Category Archives: Book Review

Night of the Fox, by Jack Higgins
Source: See my Kindle Sample Review of this book
Kindle price: $8.99
Publisher (original hardback): Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (January 15, 1986)

This is a fascinating tale based on an old true story (rendering it, therefore, into historical fiction) that is written with such a lifeless prose it’s tempting to abandon it any given time.

That’s truly ashamed, given the plot action and characters involved: A Jewish actor convincingly portraying German Field Marshall Erwin Rommell, authorized by Rommell himself. Alongside an American operative for the British who convincingly poses as a German SS officer authorized by the signature (forged) of Hitler, no less. All on the British Isle of Jersey, which was occupied by German Nazis for a portion of World War II.

In the hands of a writer with a more baritone voice, this could have been a wonderful story.

Example: The protagonist, Henry Martineau, is ostensibly a near-Nobel philosopher, yet in the story he is about as philosophical as a goat. It was a wild misfire of the character to portray him as having retreated into shallow waters.

Lessons for writers:

1. Even a great plot can collapse under the weight of dead writing.
2. Give as much psychological and emotional depth to your main characters as possible.
3. Please. Take a creative writing class. It can only help you avoid colorless writing.

The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy
Source (where I found out about it): I’m danged if I remember
Kindle price: $7.59
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1st edition (October 21, 1986)
Author website: Pat Conroy

I did not want to like this book. A friend of mine had ridiculed it. “That Pat Conroy can sure write pretty sentences,” he said. I was bound and determined not to like a book with too many pretty sentences.

But my, oh my, Pat Conroy makes a lot of pretty sentences, and after a while you begin to enjoy them. Look forward to them. Even re-read them to suck all the marrow out of them you can.

Lightning slashed at the islands and the thunder indentured the river with an amazing voice of negation. –The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy, page 439.

You’ve got to be a pretty hardened soul not to feel a little something inside your chest when you read that sentence. Especially when you re-read it.

This book is the polar opposite to the likes of The Devil Colony by James Rollins or Run by Blake Crouch. This book is not driven by the furious motion of a fast-driving plot. No, plot plays second fiddle, maybe even third fiddle for Pat Conroy — behind character and place development.

Overwrought, is it? Yes, of course.

Slow in places? Absolutely.

Not quite completely believable? Yeah, there’s that.

But that detracts very little. I read this book slowly. I savored it. I drank it like fine port. I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it.

How did Pat Conroy make me do that?

He did far more than write pretty sentences. He painted a desperately dysfunctional family from the inside-out, which made me turn inside-out with it. He reached in and grabbed my insides by grabbing the guts and sinews of a Southern family and shaking hard, like a man who means it. The whole human familial condition, in other words.

From a writer’s perspective, what are the lessons?

1. Capturing a place and the people in it can be richly satisfying.
2. Plot is still necessary. This could have been a five-star book had Conroy held the line on plot a little more strongly.
3. As long as they are used genuinely, even making pretty sentences is no obstacle to writing a good book.

The Last Days of the Incas, by Kim MacQuarrie
Source (where I found out about it): Search for “Inca History” on Amazon
Kindle price: $13.99
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 29, 2007)
Author website: Kim MacQuarrie

This is the best book I have ever read about the history of the Incas. Even better, it was masterfully done by MacQuarrie. It tells a well-documented tale about the real world for both the conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, who invaded the South American land of the Incas nearly five hundred years ago, and of the native culture, armies, and politics — all led by the Inca emperor, Atahualpa — that preceded the conquistadors and that illuminated the behavior of the Inca.

It’s a compelling story. A few men appear in a land of a relatively advanced culture numbering in the millions. Yet the conquistadors take them as easily as Cortes took down the Aztecs in Mexico a few years before.

Why? What is it about a bunch of guys with horses, steel swords and armor, and guns that puts such fear into the Incas?

It’s complicated. And MacQuarrie gives it justice, creating fully realized characters out of the main conquistadors and Incas alike.

My only quibble with the books is that it spends too much time on Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu. Granted, he set off a new phase of exploration and research into the Incas, but his discovery seems incidental to the primary story — that of the Last Days of the Incas.

