Tag: novel

The Guardian Initiative, by Liane Zane

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

Like the previous two books, this conclusion to the Unsanctioned Guardians trilogy (a prequel to the Elioud Legacy trilogy) was a generous gift to me from the author. (There was no pressure to write a positive review; the book stands easily on its merits, and she knew I’d liked the previous installments, as well as the original series.) Given their prequel status, it’s not really necessary to have read the Elioud Legacy books to enjoy reading these three; though if you have, it does give you more acquaintance with and understanding of the main characters (and conversely these books flesh out the background of the original three, and answer questions readers of those may have had). But the Unsanctioned Guardians books DO need to be read in order. Most of my general comments about the first two apply to this one as well; the premise builds organically on the preceding books, and the author’s style, literary vision and handling of content issues is consistent across all three books.

About a year has elapsed since the events of the previous book. CIA agent Olivia Markham landed on her feet sufficiently, after the events in that one, to preserve her career with the Company; but since then, at her request, she’s been moved to a desk job. For most of the interim, she’s been in charge of an agency safehouse in Montenegro, which fronts as a free clinic for the town’s numerous foreign refugees, run by an NGO that’s not aware of the CIA connection. (The clinic work is real; when she was recruited by the agency in the first book, Olivia was a college pre-med student, and she has EMT certification.) She’s also fallen in love with a French medical doctor at the local hospital; the two are living together, and will get engaged in the first chapter. But …she’s about to cross paths with an Islamic terrorist mastermind from the previous book. Meanwhile, Italian spy Stasia Fiore is still investigating the theft of a Predator drone from the Italian military; and Capt. Beta Czerna is soon to be approached by a desperate woman who needs help in rescuing her sister from the clutches of a Polish crime lord who’s into sex trafficking (among other villainous things). Circumstances are about to converge these plot strands, and bring all three ladies together for a violent, high-stakes thrill ride.

As before, Zane moves the action of the tale briskly through a variety of European locations and a trip to Morocco, in this case, making considerable use of Internet research to handle the physical geography of her scenes with photographic realism. Again, she demonstrates her strong knowledge of espionage tradecraft and modern weaponry, and handles action scenes well. The body count in this book is significantly less than in the previous one, but the suspense factor is taut and constant. There’s brief reference to loving pre-marital sex, as well as to off-screen sexual violence, but nothing explicit in either case. One short scene could be described as “sensuous,” but it consists of three sentences. Bad language is minimal, and within the bounds of reasonable realism. We’re still essentially in the realm of descriptive fiction, rather than the supernatural fiction of the first trilogy; but here there are a couple of brief incidents, not observed by viewpoint character Olivia, that suggest a bit of supernatural assistance, and readers of those original three books will readily recognize their old friend Zophie at one point.

My only minor criticisms were that in one place, we have a truck that apparently drives itself onto the scene, and nobody picks up on that fact; and in another, a character assumes knowledge of a location she wouldn’t know at that point. But that nit-picking stop me from greatly liking the book, especially given the strong emotional effect of the storyline. This is a wonderful depiction of the forging of a team that has each other’s backs, and of female friendship under fire (literally). Zane’s handling of Olivia’s moral and emotional growth here is also powerful and superb. All of these factors ably set the stage for readers to move on from here to the Elioud Legacy trilogy, if they haven’t already read it. The kick-butt quotient here takes account of the fact that we have not just one, but three gun-toting heroines racking up bad-guy corpses.

Author: Liane Zane
Publisher: Zephon Romance; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The File, by Gary Born

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

Not many novels come with a ringing endorsement from a former director of the CIA, but Gina Haspel calls this “A thoroughly enjoyable, engrossing thriller.” Argue with her, and she’ll send you an exploding cigar, or something. While it certainly isn’t bad, the rating above reflects its likely moderate appeal for readers here. A general audience might be more impressed, especially with regard to the second half, where the heroine becomes more of a passenger. Things begin at the very end of World War II with a flight out of Berlin carrying documents intended to secure the future of the Reich. It doesn’t reach its destination, crashing in the depths of the African jungle.

