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Book Reviews - Romance, Fantasy, Science Fiction - By an Adult for Adults

Creepy Scary Snoopiness – The God’s Eye View by Barry Eisler

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The God’s Eye View starts off mild, then builds suspense at the same time we start caring about the characters.

Evie Gallagher like any mother, wants to take care of her young son, Dash.  Dash is deaf and Evie is divorced, with her ex-husband only peripherally involved so Evie needs her job.  Evie is good at her work and enjoys the technical challenges and the trust and access to her boss, Anders.  Evie’s job?  She’s an analyst at the NSA and her boss is the director.

Anders is also fanatical about building complete surveillance, complete information access on everybody and complete ability to track and monitor everyone.  He’s amoral and manipulative and sees everything he does as good for the country.  In other words he is one scary, creepy menace.

The Plot

Evie keeps her head down and does her job developing a tracking system that leads her to discover a high up NSA stationed in Turkey has contacted a “subversive” journalist.  Evie reports that contact to Anders and also asks him whether her report about a CIA analyst in contact with a different “subversive” had anything to do with the analyst’s reported suicide the next day.  Anders denies it, but she can’t quite trust him – but she does not want to suspect him.

The plot builds from here.  Anders calls in his favorite nasty guys to take down the two men in Turkey, but one of the take downs, meant to be a straightforward kidnapping/murder, backfires when the kidnappers go public with their captive.  Meanwhile Anders discovers that the high NSA official, now dead, very likely knew of his pet project, God’s Eye.  Anders goes into high gear to stomp out any possibility of his project becoming public.

The book moves fast.  Evie is smart and connects the dots all too soon for Anders who orders her death.  Unfortunately for him, one of his nasty guys, Manus, has fallen for Evie and protects her.  Anders spins out of control, not caring who or how many people he has to kill in order to protect his big secrets.

The end is satisfying but not conclusive.  Big Brother is still out there, just a bit less virulent.

Characters

The people are well done, especially the main antagonists, Evie and Ander.  Eisler shows how someone like Anders, a decorated veteran, patriot, dedicated to serving his country, could go so far into the dark side.  Evie is easy to understand.  She’s smart, she enjoys being good at her work, she loves her son and needs the best job she can get in order to send him to the special school.  The two nasties are less detailed, sufficient for the story.

Backstory

The God’s Eye View is darn scary.  We know we don’t get the full story in the news and we know we can’t trust the government to be the shining city on the hill we all hope it to be.  Author Barry Eisler uses headlines and the fallout from the Eric Snowden affair to craft an excellent story.  With luck it will help us all question what we read and see.

Overall I’d give The God’s Eye View 4 stars.  Very well done, reasonably enjoyable and scary as heck.

Dear County Agent Guy – Dairy Farmer Wisdom and Wit – Jerry Nelson

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Jerry Nelson says he got his start as a humor columnist when he sent a letter to the county agent asking for help removing cattails, ducks and tourists from his flooded field one wet North Dakota spring.  The agent suggested he try writing a column for farm magazines.  Jerry was successful and now with Dear County Agent Guy: Calf Pulling, Husband Training, and Other Curious Dispatches from a Midwestern Dairy Farmer we non farm magazine readers can enjoy the his work too.

Jerry Nelson writes simply and from himself and the result is a series of funny articles that read from the heart, not at all contrived.  His columns range from memories growing up, courting his wife, suggesting his wife’s obstetrician use a calf puller on the slow-to-arrive oldest child and thoughts about raising kids, thrift and farming.  I enjoyed them.

The columns are funny because Nelson finds humor in simple, every day things.  He is not mean nor contemptuous nor snide nor sarcastic.  There is a wide streak of potty humor with a couple stories about changing diapers, handling manure, not bathing and using the side of the barn as a convenient substitute for the indoor bathroom.  Even though I’m not crazy about potty humor the stories were in good fun and a couple of the jokes were pretty funny.

Nelson never preaches or comes across as advising people on how to run their lives, or to save money or to enjoy the outdoors and friends and family.  Nonetheless it’s obvious that these virtues are among the reasons he is happy and if anyone wants to emulate him, well, they got a few good suggestions.

