Beneath the Stains of Time: Deadly Thunder (1998) by Seimaru Amagi

Beneath the Stains of Time: Deadly Thunder (1998) by Seimaru Amagi: Earlier this year, I tracked down and reviewed an obscure, hard-to-get Japanese light novel in The New Kindaichi Files series, Operazakan –...

FFB Review: A HUNGER IN THE SOUL (1998) by Mike Resnick Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Michael Drake hasn’t been seen or heard from by Men for fifteen years, but he’s famous throughout the Democracy as “the man who developed the ybonia vaccine,” which saved billions upon billions of lives, and for which “he refused all payment or royalties.”  

 

Enoch Stone, the story’s first-person narrator, is “the first Man to set down on forty-three different worlds,” as he explains to one Robert H. Markham: “I’ve seen lakes and mountains and deserts no one else has seen to this day. I’ve brought back half the animals that are mounted in this…museum and half the artifacts that are on display.”

 

Stone, who lost a leg in a previous expedition and has a prosthetic, and who suffers from recurrent bouts of jungle fever, is presently a museum staffer who hates his work compared with that from his previous life, but who bitterly accepts its necessity.

 

All kinds of reasoning suggests that Michael Drake may be dead or, if alive, not wanting to be found. Robert Markham is a glory hound journalist with seemingly unlimited funds backing him who is determined to find Drake and bring him back to find a cure for a mutation of the ybonia virus that has spread to three hundred worlds. Drake was last seen on Bushveld, and Markham wants Stone to put together as quickly as possible an expedition to that “totally undeveloped world.” Markham has already hired two holographers who will record the entirety of the expedition.

 

Despite his dubiety about the project, Stone finds himself making out a list for Markham indicating what kinds of help, weapons, clothing and other supplies they’ll need, thinking “It’s amazing what a man will do when presented with the possibility, no matter how remote, of galaxywide fame.”

 

Thus begins an expedition in which the participants thereof encounter all manner of obstacles—some fatal—and in which several of them reveal their true selves, a couple of whom are close friends of Stone, but most notably Markham, whose self-aggrandizement is both callous and boundless, and about whom Stone says: “It was not the first time I wondered if he was simply too brave by half, or out-and-out crazy.”

 

Narrated in a straightforward prose style, A Hunger in the Soul is, typical of Resnick, a fast-moving science-fiction novel that is compelling and adventurous but far from superficial. It’s one of those character studies that will leave readers with significant afterthoughts, especially when it comes to the price of fame and power and immortality.

 

Does Markham find Drake? A Hunger in the Soul is gnawlingly worth a reader’s time to find out.

 

Barry Ergang ©2018, 2021 

Barry Ergang’s parody of Mike Resnick’s novel The Soul Eater is available at Amazon  and Smashwords.

FFB Review: Instruments of Night (1998) by Thomas H. Cook Reviewed by Barry Ergang

For this final Friday in November as you surface from your Turkey driven coma, I offer you Barry’s Review of Instruments of Night by Thomas H. Cook. The review originally ran in late 2007 and then again in 2012, so it has been quite some time since it saw the light of day here. After you read his review and mosey around here, make sure you ride over to Patti Abbott’s blog as well as Aubrey Nye Hamilton’s Happiness Is A Warm Book blog and see what they suggest today. Be sure to comment with your own FFB reviews and links. 

 

Instruments of Night (1998) by Thomas H. Cook

reviewed by Barry Ergang

 

Novelist Paul Graves is a man literally haunted by his past. The ghosts of one grim and brutal night invade his thoughts daily, summoned or unbidden, and lend their power to his books.

 

Raised on a small farm in North Carolina, Graves was already an imaginative young man who had taken a liking to writing when his parents were killed in a car accident. Paul was twelve and his sister Gwen was sixteen. The two continued to live on the farm for about a year until the night Gwen was tortured and eventually slain by a sadist named Kessler and his tremulous sidekick Sykes. Forced to witness his sister's agonies, Paul retreated into a long silence.

 

In the story's present, a forty-five-year-old Graves lives a life of self-imposed relative seclusion in New York City. He's the author of a popular series of novels set in that city at the end of the 19th Century. They feature a detective named Slovak who, much like Sir Denis Nayland Smith chasing after Dr. Fu Manchu, pursues the bloodthirsty Kessler and the slavish Sykes from murder to murder, aging and wearying in the process—much as his creator has aged and wearied and considered self-extinction.