Almost eighty years later, a botanical expedition stumbles across the downed plane and its cargo. When word seeps out, various very interested parties converge on the Congo, intent on securing the contents by any means necessary. Surviving the initial onslaught is Sara West, daughter of the expedition’s head, who bails with the documents, and the parties in hot pursuit. In the jungle at least, Sara has more experience and proves eminently capable of turning the tables on her pursuers. After escaping the wilderness, she convinces one of the hunters, CIA agent Jeb Fisher, to change sides, and his assistance becomes increasingly valuable as they head through Africa, into Italy, and eventually to Zurich. There, they make a final stand, in the unlikely location of a venerable Swiss bank.

The above should hopefully explain why this feels like a book of two halves. I really enjoyed the first half, with Sara using all her knowledge, built on years of living in the jungle, to stay one step ahead of the opposition – or sneak up from behind on them. She rarely over-powers her enemies, relying more on stealth, wits and turning their own resources against them. It is still a bit of a stretch to imagine a young woman, untrained in combat, taking out a whole slew of Russian special forces. However, Born certainly sells the illusion well enough to work. The problems arise with the arrival of Jeb, not least the ease with which he disobeys orders to take Sara’s side.

Thereafter, he also becomes the main protagonist. While it makes sense that his skills would become more important outside of the jungle, it results in Sara being somewhat (though not entirely) sidelined. There’s also the almost inevitable romantic dalliance, and I feel that having a Jebina instead of Jeb, might have addressed that, and a lot of the problems I felt hampered the second half. It’s still a decent enough read on its own terms, building nicely towards the grandstand finale – although I can’t imagine even Swiss authorities taking so long to get to a hellacious firefight in downtown Zurich! But I feel it does not do Sara the justice she deserves, especially after the impressive heights reached earlier on.

Author: Gary Born
Publisher: Addison & Highsmith Publishers, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Standalone novel

Louisiana Longshot, by Jana Deleon

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

A Goodreads friend gave this novel (the first book in the author’s Miss Fortune Mysteries) five stars, which put it on my radar; and I downloaded the e-book edition when I discovered that it’s offered for free, as a teaser for the series. While my rating isn’t as high as my friend’s, and I didn’t expect that it would be, I did turn out to like the book somewhat more than I expected to.

Our protagonist and first-person narrator here is “Fortune” Redding. We’re not told her real first name (“Fortune” is the handle she’s used to answering to, but it’s indicated, well into the book, that it’s a nickname, short for “soldier of fortune”) or her exact age; but she’s worked for the CIA for eight or five years, depending on which figure we go with, since we’re given both in different places. (I took the first one to start with, so picture her as about 30, joining the Company just after college.) The affiliation was a natural one for her; her father, with whom she had a prickly relationship, was a top CIA agent, and after his death when she was 15, her remaining teen years were overseen by a couple of CIA officials, one of whom is now her boss. (Her mother had died years earlier.) She’s a seasoned assassin (of verified baddies), with a VERY long list of kills to her credit, and zero compunctions about her line of work. But she’s neither a psychopath nor a moral nihilist; on the contrary, she’s basically a kindhearted person (albeit an emotionally-constipated loner with no confidential friends), who sympathizes readily with those in danger and distress.

That trait got her in trouble on her latest mission. It wasn’t supposed to be a hit; she was simply posing as the glamorous mistress of a drug dealer, delivering money for him to a Middle Eastern crime boss. But (as we learn along with her, at the debriefing in the first chapter) her meeting was compromised by an unknown leak in the CIA, who’d tipped the bad guys off as to who she was. They’d decided to test the tip by setting up a situation where she’d have to act to try to rescue a 12-year-old sex trafficking victim, figuring that she could then easily be dealt with, since she’d come unarmed. Unhappily for them, Fortune’s quite adept at improvising a weapon when she has to; though she doesn’t care much for high heels, she dispatched the head honcho with a stiletto heel on the shoes she was wearing, and got away clean, presumably with the 12-year-old. (We learn about this only in a terse second-hand report; I’d have loved to read it in real time!) Now, the deceased’s brother Ahmad, also a big-time crime lord, has put her picture all over the Dark Web, with a million-dollar price on her head (ten million, if she can be delivered to him alive to be tortured).

