[Note: these reviews are generally reserved for R&R books I’ve found entertaining. They are NOT on Amazon, and please don’t query me to review your book here. I do my “official reviewing” at Bookpleasures.com–query there instead.]

The Nuremberg Puzzle. Laurence O’Bryan, author (Ardua, 2016). The PR for this novel calls it the “most controversial mystery of 2016.” Hmm. It’s not very controversial—people have been wondering about the Catholic Church’s support of the Nazi regime for years—so it’s just another conspiracy wrapped up in some historical fiction. It’s also not a mystery but a thriller. That said, it’s OK, and reading it is probably time better spent than playing some stupid computer game because it’s a gory tourist guide to the city where those famous trials were held.

Sean Ryan becomes involved in a neo-Nazi conspiracy designed to apply the final solution to the wave of new immigrants in Germany from the Middle East via an ethnic-specific virus. If you can stretch your mind far enough to believe that, you’ll be ready for the subplots that include the search for letters from Pius XII encouraging Hitler to invade Russia to eliminate the godless Communists (not clear why the neo-Nazis want those), a fictional excuse for Hitler’s stupid repetition of Napoleon’s mistake (Hitler already had a treaty with Stalin’s government).

The ending of this adventure in Nuremberg is unsatisfying and a 67% cliffhanger—to avoid a spoiler alert, you’ll have to read it to see what I mean—and I abhor cliffhangers. (This probably means there’s a sequel coming, but I won’t be reading it.) That 67% is just about the main characters, by the way; you’ll never know whether authorities can defeat that virus!  There are some interesting characters (FYI: Ryan isn’t one of them), but they aren’t well developed nor interesting enough to compensate for a herky-jerky plot that leaves you breathless for all the wrong reasons. There are no big plot twists or interesting themes either—the West doesn’t need neo-Nazis to make immigrants’ lives hell.

***

On sale: The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This sci-fi thriller will be on sale at Smashwords for $0.99, reduced from $2.99 (67% discount) from now until September 1. Use the coupon code FU54W. First question: what will the U.S. in the future do with retirees with Top Secret information? Second question: how do you prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate? Third question: is there room for romance in the life of an old agent? This fast-moving story’s main character is a woman who shows perseverance and strength to survive while unmasking a terrible conspiracy. Don’t miss the thrills!

In libris libertas!

[Sometimes a story will lead a reporter to the unexpected…]

Siege

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

“Who wants the story?”

Marguerite Favreau raised her hand. So did three others attending the meeting.

The ezine’s editor studied his group of volunteers. “This isn’t an easy assignment. Let’s hear ideas from the volunteers.”

Marguerite went first. There were a few backup assignments on her list, but this one had caught her attention. Roger Montgomery was an enigma, a mercenary who had retired and disappeared. No one even had a good picture of him, but he had been a player in a number of the world’s trouble spots.

“I’ll find him and interview him by discovering his whereabouts through his mother.”

“That’s interesting. He’s not a young man. Is his mother still alive?”

“Eleanor Montgomery is a rich widow who is a snowbird, living on her estate outside of New York City during summer months and the Caribbean in the winter.”

“That in itself is an interesting fact. You could slant your article on how and why her son became a merc if he came from a rich family.”

Marguerite nodded. “I’d want to get that from him too. Mothers can perceive things differently than their sons.”

“Point taken. It’s winter now. Maybe you just want a Caribbean vacation?”

“Not necessarily. She’s visiting with a friend over Christmas right here in Paris.”

“A French friend, perhaps a paramour?”

“Privileged information, but not a paramour unless she’s lesbian.” There were chuckles. “Do I have the assignment?”

“Let me here the others first.”

The others had nothing more than what one could get surfing the internet. Marguerite got the assignment.

***

 “You move in interesting circles,” Madame Montgomery said to Marguerite, studying her over the rim of her teacup. “Anyone that knows Sophie is special. How did you meet her?”

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The system is more corrupt than ever and I think people are ready to change that. What I’m doing now is practicing political medicine.—Dr. Jill Stein

***

On sale: The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This sci-fi thriller will be on sale at Smashwords for $0.99, reduced from $2.99 (67% discount) from now until September 1. Use the coupon code FU54W. First question: what will the U.S. in the future do with retirees with Top Secret information? Second question: how do you prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate? Third question: is there room for romance in the life of an old agent? This fast-moving story’s main character is a woman who shows perseverance and strength to survive while unmasking a terrible conspiracy. Don’t miss the thrills!

