Dragonflies by Andy Straka with Durrell Nelson

Rating: WARTY!

This is the second Andy Straka book I've read. I reviewed A Witness Above favorably back in May, 2015, but I could not get with this one, which evidently incorporates books 1 & 2 of a series. The biggest problem, for me, was that it felt like I was reading a book aimed at middle grade boys.

It's a novel about spying using the latest drone technology – the one where next-gen drones are so small they can sneak in through your a/c vent. You can barely see them even if you're looking, and they're quiet. This era is coming. Some of it is already here, and this bugs people...! The book was accurate in mentioning military surveillance programs such as ARGUS-IS, Gorgon Stare, and Constant Hawk.

Raina Sanchez was a chopper pilot for the military in the Middle East until a grenade launcher attack brought her chopper down hard, killing her buddy. Invalided out of the military less one foot (as in limb, not in height), she found work with a military contractor, but was tired of being a drone herself stuck in a cube like a bee in a hive. She could only dream about her previous life - and not in a good way. She leaped – as well as she was able - at the chance to pilot miniature drones for secret military operations in the civilian sector, especially since it gave her the opportunity to work with the very man who pulled her from the chopper wreck that night: Staff Sergeant Tye Palmer, who she hadn't seen for four years.

The start of this novel was great, but it quickly went downhill for me, and I had to quit reading it after chapter five or so because it was becoming increasingly less credible with each screen I swiped. It simply wasn't entertaining for grown-ups in my opinion. Neither was it really edited for prime time. I came across a lot of writing mishaps, such as phrases like "beautiful creatures staged for battle" In the context I read it, this made no sense. It was describing horses, which are not staged by any means. Trained, maybe? Bred? Not staged.

A lot of times the author meant 'breathe' but he wrote 'breath'. This happened at lest twice in the short section I read, as in "At least she could still breath." and "He didn’t allow himself to breath easier until they were well away from the building". In another section, the author made the error of conflating character speech with narration and gave us this: "...could endanger both you and whomever else might come into possession of such information."

I can see how an author might feel pressured to write that in the narration if only to try and establish some English language cred, but no-one speaks like that unless they're queen Elizabeth, or unless they're absurdly pretentious or play-acting. No one says 'whom' in everyday speech. Indeed, the very word 'whom' needs to be banned from the language as far as I'm concerned. To borrow the immortal words of John Cleese, it's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! Its metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible!

Then there were sections which were straight out of a young adult romance: "Raina didn’t normally swoon over men - she was attractive enough in her own right. But Murnell was off the charts." I don't even know what that second clause even means. What I really don't get is what Raina's looks have to do with anything. If this were a male soldier, no-one (except for Harlequin and gay romance writers) would be writing about him like this so why pick on women? Not that female soldiers can't be good looking by any means - but its simply not relevant and it's demeaning to a female character to treat her like an object.

It's also evident that the author is setting up a young-adult style love triangle, but I'm not interested in that when there's a tech-thriller to read. I want the tech, not the trope. Talking of tech, that which was employed here was right on the border line of not credible, promising to step over it, but never quite doing it until Raina is rendered. Yes, you read that right. This was when I quit reading because this was just too improbable and ridiculous to credit at all.

This is where I lost all my faith in this story for two reasons. First of all, Raina didn't seem very soldierly. She seemed like a first year college girl with confidence issues. I know that not all soldiers are the same, and there must be some, somewhere, who are like that, but for someone trained to be aggressive and deadly when the situation called for it, she just didn't seem to have it. Admittedly, she was handicapped and had been through the mill, but I would have expected to see some of that grit somewhere inside her, and it simply wasn't there. I also found her high tech foot prosthetic to be a bit unbelievable, considering the way the laughably under-funded veterans administration treats its wounded.

Worse than this though, is that Raina gets rendered by the Department of Homeland Security, and carried off handcuffed, hooded, and drugged. She wakes up in an underground bunker of some sort, and this snotty, good-looking guy is going on about how they need her for something, and she's all flirty and perky and drooling over how good looking he is? It quite simply didn't ring true and actually rendered her violently away from being viable and credible strong female character that I could follow and admire.

Soldier or not, any women with self-respect and integrity would have been pissed-off as hell with this kidnapping. She wouldn't be ogling the jerk who kidnapped her. Any soldier would have been fighting mad. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence would be a closed book to these people. not trusting a word they say, and not telling them anything. Raina placidly believes every word they say, and drinks anything she's offered without the slightest hint of a suspicion that it might contain other drugs or that these people might not be who they say they are. She wakes up bouncy and flouncy, and lusting after this guy. She's not even remotely frustrated, let alone angry. She's joking around. She had no thought of letting her partner Tye know she's OK. She's completely unrealistic. This character was already traumatized by her injury, and on top of that, she feels bad because she feels handicapped (and is in the military's eyes), and yet she has no reaction whatsoever to this, other than treating it like it was some college prank? No. Just no.

Let's look at it from the other PoV - the DHS wants her to help them with a job, yet instead of approaching her and asking her to help with this job, they drug and kidnap her? Do they seriously think this is the best way to get someone to do them a favor?! No, it's not realistic. If you want to kidnap her in your story, fine, but for god's sake come up with an intelligent reason to do it and have your character react realistically to the event!

That was the "Check please, I'm outta here!" moment for me in this story. I cannot recommend it.

A Witness Above by Andy Straka

Title: A Witness Above
Author: Andy Straka
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"I'm in a bit of a vice" should be "I'm in a bit of a vise" unless of course he really means that he's conducting himself immorally! (p68)
Change of font in mid-newspaper headline (p72)
"...whole neighbors.." should be "...whole neighborhoods..." (p156)
"About whether I arrest you now or you turn yourself in down to the department." Makes little sense. Maybe "...turn yourself in down at the department"?

