The Man Who Tried To Get Away, Stephen R. Donaldson

Title:		The Man Who Tried To Get Away
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:

The Man Who Tried To Get Away is the third of Stephen R. Donaldson's mystery novels. In content, it follows immediately on the heels of The Man Who Risked His Partner.

Here we see Mick Axebrewder and Ginny Fistoulari take on what appears to be a simple security job, only to find it is more than they anticipated. Brew's medical situation complicates things further, but to describe that would be a spoiler for those who haven't read the previous book.

As with the other Axebrewder/Fistoulari novels, Donaldson's main concerns are ethics and character. The convoluted relationship between Brew and Ginny is on center stage here.

The plot is complex and, alas, seems a bit contrived to me. Brew and Ginny are providing security for a week long murder mystery event at a remote lodge where - of course - the guests start dying. As I say, the setting felt contrived, but it also felt over used. I haven't read that many mysteries, but I am willing to bet this setting has been used a lot. It felt well worn right from the start.

Worse, there were too many characters for me to easily keep track of. Perhaps that is a fault of the writer - not making them different enough for me to sort them out - but I'm not so sure. I've had similar issues with books by other authors (George R. R. Martin for example) where other readers clearly didn't encounter such issues, so it may just be me. Regardless, some of the characters here ran together, making parts of the plot harder to follow.

What I am certain of is that Donaldson likes the Axebrewder character. There's a certain feeling to the writing that shows it. Ginny is never center stage, so it's harder to tell how he feels about her, but he clearly likes Brew.

In the end I call this a good book, but not a great book. It wasn't quite as enjoyable as The Man Who Risked His Partner, but it was still a reasonable read.

And that completes my reading of the Donaldson mystery novels. In the end I think they're OK books, but I'm just not that big a mystery fan. In my experience, mystery novels all seem alike, regardless of author. It's not a genre I will be spending a lot of time with.

For the record, the novels in question are, in order:

1. The Man Killed His Brother
2. The Man Who Risked His Partner
3. The Man Who Tried To Get Away
4. The Man Who Fought Alone

The Man Who Risked His Partner, Stephen R. Donaldson

Title:		The Man Who Risked His Partner
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:

The Man Who Risked His Partner is the second in Donaldson's mystery novel series, once again featuring Mick Axebrewder and Ginny Fistoulari. This novel sees Brew and Ginny taking on a bodyguard job shortly after the events portrayed in The Man Who Killed His Brother.

I found this novel to be substantially better than the first, and probably a bit better than the fourth. The story is more complex and I (at least) didn't figure it out until the hero did. There are more characters this time around as well, and they're given more depth and background. There was one nit that bothered me, but overall it seems a solid story.

As before, Donaldson continues to pound on his characters, but since his stories really are all about internal struggles with our desires and abilities, as well as our relationships with others, that's what I'd expect. This time both Ginny and Brew have big holes to dig themselves out of, both mentally and physically.

One of the reviews on Amazon said something like: the angst ridden nature of the novel depresses the reader. I didn't find that the case, but I can see that others might. If that's a problem for you I suggest not picking up any Donaldson at all. His novels are the literary equivalent of Pink Floyd's The Wall, in which everything is dark and black and tormented until the very last second. In that last moment - Outside The Wall on the Floyd recording, and the last few pages of TMWRHP - we get just a tiny glimmer of hope; a hint that things might get better. And even in the Thomas Covenant novels, the restoration of The Land at the end is almost an afterthought in the writing. The real story is Covenant and/or Avery's inner struggle and redemption. The Land is simply that struggle made outwardly visible, and its recovery is basically the last thing we see, and then only briefly.

The Man Who Risked His Partner is a good book. It may be from a genre I'm less interested in, but it's still a worthwhile read. If it interests you, you'll probably want to read The Man Who Killed His Brother first - to set the stage - but it's not as good as this one.

The Donaldson mystery novels in question are, in order:

1. The Man Killed His Brother
2. The Man Who Risked His Partner
3. The Man Who Tried To Get Away
4. The Man Who Fought Alone

The Man Who Killed His Brother, Stephen R. Donaldson (spoilers)

Title:		The Man Who Killed His Brother
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:

Possible spoilers are at the end of this review, and clearly marked as such. You can safely read until you're told not to.

The Man Who Killed His Brother is Stephen R. Donaldson's first mystery novel. Originally published under the pseudonym Reed Stephens, it was re-released a few years back under his real name. Some time back I reviewed The Man Who Fought Alone, the fourth (and so far, last) in the series. I'm finally getting back to these books and learning about Mick Axebrewder and Ginny Fistoulari's past.

Given the title, it's no spoiler to tell you that Brew - no one calls him Mick - killed his brother. It's also not really a spoiler to tell you his brother was a cop, or that Brew's life is pretty screwed up as a result. At the time we meet him, he's an alcoholic gone way off the deep end. Then his niece turns up missing, and he and his partner, Ginny, have to find her.

I'm not an alcoholic myself, and I've never talked in depth with anyone who is, so I cannot asses how accurate Donaldson's view of that condition is. What I can say is I buy his presentation of it. I also buy his presentation of the town in which the story happens - Puerta del Sol - and the criminal underworld operating there.

Sadly, there are a few things I didn't buy. One is related to the bad guy. I had him picked out immediately after we met him. I had no evidence yet, but Donaldson's descriptions and treatment of him left me in no real doubt that he was the heart of the problem, so to speak. I've previously said I don't read a lot of mysteries, and the genre really doesn't interest me all that much, so I'm not all that qualified to judge these things, but it seems the villain should have been a bit more difficult for me to pick out.

Another problem for me was a turning point in the book. Someone comes in with some interesting information just at the right time, but we never learn how he got it. It just seemed a bit too unlikely given the build up for that particular character. A few paragraphs of explanation would have helped with that concern, and it might have been possible for me to accept it fully with a bit more support.

The last issue - a logical flaw in the plot - is the possible spoiler, so I've put it at the bottom of this review. You can find it there if you'd like to read it.

The reviews on amazon.com are pretty positive as of the date of my own review. The one negative one is way off base, as it accuses Donaldson of "tossing off" these mystery novels. I've spent some time on Donaldson's web site and I highly doubt that is the case.

