Lexicon by Max Barry

Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum
P17 "…proddel her with his shoe." should be "…prodded her with his shoe."

I love the 'Lexicon' logo. I was attracted to this story because it’s a novel about the power of words. What could be more wonderful than that? Except maybe a story which is about the literal power of words; a story in which certain nonsense words spoken in a certain way can actually control the behavior of another person by slipping past the neurochemical barriers which the mind sets up to filter out unwanted ideas. That's what this novel is. It’s the kind of novel that makes you whine: "Why didn’t I think of that?".

This novel starts out confusingly. It’s done intentionally, but it’s a bit overdone. I can see the point of trying to put us into the confused state of the victim, but there is such a thing as too much! The story begins rather improbably with Wil Parke being kidnapped from an airport restroom by two men at least one of whom is carrying a shotgun. There's a shoot-out in the airport grounds, with some people trying to stop Wil's abductor, Eliot, but in the end he gets away with Wil. Later Eliot seems about to shoot him, but something Wil says regarding his girlfriend (a girlfriend who was waiting to pick him up at the airport but who had obviously betrayed Wil) causes Eliot to have second thoughts and stow the shotgun.

In another place, street-living teen Emily is trying to con people with a three-card scam. She utterly fails to con Lee, because he planted a suggestion in her mind, causing her to fail, and this pisses off her accomplice, so Emily is left on her own. The next morning, after sleeping in a park, she encounters Lee again conducting a survey on a street corner - and curiously asking the very same questions of the people he surveys as did the men who abducted Wil. Emily talks him into buying her breakfast. She tries to talk him into playing the card game again, but he offers her a different 'game' and he says, "Like, don’t blow me" to her, which confuses her slightly and she thinks she's misunderstood him. He then asks her those key questions:

Your name?
Are you cat cat person or a dog person?
Your favorite color?
Pick a number between one and a hundred.
Do you love your family?
Why did you do it?

Finally he says some gobbledygook to her and she feels compelled to follow his suggestion that she go to the bathroom. He follows her in there and takes out his penis, but at the last minute, Emily, who has been thinking he's not such a bad guy after all, suddenly resents all of this and punches him where it hurts most. She takes off running but is cornered by Lee and three other people. She's told that she passed the test: she beat his suggestion, and ends up being offered a scholarship at an exclusive academy set up to train people in the use of powerful 'words' to achieve ends. She decides to check it out, and over the course of many months she learns a lot, including that there are some combinations of letters that, once a recipient's personality type is properly understood, can be tailored to get that person to do whatever you want.

The way this novel is laid out is also a bit confusing. At first, it seemed to me that it’s written in parallel universes, or there are duplicates of various people! Or perhaps the tutors at the academy at which Emily is now a newbie, lead alternate lives. But it was really hard to gage what was going on because the novel was so choppy. We bounced back and forth between Emily and Wil, who are definitely on two different time lines. Wil is being abducted/befriended (it all apparently depends upon the phase of the Moon and which way the wind is blowing) by Eliot, and while his entire story is confined to only a few days or so, Emily's story, interleaved with his, takes place over many months.

This, fortunately, becomes clear as we read more deeply, but at 400 pages, it takes a while for all the pieces to fall into place. Do please rest assured, that this is worth the investment. This novel is outstanding and it’s well written. It makes it worth plowing through some awful ebooks when I can find one or two gems such as Lexicon in there amongst them. This novel has an amazing villain, with whose aims I actually found myself in sympathy at times, although I could never condone his methods. That's why he was a villain for me. I can see Terence Stamp playing him very nicely in a movie.

The hero of the story is Emily, who is as kick-A as any hero I've read, yet she isn’t someone who knocks down doors and shoots bad guys. She isn’t a weapons expert or a martial artist. Nope. Emily has it up top (no, higher than that, where it counts: in her mind. She's brilliant, she's a hard worker, and she wants to learn. She has some serious weaknesses, but she is resilient, inventive, and overcomes obstacles even when it’s time-consuming and painful to do so. And she can talk you into anything without even using sex. I rate Emily up there with Katsa and Kitai, and she doesn’t even have a feline name! Believe me, that's quite a compliment from me.

Indeed, Emily is quite the opposite of a cat, but to tell you more would be to give away secrets! I can see someone like Charice Pempengco playing Emily, or maybe Hansika Motwani, or Reem Al Baroudy. Maybe Tom Green to play Wil, and Matt Bomer or Ryan Sypek as Eliot

Down to Earth again! There are certain people who have been trained to unlock pathways in your mind by the use of key words, which don't even sound like any language you might know. But a short string of these followed by a command will compel you to carry out that command, and even make you feel like it’s a good idea to do what you've been told. I need to learn this skill to use on my kids! All the characters who are skilled at this practice are referred to as 'poets' and are code-named after people who were noted for their writing skills even though they were not strictly poets necessarily: Atwood, Bronte, De Castro, Eliot, Woolf, Yeats. The latter of these is paradoxically both the best poet and the most soulless of them all. TS Eliot is the one with Wil. He was also a teacher at the academy which Emily attended - her favorite, in fact.

Initially Emily does well at school, but she seems to flunk out twice only to be brought back. The second time, she gets to meet Yeats - something she was given to understand would never happen. This is a momentous meeting, and results in her being exiled (or deployed, depending on how you view it) to the middle-of-nowhere town in Australia called Broken Hill.

There are several attempts on Wil's life - or attempts to try and get him free of Eliot - again it depends on your PoV. These attempts fail. We learn more of Broken Hill, and it sounds like some other Broken Hill at some other time, one which has been closed off for the next two hundred years because of a toxic gas leak - so everyone is told. We're told that the rebel poet Woolf said a word there which wiped out the entire population of three thousand, and worse, the word still has power; it sits there still, waiting to wreak more destruction. But is this true? Can it be true? How can a word hang around like that?

One time when Eliot sent a kid, someone who was supposedly immune to the power of such suggestions into Broken Hill, he came back out with an ax in his hand evidently intent upon butchering Eliot - who shoots him dead. The kid was lucky, I guess: we're told that he's the only one who has ever actually come back out of Broken Hill once sent in.

So what the heck is going on here? What happened in Broken Hill? Does Emily need to take on Yeats? Can she even think of succeeding in bringing down the guy who is perhaps the most skilled practitioner of poetic suggestion in the entire world? This is a slow-burn story which brings a solid reward. I loved it. axbagor mrysow xiconn adlere go read max Barry's Lexicon now!

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Title: Dead Until Dark
Author: Charlaine Harris
Publisher: Ace Books
Rating: Worthy!

This is the novel that kicked off the HBO True Blood series, which I adore. As I've mentioned before, I am not a fan of vampire novels, or angel novels, or fairy novels. Frankly, I'm not sure what it is about the TV series that I like since it’s bleeding vampire clichés out of its ears, but there's something about it, and I think it’s mainly the humor and the ridiculous situations into which the characters so routinely get themselves.

Since I do love the TV show and I saw this first novel sitting dirt cheap on the shelf at Goodwill, I decided I had nothing to lose and picked it up. Goodwill is a great place to find novels, if you can find a store which has a decent selection. Not all of them do, but once in a while you find one with a really good selection, and it opens up the option to experiment: a novel that you don’t want to risk $20 on as a new volume is well-worth a risk of not liking it, at a mere three or four bucks. or looked at another way, you can avail yourself of four or five used novels there for the price of only one new one!

The first thing about the TV show which amused the heck out of me was the name of the female protagonist: Sookie Stackhouse. Suck-ee: she who is sucked! I thought that was priceless. The Sookie in the novel is a little bit different from the one in the TV show, but mostly the same. I do wonder how I would have viewed the novel version had I not seen the TV show first, but all I can think of, and hear, now is the TV version coming though the novel.

As far as I recall the TV show's pilot, the novel starts out very much the same way. Living in small-town Bon Temps (good times!), Louisiana, Sookie encounters her first vampire at the restaurant where she works evenings. Sookie is a bit different from your average girl if only in that she can hear people's thoughts, and she hears the thoughts of the couple who start talking to the vampire, whose name is Bill. They want to 'drain him' and sell the blood, which has aphrodisiacal and medicinal properties. When they all leave together, Sookie follows and saves Bill's life. He returns the favor shortly afterwards when the couple ambush Sookie late one night in revenge, as she leaves work.

It’s pleasant for Sookie to be with Bill because she cannot hear his thoughts and it's so peaceful for her. She can relax and she doesn’t have to work to block thoughts out like she normally does every minute of every day or her life. Her grandmother, with whom Sookie resides, wants to meet Bill, especially if he's old enough to remember the American civil war. She's a member of some civil war society or other. Why the US is so obsessed with the civil war is a mystery, but there you go. So Bill agrees, and they spend a pleasant evening together, after which Bill and Sookie take a walk in the evening air.

