(James Comey, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, Flat Iron, 2018, ISBN 978-1-250-19245-5)

I don’t like to read celeb books. Famous people hire a ghostwriter to turn experiences, opinions, reminisces, and disordered notes about them into a book, and many readers will pay top dollar to read it, which often fattens that celeb’s already bloated bank account. The Big Five publishers rush to publish books like that because of those readers. And, as good as the ghostwriter might be (sometimes they get co-author status in small print), these tell-all memoirs are usually ho-hum and self-aggrandizing tales of the rich, powerful, and/or has-beens.

I so rarely read these books that friends and family take pity on me because they think I might be missing something I’d like. This books is an example. Even though it sounded intriguing when it came out, I’m enough up on the news that I didn’t think there would be much in it that I didn’t already know—not details but the general plot. They also know I wouldn’t spend money on such a book. With the Kindle edition at $14.99 (at least three ebooks worth in my budget, although I have a bundle of three books at $5.99) and the hardcover at $13.38 (you read correctly—it’s marked $29.99 retail, but I guess Amazon decided to “discount” the hardcover more than the ebook at the time I checked…go figure), I would have waited to either buy it used or borrow it from the public library.

That’s my little story about how I came by this book, a big story that Mr. Comey tells about the cesspool that is Washington politics. He is a celeb, of course, maybe more so now than when he wrote the book. But this isn’t the typical celeb’s book. He actually has written something that’s worth reading.

Comey was famous even before the 2016 election and the later skirmishes with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He helped end the mafia of days of yore and stranglehold of the Gambino family; he prosecuted Martha Stewart; and he created the special counsel the put “Scooter” Libby where he belonged. You probably heard more about those three people, though, than about James Comey. They were more infamous celebs. (The last prosecution explains Mr. Trump’s pardon of Libby as a way to get back at Comey. The next-to-last explains the rumor about another potential pardon for the same reason. Mr. Trump is a vengeful man who holds a grudge.)

The 2016 election changed everything. The FBI was investigating Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, more for the possibility she had violated national security rules for dealing with classified material (those who have security clearances might still wonder why she wasn’t prosecuted for that) and Donald Trump and his minions’ possible collusion with the Russians (they already knew about their cyberattacks on the U.S.). Mr. Comey was no longer working in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District (starting there under Giuliani, a man Comey describes with no kind words, to be sure). He was no longer the Deputy Attorney General who became acting AG for an ailing John Ashcroft. He was Director of the FBI since 2013, taking over from Bob Mueller, and Comey was expecting to serve his country in Washington for ten years.

So, what about the book? Let me take a novelist’s point of view. The plot here is well done, interesting and complex. The characters are well drawn, none of them two-dimensional and most of them flawed. The setting, the DC power scene, is well described with all its warts and surreal nature. Make no mistake, this is a novel. But the writer didn’t have to follow Clancy’s advice and make his fiction seem real. Here the reality slaps you in the face and tells you to wake up and smell the cesspool. That’s what DC is—not a swamp—and the cesspool stinks more than ever before. In this autobiographical novel, James Comey writes like a novelist, and his story about his struggles in the halls of power often reads like a mystery/thriller. Comey is telling a story, his story, and he tells it well. (An aside: I like that he uses the Oxford comma in his title!)

I suppose I shouldn’t sing the praises of a man so many people hate, but like Comey and unlike many others in our nation’s capital, I believe in doing what’s right to the best of my abilities. In that sense, those same haters are disrespecting an honorable man who believes he’s done what’s right for the country and the integrity of the FBI as an independent police force. He might be wrong, but I don’t think so. Maybe he could have done things differently and still act rightly. Read the book before you make your decision about that.

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(Alex Gerlis, Vienna Spies, Studio 28, 2017, ASIN B06XY644HG)

What a great story! More gripping than Follett’s Eye of the Needle and Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, this spy tale about Vienna at the end of WWII kept me reading. It’s complex, poignant, and gritty. It took me a while to keep the characters straight, even with the character list kindly provided by the author, but that’s stretching it to find something negative. My kind of book!