Overall, Donaldson continues to create interesting characters and beats them to a pulp. In this case, though, I was surprised that Brew doesn't have quite as tough a time of it as I expected. All the same, ethics is still a major issue in this novel, as it is in Donaldson's other novel length works.

In short, an OK book with one major flaw that bugged me. Even so, if you're a Donaldson fan you might enjoy it.

Possible spoiler alert. Stop reading here if you care.

The most significant problem for me is the time frame the events in the novel take place in. To me it appears the horrors the victims go through just couldn't have happened in the brief time span between their kidnapping and recovery. I won't give details, but when I think logically about how fast the story takes place and so on, it doesn't hold water. I could be way, way off base, I suppose - I've spent zero time in the worlds of prostitution and drugs - but somehow I doubt I'm that far off.

The Donaldson mystery novels in question are, in order:

1. The Man Killed His Brother
2. The Man Who Risked His Partner
3. The Man Who Tried To Get Away
4. The Man Who Fought Alone

Tuf Voyaging, George R. R. Martin

Title:		Tuf Voyaging
Author:		George R. R. Martin
Rating:

Tuf Voyaging is the story of Haviland Tuf, the captain and sole human (at least I think he's human) occupant of a giant starship. That ship is a relic from an ancient war, and it was a bio-warship. Tuf calls himself an ecological engineer and takes the ship to various places where he uses the ship's equipment in interesting ways. The novel collects the stories of some of those voyages.

Alas I think it could have been better. It was OK reading, and there are some fun bits here, but it didn't hold together for me.

One problem isn't the fault of the author or the prose. What Tuf Voyaging actually contains is a set of novellas, originally published between 1978 and 1985, mostly in Analog. In their original form, they might well have been more palatable. The repetition of certain things (character appearance, certain behavioral oddities, that cats have "a touch of psi", etc.) that bothered me in novel form makes sense when you realize that originally these stories were published at wide intervals. It was necessary to refresh the reader's mind about Tuf and his situation each time around.

But that's not the only issue I had. If it was, I'd have said it was a good book and gone on. In fact, I have three other issues with the material here.

1. There is a problem with the text itself. Somehow, I found the writing to be less than ideal. In general, it was OK, but there were times when Tuf himself was speaking that it just felt wrong. I know the character is supposed to have a stilted speaking style, but it often felt like Martin wasn't letting Tuf say what he meant in places. And then on page 313 of 376 I found a concrete example of what it was that had been bothering me all along.
   

   "Reg Laithor asks me why," Haviland Tuf said to Dax, stroking the cat softly. "My motives are always imputed. People have no trust in this hard modern age, Dax" ...

   Did you spot the issue? The word "imputed" doesn't fit in there. Looking it up, it means "to attribute or ascribe" or "to estimate" but the query (from Laithor) isn't imputing anything... it's asking a question, and there is an implication that Tuf's motives may not be pure. If I'm correct, the word I suspect Martin should have put in there was "impugned", which means "to attack as false or questionable". In context, that makes more sense to me.
   
   I don't have other cases like that - where I noted words were actually wrong - but something about the prose in here struck me as odd all along, and when I found that example I felt justified in my sense of things.
   
   Martin's actual writing hasn't bothered me before - in the first couple Song of Ice and Fire books it seemed fine. I'm at a loss as to why this bugged me as much as it did, but that's the way it was.
   
   
2. Character development, or the lack thereof. We never learn about Tuf's background. We do see him acquire the ship, but that's about it. We never learn anything more about him, his past, why he is the way he is, etc. Perhaps that is another fault of a novel composed of several separately published novellas, but it still bothered me. I kept wanting to ask "why" questions as I read, but no answers were ever given. And Tuf has some interesting personality quirks that could have made for great back story.
   
   Oh, and at some points I think Tuf's morals can be questioned, but that's never explained either. The problem with Tuf's morals being uncertain is that he's presented as a hero. Not a flawed hero or an anti-hero, but an honest, simple, hero. Without any back story to explain the oddities of his behavior, it rings false.
   
   
3. My last issue has to do with the rather cavalier attitude Martin displays about ecological engineering. Tuf winds up introducing new species on all kinds of planets, and wiping out old ones without concern. Yes, supposedly Tuf runs a lot of computer simulations to figure out what is going to happen, but I didn't buy it. I can't say too much about any specific case without writing a spoiler review, but I could justify the concern with a passage or two from the book if I wanted to give story points away.
   
   The fundamental gripe is that even back when these tales were originally published, the dangers associated with introducing non-native species into an ecosystem were well known. There were then all kinds of examples of ways in which relatively harmless looking species became significant problems for the native species in an area. In Tuf's case, he's introducing wildly different species - from alien planets - into places with nothing to keep them in check. It's hard for me to like a hero who does that sort of thing. It's not - as a rule - a smart thing to do.
   
   I'm not saying that every story has to be ecologically pure or that heroes must be perfect in their behavior. Far from it. I just want explanations for behavior and some - possibly minimal - accounting of the impacts of the actions of the characters. Letting Tuf entirely off the hook didn't feel right.

Anyway, while I found the book mildly interesting, it was pretty fluffy in the end. If you're a science fiction and/or George R. R. Martin aficionado, you may want to read this. If not, you can probably give it a pass and not miss much.

Sock, Penn Jillette

Title:		Sock
Author:		Penn Jillette
Rating:

Sock is a book. I am a reviewer. The guts of the relationship is all right there, see? I am the best reviewer. Sock is a good book. Not the best book. But a good book. It has a few characters. Some dead people. A murderer. He's creepy. It's got philosophy. The author hates religion. You'll see that if you read it. It's also got sex. And profanity. Lots and lots of sex and profanity. But it's still pretty well written. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am!

And there you have a capsule review of Sock, in something vaguely similar to the style of Sock.

If that isn't enough for you, read on...

The first thing you need to know is that I had no idea what I was in for when I picked up Sock and started reading. As I mentioned in my review of Teller's book, I like Penn & Teller's brand of magic. I acquired Sock based entirely on that basis, nothing more. I did know that Penn & Teller have published articles in Skeptical Inquirer, and that they were atheists, but I've never seen their cable TV show, and I've never seen their act live. But I really had no expectations at all going into this book. Enough confession.

