John's Green Blog

Doing less and writing more.

bookssearch
« »

Category: books

  • Flags on the Bayou (2023) – Burke

    The previous book reviewed here took place in the turn of the 20th century in Wyoming. This one is during in the Civil War in Louisiana. In a place with a lovely name – Lady of the Lake Plantation – which contrary to the the name is home to mostly ugly people and ugly events.

    I thought I was getting a Robicheaux/Purcell (Dave and Clete!) Burke-style novel, but no!

    I think as Burke ages he is spending a lot of time in his head on the very complicated history of the South!

    The book is all about
    messed-up people with noble moments,
    to balance our heroes, who are
    noble people with messed up moments.
    … it’s complicated…

    The Book

    So far we have three narrators, each introduced in a new chapter which they narrate:

    • Wade Lufkin – the courtly but tortured overseer of the plantation
    • Pierre Cauchon – the local lawman – grew up dirt poor, has already been called “white trash” to his face by ole Wade in a bad moment.
    • Hannah Laveau – a slave woman – she can read and write … which slaves ain’t allowed to do. She’s hauntingly beautiful of course, so she drives the repressed white guys mad with desire. She lost her beloved baby boy at the Battle of Shiloh (Shiloh Church as they call it here).
      Apparently the Confederate Army took their slaves with them when they marched north to battle!

    So… 20 pages in we have an upper-class white guy, a lower-class white guy and a no rights at all young black woman slave. Nice setup! The white guys ain’t perfect, but they both do at least have enlightened-for-the-time views on slavery, which they keep to themselves. So far I’m diggin the three narrators thing. Authors always have their little ways to lets us know what characters are thinking, but spelling out their secret thoughts in first person for three different people will certainly do the trick!
    [Spoiler: the two guys think about hot slave ladies a lot!]

    So far I’m diggin the three narrators thing. Authors always have their little ways to lets us know what characters are thinking, but spelling out their secret thoughts in first person for three different people will certainly do the trick!

    I think the feelings Burke’s having are so profound to him that he must just spell it out so none of us miss the meaning! It’s all part of the experience of late-stage Burke novels.

    Next chapter is from good ole Pierre. His thought of the day:

    This is how plantation society works: you screw down and marry up

    All three of these people are so mean to each other. Pierre visits Hannah in the jail, but she treats him like crap for some reason. Wade and Pierre fight a duel because they piss each other off so much. (spoiler alert, the duel fizzles, otherwise we’d lose one of our three protagonists! 🙂

    Page 86

    We’ve added two more narrators:

    • Florence Milton – an independent-minded free-thinking single white woman.
      (I guess the “white” implied in the description, but to be clear…)
      She helps Hannah escape the jail.
      She may not be thinking about the boys, but the boys are thinking about her!
    • Colonel Hayes – commander of the Red Legs.
      Another really awful, morally distorted human being.

    It’s probably, sadly, pretty accurate, but Burke’s version of Louisiana during the endgame of the Civil War is a true hellscape.

    • Most of the young white men are dead or crippled (physically and mentally).
    • A battalion of Union troops (called bluebellies are implementing the Sherman-esque scorch earth policy, marching around fucking up any thing they want (right now, think Trumps cabinet secretaries!)
    • Then there’s the the Redlegs, some kind of rogue army of cashiered Union soldiers, also marching around fucking up any thing they want.
      They come from Kansas, but Burke puts a bunch of them in the bayous for the purposes of this narrative.
    • Then there are the slaves, who can see how the war is going and expect to be freed by Mr Lincoln any day now.
      So they are tired of all this shit and ready to move on.
    • Along with hot slave woman Hannah
      (who is now on the run from the law)
      we now also have hot free Negro Darla,
      who has bewitched ole Pierre.
      So far Darla is the coolest person in the darned book! I heart her! 🙂

    Page 190-ish

    What a sad, damaged bunch of people.
    Every white person in the book carries around some physical deformity, which might be little too heavy handed even for Burke in his gloomy mode!

    Some deformities they were born with and some were acquired during the course of the war.
    The two fine-looking young black women are still fine-looking. (happy to report 🙂

    Hannah and Florence, have killed a few white dudes who deserved killing, and are now on the run for it.
    For some complicated reason they are joined by Wade. The three of them are in Baton Rouge.

    Darla and dorky little Pierre are the new fun couple. They are trawling the lake for barrel full of gold which old man Lufkin was rumored to have sunk in the lake to keep it from the Yankees.