The book is related to some of the author’s other historical novels—Major Edgar, the spy controller, is in them, for example. I believe the main characters, Rolf Eder and Katharina Hoch, are new. Eder is a Vienna native who becomes a somewhat reluctant spy for the British, a dangerous game in wartime Vienna, considering the Austrians have bought into Hitler’s far-right nationalistic nightmare. His partner Katharina becomes his lover after he gets over the loss of fiancée who was tortured by the Viennese Gestapo. The overriding problem: Keep a Soviet spy Viktor from turning Austria Communist at the end of the war. The means? Get an old Austrian statesman not to side with the Soviets by hustling him out of Vienna to the American-British lines.

This novel isn’t for the squeamish, although the descriptions don’t begin to compare with the horrors the Nazis performed. At the same time, readers will meet human beings who laugh and love their way to survive the worst war the world has seen.

Readers might even end up identifying with the Soviet spy. All the spies here are conflicted. Not one Nazi has redeeming qualities. Classic battle between some good and some evil.

***

Did you miss Rembrandt’s Angel? More Nazis, ISIS terrorists, and a cartel contribute villains to this mystery/thriller about a Scotland Yard’s obsession to recover a missing Rembrandt.  Available on Amazon and Smashwords and its affiliates (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc). Or ask for it at your favorite bookstore (if they don’t have it, ask them to order it).

In libris libertas…

(Jill Paterson, The Fourth String, J. Henderson, 2017, ASIN B07848BHT2)

When Crispin Fitzgerald, new conductor of the Sydney Symphony, is brutally murdered, DCI Alistair Fitzjohn is called back from leave to take charge of the case. He finds a crowd of persons of interest: all of Fitzgerald’s condo building, quite an artsy group.

We get a peek into book signings and other author woes, the stolen art trade, and apartments used for violin practice, sculpting, and vocal lessons, as the building’s inhabitants go about their businesses under the watchful eyes of the police. Oh, and the murderer leaves spoor—a violin string draped around the victim’s neck.

As the case progresses, Inspector Fitzjohn and his sidekick Betts delve deeper into the past of all the persons of interest. They turn up even more of them as they go.  Meanwhile, Fitzjohn’s troubles with his irascible neighbor and snarky superintendent continue, although the latter is temporarily replaced by a woman. Will she become a romantic interest and someone to fill the loneliness in the Inspector’s life? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

A few copy editing errors remain, notably with the British-style single quotes, but there’s not enough to ruin the fun. The plotting is carefully done and the author continues to develop her main characters, which is the advantage of writing a series. But this novel can be read independently from the others, the mark of a good series. There’s not much local color here, though. In fact, the story could have taken place in England or Canada, and it reminds me of the P. D. James and Louise Penny mysteries—horrible happenings occurring amidst Commonwealth propriety.

I’m a fan of this series. Like all of the Fitzjohn books, nice twists and turns abound. This one is a pleasant mix of police procedural, with Fitzjohn’s traditional sleuthing, mystery—who did the deed?—and suspense, because there’s evil to be rooted out. In other words, this is the kind of novel I love to read. Fans of good mysteries will too.

(Note: I purchased this book for R&R reading.  When I do so and like the book, I often write a review.)

***

Great Spring Thaw Sale? Still on at Smashwords! My author page there lists all my ebooks there, and you’ll find at least two on sale to the end of June.  If you want more mysteries, I have them.  My oeuvre contains both oldies (more current today than ever before) and new releases. Great late spring and summer reading.

In libris libertas!

(Elizabeth Bonesteel, Cold Between, Harper Collins, 2016)

Romance? Hard Sci-Fi? Space Opera? Mystery? Thriller? Many genre tags are possible for this novel. It has some of the quirkiness I put into my own sci-fi (but maybe not enough?). Forget the bad title and the romance novel cover (bodice ripper in space?). Chief Mechanic Elena from the Central Corps battleship Galileo meets pirate Trey in a bar…. Yes, that sounds a bit like a bad joke and also a bit trite. The Corps has a Shadow Ops division, and the pirate is a retired captain from another nomad (?) fleet, the Psi.