What you've got here is a strange package. The narrator is a sock monkey. Yes, you read that right, a sock monkey. Thus the title. The prose is distinctly odd, and it was the hardest thing for me to get past in reading Sock. As in my review above, the sentences are - typically - short, sharp, and simple. For the first quarter of the book or so, I kept wondering if I was going to finish it or not just because of that. It got that annoying. (It's hard not to write like that myself now. Ugh!) But then we moved out of introduction and more into the story itself, and things got better, or I stopped noticing the writing style as much.

There's another prose oddity, but it didn't bother me. Just about every paragraph that is written by the narrator (as opposed to dialog or a very few other things) ends with some pop culture quote - mostly song lyrics. These are usually related to the topic at hand, but they can be a bit weird until you get used to them. If you read it, you might be interested in a full list of the references.

The story itself is a pretty standard (as I define these things) murder mystery. Perhaps it's even a bit simpler than most. The hero is a police diver who winds up going a bit nuts end when he happens to be the one to pull his ex-girlfriend's body out of the river. He winds up with a gay sidekick and they solve the crime, but not before a few others wind up dead as well.

The truth in this case, though, is that the story is secondary. It's actually a vehicle for other things. Jillette is strongly - and I mean strongly - anti-religion. He's also strongly against nonsense of just about any other sort. He uses this novel to advance his perspective, and he drives it home with all the subtlety of a Mack truck coming through your living room wall. To give you just two quotes pertaining to religion that caught my attention:

If it's stupid to believe in a religion with a god who looks out for you, how stupid is it to believe in a religion that has no god watching over you? Buddhism is the slowest competitor in the Special Olympics that is religion.

And:

What's the difference between god and a sock monkey?
There is a sock monkey.

This is music to my ears, as I'm both a committed atheist and a skeptic. But if you lean towards the mystical in your life - in any way - you're probably going to find Sock insulting. Anyone who calls god an "imaginary friend" isn't going out of his way to placate the religious among us.

And it's profane. Deeply and profoundly profane. Profanity flows through Sock like water over Niagara falls. And it isn't just swearing for swearing's sake. It's discussions about how to have sex, depictions of sex, and the philosophy behind sex. If he could have found a way to include it, he'd have discussed what color sex should be. Oddly, most of this actually advances the plot or the philosophy, so it's not as awful as it could have been. But if you're of a sensitive nature, this is not the book for you.

So it's got an odd narrator, strange syntax, a strong anti-religion message, profanity, and sex. Put that all together and it turns out there's a lot to think about in here. Jillette makes some significant points about how we live our lives, what we think is important, and so on. His vehicle for making those points is crass - to say the least - but the points definitely do come across. This isn't a scholarly denial of religion, but not everyone can (or will) read those. You should come out of Sock asking yourself some tough questions about what you believe and why.

The reviews on amazon.com are mostly positive, but a few people really hated it. Amusingly, there is disagreement about the pop references at the end of most paragraphs. It looks like a 50/50 split (among those who commented about them at all); they either love them or hate them. I guess it takes all kinds.

I say it's recommended, if you can take it.

The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series, Avram Davidson

Title:		The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series
Editor:		Avram Davidson
Rating:

I bought an old, used copy of The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series to get one specific short story - Automatic Tiger by Kit Reed - on Doug's recommendation.

Alas I once again get to disagree - at least somewhat - with Doug. I didn't find Automatic Tiger the stand out story here. For me that honor fell on A Rose For Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny. Automatic Tiger was OK, but not all that special in my mind.

For more on the topic of my favorite short story, you can look here, and you might contribute your own favorites here.

But about this book...

It's a collection of (mostly) fantasy short stories, originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in 1963, 1964, or 1965. (The copyright data in my copy is very limited, and not even the editor's introduction says what - if any - specific year these stories were published in.

As I read over the back cover, reviewing each of the stories I read just a few days ago, it's sad to note that I remember so few of the details. Some are already mostly forgotten and a few I actually don't recall at all. Perhaps my tastes really are changing in some way, but clearly most of these stories didn't stick with me. For the record, in this volume are:

• Sacheverell by Avram Davidson
• Trade In by Jack Sharkey
• The Illuminated Man by J. G. Ballard
• A Bulletin From the Trustees of the Institute of Advanced Research by Wilma Shore
• Automatic Tiger by Kit Reed
• The Court of Tartary by T. P. Caravan
• Touchstone by Terry Carr
• Thaw and Serve by Allen Kim Lang
• Nada by Thomas M. Disch
• Into The Shop by Ron Goulart
• A Rose For Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny
• Olsen and the Gull by Eric St. Clair
• Dark Conception by Louis J. A. Adams
• The Compleat Consumators by Alan E. Nourse
• The House by the Crab Apple Tree by S. S. Johnson
• The Girl With the Hundred Proof Eyes by Ron Webb
• Fred One by James Ransom

So how many of those stories and authors have you heard of, now that we're 40+ years past the initial publication of these works?

As stated above, the highlight of this collection - for me - was Zelazny's A Rose For Ecclesiastes. I'd probably read it before, somewhere, but if so it was a long, long time ago. In that story, I finally found what I believe to be the origin of this line: "Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony", which I have heard many times in my life. It comes from this slightly larger quote:

Someday I am going to write an article for the Journal of Semantics, called "Tone of Voice: An Insufficient Vehicle for Irony."

As with nearly everything Zelazny wrote, he really can turn a phrase, and he keeps my attention. This is an early work, and the first he published in Fantasy And Science Fiction. He was 25, and (among other things) a former epee instructor. I knew I liked him for a reason. If only he was still among the living.

The rest of the book is what it is: uneven, with a couple of average or slightly better pieces, with the rest being basically forgettable, at least for me. But read A Rose For Ecclesiastes from some source, even if it isn't this one. That's a great story.

Dimension Of Miracles, Robert Sheckley

Title:		Dimension Of Miracles
Author:		Robert Sheckley
Rating:

I'm afraid this review is going to bother a couple of people.

Dimension Of Miracles came highly recommended by at least two others, and it has been claimed that it is much like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It has even been suggested that Adams might have cribbed ideas from Sheckley. In the interests of intellectual honesty, you can go read the thread that caused me to pick up the book and that discusses some of these claims.

