KRL-- Short stories by Terry Shames & Gail Farrelly & much more in KRL this week

As posted elsewhere yesterday...

For some pet and mystery fun this morning in Kings River Life Magazine we have a review & giveaway of Krista Davis new pet related mystery novel "Murder, She Barked" & a fun guest post from Krista about the new series http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/murder-she-barked-mystery-by-krista-davis/

We also have a mystery short story from Terry Shames http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/the-box-a-mystery-short-story/

And we have a Christmas short story with just a bit of a mystery twist, by Gail Farrelly http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/the-christmas-temptation-a-christmas-short-story

For more pet related mystery fun, we have review & giveaway of Spencer Quinn's latest Chet & Bernie mystery, "The Sound and the Furry" http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/the-sound-and-the-furry-by-spencer-quinn/

Also this week we have reviews & giveaways of a few more Penguin mysteries to end out your year. "Fixing to Die: A Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper Mystery" By Elaine Viets, "The Quotient of Murder: A Professor Sophie Knowles Mystery" By Ada Madison, "The Thrill of the Haunt: A Haunted Guesthouse Mystery" By E.j. Copperman, "Wedding Cake Killer" By Livia J. Washburn, and "Words with Fiends" By Ali Brandon http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/end-of-the-year-penguin-mystery-fun/

Over at KRL Lite we have a review & giveaway of a sci-fi mystery, "The Zyraton Affair" by Joe Nowlan http://kingsriverlife.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-zyratron-affair-by-joe-nowlan.html

For those like me who also enjoy some fantasy, we have a review & giveaway of the latest fantasy novel by Jacqueline Carey, "Dark Currents" http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/dark-currents-agent-of-hel-by-jacqueline-carey/

And a review & giveaway of the latest Morganville Vampire book by fantasy author Rachel Caine, "Daylighters" http://kingsriverlife.com/12/14/daylighters-the-morganville-vampires-by-rachel-caine/

For all of this you can also go to our home page and scroll down http://KingsRiverLife.com 

Watch this week for a bunch of Christmas mystery short stories!

Happy holidays,

Lorie Ham

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RTE Holiday Issue

As posted elsewhere earlier today...

At RTE this week we have

Our year-end holiday issue, with

15 new crime fiction reviews:

http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com

Christopher Fowler  in the 'Sixty seconds with . . .' interview hot seat:

http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/interviews.html?id=172

Reviews this week:

TITLE                    AUTHOR                REVIEWER

A CHRISTMAS HOPE        Anne Perry    Lourdes Venard   
In Anne Perry's annual Christmas offering, Claudine Burroughs, part of London,s upper-class clique, challenges the conventions of society to find the real killer of a prostitute.

SPIRIT OF STEAMBOAT    Craig Johnson   Sharon Mensing   
On Christmas eve past, Longmire must find a way to transport a dying girl to a hospital where her burns can be treated and her life saved, even in the midst of a raging storm.

TEN LORDS A-LEAPING    C.C. Benison       
Having damaged his ankle skydiving for charity, the Reverend Tom Christmas is recuperating at a stately home where a series of puzzling murders takes place.

SILENT KNIFE    Shelley Freydont    Sarah Dudley       
When a counterfeit Santa is murdered, Liv Montgomery must clear the town's Santa's name and save Christmas for the town of Celebrations Bay.

THE INVISIBLE CODE    Christopher Fowler    Yvonne Klein       
The venerable detectives Bryant & May are retained by the loathed head of Home Security, Oskar Kasavian, to investigate the sudden bizarre behaviour of his wife.

THE MINOR ADJUSTMENT BEAUTY SALON  Alexander McCall Smith
With her assistant on maternity leave, Mma Ramotswe, Botswana's No.1 Ladies' Detective, must solve two cases, one involving defamation of character, and another concerning the legitimacy of a young heir.

PAGAN SPRING    G.M. Malliet    Ben Neal       
Vicar Max Tudor is once again thrust into the investigation into a murder of one of his most despised townspeople

SYCAMORE ROW (Audio)    John Grisham    Karla Jay   
After Seth Hubbard hangs himself and leaves a new, handwritten will giving his fortune to his Black housekeeper, Hubbard's kin and their offspring descend on a rural Mississippi county to claim the twenty million dollar estate.

THE PRISONER OF THE RIVIERA    Janice Law    Christine Zibas       
The young painter, Francis Bacon, finds himself involved in a complicated plot as a result of his trying to clear his gambling debts.

USA NOIR     Johnny Temple, ed.    Jim Napier       
A collection of contemporary noir fiction spanning the continental US, selected from Akashic's City Noir series, and including many literary luminaries

THE GODS OF GUILT    Michael Connelly    Anne Corey   
Criminal defense lawyer Mickey Haller takes on the case of a pimp accused of murdering one of his girls and over the course of many months and plot twists links her death with a rogue DEA agent and a series of other crimes.

AN OLD BETRAYAL    Charles Finch        Cathy Downs       
Charles Lenox, now an MP, in searching for a man who has been harassing a woman of mysterious parentage, discovers a plot against the queen, a philanderer who is not what he seems, a woman who has found a way to subvert "the woman question," and a bit of political plotting against - himself

THE BONES OF PARIS    Laurie R. King    Ann Pearson   
Private detective Harris Stuyvesant's search for a missing American girl takes him on a macabre adventure in the Bohemian world of Paris in 1929.

THE PRINCE OF RISK    Christopher Reich    Christine Zibas       
A plot to destabilize the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is uncovered by the head of the exchange, who just happens to be the estranged father of a hedge fund manager. His son then must find out who killed his father.