If Ahmad can be taken out, the contract on her will be moot, but in the meantime, she needs to be stashed in a safe place –and one that can’t be compromised by the unidentified leaker. Luckily, her boss’ niece, librarian and former beauty queen Sandy-Sue Morrow, just inherited a house in Sinful (population 253) in the bayou country of southern Louisiana from a newly-dead aunt on her mother’s side. The two weren’t close; Sandy-Sue has never been to Sinful, and she has no social media presence due to a stalking incident years ago. With summer just starting, she’s scheduled to go down there to inventory the house’s contents and prepare it for sale. Before the very unwilling Fortune can say “culture shock,” her boss has packed the real Sandy-Sue off for a summer in Europe, and our heroine is in route to Louisiana to hide under this new identity. It’s only supposed to be through the summer months; and in a small, quiet southern community, nothing’s apt to go wrong, right? But the flooding caused by a recent hurricane unearthed and moved a lot of debris in the backwoods, and on Fortune’s first evening in town, the late aunt’s dog fishes a human bone out of the bayou behind the house. It proves to have belonged to a very wealthy, and universally hated, town resident who disappeared some five years ago….

As mysteries go, this one is not deep or in some respects very plausible, but it is entertaining. Despite the author’s use of a humorous tone in most of it –though it has its serious moments, some of them deadly so (literally!)– it’s not really an example of the “cozy” subgenre, nor even of the broader stream of more “genteel” who-dunnits in general. That tradition features more actual detection in terms of sifting physical clues and witness statements, and eschews directly-described physical violence. There’s little of the former here, and definitely some of the latter in the denouement. (Action-heroine fans may be pleasantly surprised to find that Fortune’s combat skills won’t necessarily have to go to waste in this new environment!) But the mystery of who killed Harvey Chicoran doesn’t necessarily have an immediately obvious solution (many characters, and no doubt readers, may assume that the widow did it –but did she?). There will be twists and turns in solving it, and Fortune’s involvement in that effort will provide her –and readers– with challenges, adventures, excitement and danger.

A weakness of the book is that a lot of the humor exaggerates the quirkiness and peculiarities of the Louisiana bayou country’s rural inhabitants to the point of caricature. It plays to stereotypes that too many urbanites have about the South, and rural people in general, which reflects culpable ignorance of cultures outside their own. Fortune herself is a prime example; she seriously wonders, for instance, if the community she’s going to has electricity. (Rolls eyes profusely.) She also has a tendency to reduce women with Sandy-Sue’s background to despised, stereotyped “Others.” Some characters, like the members of the Sinful Ladies Society (membership is only open to “old maids” or widows of 10 years standing, to avoid contamination by “silly man thinking”), are steeped in misandry, and Deleon views that as funny. This is mitigated to a degree by the fact that she’s native to the region (which I’ve visited) herself, does reveal some basic affection for it, and depicts it with some realistic local color; and by the fact that she does portray a couple of male characters positively. There are also a few inconsistencies that should have been caught and edited out.

On the positive side, this is a tautly paced book that keeps you turning pages, or in my case clicking frames (I read the first two-thirds of it in one sitting, and could and would have read it all if time had allowed!), with a tightly-compressed plot that unfolds in less than a week. Even if you disagree with some of Fortune’s attitudes, she is honestly likable, with a wryly humorous narrative voice that’s appealing (at least to this reader). She exhibits a willingness to look at herself and grow through exposure to new experience, which I like; and I appreciated the strong depiction of female friendship and loyalty. There’s a certain amount of bad language here, mostly of the h and d-word sort or vulgarisms, but not much profanity and no obscenity; and there’s no sexual content nor any romance at all (though I understand that a romance develops in subsequent books in the series). While Fortune describes herself, though not out loud, as a “heathen” (when she’s informed that everybody in Sinful who’s not one of the latter attends one of its two churches), and some humor based on the foibles of the church-goers, there’s no actual pushing of an anti-Christian agenda.

I only read this book as a diversion, because it was free; I don’t plan to follow the series. But I don’t regret making Fortune’s acquaintance, nor visiting her in her new-found community. :-)

Author: Jana Deleon
Publisher: Self-publihed; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Killing Complex, by K.G. Leslie

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

There’s something to be said for sparse simplicity, and this delivers on that concept in spades. Except for occasional flashbacks, the entire things takes place in one location: a facility somewhere in Europe. It’s where Cassie ends up, locked in a cage, after being abducted while on a trip from Britain, intending to find herself. She’s then deposited in a hall and made to fight for the amusement, gambling or whatever of online spectators. She starts off facing animals, but through pharmaceutical treatment, her strength, speed and savagery are enhanced, and the opponents – both fauna and, eventually, her own species too – become more vicious. The shock collar around her neck ensures her compliance.