Alas I once again have to disagree with the crowd and say I was unimpressed. At best I found it mildly amusing in a few places.

Every single scene was so short that it was impossible to get a good feel for things before you were whipped on to the next one. That might have been called "rapid pacing" - and it could have been a plus - but given that the book dragged overall it is hard for me to grant it that attribute.

Another negative: every single character sounds exactly the same. They're all walking, talking encyclopedias, even the hapless earthling who plays the hero. That got old, even in such a short work.

As to the idea that Adams borrows concepts from Sheckley, I find it a bit far fetched. On re-reading Eisworth's review, I don't think the parallels are as dramatic as he suggests, but then again my copy of Dimension of Miracles is so old - dated June 1968 - there is no essay within it about the parallels with Adams's work. But even if Adams did borrow from Sheckley, for my money he did it better than Sheckley by a large margin. If I thought such borrowing had happened, I'd compare it with Mozart borrowing - and radically improving on - a theme from some unknown composer, rather than plagiarism. I stress, however, that my guess is that Adams wrote his works without influence from Sheckley. Lots of people write murder mysteries as well, and deep parallels could be drawn between many of them after the fact.

In summary I think Dimension of Miracles is OK, but not great. I may be banned from Doug's forums for saying so, but I found it pretty bland.

Cobra II, Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor

Title:		Cobra II
Authors:		Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor
Rating:

I have finally finished the long, hard slog through this book. Some of it was interesting. Some of it was appalling. Most of it was rather dull, but those parts might be really attractive to someone who loves military history. I suppose I should really concentrate on the book rather than on the politics of the war. Let me at least start there.

The book is about 600 pages long, distributed roughly this way:

• 150 pages are devoted to pre-war planning
• 300 pages cover the war itself (roughly up to the time our fearless leader pulled his famous aircraft carrier landing and announced that the mission was accomplished)
• 50 pages discuss a few of the early post-war issues
• 100 pages are appendix, index, end notes, and acknowledgments

The chapters discussing the pre-war planning are interesting. It is very clear that Rumsfeld put his stamp on this war very, very firmly. He was the one pushing to limit our troops in Iraq. He was the one who most clearly discounted previous war plans for Iraq that required three times the troops we deployed there. He even prevented the Pentagon from using its usual troop deployment computer system and went over all the deployment requests by hand, himself, to minimize the number of troops and resources we deployed to Iraq. Whether you agree with the war or not - and it is clear that Saddam was a bad guy in any case - there are all kinds of questions that can be raised about the planning for the war.

Those 300 pages in the middle were hard sledding for me. I can read a detailed description of one battle just fine. I can even read detailed descriptions of a few battles without glazing over. But this is 300 pages of "Colonel Foo took his XYZ to some-town-I've-never-heard-of and attacked from the East. While that was going on, Captain Bar of the 2772nd Marine XFN took his platoon into some-other-town-I've-never-heard-of and attacked from the West, intending to take the bridge over the river Yadda-yadda." And so on. It is full of military acronyms that I don't know, and descriptions of both carnage and heroism.

Individually - based on this book - it seems that many (and probably most) of our soldiers were trying to do the right thing. However, as a group we wound up doing some things I find just awful. I'm no military expert, however, and perhaps (viewed from a military perspective) these things were done correctly. I honestly don't know. But they do make for some awful reading at times.

Cobra II, while it was published in 2006, doesn't cover much of the post war effort in any depth. Thus there are only 50 pages or so in that section. In any event, those pages do discuss some of the issues that we encountered in the initial post-war phase, and some of the stupid things we did in the process of trying to wind things up. One of the largest problems is that we didn't have enough troops on the ground to provide security after the war.

The Bush administration has long said it doesn't value nation building, and that it sees the US efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo as failures. Their idea was to go in quickly, get rid of Saddam, and get out. The hope was that the local people - like the Iraqi army - would assist in the stabilization effort after the war was over. In addition, they planned on getting a lot of international support afterwards. Neither of those hopes ever materialized, and (in a strange twist) we actually disbanded the Iraqi army ourselves, putting something like 300,000 unemployed and armed men out on the streets.

Several earlier war plans said we'd need something like 350,000 to 450,000 troops to win the war and stabilize the country afterwards. A Rand Corp study supported those numbers, saying that the safest peacekeeping efforts the US has been involved in have been the ones where the most troops were involved. Several other advisers told the President and Rumsfeld the same basic thing, but all were ignored. Rumsfeld, Tommy Franks, and Bush decided to go with the minimal number of troops needed to win the initial conflict, which turned out to be about 150,000 in Iraq itself. (Mind you, they were planning to fight the Iraqi army and Republican Guard, not the Fedayeen. But that's another issue that they ignored altogether when things got rolling.)

Now stop for a moment and ponder the reasons we went to war in the first place. The single biggest factor was Iraq's presumed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. Bush didn't want those used or (more importantly) given to terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. From this book it is clear that the military believed Iraq had WMD and would use them at some point - probably as we closed in on Baghdad. Chemical and biological weapons were both possible, and even nuclear weapons weren't unexpected.

And yet, we went in with so few troops that we couldn't even secure all of the suspected WMD sites and the country's borders. In at least some cases, military units going into the initial conflict didn't even have maps telling them where suspected WMD sites were. Thus, they never bothered trying to secure (or even examine) them as they went by. And in the chaos after the war, if there had been WMD sites scattered all over the country - as the CIA thought - they'd have been looted and their contents sold to the highest bidders all over.

In other words, if our intelligence had been right, this administration's actions would have made the world a far less safe place. We'd have chemical weapon attacks going off all over the planet by now, and all because we tried to run the war on the cheap. This was, to me, the biggest surprise of all: the incompetence of our elected leaders and military planning was offset by the incompetence of our intelligence apparatus, at least as far as Iraqi WMD was concerned.

As bad as it continues to be in Iraq - and I believe it is very bad - we're lucky it isn't far, far worse for all of us, everywhere on earth.

My overall evaluation of this book is just "it's OK". If you're a military historian, it may be a fascinating read. If you're interested in the politics behind the decisions to go to war, there's not as much of that here as you'd probably like. And if you're looking for data on the post-war efforts and events, that's mostly missing from this volume as well.