"kibosh" should be "kibosh" or "kybosh" from the Gaelic Caip bháis meaning candle snuffer (p38)
Not an erratum as such, but an oddity:
Nicole says of her friend "We were always chums" which sounds really odd and not something which is likely for a teenager, especially an older one, to say.

I've enjoyed a warm relationship with Brash books despite posting some negative reviews, so I'm glad to be able to post a positive one like this one! This novel, despite some issues I had with it, is a worthy read and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in a nice private detective story that unfolds comfortably, always moving forwards, with some really interesting characters.

This is your standard private dick story told, of course in the first person (since it's evidently illegal to tell a PI story in third person, as you know!). First person isn't my favorite voice by a long chalk, but some authors can carry it, and this one does. The PI is Frank Pavlicek (Pav-li-check). His quirk (because they all have to have a quirk right?) is that he's into falconry and goes hunting with a red tailed hawk in time-honored tradition. His baggage (because they all have to have baggage, right?) is that he has a wife who hates him and a rather estranged teen daughter.

I found myself thinking wryly that maybe the daughterly estrangement is due to the fact that he still calls her Nicky and she still calls him 'Daddy' despite the fact that she's old enough to go into bars if not to drink alcohol. This endearment felt a bit confusing given that he tells us at one point shortly afterwards that the last time he thought of his daughter as little was when she was nine, and later again refers to her as though she's just a little girl.

The wifely break-up has no solid explanation. What seemed to be a perfectly good marriage broke down for two putative reasons: he apparently hauled her from their old life to a Podunk town and begin a career as a PI all without talking to her about his plans, apparently. Also she developed a money-grubbing attitude out of nowhere, evidently, along with an inability to work. Frank also has the requisite love interest who is, of course, a wise divorced woman. Nothing new here. The only interesting thing about him to me, was that at the time of the story, he lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I lived for a time. It was nice to read a story for once, set in a place I know!

There's actually nothing in Charlottesville. It's dead, despite being a university town. It's the kind of place you leave if you want to have fun. I've had a lot of fun since I left! It is picturesque, with the mountains a drive away on one side and the beach a really long drive away on the other, but there's really no there, there, as the saying goes, which is why I left and never looked back. It was nice to reminisce here, though.

Of Frank's girlfriend. The first thing we learn is that "She was not the most beautiful woman in the world...". This is the exact opposite of what I usually complain about, but the problem here is that we have a case of what I shall term inverse objectification. The point here is not that she's outstandingly beautiful as way too many women are in your typical novel, but that she's not the most beautiful, and so once again we have a female character who is defined by her looks and for no good reason.

Yes, there are good reasons to have a character defined (I should say primarily defined, because it never is a definition by itself) by her beauty: if the story is, for example, about a woman who was beautiful, and now has to cope for whatever reason with not being so, but in most stories, a woman's good looks or otherwise are no more relevant or pertinent than a man's, and focusing attention on how attractive or unattractive a female character is, merely serves to reduce half the population to skin. Can we not simply describe her as we'd describe a guy, without going into any pseudo poetic declarations or the gratuitous employment of superlatives, or by going into stealth mode and telling us she's not the most attractive woman in the world?

The weird thing here that made me smirk is that even after we're told how not-the-most-beautiful she is, we're still told that she has a photogenic magnetism in her eyes. Because god forbid she would just be a regular girl. No room for regular girls in this world. If they don't meet the Aryan ideal, then they must be extirpated. That sounds so familiar. Where did I hear that? I also found it odd that when Regan discovers it's a boy. it's congratulations all around? What would they do if it had been a girl? Bought wreaths?!

But in this regard, this novel is no better and no worse than any other story out there, and as a PI story, it's better than many in how it treats women. So instead, let's side-step all of this, and look at the story itself. Pavlicek is out hunting with his hawk in his hand and encounters a dead body from which he removes evidence before calling in the police. Already I don't like this guy, but you don't always have to actually like the main character to enjoy a good story, so this is fine. The evidence links his daughter to a drug dealer, so it seems, and he wants to find out what's going on. But have no fear. His daughter will be fine. After all, she's not ordinary either, because she's been endowed "With the same spectacular good looks as her mother...". I know husbands have every right to deem their wife and daughter beautiful, but this constant worship of beauty was tedious to say the least.

Pavlicek's daughter isn't very pleased to see dad until she gets jailed for possession with intent to distribute, then she's calling him. Why isn't clear, since her mom was married to a rich guy and had no problem hiring a lawyer, so this was interesting, especially since mom was behaving rather dismissively if not in a hostile manner towards her own daughter! When when Frank visits Nicole in the jail (and calls her Nickita) he notes that her eyes are brimming with tears, but still is dumb enough to need to ask her how she's doing. Some dads never learn!

The story really takes off from there and in general, it's very well written. I could have done without the falconry interludes which really felt like 'ludes to me, but I skipped those few pages and focused on the story itself, which was a bit predictable but nonetheless well done and engrossing. It was fun for me to read about a place I'd lived, so this lent the story a certain familiarity to me, like meeting an old friend. I ended-up still not liking Pavlicek. He didn't strike me as the smartest PI in the deck, and consequently I don't feel any desire to read more about him, but I actually would have liked to have read more about his daughter and her friend Regan. Those two were quite complex and entertaining characters, but not in the story much. Who knows, maybe a few years down the road we'll meet Nicky and Regan, Private Eyes? Until then, I think this is a worthy read if you're into PI stories.

Post scriptum - here's an oddity from the Adobe Digital Editions reader - there's no page 268 in a 268 page document!: