Least Loved Stories

This caught my eye--you often see lists of the top [pick your number] best books. Why not a discussion of the worst of the lot (at least, in the opinion of this select group of critics)?

I can think of a few pretty awful candidates, but I refuse to name them if the authors are alive. I figure, why add to their troubles? Isn't the agony you go through to get (and stay) published bad enough?

Something in the 'Air That Kills'

Review of AN AIR THAT KILLS (IPL 1985) by Margaret Millar

Margaret Millar was without question a talented writer of mystery and suspense novels. Wife of Kenneth Millar (better known as Ross MacDonald), some say she exceeded her husband in writing ability, if not in fame among the general public.

AN AIR THAT KILLS makes great reading, too. Millar had a way with dialogue—her characters could be pathetic, sarcastic, annoying or droll and she had an eye for detail and an ear for the spoken word that just nailed each of them.

And Millar could set you up like no one else. Her stories had a way of leading you down a primrose path, only to leave you staring at a trash heap, realizing she really had you going all along. And the clues to where you ended up were all hiding in plain sight, in retrospect. These things are all true, if you aren’t already familiar with her work.

See, I’ve already read Millar before—HOW LIKE AN ANGEL, another convoluted story that kept the reader guessing up to the last line, no less—and actually figured out the big surprise before I got to that line. So, when she laid the surprising finish on in this story, I wasn’t quite as shocked as I might have been if I didn’t already know how Millar tended to write.

I enjoyed AN AIR THAT KILLS—the writing is superb, the dialogue crackles, the plot intrigues. What bothered me was the premise—in the end, I just found the whole setup a teeny bit hard to swallow. Without spoiling anything for others who wish to read it, I’d love to know if anyone else who knows the story felt a similar sense of anti-climactic disbelief in the ending. All comments are welcome.

Spending Time With 'A Girl Named Zippy'

Review of A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY (Broadway Books 2001)
Author, Haven Kimmel

When I looked at the cover blurbs for A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY by Haven Kimmel—stuff that said it was “[f]illed with good humor, fine storytelling, and acute observations of small-town life” and described the author as “a spunky little girl trying to puzzle through the adult world . . . in this gentle memoir”—I thought “Aw, jeez. Is this going to be one of those collections of too-cute essays? Is this going to be Lake Wobegon in Indiana?”

But I picked up this book on my sister’s recommendation, and I respect my sister’s opinions on books greatly. Plus I met a woman at a business mixer who liked the book, which reflected well on her since she shared my sister’s enthusiasm for it. And I figured I’d give it a try.

So I did. And the book is neither too-cute nor would it be confused with anything by Garrison Keillor.

Zippy not only avoids being excessively cute, she can actually be outright dislikeable at times. Kimmel writes with disarming honesty about one instance in particular where a girl in Zippy’s class suffers a family disgrace, and Zippy proceeds to find out about it by pretending to be her friend.

But I do the book and Kimmel a disservice if I leave you with the thought that Zippy was a horrible child. She wasn’t. It’s just that Kimmel is so forthright about her (occasional) bad qualities, you have to really respect her. And like her, too.

It also doesn’t seem to be saying enough to mention that Kimmel has a unique voice. Anyone who would write of a ceramic bowl her mother made that “was so pretty I wanted to break it” has more than a unique voice.

The book does paint a picture of small (very small) town life, in a way that captures the joys, anxieties and outright terrors of childhood in a distinctive and (deceptively) simple way.

Kimmel is a gifted storyteller—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she didn’t speak a word until she was three years old. And, in case you hadn’t already guessed, I did indeed enjoy A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY so much, I would highly recommend it to anyone and everyone looking for (as the Python boys would say) “something completely different” to read.

Finding Yourself 'In the Midst of Death'

Review of IN THE MIDST OF DEATH (Jove ed. 1984)
Author, Lawrence Block

Lawrence Block is the kind of writer who can pretty much do it all. I’ve read books from his series about Evan Tanner, the perennial insomniac, and the droll burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. But my favorite of his protagonists has to be Matthew Scudder.

Scudder works as an unlicensed private eye. He was once an NYPD officer, but quit after accidentally killing a young girl when a bullet he fired at a fleeing criminal took a bad ricochet into the girl’s head. As a result, he quit the force, left his wife, took a room at a Manhattan hotel and began drinking bourbon for breakfast. He is, in short, a man with issues.

In addition to drinking too much, Scudder is working through his demons by tithing at the first church he runs across every time he’s paid and trying to right wrongs as an investigator.

IN THE MIDST OF DEATH shows Scudder taking up the cause of Jerry Broadfield, who claims to have been framed for the murder of a high-class call girl. The police would just as soon see Broadfield take the rap for the crime, as he was cooperating (voluntarily, at that) with a police corruption investigation.

So did someone on the force set Broadfield up? Or was someone else behind the prostitute’s murder? Block’s story piles on the questions, the characters and the dead bodies. Our flawed hero, Scudder, gets to the bottom of it all. But does he win in the end? In a story like this, the best one can hope for is resolution—even if it’s not entirely a happy one.

'Little Girl Lost' is a Find

Review of LITTLE GIRL LOST (Hard Case Crime 2004) by Richard Aleas

LITTLE GIRL LOST is the first of the John Blake books written by Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, under the pseudonym Richard Aleas. Having read the second book (SONGS OF INNOCENCE) first, I had some sense of what might happen in this one, but not enough to ruin the story for me.