Sookie volunteers to help Bill liaise with the workers who are working on renovating the old house he's inherited and decided to move into. He has a problem with being out in daylight, and they have a problem with being around a vampire after sundown! She also kisses Bill good night, which turns into a passionate embrace and leaves her wondering if the undead 'do it' in the same way that the non-dead do! Not that she's had much (indeed, any) experience with doing it - the very thought of trying to have sex with someone to whose every thought she is party quite turns Sookie off.

Sookie is also turned off Bill somewhat when she visits him to deliver the details of the arrangements she made with the local builders to work on his house, only to find Bill in the company of several vampires, who are not at all as gentlemanly as Bill is. The most interesting of the vampires is a tall, slim dark-skinned female and a tall, muscular male, who (according to Bill) are ancient acquaintances. Sookie leaves shortly after the vamps do, and she isn't very thrilled with Bill's attitude.

This book is a bit odd in that it's almost 300 pages and yet only twelve chapters, but Harris definitely moves the story along apace. In addition to Sookie's growing relationship with Bill, we're treated to several murders in Bon Temps. The victims have apparently been murdered because of their association with vampires, but rather than see this as a series of acts perpetrated by someone who hates vampires, the community sees these as the act of a vampire. Sookie discovers the next victim when she's sent by her boss Sam Merlotte, to find out why one of his waitresses has not shown up for work in two days.

Intent upon finding out more about the murders, Sookie asks Bill to take her to Shreveport, to Fangtasia, the vampire bar which both Dawn and Maudette apparently frequented. She confirms that they visited, but can learn no further details. She does meet a native American vampire who tends bar there, and she meets Eric and Pam, the oldest vampires in the region, although they by no means look old at all. She makes a favorable impression on these three vampires when she warns them that there is an undercover cop in the bar who is calling in the police for a raid. She, Bill, Eric, Pam, and Long Shadow, the barman, all manage to leave without any problem.

The third murder is a huge personal tragedy for Sookie. After Bill has spoken at the civil war society meeting and made a very favorable impression, Sookie, who attended with Sam, arrives home later to discover her grandmother dead on the kitchen floor: beaten to death apparently by the same psycho who killed Maudette and Dawn. It would appear that the killer intended to murder Sookie, but found only her grandmother home alone. After this, Sookie resumes her relationship with Bill in a most dramatic way: by relinquishing her virginity to him in her grandmother's bed. The house is now her own and she chose to use the main bedroom now. Her brother Jason, the local stud, is not thrilled that she inherited the entire house (and surrounding land) to herself, but she relinquishes her share in her parent's home to Jason free and clear, and the violent disagreement slowly heals.

So the killings continue and Bill and Sookie's relationship continues to be a roller-coaster. Eric calls upon Sookie's services because someone at his bar stole $60,000. Sookie helps them figure out who did it, but both she and Bill fear this growing relationship with Eric. Bill heads off to New Orleans to do something about it, leaving Sookie all alone. He did leave the vampire of Elvis Presley in charge of securing Sookie's grounds, but Bubba is of no use at all, and Sookie becomes more fearful and desperate, especially since her brother Jason is arrested after the latest murder! There are disturbances around Sookie's home, and the rifle she kept in a closet is missing. One night, no help to be had, she has to go out to confront the killer...!

I rate this novel a big worthy, which was a bit of a surprise in some regards since I'm not a vampire novel fan, as I've mentioned. However, I do adore True Blood the TV show, so perhaps it wasn't such a stretch after all. I do plan on reading more in this series!

Found by Stacey Wallace Benefiel

Title: Found
Author: Stacey Wallace Benefiel
Publisher: Smashwords
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Errata
P21 "…younger sister's of retroacts…" should be "younger sisters of retroacts". Apostrophes are way over-used and all-too-often badly so!
P35 "...the busyness of the city..." is not so much an error as a really interesting use of the English language. There's already a word 'business' so why not use that one instead of making up one? Discuss!

This novel is set in the not-too-distant future where cars are self-drive. Google, believe it or not, is already testing such a vehicle in California, and even the US car manufacturers are waking up and working on the concept! It’s a pity Google can’t invest just as much into getting bloggers' pictures loaded, isn’t it?! The female protagonist is Penny Black (evidently named after a stamp!), four months shy of her eighteenth, who is released from a juvie center on the outskirts of Washington DC into the custody of an 'uncle' she knows she doesn’t have. He's young and from what he says about her resembling her mother, he's never met either her mother or her father. She goes with him because she thinks she can run as soon as she's away from the juvie center. He holds her arm firmly, but not painfully, as he leads her outside, telling her that he's just like her.

Hopefully real juvie centers don’t release children so easily, but Penny decides to go with him because he doesn't represent a threat and she's a really good judge of character (so she mistakenly believes). She gets no bad vibes from him at all. He talks about The New Society, but she has no idea what that is. Christopher hands her his 'Ret-Tech' some sort of head-worn video device. On it, Penny watches a recording of a traffic accident. This was something she dreamed, yet it turns out it really happened. But it gets even more weird. Penny sees herself in the video. She sees herself make hand gestures which rewind time itself, and prevent the accident from happening! She learns she is a 'retroact'.

It turns out that Christopher is part of a very small unit bankrolled by a wealthy business woman, who wants people with Penny's talent to be productive and cared for. Penny will have to share a room. I don’t get that part! If Clare is so wealthy, why is she so cheap with the accommodations?! Wyatt Adams, a non-retroact, is on his way to pick her up at LAX. He's a chalk-and-cheese counterpart to Penny, having a real family (two sisters, for example, one of whom he's traveling with along with her husband). Actually, I've never understood the chalk and cheese thing! Given that both have a lot of calcium in them they’re really not so different at the atomic level...!

Apparently the retroacts have a trigger person; the trigger is having sex with the retroact. Wyatt is a virgin. I guess that's why Penny isn’t with Darren any more. And both her parents are dead. So at this point I don't get why she couldn’t rewind and bring them all back. I thought that perhaps we'd find out during this particular novel but we don't!

The school they take Penny to is rich - absurdly, improbably rich. No one has that kind of money. It’s located in a street which is gorgeous, but is made to look trashy by the psychic powers of Christopher. Most of the school us underground where there are absurdly long secret tunnels that Penny discovers she can access. All the accommodations and food, and even the clothes Penny gets are provided free. I found it odd, given that this story is set in the future, that people there are having to use badges to get through doors. Why not just chip them with RFID?

At sixty pages in the writing style was really starting to grate, I have to confess. Absolutely everyone, without exception, has their name abbreviated (or should I say abbrev'd?!), which really jars because it seemed so juvenile and unrealistic to me. There's Ty, Wy, and Kai for goodness sakes! There are also good-natured insults like 'dicknob', and 'buttwrinkle', which make me feel like I'm reading a story written by a thirteen-year-old. There's "you’re a dime" or "he's a dime" meaning a ten, which is too cute for its own good. There are two Spanish words used repeatedly: 'bueno' and 'chido'. Bueno means 'good', but it’s also a bit like 'okay' - a general purpose word that can mean all right, hello, etc. Chido reminds me of Cheetohs®! It's a slang word meaning cool or awesome. Those two words really jump out, and not in a good way.

I'm not at all sure what to make of a phrase like this on p64; "The collar is high, skimming just below her delicate clavicles..." (this is Wyatt pretty much raping Penny with his eyes). Either the collar is high or it's below her collar bones. It can’t be both. There is way too much instadore between the two of them. Admittedly he's a juvenile (or close enough), and full of untempered male hormones, and she had a vision of herself kissing him, so there is some impetus behind the attraction. That alone isn’t what bothers me; it's the endless description of how hot they are for each other, which will become really tiresome if it isn’t tempered.

I don’t mind people being hot for one another, I do mind being slapped upside the head with it on almost every single page, like there's nothing more to life than how hot or not is this particular member of the other gender is, or worse, being effectively told that I'm too stupid to recall or even register that they're hot for one another from two paragraphs ago, so here's yet another booster shot!

These are people with extraordinary powers, and yet instead of being fascinated by those, all they can think about is whether they want in the pants of the nearest member of the opposite (or the same or that matter) gender? It’s not realistic, and it cheapens the story for me, turning this extraordinary school into nothing more than you average high school.

It turns out, very conveniently, that Penny (short for Penelope) and Elle (also short for Penelope!) are in fact cousins. It turns out that Penny can heal unnaturally quickly, but irrationally, she can’t heal her numerous bruises or scars! It turns out that there's a guy she meets briefly in the airport who is a look-alike for a famous singer, and this doppelganger is kidnapped, as witnessed by Penny in one of her insta-visions - she doesn’t see the future, she sees the now! A group of them take off after him and Wyatt ends up in serious trouble. I really appreciated that realism when I've read all too many other stories where young people do dumb stuff and there are never consequences.

