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Biblioholic Review: Tier One Wild

25 Jan

Tier-One-Wild-Fury-DaltonThe field of adventure and military fiction is pretty clogged these days. Lots of armchair warriors or those with dubious “snake eating” creds fill the physical and virtual bookshelves of popular fiction. There are a handful of bonafide fighters turned novelists out there and Dalton Fury is one of them.

Fury, a pen name, is a former officer in the elite “Delta Force” and authored an early non-fiction take on the efforts to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. After that book Fury branched out and created a fictional, battered and outsider Delta operator in Kolt Raynor. Raynor appeared in Black Site, Fury’s inaugural action fiction tale that was fast paced and enjoyable. Fury follows-up Black Site with a new Raynor adventure, Tier One Wild.

Raynor, once an outcast from the special operations mainstream, has now been re-qualified and is welcomed back to the world of Delta in an adventure story that hopscotches around the globe hitting every conceivable hotspot. The story opens with audacious action as Raynor and his small team of shooters literally descend from the night sky to assault a hijacked jetliner. Thing is, Fury doesn’t make it a simple land, creep and linear assault. Nope, the adventure quotient immediately amps up as the jet starts to take off and the Raynor team lands ON the accelerating aircraft. What follows is a quick, brutal action of close quarters battle.

From there, Tier One Wild bounces from India, to the United States, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. Surface to air missiles are on the loose and Raynor’s team needs to stay one step ahead of the terrorist band, led by an American ex-pat turned radical. Ultimately, the trail takes bullet spewing twists and turns to a conclusion where Raynor must take action by his own hand.

The technical details, gear and guns are punctuation to a kinetic story. The “bad guy” Abu al-Amriki appears as a mad, calculating master mind in Black Site and his story arc effectively propels forward into Tier One Wild without getting bogged down in typical xenophobic characterizations.

As military thrillers go, Tier One Wild has a clear story, clear characters and smooth, rapid pacing. If you’re a fan of the genre, you’ve probably already picked up Fury’s work. If on the fence about military adventure fiction, this book is a good entree to the crowded field.

Tier One Wild by Dalton Fury was purchased for review by the Boston Book Bums

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B3 Week In Review

11 Jun

Monday: In preparation for our review of Robopocalypse we kick off the week with a look at some historic and overlooked robotic characters from literature. Also, to start the week well informed, we gather news for a Bookish Intelligence Report.

Tuesday: In the tradition of science fiction genre romps like World War Z comes Robopocalypse. We tackle the work by Daniel Wilson that imagines the rise of the machines and mankind’s fight back.

Wednesday: News from around the world is collected to better inform in our regular Bookish Intelligence Report. Also, ahead of tomorrow’s review, we chat with author and former Massachusetts resident Arthur Wooten about his newest work, Birthday Pie.

Thursday: Want to know what we think of Birthday Pie, a book that makes you a fly on the wall of a family in the midst of serious and comedic life issues.

Friday: Always some news happening around the bookish world, and we do our due diligence to collect fresh happenings in a BIR. Also, we want to send you off to weekend gatherings with a new bookish question- What do libraries mean to you?

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B3 Week in Review

12 Mar

Monday: South American noir was spotlighted in an interview with new author Herbert Cooke Jr. about his first book Rainfall and Bullets. We started the week with a Bookish Intelligence Report.

Tuesday: Our review of Rainfall and Bullets.

Wednesday: Jack n Jill had some new book releases that interested them; while book news was assembled once again for a BIR.

Thursday: The memoir of a Portland, Maine woman whose move to China with her family takes some unexpected life turns, The Foremost Good Fortune, is reviewed by the team.

Friday: A week-ending Bookish Intelligence Report along with an announcement of a book giveaway, Cleaning Nabokov’s House.

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B3: The Week That Was

11 Jul

A brilliant holiday weekend segued into a short week for the B3 crew. We kept up the normal pace providing a trio of reviews; as well as features on e-readers and the habits of online or on foot book buyers.

Monday: We hopped into the Way Back Machine and reviewed Peter Benchley’s 1974 summer-time pot boiler, Jaws. We realized that while the book has its moments, the movie adaptation might actually be the better, tighter story.

Tuesday: With the rise in e-reader use, we wondered what kind of cases, sleeves or covers are being produced for the major e-book readers. But, as stalwart supporters of the less ephemeral printed page, we profiled a few new and old fashioned methods of covering a bound book.

Wednesday: Catherine Delors For the King, a historical piece of fiction, is reviewed by the team. More policier than bodice ripper, For the King surprised us as an engaging mystery.

Thursday: We pondered how people shop online and on foot for books; and whether they are similar, different, better or worse?

Friday: The team grabbed a copy of Cammie McGovern’s Neighborhood Watch at the local library. We cracked the spine to find a tale of an apparently wrongly incarcerated librarian that goes from the high walls of prison to the mental barbed wire of suburbia.

Saturday: After a recent book store trip, some on the team wondered why some ‘classics’ are so slender or downright literary waif-like when compared to their blockbuster, cinderblock sized modern brethren?

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B3: The Week That Was

27 Jun

We came out with a tentacle whipping crack this week with a review of China Mieville’s Kraken and ended with questions whether vampires and werewolves are still “monsters.”

Monday: China Mieville’s Kraken is an occult shell game, bursting with trippy slang, pop-culture riffs & tentacle like plot that twists to climax.

Tuesday: What the bloody umlat!? We wondered why Scandinavian crime fiction has suddenly become so popular? Considering how gentile they seem to us in the States, when did places like Sweden and Norway become hot beds of murderous writings?

Wednesday: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy is a collection of short stories are concise and deep, not something you often find together. Eleven stories in 232 pages that universally explore loneliness in all sorts of characters.

Thursday: It crossed our minds recently that vampires and monsters when we were growing up were monsters, something to be feared and hunted. Now, the fanged ones are hunky loners with blood lusts but hearts of gold. Are they still monsters to you?

Friday: We tackled the review of Metrophilias, a short story collection that tracked and delved into the nature of lust and desire in 36 stories spread through 36 cities.

Saturday: Sometimes you think you have an iron clad memory when it comes to books read as a kid. Well recently we were reminded of two foundation books that changed one readers life.

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Biblioholic Review: The Map of True Places

16 Jun

You may recall that BBB recently read Salem-based author, Brunonia Barry’s first novel, The Lace Reader, and we enjoyed it so much we ran to our local bookstore to buy her recently released 2nd book, The Map of True Places. There are many similarities between The Lace Reader and The Map of True Places, most notably Salem.

If Barry decides to leave the fiction field (although we see no reason why she would) she has a future at Salem’s tourism bureau. She highlights Salem’s history and eccentricities skillfully, intertwining it all in the story of Zee and her family.

Zee, is a pyschotherapist working and living in Boston when both her professional and personal life collide to bring her back home to the North Shore.  We learn of Zee’s mother suicide 15 years ago, which had a direct impact her career choice and her recent patient whose mental health arc is dangerously close to her own mother’s.  Meanwhile, her father is quickly deteriorating from Parkinson’s disease and her impending wedding is seeming less likely each passing day.

Fortunately Zee has old friends, some you may recognize from The Lace Reader, and new friends that help her deal with it all.  Ann Chase, the trust-worthy friend and witch makes a return in The Map of True Places to offer support and advice and even the sexy detective from the 1st novel makes a cameo.

This is not a sequel.  Barry creates an all new cast of characters for her sophomore novel but the Salem is such a part of the story, it makes perfect sense for some of the already established townspeople to be involved in Zee’s life.  Mental illness, abuse and family secrets are the themes that wrap around the characters in The Map of True Places, as well as The Lace Reader.

We may have done a disservice to Barry in reading her second book in such close proximity to her first.  Zee encounters many twist and turns in her pursuit of helping her father, and deciding what she wants in life, there is a great reveal near the end of book, like The Lace Reader, but it lacks the punch.

It seemed that The Lace Reader overshadowed at every turn.