In libris libertas!

Star Trek Beyond is too confined. Justin Lin, director. This is #3 in the new parallel universe of the franchise. The screenplay by Simon Pegg (Scotty) and Doug Jung (Ben) is a wee bit slow at the start, but it soon becomes another breathless summer action film. I could have done without the futuristic Harley.  I like Chris Pine (Kirk), but Patrick Stewart (Picard) was and will always be my idea of what a starship captain should be. Maybe Pine is channeling Shatner? Nothing logical about his portrayal. No wonder Spock (Zachary Quinto) has problems with him. Idris Elba (Krall) shows masterful villainy—I just wish the black guy wasn’t always the villain (is he typecast in too many of these roles now?). The movie is an entertaining wham-bam shootout, although there is too much action and not much sci-fi—or the usual morality story either.  I’m getting almost as tired of these movies as the Star Wars movies. Let the trekkies go and worship at their altar. Definitely a mixed bag, although enough to make you happy on a rainy day with thunder storms.

Jason Bourne is born again. Paul Greenglass, director. Screnplay: Chris Rouse. Ten years ago we saw Bourne floating at the bottom of the murky Hudson. This cat has more than nine lives. At the beginning of the film, Bourne is making a living beating the crap out of guys in bareknuckle fights—sort of mirrors that austerity movement in Greece too. Jason (Matt Damon) looks old and tired and wired, but the pace is still relentless—not a moment’s peace for the old duffer. Somehow the music keeps up with that pace, echoing previous films and leaving me with a similar headache. We learn why Bourne volunteered for the program in the first place, and a new and ambitious CIA operator Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), more hacker than agent (but she can wield a gun), steps up as the next villain—maybe? typical miscasting—while wrinkled old prune Tommy Lee Jones retires as director (great miscasting again). Lots of privacy v. national security concerns are given lip service (did Apple participate in the script writing?). A good time was had by all, but I liked #2 and #3 better. There’s room for a sequel, by the way, if you’re a Bourne-again type. Again, good when the summer weather drives you into the theater.

***

On sale: The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This sci-fi thriller will be on sale at Smashwords for $0.99, reduced from $2.99 (67% discount) from now until September 1. Use the coupon code FU54W. First question: what will the U.S. in the future do with retirees with Top Secret information? Second question: how do you prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate? Third question: is there room for romance in the life of an old agent? This fast-moving story’s main character is a woman who shows perseverance and strength to survive while unmasking a terrible conspiracy. Don’t miss the thrills!

In libris libertas!

Wild about Harry? Not so fast! First, what’s hit the bookstores and brought out wizards, muggles, and so forth wasn’t written by Rowling—her name is prominently featured on the cover in a blatant show of brand borrowing designed to entrap the naïve. Second, it’s a play, not a novel, the written version of a drama that has already opened in London. Third, Harry is all grownup and sending his own kids to magic school. This exploitation of a brand name is as flagrant as when the Chines bought Lenovo from IBM and still called it Lenovo (although “Rowling” and “Harry Potter” generally offer more quality than anything manufactured in China).  I wonder how much the play’s authors paid J. K. Rowling.

Short is the new long? I never start a story thinking, “This is going to be a novel.” Or, short story or novella. Some zines have limits for short stories, lower and upper bound; so do some traditional publishers for novels they publish. The author has to respect that, of course. But let me quote marketing guru Penny Sansevieri:

“Shorter books rock. I’ve said before that short is the new long, but that applies even more with your avid reader groups.”

Is she right? Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy books, for example, are long novels; most of his books are long (The Ambler Warning, one of his books I found handy on my bookshelf, is 489 pages). (The Bourne movies only shared their titles with the Bourne books—the new movie is simply called Jason Bourne.) Clancy’s A Clear and Present Danger is 688 pages long. OK, these books were all written long before the ebook revolution, but the question still is important: how long should a genre X be, where X = short story, novella, or novel. Clearly, the answer is genre-dependent, and a wide variation can be found.