The Devil Colony: A Sigma Force Novel, by James Rollins
Source (where I found out about it): My wife bought it
Kindle price: $12.99
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Author website: James Rollins

This is fiction in the truest sense of the word: a tall tale, a yarn, a leg-puller. If you have any sort of a rational sensibility grounded in fact, then be prepared to suspend your disbelief — time and time again.

That’s my main issue with this book and every James Rollins book I’ve read (three to date, including Altar of Eden and Map of Bones). He reaches so far beyond the reasonable it begins to feel childish to me and my interest wanes in the story. It enters the realm of fantasy. It’s too much to swallow — or at least it’s too much to swallow again. This will likely be my last James Rollins book.

Example: A Jewish temple built of gold in a subterranean chamber beneath Yellowstone National Park by the Anasazi.

Yeah. Right. Next.

Rollins almost carries it off. He turns it into a high-pressure, fast-paced romp (as he always does), with a ticking clock and a nest of nanotechnology robots (mastered by the Anasazi Jews, of course) that could destroy the world. It’s edge-of-the-seat breathtaking. It’s … so incredibly unbelievable I almost abandoned the book several times.

But I already said that.

From a writer’s perspective, what else did I see? Rollins injects just enough character development to sustain the plot and give a little depth to the story. But not much. He’s not a character kind of writer. He’s a plot guy. Who needs character development when you find a booby trap set by Anasazi Jews hundreds of years ago that could cause the human race to become extinct?

I try to pull lessons from the bestsellers. Here’s the best I can do:

1. Mass market readers prefer a wild ride over veracity
2. A hard- and fast-driving plot can let you scrimp on character development
3. Physical motion is a key part of sustaining the wild ride

The best thing about James Rollins is that he’s the keynote speaker at the 2012 DFW Writers’ Conference, May 19-20. He is no doubt a master of his chosen craft, and we writers would be foolish to ignore his advice. I’ll certainly be there.

The Girl with the Long Green Heart, by Lawrence Block

I really liked this book.  I knew the writing of Lawrence Block from a few short stories way back in the 1980s. I saw his name in an Amazon promotion (sorry, I didn’t record which one, and memory fails me), and picked it up for $0.99. This is the only $0.99 book I’ve ever purchased and read. I’m highly prejudiced against such cheap book stock, but I accepted it as a promotional price. The Kindle version now retails for $6.64 as of this writing.

This book reeks film noir, the potboilers of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spilane, the good old days when men wore hats (as we should).

Just look at the sentence structure of his first paragraph:

When the phone rang I was shaving. I put my razor down and walked across the room to pick up the phone on the bedside table.

Short. Clipped. Precise. Each movement or action or thought a single phrase or sentence like you’re getting the inside story from a tight-lipped guy reluctant to talk but you’ve wrung it out of him.

I’ve been thinking a lot about tone lately. This book is an example of tone perfectly matching the storytelling style, the plot, the characters, the setting.

I also love the gritty characters. There are no heroes here. Only the desperate. Civilized enough to value civilized things, but not enough to acquire them through civilized means.

There are three main characters, which means we have a lot of triangulation — one character worried about the other two, two characters talking to each other about the third. First person locked POV, so we see the world only through the eyes of the protagonist. But it’s enough. Remember, we had to lean on this guy to tell his story, so it’s his story, nobody else’s. Now, if these three characters were open and honest with each other, these scenes would be, well, boring. But Block’s characters aren’t really capable of such a thing as trust. Not without some insurance of some kind on each other, if you know what I mean.

And then Block does one of those wonderful things in storytelling. He reveals an ending we might possibly have suspected, but rejected somewhere along the way. When it hits you, you nod your head, smile grimly, then shake your head.

I like that kind of book.

Adrenaline, by Jeff Abbott
See my Kindle Sample Review of Adrenaline, which inspired me to buy and read this book.

Well-written … yet there are things not quite right about this book. Two that I recognize, but I get the feeling there is more that leads to my discomfort with it. I’ll try to dig deep and find it. For now, here are the two:

1. Tone
2. Logic errors

Tone

Tone is hard. Both to explain and to control as a writer. It’s tied into style.