Dear County Agent Guy will appeal to anyone who enjoys the outdoors, not just farmers.  Nelson explains the farming background with minimal detail, enough to clarify what he’s talking about but not so much that we readers feel we need to become dairy farmers to enjoy his work.

I received an advance copy through NetGalley in expectation of an honest review.  The E book could use some copy editing to clean up the format.  The overall writing needs little editing – for one thing these were taken from magazine columns and for another Nelson’s style is good and his sentences, spelling and such are already readable.

Overall I would give this 4 stars.

Impulse New Hard Science Fiction Novel by Dave Bara

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A couple weeks ago Penguin Books sent me a hard back copy of Impulse: Lightship Chronicles, Book One; it arrived in the mailbox with no note so I guess I must have won a giveaway but who knows.  I took it with me on a flight to San Antonio, read it, moderately enjoyed it, packed it back to take home.  A week later I could not remember anything about the story other than it was OK but had a lot of holes.  I had to open it back up to recall anything about the plot or characters.

Once recalled I did remember the book, which is an amazing medley of good and awful.  On the good side the back story is intriguing and author Dave Bara could do a lot of stories set there.  We have the successors to two sides in an interstellar civil war who are now on the same side, cooperating and looking for more planets to bring back into the fold, the Earth Historians who are Yoda-like characters except with their own infighting and factions, the Sri, who combine Dark Lord of the Sith qualities with scientific brilliance, the remnants of the old Corporate Empire and allusions to mysterious Forerunners.  Right there we have the nucleus for many fine story telling opportunities.

The plot moves pretty fast with protagonist Peter serving on Impulse, a joint operation from Quantar (Peter’s home) and Carinthia to understand the attack on the ship Impulse and to seek other groups that survived the war.  Peter does all sorts of heroic deeds and gains a nifty Forerunner artifact (of unknown capability) plus ends up engaged to the princess of a different planet.  All in a days work for our hero!

The main problems with the book are the contradictions and ridiculous actions.  For example:

Peter is on his first assignment after the military college, yet is promoted to lieutenant commander and is the third senior officer on the ship.  True, he is the son of the soon-to-be planetary director but I had a hard time believing that any amount of nepotism would propel someone this high, especially when serving under a captain from Carinthia.

The Impulse captain and executive officer both leave the ship on shuttles to recreate an attack that nearly wiped out a different ship.  They left fully expecting to be attacked, and left Peter in charge.  Even to this non military expert that seems like dereliction of duty.  Surely there is another way to diagnose an attack than by recreating it with crewed shuttles, and no captain and first officer simultaneously would jaunt off leaving college boy in charge.  To top it off, Peter then delegates command to the non naval Historian, someone definitely not in the chain of command; that’s illegal.

Then when they are attacked Peter has to rescue them from a “hydrazine fire”.  My memories from chemistry class are dim, but hydrazine is a nifty rocket fuel that would burn mighty hot and mighty quick.

Right after Peter joins the Impulse the crew pressures him to wear the Carinthian uniform, not the Unified Space nor Quantar uniform.  He refuses, then the captain suddenly acts like it was all a big joke, hazing.  It didn’t read like a joke and I don’t think it added anything to the story.  Even my zero military knowledge says that’s not good manners or smart practice.  Nor does it make any sense that a navy lieutenant commander would outrank a marine colonel.  These are small errors that shake the reader out of book trance.

There is another scene where the executive officer is setting explosive charges but doesn’t know how and is unwilling to have Peter (who is expert) do it.  Hmm.  Again, this doesn’t seem like good military practice; certainly in the corporate world we expect senior management to delegate to the person best able to do a task.

The biggest sour note was the relationship and dialogue with Levant, a third planet ruled by a prince.  During a social reception the prince first twists Peter’s arm to marry his sister, then demands full access to the Unified Quantar/Carinthia/Earth technology – and gets both.  The prince has the repulsive habit of demanding something, hearing he can have it in 10 days and demanding it in 5.  (I used to hate this behavior.  It is disrespectful and in practice yields really bad results since everyone will sandbag whatever they say.)  Peter and the rest don’t seem to mind and give in to every demand and speed up.