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Britain has the Conservative and Labour parties. We have the GOP and Dems. France’s two main parties are the Socialist Party and Republican Party, while Germany’s are the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties. Western democracies tend to have two major parties, whether their system of government is parliamentary or like ours.  In parliamentary systems, more sharing of power is done, because a multitude of minor parties often guarantees that two or more parties have to join forces to govern—no party has a simple majority. In any case, these are all representative democracies.

Conservative voters should be happy, though. For the most part, representative democracy is more conservative than progressive, because majority opinion often puts brakes on any radical ideas. In this sense, conservative parties are superfluous. It often takes the domination of one party, often despotic, like in Venezuela, or in faux democracies (the German Democratic Republic AKA East Germany was a prime example), for the majority to wake upa an spur on radical, progressive change. For the most part, people just try to get on with their own lives and hope THEIR representatives don’t screw things up too much.

When I first arrived in Colombia, Conservatives and Liberals took turns. That was an agreement reached after toppling the dictator Rojas Pinilla, who had forcibly ended La Violencia, that terrible civil war between—you guessed it—Conservatives and Liberals. For years, government in Colombia was a shadow representative democracy, although elections for lower legislative positions were “representative.” Democracy is messy, so people often turn to strong men (or women) who will clean things up. There are still people in Spain who yearn for Franco, for example. “You could walk safely in the streets of Madrid late at night,” one guest at a dinner party there once told me. Fascism appeals to people who see chaos all around them.

Franco’s appeal is Trump’s appeal in the U.S. now. People want to walk safely in the streets late at night. They don’t want to be terrorized by criminals of any stripe. They want to feel safe, have good jobs, educate their children, and forget about government. Now they feel that the old way of doing things isn’t working. Sanders’s appeal is often said to serve that same purpose. But it was the other pole of the magnet. Yes, people wanted change, but they didn’t want to turn to fascism either. Sanders’s revolution also was attractive to many not satisfied with the old way of doing things, but his supporters looked toward a brighter future, not a return to the dark past of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese Empire, or the faux democracies Russia has often suffered from and promoted, or Donald Trump.

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What injures the health of the climate also injures human health.—Dr. Jill Stein

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On sale: The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. This sci-fi thriller will be on sale at Smashwords for $0.99, reduced from $2.99 (67% discount) from now until September 1. Use the coupon code FU54W. First question: what will the U.S. in the future do with retirees with Top Secret information? Second question: how do you prevent the assassination of a presidential candidate? Third question: is there room for romance in the life of an old agent? This fast-moving story’s main character is a woman who shows perseverance and strength to survive while unmasking a terrible conspiracy. Don’t miss the thrills!

In libris libertas!

[An oldie but goodie that bears repeating…]

In essay-land (that includes op-ed, of course), theme rules: you have to have at least one theme to opine.  For writing fiction, not so much.  And, perhaps because I do both, I make a semantical distinction between theme and plot when I write fiction.  A good story doesn’t need themes per se, but it does need a plot.  But one or two themes make for a better story—they enhance the plot.  The theme or themes in a story are motivating issues: spousal infidelity or abuse, mental illness, the horrors of war, how spies make it through the night, sexual aberrations, child pornography, and so forth.  The plot weaves these themes together to create a good story, so a plot is a wee bit weak if there’s nothing to weave!

As an avid reader (even if you’re a writer, you should be an avid reader), you probably have many examples of what I’m talking about if you just stop and think about stories you’ve read.  If you’re like me, you enjoy the added complexity of having some themes woven into the tapestry of the novel.  Often themes and how they’re woven into a plot make a reader stop and remark, “Geez, that’s a twist—I never thought about those issues in that way.”  A good story is more than entertainment; it should be the genesis for those type of internal dialogues.  Of course, some readers don’t appreciate that complexity—that’s fine, because there are many novels, even enjoyable ones, that don’t make you think.  But you probably can’t avoid that type of mental introspection when reading my novels.

So, at the risk of being accused of beating my own drum (I can, because this is my blog), let me analyze the ebooks in my “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series.”  I’ll call my cops C & C for brevity.  As you might guess, I’m an expert on those novels!  (Here’s a link to my Amazon book page for access to more descriptions.) They provide examples of how themes are woven into plots.  I can’t help it—my stories contain themes associated with problems I’ve observed during a lifetime of observation.  My first goal is to entertain, but, in doing so, also comment.  The ebooks in this series are mysteries or thrillers—they tend to alternate, and all contain suspense.  The two cops are main characters, of course, and there are some nasty villains.  How they solve the crimes or stop the perps is the entertainment.  The themes are usually associated with the perps’ nastiness.