At times, the story seemed redundant, partially because the same ground was covered better in the 1st book and partly because of poor editing.  There is chapter almost 1/2 way through where near identical sentences appear within paragraphs of each other. I understand in writing and rewriting a chapter this would happen but I think that is were an editor comes in.

The Map of True Places is a good book, the characters are likable and the story is engrossing.  Just not as good as Barry’s debut.

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Thrill of the Kill?

12 Jun

Whether you call them mysteries or thrillers, when it comes to cops and robbers, detectives and killers, people love crime in fiction.

And when it comes to the sub-genre that topping them all, no subject matter comes close to prolific stories of fictional serial killers. The Boston Book Bums team are more rough and tumble crime types, noir and heist stories capture our interest. Serial killers and the cops that hunt them are stomach churning protagonists in tales we just cannot get into.

However, acknowledging the genre popularity we ask why is the most gruesome of criminal beloved to readers?

In talking with lovers of the genre in the past we generally get some standard answers. Some readers thrill in the detail of the police hunt, chasing down the brilliant killer using deduction and science. But just as many, if not possibly more, secretly thrill at the viscer of the killer. The unstoppable precision, calculation paired with sadism, keeps readers willingly wrapped up in a mind so foreign to them, yet somehow interesting.

Or is it a matured extension of those childhood scary tales that chilled and horrified? What makes such gruesome figures so fascinating to readers?

It is interesting that serial killer books, branching out of true crime to all manners of fiction, from thriller to paranormal, represent a statistically insignificant criminal element in society. But the super killer, apparently deeply attracts readers as much as the super hero.

Arguably the first true-life serial killer to capture a popular imagination was Jack the Ripper. The story of the Whitechapel Murderer has been redeveloped and turned around a dozen times over to suit story tellers through the 20th century. Inspired by Ripper and other real life killers, American crime fiction saw the birth of a serial murder in Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me. Barely seven years later readers were lapping up Robert Bloch’s now iconic Psycho.

By the run up to the end of the 20th century Thomas Harris had created the titular killer Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Yet if you go back nearly a century you can find an equally sadistic (if less cannibalistic) sociopath- super-criminal-mind in the form of Fantomas.

In case you’re not familiar with Fantomas (poster above,) creation of a pair of French authors, he was the fictional criminal mastermind of the 20th century. His impact on fiction remains unyielding, considering he remorselessly killed men, women and children, in increasingly fantastic ways (from using rats to pedestrian poisonings.)

The viability of Fantomas and enormous popularity of Lecter illustrate how killers, no matter the age or nation, will find eager readers.

We wonder, if you ask killer-genre readers what their favorite Bible story was, might it be Cain and Abel?

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Biblioholic Review: Sleepless

2 Jun

Parker Haas is a moral LAPD cop watching Sodom and Gomorrah of  Southern California crumble around him. Haas is a patrol officer turned undercover narcotics cop as the world unravels in a sleep deprived madness.

Haas is the hero in the no-win story established by Charlie Huston in Sleepless. Ten percent of the world’s population is infected by some sort of sleep robbing virus. As it spreads, the numbers grow and the victims suffer through waking nightmares that drive many into madness or suicide.

The Sleepless contagion can only be remedied by a drug called Dreamer. And that drug has eclipsed every other known med or illegal narcotic in value. The importance of the drug’s manufacturer is illustrated by seating him at tables with oil barons, arms producers and all the other titans of 21st century industry. Without Dreamer the world’s sanity would snap in an instant.

Haas is a brain with a badge, but flawed in his handling of his personal life. Racked by the Sleepless virus Haas’ wife, Rose, rapidly deteriorates into a brain rotting madness. His daughter, Omaha, might be immune. But who knows, they don’t want to test her to find out. Each time Haas returns home your heart wrenches. It is sad because you can see compassion and logic battling it out.

If Huston’s Sleepless suffers from any hiccups it is early on in the book when his style of exposition clumsily introduces Haas, the world of Sleepless and Haas evil-righteous shadow, Jasper.

Jasper is a hired gun, apparently ex-Special Forces left over from the Vietnam era (Huston does make a gaff describing Jasper leaping in and out of Cobras, can’t do that in a two seat gunship.) He is ruthless, bloody good at killing, as well a tactician adept at close quarters psychological warfare (ie mind games.) Jasper however ends up being the savior that Haas, in all his morality, could not be.

Huston copiously brand-drops, mostly when it comes to firearms, but pretty much every gadget, typewriter, computer or camera, is sprinkled liberally around Sleepless. Not in a bad way, just in ways that we modern-day consumers are pre-programmed to notice.

When Huston does explain the origins of the Sleepless virus, but you may not buy the tale. Not that Huston failed to write a convincing back story,  you might wonder if the truth is being told by the oily entry into Who’s Who.

Whether conscious or not, Huston utilizes the past two decades of near-apocalyptic riot and civil unrest imagery from Los Angeles to prime the reader. We don’t need broader views, we know the world is crumbling, the U.S. is engaged in oil wars around the world, and that increasing numbers of humanity cannot sleep.

If anything Huston could be accused of laying on the machismo a bit too thick, making a serious tone drift into black comedy (exemplified by his description of a Los Angeles high-rise bristling with anti-aircraft weapons. A bit too Escape from New York.)

Sleepless is modern crime-noir-sci-fi. It engages the reader to follow the bloody trail of broken minds to a fully satisfying ending of hope mixed into a cauldron of misery.

To us, near future dystopia is best served by playing it real and dark. And Charlie Huston’s Sleepless does exactly that.

Sleepless by Charlie Huston was purchased for our biblioholic enjoyment by the Boston Book Bums.

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Biblioholic Review: Angelology

26 May

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”

Genesis 6:4

If you are familiar with the Book of Enoch, angel lore and the Nephilim; as well as the Book of Genesis and a number of apocryphal works, Angelology will seem a bit familiar. It’s because Author Danielle Trussoni relies on these works to bulwark her new story of angels, brave nuns, secret expeditions and lost, inexplicable and miraculous treasures.

Angelology is the story of Sister Evangeline, a young nun living a devout life at a convent outside of New York City. A request seeking information regarding possible connections between the convent and Abigail Rockefeller, pique her natural curiosity. From there we travel around metropolitan New York, back to pre-World War II Paris and into the caverns of Bulgaria, searching for angels and their gauzy fingerprints on humanity.

Evangeline is a level headed, smart young nun. She is sketched out in details throughout the first half of Angelology, appreciating her  pious efforts, without becoming bored by superfluous personal details that exercise the author but not the character.

And while we liked Evangeline, we were reminded of another fictional nun thrown into a meta-physical thriller, Sister Ottavia Salina in the Spanish thriller, The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi. We warmed to Sister Salina a bit more because she was in WAY over her head unraveling a mystery involving Dante’s Inferno. A bit more of a rebel, willing to listen to her heart even when it conflicted with her vows. Was it cliched? Sure. But her transformation was character evolution, compared to Evangeline’s eventual metamorphosis. All around, both very enjoyable nuns as heroines.

When you start reading Angelology you wonder if you’ll be sucked into a strict reality, interrupted by some jolting grotesque antagonist. Quickly you realize its a parallel reality, similar and overlapping to ours, but different. It is our history, our world, but it’s written by different masters with a will outside of God. It can be called meta-physical thriller, but its devotion to Biblical and pagan mythic sources make it a tad more interesting than pedestrian occult-thriller- fantasy.

Angelology becomes interesting pretty fast because it is “real.” It embraces the reality that religion has to some in today’s society, but was copious a generation ago and omnipresent a millennium before. The world of Christianity at its birth was magical, borrowing from ancient traditions, updated and turned modern by each successive generation. A reality, given creative twists, appealing to the changing user.

Both God and the Devil are absentee players in this tale. They are a sort of producer and director of the picture. The Nephilim are the prime movers in Angelology. They replace vampires, demons or Satan’s minions as evil-doers. In case you don’t know Nephilim are the spawn of angels and humans (referenced at the top with the Genesis passage,) or the fallen angels themselves.

Trussoni had a few thousand years of material to seek inspiration from, cherry picking  ideas and spinning off new concepts. It is supremely easy to get buried in your research, lose the focal point of your tale only to find it buried under a millenia of fascinating, but extraneous, back story. Trussoni creates set pieces, dropping in nice details that flesh out the broader story.

Would it be simple to say that angels are the new vampire? In a way, they are on the verge of breaking really big. Anne Rice left vampires and Jesus behind recently to pen Angel Time (a generally uninspiring book.) Last year we saw the movie Legion (based on a comic book) chronicle a struggle between armies of angels over a prophetical birth. And in the upcoming Garry Kilworth novel, Angel, San Francisco burns because of war in heaven spilling over to Earth.

Angelology can stake a legitimate claim as the standard for angel-centric thrillers. Not as scholarly deep as it could be, but still intelligent. Trussoni smartly relies on a wealth of ancient source material to knit together a pretty interesting plot with rewarding multiple climaxes.

Angelology by Danielle Trussoni was bought for our biblioholic enjoyment by the Boston Book Bums

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Biblioholic Review: 20 Times a Lady

24 May

Boston has been a-buzz these last couple of weeks with the filming of What’s Your Number?, starring Anna Faris, Zachary Quinto and Chris Evans.  There have been Anna sightings here and there, street closures in the North End and there is more movie magic to come since filming continues all over Greater Boston.

With filming in our backyard, we at Boston Book Bums decided to read the source material for What’s Your Number?, Karyn Bosnak’s 20 Times a Lady.  The main character, Deliah, to be played by Faris, has just read a survey that states the average number sexual partners people have is 10.5. Her number is well above that.

Deliah decides at 19 partners, she will stop there until she finds Mr. Right and he will be number 20. Her final number. Umm yeah…you know what’s coming next.

Then Deliah’s employer sacks her, then she gets drunk, then ends up in the sack with Number 20.  Oops.  Number 20 is not Mr. Right.  What now?  She backtracks.  She looks up all her old boyfriends and decides to revisit all of them to see if perhaps Mr. Right is someone she’s already had sex with, then there would be no need to alter her number or live a celibate life.

She drives to Philadelphia to stalk a guy who wasn’t really a boyfriend but a serial hook-up.  He, of course, is a total loser.  So is the next guy, and the next.  You see how the story goes.  Of course, there is a little irony here.  Deliah judging all these men as losers but yet she is the one is blowing her severance check on traveling around the country, stalking ex-sex partners.  If there is ever an occasion to turn your thumb and index finger into the shape of L and stick it your forehead…

Of course, this is a romantic comedy so everything works out in the end.  And why shouldn’t it? Deliah doesn’t look for a new job, she spends all of her money on an ego-driven, obsessive quest. How deep does Bosnak plunge Deliah, without any true emotional repercussion? Well, she has her lead fake a drug addiction to stalk an ex-bf inside a rehab facility.

In the tradition of Hollywood endings, she gets the guy, the job and even improved familial relations.  The Hollywood ending is not the only cliche in the book, in fact, I’m hard pressed to find the non-cliched moments. We’re pretty sure it was Bosnak’s intention to be this cliched, it couldn’t have possibly happened by accident.  It seems Bosnak was energized by watching reruns of Sex and the City, imagining John Cusak from his Say Anything days while drawing inspiration from her personal experience.  After all, Bosnak found her fame by asking the public for a dollar each to pay off her $20,000 debt.  Seriously, it is chronicled in her first book, Saving Karyn. Yeah, the digital age pan-handler. But we guess it’s OK, because she is a bubbly Manhattanite. Right?

Bosnak shows us she can construct a story and write it in an engaging fashion. However, will she fashion something deeper in the future. And should she? Is this the perfect escapist genre book for today’s 20-something reader? Sort of like an emotional ATM with no moral overdraft fees?

I think Faris and cast will do a fine job and this could be entertaining film but given the choice to spend $7 on a 2 hour matinee or  $14 and decidedly more than 2 hours of reading, we’ll choose the movie.  This is one, big old predictable, morally questionable book that will not likely suffer from translation to the big screen.  If anything, it might be improved.

20 Times a Lady was purchased by the Boston Book Bums for our biblioholic enjoyment.

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