    Now it’s time to do my Burke pattern of skipping as many pages as it takes to get past some particularly gruesome episode.

    I get it what War is Hell, and war in the wind-down of the Civil War in Louisiana was particularly hellish, but Burke’s mission nowadays is to make sure we feel it!

    Page 228

    I think Pierre has become the go-to narrator.
    The one that does the heavy lifting in terms of keeping the plot momentum going!

    Very hot free Negro Darla lives out by one of the many lakes, where Pierre thinks they might have hid the family’s treasure from from the invading Northerners. The randy white men need to be reminded that always she keeps her straight razor within easy reach.

    Page 280-ish

    The war and the awfulness don’t end, but our heroes mostly come out of it alive and in a better place. The evil-est psychopath in the book, Col John Endicott, a free-booting privateer, gets taken out be the ladies – Florence clocks him with a doorstop and Darla finishes him with gusto with her trusty straight razor. yay!
    Hannah find her 5 year old son (that she’s been searching for the whole book) and they get away to some other place.

    Epilogue

    I won’t spoil the cheesy-but pretty cool situation of the epilogue, but suffice to say that all the heroes mentioned above get out and live happy lives far away from all that sadness.

    Darla and Pierre are together forever (hooray!). I do worry about Pierre’s noble horse Varina. She was one of the unsung stars of the novel, and I fear she probably left at the dock when they departed for the lovely place where they ended up!

  • The Familiar Stranger – Steve Kelton

    An Elmer Kelton Western by Steve Kelton and John Bradshaw
    — A Hewey Calloway Adventure —

    Prologue

    Yay! A nice simple western yarn … no serial killers or other-worldly apparitions I hope.

    Here’s another writer milking a profitable literary franchise by co-authoring new books under his name plus another writer. Here the book bears Elmer Kelton’s name and his and a third fellow named John Bradshaw.

    Elmer, the original money-maker, died in 2009 but there’s more bucks to be had from cranking out more Hewey Calloway adventures.

    A epilogue note says that the son, Steve Kelton, also died (in 2022) and John Bradshaw finished the book. So that’s a lot drama we and even gotten to the book yet!

    That sounded meaner than I intended. This was a delightful book to read!

    The book

    Hewey finds himself out of normal his West Texas element. He is in southern Colorado, outside Durango. He pulls up at an isolated cabin, and there’s a dude with inside sweating out a bout of smallpox!. Hewey nurses him back to health. The fellow sneaks off in the middle fo the night (why?), then Hewey gets a mild case(!?) of smallpox. I’ve never read about a mild case of smallpox before! When smallpox shows up in a book, the person dies. But I guess rough, tough cowboys in the wild west can just shake if off and keep riding!)

    70 Pages in

    Lovely descriptions of the Colorado Rockies.
    Pure mountain lakes like you don’t get in Texas etc.
    Kind of a nice travelogue so far!

    This is my first Hewey Calloway book and I think I’m a fan!

    In a little Wyoming town he passing through he needs to get his horse re-shod, so he works a deal with the local blacksmith to shoe a couple of mules for in exchange for getting his horse fitted out … hilarity ensues …

    We spend 10 pages or so on the details of how to shoe a horse or mule in the old west. Maybe this is what Hewey is all about … we shall see!

    105 Pages

    Hewey gets it in his head to go to Laramie for the Cowboy Roundup! Plenty more local color and cowboy trivia.

    The Familiar Stranger of the title is I think, Bob Wilson: the guy Hewey helped survive the smallpox.

    This Bob fellow snuck out on Hewey in the first part of the book because he had been unjustly accused of bank robbery.

    He turns up again in Laramie at the blacksmith shop. Small world out there! 🙂

    145 Pages

    If you’ve ever driven through Wyoming you know it is a very big place! But this small group of main characters keep running to each other in each town they go to.

    Anyway… the evil bank robbers abduct Bob Wilson from the Laramie jail while the Sheriff is having dinner with the pretty girl (there’s only one :). Hewey and the Sheriff and the retired Ranger guy catch up with them at the blacksmith’s.

    Then the whole plot wraps up in a few pages.