 

Graves is invited to Riverwood, an estate in the Hudson Valley that remains a family home and also an artists' colony, by wealthy Allison Davies, who grew up there and who has never left. She offers him an odd commission: look into the fifty-year-old murder of her closest friend Faye Harrison, who was killed at the age of sixteen, and write a story about it that will satisfy Faye's dying mother about who killed her daughter. The story needn't be true, only plausible.

 

Reluctant at first, Graves finally accepts the job and takes up residence at Riverwood, where he's given access to all of the information about Faye's death, including the detailed reports by the investigating police detective, Dennis Portman. He is joined by Eleanor Stern, a playwright, who is quite possibly more intrigued by the project than Graves is.

 

What might seem like a dry historical probe is rendered dramatic by Graves's vivid imagination. He visualizes the players and the scenes they enact so as to carry the reader into the moments Portman's summaries only sketch. His investigations lead to revelations about Riverwood and its denizens in that long-ago time, and about Graves's own past.

 

I should add, for Golden Age fans, that although Instruments of Night is very much a psychological thriller, it's also a fairly-clued mystery. The key clue is extremely subtle and easily overlooked.

 

I discovered Edgar Allan Poe in early adolescence, William Faulkner in my late teens. What struck me about both of their prose styles was the quality of envelopment: you might be sitting in a riotous, crowded stadium during the Super Bowl or the World Series, but if you were reading one of their stories, you'd feel as though you were alone in inky blackness, aswirl in the story's events. Thomas H. Cook—at least in this novel, the first of his I've read—conveys that same envelopment.

 

So why am I torn about this book?

 

It's very well-written, Cook's prose often lyrical. The characters are properly fleshed-out, the pacing spot-on, and the suspense carefully built and sustained.

 

But its tone is unremittingly dark. In short stories like Poe's, where uniformity of tone was a goal, that quality is tolerable. Many of Faulkner's darker novels were occasionally relieved by moments of levity. Not so Instruments of Night. Cook sometimes overdoes Graves's recollections of his own horrors. Thus, compelling as the storyline is, I found it hard to sustain long periods of reading. I can't recall ever having read anything darker: not Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury, or Light in August. Nor Bernard Malamud's The Fixer. Not even Elie Wiesel's Night.

 

With that caveat in place, I can recommend Instruments of Night as worth your time.

 

For more on the Golden Age follow the link http://gadetection.pbwiki.com/

 

 

Barry Ergang © 2007, 2012, 2020 

 Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s written work has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of it is available at Amazon and at Smashwords. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ where he is available for your editing needs.

 

Beneath the Stains of Time: Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Other Stories (1998) by Roy Templeman

Beneath the Stains of Time: Sherlock Holmes and the Chinese Junk Affair and Ot...: Roy Templeman's "Sherlock Holmes and the Trophy Room" is one of three novella-length pastiches, collected in Sherlock Holme...

FFB Review: THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain Reviewed by Barry Ergang

After his all new review of The Big Bad City by Ed McBain last week, it seemed appropriate to run again Barry’s review of THE LAST BEST HOPE.  For the full list of reading suggestions, check out Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog.

THE LAST BEST HOPE (1998) by Ed McBain

Jill Lawton comes to attorney Matthew Hope's law office in Calusa, Florida to get a divorce—with alimony—from her long-gone husband Jack. Nine months earlier, Jack had gone north, ostensibly in search of freelance graphic design work, and she has not heard from him since. Jill hopes to invoke the Enoch Arden Law, but Matthew explains that not enough time has passed for this to apply, and that they'll have to find Jack and serve him with the divorce papers.

It's not long thereafter that a man's body is found on a beach in Calusa, the face gone from a shotgun blast. A driver's license and Visa card in the man's pockets suggest he's Jack Lawton. But when Jill is summoned to positively identify the body, she instantly determines from the absence of a miniscule blue dot on his Adam's apple that the man is not her husband.

Matthew puts a firm of private investigators on the case, and on his own phones a precinct in the city where Jack was last known to have been. The city is unnamed; the precinct is the 87th; the detective Matthew talks to is Steve Carella.

Thus McBain melds two series and the sleuths therefrom, each working in different locations on the same case.

As the body count increases and surprises unfold, McBain with the skill his fans know and love conveys the story's past and present from different angles and viewpoints, switching among the various investigators and multiple villains. The reader is taken into the heads of the characters, all of whom are believably fleshed-out, and comes to know them from their conversations with others and their internal monologues—another McBain trademark.

The Last Best Hope never lets up—it's a superb example of a "page-turner"—as characters and events converge in a wild climax tense with excitement but leavened with humor situational, coincidental, and authorial. The lyric from a song in a James Bond movie aptly sums up Ed McBain: "Nobody does it better."




