Hardscape

A small-town real estate agent might not be the obvious choice of hero for a mystery thriller, but Justin Scott makes it work. He endows Ben Abbott with a backstory as a financial wheeler-dealer who runs afoul of securities laws and spends prison time as a convicted felon. Then he returns home to northwest Connecticut to make a new life taking over his father's real estate business.

Abbott's past complicates his life. He feels like a liability to his sometime girlfriend, the politically ambitious "first selectman" of the fictional Newbury. He is looked upon with disdain by law enforcement officials, private detectives and eventually social connections. So the idyll of living in an inherited house on Main Street, running an inherited business in a town surrounded by friends and family is hardly perfect. Scott further complicates Abbott's story by making his mother come from the wrong side of the tacks, giving Abbott a whole raft of scurrilous cousins.

All this comes into play when Abbott is solicited to play private detective and videotape (the book first appeared in 1993, so there are videotapes, carphones, and junk bonds galore) a rich weekender's unfaithful wife. Abbott of course falls for the wife, destroys the tape and rushes to her aid when she is accused of murdering her lover. It is patently obvious who the murderer is, though Scott belabors the point in an entertaining fashion for another couple hundred pages. A subplot involving some of Abbott's disreputable cousins intersects at some points with the murder plot.

The strength of the book is the sympathetic hero and the Connecticut setting. Small-town New England life, with its cookouts, its simmering feuds, its stratified society, its quaint buildings and customs is all yours for a while. Abbott knows his flaws, but has inherited a "claptrap Puritan" nature that gives him some gritty integrity. He manages to string along three women -- that selectman, the adulteress, and even the female state trooper investigating the murder -- so we are to assume that our first-person protagonist has a magnetic charm.

This is another Poisoned Pen book, so a pattern is emerging. Competent prose with strong sense of place, quirky characters and plot, and an overall package hovering around four stars. Nothing startlingly original, but reliable.

The Jackpot

David Kazzie has written a thoroughly entertaining thriller that shares many of the good qualities of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen while introducing a wholly original voice. The story takes off from the first page and hardly lets you put it down.

As I posted recently in my writing blog, Kazzie succeeds at many levels. Part of what keeps you reading is the violence, the turns it takes and the suddenness of unexpected death. Part of it is the quirkiness of the characters; Kazzie takes the time to explore each character and endow them with surprising qualities. The concept -- what happens to the winner of a super-jackpot lottery -- is a great one, with lots of natural suspense. The writing, if not exactly scintillating, is much better than just competent.

But one of the main attributes is that from the first page you care about the characters. There is Julius, who is watching the lottery drawing with good-for-nothing cousin and realizes he actually has the winning number. There is Samantha Khouri, the ambitious associate who has just been passed over for partner at her law firm when Julius turns to her for legal advice about his ticket. You're on their side. But even the heavies, like Samantha's stressed-out boss at the firm, or the eccentric bounty hunter sent to find the ticket, draw more sympathy than antipathy from the reader.

The setting in Richmond, Va., is well-drawn without being intrusive. It is a place, a real place, but it is subordinate to the action. The riffs on the legal profession -- Kazzie has made something of a name for himself with his YouTube diatribe on the profession ("So you want to go to law school") -- are entertaining and just reined in enough.

As Samantha wrestles with her conscience to do the right thing by her client with this incredibly valuable lottery ticket, the story rockets to its conclusion with a twist that is a surprise even though Kazzie laid down a couple of clues on the way.

Kazzie is harsh in his description of ghetto life, but he is also harsh and unflinching in his portrayal of the hollowness of the 1 percent. There are attitudes and behavior that remind you this was the capital of the Confederacy, but the author does not club you over the head with it. It all comes across as being honest, and not offensive. It is a bit of a stretch to accept Samantha's naivete regarding her chances at the law firm given the particular history of her family, and this may be the weakest point of the plot. But there is so much else to like, the reader is more than willing to suspend disbelief on this point.

Revenge

Mark Young situates his police procedural in the wilds of Idaho. He makes you smell and feel the outdoors and you wish you were there. His hero, Travis Mays, takes a whitewater kayak trip with his Indian guide, Jessie, and begins a romance and a mystery that takes us up and down the river and trails along Highway 12 in western Idaho.

Takes us a few too many times, really. The 350-page book could have been 70, if not 100, pages shorter. The action is at times needlessly duplicated or drawn out without adding anything to the plot or character development. Travis is well-drawn as a policeman who has a case go terribly wrong and who wants to retreat to his inaccessible cabin in the Idaho mountains and teach his courses at nearby Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. But Jessie is two-dimensional and comes across as a bit whiney, while her father, Frank, the tribal chief of police for the Nez Perce, is also a cliche who never really gets fleshed out.

Otherwise, there are too many characters doing too many superfluous things to make this successful as a suspense thriller. I enjoyed the scenery, the sense of place, but felt too often that I was plodding through. There are a couple of twists at the end, but one twist creating too many coincidences, and the unmasking of a villain who is introduced late but too obviously.

It's a good enough addition to my 50-state mystery challenge, but could have been much more satisfying with a little more judicious editing. Young has a good command of narrative and language; his action sequences work well. His years as an officer in the Santa Rosa police force give the book an authentic voice and feel. I can't quite get to four stars on this but I would want to give it more than three, so I won't post it elsewhere. There is much to emulate in writing a procedural and some other good lessons from the mistakes.

Murder in Mykonos

Jeffrey Siger's accomplished procedural delivers everything you want from a murder mystery -- a plot with lots of twists and mounting suspense, a protagonist who's not perfect but sympathetic, and a great sense of place. It helps that the place in this instance is a beautiful, exotic island in the Aegean. I found the vicarious trip to Greece so real that I broke out the ouzo for an aperitif and cooked up a lamb stew from my Greek cookbook.