Take The Cannoli, Sarah Vowell

Title:		Take The Cannoli
Author:		Sarah Vowell
Rating:

My last review indicated that I was slogging through two books and not particularly enjoying either one. That review - of Catch-22 - was one of those books. This is not the other one. In fact, Take The Cannoli is a highly enjoyable, quickly read book of essays, some of which I've heard before on NPR - usually via a show called This American Life where Sarah Vowell is a regular contributor.

Sarah's writing is generally light and fun, often concentrating on humorous episodes from her personal life, but she does tackle some larger and/or more painful subjects. Here she covers things as dark as the Trail Of Tears, but for me her writing is at its best when it is most personal. The story of her trying to understand her father the gun nut is a gem. The pieces about American history of one sort or another - where the connection between her and the story is more tenuous - are interesting, but don't grab me quite as deeply.

This book was published in 2000, and we all know a few things have changed since it was printed. I hope she writes a book including the essays she's written during the Bush (43) years. She'll have some very interesting things to say.

Here are a few lines from Take The Cannoli that I thought were particularly good:

• "Being irrational can get so inexplicable." From Drive Through Please, about learning to drive at age 28.
  
  
• "Observing these random hobbyists try to keep up with [Nils] Lofgren is like watching Origin of the Species: The Musical." From Your Dream, My Nightmare, in which she goes to Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy Camp.
  
  
• "Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee I'm nothing." Her personal motto, from Dark Circles, about trying to find a remedy for insomnia.

Sarah Vowell definitely can turn a phrase. And while her work is better when she reads it in that second grade (her term) voice of hers, it seems to hold up better in written form than that of David Sedaris. It's still properly warm and fuzzy on the page, even though you know it would be funnier if she were there in person, reading it aloud.

A recommended read.

Oh, and for those who haven't seen it or don't know, Sarah Vowell is also the voice of Violet Parr (the oldest child) in the movie The Incredibles.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller

Title:		Catch-22
Author:		Joseph Heller
Rating:

I've been slogging through two different books lately, neither has been fun, and neither is all that interesting, but this one finished up first.

"What?" I hear you cry. "Catch-22 is famous! It's one of the top 100 books! It's a classic! It has to be good! It is good!"

Forget it. I don't care that it appears at number seven on The Modern Library's list. It's not that good. Not even remotely. I'm giving it a neutral rating for a very specific reason, rather than the negative rating I think it really deserves.

My reasons for such a harsh judgment are pretty straightforward:

1. It borders on incoherent. The story isn't told in any order the reader can fathom. Yes, perhaps, if you take detailed notes about a couple of things you might be able to track some of it, but overall, it's impossible to follow.
   
   
2. There is no - and I mean zero - character development. None. Not a single one of the characters we meet changes in any appreciable way during the book, except that a bunch of them die. At the very end you might think that the Chaplain has possibly changed, but three pages later the book is over and you never find out. Yossarian - in theory the hero of the book - also never changes. Right up until the very end he's still the same confused git that he was at the start.
   
   
3. There are no characters to care about in here. People talk about Major Major Major Major as being hysterically funny. He's a bit player, mentioned in any depth in a couple of short chapters and just a passing character after that. What about the guy who's extending his life through boredom? There's almost no actual mention of that here. Again, he's just not there. None of the characters has a role significant enough to cause me to get interested in them. I kept wondering when someone would do something interesting, and if I should even bother finishing the book if they didn't.
   
   
4. The characters have no motivations. Why is Yossarian good (or at least as good as he is)? Why does Nately's whore go off the deep end like she does? Why are Colonels Cathcart & Korn slimy bastards? We don't know. Nothing is ever explained about them. This just adds to the fact that I don't care about any of the characters in the least.
   
   
5. The writing is poor. Heller describes the appearance of characters we've met before almost every time we meet them again. Each time he blurs the few distinct impressions we have of them until they're all just faceless, pointless people. That may be deliberate on his part, but it keeps them from being memorable. Again, maybe that was part of the point, but if he's going to write about people we're supposed to forget, why bother writing about them in the first place?
   
   Oh, and every so often Heller tosses in a word or two that you need an OED to lookup. I'm good at picking meanings up from context - I do it all the time - but this was just pointless. All it did was irritate me.
   
   
6. It's not funny. Pure and simple. It's just not funny. I never even cracked a smile while reading this, let alone laughed out loud. It's so off that it doesn't even work as farce. That was my biggest frustration with the book. I'd been lead to believe that it was hilarious when it simply wasn't.

So why am I giving it a neutral rating? I suspect there is a matter of perspective here, and I grant that I may not have the right one. It is possible that - for its time - this was a ground breaking book. Maybe no one had written like this about WWII before. Perhaps no one had made fun of "The Greatest Generation" in this way. If so - and I think it is possible - then taken in that context it may be an important work. Viewed with my sensibilities, from 2007, though, it fails totally. But on the assumption that lots of people think it is either important or funny or both, I'm not going to trash it completely. I don't claim to understand those points of view, but perhaps there is something to them. I'm giving it a neutral rating for that reason only.

Lastly, I have another frustration to go with this book that I want to call out separately. For as long as I can remember I've known the expression "Catch-22" and wondered where it came from. I'd been told it came from this book, so I was hoping for a real explanation here. Not of what the expression means - that I understand - but why that phrase was picked. Is there perhaps some historical reason for it? Or does it come from some obscure legal jargon?

Nope. He made it up. From whole cloth. There's nothing in the book about it at all. Nothing except the first explanation of what it means. But if you search wikipedia for "Catch-22" you learn (as of the date this review was written anyway) that the book was originally titled Catch-18 and the publisher wanted it changed to avoid confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18. Read the wiki page for the details.

Now let me be clear. If an author is good enough to get some new phrase stuck into the language as completely as "catch-22" has become a part of idiomatic English, I congratulate him or her for the achievement. Heller deserves full credit for that. But when I stand back and say "OK.. why that phrase?" there is no answer. If he'd done something really clever - based the phrase on something that was obscure but interesting or relevant, I'd really applaud him. But in this case he could just as easily have called it the "olgleblat rule" as "catch-22" (or "catch-18") and it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest:

"That's some rule, that ogleblat rule," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.

See. No change. Nothing important differs. It's just silly. Now I do admire and appreciate silliness, but for it to work it has to be funny, and as I pointed out above, it's not.

I wish I'd enjoyed this book.

As it happens, I saw the movie of the same name just before starting to read the book. The movie is actually much worse than the book. Entire series of events are explained even less well in the movie. For example, I had no idea who it was that was stabbing Yossarian in the movie at all. None. I had to read the book to learn that tidbit. Of course I still didn't care, but at least the book let me know who it was. So give the movie a pass along with the book. Neither is any good.

Marley & Me, John Grogan

Title:		Marley & Me
Author:		John Grogan
Rating:

My wife was given this book for Christmas, and spent a fair bit of time howling with laughter while she read it. Then she set it down on the top of my TBR pile, so I picked it up next. The story covers the life and times of Marley, a huge, goofy, and borderline psychotic Labrador Retriever owned by John Grogan and his family. The subtitle is "Life and love with the world's worst dog" and that gives you a pretty good idea of what is coming. Marley lived a long and full life, and I can assure you that parts of it are amazingly funny. Of course, any story of this nature covers the end as well, and I spent the last two chapters bawling my eyes out as I read about Marley's failing health and eventual end.

I love my dogs. They mean more to me than almost anything, and I do my best to take them everywhere I can. Sometimes they drive me crazy, of course, but that's all part of the package deal. I won't recount their stories here - though I still need to write them up for posterity - but I will say that Nikki suffered one of the same issues that Marley did: a horrible fear of loud noises, particularly thunderstorms. If you read this book and learn what Marley was like, you've also learned about Nikki in that case, though she was a lot lighter than Marley, which reduces the damage potential somewhat.

Grogan covers more than Marley's life, though. This is basically an autobiography. He's a good writer, and the stories are good, but they are at their best when Marley is on the center stage.

Recommended reading if you're an animal lover, or want to be one.

Letter To A Christian Nation, Sam Harris

Title:		Letter To A Christian Nation
Author:		Sam Harris
Rating:

This little (91 page) book should be read by everyone. And I mean everyone. Harris clearly and concisely addresses a broad range of concerns about religion that most of us ignore or sidestep. Given he's also the author of The End Of Faith - a book I must go out and purchase - you can guess that his point of view is strongly anti-religion. I say: "more power to him."

Doug reviewed this book as well, and his comments are well thought out (it was that review, in fact, that setup my reading of the book) but I'm not sure I agree with him about the need to avoid provoking the mainstream Christians. If we don't, I don't see how anything changes for the better. Of course, there may be no way to change things for the better in any case. If it can happen, though, it's got to start here at home, in the good old US of A. Our house must be scrupulously in order before we try to lead on this (or any other) issue, and frankly, we're pretty messed up as a nation of late.

Harris is eloquent in his writing, but he holds nothing back. Here's a quote - one of many that strongly resonated with me - as I read this little gem of a book. This comes from page 73:

The truth is that no one knows how or why the universe came into being. It is not clear that we can even speak coherently about the creation of the universe, given that such an event can be conceived only with reference to time, and here we are talking about the birth of space-time itself. Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be appreciated in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other non-believers for there intellectual arrogance. There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell. . . . An average Christian, in an average church, listening to an average Sunday sermon has achieved a level of arrogance simply unimaginable in scientific discourse - and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

I wish I could write half as well.

Do yourself a favor: if you are honest about your beliefs and think that religion is correct in any sense, please read this book. You don't have to agree with it in the end, and I'm not asking you to buy it - get it from the library if you can - but please read it. It's a cry for intellectual honesty and reason from all of us. If you don't come away questioning your religious beliefs, at least you'll have spend some time thinking about them in depth, and asking questions about them that might not have occurred to you before. Hopefully you can't be hurt by that bit of introspection.

When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours, Teller

Title:		When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours
Author:		Teller
Rating:

I think I found a reference to this book on paperbackswap.com. Regardless of where I heard about it, I've always liked Penn and Teller's brand of magic, so I requested it on a whim.

Think of it as a short, light hearted biography of Joe and Irene Teller - the parents of Teller, the quiet half of Penn and Teller - by their son. It was inspired by Teller's discovery that his father had drawn cartoons at one time, hoping to be published (and make some money in the process, of course).

I found the book to be a brief but amusing diversion. The cartoons are interesting, but the center of the story is Joe Teller's life as he grew from boyhood to marriage to WWII. He spent time as a tramp, riding rail cars all over the lower 48, and some of that lifestyle is briefly documented here.

There isn't anything amazing in these pages, just anecdotes from Teller's parents as they look back on their first 40 years of life. But it is fun in its own, quiet way. I'd have liked to see more paintings by the Tellers, though. The few included show they both have significant skill with paint - far more than I will ever have.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Title:		Neuromancer
Author:		William Gibson
Rating:

Blame this one on crystaldearest. Her review at the end of 2006 caused me to decide it was past time to reread this classic. I'd had it on my 2006 reading list but hadn't gotten around to it. Now I have.

In my opinion, Neuromancer continues to be one of the great pieces of science fiction. The plot is complex, the future real, and the characters fascinating. Some of my more recent reading has had me a bit worried. I haven't enjoyed some of the science fiction and fantasy as much as I expected I would. Perhaps, I thought, my tastes are changing. But no, Neuromancer is still every bit as good as it was back in 1984 when it was published.

For those who haven't read it, it's the story of Case (a hacker in today's lingo), Molly (a thug, but what a thug), and a few others as they commit a crime of mind bending proportions. When they are done, something new may come into existence, or they may all be dead.

Of all the characters here I have the most affection for Molly. She's always viewed from the outside - the story is told entirely from Case's perspective - so she's got a bit of mystery to her. And she really is a thug. You wouldn't want to meet her in a dark alley, regardless of whose side she (and you) are on. But she's got style, and something else - something that is hard to describe. Perhaps it's a code of ethics, though it's clear that she'll break any rules she wants. Regardless, there is something attractive about Molly, at least to me.

As I say, the story is complex and the future world presented is very real. It's dark, no doubt, but even in that setting Gibson doesn't have us give up hope. He's showing us the worst of the worst - the seedy criminal element and the ultra-rich - without spending a lot of time on the rest of the population. But they're around - called "tourists" mostly - and though the work might be called dystopian, it does have elements of hope.

