Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

STILLHOUSE LAKE by Rachel Caine is the first in a thriller series featuring Gwen Proctor. She used to be Gina Royal, until she and the rest of the world discovered her husband was a serial killer.  He was arrested, convicted, and sent to death row, but Gwen and her two kids got a life sentence of running from his fans and foes alike.  Quite a number of people are convinced that she must have known and helped him in his sadistic killings. The depths to which internet stalkers will go is incredibly creepy and sadly sounds too, too authentic.

Gwen’s found a suspiciously affordable house near Stillhouse Lake, a place that used to be something of a resort community but has fallen on hard times.  Gwen’s paranoia is off the charts but this place really seems to be somewhere they can settle for a while. The two teens are predictably damaged by what’s happened, but they are aware of how careful they need to be. But now they have a couple friends, Gwen has a neighbor who seems trustworthy – it can’t mean much if they slip up once in a while, right?

Then a body turns up in the lake, a girl who’s been killed in a fashion not unlike what Gwen’s ex used to do. The police investigate and slowly their suspicions start to coalesce around Gwen.  Gwen knows she didn’t do it, so who did?  Gwen is getting letters from her ex – awful letters – and the latest one has a reference that tells Gwen he knows exactly where they are. She’s been so careful, how could this possibly happen?

This is a fast-paced, very creepy thriller but fair warning – while the main plot is resolved, a new development means it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger.  Lots of tense atmosphere, good dialogue, lots of suspects. Also some gory detail about women being killed if you’re sensitive to that.  While it didn’t spoil the suspense for me,  if you are a frequent mystery/thriller reader you’ll probably figure out the identities of the bad guys right away.

Caine does a great job making us empathize with Gwen.  I felt really bad for her and her kids. How could they ever have anything approaching a normal life? How could you come to grips with what happened, and how could the kids grow up and move on? Then I discovered there are multiple sequels and it looks like trouble just keeps finding them. I enjoyed this book a lot, but I empathized too much with the characters – I can’t bear to put myself into their places for another 4 novels so I’m stopping here. And that’s fine.  If you like a nice tense, suspense-filled story with a fierce female protagonist, this fits the bill.

Wreckers Must Breathe by Hammond Innes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

I detest spoilers so I find it hard to discuss this World War II adventure story without giving any of the surprises away.

I will satisfy myself by observing that the thriller opens with drama critic Walter Craig on a beach vacation, perhaps, he feels, his last for a long while because of German mobilization on the continent. Cruising in a chartered fishing boat captained by Big Logan, Craig is yanked overboard by a huge black shape. Later on a walk Craig has an encounter with a stiff strict guy who speaks English a little too precisely. Soon enough, Craig and Big Logan find out they must do their bit to foil Nazi plans to attack a rendezvous of Royal Navy ships in the North Sea.

I like old thrillers because Innes creates plausible characters who are human beings, not Men of Steel like Jack Reacher. To his credit, Innes varies the narrative voices with the dispatches of Maureen Weston, a tough Irishwoman and journalist colleague of Craig. Big Logan is a great sidekick, strong, brave, and smart. Because this was written early on in the war in 1940, Innes persuasively conveys the atmosphere of the UK on the brink of war. People know that war with Hitlerism is inevitable, but they still feel a chill once war is declared.

Innes is skillful in ratcheting up tension. Some of the tropes used convince us readers that Innes must have read Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells in his younger days. In his own time Innes worked the action thriller patch along with Geoffrey Household, Victor Canning, and Alistair MacLean. In our era similar writers are James Rollins and Clive Cussler. A reader looking a cracking WWII era thriller won’t go wrong with this one.

The Martian by Andy Weir

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

Before THE MARTIAN was a hit movie, it was a successful near-future science-fiction novel. Andy Weir created an immensely likeable and humorous protagonist in astronaut Mark Watney, who absolutely has the right stuff.

Watney is the sixth member of an astronaut crew sent to spend a few weeks on Mars, testing survivability and conducting experiments. They’ve only been there a couple days when a vicious storm blows in, forcing the mission to abort. On their way to their shuttlecraft, a piece of debris skewers Watney, blanking out his spacesuit’s telemetry signal and knocks him unconscious. Because of the dust storm, the crew can’t see him nor can they hear any signal from his suit.  They can’t search long because of the storm. Believing him dead, they take off. When Watney finally comes to, he’s alone on Mars with no chance of rescue for years.

How Watney manages to survive his ordeal makes for great reading.  Watney’s first-person log accounts capture his determination, never-say-die attitude, humor and inventiveness, and not to mention loneliness of his situation.  Weir delighted in coming up with various survivable disasters that might happen to a crew on a distant planet, and he throws most of them at Watney.

Interspersed with Watney’s account are scenes back at NASA and JPL, and later the spacecraft. The characters are distinct, and they talk like real people. Again, there are many scenarios that you can readily imagine playing out.

The thing that might put off many is the incredible amount of scientific detail that’s gone into this book. Let me reassure you there are no equations although there is Mark Watney telling you about the equations he’s doing, but in an understandable way.  For every disaster that Watney encounters, there’s a solution and he tells the reader exactly how he’s going to solve it. This means a lot of explanatory detail and for some, that’s just going to slow down the narrative too much. Personally, I loved it. All the things that Watney does, those are real or something that soon could be real – no faster-than-light travel, no magical Force, no handwavium physics. There’s chemistry, astrophysics, astrodynamics, botany, and duct tape. Yep, duct tape works just as well on Mars as it does here.

My only other criticism is that Watney is almost always upbeat, always ready with a quip. I like to think because his log is meant for future readers, his astronaut training isn’t going to allow him to break down “in public” as it were, so Weir never lets us see Watney in real despair.

I am someone who will go back and re-read books I really like, This is my second time around with THE MARTIAN, and I still think it’s excellent.

The Mamur Zapt & the Return of the Carpet by Michael Pearce

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1988 historical police procedural thriller was the first in a series that is still going with as many as 19 published as of 2016.

The Mamur Zapt is a title for the head of the secret political police in Cairo, capital of an Egypt indirectly run by the British in the early 20th century. Gareth Cadwallader Owen, a Welsh army captain, is young to have such an important job but he has two important qualifications. He’s a member of an ethnic group with a romantic past so he’s canny about the ways of thinking of embattled minorities. He’s also smarter than the bureaucrats and military types he works with, both of whom depend much on smokescreen and force respectively.

The author was born in the Sudan so his details about the heat and environment come from real life observation. His line about the smell of wet sand in 120-degree heat brought back Saudi Arabia for me. Pearce skillfully evokes settings such as crowded cafes, interrogation rooms, and busy street life. Pearce wonderfully describes a bath house (hammam) when Owen and his faithful counterpart Mahmoud tail a crook. This scene took me back to hot springs in Japan: the ritual of washing before entering the bath, the talking with other patrons, enjoying snacks and beer.

Indeed, readers may object that the book is long on scene setting and cross-cultural interaction but short on action. I will grant the climax was a lot less rip-roaring than I like in a thriller, but I’m told low-key climaxes and subdued endings are not unusual with this writer.

I think that readers will like this novel who like historical mysteries, terrorist intrigues, and Middle Eastern settings. Similar authors are Michael Gilbert, Eric Ambler, and John le Carré.

The Infinity Concerto by Greg Bear

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

THE INFINITY CONCERTO by Greg Bear is the first of a duology, but if you’re not inclined to go further this one has a story arc so at least there’s an ending.

Sixteen year old Michael Perrin is interested in poetry, music, and old films. He meets and becomes friends with Arno Waltiri, an elderly friend of his parents. Waltiri was a composer of film scores and one very strange symphony that was requested by a man named David Clarkham. Waltiri gives Michael a key left to him by Clarkham saying it could lead to an adventure, if Michael is willing to take a risk.  Waltiri says he never had the courage to go through with it.