In the early going, much of this unfolds inside Cassie’s head, as she goes through what perhaps seems inspired by the five stages of grief, from rejecting the reality of her predicament, through anger, and ending up in a personal commitment to do whatever is necessary in order to survive – even if this comes at the cost of her own humanity. But just when she’s on the edge of becoming a soulless killing machine, she’s relocated, and placed next to another prisoner, Thomas. He was also abducted, but more recently, so hasn’t been ground down by his situation yet, and his optimism reignites Cassie’s own interest in life. But is everything quite what it seems, or are there other agendas at work?

Without giving them away, there are a couple of very effective twists here, which I did not see coming – and, indeed, I defy anyone to say they did. The first is something of a cheat, considering how much of the time to that point has been Cassie’s internal monologue, and this has carefully hid a key piece of information. But the second works particularly well, because it demonstrates that the bad guys here aren’t stupid: Carrie is going to need to do more than bludgeon her way out. Good though she certainly is at that, as is proven repeatedly. This isn’t a book for animal rights activists though, with Cassie working her way up from herbivores to the top of the food chain, in addition to her human opponents.

I do wonder quite why the people are wasting the remarkable drugs, which help Cassie survive massive damage as well as enhance her fighting abilities, on an inter-species fight club. I’d have said the military-industrial complex would pay better than Fanduel for that stuff. But sadistic perverts gonna pervert, I guess, and so here we are. By the end, I was galloping through the pages, staying up well past my usual bedtime to do the dreaded “one more chapter.” It does end on something of a cliffhanger: usually that’s something I don’t like, but I didn’t feel like I’d been sold half a story here, and can definitely see further entries appearing here down the road.

Author: K.G. Leslie
Publisher: Self published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Killing saga.

Caught in Crystal, by Patricia C. Wrede

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

One of my favorite fantasy authors, Patricia C. Wrede [pronounced as “Reedy”] began her writing career in the late 70s; this book, published in 1987, is part of one of her earliest bodies of work, the five-novel Lyra series. However, it’s essentially a stand-alone; though all five of the books are set in the author’s fantasy world of Lyra, they’re all about entirely different sets of characters, widely separated geographically or chronologically (or both –like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lyra has a very long fictional history), and are unrelated in their plots.

As is usual in traditional fantasy, Lyra is a low-tech world much like medieval Europe, except that magic really works there and is universally recognized as a reality. Also unlike medieval Europe, it has no equivalent of the Roman Catholic Church; such religion as it has is a vague polytheism that doesn’t bulk large in the story. It’s home to five races (at least some of which can interbreed): humans, the elven Shee; the furred Wyrds, who are somewhat cat-like, but are as big as small humans, use spoken language and have opposable thumbs; the mostly aquatic Neira; and the gray-skinned sklathran’sy, often referred to by humans as “demons,” but as in the work of such writers as Piers Anthony and Robert Asprin, not evil fallen angels but just a non-human race with a talent for magic. (In fact, all of the non-human Lyran races have a more natural affinity for magic than humans, and that factor plays a role in this novel and probably the series as a whole.)

Our protagonist is Kayl Larrinar, who when the book opens is a 36-year-old innkeeper in a back-water village, five years a widow, and a caring mom to two kids (Dara and Mark, ages 12 and 10). But (although we learn some of these details a bit more gradually), she’s not native to the place. Orphaned or at least separated from her parents young, she was first raised among Thar raiders but then taken in as a child by the Sisterhood of Stars, an all-female clerisy of warriors and sorceresses who wield considerable influence in much of Lyra. Trained as a swordswoman (though her sword is now buried beneath her hearth –but she still knows how to use it), she was one of the order’s best.

But she broke with the Sisterhood 15 years ago, after an ill-fated expedition to the mysterious and ill-omened Twisted Tower that stands in the remote and inhospitable Windhome Mountains (the expedition where she met her late husband, a Varnan wizard). She never wants to see that place again. Now, however, sorceress Elder Sister Corrana, one Glyndon shal Morag (another survivor of the expedition and a fellow wizard and friend of Kayl’s husband), and an unsavory gaggle of Magicseekers, a human organization determined to get their hands on magical power by any means, fair or foul, are all converging on the inn, and the Tower’s casting its shadow again.