15. a particular style or manner, as of writing or speech; mood: the macabre tone of Poe’s stories.

Origin: 1275–1325; Middle English (noun) < Latin tonus < Greek tónos strain, tone, mode, literally, a stretching, akin to teínein to stretch

via Tone | Define Tone at Dictionary.com.

Even the definition is so nonspecific it’s hard to work with. Yet, it’s exactly what I find troublesome in this book.

Adrenaline itself is associated with a tone, a heightened sense of being, a tension about to bust through its bounds, a frantic feeling of jumping out of one’s skin.

This book does not have that. Run by Blake Crouch is bursting with the tone of flight, to the point that it grates on my nerves as a reader. But Jeff Abbott creates a far more gentle tone, a pace of speech and of micro-storytelling that is often at odds with the plot and title of the book. When things should be frantic for the parkour-practicing protagonist, Sam, he thinks the right frantic thoughts and does the right frantic things, but it all seems to happen as if your ears are plugged and you’re disconnected from the reality of the story. There’s a tone of distance. Of quietly observing, but not of being in situ. I kept waiting for that feeling to pop like a balloon, to find myself wholly engaged not just with Sam, who tries desperately to find his kidnapped pregnant wife, but with the “particular style or manner” of the storytelling.

I didn’t.

The tone muffles somehow the emotions of the characters, it stands at a distance from them and describes their feelings without making me feel them.

I think I tend to do that with my storytelling. I let the actors play on stage and I sit in the second row, dutifully recording what I see and think. Why? Perhaps I think that the action and dialog of the actors will reveal their inner emotions enough to satisfy readers. Maybe I’m wrong.

Back when I was an editor at American Way magazine, I assigned a writer a story on Death Valley. When I sent the first draft back for revisions, I said, “Make me feel the heat.” The author, a particularly gifted fellow, did just that with a minimal insertion of sensual descriptions: the literal burn of grabbing a car door handle (the locals carry pot holders to open their doors), the disorienting light-headedness that comes from even a short stroll in the desert at midday, the sound of actually cooking an egg on the sidewalk (and nearly cooking the cook in the process).

These, I think, are the heart of writing a “close tone,” one that gives the reader lots of sensual input, especially of the emotional sort.

Would that have corrected the problem I felt in this book? I’m not sure. Abbott does much of that. Yet it’s still distant somehow. I fear I’m not doing justice at seeing and dealing fully and clearly with this. Tone is so subjective. Like the ringing of a bell. Is it right on, or slightly off?

Logic errors

Now these, I can sink my teeth into. Here’s an example:

I turned and saw a truck whip around an idling Audi, thirty feet away, the car facing me on the opposite side of the road, Lucy in the passenger seat. My office building stood between me and the Audi.

Wait a minute. The “office building stood between” protagonist Sam and the Audi (which contained his kidnapped pregnant wife, Lucy)? Then how in the hell could Sam see it? Could he see through buildings? Was the building made of glass? No and no.

There are dozens of these kinds of logic errors in this book. I’ll give you another one, but without the direct quote.

Sam stows away on a ship out of New York bound for Europe. Two days out the ship just stops, powers down its engines, and drops anchor. In the middle of the North Atlantic. Do you know how long that anchor chain would have to be? I’m not a sailor, but I’m nearly 100% certain ships don’t do this.

I think it’s okay to have implausible action and scenes if it’s big and important enough to explain into plausibility. That’s how science fiction and fantasy works. The mere act of immersing yourself into a story is complicit with the suspension of disbelief.

But the little facts can cut you in many small places, death by a thousand cuts. The little facts must be genuine and right on their face. If not, you lose trust in the author. You begin to question everything. The overall effect is that I don’t believe the plot or actions by Sam, the protagonist.

Why is it that a writer like Daniel Silva can make me get into the character and the action with no jolts to my sensibility — to the point that I know, I just know, that Silva must have been an undercover operative for a time in his life (how else can everything he says ring so true and genuine?).

For storytellers, it’s a matter of veracity, and this book just doesn’t show that Jeff Abbott has that.