And that's all you get - oh, apart for the humongous twist at the end, no doubt designed (and very effectively so!) to make you read book 2, despite some issues I had with book 1! Go read the ebook! I found this a worthy read and would be interested in reading more. The cutesy language, buzz-words and abbreviations were rather annoying but the story itself was strong enough that it didn’t turn me off the novel as a whole. I liked it, I found it an easy read, and I kept looking forward to the next chapter as I read each one, which is always a good sign.

The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie

Title: The Unexpected Guest
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: St Martin's Minotaur
Rating: worthy

The Unexpected Guest was first published as a play in 1958, and written into a novel by Charles Osborne in 1999. The story is set in Wales one foggy night. The protagonist is Michael Starkwedder (sounds rather like Starkadder, doesn’t it?!). He's an oil engineer who has returned to his roots after a spell in the Middle East, perhaps looking to buy a house there. His car gets stuck in a ditch conveniently outside this residence. Looking for assistance, he enters the house uninvited since no one answers when he knocks on the french windows (why there and not the front door is unexplained, except that in a play, it usefully confines the action to one setting, but as a novel it's klutzy). This is actually why I don’t go to see stage plays. In my experience of them, they have a sour tendency to be pretentious, and the action is typically completely unrealistic.

In the room Michael discovers an old man (whom he later learns is Richard Warwick) in a wheelchair. He apparently doesn’t notice that the man has been shot through the head(!) until the man's wife, Laura, shows up gun in hand and spontaneously confesses that she killed him. Instead of calling the police, Michael sits down and becomes all chatty with Laura about why she did it. Apparently it was because her husband was a cruel and spiteful man. He offers her a cigarette without asking if she smokes, and he observes that she's very attractive. So they sit there smoking and talking.

My first impression was that Starkwedder was a moron, but it turns out that he's a jerk - or so it appears. He seems to want to cash in on Warwick's personal tragedy and profit by it for no other reason than that she's pretty. It occurs to me that perhaps Laura Warwick isn't quite as helpless as she seems since she goes along with his suggestions as they talk. I can see her, in the end, turning the tables on Starkwedder and using him to her own advantage! For no good reason, Michael suggests covering up the murder to make it seem like something else. As he learns about Richard from Laura, he concocts a plan. Apparently Richard was a cruel and nasty person, and about two years previously, he had killed a child when driving drunk, and had got away with it!

Given that the 'breathalyzer' test made its first appearance as early as 1927 in England, and it’s not so difficult to tell if someone is drunk or has had merely one sherry (as Richard lied) even without the test, I can only put his avoidance of all charges as incompetence on the part of the police. The child's father was extremely angry, but Richard's nurse, who was with him in the car, backed up Richard's story and he was cleared. The family had to move from Norfolk (where this happened) to Wales to get away from the publicity. Now Michael's plan is to blame this murder on belated retribution from the child's father.

I have to say I appreciate the twist here, in that unlike your usual detective story, we know who the perp is right from the start! So the suspense here is whether the two of them can get away with murder or whether the police in Wales are more competent than the ones in Norfolk, and will discover what really happened. The police are represented by Sergeant Cadwallader, who is annoying in the extreme, and Inspector Thompson.

Michael's plan is to create a 'blackmail style' note, made up from letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a page reading simply: 'May 15th. Paid in full', the date being the day Richard killed the child. His first mistake (I believe, but we'll see!) is to give Laura the newspaper from which he cut the letters for the note, asking her to burn it in the furnace. We don't know if she did so. He wipes his fingerprints from the room, and instructs Laura to pretend she had a headache and got out of bed looking for aspirin. In this way she can be with a witness when a shot is fired (by Michael) from the gun. Several of the residents then go to the murder scene, and Michael comes through the door carrying the gun, claiming he was knocked down by someone who came running out of the room with the gun in hand, dropping it as they collided. From that point onwards, he uses his real story - that of being stuck in the ditch and coming to the house for help.

This novel started out being rather poorly for me, but once I discovered how it was going to go down, it improved somewhat. After reading Ian Rankin and being disappointed, and then reading John Dickson Carr and being disappointed, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in Agatha Christie, too, to begin with! It appeared to be a sad month for detective stories.

This one slowly grew on me as yet one layer after another was revealed. I did start to think that this would have made a better story had it been combined with Carr's The House at Satan's Elbow and the resultant mash-up has been titled "The Unexpected Ghast"! Despite these improvements, though, I still found myself looking forward to getting past this novel and moving on to a different genre, which is a bit sad. Three rather disappointing detective stories in a row! I'm having better luck with the TV shows! Prime Suspect (US version) continues to please, and I can recommend the first episode of Midsomer Murders so all is not lost! I plan on getting my hands on the novel that inspired that show, it was so good. As for Prime Suspect the shorter format tells a better story than the English original, but the other side of that coin is that it’s rather sad that the US is completely unwilling to experiment or to stray far from formulaic, given all the jingoistic talk of the US being an innovative and cutting edge nation! Not in entertainment we're not!

But I digress! Christie seems extraordinarily obsessed with people sitting on the ends of things - most often the sofa! I found that a bit weird. Throughout the novel I found myself changing the person I suspected as being the perp. Obviously at the beginning, it seemed pretty obvious that it was Laura, but that "fact" changed and so the story itself changed. Instead of being one where we knew who the perp was and were left thinking that the mystery was whether she would get away with it, it returned to being the standard detective story wherein we no longer sure of the perp, and have to figure it out. Methinks 'twas a bit overdone, though!

Just when I was starting to suspect that Jan (the adult with the mind of a boy who Laura takes care of, and who is Richard's young step-brother) might have shot Richard, and Laura was covering-up for him, a new character showed up: a local politician and evidently an ex-military man named Julian who is Laura's secret boyfriend. At that point it was impossible to to tell if Laura shot Richard to be free to indulge herself with Julian, or if Julian did likewise! Needless to say, Michael is a bit miffed at discovering that Laura has a boyfriend! Or maybe the Laura/Julian thing is a red herring and it was Jan who shot Richard after all? I'm not going to reveal it. All I will do is taunt you with the fact that it becomes much more complicated than that!

While Jan shows the inspector and the sergeant to Richard's gun room, which is only next door, Julian leaves, and Michael, now alone with Laura, challenges her to demonstrate how she shot Richard. She does a really unconvincing job leaving Michael to conclude that Laura never did shoot her husband. There are two problems here. The first is that they're speaking loudly, so unless the room is superbly well sound-proofed, the police ought to be able to hear everything they're saying. Michael is now convinced that that it was Julian who carried out the murder. He remarks to Laura, "You've never fired a revolver in your life...You don’t even know enough to release the safety catch." The problem is that revolvers don’t have a safety! It’s quite amazing that crime writer of Christie's stature did not know this.

Even though this started out looking like an open and shut case, Christie kept ripping out the rug from under me as Jan, Bennett, Angell, Julian, Warwick's mother et al were paraded before me. Every time I thought I knew who had done this, Christie turned it around and pointed me at someone else. In the end, I never did guess who had done it, so it came as rather a surprise! I went back and forth in thinking that this was warty, and then it was not, and on and on. In the end, I decided that it was good enough to be deemed worthy!

Key To Lawrence by Linda and Gary Cargill

Title: Key To Lawrence
Author: Linda and Gary Cargill
Publisher: Cheops Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

Erratum
p18 "Corinthian columns crowned sprang up everywhere" - makes no sense!

Beware spoilers!!

Twenty-year-old Dora Benley is about to embark upon a first class transatlantic voyage upon the luxury liner Lusitania. A very suspicious man is watching her on the dock, and he later boards the ship. He seems extraordinarily interested in the package she's carrying. It’s a birthday present she's holding for her father's birthday on the voyage. Why is the stranger interested in an ordinary birthday present? Who ransacked her cabin trying to find it?

Cargill who writes technically well, based on first impressions and has set up an intriguing-sounding adventure, but it went nowhere for me. The RMS Lusitania was a real ship. It sank three years after the Titanic with pretty much the same magnitude of loss of life, yet it garners nowhere near the attention which the Titanic does. Why is that? The Lusitania is far more of a mystery than the Titanic was. It’s known that it was hit by a torpedo from a German U boat, a submarine which would never have been able to catch the Lusitania in a straight race, so fast was the ship (for its time), but the U boat just happened to be fortuitously (or disastrously, dependent upon your perspective) in the right place at the wrong time.

It fired only the one torpedo. The damage was sufficient to sink the ship, but also of such limited scope that everyone ought to have been able to get off the ship reasonably comfortably. However, shortly after the torpedo hit, there was another explosion - of something inside the Lusitania - which doomed it and some twelve hundred people on board. The ship upended just like the Titanic, the prow hitting the bottom of the ocean while the stern was was still high in the air and it sank within eighteen minutes. Unlike the Titanic which was swallowed by twelve thousand feet of bitterly cold ocean, the sea was rather shallow just eleven miles off the Irish coast where the Lusitania went down.

Where was the Royal Navy, which was supposed to escort the ship home to Liverpool through these dangerous waters? It was known that the Germans were in the area and targeting all suspect shipping around the British Isles. As Cargill points out in her novel, warnings had been issued by the Germans that all ships suspected of carrying munitions would be deemed to be targets. Indeed, one was published in some fifty American newspapers, including one right by the side of the advertisement for the Lusitania's upcoming voyage. The Lusitania was carrying some fifty tonnes of shells, and over four million rounds of ammunition, as wikipedia points out. Did the British want her to be hit, in the hope that the Americans would be drawn into the war? As I said, far more mystery surrounds the Lusitania than the Titanic. It was ripe for a novel!

I have to wonder about the propriety of Charles Klein propositioning Dora with a dinner invitation, and sitting with her at a table with her having no chaperon, but she's far more concerned about the mysterious stranger, a glimpse of whom is all she can claim in the sumptuous dining room, before she loses sight of him completely. I also wonder about the propriety of her 'powdering her nose' quite literally (at least, faking it) at the dinner table, as she uses her mirror to scan the dining room behind her. I'm not at all sure a proper woman would do such a crass thing in 1915. Perhaps Dora isn't so proper?!

Unfortunately with this novel, I was all-too-rapidly at the point where I had to question some of Cargill's writing. This is 1915, supposedly, not 2013, so why is Dora behaving like she's not from 1915? This isn't a time travel novel! I was willing to allow some 'artistic license' for the story, with Dora running around unsupervised and unescorted even though she was, legally speaking in 1915, a child, but Cargill takes this beyond what is reasonable. Dora is talking with men she does not know and has never met. She's running around with a guy who is over twice her age. Her parents are practically non-existent for all her interaction with them. They seem to take no interest in her, or her welfare, or her whereabouts, or in the company she's keeping! I know Dora isn't a nun, and this is 1915, not 1815, but Cargill's dispensation with propriety has gone too far for me to put any stock in its credibility.

It’s also unreasonable that Dora would hold on to that birthday gift in such circumstances. Ships like the Lusitania had a purser whose duty, in part, was to take charge of passenger valuables and lock them away safely. It makes no sense for her to be wrestling with where to hide the humidor and thinking of prevailing upon Charles to secure it for her when she could have turned it in to the purser and been done with it. For all she knows, Charles could be a part of the plan to steal it!

It makes no sense at all, either, for her to be receiving threatening notes, and to have her cabin broken into and ransacked, and for her to not even think of reporting these things and identifying the man whom she thinks is responsible. She's a first class passenger for goodness sakes! Back then, and rightly or wrongly, that meant something. This not only breaks, but completely shatters suspension of disbelief. I could see a story here wherein the shabby man whom she thinks is the threat is actually a benefactor, and it’s Charles who is the villain! There would be an entertaining story, but it appears that this story isn’t that one, since the man, often referred to as 'the Arab' by Cargill (talk about racial profiling!), fires a shot at her, and chases her. She encounters some of the very wealthiest passengers, a Vanderbilt amongst them, yet despite her state of dishevelment, not a single one of them behaves gallantly!

Despite a gun being fired aboard the ship, not a single one of the crew shows up or takes the slightest interest in what’s going on. This is beyond ridiculous! I'm sorry, but at this point this novel precipitously dropped from being attractive to being completely absurd. It’s inconceivable that such men would uniformly turn Dora's distress into a joke and make risqué remarks. It gets worse, from there, too. Dora is escorted into a supposedly private dining room where Cargill proceeds to trumpet how much research she did by dropping one name after another, every one of whom, male and female, consistently makes fun of Dora's predicament. This is purest bullshit.

Cargill writes almost as though the ship's manifest made zero mention of munitions, but that isn't correct. Some things apparently were hidden, but the ship's manifest did identify some munitions that were aboard. The ship was an auxiliary warship, and had been for some time. Indeed, Cunard had received a subsidy for building this ship and its two sisters, the Mauritania and the Aquitainia, on the understanding that in the event of war, they could be commandeered, armed, and used for military purposes as the Lusitania was indeed being employed. To imply that this wasn't so is misleading at best. Indeed, it was this very fact which triggered Germany to issue warnings that the Lusitania would be deemed to be a military vessel.

This story continued to deteriorate from there. We have "the Arab" hauling Dora from her cabin to a different one and then from there to a third cabin, with not a single person seeing or hearing them or Dora's cries. Despite having access to a port hole in the last cabin, Dora makes only one brief attempt to call for help and then she gives up and takes a nap! In that cabin, she can hear her parents outside the porthole quite clearly discussing her mysterious absence, yet never once does she call out to them. Clearly if she can hear them, they can hear her. All she had to do was to loudly call out that she was right there in the cabin, and that she had been abducted, and this whole thing would be over. Yet she stays quietly watching her captor build chemical bombs! I'm sorry but this is infantile.

She sleeps another night in captivity making no attempt whatsoever to break the glass or to call to passers-by even though she can hear them clearly. No one on the ship seems to think her disappearance is worth bothering with! No one considers that she might have gone overboard. The next morning the ship's crew runs a lifeboat drill (why so late in the journey?!) with scores of people right outside the porthole and never once does Dora utter a sound! I can only conclude that Dora is a complete Moron Sue and no hero about whom I'd want to read anything. She's finally discovered by Byrne, the guy who was whining to her about there being munitions on the ship, and she escapes her prison with his aid, but after she's free, she never thinks even for a second of contacting her parents to let them know she's safe! She never once considers going to the captain to tell him what happened and to warn him that there's a bomb aboard the ship!

This is about fifty pages in and by that point I'd had more than enough. This novel is beyond ludicrous and it's entirely unbelievable. It could have been a worthy story, but that chance was let slip and far from being worthy, it’s a definite, without-question warty tale! I have far better things to do with my time than to read this kind of crap.

The House at Satan's Elbow by John Dickson Carr

Title: The House at Satan's Elbow
Author: John Dickson Carr
Publisher: International Polygonics Press
Rating: WARTY!

After a disappointing outing with Ian Rankin's Detective Sergeant John Rebus, I decided to try a date with the master, John Dickson Carr and his hero Gideon Fell, which you have to admit is a less-then-complimentary name for someone who's supposed to succeed! Note that John Dickson Carr is the grandfather of Shelly Dickson Carr whose novel Ripped I reviewed back in April.

I've decided that July is detective month, so after this one, I'll move on to an Agatha Christie novel. At the same time, I'm watching the US version of Prime Suspect (having completed watching the original Brit series), and also catching up on Steven Moffat's Sherlock. All of these TV series have been or will be reviewed in the TV section of this blog. I'm also going to check out the Midsomer Murders!

The house at Satan's Elbow is a detective mystery novel published in 1965 - although it seems to be set earlier as I'm reading it. I don't know why it feels that way to me! Satan's Elbow is a fictional creation, but there is a village of Lepe (not quite the Lepe Beach mentioned in the novel but near enough), although there's really no obvious elbow to be found in the area. Maybe the locals are religiously superstitious and gave it the elbow? The fictional Satan's Elbow is one mile from Exbury which itself isn’t far from Beaulieu after taking a left at a crossroads so we're told. They travel a road where they can see the Isle of Wight three miles away to the right. It's all a bit confusing! But enough about that.

The novel begins with Nick Barclay inviting his old friend Garret Anderson down to Greengrove - his family's residence. There is a big fuss over old Clovis's will. Just when everything was considered settled after his death, a new will was discovered hidden inside a large tobacco jar kept on the mantle in a rarely used room in the house. The jar was accidentally broken revealing the will in front of several witnesses. The new will, un-witnessed, but hand-written by Clovis, disenfranchised Uncle Pennington in favor of Nick, but the latter is independently wealthy, and doesn't want to deprive his uncle of the family home, so he's headed down there to set things straight and evidently wants Garret along for moral support.

So far, so good. As they're about to board the train, Garret is delivered a note from a woman in one of the carriages, who turns out to be Fay Wardour, the woman with whom he had a passionate fling when in Paris, a year or so ago. They were supposed to meet up in London shortly afterwards, but she never showed, and never contacted him. Now she's evidently Uncle Pen's secretary, living at Greengrove. However, in order to protect her privacy, she begs Garrett to act like he doesn't know her and their meeting at Greengrove is their first. She plans to disembark the train at the station before the others will get off and ride the bus into Lepe Beach.