Something I really appreciate about this novel is that it doesn't descend into fantasy. Gibson writes solid SF here. He doesn't violate the rules he sets up for the world. Some cyberpunk novels wind up with mysterious beings that populate the matrix and can do things outside of it. That's bugged me, but it doesn't happen here. Neuromancer is solid entertainment, very thought provoking, and non-stop action.

So thank you, crystaldearest, for causing me to reread this one. It's still an excellent book. Highly recommended.

Heris Serrano, Elizabeth Moon

Title:		Heris Serrano
Author:		Elizabeth Moon
Rating:

Malabar reviewed this book some time back. As I mentioned in a follow up to her review, it's really a combined reprint of three other novels:

• Hunting Party
• Winning Colors
• Sporting Chance

That said, these novels follow right on each other's heels, and make no allowances for those who've not read the former books. You need to read them in order to have them make total sense. Calling them a single novel isn't really out of the question as a result.

They all feature Captain Heris Serrano, who's been drummed out of the space service and has taken up employment as a captain of Lady Cecilia de Marktos's yacht. There are other major characters as well - relatives of Cecilia and friends of the same. We follow their adventures over 1041 pages.

The cover of my copy calls these books space opera. At times that title fits, but at times I wondered. Moon gets lost in the intricacies of horses and horse people a lot in these pages, and that aspect just wasn't all that interesting to me. I have a few other quibbles with these books as well.

They contain a lot of jargon relating to FTL space travel & communication, but after a while it seemed it had all been made up for convenience in telling the story, rather than trying to create a believable technological background. That got a bit annoying.

Also, there are too many coincidences here. Too many people that just happen to be present when needed, and events that are very unlikely happening at exactly the right time. It interfered with the willing suspension of disbelief in places.

However, against those issues, there are some positives. Moon does cover some interesting ground in the area of what impact extended life times (via that old SF staple, rejuvenation) would have on society. She also manages to inject the right amount of humor into the book, and the story can be very engaging at points.

In the end, I'm happy I read them, though at times in the process I wondered if I should bother. They won't be on my reread list, but they were a nice diversion. A bit fluffy, perhaps, but a diversion.

The End, Lemony Snicket

Title:		The End
Author:		Lemony Snicket
Rating:

Here I sit, trying to analyze what I think of The End by Lemony Snicket. I guess, to use a phrase that appears regularly in the book itself, it depends on how you look at it.

On one hand, the story does end, and he (Daniel Handler, the author) does resolve - to some degree - the lives of the Baudelaire orphans. That's good, and it's handled reasonably well. On the other hand, and against that initial somewhat positive note, I have to set two things:

First, there is the constant background of mystery and the general feeling that if you read between the lines closely enough you'll learn something others will miss. That may not be true, but the whole series - particularly the supplemental books - have played things up to make it appear that way. I am lousy at puzzles of almost any kind, and I find the expectation (possibly self-inflicted) that I should be reading The End and all the others with a manic intensity, trying to figure out just how Beatrice fits into everything (for example) more than a bit annoying.

Second, it must be said that many of the things behind the events in the Baudelaire orphan's lives aren't explained. I won't give specific examples - that would be spoiling things - but there are all kinds of questions that could have been answered that simply aren't. Perhaps my expectations were created by the US movie making industry that wants to create a clean, concise story with a clear ending - wrapping up all the loose ends - in about 90 minutes. I don't know. What I do know is that The End would have been more satisfying if it contained a few of the answers that I'd come to expect. That it doesn't is a bit of a problem for me. In fact, in a review I wrote of the first 11 books in the series I said: "I hope the author resolves all the various loose ends well by book 13." I guess Handler didn't do that to my satisfaction, whatever the reason.

In addition to all of that, this book suffered because it has been too long since I read the previous book and the many books before it. Not enough of the story is fresh in my head to let me recall it easily. The author does remind the reader about past events where needed, but he's sparing in that area, and I needed more than I got.

That means that I really need to read the entire thing again, top to bottom, with all the books present so I can be fresh on things as I go into each volume. It will be interesting to do so and compare first opinions with later opinions when I get around to that exercise.

The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket

Title:		The Beatrice Letters
Author:		Lemony Snicket
Rating:

I wish I knew what to make of this "book". It's a small collection of letters between Beatrice Beaudelair and Lemony Snicket, billed as "supplemental material" to the 13 books of the Lemony Snicket series.

It's mildly amusing, but I wish I'd taken my own advice. Back in my review of Lemony Snicket, The Unauthorized Autobiography I said that people should steer clear and read only the actual series. I should have remembered that.

The other things I said there are also true here. If you like puzzles and have the time to try and put it all together, it may be amusing. For me, alas, it was mostly a waste of time.

Born Of Nifty, Pete Abrams

Title:		Born Of Nifty
Author:		Pete Abrams
Rating:

Do you read Sluggy Freelance? No? You mean you read my review of Dangerous Days and didn't follow my instructions then? Really?

Well, let me repeat myself:

Go, now! Drop everything for the next few hours, go here:

http://www.sluggy.com/

and get reading! Do it now. Don't wait. You're only falling farther behind with each passing day, and you don't want to do that.

Born Of Nifty is a reprint of the first three Sluggy books in one, hard bound volume, with a few add-ons thrown in. It's wonderful. Color strips are presented in color, the format is large, and the quality of the book is excellent. Add to that the ongoing, serialized adventures of Torg, Riff, Zoe (with an umlaut), Gwen, Kiki, Bun-bun, and a host of others, and you've got a great time.

Consider this a graphic novel. It's not quite that since the original presentation was in daily comic strip format, but the story lines arc over long periods of time, and the overall presentation is similar. (Abrams work gets even more like a graphic novel in more recent years, with many daily strips approaching the length of one or two full pages in a book.)

The humor here is twisted, and the characters are silly, but it all works, and works well. Reading this book - and thus rereading the first two years or so of Sluggy - was great fun. Lots of plot elements and foreshadowing that I didn't remember are here, and still affecting the story line years later. The parodies are hilarious, and the characters are wonderful.