When I first read this novel in the 90s (I’ve now read it twice), I was really impressed by the wonderfully textured world-building. As I know now, that’s helped by this being the fourth book set in the same world. But it’s still impressive! The magic systems (built in the case of the Sisterhood on the use of true names) also have some thought behind them.) Kayl’s a very relatable heroine, a good and conscientious mom whose relationship to her kids is developed well, and realistically; plenty of real-world single moms, I think, could easily identify with her. There’s an element of clean, low-key romance that was also a plus for me. Wrede tells her story at a deliberate pace that allows for character development; and while there are points of suspense and danger, serious violent action occurs only at the climax of the plot. Kayl can (and does) handle herself very well in combat, but that doesn’t take up much of the plot.

So as action-heroine fiction goes, this is on the low action side; but that element is there, and some baddies who tangle with Kayl won’t tangle with anybody else again. (She’s good with a sword, but her knife-throwing skill is jaw-dropping.) Readers who prefer more exoticism and less realism in their fantasy, a plot-driven and faster-paced story, and more violence and sexual steam won’t like this as much as both my wife and I do. But for my part, I appreciated this as an involving, serious fantasy tale that respected my intelligence as a reader. And the positive message of cross-racial and cross-cultural friendship and respect, and the negative view of prejudice, have grown more rather than less relevant in the ensuing decades.

For me, the primary enjoyment of this reading experience was in spending time with these three-dimensional, vital and likable main characters. Even though Lyra is well-realized, it’s not such a fascinating setting in itself that I feel any need to re-visit it centuries later with totally different characters. But I can enthusiastically recommend this as a great adventure for fantasy fans who want a stand-alone rather than a gargantuan series.

Author: Patricia C. Wrede
Publisher: Ace (paperback) and Open Road Media (e-book); available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Legacy of the Lost, by Lindsey Sparks

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

Cora Blackthorn’s teenage life has been severely hampered by an untreatable condition, which triggers a severe, painful reaction any time she has physical contact with another human being. She spends her live sequestered on Orcas Island, off the coast in the Pacific Northwest, but has found solace in the world of online gaming. Her mother, however, is a globe-trotting archaeologist, explorer and… well, let’s be honest, tomb raider. [Small letters, please, to avoid copyright suits] Then, Mom vanishes, the only clue being a cryptic package she sent back to her daughter. Cora now needs to come out of her seclusion, with the help of childhood friend, ex-soldier Raiden, and travel to Rome and the catacombs under the Vatican, in search of the truth about both what happened to her mother, as well as Cora’s own origins.

For, it turns out, there”s quite a lot going on. Top of the list is that Cora is not of this Earth, being an alien embryo, part of the race who were known in ancient history as Atlanteans. who was implanted in her mother after she stole it from an ancient Catholic order, the Custodes Veritatis, and is now coming into her ancestral talents, based on the genetic material from her ancestor, an Atlantean called Persephone, which include all of Persephone’s memories, and holy run-on sentence, Batman. Yeah, it’s a lot to swallow, both on the literary and story level, and Sparks leans heavily on not one, but two, writing clichés. Firstly, the mental link to Persephone, whose memories and abilities conveniently pop up when necessary to the plot; secondly, a journal left behind by Cora’s mom for her daughter, which explains exactly the amount of information required at that point. Cora trapped in a situation with no hope of escape? Oh, look: here comes Persephone, and/or an alien artifact to get her out of trouble.

It is kinda interesting to see Cora develop over the course of the novel, but it just does not feel like a natural arc: at times, she feels like a meat puppet, not operating of her own free will. The inevitable romantic angle with Raiden feels dutiful rather than organic, and he’s entirely abandoned for the final quarter of the book, having outlived his usefulness to the plot. There is a decent sense of place, with Sparks clearly having done her research regarding Rome, and when things are in motion, you do sense Cora being involved in a grand conspiracy beyond anything she could have imagined. Yet the clunky elements repeatedly derail this progress. I think the point at which I abandoned hope, was when Cora needed a detailed map of the Rome catacombs, and her online BFF, just so happened to have spent the past few years researching exactly this. I kept expecting BFF to be part of the Custodes Veritatis, or something to justify this outrageous leap. No such luck. At least not in this volume, and I won’t be engaging with future ones.

