The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

Let’s go back to the 1980s for a lovely fantasy from Robin McKinley – THE BLUE SWORD. I don’t remember if it was marketed as YA at the time but it’s on the Newbury Honor Roll. No fairies or elves in this one, but it has lots of other elements of classic high fantasy along with a nice bit of romance.

Angharad Crewe (she prefers Harry) is a young woman whose father has just passed away, leaving her in the care of her older brother Richard. He’s a military officer, posted at a remote desert town in Damar. If you think of the British rule in India you’ll have the scene in mind.  Harry has been invited to stay in the house of the commanding officer, with his wife and two daughters.

Harry is a dutiful young lady but isn’t all that into the normal girlish activities. But she’s grateful to have a place to go, and settles into the rather tedious life in this small community – not without a bit of restlessness, but she’s not going to complain.  And she likes the desert; it calls to her somehow.

There are other people in the desert too, the Hillfolk, who are rumored to have a bit of magic, easily laughed off by the military men. When Corlath, the King of the Hillfolk, asks for a meeting, they’re all stunned but readily agree. It so happens that Harry and her companions, hoping to at least see the mysterious folk, run into Corlath as he’s leaving in a fury. Harry is shaken by something, something in his eyes…

Corlath asked for  help from the military against a threat growing from the North. What help they might be, he wasn’t sure, because the enemy has magic, but he knows his own forces are not going to be a match for them. The Homelanders refuse; it’s not their business plus a war between the two other forces will only strengthen their own position. Corlath can’t explain that the inimical magic of the Northerns will destroy all. But as they ride out he sees Harry. Corlath has the Sight, sometimes, and the Sight tells him Harry is important. This is not pleasing to Corlath, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Harry wakes up from a drugged sleep to find herself kidnapped, traveling with Corlath’s band toward his town. The men have accepted that she’s important in some way and are kind, and slowly it becomes apparent that Harry does have a contribution to make.  Her training, and how she becomes the new wielder of Gonturan, the legendary Blue Sword, make up the bulk of the novel.

Harry is your classic orphan who comes into surprising powers. She’s perfectly delineated and extremely relatable. Corlath too is an excellent character – his reluctance to use her at all, then his reluctance to put her in harm’s way was a good progression.  McKinley gives real depth to all the characters including the minor ones. Even Narknon the cat and Sungold the horse are distinct personalities.  Excellent world-building too. The enemy is a mysteriously evil force with a malevolent leader, and the battle scenes are vivid.

An aside – after it’s all over, you might notice that conversation between Harry and Corlath becomes couched in strangely formal language.  That happened in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, too, so I wonder if that was a deliberate choice by McKinley.

THE BLUE SWORD is such a good book and plus it’s stand-alone, not as common these days. I also highly recommend McKinley’s second in the same world, THE HERO AND THE CROWN, which tells the story of Aerin, the first wielder of Gonturan.  You can read them in either order, and you should, because they are classics.

Midnight in Europe by Alan Furst

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 2014 espionage thriller is set in Europe between the wars. A refugee from the Spanish Civil War, Cristián Ferrar works as a lawyer for a prestigious law firm with clients in Paris, New York, and as far east as Budapest. The firm sympathizes with the Spanish Republic against Franco’s Nationalists. Cristián is approached by the Spanish Embassy to procure arms on behalf of the embattled Republic, whose ostensible ally, Stalin’s USSR, is not providing replacement parts and ammunition.

Unlike lots of heroes in spy thrillers, Cristián is not a combat infantry veteran or old hand in a tough-guy job like a walking boss of lumberjacks or manager of a heroin factory. He’s just a quick-witted professional who does his duty when his government, his country, asks him to do his part. Furst has faith that ordinary people will step up to the plate when the going gets rough.

Cristián soon finds himself in various European cities with arms merchant Max de Lyon, who’s been there and done that when it comes to gun-running. Furst convincingly portrays Berlin in 1938 as a place smothered by secret police. We readers are also convinced by the settings of the tough shipyards of Gdansk and low-class sporting houses in Istanbul.

The novel is divided up into episodes in which Cristián and Max have to call on all their smarts and resourcefulness. The best set-piece is the last, in which Max’s confederates in Odessa manage to use Stalin’s system of terror against itself and pull off an audacious heist. The climax involves getting the maguffin back to Valencia on a tramp steamer.

While there is not much shooting and stuff blowing up real good, it’s gripping thriller material.

