we don’t know her last name). Fostered by a few other pulp heroes, both classic and New Pulp, who taught her a lot that’s not usually covered in a typical education, she’s now in her 20s. Like Pro Se Press, she’s based in small-town Arkansas; but she travels wherever her mission leads her, and her mission is to help the innocent and take down the perpetrators of evil, working from outside the normal channels of law enforcement and with a variety of aliases. A mistress of disguise and possessed of gymnastic skills that are, I’d say, of Olympic quality, she’s also smart, trained in martial arts, and no slouch with a firearm. While she’s attractive, she’s also described at various points as “strong,” and “buff,” with well-toned muscles –as the cover art indicates, those aren’t antithetical ideas.

A potential problem in this type of collection can be that the individual authors don’t have enough common conception of the main character to make her seem like the same person from story to story. That’s largely not a problem here: the Pulptress is recognizably herself from beginning to end, and all five writers draw her with an appealing, good-hearted and easily likeable personality; she cares about others, and she’s got an obvious zest for the challenging and adventurous elements in what she does. Being adept at hand-to-hand (or foot-to-head, or fist-to-gut, etc. :-) ) fighting, her situation doesn’t require her to use a gun, or lethal force, in all stories, and you get the impression that bringing her (human, at least) opponents in alive is her preference; but as Ron Fortier’s “Butcher’s Festival” indicates, she can also handle situations where that’s not an option. (I didn’t view that as a contradiction, just a flexible response to different circumstances.) A more noticeable contradiction is in the area of speaking style. Like the older pulp yarns that serve as models, none of these stories has a large amount of bad language (some have none), and all the writers here avoid obscenity or misuse of Divine names. But in some stories, our protagonist will cuss some, while in others she doesn’t at all. Most people are more consistent in their speech than that, so it would be more realistic to let her be consistent as well. But this wasn’t a major problem for me!

The quality of the writing in all five stories is good; our authors each have their own style, but they all use description well and bring characters and settings to vivid life. (Andrea Judy’s evocation of the catacombs under the city of Paris is especially memorable; if she hasn’t actually been there, her research was exceptionally good.) The action scenes are (for pulp) realistic, in that we don’t have protracted fights between two combatants who absorb punishment well beyond human capacity and keep fighting; here, a knock-out blow to the head will do what that kind of blow actually does. Emily’s not Super Girl, either; she can be pushed to her absolute physical limit at times, and she doesn’t disdain help or rescue when it’s needed. An interesting feature of the stories is that they sometimes employ other series characters, whose paths cross the Pulptress’ to give her a helping hand: Derrick Ferguson’s Dillon, a black man whose race is underrepresented among pulp heroic figures (used by Hancock in “Black Mask, Big City”), Erwin K. Roberts’ The Voice, and Fortier’s Brother Bones. Obviously, prior knowledge of these characters would enhance those stories, but it isn’t required; I hadn’t encountered any of them before. (If you haven’t, these tales may whet your interest –I’d definitely like to read more Brother Bones stories!) Given my liking for the supernatural in fiction, it was an added plus to find that the menaces in two stories are supernatural, and another has a definitely supernatural important character.

Arguably, I hand out too many five-star ratings; but I loved these stories, and didn’t really see any serious downside here (though you’ll find the occasional minor typo or editorial snafu). If pulp action adventure is your thing, what with no sex, tasteful handling of violence (nothing gratuitous or over-stressed), a conflict of good and evil that you know in your gut the bad guys don’t have a prayer of winning, and a heroine you can respect and admire, you can’t go wrong with this one!

Editor: Tommy Hancock
Publisher: Pro Se Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Sword Woman, by Robert E. Howard

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

swordwomanThis collection of five short pieces by pulp era master of rough-and-tough fiction Robert E. Howard includes two unfinished story or novel fragments dealing with barbarian heroes in the Conan mold. But the focus of this review is on the title story and two others, “Blades for France” and “Mistress of Death” (the latter completed by Gerald W. Page after REH’s death), which are the only Howard stories that feature one of his most striking and memorable characters, “Dark” Agnes de Chastillon, sometimes called, in medieval/early modern fashion, Agnes de la Ferre, after her home village. (There’s another collection that uses the same title story and also includes “Blades for France;” but it only includes one –or possibly both, I’m not sure– of the fragments later used by Page to complete the third story.) These tales are first-rank parts of the Howard canon, and my five-star rating above refers just to them. They’re violent, gritty tales of historical action-adventure, with a tone like that of the Conan and Kull stories but mostly without supernatural elements. (A wizard does appear as the villain in “Mistress of Death.”)

Howard was not as constrained by the sexist attitudes of his day as many of his contemporary pulp writers were. So some of his writings are trail-blazers in terms of female roles. Where women in pulp action yarns were usually passive, meek and needing rescue (or sinister and sneaky, wreaking their evil by stealth and treachery), Howard dared to actually portray some women who step out of the damsel-in-distress mode to pick up lethal weapons and use them;. But they don’t lose their moral compass as a result, so that they’re genuine heroic figures rather than villainesses.

Conan sidekicks Valeria in “Red Nails” and pirate queen Belit in “Queen of the Black Coast” come to mind (actually, since she’s Conan’s boss in the latter story, one could argue that he’s her sidekick there!), as does Red Sonya in “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Agnes is cut from similar cloth; but where these other women are all in stories with a male protagonist, Agnes is the protagonist and first-person narrator of her stories, and the only one of the four to appear in more than one tale. That allows her to take center stage much more obviously in the reader’s focus, and for Howard to develop her more as a character; in “Sword Woman,” he actually gives us her origin story, something he seldom if ever did for his other series characters.

Agnes was reared as a peasant in early 16th-century France, though her abusive father is the out-of-wedlock son of a duke (and uses his father’s name as a family name). In a vividly-sketched opening scene, that shows you exactly the kind of drudgery-filled bleakness her life up to then has been, when she’s about to be physically forced into an unwanted marriage to a youth she detests (and who knows that), her sister secretly hands her a dagger to commit suicide with. Instead, she uses it to knife her would-be groom/rapist, “with mad glee,” and takes to the woods. Circumstances soon give her the chance to get some combat training from a skilled mercenary, which she takes to like a fish to water, instinctively. With a tall physique strengthened by hard work, and quick reflexes, she’s a fighter to reckon with, and her embrace of that lifestyle is completely believable. She’s resolved to be no man’s sexual plaything; motherhood isn’t something she wants for herself; and the chance to be free, her own boss, and able to taste the world and its adventures is like a liberating new birth. (And she’ll have adventures in spades, with her share of dangerous enemies.)

Given her background, I could completely sympathize with the appeal this has for her, and understand her choices. I don’t think Howard intends to make an anti-marriage, anti-family statement through her, or to imply that her choice is the only legitimate one for a woman to make. But he does have the courage to portray her as the person she is, with legitimate reasons for feeling the way she does; and that he’s also questioning the kind of patriarchal, sexist perversions of marriage and family life that could turn those things into a prison (which they were never intended to be) for a woman, and make her willing to choose celibacy to escape it. And then too, he’s recognizing that the idea of “primitivism,” of escaping from society’s constraining rules, roles and routines, that leach every bit of freedom and spontaneity out of life, and being free to carve out your path in the world with your own courage and strength, is just as appealing to a woman as it is to a man, and for the same reasons.

If Howard had lived to write more about Agnes, and followed her for more of her life, who knows: she might someday have found a male who didn’t want to to imprison and dominate her, whom she might have wanted to be with as an equal, and might even have someday decided she was ready to have a child. (And if she had, I think she’d have been a doggone good mom!) But even if that had ever happened, you can bet she’d never have become any man’s slave or drudge.

All three stories exhibit the strengths Howard fans appreciate in his work: strong, exciting story-telling, full of adventure, suspense, and violent action, all of it well-drawn; excellent prose style; and good, vivid characterization. Agnes’ character, of course, dominates all three, and she’s one of Howard’s most memorable figures, round and nuanced. Like her sword-swinging soul-sisters mentioned above, she’s no choir girl, but she’s not evil in any sense. She doesn’t revel in killing (her “mad glee” near the beginning of the first story is an emotional reaction to the thrill of self-achieved deliverance and escape from hell on earth, not homicidal mania as such); on the contrary, she’s quite capable of showing mercy even when it’s not deserved, of genuine kindness to others, and of putting her life on the line even for an enemy. She’s a woman with principles; and while her early life has made her so emotionally repressed that she’s never been able to cry, she’s still got feelings, and can need comfort at times. (In other words, she’s a human being, not an animated stone statue of Superwoman.)

But several other characters are also developed with some moral complexity, especially Etienne Villiers. REH was also a serious student of history, and makes effective use of real historical persons and situations to flavor his historical fiction; these tales are no exception. In the third story, IMO, Page imitates Howard’s style and character conception quite well; I disagree strongly with critics like Jessica Salmonson who find the story inferior and see Agnes there as an unrecognizable, wimpy parody of herself. (If they weren’t dead by the time she’s done with them, there are a few male characters there who’d probably dispute the claim that she’s wimpy!

The editor of this collection isn’t named (Leigh Brackett contributes a worthwhile introduction, but I doubt if she was the editor), but whoever it was clearly just threw the last two selections in as filler to bulk up the book. They’d be better included in a collection of Howard fragments. The stories cited in the second paragraph above would have been better choices, IMO; then the collection would have been a genuinely thematic one showcasing all of Howard’s action heroines! Maybe some publisher will pick up on that idea?

Author: Robert E. Howard
Publisher: Zebra Books, available through Amazon, only in paperback.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Last Stratiote, by LeAnn Neal Reilly

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Literary rating: ★★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

“Sharp scent of hot blood
blooms beneath darkening skies.
Justice rends March night.” –Elira Dukagjini

Full disclosure: The author offered me an advance review copy of this novel, with no conditions on how I reviewed it.

laststratioteStratiote is simply the Greek word for soldier; but it was a term particularly applied, in the 1400s and 1500s, to Greek and Albanian mercenaries who fled from their homelands to escape Turkish invaders and hired out to fight, first against the Turks for the Venetians and later in other European wars as well. So the title might suggest a historical novel; but our setting is actually mostly in contemporary Boston (which has an Albanian immigrant community). Its roots, though, lie in the small country of Albania (and neighboring Kosovo), the poorest and least modernized part of the poor and not-very-modern Balkans.

Our titular “last stratiote” is Elira Dukagjini (a.k.a. a “certified Albanian whack job”). Born and bred in a part of the world that’s been a seething cauldron of religious and ethnic hatreds for centuries, that aspect of her heritage is very prominent in her attitudes. Her little sister and two cousins were lost to her when they were kidnapped into sex slavery, and she herself was the victim of a brutal gang rape that left her female organs too damaged to bear children. Not being of a gentle or forgiving disposition, she’s channeled her rage and vengefulness into becoming, among other things, a vigilante on a blood vendetta against sex traffickers.

This brings her into contact with our other two main characters, symbolically-named James Goodman, an ICE agent (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch of Homeland Security which is in charge of combating sex trafficking), and Mirjeta, the woman he loves, who fled the horrors of her Albanian homeland as a teen, but who, as the book opens, has been snatched by those who would drag her back there. The complex relationship that develops between these three characters is at the heart of the book, but they’re well-supported by a full cast of strongly-drawn characters. (In particular, you gotta love Zophie!)

Given that action-heroine types often function in and are shaped by a rough milieu, they’re often rough-edged. But Elira vastly pushes the envelope on the “rough” idea; if characters like Red Sonya or Jirel of Joiry are likened to a Brillo pad, she’s an industrial-strength metal sander. She’s not simply tough, hard-drinking, and sometimes potty-mouthed; she’s also bisexual, very promiscuous, a cocaine addict (yes, so was Sherlock Holmes, whom I like, but he didn’t have access to modern knowledge of how harmful drugs like this are; Elira does), and capable of dishing out mayhem that causes trained cops to vomit. Hanging out with her, as a reader, yanked me WAY out of my comfort zone.

But by following the Muse to create this character and let her be who she is, Reilly helps us to learn to empathize rather than judge; and I did come to empathize. Elira isn’t essentially evil (though sex traffickers unlucky enough to meet her might think that she is, before they died!), and underneath the grunge and capacity for savagery, she’s a hurting woman to whom the world hasn’t been very kind. Like all of us, she’s on her own unique journey; and by the end of the book, she’s a lady I honestly liked, respected, and straight-out admired. If you read the book, you’ll find out why; and you might feel the same way. You’ll for sure never forget her!

This novel has a lot going for it. Reilly’s writing skills are top-notch; she handles language very well in bringing out the exact effects that she wants, and she knows the perfect way to handle scenes that in lesser hands could be a challenge. She’s done her homework very well, even to the point of being able to write dialogue in Albanian (with English translations), and she knows her Albanian history and geography, etc., even to the point of identifying the tribal groups (Elira and Mirjeta are Ghegs, the main group in the north, as the Tosks are in the south). Her wide reading allows her to enrich the book with literary allusions; Elira’s quite a fan of Shakespeare, among other things, and enjoys composing haiku poetry. (And I’m anxious to find the translation of the Scots dialect in the Robert Burns quote!). There are also quite a few contemporary pop culture references, but they’re not just thrown in as a cheap way of faking texture; they’re actually used to make points in discussion. And there’s really powerful, creative and effective use made here of symbolism, and a unique take on the vampire mythos.

This isn’t solely a novel of action and intrigue. James Goodman was a philosophy student, and there are some major philosophical/theological discussions here that touch on issues naturally suggested by the story. What moral claim does the idea of “Blood Law,” the need for blood vengeance in kind for genuine wrongs, have on us? How far does it go, and what effect does it have on the avenger? What place does forgiveness have –and does it demand pacifism in the face of aggressive evil? And what does the Roman Catholic spirituality that Elira was raised with have to contribute to those questions? There are Moslem villains here who are engaged in really vile deeds; does that mean we’re justified (as the author’s fictional Code Red hate group claims) in hateful words and actions towards all Moslems?

Of course, would-be guru Jacob Stryver here isn’t the most lucid or reliable philosophical guide –and isn’t meant to be! That can mean that some of Goodman’s discussions with him aren’t always 100% easy to interpret. But other than that, most of the few negative points I saw in the book are very minor quibbles. Some plot points I thought weren’t completely smooth; but in the main, Reilly crafts her plot very well, with pieces of it coming together like a jigsaw right up to the end. And a real page-turner it is!

Note: The f-word appears here at times, along with some other profane and scatological bad language. There are a couple of short sex scenes that may be more explicit than some readers prefer, and an instance of implied female-female oral sex, in a quasi-public place, that a male character stumbles on and watches for several minutes feeling titillated. However, the author doesn’t attempt to titillate the reader, and none of this content is there for its own sake or for shock value.

Author: LeAnn Neal Reilly
Publisher: Zephon Books, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.