Author: Lindsey Sparks
Publisher: Rubus Pressg, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 4 in the Atlantis Legacy series.

Blood Claws, by John P. Logsdon and Ben Zackheim

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

I picked this up without realizing I already had another book in the _______ Paranormal Police Department universe. That was Sinister: Unhallowed, part of the Black Ops PPD series. Logsdon was also a co-writer on that, so I am going to speculate he’s the “showrunner”, for want of a better phrase, while his partners run their individual franchises. The underlying theme is the Netherworld, a realm of everything from goblins to were-creatures, which runs parallel to this one, and whose residents occasionally move to ours. To keep them in check, the various PPDs exist, acting to prevent things from getting out of line.

Is in this world that Bethany Black exists. She’s a weretiger, who has always harboured an ambition to join the New York PPD. However, there’s a problem, in that her species is a seriously endangered one. As in, there are only two left. Making matters worse for species survival prospects, the other one, Mike, is gay. So she has been basically kept in bubble-wrap, until finally convincing her minders to give Bethany the chance at her lifelong goal. While being a weretiger does certainly give her certain advantages, there’s a very large gap between how she imagined and expected NYPPD life to be, and the harsh reality of working with irascible pixie partner, the veteran Max Shakespeare. Making matters worse, when Mike pays Bethany a visit, he is abducted off the street, setting in motion a frantic search and rescue mission.

Much of what I said about Sinister: Unhallowed applies here. Indeed, if you’d told me they were written by the same people, I would have nodded in agreement, as the style is similarly fast and loose – and the same largely goes for the heroine here, too. Bethany is very much inclined to act first and think… eventually, a trait which is obviously at odds with the grizzled experience of Max. Can a pixie be “grizzled”? I feel if one ever can, it’s likely him. If you think along the lines of Lethal Weapon with mystical creatures, you are probably not too far wrong.

I think this works better once Bethany gets through her training, which is so brief as to be almost pointless – it seems to consist mostly of a fiendish obstacle course. Once there’s an actual case, things settle down, and the personal nature of the victim plays into the heroine’s tendency against measured and considered response. This tends to cause more problems than it solves, especially for the supporting characters around her, quite a few of whom do not make it to the end of the book. I’m not sure what is depicted here represents a very practical way to run a police department. But on the other hand: weretigers. Complaining about realism under the circumstances seems a bit churlish. A quick enough read, this is enjoyable without a lasting presence.

Author: John P. Logsdon and Ben Zackheim
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 5 in the New York Paranormal Police Department series. 

The Jo Modeen series, books 1-3 by Frank H. Jordan

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

The structure here is kinda odd. While each of the three volumes included in this omnibus are effectively standalone stories, they each feel so slight as almost not to be worth bothering with. In particular, there seems to be a lot of descriptive padding, covering journeys, meals and technical trivia that don’t develop character or push the story forward. The heroine – nominally, at least – is Jo Modeen, who had become the first woman to be accepted into the elite Special Air Services regiment of Australia. Two years after leaving the military, she finds herself at a bit of a loose end, until contacted by her former CO, Ben Logan, who makes her an offer.

He wants to bring her in as part of his team at NatSec, a covert operations group affiliated with the Australian Intelligence Service. They are “called in when diplomacy and other methods fail,” to solve problems of Aussie national security. The first volume largely concerns her training, with a brief diversion early on, to deal with a case of domestic abuse. The second sees Jo’s father, a magistrate, one of three high-ranking officials kidnapped by terrorist group, the Spear of Allah at a conference in Brisbane. And the third sees the group kidnap Ben’s wife and daughter, in an effort to coerce him into using his team to do jobs in their interests. Really, on the basis of this block, it feels like the members of NatSec and their families cause more problems than they solve.

The main issue is that, in volumes two and three especially, this becomes much more of a team effort, rather than concentrating on Jo. The NatSec team typically ends up getting split-up, with smaller groups performing various tasks, whether it’s surveillance, hostage rescue or whatever. This significantly dilutes the book’s focus, with Jo feeling like she has been forgotten about for multiple chapters in a row. I mean, as generic action, kick the butts of the terrorist stuff, it’s marginally okay. But I definitely expected much more focus on Jo, to the point I wavered over whether or not it even qualified for this site.