John Blake is working in New York City (his home town) as a private eye for a two-man detective agency when he finds out that his high school sweetheart, Miranda Sugarman, has been shot, execution-style, on the roof of a “tenth rate” strip club, where it turns out she was also performing. Blake’s last memories of Miranda are of a girl who left New York to attend college in New Mexico, harboring dreams of becoming an ophthalmologist (or an optometrist—Blake can’t remember which). Along with the news of her murder, finding out that Miranda returned to New York ten years later, only to end up stripping at a bottom-of-the-barrel club, comes as a bit of a shock to Blake. He decides he simply has to find out who killed her.

This necessarily entails finding out more about Miranda and how she ended up where she did—inquiries that, as his employer warns him, may lead Blake to information he will wish he’d never found. It also involves his establishing a relationship with another stripper going by the stage name Rachel Firestone, whose real name is Susan—a woman who ends up doing a lot of the dull legwork for Blake “off-stage” so the narrative can focus more on action-oriented plot developments and Blake’s theories about the case.

Aleas captures the world-weary, ironic tone of the genre, yet makes Blake vulnerable enough for us to see that he’s not completely hardened by his experiences. Thus, finding the truth about Miranda’s death becomes something of a harsh reality check for him. The plot goes through its twisty paces as Blake tries to reason out what could have happened. By the end of LITTLE GIRL LOST, Blake loses what’s left of his innocence and makes a tough, but understandable decision. All this, plus the story’s gritty, evocative descriptions of New York and its noir-ish ending, make it easy to see why it was nominated for both the Edgar and Shamus awards.

'Deal Breaker': An Offer You Shouldn’t Refuse

Review of DEAL BREAKER (Dell 1995) by Harlan Coben

I decided to read my first Harlan Coben book and chose DEAL BREAKER at random, based on a description on Amazon. I was lucky in that 1) I stumbled upon the first book in the Myron Bolitar series and 2) Coben is a writer after my heart.

For anyone who hasn’t read this best-selling author or this series, Myron Bolitar is a sports agent. As the story begins, he’s on the verge of signing his first major client, a promising rookie quarterback named Christian Steele, to an NFL contract with (if the sleazy team owner will agree to it) a record-setting salary. Things get a bit rocky when a nude photo of Steele’s old girlfriend, Kathy Culver, who mysteriously vanished and is thought dead, turns up in the back pages of a porno rag. They get more bizarre when Kathy’s father, Adam Culver, is murdered during an apparent robbery. But Kathy’s sister (who also happens to be Myron’s ex-girlfriend—yes, these people are a cozy lot) isn’t convinced that muggers killed her dad. And she thinks there’s some connection between his death and Kathy’s disappearance.

Coben is, to say the least, a skillful storyteller. Bolitar is not only a likeable character, with sardonic wit reminiscent of Robert Parker’s Spenser, but he’s a sports agent with a heart of gold (sort of Jerry Maguire as wisecracking private eye, if you will). Bolitar is also a former baseketball star who lost his chance at everlasting fame and fortune in the pros due to a career-ending injury. Somewhere along the line, he also found time to acquire a law degree, do some kind of mysterious work for the FBI and (conveniently?) become something of an expert in self-defense. Lest he sound too much like a Superman here, I might add that even though Bolitar is in his early thirties, he still (for reasons not really explained) lives in his parents’ basement.

Not only does Coben manage to weave all this backstory (and more) into the narrative without slowing the pace, but he creates memorable characters and writes sparkling dialogue. Bolitar also has a wonderful sidekick named Windsor Horne Lockwood III to do his dirty work—his “psychopathic Tonto” as I think one character put it. Win Lockwood is to Bolitar as Mouse is to Easy Rawlins or Hawk is to Spenser—except Win is wealthy and white.

The plot twists along at a fast pace and Coben plays fair with the reader clue-wise. When the telling clue comes along, it’s not hard to spot—but you might skim past it because you don’t want to believe what it has to mean. And when the truth comes out about Kathy and her father, you may think of that clue and find yourself saying, “I should’ve seen that coming!”

Enough to Give Terrorism a Bad Name

A Review of WILD FIRE (audiobook) by guest blogger Star Lawrence
Author, Nelson DeMille, read by Scott Brick

You know those wacky millionaires, always using their ill-gotten (in this case, oil-gotten) gains to wipe out the world, just when you’d think they’d want to be ordering another Hummer or something. Let’s see, where can we find a wisecracking ex-New York cop turned terrorism expert and his long-suffering FBI agent wife to unravel the shenanigans? Why, in this very book, WILD FIRE by best-selling, page-turning, or in this case, disk-flipping, Nelson DeMille.

When last visited, the duo of John Corey and the purry Spec Agent Kate Mayfield were just running over to the World Trade Center for breakfast…and that didn’t turn out well.

In WILD FIRE, their buddy Harry Muller has disappeared from the lavish Adirondack estate of the aforementioned millionaire—and they drive up from the terrorism task force office in New York City for a look-see.

Corey is worried about those woods up there—are there bears? He even had me laughing out loud as he belabored this point over and over. DeMille can be quite amusing, although Corey is only half as wise-ass as he thinks he is. Maybe the second half.

Anyhow, a trip to the morgue does result in an unusual clue I have never read before—and that is saying something!

WILD FIRE is read by my personal favorite reader Scott Brick, who is snarky and wry and manages to keep the voices apart pretty well.

Did the world end? You’re reading this aren’t you? Now ask me do they see a bear. Wasn’t that actually the point?

Star Lawrence is owner of HEALTH’Sass, http://healthsass.blogspot.com.