The story works best when the author focuses on chain-of-command human relationships between the crew of Galileo, whether ship-based or planet bound; it’s awful when she focuses on the romantic ones. In fact, the characters, including the main character Elena, aren’t very believable, and the author could have used better content editors because the plot flow is jumpy. All those possible genre tags imply that readers will be jerked around, which can be disconcerting at times.  But let’s analyze some of those possible categories.

Romance? Actually, there’s not much—thank you for minimizing my pain, Ms. Bonesteel! After that bar scene, there’s a lengthy and steamy orgy, an animalistic bonding between Elena and Trey. That’s the raciest part of the book, but there are sappy parts sprinkled throughout, and especially at the end (the author doesn’t seem to know how to end her novel after blathering on and on for 500+ equivalent pages).

Elena’s relationships, especially the one with Trey, diminishes this main character. She acts all too often like a pubescent rock star fan instead of a mature crewmember. The author should have built up the relationship with Trey slowly in the plot—the novel is long enough to do that.

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(Joanna Penn, Public Speaking, self-published, 2014)

More focused on helping someone wanting to make a career out of public speaking, Ms. Penn’s book still offers some good tips for introverted types who must do some public speaking and dread it. Of course, you don’t have to be nerdy or introverted to dread public speaking—we’ve all heard the expression “tough audience”!  Facing the know-it-alls and hecklers can be daunting…or even just facing a lot of people you don’t know.

She starts by defining some characteristics that make her an introvert. I found this part amusing; I share all those characteristics! In academia and R&D work, I was forced into public speaking, though, so I’ve had some practice. A large lecture class or conference presentation certainly qualifies as a large audience (sometimes with a Nobel Prize winner in it), but I was still nervous during a recent podcast and lecture about reading, writing, and book publishing (here are the links: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/dead-to-writes/id1323768397?mt=2 and https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dLNmI9KdD88 ). Invisible audiences engender trepidation as much as visible ones, it seems—at least for me. I’m much better with discussions in a small group. (Maybe because I’ve run them?)

Other than bloviating politicians who seem to love to go on and on, public speaking is daunting for most people, in fact, but especially introverts, so I’m not exceptional. And authors tend to be reclusive (that’s me!)—how can you seriously write in a crowd?—so even greeting readers can make a writer uncomfortable. I’ve done enough public speaking that I should be comfortable with all its aspects, but I’m not. But I can’t say that this book makes me feel more comfortable.

But back to the book’s emphasis on a career in public speaking: I doubt that the world needs another Joanna Penn. She’s unique in the book world. She makes supplementary income, according to her book, on her speaking tours, but the average author shouldn’t start thinking that s/he can do the same by following the advice in this book. Ms. Penn started in the publishing business after I did and chose some roads I didn’t follow to make a living with her novels, marketing advice, and public speaking. More power to her—she filled an ecological niche that was waiting to be filled. I wouldn’t have made those choices, and I didn’t have to do so.

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(Craig A. Falconer, Not Alone, self-published?, 12/19/15)

Mr. Falconer’s book doesn’t need another review—at last count, 1850+ readers have jumped on the fanwagon and written their one- and two-line endorsements (called reviews by Amazon)—but I often review books that I buy for R&R reading when they have a lot of positives.  Unfortunately this one has many negatives too.  So here goes.

First, the positives. There is no Star Wars-like space opera here. Most of the first half of the book is spent uncovering a government conspiracy and battling the perpetrator’s and media’s attempts to hide it. Dan Murphy, a believer in UFOs, just happens to be present when a thief steals a Top Secret folder containing evidence for ETs from a government agency, and it also just happens that Emma Ford, an expert in PR and marketing, shows up to help him battle the media. When no one worries about who the thief is, I became suspicious—that’s a flaw some readers might glide over, but I didn’t. Still, I managed to get through this ponderous half of the story because the concept was interesting, albeit a long variation on all those conspiracy theories about Area 51.