The book has several goofy scientific problems, such as a geosynchronous orbit only 300 miles up, but overall I can ignore science errors when the story moves along and the characters are interesting.  With Impulse we have the outline of a good story universe, potentially interesting characters and problems, but we don’t have a finished novel.  Impulse is Dave Bara’s first novel and I hope and expect he will improve his craftsmanship – and if writing science fiction or stories with military landscapes that he learns the basics.

Overall I’d give this 2 or 3 stars.  I won’t look for book 2 in the series, Starbound: Volume Two of the Lightship Chronicles, which is out.  The fact I couldn’t recall anything about Impulse a week after reading says it all.

Let’s Give a Big Welcome Back to L. E. Modesitt! Solar Express Review

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Finally, after his last 3 books that were glacially paced, with wooden dialogue and peopled by stock crews of greedy (and stupid) businessmen, corrupt (and stupid) political leaders, weak-kneed (and obtuse) co-workers,  plus one resourceful hero, Modesitt delivers a good story with interesting people, genuinely worrisome situations, awe-inspiring settings and a plot.  Welcome back!

Modesitt set Solar Express 100 years from now where not much has changed in terms of politics or people.  The US and Canada (and maybe Mexico) are now Noram; China plus unknown other countries are now the Sinese; India is a world power and Europe is one big agglomeration with strong Russian leadership.  African, Middle East, Australia and South America are smaller powers with the African/Middle East/Australian grouped into a union nominally allied with India.

Modesitt writes excellent hard science fiction, which this is, and good to excellent fantasy like the Imager series.  He has three major habits that you either need to love or be able to ignore in order to enjoy any of his books.

  • Politics with head-shaking cultural observations and wooden dialogue
  • Slow pacing
  • Rinse and repeat characters.

As usual Modesitt can’t resist declaring his political beliefs in Solar Express.  He imagines a news outlet, Hot News! that combines accurate reporting, innuendo, celebrity watching and political acumen. Hot News! stories cover global warming results, environmental havoc in polar regions, flooded cities and ravaged coasts and speculation about the Sinese intentions and the apparent inability for the Noram leaders to do anything.

The more interesting snippets are news articles and memos from the Noram government leaders that present facts that align to some Hot News! speculation with just enough to tease us readers.  I wanted to know a lot more than Modesitt gave us!

The pace varies between really slow and slow with a touch of zip-bang.  The pace fits the subject – neither pilot Chris Tavoian nor astrophysicist Alayna Wong-Grant can exactly hurry their work along – and is countered by the fast-moving Solar Express and geopolitical events.   I got a little antsy about a third through, but the Hot News! punctuated the crawling science.

One pleasant change was the characters.  Yes, we still had evil, greedy people who lust after power, but none appeared in person.  “Colonel Anson”, Chris Tavoian’s superior officer is well-meaning and effective (many Modesitt superior officers are either venal or incompentent) and the minor characters Kit and Emma are warm and interesting.  Chris and Alayna are interesting people, a bit reserved, but with feelings and interests.

Modesitt is one of the few authors who successfully write fantasy and science fiction (Bujold and Dave Weber are two others) and some of his science fiction has fantasy-seeming elements (Empress of Eternity and Hammer of Darkness).  Solar Express is unusual in being set so close to today, with technology and politics we can easily extrapolate to.  It made it easy to follow.  Even if you don’t agree with his extrapolated climate, political and cultural changes you can visual them happening.

In Solar Express Modesitt slipped in a fourth annoying habit, dumping complex geographic and political backgrounds early, explaining some later and some not at all.  For example, page 15 in one sentence he introduces:  FuxEx burners (apparently the standard shuttle/small freighter), DOEA (Department of Off Earth Affairs, a government agency charged to oversee space), Policia Espacial (never re-introduced, likely the South American security force), Sudam (South American government), magline (OK, that’s pretty easy, basically a train on the moon), ONeill Station (believe the main transship point orbiting the moon, run by Noram), the elevator (moon to space elevator), standard climber (likely a car that runs on the elevator), main station (terminus for the elevator).

The next page gives us fusionjet (similar to the FusEx?), vasimr slowboats (never explained, likely just what they sound, a s-l-o-w way to move cargo) and Hel3, otherwise known as a helium isotope.  I wouldn’t mind the dump if he gave just a bit of background first or omitted altogether if never revisited.  It is not wise to make your readers feel stupid, especially when the author’s entire body of work holds up thinking as a great virtue.