After Waltiri’s death, Michael decides to follow the directions left with the key and suddenly finds himself in a strange landscape with no method of return. He is, in fact, in the land of the Sidhe – the Realm.  There are other humans here, but they’ve been relegated to a dismal little ghetto in the middle of the Blasted Plain. Hated by the Sidhe, the humans are nonetheless protected by a treaty from a long-ago war.  Michael is apparently the only human to arrive by choice; all the others seem to have been transported somehow while lost in music – playing, listening, or composing.

However, as the reader knows from the beginning, someone or something has plans for Michael.  He doesn’t know why he’s sent to train with the half-Sidhe, half-human Crane women, but he soon realizes there are a lot of forces in play and eventually he realizes there’s something for him to do, if he can just figure out what. Michael’s training is abruptly brought to an end and he must  make his way across the dangerous land if he’s ever to find a way home.

This is a nice hero’s journey sort of fantasy, lots of references to poetry, classical music and some religion; I expect I missed a number of references  I liked the idea of the ancient war that caused the devolution/evolution of humans, and the other races like the Spryggla and the Cledar. I liked Michael – at times he seems very adult, and sometimes he’s cranky and obstinate as you’d expect in a 16-yr-old.  His ability to break off and then throw away the parts of himself he doesn’t like seems very convenient and I wondered about it. Does that mean he won’t, or can’t, act that selfishly in the future?

It can be a little slow in places, and there were scenes I couldn’t visualize very well. Others, like the spreading blue plague, were quite vivid.  I thought the transition from training to quest was a little abrupt, and Michael’s growing magic abilities weren’t given enough emphasis.  It’s a good fantasy, sets up the next book very nicely, with good characters and world-building but Michael’s experiences in the Realm are mostly grim.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1949 mystery starts in cozy way, with shy young art teacher Faustina Crayle living and working in a girl’s boarding school that is prim to the point of grim. Like Rebecca at Manderley, she’s being given poor service on top of the fisheye by the servants. Faustina’s problem is the fallout from multiple witnesses seeing her double here and there on school grounds

You enter a room, a street, a country road. You see a figure ahead of you, solid, three-dimensional, brightly colored. Moving and obeying all the laws of optics. Its clothing and posture is vaguely familiar. You hurry toward the figure for a closer view. It turns its head and – you are looking at yourself. Or rather a perfect mirror-image of yourself only – there is no mirror. So, you know it is your double. And that frightens you, for tradition tells you that he who sees his own double is about to die…

One professional challenge caused by this uncanny phenomenon is that she is fired from her job. One of her fellow teachers, a pretty refugee Austrian named Gisela von Hohenems, urges her fiancé to look into the “termination without cause.” Her fiancé is psychiatrist Dr. Basil Willing, on staff of a famous Big Apple hospital and consultant to the NYC DA.

Since its first publication, this mystery has received much acclaim for its skillful use of a superstitious belief about The Double as a background for an outstanding mystery plot (see also Dorothy L. Sayers’ “The Image in the Mirror”). McCloy seems to have known a little about a range of people, places, and phenomena. She includes informational tidbits about costume designs for the production of the play Medea, changes in kitchens over time in the Western world, and shifts of attitude on the sable vs. mink controversy. Like Edith Wharton, McCloy provides plenty of details about room arrangements, furnishings, furniture and colors of wall paints. Into describing clothes in a big way, McCloy sent me to my thread-bending wife to ask about words like “chiffon” and “taffeta” and “voile.”

From the early Thirties to the late Seventies, critics and readers respected McCloy for her elegant writing. Even when the reader is dubious about seemingly supernatural elements in a mystery, McCloy’s solution can also appeal to readers who are skeptical about the paranormal. It’s a challenging balance but she manages it through intelligent and graceful writing that is beyond our expectations for a mystery.