    • The bad guys get the drop on the good guys.
    • Bob Wilson does something really brave and gets shot in the chest.
    • The nice blacksmith has conflated Wilson with his dead son. When he is shot the blacksmith is so enraged that kills the lesser bad guy with his tongs.
    • In the confusion the retired Ranger knocks out the major bad guy and handcuffs him.
    • Side note: I don’t think they ever recovered the bank money.
    • Bob Wilson will survive (yay!).
    • He will probably marry the pretty girl and stay in Laramie (yay again!)…
    • so she can be near her dad and …
    • Bob can work under the blacksmith and be a surrogate for the son he lost a few years ago.

    Very neat and tidy, right? Just the kind of simple plot I was looking for!

    Hewey is still a-hankerin’ to see Canada, so he heads north.

    There are a couple of odd little stories in the last few that don’t fit the plot at all, e.g. Hewey finally see a Mountie in his cool red jacket way the heck up there somewhere…

    In view what I described in the intro where both Keltons died off and the book was finished up by a third party, I think these are stort fragments from Kelton’s notes that the last guy tossed in here so they would live in these pages rather than just throwing them away.

    Good for him, and a lovely book all in all!

  • Half Moon Bay (2020) Jonathon and Jesse Kellerman

    “On a Saturday, just last year, the Sixties finally died in Berkeley.
    On Sunday I came for the bones.    “

    Now that’s a quality opening sentence!

    This book is co-authored by father and son Kellermans, Jonathon and Jesse. It’s hero is Clay Edison, an Alameda County Coroner. This is the third book in the Clay Edison series, Google tells me there are now six in all. The biggest mystery in the first 300 pages is Why is it called Half Moon Bay?, but more on that below!

    Background

    Jonathon Kellerman is an enormously successful crime fiction author. He made his name with an long-running series starring Alex Delaware, an LA child psychologist. The main hook is him getting called no my the LAPD to interview involved in a violent crime somehow. They are very fun, and there are well over thirty of them. Four in the 80’s, and basically one a year since 1990! That’s some authorly discipline!

    In the 2010’s he started writing non-Alex Delaware novels with his son Jesse. My opinion is that this is an entirely commendable attempt by dad to bring son into the family business and to pass the bookstore magic of the Kellerman name on to him. I think it’s cool, and I’m all for it!

    Anyway … on to this book.

    The Book

    Clay Edison is the Chief Coroner for Alameda County, which means the town of Berkeley and Cal Berkeley are in his jursdctiiion. He was a starting point guard for the Cal Bears back in the day, so he’s an athletic 6’2″-ish.

    The cryptic quote that starts the book references the body of a small child that was unearthed by the bulldozers razing the People’s Park in the heart of Berkeley for student housing. Any of you with familiarity with the 60’s in Nothern California could probably write your own novel from that set up! :))

    The particular novel the K’s chose to write is well-crafted and engaging as their books always are, but they are starting wear me out a little with the Berkeley cliches.

    • There’s the crowds of hippies protesting at People’s Park.
    • There’s the family of meth-dealing biker Nazis squatting in the remote hills of Alemeda County.
    • The guy that starts Edison on his quest for the baby’s identity is a mid-level tech executive, who is the son of a Berkely/Lawence Labs scientist who got protested back in the day for working on bomb tectnology.
      • Along with the anti-social behavior of working on atom bombs, the dad was a real asshole in his real life. The first wife was miserable, her kids were all weirdos. He fucked around …
      • Somehow the biker-Nazis are related to ole dad also.

    Is that enough 60’s cliches for you?

    Oh what the hell, I was a stoned college student (on the other coast) too, and basically it was all true.

    Half Moon Bay

    I wondered above why this book is called “Half Moon Bay”, since that place has not been mentioned and has no part of the narrative. Well, here on Page 298 (of a 354 page book) it finally appears!

    Good story, but the “gee there sure are a lot of weirdos in Berkeley” stuff is a little overdone.

    New baby, the Kellermans fail to make this realistic.

  • A World of Curiosities – Louise Penny

    Wow, hopping from the last pages of a Dennis Lehane novel right into a Louise Penny book is quite a shift in style. Their styles are as different as Quebec French and Dorchester’s version of English!

    But both are police procedurals, and within the first three pages of this book we are already hearing how Armand Gamache has somehow kept his humanity instead of becoming a wife-beating alcoholic like the other inspectors. Which sentiment could have come right out of the Lehane book!

    50 pages in the synchroncity continues… A woman’s frozen body has been found and the edge of a frozen lake deep in the frozen wilds of Quebec province (it’s wintertime :).

    I do most of my reading in little spurts at dinner time nowadays, and a this is not the best book for that. There’s a lot of walk-on townspeople with opinions and small parts, and I’m afraid may have I lost the thread a bit…

    When the police check out the dead woman’s flat they find two young and abused children, and stuff going on! There’s a brand new TV. Someone tried to wipe the woman’s hard drive. There was still enough evidence to nail a creepy crooked policeman, (he bought the TV!). It’s dramatic but does not advance the plot very much, because the cop goes to jail, and the kids are still massively f—ed up and a vaguely disconcerting presence continues to lurk in everyone’s life.

    70 pages in we flash-forward to the present day when the young lady is graduating from the Polytechnic Institute, under Gamache’s sponsorship.

    The boy and the girl are both really smart, genius-level kids. Gamache was immediately drawn to the girl, and has looked out for her into young adulthood. On the other hand, it was hate at first sight between Gamache and the boy, Sam.

    Gamache’s second in command, Beauvior balances it out by instinctively loving Sam at first sight, and distrusting the girl (Fiona). Sam butters him up pretty shamelessly … just the way we would expect a psychopath to do …

    The big plot point we seem to be heading for is:

    • Fiona — beloved and trusted by Gamache
      — distrusted at a gut level by Beauvior
    • Sam — distrusted and feared by Gamache since childhood
      — trusted by Beauvior, who he flatters shamelessly.

    Looking back, it seems like pretty lazy plotting to me, but she’s a graceful write and I’m already here, so let’s figure this thing out!

    After I make it to the end of this I think I’m done with child abuse books for a while. Maybe a nice simple western! The chances of running into a child abuse western are pretty slim I hope.

    Anyway, the plot is turning. Both the kids are teenagers now, very smart and accomplished teenagers. The girl and Gamache have a sort of natural attachment to each other. Likewise the boy and Beauvior are a pair. Gamache thinks the boy is the evil mastermind, and surprise, Beauvior thinks the girl is the evil mastermind.

    The one thing that does not ring true to me is that Gamache is always seeing Sam make little subtle disrespectful to him, but no one else ever sees these! Likewise the Sam fans always see some hidden evil lurking in the eyes of Fiona, but nobody else ever see it!

    120 pages in we find that how we got here is that these two lovely children conspired to kill their mother. There’s a lot of noise, but the upshot seems to be that Fiona did it and went to prison for it, but is now out because Gamache advocated for her.

    By page 140, many years have passed. Fiona has been sponsored by the Gamache’s and she lives with them while she goes to enginering school. Sam is around somewhere

    170 pages It’s getting complicated – a hidden room has been discovered at the bookshop.

    Somebody’s daughter Harriet is falling for Sam. The world continue to be divided pretty evenly between folks who sense evil in Sam and pure thoughts in Fiona, and people who sense the opposite. I’m losing track of everybody!

    A new character! To set up the incident room for this newly discovers secret room, Gamache has called for this punker chick from the city. She provides some comic relief as everyone is disconcerted by her hostility and all around weirdness (clicking her tongue post in Morse code that only Gamache understands is pretty weird to me!).

    But around page 200 she provides us all a useful service. We get a reprise the (too complicated) plot by having everyone explain to her WTF is going on. Armand explains how awesome he thinks (Fiona) is, and (Sam) creeps him out.
    Jean-Guy then has his turn: Sam’s a solid guy, Fiona’s a weirdo.

    220 pages Lotta stuff going on. One of these kids is a criminal mastermind for sure. Heck, maybe both of them are! 🙂

    One of them dropped hints tht only Gamache would get from an earlier books that threaten him, his wife, and his kids. So he’s freaked!

    310 pages Oh, the danger is ratcheting – I gotta finish this book and put myself out of my misery. 🙂

    Gamache visits the maximum security prison and discovered that the arch-psychopath he wanted to interview is NOT THERE! An impersonator is in his place and the psycho has been loose in the world for the last 3 years … or maybe the last 10 years … no one really knows. But Gamache is pretty sure that this whole hidden room and fake artwork thing was orchestrated by the psychopath to get him and his family.

    … You get the idea. A whole lot going on here.

    I will spoil it just a little to say that all the good guys and their families survive although it’s a little dicey there for a few pages. Even the punker girl comes out OK!