This novel continues to slightly confuse. The story is written using the language and the manners of a much earlier era. It doesn’t read like it's talking place in 1965. This, I suspect, is because Carr was born and spent his formative years in a much earlier era and either chose not to, or could not, adapt to a more modern style. He lived in England for the better part of two decades, married to an English woman. That's where he began writing, and it seems to me that he never changed his style from the behaviors, and language usage, he encountered around him in the 1930's and 1940's. Frankly this was off-putting to me to begin with, and it still keeps distracting me from the story, but it has become much more engrossing now that we're out of the tedious introduction and getting into the action.

Sir Horace Wildfare supposedly haunts Greengrove. He was an extremely stern judge in the mid 18th century, who was ridiculed for what was considered to be a miscarriage of justice when a wealthy landowner, accused of slitting the throat of a 12 year old girl he was known to have raped, was found not guilty after the judge had gone after the prosecution mercilessly. It’s rumored that he built Greengrove with bribe money from such trials. Two people have claimed to see this ghost in the same part of the house - one of them claimed it went through a wall, the other claimed it went through a locked door. These people are Mrs Tiffin, the so-so cook, and Nick's Aunt Estelle.

As the party from the train (Nick, Garret, Deidre, who picked them up, and Dawlish, the lawyer) arrives at the house, they hear a gunshot. Uncle Pen is known to carry a .22 revolver in the pocket of the old-fashioned smoking jacket he routinely wears. Rather than go in the front door, the party absurdly goes in through an open library window and by amazing coincidence, Uncle Pennington is in the library. He tells them that the 'ghost' fired a shot at him, but it was a blank, and all that hit him in his chest was a wad of paper that was in the gun - his own gun. Rather suspiciously, his young wife Deidre has disappeared and shows up again shortly thereafter claiming that once she knew her husband was OK she went to park the car properly.

Pen explains that he was sitting in the room facing the window and must have dozed off because when he was next aware, there was a figure entirely covered in black standing inside the room by the window (which was locked on the inside). The figure retrieved Pen's own gun from a pocket in the robe it wore, fired the one blank shot at his heart, then dropped the gun and retreated behind the curtains. Pen did not give chase. The figure apparently disappeared. There are no prints on the gun because the figure wore grey nylon gloves.

Doctor Fortescue supports Pen's story by relating that he observed someone dressed in black disappearing behind the high hedges in the garden outside his window. His room was directly above the library. Estelle also arrives in the room having apparently been spying on the goings-on from a small interconnecting room. So the ones who could have done this are (so far), Fay, Doctor Fortescue, Aunt Estelle, Mrs Tiffin, and either of the two maids, all of whom were so far unaccounted for in terms of my having certain knowledge of where they were.

Well I can't speak to Carr's ability to create a good crime yet, but I am beginning to think he can't create a good story. In addition to the antique language I mentioned earlier, Carr also has an annoying habit of over-describing or of describing things that really jar you out of the story and back to the realization that he's making this up as he goes along! There's a lot of annoying detail and interruptions to describe the layout of the house! For example, when Fay arrives home, she comes into the room at a point when Pennington is talking about someone being poisoned, and Fay takes a look of horror upon her face and immediately hurries away. Deidre runs after her, and Garret runs after her, using Fay's dropped cigarette case as an excuse, since he isn't supposed to know Fay.

Instead of Garret catching up to Fay and the two of them having a good conversation, Garret is stopped by Deidre, who for no reason at all describes the layout of the house, not only the room into which Fay went,. but also the rooms all around it and the rooms down the hallways at the other end of the house. That's completely absurd, and so fake! So at this point I do not rate Carr as a writer, and especially not as a writer of suspense! When Garret finally reaches Fay, she tells him a story which has effectively robbed me of my suspicions of her, gullible fool that I am! I hope this won't come back to, er, haunt me, but at this point I can't see Carr fingering her as the guilty party. Right now my money is on Fortescue.

Carr may be a great concocter of locked room mysteries, but as a writer, particularly when graded as a suspense writer, he rather sucks. At one point he has Garret address Fay as "my sugar-candy witch". That's really an Americanism, and while it may have been 'appropriate' in 1935, it seems entirely out of place in 1965 and in Britain. Worse than this, he has Nick Barclay address Deidre - his step mother - in appallingly familiar terms. I know there was no political correctness, in general, in 1965, but amongst the upper class in Britain there was a rather solidly-established political correctness after a fashion, and this particular portion of the novel seemed entirely contrary to that, to me. Unless, of course, there's something going on between the two of them! Carr's inability to make a story flow is starkly outlined later, as well.

After the discussion in Pen's study, the group splits up,with Fortescue rudely disappearing into what I shall describe as the music room, playing Gilbert and Sullivan at an anti-social volume on the "hi-fi". This seems to me to be a liberty which no one would take as a guest in a home like this. Unless, of course, Fortescue is the would-be murderer (which is still the option I'm going with at present). The loud music will obviously cover any shenanigans he wants to get up to. It’s possible that this could be a herring of a decidedly scarlet hue, of course. Garret and Fay are in discussion next door in the billiard room, Estelle is supposedly in her room, and Nick and the servants are god-knows-where. Nick shows up, concerned about Pen, who has evidently bolted both of the doors and locked both of the windows to his study.

When the party goes outside to look in through the windows, they see Pen lying on his back, the gun at his feet, and a bleeding wound in his chest. The gun was fired at point-blank range, which means he could have done it himself, or the villain could have wanted us to think that, but if there was another party to this, where did they go?

Now we come to Carr's mistake: when Fell rounds up the parties, in clichéd fashion, and begins to examine this disturbing attack on Pen, Garret rudely interrupts him to ask about the manuscript of Sheridan's The Rivals which is why Fell is there - to authenticate it or otherwise. Seriously? Someone has just been shot and may die and Garret's only interest is in some antiquated manuscript? That just kicked me right out of suspension of disbelief. I can only conclude that Garret is a complete jerk or that Carr is a poor writer, or both!

Another issue here is that we're not told what happened to Pen until some time later! Its like he's completely irrelevant at this point! Fortescue advocates moving him to his room without making any attempt at all to arrest the profuse bleeding, and this is what happens! No ambulance is called! Pen is stuffed away in a room upstairs and we find Fortescue there in the study with everyone else! Since Pen didn’t go to the hospital, what in god's name is going on with leaving a bleeding man unattended by a medical professional? Worse than this, Fortescue later announces that he has given a man suffering serious blood loss a sedative! This is appallingly bad writing, but as hard as it is to conceive of something worse than this, there is: Fell, supposedly a brilliant detective, allows Fortescue, who must be at least a suspect, to take charge of Pen and remove him from everyone's sight rather than leave him lying where he is until an ambulance arrives! The only one watching Pen is a constable.

Carr very loudly telegraphs things, too. For example, he has made it clear that hand-written communications play a part in this story and that Estelle can imitate handwriting - so she could have both forged Clovis's new will, for example, and/or sent the note that brought Fell to Greengrove. Indeed, it was Estelle who ensured that the new will was discovered by 'clumsily' breaking the tobacco jar in which it was hidden. So are we seeing Fortescue telegraphed as the villain of the piece, or is that merely misdirection from Estelle? Or are both of these marooned-herrings and the real perp here is Nick Barclay? Or is it his close friend - and aunt-in-law - Deidre? I don’t know!

I'm done with this one now and I have to say that it deteriorates and never really recovers. The end is a surprise (at least it was to me) but by that point I had become so tired of all the meandering that it was far more of a meh than a yeay! WARTY!

Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin

Title: Knots and Crosses
Author: Ian Rankin
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Rating: worthy

Well how weird is this? For the first time since I started this blog in January, I'm bereft of both galley ebooks and library books! Yep! For the next few volumes I review, I'll be going through books which are wholly-owned subsidiaries of me! Just thought I'd get that off my chest! Not that it was actually on my chest, but you know what I mean. And before we go on I have to note here that after I read this novel, I watched two of the Rebus TV shows and couldn't watch any more. I started on the third and had to ask myself why? Rebus in the TV shows is presented as nothing but an incompetent, cluless, thoughtless drunk, and I couldn't even begin to sustain an interest in a waste of time like that.

I have to award Ian Rankin the MIRAPro (Make Ian Read A Prologue) award for 2013. He bypassed all my defenses and titled the entire first section of the book 'Prologue', even including numbered chapters in it to force me to read it! That's without question the sneakiest assault yet, and since I cannot see anyone beating that approach, and even though it's barely past the half-year mark, he gets the award hands-down. He then adds assault to injury by including an epilogue! He also gets a What? award for this sentence: "...some of them brought in from stations outwith the city"?! p26. I'm sure that makes sense in Scotland. I've just never heard that phraseology before!