The Amazon reader reviews for Solar Express are split, about 2/3 positive and 1/3 negative and almost no 3 stars.  Modesitt in his blog attributes this to too many fantasy readers who were turned off by the science fiction aspects.  Several readers complained about the characters communicating by delayed message vs. real time in person (as they would in fantasy series).  However other readers noted the slow pace and abundant political commentary as turn offs so I think the criticism was more than reaction from disgruntled fantasy fans.

Overall, Solar Express is an excellent addition to Modesitt’s novels.  4 Stars.

Nasty Ghosts and So So Book – The Spookshow by Tim McGregor

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The blurb for The Spookshow: (Book 1) describes the plot: Billie Culpepper accompanies her friends to an abandoned house with dark reputation.  What the blurb leaves out is the rest of the story.  First they find a long-dead body surrounded by satanic markings and secondly, the nastiest ghost goes home with Kaitlin, the instigator of the let’s-explore-the-haunted house visit.

The book was so-so.  I didn’t care for any of the characters and the story was boring.  There’s no conclusion; the book just stops.  Two stars.

As the title implies The Spookshow is the first book of a planned series.  I won’t read the others.

Bubba and the 12 Deadly Days of Christmas – Is This Funny?

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Bubba and the 12 Deadly Days of Christmas was on BookBub and sounded funny so I got it.  It’s one of those books that tries so hard to be funny you lose track of the story until you reach the end and think “Is that all there was?”   The plot is ridiculous.

Bubba Snoddy, grown son of the current Snoddy matriarch, lives at home with his mother in the decrepit Snoddy mansion near a small Texas town.  Bubba’s cousins from Louisiana are visiting with an eye to appropriating anything in the house that may have value.  Bubba wants to date gorgeous sheriff deputy Willodean but lacks courage to ask her out.  Oh, then he finds a corpse dressed in the Santa suit in the city’s Christmas display.

Of course the local police chief assumes Bubba is the murderer, arrests him with a concussion, then spends the rest of the novel chasing around for clues to prove Bubba killed the Santa, the older lady, assaulted the sheriff and is after Bubba’s mother.  Everything ends up tied neatly with a bow at the end except the chief still thinks that if Bubba didn’t commit this murder he’ll surely commit one next week.

The book could have been so much more.  The interplay with the covetous cousins and their 10 year old active, intelligent son Brownie was fun to read and could have been the focus of the story instead of a nonsensical murder rampage.  Bubba reveals a more complicated character during the book than the one-dimensional redneck he seems initially.  Had author C. L. Beville spent more time on the family and less on too-neat murders it could have been a good book.

I noticed the reviewers on Amazon mostly liked the novel with under 10% giving it low marks.  I would give it 2 or 3 stars; it wasn’t good enough that I want to read more Bubba books, but it wasn’t so bad that I stopped midway.  It’s a fast read with some funny scenes interspersed with bad word plays and incredibly stupid-acting police and villains.  I’m not a fan of making fun of people who talk funny or believe and act differently and didn’t enjoy the redneck cliches.

Five Days in May by Ninnie Hammon. How Do You Face Your Last Days?

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We’ve all read about terminally ill people and how they face death; we may have known friends or family who bravely lived their last days on earth, knowing they were their last days. Five Days in May: A Novel by Ninnie Hammon brings us Princess, a barely educated woman facing death in 5 days via the electric chair.

Five Days in May is set in Oklahoma in the early 1960s, before DNA evidence, before women would be believed when they said rape or molestation or assault.  With an enormous tornado fast coming we have four people whose lives mingle:

Jonah whose beloved wife Maggie has advanced dementia.  Maggie swears and smears excrement all over and has become violent.  Jonah has a prescription for sleeping pills he intends to use to over-sedate Maggie in what he sees as an act of love, not murder.

Mac MacIntosh is a successful pastor whose wife died and now his faith is dead too.  He contemplates suicide or resigning from the ministry.

Joy MacIntosh is Mac’s daughter, 16, pregnant and scared.  She decides to get an abortion.  Joy is adopted but doesn’t know it.