By the time you read this it may not be possible to buy Born Of Nifty any more. It's a limited printing and available only from http://www.sluggy.com/. But you can always read the strip archives on the web site, and you should. If you like what you see there and can afford it, please buy a copy of Born Of Nifty - if you can - to help support Pete and give you a copy you can snuggle up with in a comfy chair.

Spend some time with Sluggy Freelance. You'll really enjoy it!

Broken Angels, Richard Morgan

Title:		Broken Angels
Author:		Richard Morgan
Rating:

I've been so busy I've been unable to get this review written and posted, but it's finally time to do it.

Broken Angels is Richard Morgan's follow-on to Altered Carbon. I enjoyed that first book, and with this one, Morgan has improved both his writing and his story telling.

Once again we follow Takeshi Kovacs's exploits, but this time he's not acting in the role of a detective. Instead, the plot is more like pure science fiction. Kovacs is on a planet at war and gets diverted to go after an artifact left behind by the long, long dead (or gone) Martian race. Others are going after it as well, of course, and there is always the possibility that one of his fellow team members is betraying his team.

The story is deep and complex enough to hold your attention. The writing is clear and concise, and the action keeps the entire thing moving crisply. As with the first book, there's a fair amount of violence here, and some explicit sexual content, but those are both toned down a bit from their levels in the first volume.

If I have a gripe, it's that despite the fact that we're following Kovacs through the book, there are times when he does important things off stage. That writing technique can work, but it's best to camouflage it in some way, perhaps by shifting the POV around so we're following someone else when the hero does his important work out of our sight.

In the end, though, that is a minor quibble. Broken Angels is a well written science fiction. It's fast paced, set in an interesting universe, and populated with believable, complex characters. Highly recommended.

The Man Who Fought Alone, Stephen R. Donaldson

Title:		The Man Who Fought Alone
Author:		Stephen R. Donaldson
Rating:

Life has taken some complex turns of late - in various directions - and it's been a challenge to read much of anything for nearly a month now. At last I've finished reading another novel - The Man Who Fought Alone by Stephen R. Donaldson - and it's time to write a review.

I should mention - for those who don't already know it - that I have a prejudice in this case. I almost always enjoy Donaldson's writing. I've read various things he's written - nearly all of it in fact - with the exception of his mystery series, of which this novel is a part. "Mystery series?" I hear you ask. "Isn't this the guy that wrote about Thomas Covenant?" Yes, that's him.

Back in about 1980 Donaldson began writing detective novels. He's written four so far. The first three were initially published under the pseudonym "Reed Stephens". This novel - The Man Who Fought Alone - is the fourth in the series.

"Fourth," I now hear you say. "Why did you start with number four?"

Actually, I didn't mean to. I grabbed this one out of my TBR pile and glanced at its list of other books written by Donaldson, which includes everything except any of the other "Man Who..." novels and one other (very recent) book. Based on that I assumed it was the first in the series and started in on it. Only just now - as I scan amazon.com's database for info - did I learn that it was the latest in the series. Oh well. I guess I hold the publisher who didn't list everything he should have on that page responsible for my getting things out of order. From the looks of it the series goes like this:

1. The Man Killed His Brother (1980)
2. The Man Who Risked His Partner (1986)
3. The Man Who Tried To Get Away (1990)
4. The Man Who Fought Alone (2001)

Some may wonder why Donaldson started writing mysteries when his fantasy writing was so successful. He gives you his own answer (in general terms) here:

http://www.stephenrdonaldson.com/fromtheauthor/index.php

To summarize, though, he was stretching his wings - to see how far they'd go - before tackling the really big story floating around in his head. (That really big story is The Last Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, by the way.)

So, what can I say about The Man Who Fought Alone? Well, it's a mystery novel. A murder mystery, in fact. The hero - a rough and beat up private investigator, possibly deserving of the term "hard boiled" - is Mick Axebrewder, known as "Brew" to his few friends. Like just about all of Donaldson's heroes, Brew suffers a lot through this book - both physically and psychologically - but it's not as bad as it could be. In fact, it's almost uplifting by the end. To say more - or why - would be a spoiler. Since I haven't read the first three novels in the series yet I lack all kinds of background information, but I suspect that Brew suffers much more in those earlier novels than he does here. I could be wrong, but it seems likely knowing Donaldson and seeing how Brew is treated here.

The plot is harder for me to evaluate. I've never been a big reader of mysteries - by any author - so I am not the best qualified to judge such things. I found it enjoyable and it kept me wondering who the guilty party was all along. Some of the reviews I checked on amazon.com say Donaldson gives it away about halfway through. I didn't see that, but that could easily be explained by my lack of mystery reading experience.

What I can criticize - to some extent - is the setting. Brew starts out needing a job and winds up doing security work at a martial arts tournament. Donaldson then uses that setting to expound on the martial arts in depth throughout the book. A few times I thought it hung on the very edge of bogging the story down but then recovered. Let's say I was too aware of it in some way, and that perhaps it could have been limited somewhat without losing the story. Of course, Donaldson is a second degree black belt himself, so he's writing about something he knows. I actually appreciated the background in many cases, and I'm willing to cut him some slack for discussing in detail something he clearly loves.

The only other criticism I can lay out relates to Donaldson's writing style. I love the way he writes, but for certain characters it may be a liability. Brew is used to working in squalid conditions and hanging out in places most would never go. Every so often Donaldson has him think (and less often speak) in words that I really doubt he'd know or use. Here is an example. Brew is talking to his new love interest and says: "Me neither. Heaven forfend."

The context really doesn't matter much there, but the words "heaven forfend" just don't sound plausible coming out of Brew's mouth. He's a tough SOB and I just don't think he'd actually speak that way. More likely he'd say "Me neither. Hell no."

Of course, I could be mistaken. There are those previously mentioned three volumes of "introductory" material that I haven't read yet. They might explain why Brew occasionally has a vocabulary more appropriate for an English professor than a PI. I guess I'll figure that out when I read those books.

And read them I will. This book was good enough to make me want to learn more about Brew and his partner, Ginny Fistoulari. Their history sounds interesting, and even if Donaldson's writing isn't quite right for the characters in all cases, it's still a pleasure to read.

In short, a recommended work by one of my favorite authors. Not his best effort, but easily good enough to merit your time.