There’s also a problem in that she is rather too high-powered. The blurb compares her to Jack Reacher: I’ve not read those books, but we’ve been watching the TV show, as well as the Tom Cruise movies, and it takes a good deal of finesse to make someone who’s so amazing, work on the screen, or the page. I’m not seeing that finesse present here. We do get extended description of how pretty Jo is. On the other side, the Spear of Allah are… well, a bit crap as terrorist groups go. In almost every confrontation with NatSec, they’re easily defeated, and you never get much sense of them being a genuine threat. The end result is conflict without real drama, and I’ll not be going any further.

Author: Frank H. Jordan
Publisher: A Hope, available through Amazon, only as an e-book
Books 1-3 of 12 in the Jo Modeen series.

Avenging Angels: Vengeance Trail, by A. W. Hart

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

Published in 2019, this is the opening volume of Wolfpack Publishing’s Avenging Angels series. My wife Barb and I had previously read the seventh and second installments out of order (long story!); and having really liked those, we recently decided to commit to reading the series. This one takes us to the very beginning of the titular “avenging angels'” adventures.

The Bass twins, George Washington (nicknamed “Reno”) and Sara, were 16 in the fall of 1865, just after the Civil War, when they returned home from school and found their western Kansas homestead burned and their parents and three older siblings dead or dying, murdered by a band of vengeful renegade ex-Confederates. (Their sister had also been gang raped.) Before he died, their father charged them to avenge that slaughter. This book is the story of that quest and its outcome (hence the title). “A. W. Hart” is a house pen name; all of the books of the series have different actual authors. Here, the writer was Peter Brandvold, who grew up as a Western fan in the 60s and 70s and went on to write over 100 Western novels, under his own name or his “Frank Leslie” pen name. (Neither Barb nor I had any prior experience with his work.)

There are a couple of significant continuity issues between this volume and the later ones, though these aren’t Brandvold’s fault. Starting in the second book, our hero’s and heroine’s promise to their father is said to have explicitly included a charge to continue to hunt down and rid the earth of other evil-doers, even after justice was served on the original villains. That’s not at all clear and explicit here. At the end of this book, their resolution to make their quest a continuing one is said to be their own decision, a response to an emotional need of their own. And in the seventh book (and possibly others earlier), the late John Bass is described as having been a Lutheran pastor. In this book, while he’s said to have been a God-fearing person who raised his kids to be familiar with the Bible, there’s no hint that he was a clergyman of any kind. IMO, on both points, the portrayal here is more plausible and realistic.

However, there are definite flaws in Brandvold’s craftsmanship here, starting with chronology. John Bass served in the Mexican War, after which he married and settled in Kansas. The Bass family graveyard on the homestead is said to hold the remains of an infant sibling who died over 20 years before 1865 –in other words, before 1845, and the Bass twins would have been born ca. 1849. But the Mexican War was fought from 1846-1848. There isn’t time between Feb. 1848 and the end of 1849 to fit in John Bass’ post-war activity, subsequent courtship and marriage, the couple’s move to Kansas, and four pregnancies prior to Reno and Sara. (And Kansas was not even opened for settlement until 1854.) If his general knowledge of U.S. history didn’t furnish red flags here, very basic research would have precluded these kinds of mistakes.

Editing and proofreading here is poor. Brandvold loses the thread of which character is speaking in one key conversation; he can’t make up his mind whether two or three antagonists are positioned in one spot during a gun fight, and near the end, a character’s last name unaccountably changes from Hill to Stock in the space of two pages. The third-person narrative is consistently from Reno’s viewpoint, but in the earlier chapters it incorporates gunslinger’s slang (thankfully abandoned later) that a peaceful teenage farm boy would be unlikely to be acquainted with. Near the end, conduct by two of the villains is inconsistent with their group’s overall plan. There are other logistical and editorial quibbles that could be made as well.