Princess, aka Emily Prentiss, not quite 30, convicted of murdering her toddler sister and sentenced to death.

Princess asks for a minister and the prison warden asks Mac to step in.  Princess is barely literate but gifted to know things she should have no way to know.  Things like Joy’s pregnancy, an accident in a guard’s family.

The novel walks us through all four people’s pain and with the tornado of the century bearing down on them, how they each respond.  Princess has a deep secret which Mac manages to figure out, but he has time to save only one person, not two, before the tornado hits.  Will he choose Joy and Joy’s unborn child, or Princess?

Jonah could leave Maggie outside for the tornado but risks his own life to bring her in.

Gift for Character

Ninnie Hammon is incredible at building real people, not characters in a novel.  The people act as you would expect them, even Princess who faces her imminent death with peace.

Hammon’s gift for people extends to the other characters:  The villain, Princess’ supposed step father, is bigoted, ignorant, nasty and as mean as a person can be.  He too is believable.  We can visualize the minor characters such as the warden, prison guards, Joy’s despicable boyfriend because they too are people, not words on a page.

Be Aware

Some of the characters, especially the stepfather, are truly despicable, with cruel vocabulary and thoughts.  The plot is a bit contrived and we can see the twist coming.

Summary

Five Days In May is not an easy read.  Mac, Joy and Jonah hurt so much it is hard to read about them – you will feel right alongside – and the whole murder and execution tale is difficult.  The stepfather is horrible, another person who it is painful to watch and listen to.

Nonetheless it is 5 stars.

 

The Knowing by Ninie Hammon Supernatural Suspense With a Bang

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I was skeptical when I read author Ninie Hammon’s description of her novel The Knowing,  it will “grab you in a reality so gripping you’ll decide you can fold the towels later and the lawn will still be out there to mow tomorrow”.  About 50 pages in I realized it was way past bedtime and 50 pages more finally decided to put it down.  It truly is that good.

The author describes it as supernatural spiritual warfare, or a paranormal thriller with a backstory that depends on “scriptural realities, though, that most Christians say they believe–but really don’t”, dealing with demons, hell, foolish and evil people that knowingly invite in the devil.  Despite this there is no religion in it, no preaching, no reason that non-believers won’t enjoy the story and characters.

Characters

Jack is a cop called in to stop a school massacre.  Daniel is a Protestant pastor who lost his belief but has his wife and daughter to care for.  Theresa is an older lady, a crossing guard, whose husband died in the school shooting.  These three struggle to understand what is happening to them, what happened about 20 years before when Jack and Daniel were 14 and best friends, what the evil is that threatens them and their families.

Author Hammond makes her people so real that you feel as if you know them.  She lets us into their hearts and minds as we ride along, as bewildered and over matched as they feel.  She builds sub plots, such as Daniel’s wife’s infidelity and Daniel’s struggle to understand his faith and its loss.

The bad guys are believable too, what appear to be normal (more or less) guys driven by demons.  Hammond shows us what happens today and what happened 20 years before, and we see pain and fear and misery, that Jack and Daniel and the mystery girl Becca.  Now the demons are back and want to pick up where they left off.

Be Aware

The bad guys are racist and cruel.  Know going in you will hear some disgusting terms for people and animal cruelty.  Several characters have horrible grammar; don’t use this book as a guide to the English language.

The Knowing: Book One launches a series, total book count unknown.  You can read this as a standalone novel as it has a beginning, middle and end, but it’s easy to see where Book 2 will start.

I’ve not read anything by this author before and am fast changing that.  She is exceptionally strong at building characters that are people and fast moving plots.  Five Stars.

Sower of Dreams by Debra Holland, Classic Fantasy with Romantic Touch

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The cover of Sower of Dreams (The Gods’ Dream Trilogy Book 1) includes an Andre Norton quote endorsing the novel as “outstanding and well presented fantasy” and the author credits Norton’s Witchworld series as inspiring her book. How could I not read it?

Sower of Dreams does not disappoint.  It reminded me of some Andre Norton stories with the enigmatic and never explained portals that terminate in ruined cities on different worlds, and the mood was reminiscent of Norton’s work too, a combination of dreaming, fear, running, love and standing up finally for one’s self and one’s loves.