Inspector Andreas Kaldis is sent to Mykonos to get him out of Athens, but instead of supervising drunk tourists and handing out parking tickets he stumbles upon what may be Greece's first ever serial killer. Obviously, having a killer on the loose who favors tall, blonde foreign women would not be great for tourism, the lifeblood not only of Mykonos but of all the islands. So there is considerable pressure on Kaldis  to track down the killer quickly, and to do so without notifying anyone he exists.

Siger not only enables you to see, taste and smell Mykonos, he is a master at whipping around veils of deception that tease the reader with false conclusions -- about the identity of the victims, the possible murder suspects and the motives of Kaldis's law enforcement allies. He also does an admirable job of building the suspense, so that by the last third of the book you are clicking away at the "next page" button almost faster than you can read.

I went to Mykonos many years ago, perhaps in the simpler, less frenetic time that Kaldis himself recalls. The crass tourism depicted here might repel some readers, though Siger, who apparently lives in Mykonos himself, clearly is taken with its natural beauty. I'm sure the off-season is wonderful. The author also shows great insight into the Greek character, as well as the assortment of expats, dissipates, and tourists you find in great resort areas.

Siger makes great use of the local scenery -- the little churches with rounded tops (that you will never view with the same eyes again!), the old mining tunnels that evidently crisscross the island, the beautiful beaches where a young tourist realizes she will be more conspicuous if she leaves on her bathing suit. The author is adept at shifting the point of view between Andreas, our intrepid detective, and, for long passages, Annika, the engaging Dutch woman who is likely to become the killer's next victim. Less successful, perhaps because the author wants to keep as many suspects as possible, are the times we view the action from the killer's point of view.

There are several suspects, and it's an object lesson in how suspicion bordering on paranoia can cast even ordinary, innocent actions in a bad light. In a final tease, the author reveals the identity of the killer only in the last paragraph, and this may be a tease too many. Readers appreciate a little anticlimax, time to think back to the clues along the way, perhaps a reprise of how normal the other suspects look now that they are in the clear.

Siger has written two further Andreas Kaldis mysteries in the meantime, which I look forward to reading. He is published by Poisoned Pen Press, which has become a model for how a small, independent press can flourish in the new world of digital publishing.

Buying books

Buying books has gotten to be pretty complicated.

I truly admire people who go to the library for most of their reading material. In the end, supporting libraries guarantees more sales of books. I got completely out of the habit living abroad for many years in non-English speaking countries. Also, my erratic reading habits – starting, stopping, reading two or three books concurrently – don’t lend themselves to library due dates.

So I buy most of the books I read. And as a book consumer, I’m very conscious that my choices are critical to sustaining the book publishing industry in its various facets.

I have many choices:

• Buy a hardback book at full retail price when it comes out. This is important to support authors and independent bookstores.

• Buy a discounted hardback at a megastore. Still helps authors and megastores are an important part of the landscape, too.

• Buy a remaindered hardback. Doesn’t do much for authors, but is good for publishers (which actually helps authors since it’s important for publishers to be able to sell overstock) and still helps the independent bookstore. Politics & Prose, for instance, works hard at keeping its remainder shelves stocked with good books.

• Buy the ebook version for Kindle or iPad. Cuts out the bookstore, but potentially adds to my convenience in reading, and still gives a royalty to the author.

• Buy the audiobooks version. Increasingly, this is released simultaneously with the hardback. This supports a whole new industry in narrators and gives me the convenience of “reading” a book while walking, driving, working out, etc.

• Wait for the trade paperback to come out. What I often do when I see a new book I think I might like or which got a good review is to look for earlier books by the same author that have already come out in paperback. This is not as good for author/publisher/bookstore as buying the hardback, but helps keep them all in business.

• Buy the heavily discounted hardbacks or trade paperbacks through Amazon. So easy, relatively cheap – especially when you’re a prime customer and save on shipping costs – and yet fatal for those independent bookstores and megastores where I can go in, browse, relax, have a cup of coffee.

• Wait for the mass paperback, though of course a lot of books don’t make it to this stage.

• Buy the remaindered trade paperback. Helps my budget; almost as cheap as a triple tall cappuccino.

• Take pot luck at the library sale, where a hardback can cost less than a cookie.

What are the factors in my decisions?

• I still love the printed book – the covers, the typeface, the creamy paper. Book publishers have realized that we baby boomers need bigger print and more leading, so the hardbacks and trade paperbacks are easier than ever to read. But these books can be heavy, cumbersome, or just inconvenient in many situations. I was an early adopter for Kindle but have since abandoned it. I just got an iPad and downloaded the Kindle app, so I may get back to reading ebooks.

• I’m not in a big hurry to read most books. This won’t stop me from buying the hardback, but it will make me think twice.

• I resist having my iPod/iPhone as a constant companion. I could “read” a lot more, for instance, if I listened to audiobooks while walking the dog, but then when would I daydream, or think about my stories, or hear the chattering squirrels, or exchange a greeting with neighbors?

In the end, I will buy books on various platforms. Sometimes there is no choice – many books may be available only in hard copy. Perhaps they are out of print and available only as used books on Amazon’s helpful site for booksellers.
Some books may lend themselves to a particular platform. A friend of mine says he reads poetry on his iPad while killing time in airports. This seems to me to be a stroke of genius. No one can carry around a bag full of tiny poetry volumes, but you’re never sure what poet you’ll be in the mood for. Yet a poem is the perfect length (generally speaking) for those broken bits of 10 or 15 minutes you experience in air travel.