Second, there are nice twists that happen in the second half of the book, if you can make it that far. Consider them examples of the adage, “It’s not paranoia if it’s true.” These twists can be a lot of fun, I’ll admit, but I just wish it hadn’t taken the author so long to get to them—completely unnecessary. Because Mr. Falconer can’t seem to pare things down, he should have hired a content editor.

In his “apology” at the end, he states that he wanted to make just one novel and not split it up. At 742 equivalent pages, this ebook is shorter than my Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collection, but it’s certainly equivalent to at least two novels.  And it didn’t need to be! Where does Falconer go wrong? Call it his being a wannabe speech writer, overly enchanted with his own prose, or what you like—he’s just too verbose.

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(Andy Weir, Artemis, Crown-Penguin Random House, 2017, ISBN 978-0-553-44812-2)

Visitors to this website and readers of this blog should know that my book reviews originate in two ways. I “officially review” at Bookpleasures.com because I can choose from many books I’m not familiar with and provide authors new to me some name recognition. I also read many books for R&R and will sometimes review some of them if I have something positive to say. In either case, I won’t refrain from stating the negatives.

Artemis fits in the last category, I suppose, but I didn’t buy it.  I rarely purchase any Big Five ebooks these days because I can buy three, sometimes four, excellent ebooks for the price of one Big Five ebook.  That said, I’m reviewing the print version that I received as a gift.  I enjoyed Mark Weir’s new sci-fi thriller enough that I’m motivated to write the review, even with its many flaws. So, play Ennio Morricone’s wonderful score, because I’m going to discuss the good, bad, and ugly about this novel.

The good. This is a fair sci-fi thriller, much better than The Martian in the genre-sense.  It’s nothing like Weir’s first book, in fact, and dabbles in some political issues that make me think of sci-fi Libertarians like Heinlein, Pournelle, Niven, and Hogan.  Actually, that’s a negative, but I just want to point out that the plot is much more complex. I’ll read a good sci-fi story even if I disagree with opinions expressed via underlying themes.

The tale here has more meat on it than The Martian, although compared to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Friday, two classics, Weir’s novel often seems like watered-down Bud Light compared to Guinness.  Fun, yes; profoundly entertaining, no. Heinlein’s first book has a better plot (though Weir’s is also Libertarian, in the sense that the lunar city has a lot of vigilante justice), is more entertaining (Heinlein’s characters aren’t stereotypes, for example), and is more profound (Heinlein’s lunar city is a penal colony, for example, not a haven for fascist capitalists); his second has a better female protagonist (OK, she’s a bit of a female Rambo, but not a spoiled brat).  To his credit, Weir’s main character is a woman; he stepped up to that challenge.  From his acknowledgments, he even had female help, but something went wrong. Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara acts like a precocious, immature, and rebellious tween throughout the book, not a mature woman in her twenties with some common sense. Does Weir think this YA character merits serious sci-fi readers’ attention?

The plot starts slowly—there’s too much superfluous narrative because Weir isn’t world-building in this novel—but the pace increases, enough so to keep me reading to finish the tale.  Jazz is smart, but she wants to be rich. She graduates from small-time smuggler to more profitable crime…and gets into a heap of trouble. You might think she’s some urban urchin eking out a street life in any big city on Earth—in fact, you could transport the tale to such a venue, except for the lunar setting—but she lives in Artemis, the first and only lunar city created in the future by a strange Kenyan organization–as Africa’s response to European colonialism, it’s too much like a Steve Jobs’ project. (That’s a bit weird, but I’ll not dwell on it.)

