Tim Frazer Again by Francis Durbridge

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

The longest–running BBC thriller series of the early 1960s was The World of Tim Frazer. It was so popular in fact that professional writer Francis Durbridge was encouraged to write three novels starring the engineer-spy Tim Frazer. Laid-back and relatable, Tim is an everyman character that we like in comfort reading such as this lightweight 1972 classic.

A fellow agent, Leo Salinger, in Tim’s unnamed spy agency is struck and killed by a car in Amsterdam. The driver, comely Englishwoman Barbara Day, is cleared of culpability. But Tim’s boss, the enigmatic Ross, wonders if Salinger was bent, a disturbing thought since hiring Salinger would reflect badly on Ross’ judgement. Tim is sent to Holland to shadow Barbara Day to see if she makes any shady contacts.

Barbara Day seems to be just what she is, a partner in an antiques business. Tim returns to London, only to meet a weird situation. He discovers the body of American tourist in Barbara’s apartment. The cops think Tim knows more than he is saying and boss Ross tells Tim that he is on his own in dealing with the cops.

The story is complicated without confusion. Weird artifacts like metronomes and tulip bulb catalogs stir up our curiosity. Iffy bad guys start fights and attempt murder, though violence is minimized. There’s a Master Controller that even the thugs are scared of, mortally. As I said, Tim as hero is approachable, without the lone hero baggage of Jack Reacher or killer machine relentlessness of John Wick. The writing is smooth and readable despite the frequent and odd use of jarring adverbs like “exasperatingly” and “hostilely.”

Shergar: A True Crime Story of Kidnapping, Racehorse, and Politics by Conrad Bauer

Review by jjares

The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This is the first mystery that stars the series hero Commissario Salvo Montalbano. Set in Sicily in the early 1990s, the story opens with two garbage collectors discovering a body near The Pasture, a den of dope dealers, dope takers and prostitutes. The corpse in the BMW is local big shot Silvio Luparello, partly clothed but no apparent signs of suspicious death.

Indeed the local bigwigs seem relieved that Luparello’s autopsy shows that he died of natural causes. They want him below ground as soon as possible. Montalbano is not satisfied because he assumes that appearances are always deceptive. He even comes around to thinking that surviving big shots want the silence over the death to resound, make people mutter about cover-ups, and thus bring Luparello’s political faction into disrepute.

Camilleri didn’t write puzzles so the mystery is not the main draw here. Amazing are the smooth connections between the interviews Montalbano conducts with his superiors and subordinates and persons of interest. The interviews run the gamut, from locker-room smutty to comical to profound (such as the deep explanation of the title).

Montalbano is a brilliant creation. He’s a street-wise man of integrity who takes brave stances against supervisors, bishops, judges, mobsters, managers, land-owners, bureaucrats and all the other syndicates that want to keep The Little Guy down. But he’s also cranky and short-tempered when he’s hungry. Camilleri also includes pointed social critiques, drawing a straight line between the story and the centuries-long history of misgovernment, corruption, and exploitation in Sicily.

Highly recommended. It’s amazing that from the very first novel in the series of 28 Montalbano novels, Camilleri determined what he wanted to do in the books and he did it successfully time after time. That he wrote all these books after the age of 69 should give us of a certain age heart.

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.