    Oh, Gamache was slightly less wrong about his psychopath than Beauvior was about his, so the order of the universe is maintained. I’m not sure Penny would write a book where some else was more correct than Gamache at the end of the book. 🙂

    I’m kind of exhausted!

  • Gone Baby Gone (1998) – Dennis Lehane

    I was over reading Dennis Lehane, had been for years, then I read a Kenzie-Gennaro this summer and kinda got into them again.

    That book, A Drink Before the War, was the first in the Kenzie-Gennaro series, and it was the backdrop for all the future drama:

    Angie Gennero and her husband and Patrick Kenzie were friends all the way back to high school in Dorchester. Her hubby used to be cool, but now was an abusive, alcoholic loser.
    Surprise, Angie and Patrick still have the hots for each other after all these years.

    That dynamic interested me more that the actual plot of the book, which like every Lehane book I every read, was kind of grimy and depressing. Wiki tells me that over the next two books they got all the personal drama sorted out and were an officially together by of this, the fourth book. So my plan was to read them in order. Request the next two books from the far-flung reaches of the Sonoma County Library system, but … one day cruising the stacks at the Rohnert Park Library there was this book right there in front of me on the shelf! So I took it! Great plans lose out to current opportunity again. 🙂

    The personal drama is so well sorted out that they are just another old married couple by the beginning of this book. I would still like to read the previous two books to get the scoop on how we got from there to here!

    The plot of this book is super engaging. Grimy and depressing as expected, but with so many twists and turns and drama points. I still have 100 pages to go, and I think there are still more twists and turns to go. No wonder Ben Affleck made a movie of it!
    (never saw the movie … seemed too grimy and depressing at the time. :)

    Halfway

    Lehane really is an engaging writer. His mind seems to dwell in some dark places, so reading him isn’t exactly exactly enjoyable many times. But he sure is fun to tag along with … except for parts with the murdered babies and such.

    He’s unbeatable at Boston stuff. Particularly Boston Irish, and even more particularly Dorchester Irish — which evidently is a distinct thing from Southie Irish. Whatever…

    Kenzie went to high school and played league softball with the main bad guy of the first part of the book. Everybody in Dorchester had an abusive father and a long-suffering mother it seems.

    The Quarry section was particularly rich in this stuff.
    The good guys are preparing for a swap of a bag of cash for a kidnapped child. This gives Lehane an excuse for a couple of very well-crafted pages on the history of the Quincy Quarries, where the exchange is to happen. There are a couple of pages breaking down the styles and attitudes of the various law-enforcement groups involved:

    • the paramilitary state troopers,
    • Quincy cops in the front of the action: also military, but enlisted grunts rather that the goose-stepping Staties (his words!)
    • Boston cops at the back of the action, looking like the waiting area at a soup kitchen

    This is the quality writing that keeps me here!

    At the Quarry

    He’s wonderful on local color, in this case what it was like to sneak up to the quarry for a summertime swim as kids.

    Then the shooting starts and it gets really complicated. It takes the next 200 pages to sort it all out.

    After the Quarry

    Damn this is a rough book!

    Our heroes stumble on some of seriously sick child predators introduced earlier as possible suspects, and it’s really grizzly.

    I think I’m gonna close out this report now. I can’t talk about the plot or the characters without giving away the story.

    I will say it was a compelling story all the way up to the last 20 pages, where I just couldn’t do it anymore. The good people were going to have bad things happen to them, and the good people’s lives were going to be ruined because our hero Patrick Kenzie has a fucked-up idea of the Right Way that I have no sympathy for.

    A very compelling book, though!

  • Wild Justice – Loren Estelman (2018)

    Loren Estelman is a prolific writer. The page that’s at the front most novels that lists all the author’s works requires a bible font (i.e. really type 🙂 to be able to fit them all on one page.

    The character that made him famous is Amos Walker, a wise-cracking Detroit private eye who I’ve loved for decades! Some time ago he decided to clone his very successful big city gumshoe into into Page Murdock, a wise-cracking, hard-boiled U.S. Marshall in 1890’s Montana.

    These two are the dead center of the Estelman world for me. They are kind of the same guy, with their snappy dialog and their way with the ladies (although the lady thing never seems to work out … by the end of each book they are always back to their bachelor ways).

    The main difference is that Walker is beholden to a different “boss” each book, because he’s a private eye who someone hires to do a thing.