A Symphony of Echoes by Jodi Taylor

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

A SYMPHONY OF ECHOES by Jodi Taylor is the second in The Chronicles of St. Mary’s, the institute of time-traveling historians. (To read my review of the first book, Just One Damned Thing After Another, click here.)

It’s best for a new reader to start at the beginning; Taylor provides some backstory but there’s so much that happened in book 1 that’s germane to this episode. We begin in Jack the Ripper’s London, where Max and her best friend are having a pleasurable jaunt to check out the last of The Ripper’s victims. Yeah, doesn’t sound like a great time to me either, but those historians are made of stern stuff. They barely make it back without incident…or do they? Bwa-ha-ha! (that’s a sinister laugh, sorry).  But that’s just a warm-up.  The big villains of the last book – Ronan and the evil Barclay – are still out there.

It’s a breakneck pace all through the book, with people zipping back and forth through time. It turns out they can jump into the future too; Max and Leon have to go forward to save a future St. Mary’s

Speaking of Max and Leon, I have to say I didn’t care for the big blow-up scene between them.  Romantic partners leaping to conclusions without talking to each other makes me sigh. On the other hand, if it weren’t common authors wouldn’t use it so much. Max’s immediate revenge was very funny.

Anyway, the big adventure of this story is from the end of the last book, to wit, the “undiscovered” play by Shakespeare that has Mary Queen of Scots becoming queen of England instead of Elizabeth 1. Someone has monkeyed around with history, and History did not drop a rock on them for doing it, so obviously the team has to go back in time and fix things.  I loved the depiction of the trip, Max’s conversations with Queen Mary, and her anguish/anger at how she fixed the problem.

Did I mention catching dodoes as a team-building exercise? Another grin-worthy chapter.

Do not attempt to apply a lot of logic to the time-travel paradoxes. Probably best if you don’t attempt to apply it to the book’s internal rules, either, because just like Star Trek’s Prime Directive, they are only there so our heroes can break them. Sometimes that sort of thing irritates me in a book, but here I feel that it’s all tongue-in-cheek and don’t mind it much.  While it’s fun, there’s a lot of darkness here too; not everyone lives (again) and not everyone is who they claim to be. People do die in awful ways.  But all in all, this is highly entertaining. I don’t know how long Taylor can keep my attention, because already I can see outlines of plot formulas, but I’ve got number 3 on my list.

PLACES IN THE DARKNESS by Chris Brookmyre

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

Looking for a gritty mystery set in a space station?  Got it –  PLACES IN THE DARKNESS by Chris Brookmyre.

Space station Ciudad de Cielo – City in the Sky – is engaged in humanity’s quest for the stars. Here it is that the spaceships are being tested and will eventually be built to carry us to new worlds. In the meantime, it is a home for 100,000 people, embodying a society that is supposed to reflect the very best that people can become. Everyone is working for its noble ideals.

Yeah, you didn’t really believe that either. People are people, and wherever we are, there’s going to be noble ideals, sure, but there will also be veniality and corruption. In CdC, there’s bootlegging, prostitution, graft and more. What there isn’t is outright murder. Sure, a few “accidents” happen now and again, which are covered up quickly by the Seguridad. You can’t let that stuff get back to Earth, after all, they might send their own security forces to crack down. Nope, all is well, nothing to see here.

Nikki “Fix” Freeman is an officer in the Seguridad and also one of the most corrupt out there. She runs a protection racket and drinks herself to oblivion almost every night. Everyone knows Nikki. Most of them are afraid of her.  Alice Blake is an idealistic bureaucrat newly sent from Earth as a deputy with the Federal National Governments – she’s a big deal charged with oversight of the Seguridad. She believes in the noble aspirations of the station, that there isn’t any corruption and if there is, she can root it out.

Just as Alice arrives on station, a horribly mutilated corpse is discovered in a cargo bay. This is so bad it cannot be hidden.  There are no homicide investigators on CdC…except Nikki.  Nikki is appalled to be chosen. Nothing about this can be good for her. But there’s not much choice.  And Alice is appalled at just how crooked Nikki is. Then more bodies start to pile up. Is this the work of a deranged killer? Or does it have an even more sinister motive?

Brookmyre gives the reader clues right in the beginning where he’s going with it.  His pacing is very good, with Nikki lurching along from disaster to disaster until everything she knows starts to look suspect, what she remembers might not be real, and what she doesn’t remember might kill her.  We can be sure that Alice is going to have surprises of her own and Brookmyre doesn’t disappoint us there either.  We get two strong female characters who change over the course of the book. Excellent sense of place with descriptions of how the space station is put together and a little about how it’s run. The desriptions of the “lens” and the mesh implants give a sense of how people interact.  I would have liked a bit more about the normal day to day ops, but the novel is not about normality, so no matter.  The identity of the initial murderer was a fun surprise. I didn’t guess the ultimate villain but an alert reader might not have any problem there. I think the motive got a little too convoluted towards the end, but it wraps up nicely.