This novel is over a quarter of a century old, but something talked me into reading it. I probably would not have had I not been able to purchase it used! Rankin should probably thank the penny-pinching Scot trope in me for buying it. But why look at this novel in particular? Was it because I love Scotland (it was featured powerfully in my novel Saurus), or because I believe I once watched the TV version of this novel - although the memory is vague? It doesn't hurt that I recently got through viewing Prime Suspect an equally venerable TV show set mostly in London, and featuring a feisty and put-upon detective, too. I've even started watching the US version of that show and it's proving quite watchable, too. However my decision to read this novel was arrived at, it was evidently not a completely dumb one, because I was finding it reasonably readable at about one third the way through it.

Seasoned and battered Detective Sergeant John Rebus, on the Edinburgh police force, is put on a child abduction task force only to discover, his first night on the job, that both children have been recovered - but dead. Rebus has, curiously, received the same number of hand-delivered letters, each one showing up at the police station where he works, with his name and nothing else on the envelope, and containing a piece of knotted string and one short sentence: 'there are clues are everywhere'. A third envelope arrives not long afterwards. This has a different message and a different 'toy' enclosed. Yet despite the fact that Rebus gets an envelope for each murder, this guy is so lousy a detective that he never, ever links the two things together, and this costs him in the end.

Rebus isn't exactly adored on the force, so he's given really low-level jobs, such as reading through case files for the assorted known deviants and perverts in the area, and then knocking door-to-door to find out what, if anything, anyone has seen regarding the two abductions/murders. He appears to luck-out personally in the cafeteria one day, when a fellow detective invites him to a party she's throwing, but when he gets there, she's with another guy. He hooks up instead with a detective inspector named Gill Templer. This is later misspelled as 'Temple' in the novel, which goes to show two things: a spell-checker will not completely save your ass, and professional editors are really no better than editing yourself when you get right down to it. Gill is also on the task force, and they end up in bed together. Gill is evidently quite an adventurer in bed, but the relationship really goes nowhere.

Rebus has a bother, Mark, who is a stage hypnotist, and who is also apparently a middle-man in some shady drug dealings, which are weirdly tied to the main case on Rebus's agenda. Rebus has an ex-wife who is dating the son of Rebus's superior at work! So yeah, it couldn't really get any more screwed up than that.

On top of all this, we discover that Rebus is an ex-SAS soldier who has mixed feelings about being in (and then leaving) the military. The way this is written made me suspect that whatever is going on in Edinburgh right then has something, somehow, to do with his military service - and for once, miraculously, I was right, but this revelation only goes to make me feel even more cheated that I didn't get a decent detective story out of this! Most of my suspicions and guesses are completely wrong, so I was a bit surprised by this one being right! This is why I'm not a detective; I do have designs on writing such stories, though!

So, long-story short: I went into this hoping for some cool detective work and I got a police procedural where none of the police work paid off in any way at all. I got no great insights, no deep observations, no cool detecting or problem-solving. I got a lot of nauseating swilling of whisky and smoking of cigarettes, which I felt was unnecessary - and an unnecessary slur on the Scots! So like I said, I feel cheated; however, the story itself wasn't bad in the sense that it was badly written or too stupid to take seriously. So how do I rate a novel like this? I thought about this for a while, and in the end, I decided that I will rate it a low worthy, but qualify that by adding that based on this novel, I doubt I will ever feel a compulsion to read any of the numerous sequels to it!

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

Title: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
Author: E. Lockhart aka Emily Jenkins
Publisher: Hyperion Books
Rating: WORTHY

E(mily) Lockhart is the writer behind The Boy Book, The Boyfriend List, Dramarama, and Fly on the Wall. It would be unfair to start this review without quoting Frankie's bizarre (until you've read the novel, that is!) letter.

December 14, 2007
To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors,
Alabaster Preparatory Academy

I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds. I take full responsibility for the disruptions caused by the Order—including the Library Lady, the Doggies in the Window, the Night of a Thousand Dogs, the Canned Beet Rebellion, and the abduction of the Guppy.

That is, I wrote the directives telling everyone what to do.

I. And I alone.

No matter what Porter Welsch told you in his statement...

Of course, the dogs of the Order are human beings with free will. They contributed their labor under no explicit compunction. I did not threaten them or coerce them in any way, and if they chose to follow my instructions, it was not because they feared retribution.

You have requested that I provide you with their names. I respectfully decline to do so. It’s not for me to pugn or impugn their characters.

I would like to point out that many of the Order’s escapades were intended as social criticism. And that many of the Order’s members were probably diverted from more self-destructive behaviors by the activities prescribed them by me. So maybe my actions contributed to a larger good, despite the inconveniences you, no doubt, suffered.

I do understand the administration’s disgruntlement over the incidents. I see that my behavior disrupted the smooth running of your patriarchal establishment. And yet I would like to suggest that you view each of the Loyal Order’s projects with the gruntlement that should attend the creative civil disobedience of students who are politically aware and artistically expressive.

I am not asking that you indulge my behavior; merely that you do not dulge it without considering its context.

Yours sincerely,
[Signature]
Frances Rose Landau-Banks,
class of 2010

This novel begins, as you saw, with a letter of confession from Frances Rose Landau-Banks regarding certain disreputable activities which take place during the first semester of her sophomore high school year. She owns up to being the ring-leader for a reputable reason. Frankie fell afoul of reputability despite advice from her best friend is Trish, who is the daughter of a psychiatrist and who does a pretty darned amazing job of psychoanalyzing people's behaviors herself. Why is it, in these novels, that all-too-often, I find myself preferring the best friend over the main character?! In this case, however, it's a tough call.

So Frankie is now a sophomore at Alabaster prep school, but none of the more senior boys even remember her from her freshman year; they think she's a new student. There seems to be a significant memory loss problem at this school. If it were a paranormal novel I’d be suspicious that some supernatural evil was at work here, but since it isn’t, I have to assume that we’re being telegraphed here that Frankie is going to shoot to super stardom before long, which will render her unforgettable.

The guy "Alpha", whom she met while at the beach just a couple of weeks before, claims he doesn’t remember her. Dean, who is annoyed that he first encountered her with the real alpha, Matthew, lies that he doesn’t know her just because of that. Matthew Livingston (I presume) denies that he knows her and is probably the only one of the three who is telling the truth. But the guys are amusing so Frankie isn’t angry with them. I agree with Frankie - the guys are amusing, but rather snotty. There are also some snotty girls hanging around, whom she meets at a depressing party on the golf links, and who don’t remember her either. Nor do they seem to have any wish for her acquaintanceship.

Frankie has learned of a society - the Basset Society - at the school, which is secret and open only to men. Matthew Livingston is apparently a member of this club. Frankie has a huge crush on him, which is a bit pathetic. It’s easy to condemn that, of course, but since Frankie is only a sophomore (~15 years old), I'm willing to allow her a bit more latitude than if she were your standard YA girl of 17, but you would think that, even at that age and especially in 2008, that she would realize that Matthew's future in his father's newspaper business is at best problematical when newspapers are going out of business at a phenomenal rate. Hasn’t Frankie heard of Internet media?!

Okay, it's confessional time. I'm hopelessly in love with Emily Lockhart/Jenkins/Whatever. Yes, I know it will do me absolutely no good whatsoever because she's having a riotous affair with the English language, which is, ironically, why I love her so much. I’d also be in love with Frankie Landau-Banks, but she's way too young for me! I do know that I want to read Lockhart/Jenkins's Dramarama ASAP. This novel, the one I'm currently reviewing The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is a tour de force. I'm recommending it right now even before I've finished it because, as I said recently about another joyous novel, I don’t care if the ending sucks stinking rotten green wieners, it’s eminently worth reading just for what it offers this far.

Frankie is a very curious person; not curious as in peculiar, but curious as in curiosity killed the cat (I wonder, was that Schrödinger's cat - and what if it’s still alive?). Frankie is also rather insecure, which is understandable, given her age. She loves being a part of Matthew's elite school group, and is constantly in some fear of losing his favor, which leads her to testing his commitment, both surreptitiously and quite often.

She's also a bit curious about Alpha, and why he so often seems to call Matthew away when the latter is supposed to be spending time with Frankie. Is he jealous of her hogging Matthew, or of Matthew hogging her? And why does Matthew always go, choosing Alpha over her? Her insecurity isn’t helped by the fact that one of the elite, Dean, dumps his girlfriend Sarah - someone whom Frankie doesn’t even like that much - and it becomes painfully apparent that no-one in the elite will even speak to Sarah after that. Frankie wonders if the same thing would happen to her - that the guys are only friendly towards her because she's with Matthew, not because they actually like her and enjoy her company in her own right.