I enjoyed the simplicity of the character set.  We have major players Khan, exiled from earth to flee his murderous half brother, Daria, princess of Seagem, Thaddis, newly crowned king of ally Ocean’s Glory, Amir, envious half brother to Khan, plus assorted friends and family members.  I appreciate books where the characters have reasonably short, memorable names (as opposed to those with lots of consonants and apostrophes).

Characters and setting were well done as was the romance between Daria and Khan and the tension and fear as they seek ways to build a life together.  I wasn’t altogether pleased with how easily Daria rejected her “god” Yadarius or her father’s charge to be the queen.  Her actions fit the story (better than the alternatives), they just sounded a sour note in the background.

True to the Andre Norton spirit author Holland constructs lovable creatures, monkey bats Shad and Shir, who become friends with Khan and Daria.  Also true to the Norton spirit, the author presents both villains with an opportunity to choose the wise and moral path and both villains spurn the choice.

Also like Norton author Holland left some dangling pieces to use in follow up novels, whether separate series or sequels.  One is Khan’s earth friend Jasmine escapes via the mysterious portal in the middle of the earth desert to a foggy, shadowed land.  Another is the political fallout and restitution between Ocean’s Glory and Seagem once Thaddis’s soldier Boerk takes Thaddis back to Ocean’s Glory.  The last string is the missing Pasinea, a nasty lady whose “power is temporarily depleted”.

The book is not complex nor challenging, a gentle, enjoyable read with interesting characters and familiar mood.

As the title notes, Sower of Dreams is the first in a trilogy.  The excerpt for book two, Reaper of Dreams, shows us that Daria’s beloved oldest brother Indaran still lives, a prisoner of an evil “god”.  It would be interesting to see how Holland ties the Jasmine and Pasinea strings into the Indaran story.

Four stars if you are in the mood, three stars if  you want something a bit meatier.

The Galaxy Chronicles – Contemporary Science Fiction Short Stories

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The Galaxy Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) is a collection of science fiction short stories by several newer authors. The stories have a contemporary feeling to them, with characters that behave much as Americans do today, and with themes that we can extrapolate.

As with any anthology there were stories I like better than others.

Enjoyable Winners

Keep Off The Grass by Felix R. Savage has a young Catholic man of Japanese ancestry mining (aka poaching) on a water-bearing comet.  His primary, exterior missiion is to bring the Gospel to the solar system, but desperate to bring water to his home on a Venus Trojan where the water recycling unit has broken, he lands on a comet and begins to gather water.  The other group on the comet is an apocalyptic bunch who expects to reach the Oort cloud eventually.

The story moves along and the characters are interesting and well done.

Earth Fall by Raymond L. Weill is the only story in the bunch where I had previous experience with the author.  I enjoy just about all Mr. Weill’s books as he tells a great story, moves it along, has fun and interesting characters and settings.  My quibble is that dialogue sequences with aliens tend to be wooden and good guy/bad guy straightforward.

I hope he develops this into a full novel or series.

Ser Pan Comido by Matthew Alan Thyer is very different from the usual sci-fi adventure.  The main characters are a trio of poor street kids on a planet ruled by despotic oligarchs, the secret police captain and the pilot attached to/time locked into star ship.

Pretty Good

The Stars that Bind by Nick Webb is set in the far, far future where man has spread to thousands of galaxies that are united and whole.  It’s so far in the future that the universe expansion is causing pieces to fall off, too far to reach.  The idea is intriguing.

Multiply by Nicolas Wilson also has an intriguing story line.  Comet and Walter are AIs charged with preparing a base for their humans.  Sent off from the main ship they crash land on an asteroid and must build from scratch.  I liked the characters.

The Imortals:  Kronis Valley by David Adams has a terribly wounded military man nearly disintegrate upon return home.  The author did a fine job with characters.

The Rest

All the stories were readable with interesting characters or ideas.  They didn’t catch my imagination as did the ones mentioned.  I am not fond of stories that turn assassins into heroes, which is why a couple of them dropped down here.

Summary

If you enjoy science fiction and like to discover new(er) authors then I highly recommend The Galaxy Chronicles (The Future Chronicles).  Right now it’s available only as an E book ($1.99 Kindle).