    Murdock on the other hand is beholden to the same boss every darned time! He is pretty much owned by Judge Harlan Blackthorne, the only Fereral law in the vast territory of Montana.

    Estelman is a history buff. A number of his books, both westerns and modern involve an actual historical event. All the Page Murdock books center around the Judge. He is painted in such detail over all the books that I thought HE was an historical character, but Wikipedia tells me no, he springs from Estelman’s imagination!

    This is might be the last Page Murdock book. In the first sentence of the book the judge keels over dead while pronouncing sentence on some poor fellow. Page endures, but in this book he’s offered at least five different jobs, competent fellow that he is. He accepts none, so it doesn’t look good for the extension of the series.

    So the Judge is dead, and his instructions require that Murdock accompany his widow and casket on the loooong train ride across the nothern US to Wilmington Delaware. There’s the usual wise-cracking (the Judge is ordering him around even from the grave), some remimiscing abut earlier cases, a log of history and local color, then after a few chapters, final an actual plot!!

    The train conductor disappears, and soon it’s apparent that someone is trying to kill … someone. It’s not clear till the end of the book whether Murdock or the Judge’s widow is the target, but since his job is to protect her, they both get the drama.

    There are some funny interludes with taciturn Norwegian dirt farmers, then the final drama happens in turn of the 20th century Minneapolis. There was a really heart-tugging plot twist at the end, and over all the book was a lot of fun, if a little slow in the middle sometimes.

  • A Drink Before the War (1994) – Dennis Lehane

    Before I dive into the book, I want to appreciate Dennis Lehane for just a minute. I feel like we got off on a bad footing some years ago. 🙂

    I’d say his books are about everything Irish-American. From www.bookseriesinorder.com/dennis-lehane/, I’m gonna divide his works into three groups.:

    • the Kenzie-Gennaro books – this book is the first in that series.
      Very Irish Dorchester detectives.
      • I really like these!
    • the Coughlin books – three epics, documenting the sweep of mid century American life through a set of (Irish) families.
      • Haven’t read any of these.
    • the standalone books – these are the ones that made him an “acclaimed author” – Mystic River, Shutter Island etc.
      • I did try to make my way through the first two, and did not enjoy them (see below). They are a little too sophisticated for me

    I am really enjoying this book!s I

    The reason I got off of Lehane came back to me as the story wore on. He spends way too much time in the darkest corners of the human mind. I did skip ahead a few times, once I get the idea about the sexual abuse or mutilation of the moment, I don’t want the details. I’d rather just pick up the story after it’s over.

    That said, overall it was a fun book with a good ending. 🙂

    I’ve checked Gone Baby Gone out of the library. It’s three books ahead in the series, and I know from Wiki that the heroes get married in that one.
    I’m pretty stoked about that!

    On the other hand I would very much like to follow along with the developing relationship in the two intervening books. By the end of this one, Angie had tasered her current husband (everyone cheers!!!) so she is gonna be a free againt in the next one!

  • Many a River (2008) – Elmer Kelton

    The book is about two orphan boys. In the disruptions of the pre-Civil War era the two boys go two different ways:

    • One ends up with a secessionist family in Texas,
    • the other with a loyalist family in New Mexico.

    There is quite a cast of characters here taken from these groups:

    • Comanches – there are some token appearances by Navahos and the Apaches, but the Comanches are the bad-asses of the first part of the book.
    • Mexicans – They come north for opportunity, and are very much like the white family that started the story.
    • Whites – The whites have moved even farther west because the Texas government was too restrictive! So here they are, in what I guess is New Mexico. They will not be fenced in! They’re just people, there’s good ones and bad ones.
    • Comancheros – a motley bunch of Texans, Mexicans and half-breeds. They’re selling guns to the Indians, and horses and stolen goods back to the white folks. Nobody likes them, but they are a useful part of the ecosystem.
    • US Army – They seem to have come all the way out here just to piss everybody off! 🙂 They do non-loveable things like stop you and take your horse away from you if it has a Army brand. Could easily happen if you bought it from the Comancheros!

    Then the actual Civil War breaks out back east!

    Indian problems recede in to the background and and Confederate Army / Union Army problems take over the foreground.

    His writing doesn’t exactly sparkle, but it’s good enough, and I am a little surprised about how much I’ve learned so far.

    He’s excellent on the Western lore, merely good on the plotting and dialog.
    At least that’s how it struck me reading this book this week.