On one of these occasions, she tails Matthew and finds that he's meeting secretly in the old arts theater, with a dozen or so guys, some of whom Frankie knows from sitting at the elite table in the cafeteria. She knows this group is the secret order of the basset hounds, because her father was a member. He would never tell Frankie a thing about it - except the one time he did reveal that there was a 'Disreputable History' diary squirreled away somewhere, which details the nefarious exploits of the order.

Frankie begins routinely spying on the order's meetings, and she discovers that they do not even know that there is such a diary. She realizes, at the same time, that the loyalty oath which they repeat at the start of each meeting is actually a riddle pointing to where the history is hidden. She turns detective and actually discovers the secret hiding place of the diary, whereupon she retrieves it and reads it shamelessly, learning all the secrets of this men's club! The secrets pretty much amount to nothing more than carrying on some college-student style pranks, although they did seem to be a bit more wild and inventive, and to have more fun than the current members do. The group started in 1951 and appears to have lost the location of the diary in the mid seventies. Things seems to have rather fizzled since then. Ultimately, though, Frankie realizes that the real value of the group is not the pranks they pull but the camaraderie engendered amongst them, and the enduring friendships which are spawned between them. She notes that this is something which is sorely lacking in her own life.

This novel makes Sloppy Firsts look like sloppy seconds. It's the novel which that one ought to have been but failed.

Having finished this now I can confirm my earlier decision to fully recommend this excellent novel. No, the ending wasn't a disaster, though I have to admit to some surprise and a bit of dismay engendered from reading it. Things don’t turn out peachy and commendably, which is fine, and Lockhart/Jenkins doesn't neatly pair off Frankie with anyone (not even Trish!). That was a warm and welcome surprise, but the dismay came from the ending being so bleak! I didn’t expect, and indeed didn’t hope for a sunny, happy, joy-joy ending, but I was a bit discomfited by Frankie being left in so stark a position, shunned and treated with suspicion in so many quarters, although in some ways I guess I do concur that this is exactly where she needed to be.

I loved Lockhart/Jenkins's pursuit of English language's 'missing inversions', such as there not being a word 'maculate' to pair with immaculate, and there not being an 'advertant' to pair with inadvertent (actually, both of these cases there is such a word!). She has this amazing section where she launches into this, inspired by PG Wodehouse (I've never read any Wodehouse. The closest I came was watching Hugh Laurie's and Stephen Fry's TV series which I recommend). Wodehouse at one point apparently uses the word 'gruntled' as opposed to disgruntled, and this really catches Frankie's imagination. She starts using these fake inverted words routinely, causing amusement and confusion amongst her fellow students. That part really caught my imagination because it’s well within the range of the kind of thing I like to do when I'm writing.

In the end, I think The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks is the most feminist and rebellious novel I've ever read. The way she takes charge and dives into this so expertly and so deviously is, I'm afraid to say (because in some ways it’s so insulting) masterful! She kicks ass and doesn’t even bother taking names. Instead she takes liberties. Her story and her behavior are wonderful. In many ways, a sequel to this would be a crime, because it’s hard to imagine any sequel ever being capable of recapturing the charm and skill of the original, but I can't prevent myself from feeling that I want to see Frankie in college, or if not there, then in business after she graduates, surreptitiously taking charge and undermining the male patriarchy! She's wonderful!

Don't Look Away by Leslie A. Smith

Title: Don't Look Away
Author: Leslie A. Smith aka Leslie Kelly
Publisher: LK Books
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of her story.

This is Book 1 of the 'Veronica Sloan' series. I don’t know if Leslie Smith got married and decided to change her name, or got divorced and did likewise, or just wanted to separate her action-adventure name from her romance novels, but if it was the latter, it doesn’t seem to have worked since Don't Look Away is out under both her names! The 'Smith' attributed version is copyrighted to the Kelly name. I'm not sure what the wisdom or even the point is of that, but there you have it!

The novel is well-written apart from a minor quirk here and there, like the name 'Carr' misspelled as 'car' on P202. But this is a proof copy, so maybe these things are all ironed out in the press version. The writing is to the point, moving the tale, and not overly dramatic or underly so. There is a small but slightly disturbing amount of genderism going on, but not enough to turn my stomach. I found it amusing that she uses the phrase "out in Texas" rather than "down in Texas". The novel is some 338 pages, but it’s spaced very generously; if it were more compact it would be significantly shorter. The spacing reminds me of how I did Saurus before I became fully clued-in to the idiosyncrasies of word-processor formatting. It just goes to show that page count really doesn't convey diddly without also knowing the spacing and font details; that's why I quit including a page count in my reviews. It’s really irrelevant in this age of ebooks, anyway.

Set in the second quarter of the 21st century, in Washington DC, this is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic story. The apocalypse was some (only vaguely described) terrorist attack of such magnitude that it devastated the mall area of DC, killed the president, and destroyed the White House. The attack changed things even more significantly than the attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon did, so the new bookmark is 10/20, not 9/11. I'm not sure why Smith/Kelly went there when the overall story would have worked just fine had it been set in 2013.

At around the time of the bombings, there was a program to 'chip' people - that is to embed in a person's skin a microchip which would contain basic data about that person. This technology is available now, and I can see it becoming wide-spread in the future. I know a lot of people reject this 'big brother' idea, but if you have nothing to hide you should have nothing to snide. I don’t see the logic to a society that will chip pets but not children, and then whine when children are abducted and we can't find them. Do we value our vehicles more than children so that we will LoJack a car and then reject that same security for a child? I guess so. We obviously believe strongly in lighting car dealerships far more brilliantly at night than we'll ever light up residential neighborhoods. That says a lot about American values, doesn’t it?

Police detective Veronica Sloan and her partner Mark Daniels are called to a murder in the basement of the under-construction White House. The reason Ronnie is called is because she's in the 'Optical' squad (Smith/Kelly doesn't know how to coin a good acronym! The squad is Optical Evidence Program Investigative Squad, or O.E.P.I.S. as she writes it - pronounced, presumably, E-piss? I think it needs a better name!). It's an elite group of law-enforcement officers spread across the country who have high security clearance, specialized training, and a camera embedded in their head, tied to their optic nerve. I guess it's a bit like Kiera Cameron's rig in Continuum. The reason Ronnie is called in is that victim is also an OEPIS member. You might think a crime like this would be easy to solve, even one so gruesome that her body is cut to pieces, quite literally. Unfortunately, the head containing the camera is, in her case, missing!

It seemed to me from the start that there was a big flaw in this system. It evidently can detect when life is terminated, but no-one thought to have it set up to send an encrypted burst-transmission of data recorded since the last archiving, to a secure location, if the bearer is dying. If it had, they would have a lot more chance of figuring this out. As it is, with the head gone, they’re screwed in every way but pleasant. I'm also a bit surprised at the evident reticence of Ronnie and her partner to actually go look at Leanne's previously archived material to see what she was doing and with whom she was involved. I would have thought that would be the first priority, lacking other evidence. The murder took place during a festival and there were some 55,000 people in the mall at the time, so their potential suspect pool is overwhelmingly huge!

Oh, and someone needs to clue Smith/Kelly in that it's not "rocket to air missiles"! I think she means surface-to-air. Along that same line of thinking, the term 'optical camera' is a tautology, but these minor flaws aside, I can see myself wanting to read a sequel to this if the novel continues to be a decent read as it has shown itself to be so far. Admittedly some of my complaints are no more than pet peeves, but some are issues with the writing of the novel, and it’s appropriate to address them because my blog isn’t just about reading and reviewing, it’s about the writing process and the English language, and I've begun to realize that while I do touch on this often, I don't spend anywhere near enough time on discussing those things in relation to what I'm reading.One thing which piqued my interest was Smith/Kelly's use of "utilizing" (or "utilize(d)"). I noticed this three times in the space of a few pages on p74, p79, p83. It was sufficiently distracting that I did a search for it then, purely out of curiosity! I never would have been able to do this were this a real book rather than a virtual ebook! My search pulled these terms up on p154, p237, p297, p328, which isn't that often I suppose, but they did jump out at me because that words bothers me!

Now obviously this is Smith/Kelly's novel, and it's entirely up to her how she writes it and which words she chooses, but as for me, I've never liked that word. It seems...what’s the word? Pretentious? Officious? Overblown? I've never been a fan of using a more complex word when a simpler one will suffice, unless of course, you're going for some particular effect, so each time I read one of those uses, I found myself distracted from the text, wondering what was wrong with substituting "using" or "making use of." Maybe no one else will notice, and it’s not a criticism of this novel but definitely a criticism of writing in general!