Both Sara and another important female character, Isabelle Mando, act out of character, or unrealistically for the situation, in one place (though not in the same place). Sara’s character, in particular, comes across as less winsome here than it does in the two later books we read. Of the two twins, she’s always been the more enduringly angry and vindictive over her family’s tragedy, the more aloof and self-contained, and the more ruthless and readily inured to violence. Here, though, she has a readiness to execute even disabled and helpless adversaries that alarms Reno, and at the same time a willingness to ignore a rape attempt on someone else as none of her business. (Thankfully for the victim, Reno didn’t share that indifference.) At one point, Reno was feeling a genuine concern for the state of Sara’s soul, and a resolution to try to influence her for the better. But later, he’s surprised and puzzled when Sara expresses a concern about her own spiritual state; and that theme is never developed any further, just forgotten and left hanging. Brandvold is undeniably a prolific writer; but he comes across to me as a careless and hasty one who sacrifices quality to quantity.

While the main characters here are Christians, and there’s a definite theme of good vs. evil, with the idea that God sides with the former and against the latter, none of the series writers are necessarily Christians themselves as far as I know. Bible verses serve as epigraph and postscript, and are quoted at times in the text; but there’s no real presentation of the gospel of grace and mercy, and not much wrestling with the Christian ethics of lethal force in a fallen world. Despite the teen protagonists, this is not really YA fiction either; it’s a very violent book, with a high body count. (It is, however, free of sexual content, beyond some references to scantily-clad chorus girls in a frontier music hall, and has very little bad language.) There’s a chaste romance which some readers will see as marred by an insta-love factor; but in the cultural context, I wasn’t bothered by the latter, and for me it’s a plus that it’s inter-racial. (Positive portrayal of half-Lakota characters and a black character do Brandvold credit.)

While I didn’t rate this book as highly as the two later ones, Barb and I still plan to continue with the series. It won’t disappoint genre fans who like a heavy dose of gun-fighting action.

Author: A. W. Hart.
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing; available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a print book.
A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, by Susan Elia MacNeal

  By

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

It’s often forgotten that America didn’t join World War II until almost three years after it started. In the early days, there was a strong isolationist movement, which saw the conflict as other countries’ problems, from people like aviator Charles Lindbergh and broad groups like the America First Committee. Indeed, there was a surprising amount of support for the Nazi regime: in February 1939, a rally at Madison Square Gardens drew twenty thousand people, and even after the war started in Europe, there was significant activity attempting to keep America out. It’s in this period, between the start of the war and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that the story told here takes place.

Veronica Grace is an aspiring journalist who has just graduated college when her plans are upended. A dalliance with a married man blows up, resulting in her being blackballed from employment in New York. She and her widowed mother Vi opt to move to Los Angeles instead, but are shocked to discover the local community rife with Nazi sympathizers. Her attempt to report this fall on deaf ears, the authorities at the time being more concerned with the Red Menace. But a friend of her late father, a naval officer, is able to connect the Graces to Ari Lewis, who is running a semi-official anti-Nazi investigation. Their German ancestry make them perfect to go undercover, and they agree to do so, despite the risk, and knowing that exposure would likely mean a brutal fate.

Interestingly, this is based on real characters, with almost everyone having an equivalent in historical fact. For instance, Veronica Grace is based on Sylvia Comfort, a young woman who did indeed become an inside operative, initially as a secretary, working against the German American Bund and their members. MacNeal colours in a lot of the background; there’s no indication the real Sylvia wanted to be a journalist. I am a little uncertain about some historical elements too. For instance, the Nazis all want Wendell Wilkie to beat Roosevelt in the 1940 election. Except Wilkie was, per Wikipedia, “a forceful and outspoken advocate of aid to the Allies”, a stance key in winning him the Republican nomination. Not exactly a “fellow traveller”.

Still, I’m fine with bending history for the sake of a good story. This is at its best when capturing the steadily increasing sense of paranoia as Veronica embeds herself even more deeply, the struggle to maintain her own identity, and the tension between associating with people she has grown to like, and their abhorrent views. As her handler puts it, “Here’s the thing, Veronica. ‘Nice’ isn’t good.” Given the nature of her work, the amount of physical action here is inevitably limited; it’s mostly near the end, and neither Veronica nor her mother are involved. However, it remained an interesting read, with an unusual setting for a spy novel. I was certainly left wondering how things might have turned out, if not for the efforts of people like Veronica.

Author: Susan Elia MacNeal
Publisher: Bantam, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
A stand-alone novel.