DEATH OF THE DEMON    Anne Holt    Barbara Fister       
When the head of a children's home is murdered, Hanne Wilhemsen needs to talk to a 12-year-old boy with severe behavioral problems – but he has gone missing.

We post more than 900 new reviews a year -- all of them are archived on the site -- as well as a new interview with a top author every issue.


Yvonne Klein
Editor: ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com

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Sample Sunday: Excerpt from "Stuffed Shirt" by Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang is back this week with an excerpt from his short story e-book STUFFED SHIRT.

STUFFED SHIRT

by Barry Ergang

Label it instinct, intuition, or clairvoyance—when I met Theron Claymore, I immediately sensed a predator in our midst.

When he strode into the department alongside Haskell, art director at Danforth Advertising, I thought Claymore was a model. Tall and blond, with appraising slate-blue eyes, he carried himself with the erect confidence one associates with a California surfer. He lacked only the deep suntan. Sensing his superficiality, I was astonished when Haskell announced him as the newest member of our ranks.

Claymore gave the room and the occupants of its glassed cubicles a conquistadorial scrutiny. Haskell then individually introduced him to us.

“This is Eric Dennison,” Haskell said, smiling benevolently beneath his heavy mustache, “our senior artist.”

Despite my repulsion, I shook his hand and murmured, “Nice to meet you.”

Within a short time my initial assessments were confirmed. Claymore’s work had a draftsmanlike competence but lacked the passion, if such a term may be used with regard to advertising, necessary to our type of illustration. Haskell, however, apparently took to it. Perhaps Claymore’s greatest artistry was his ability to sell himself despite the charming sophistry of the product.

Indeed, charm was his biggest commodity and he used it like a chameleon, adapting himself to suit the various agency personalities with whom he had to contend. His good looks and forceful manner endeared him to many of the women, but he was equally adept at bantering with the men. He had none of the newcomer’s reserve and quickly became the focal figure in the art department, magnet for the irreverent remark or salacious joke. Tales of the women he purportedly bedded were incessant.

Most of it I was able to ignore. In my five years at Danforth, I had for self-protective reasons kept distant from my colleagues, which allowed me to work with a relative freedom from interruption. What I could not ignore was Claymore’s camaraderie with Haskell, my immediate superior. Their time together was not spent exclusively on matters of agency business. They lingered in the corridors exchanging jokes and stories, they went out for drinks after hours, they lunched together—often with other department heads. During my tenure I had never socialized with the upper echelons; Claymore exerted a disproportionate amount of time insinuating himself into their circles.

My mother would have been appalled. When she returned to the workplace after my father died, she performed her duties diligently and reliably but shunned the intra-office politicking common among her colleagues and thus never received the promotions she deserved. “I don’t understand them,” she would say of the other women in her office, “fawning and bootlicking and backstabbing to be noticed. No woman—nor man either—should have to stoop that low.”

Up until her own death, she did not possess the pragmatism necessary to deal with Theron Claymore’s sort. She never knew her child did—never knew, for instance, that the  disfiguring “accident” in high school chemistry which befell one of my classmates avenged an affront; never knew that during my first year at Danforth, the occupant of an apartment in the building next to mine died to prevent disclosure of what he saw when, upon arriving home from work one evening, I carelessly left the bedroom curtains open.

Barry Ergang ©2013
Stuffed Shirt is one of a number of Barry Ergang's books available at Amazon and Smashwords.

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FFB Review: "The Fabulous Clipjoint" by Fredric Brown --reviewed By Barry Ergang

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott here. Please welcome back Barry Ergang who contributes his review of The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown.

 

 

THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT (1947)

by Fredric Brown

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

I’m tempted to call this novel mystery fiction’s version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not a wholly accurate description, and I’m sure there are a lot of folks who’d take me to task for it, but The Fabulous Clipjoint may be the closest thing in spirit — though without the comedy — to Mark Twain’s masterwork that the genre has.

At eighteen, Ed Hunter is older than Huck and a good deal more worldly. When his father is beaten to death, the apparent victim of a random mugging, he wants answers but knows he‘s out of his depth when it comes to getting them. He therefore enlists the help of his father’s brother Ambrose, a carnival barker savvy in the ways of the mean streets. In teaming up with Uncle Am to solve what they eventually determine is a deliberate murder rather than an impersonal mugging, Ed undertakes his own Huck-like voyages of discovery through the streets of Chicago and thus performs his rite of passage.

The characters, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are neither all good nor all bad. Most exhibit morally gray behaviors and attitudes. The story itself is as “naturalistic” as any I’ve ever read in the genre, a superb example of the kind Raymond Chandler alluded to when he wrote about Dashiell Hammett (and by extension other good pulp writers) giving “murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Anthony Boucher called it “a singularly effective job of portraying people as they are and murder as it is — a solidly compelling story.” But while it contains its share of dark moments and situations, and has a strong sense of place, Brown’s style — though eminently readable — is relatively pedestrian, lacks the brooding lyricism that infuses, for instance, a David Goodis novel.

The Fabulous Clipjoint has been marginalized as a minor classic for many years. Recently, an article by Dick Adler argued for the elevation of its stature. Read it for yourself to decide if Fredric Brown merits being ranked with Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Jim Thompson.

 
Barry Ergang ©2009, 2013

Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang's fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Visit his website: http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/ Some of his work is available at Amazon and at Smashwords.

Stress Reducer

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