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[Every once and a while I clean out my writing lair to get rid of notes for novels no longer needed (they’ve been published), ARCs I’ve reviewed (traditionally published mostly, because the traditional publishers still push paper books over ebooks—Gaia mourns for her trees), or just make room for paper copies of my own books (yeah, hypocritical, considering my trees comment, but they’re only for book fairs and such). When I do this, I find stuff. “Escape from Earth,” a recent freebie novella posted here and available as a PDF, was “discovered” that way. The short story below is another zombie-like reawakening (not the subject), except I can’t remember exactly when I wrote it—several years ago, but not as long ago as “Escape.” In editing for this post, see if you can detect the one complete sentence I added. The first reader that emails me with that sentence can have one free copy of any ebook from my catalog—offer good to the end of August. Enjoy.]

A Meaningful Encounter

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

The huge cruiser Jiang Xiaowan came out of the jump across multiverses and lumbered into the ancient solar system. The once proud military vessel belonging to the Huang Empire had been refurbished as an exploratory vessel. Version 2.0 had then become 3.0 as the vessel was acquired by a private consortium owned by the Grand Duchy of Ermon. Military personnel were still present onboard, but so were scientists, engineers, and techies. Long into a multiyear voyage, subjective time, they went about their shipboard lives—only a few visited the observation lounge to watch the crawl into yet another system of planets orbiting an old star.

After a few weeks, the gargantuan old ship went into orbit about a desert planet in the system. There were still oceans. Perhaps life still existed in their depths. Some plant life still subsisted in the mountainous regions where steep slopes managed to squeeze out moisture from ocean breezes, leaving arid wastelands on the other side. After a series of orbital adjustments and cautionary sensor measurements that spanned the planet’s entire surface, producing enough data to feed the scientists’ computers as well as detailed SAR maps and images from beneath the seas via various probes, a shuttle left the leviathan like a parasite jumping from its animal victim, and descended.

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Most dust from the fallout of the hacked DNC emails has settled by now (Hillary and friends seem to have problems with that antiquated communications medium–maybe she should have used Twitter, but what’s the hashtag for TOP SECRET). I’m still writing this post, though, because I’m still pissed. Not surprised, mind you—I never was—but still pissed. (OK, maybe I was surprised that we saw a wee bit of the tip of that iceberg made from the toxic waters of dirty politics.) I can now refine last Tuesday’s post that spoke about general corruption in the democratic process in both parties by analyzing how the DNC committed election fraud in their rush to get Hillary nominated and Bernie thwarted, probably all under the auspices of Clinton Inc.

Every Bernie supporter knows the Dem establishment rigged the game. (Warren spoke of a “rigged system” at the Convention, but that was a poor choice of words and flew in the faces of Bernie supporters—the email leaks only added to the narrower meaning.) The more he surged, the more desperate they got, and the more they strived to thwart his efforts. While you can bet Clinton Inc was behind all this, although her cohorts ensured deniability, the DNC, led by Wasserman Schultz, represent the gang of hitmen the Clinton mafia used. Clinton is the capo; Wasserman Schultz the stooge-assassin. Yeah, it’s character assassination of Bernie, but it was still an assassination.

Forget for the moment the super delegates and arcane primary events like flipping a coin in caucuses (although both are still open wounds for me). Forget for the moment scurrilous Bill standing outside polls, cajoling voters to vote for his wife (he also courted those super delegates—promises of rewards and special favors if she wins?). Forget for the moment all the evidence indicating that the Clintons are kissing the butts of one-percenters so their entire family can join that crowd (Chelsea’s already married to one, of course, so we know where her loyalty lies). The emails are an indictment: Released by Wikileaks, they show a concerted effort to attack Bernie and tilt the scales in Hillary’s favor by the DNC. The Russian connection (even if it’s true, it’s a distraction engineered by the Clinton camp to diminish outrage at the real problem) doesn’t change the damning content of those emails—Wasserman Schultz and her cohorts in the DNC were out to get Bernie. That’s election fraud.

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