  • Return to Sender (2025) – Craig Johnson

    On my last visit to the Rohnert Park Library the New Releases shelf at had a new Longmire book! The last Longmire book I read didn’t do much for me.

    I thought the TV show got kinda tired before the end, so maybe that affected how I read the books. But tha a wht was a while ago, so I’m ready to give him another whirl!

    It’s been lot of fun so far!

    Walt has somehow been finagled into looking into the disappearance of a mail-carrier … undercover! I would love to explain the setup to you, but I just re-read the first few page, and it’s just not clear to me. Walt is a Sheriff in another part of Wyoming for goodness sakes, but somehow he is taking the job of replacement mail carrier (note: doesn’t really matter, turns out 🙂

    Towards the middle of the book was an interlude whose function seems to have been to bring us up to date on all the supporting players in Walt’s universe that Johnson has populated the series with.

    Walt takes a break from the undercover nonsense to get a ride from a state trooper to Cheyenne because his daughter, now all grown up and a lawyer, is going to be appointed Attorney General of Wyoming (c’mon, really?!?).

    Small world in Wyoming I guess….

    Second Half

    Here in the middle of the book, Johnson has trotted out all the motifs that have worn me out in the last few books.

    In particular, grizzled old Walt has been gettin it on hot and heavy with his fine-looking young deputy for years. I think now that I am grizzled and old that seems even less believable than it did when I was younger..

    This is not the only series where the aging male hero has a big romance with a nice-looking woman from his work life who is 20 years his junior. And I’ve press the “Next” button on all of them.

    Although Vic is genuinely charming in the books and genuinely smoking gorgeous in the form of Katie Sackhoff in the TV show, I just can’t go along with it anymore.

    Maybe I’m just jealous, or maybe it’s just a tired premise, but in any event, I don’t think I finished the book!

    The End (of the review 🙂

  • Clete (2024) – James Lee Burke

    Burke made his money cranking out Louisiana bayou, gumbo-fried crime novels starring good ole Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell. The early ones had crackin’ good dialog and characters and were really fun to read. But Burke seems to have gone through some changes over the years and the books have gotten gloomier and more introspective and not as much fun.

    I kind of like of feel like an LSD experience in some parts of his recent books, and not in a good way!

    The heroes, Dave and Clete are still the same heroic dudes – wonderful and flawed people.

    The early books – Heaven’s Prisoners, Black Cherry Blues are perfect noir novels (IMO). In the 90’s he spawns a second hero. Billy Bob Holland, a Montana sheriff. They are very good, but they don’t have Clete!

    The book Electric Mist with Confederate Dead was where I first noticed the appearance of the supernatural. “Ghostly apparitions” appear. Over time paranormal signals become a regular feature of the books. No thank you.

    The endless rehashing of the heroes’ Vietnam nightmares has become tedious for me over the years. I just looked back and realized I have quit this author twice before, but then time passes, and a new Robicheaux book shows up and there I am remembering the good times and willing to overlook the more recent bad times. I start again and after 50 pages again wonder why?

    The book

    The switcheroo in this book is that it is still a Robicheaux novel but narrated by Clete rather than Dave. So instead of Dave’s inner thoughts about Clete, we get Clete’s inner thought about Dave. That part is great fun!

    They are both Vietnam War heroes who were permanently scarred by it. Still after all these years they can’t get past it and in this book spend too many pages talking entirely too much time and energy talking about it.

    I’m 1/3 of the way through now, and the supernatural has appeared as we knew it would. This is usually a big turn-off for me, but so far so good in this case. A Burke strength is a deep connection to the history of the place we’re at in the book. Sounds pretty specific, but he wrote a whole book about Confederate soldiers appearing in the mist at a Civil War battlefield site. This time we have Joan of Arc coming back to save Clete’s ass in the misty swamp! Like I say, not my thing, but it’s working for me so far.

    … OK, I made it to the end. I feel again like I took psychedelics. Apparently the world was saved from a evil new synthetic drug which may or may not have been what made Clete trip out for half the book. The bad guys got their just deserts, and most of the good guys survived. Notably the abused Asian woman with the super cute accent is left out of the final accounting.

    To sum it up, I feel a little put upon. It really seems like the main point of his last few books is some kind of therapy for the author’s Vietnam trauma. Whether you or I enjoyed it does not seem to be a big part of his calculation. But hey, he’s a gifted and talented writer and folks are still buying his books!