Barry Ergang © 2007, 2019

Some of Derringer winner Barry Ergang's work is available at Amazon and Smashwords.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Salton Killings by Sally Spencer

The Salton Killings by Sally Spencer (Severn House, 1998) is the first Chief Inspector Woodend title in an impressive collection of 20 books that begin in the late 1950s, when the aftermath of World War II has receded but is still felt. (The Amazon subtitle for this book says it is set in the 1970s but the book makes the late 1950s timing clear in multiple places.) Woodend is a brusque guy from the north of England who has antagonized his superiors in Scotland Yard, earning every out-of-the-way case that comes along. So when the strangled body of a girl is found in a salt pile in a village in Cheshire, off he goes with his newest sergeant.

Woodend’s first act is to locate the nearest village pub, and then he identifies a police cadet who was born in the village and knows the history and gossip for generations back. The village still remembers vividly the murder of a local teenager during World War II, the killer believed to be her American military boyfriend who was not charged due to a lack of evidence. The discovery of two more teenage girls who died since then in what was thought to be accidents makes Woodend think he’s dealing with a serial killer who has been at work for 10 years or longer.

This story is a definitive British police procedural set in a village. The investigation is carefully worked out and logical in its steps, the suspects are everywhere, and misdirection abounds. The characters come into their own as they become accustomed to Woodend’s thought processes and as secrets unfold. The confrontation at the end and the identification of the culprit were as unexpected as could be. Not surprising to me at all that this turned into an extended series. The epilogue is great, worth the read of the book all in itself.

·         Hardcover: 224 pages

·         Publisher: Severn House Publishers; 1st World Ed edition (July 1, 1998)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0727853449

·         ISBN-13: 978-0727853448

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

FFB Review: A HUNGER IN THE SOUL (1998) by Mike Resnick (Reviewed by Barry Ergang)

For this first Friday in August 2018, Barry is back with an all new review. Make sure you check out the full list over at Todd Mason's blog as he is subbing for Patti this week. If you are so inclined, please give an extra thought to Patti and her husband, Phil, as they are dealing with the evils of cancer and treatment difficulties. 

A HUNGER IN THE SOUL (1998) by Mike Resnick

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Michael Drake hasn’t been seen or heard from by Men for fifteen years, but he’s famous throughout the Democracy as “the man who developed the ybonia vaccine,” which saved billions upon billions of lives, and for which “he refused all payment or royalties.”  

Enoch Stone, the story’s first-person narrator, is “the first Man to set down on forty-three different worlds,” as he explains to one Robert H. Markham: “I’ve seen lakes and mountains and deserts no one else has seen to this day. I’ve brought back half the animals that are mounted in this…museum and half the artifacts that are on display.”

Stone, who lost a leg in a previous expedition and has a prosthetic, and who suffers from recurrent bouts of jungle fever, is presently a museum staffer who hates his work compared with that from his previous life, but who bitterly accepts its necessity.

All kinds of reasoning suggests that Michael Drake may be dead or, if alive, not wanting to be found. Robert Markham is a glory hound journalist with seemingly unlimited funds backing him who is determined to find Drake and bring him back to find a cure for a mutation of the ybonia virus that has spread to three hundred worlds. Drake was last seen on Bushveld, and Markham wants Stone to put together as quickly as possible an expedition to that “totally undeveloped world.” Markham has already hired two holographers who will record the entirety of the expedition.

Despite his dubiety about the project, Stone finds himself making out a list for Markham indicating what kinds of help, weapons, clothing and other supplies they’ll need, thinking “It’s amazing what a man will do when presented with the possibility, no matter how remote, of galaxywide fame.”

Thus begins an expedition in which the participants thereof encounter all manner of obstacles—some fatal—and in which several of them reveal their true selves, a couple of whom are close friends of Stone, but most notably Markham, whose self-aggrandizement is both callous and boundless, and about whom Stone says: “It was not the first time I wondered if he was simply too brave by half, or out-and-out crazy.”

Narrated in a straightforward prose style, A Hunger in the Soul is, typical of Resnick, a fast-moving science-fiction novel that is compelling and adventurous but far from superficial. It’s one of those character studies that will leave readers with significant afterthoughts, especially when it comes to the price of fame and power and immortality.

Does Markham find Drake? A Hunger in the Soul is gnawlingly worth a reader’s time to find out.

© 2018 Barry Ergang

 Barry Ergang’s parody of Mike Resnick’s novel The Soul Eater is available at Amazon   and Smashwords.