The bad. The boring potato farming in The Martian has been replaced by boring details about Jasmine’s life, EVAs, and blowing up ore harvesters and smelters.  Like the potato farming, most readers will want to skip over most of the tedious technical details in Artemis—they read like an engineering manual, except Jazz is describing them in her urban-urchin’s cutesy language.  The tech here is more varied, but most people won’t be able to check it, or care to do so. I was turned off by the super fiber optics, though. Any transmission medium is lossy—zero loss only exists in a vacuum, and there EM radiation (light and radio, for example) loses by the one-over-r-squared effect. Because the story depends so much on this “discovery” in fiber-optics technology, I was immediately turned off.  And Weir only provides some unbelievable techno-babble to explain why it has to be made in a low-g environment.

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(Edita A. Petrick, Ribbons of Death (2^nd ed.), Peacetaker series #1, 2017)

I suspect this started with a play on words. We all know what peacemaker means, but what is a peacetaker? You can find out in detail by reading this sci-fi/fantasy/mystery/thriller. I’ll start by explaining the genre overlap. The sciences are archaeology and linguistics. The fantasy is a curse that has affected several ancient civilizations. The mystery is in how it is now affecting our modern world…and why. The thriller is in trying to stop people from being murdered by the peacetaker.

That’s quite a lot for a plot, but the author handles it well. She goes too deep into the archaeological/linguistic narrative with the ex-prof who is the main character and wrote a book about the curse—I skipped a lot of that once I got the gist. The subtitle of every chapter also contains some ancient historical reference that I usually didn’t understand—maybe the author saying, “I did a lot of research for this”? The ex-prof is a solid character. Her on-again-off-again romantic interest isn’t—he’s a thriller stereotype, shallow but violent. I believe both continue on in the series—the ex-prof should have dumped him.

What the peacetaker does is scary—he makes people go mad. (I wonder if one was operating in Las Vegas. Nah. That was just one guy. The peacetaker makes whole crowds of people go mad and try to kill each other.) There’s some fantastic gobbledygook about “why” this happens that never makes much sense—because it borders on magic, it’s pure fantasy and akin to werewolves going wild with a full moon, and I hate stories about werewolves, especially the Twilight series.

The plot moves along in spite of the narrative overload mentioned above (especially if you skip most of it). It held my interest for the most part, and there’s a nice twist at the end involving that nasty peacetaker. This is basically a road-trip story where the womansplaining ex-prof takes her mansplaining hunk around the country trying to prove her theories about the peacetaker, and he tries to prove her wrong. There’s a nice hook at the beginning when that soldier-of-fortune stereotype also goes mad in a crowd affected by the peacetaker. The hunk’s scars from his injuries play a small role in the story, as well as the stereotypical ambivalence of a feebie who’s contracted that soldier-of-fortune  (he’s torn between obeying the ex-prof and the feebie, of course). There’s an evil rich guy as villain in this story too, generally skulking around in the wings like some ghoulish phantom of the opera. You don’t actually know for sure he’s the villain. Is the peacetaker ultimately controlled by him? Does the villain get what he deserves? You’ll have to read the book to find out. No spoilers here.

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(Peter May, Entry Island, Quercus, 2014, 978-1-62365-663-8)

Because I’m half-Irish by ancestry, I once tried to learn Gaelic. I failed. So it was interesting to learn in this novel that speakers of Irish and Scotch Gaelic can understand each other, but, thinking about that some more, I guess it’s like when I spoke Spanish in Italy and got along fine.

This is a small point about the huge panorama of this novel. It’s a tour through history as Sime (pronounced “sheem”) MacKenzie, a homicide detective, tries to figure out how he already knows Kirsty Cowell, a murder suspect. That’s one mystery. The other is about who killed Kirsty’s husband.

Being half-Irish, I also knew about the Irish potato famines (I seem to remember there were several), but again I had no idea The Famine had affected parts of Scotland too. And the bad history between English lords and their Irish tenants had its parallel with the English lairds and their Scottish tenants. You can learn history from reading fiction much more than you can watching Hollywood destroy it on the silver screen (after I saw The Gladiator, I had to come home and check to make sure I wasn’t going senile—and that movie won an Academy Award?).