Peeper by Loren D. Estleman

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In this 1989 parody of the late Eighties hard-boiled detective novel, main character Ralph Poteet is a drunken, thieving, conniving sleaze of a PI. He’s not a sociopath like the protagonist in a Jim Thompson novel but he can’t help but make the wrong choices that only make the situation worse for himself and others. Through a combination of bad luck and sheer stupidity, he finds himself suspected of murder and arson.

The language is often pretty foul. The jokes are guy-oriented, which means the reader might feel coarse and crass in still finding them funny in our more enlightened era of 2023. If readers take the goings-on too seriously, they may feel sad, especially if they remember Detroit bleeding population and businesses in the Eighties.

But readers of a certain age will enjoy the references to Eighties pop culture such as Brooke Shields, Popeil’s Veg-O-Matic, and what I suspect is a fictitious long-playing album called “Slim Whitman Yodels Songs of Faith.” Readers like me who know SE Michigan and feel a sentimental feeling anyway will like the nod to the Uniroyal tire on eastbound 94 in Allen Park (no giant Presto Whip cans in Dearborn on Telegraph because they were removed in 1983 – an unhappy day indeed).

I’ve been reading Estleman for about 30 years and enjoyed the PI Amos Walker books in the 1990s. This book is a successful attempt to parody his own character. But he still manages to develop an original character and surprising twists and turns of plot. Unlike most comic mysteries, it does not feel too long by the end. Its incidents are darkly humorous but overall the hard-boiled genre is mocked for its pretentions and cynicism, especially in terms of its portraying the world as more unfair, uncaring, and corrupt than it really is.

The Doctor, the Hitman, and the Motorcycle Gang: The True Story of One of New Jersey’s Most Notorious Murder for Hire Plots by Annie McCormick

Review by jjares

New Jersey locals woke up to the news that one of their famous radio personalities had been murdered in her home. Vivacious April Kauffman, an advocate for veteran’s issues, was found dead on the floor of her bedroom, shot twice. However, this appalling crime took six years to unravel in court. This turned out to be one of New Jersey’s most notorious murder-for-hire cases. Before it was all over, a highly-regarded physician and a motorcycle gang were brought down for April’s death.
It takes a bit to get involved in this story. The author sets the stage by explaining April Kaufmann’s life and how she got to the point where someone decided she needed to die. In the beginning, it looked like there could not be a more unlikely murder victim. April had it all; she was widely known for her philanthropic activities. She didn’t just move mountains for veterans; she assisted anyone who asked her for help. Yet, on May 10, 2012, locals learned that this famous advocate for many causes was dead.
After a whirlwind courtship, Dr. James Kauffman and April married. April was so caught up in Jim’s story about his military service in Vietnam that she turned her radio program’s focus to veteran issues. However, after some time, April learned that Jim was never a green beret in the service; April was devastated.
Due to how Jim’s story affected her, she had lined up many activities to help veterans. She knew that when veterans found out that Jim’s story was a fraud, she would be smeared with the same lies. At about the same time, April found out that her husband ran a pill mill through his office, using a local unit of the national Pagan Motorcycle Gang.
The doctor was clever; the paperwork in the office showed that these were actual patients with real needs for pain medications. He gave the patients scripts for 120 OxyCodone narcotic prescriptions, which the motorcycle gang members resold for $20+ per pill. They made so much money that the doctor added a lab scam. When April started to notice, she told Jim she wanted a divorce. Jim told her she wasn’t getting half of his “empire.” He would kill  April’s daughter (from another marriage) if April didn’t drop the divorce idea immediately. Unfortunately, April didn’t understand the depth of Jim’s rage. Dr. Kauffman was also angry that people called him Mr. April.
Most of the book is about how April got justice; it took six years. Because the Pagan Motorcycle Gang is noted for their deep-seated animus against betraying each other, it was hard to crack their bond to get anyone to talk. Finally, it became known that the doctor offered $50,000 and unlimited OxyCodone prescriptions to murder his wife.
Many people will be aware of this story because of ABC’s 20/20 investigative program. The author of this book takes the time to give the backstory of the main characters involved. She also gives credit to Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner. He reignited the case once he was elected. This is a fascinating, multi-layered story about a tragedy in New Jersey.