Having said all that, there are some things specific to this novel. One of these is the seemingly contradictory text at one point where Smith/Kelly writes that Ronnie "...wanted the darkness", but immediately afterwards has her switch on her flashlight! That made no sense to me and stuck out like a sore thumb. Another thing which perked-up my interest is where Smith/Kelly says of the perp, "...he'd covered his tracks." The big allusion here is to the gender of the perp. I don’t know if she gave this away on purpose, or was just using unfortunately gender-laden terminology, but that's not what really interested me. The way this is written, it's impossible to tell if these are thoughts that Ronnie is entertaining, or if it's just the way Smith/Kelly wrote it. If the latter is the case, then was it deliberate, or merely thoughtless? Sneaky or sloppy? I don’t know. If it was the former, does it betray that female hero Ronnie is genderist in her thinking?!

Back to the story! There's a big effort at a red-herring with a character called Bailey! Should I bite? Is it a red-herring? It’s hard to say! Right around this time is when Ronnie herself is attacked by the perp, who is returning the vic's head to the scene of the crime, and runs into Ronnie in the process. She's in the basement by herself, of course. We've been treated to a few of the perp's thoughts, but not many. "He" seems conflicted about taking the head. What bothers me about this particular event is that no one seems to realize that their 55,000 suspect pool has now been drastically narrowed. Clearly, this can only have been done by someone who has access to the site, able to pass through all the security, and doing so while carrying a victim's head in some sort of container, yet none of the investigating officers pick up on this: that he had to get the head out of there on day one, and then get it back in there that day he attacked Ronnie. This is a huge clue. All Ronnie wonders is if there is a tunnel still in use - one which was not sealed and filled in after the 10/20 attacks. Is that the case?

Because of the attack on Ronnie (which incapacitates her to unconsciouness for eight straight hours!), Jeremy Sykes shows up. He's a very competitive OEPIS trainee, with whom Ronnie locked horns repeatedly. She decided never to pursue that relationship, but she has a sadly adolescent crush on him which completely stalls the story for me. There's a hugely annoying amount of 'Ronnie instadore' over Jeremy, which really turned me off because instead of getting on with the investigation which is what I'm interested in, many more than half her thoughts are now focused on Jeremy instead of on solving the murder. And there's been another murder - of another OEPIS member - in Philadelphia! But this swooning by Ronnie over Jeremy is nauseating, frankly and IMO it rather belittles and demeans her.

The set-up for the second murder is really cheesy since Smith/Kelly goes out of her way to describe how sugary the relationship is between the new vic and his wife. To me, a murder isn’t somehow worse because the victim was in a beautiful relationship; all murders are awful. The second murder is also rendered absurdist with the description of the discovery of the second victim's head and how it made the girl (who was coming in to work) panic and run in front of a garbage truck. How abusively genderist is that? If the employee was a guy, would he have screamed and ran?! And if this girl was so badly injured after this, then how can the police possibly know the circumstances of how she discovered the body?! That struck me as a bit thoughtless. This scene seemed to offer a big clue indicating that the victim was being watched for some time - at least a couple of weeks and perhaps more - before the perp struck, but nothing is made of this at all. Was the victim being watched using his own downloaded video? Was this crime committed by someone who is high-up in the OEPIS hierarchy?

We truly enter tropesville when Ronnie proves how super-tough and dedicated she is by checking herself out of the hospital against medical advice. I have a feeling that in the real world her supervisor would have something seriously unpleasant to say about an officer who tried to do that, especially when there's another competent OEPIS officer now on the case. How many times do we see this trope in in books, and on TV and in movies: the overworked cop cliché, working super-extra-hard and going without sleep, cases piling up? I am not impressed by that. It just annoys me.

Once Ronnie's old OEPIS nemesis Jeremy came back into the picture - as we knew he would, of course! - I also got the overwhelming feeling that her partner Mark Daniels isn’t going to survive this novel. Was I right? You'll have to read it to find out! Recall that this is the start of a series, so how is it going to proceed? Is the next volume going to be Ronnie and Mark again with no Jeremy in the picture? I doubt it. Not with the way Smith/Kelly gushes about how hot Ronnie is for Jeremy. Or is Mark going to be quietly eliminated, to provide yet more amped-up angst, and allow Jeremy to slide into his place somehow? It's pretty obvious that if anyone is killed off it's not going to be Jeremy!

An out of left field surprise is that Mark is revealed to be a OEPIS member. I either missed this earlier in the text, or it really is out of left field, because I don’t remember this being broached at all! He's not mentioned in connection with the training "out in Texas"! Maybe I'm wrong and I just missed it.

There's a weak spot (at least that's how it looks to me) when Smith/Kelly has a barcode reader read the RFID chip embedded in (Ronnie's mentor) Doctor Tate's arm! Surely that should be a RFID reader and not a barcode reader? It gets worse as Ronnie and Jeremy are both asked to put their palm onto the palm reader so they can be granted access to the facilities in pursuit of their investigation. My question here is: how does the system know which of them is putting their palm on the reader? Does it already have their fignerprints and can figure it out? Maybe, but it bothers me a bit that this isn’t explained.

The pair of them is required to go to Tate's lab to look at the implanted cameras which were recovered from both victims. We get a bit of the movie Disclosure here. If you saw that movie you'll recall the absurd 3D database which Michael Crichton cluelessly had some people explore. In the movie, they excused his cluelessness by explaining that this was just a proof-of-concept thing: that in real life, it would be used for other more practical purposes.

Smith/Kelly is wiser than Crichton, because she employs it much more realistically. It still seems like overkill to me, but it would look good in a movie! In the lab, they meet Eileen Cavanaugh - Doctor Tate's assistant - and are treated to a firm handshake, James Bond style! I think this 'firm-handshake tells you a lot about a person' trope is pure bullshit, but whatever. Eileen is, of course, "drop-dead gorgeous" and has "ample curves". That bothered me. It’s already hard enough to get women into science and engineering. Are we aiming to further dissuade them by implying that you'll really only have standing there if you're hot, or if you're geeky (which is the other clichéd extreme)? I'd rather some characters were just everyday, regular people like they are in real life! There seems to me to be no reason at all to amp up the Cavanaugh character given that it goes nowhere.

Okay! I think that's enough secrets to give away! Yeah, there were some issues with this novel, and the ending was a bit too mundane for me given the great build-up to it, but the story-telling in general was really good, and I will look forward to the sequel - which is sneakily set-up at the end, and perhaps does promise something rather more along the lines of what I'd been hoping for. So definitely a worthy read! After reading a few disasters lately, its so good to finally have the opportunity to read an ebook that really was a pleasure.

Semmant by Vadim Babenko

Title: Semmant
Author: Vadim Babenko
Publisher: Ergo Sum Publishing
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I could not get into this novel at all. I know Babenko is a seasoned and respected writer, but I wonder if that's because he's "foreign" rather than because he has anything worthy to tell. Whatever the explanation, his seasoning was written off as far as I'm concerned. The blurb fooled me into believing it was going to be something interesting about AIs and technology and the human condition, but I saw very little AI and technology, very little human condition, and a lot of somewhat abusive adolescent sexual fantasy, which puts this novel right in the same boat as The Prelude as far as I'm concerned. The only strong feeling I got from it was that it ought to have been titled 50 Shades of A(I).

After plowing through the overwhelmingly massive info-dump of the first five chapters, I had pretty much lost all interest and found myself skimming the remaining chapters, glancing them over, reading a paragraph here and there because that was all I could bring myself to do. This tale felt much more like it should have been a short-story rather than a novel, and the endless description of obsession with women, and the notable absence of decent conversation was really wearing. There was far too much telling, and no showing to speak of.

The story is of Bogdan Bogdanovich, who creates an AI he calls Semmant. I have no idea why this name was chosen when 'Pedant' would have served just as well for a title. I must have missed that bit. Semmant is designed to beat the financial markets and does so very well. How this translates into it learning of Bogdan's 'human condition' I have no idea, because once Semmant is created, we pretty much bid it farewell, and descend into Bogdan's juvenile, somewhat cruel, and very shallow sexual fantasies and obsessions with one woman or another, all of which depended very little on technology or intelligence, artificial or otherwise. I have no interest in Bogdan or his women. I don’t care about his spoiled-rotten life or how it all comes crashing down around him or where he ends up. I really don’t. I tried to, but I had any reason to care sucked right out of me by the juvenile sex-obsession. I could neither sympathize nor empathize, nor even understand what it was Bogdan thought he was after, nor why he couldn’t find it, so I can't rate this novel as at all worthy, not even a little bit.