Maybe because of these relationships between Irish and Scottish history, I found the mostly predictable plot still gripping. Sime’s ancestor’s history, told via the latter’s diary entries, is the short part and the most interesting until the Postscript (it should have been called an epilogue) that shattered most of my admiration for the ancestor. Maybe I should have said two plots, as the longer part of the novel describes Sime’s struggles to solve a murder case while carrying the mental baggage of a failed marriage, insomnia, and the loneliness he feels as a Scotsman in French Canada, the last similar to his ancestor’s troubles in the New World.

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(Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem, Tor, 2006)

I’ll admit it: I struggled through this Hugo Award winner. It’s a cross between a physics textbook; a historical account of China, including the Cultural Revolution; and a story about first contact.

The physics is a bit much for the average sci-fi reader perhaps, especially for those who think Star Wars, Star Trek, and other Hollywood gruel are real sci-fi. The history is more interesting. I feel I don’t know enough about China. Books like this one, Ludlum’s third Bourne novel (and not the third movie!), and The First Excellence by Donna Carrick, represent good ways to understand Chinese history and modern culture via fiction. First contact is overdone in the sci-fi literature (perhaps Asimov was smart to avoid ETs altogether in his Foundation series), and this book offers few novelties.

I can’t refrain from commenting on the title. The Centauri star system has achieved some notoriety lately because there’s an Earth-sized planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima (the usual extra-solar planets are Jovian-sized). Obviously the author didn’t know about this planet when he wrote his book, but any inhabitants of that planet might be interested in exact solutions to the three-body problem because the “suns” in their sky form such a system. Beyond that, the mysticism that shrouds the three-body system in this novel is unwarranted because the Centauri three-star system has been stable for millions of years.

The end of the book leans more to Harry Potter-like fantasy than hard sci-fi. Unfolding a proton and etching integrated circuits on its surface is a story that Harry’s house dwarf might dream up (if the author knew anything about science, that is). It’s a silly extrapolation, if it can even be called that. And it’s definitely not good sci-fi.

The climax is too long coming. The description of the two camps of human thought about how to deal with the ETs is too. I’d say 70% of the book is how one woman dealt with and had her little victories against the Cultural Revolution; there’s very little sci-fi beyond the fact that she and her father were physicists. That’s about 270 pages out of 390 before the reader even gets to the point.

The usual sci-fi story elements are missing: fast-moving plot (there’s not much world-building here, so why is it so slow?); interesting characters (I don’t like any of them); strange settings (OK, there are foreign and interesting ones, but I wouldn’t call them all that strange, except for the fantasy home of the Centaurians, and you can’t tell them apart from those in a computer game); and so forth. The author also spends too much time writing about a computer game. I’m just not into them because they’re a waste of time, but this one is used to subvert and convert and recruit intellectuals to further the ambitions of the main character (hard to tell whether she’s protagonist or antagonist, by the way). Maybe you like computer games. If that’ the case, you’ll maybe like some of this book.

I kept thinking as I read, “Hey, Steve, this is a Hugo winner. It must get better.” It never did–not for me. I found it to be a slog. Maybe the Hugo judges were trying to achieve some rapprochement with China? For me, Hugo has been slipping the last two decades. This one was a major slip-up (I previously tried to read another Hugo winner, one I couldn’t even finish, so I didn’t review it).

This is the first book in a trilogy. I won’t be reading the two remaining ones. That’s my cultural revolution against Hugo as much as this author.

***

Rembrandt’s Angel (a mystery/thriller from Penmore Press). To what lengths would you go to recover a stolen masterpiece? Scotland Yard’s Arts and Antiques Inspector Esther Brookstone goes the extra mile. She and paramour/sidekick Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent, set out to outwit the dealers of stolen art and recover “An Angel with Titus’ Features,” a Rembrandt painting stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. Their efforts lead to much more, as they uncover an international conspiracy that threatens Europe. During their dangerous adventures, their relationship solidifies and becomes a full-blown romance. This book is available in ebook format at Amazon and at Smashwords and its affiliate retailers. It’s available as a print version at Amazon, B&N, or your favorite bookstore (if not there, ask for it). Happy reading!

In libris libertas…