Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Chet Conway, a cabbie in the Big Apple, gets a tip on horse race from an appreciative fare who enjoys Chet’s conversation. The horse comes in to the tune of $900.00. At the time the story was set, 1969, that’s about $5,300.00 in our post-modern dollars.

Chet, a gambler, badly needs the cash to pay off markers. But when he goes to collect his winnings, he finds his bookie dead on the floor, his chest looking as if he’d been “hit with anti-aircraft guns.”

Though he hasn’t a clue whodunit, Chet finds himself in the middle of struggles among the cops, two rival gangs of thugs, and the dead bookie’s hottie sister. Abbie’s a card mechanic in Vegas. She has flown in from Las Vegas to avenge her brother’s murder, since she figures her cheating sister-in-law is the perp. Chet and Abbie have slapstick adventures while they avoid the bad guys and get to the bottom of the murder.

Readers looking for a comic-caper stand-alone mystery will be entertained by this novel. Since many chapters end with a cliffhanger, it keeps us readers turning the pages. Westlake is deft with twists and turns and creates interesting characters. He keeps the language simple, so this is extremely easy to read. Westlake is a master of the quip. For instance, Chet ruefully observes that impetuous Abbie has “all the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.” The author is firmly in the tradition of mystery writers poking genial fun at the conventions of mysteries.

I hadn’t read Westlake, whom fans remember fondly for his humor, since I was teenager during the Nixon administration. Clearly, I don’t read in the comic-crime genre much. The reason is that for me comedy, however refreshing witty or farcical or absurd, pales into the merely facetious over the course of a 250-page book. In a mystery, character, setting, plot and suspense have to trump burlesque and high jinks. Still, I liked this return to reading Westlake and will read another of his before another 40 years go by.

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The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Troubled parents call in PI Lew Archer on a runaway daughter case. An additional detail is that the girl and her unstable boyfriend have stolen pop’s shotgun and a few cartridges. Poking around, Archer finds evidence that the weapon has been turned into a sawed-off shotgun. Then a millionaire financier is kidnapped by the young ‘uns. Hey, it’s 1968 in the mystery, so maybe those crazy kids were influenced by the movie Bonnie & Clyde.

The distraught mother of the millionaire offers Archer $100K to get her son back in one piece. As usual, the more interviews Archer conducts, the more tangled the connections among the principals become, which may throw a less than attentive reader. The descriptions are intense and revealing. This, a poor duffer’s stuff:

I could recognize some of the things on sight: a broad-bladed fisherman’s knife to which a few old fish scales were clinging like dry tears, a marriage certificate with deep fold-marks cutting across it, a bundle of letters tied together with a brown shoestring, some rifle bullets and a silver dollar in a net sack, a small miner’s pick, a couple of ancient pipes, an ineffectual-looking rabbit’s foot, some clean folded underwear and socks, a glass ball that filled itself with a miniature snowstorm when you shook it, a peacock feather watching us with its eye, and an eagle’s claw.

Granted, the “dry tears” are over the top, but this gaffe is balanced by the “ineffectual-looking” good luck charm.

All the interview scenes are outstanding, but Macdonald writes brilliantly the interview in which a witness who’s been sitting on something coughs up crucial dope. Macdonald sets an especially rapid pace in this one.

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A Fragment of Fear by John Bingham

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

Mystery writer James Compton vacations in Italy in order to follow his doctor’s orders to rest. At Pompeii, the strangulation death of an elderly Englishwoman, Lucy Dawson, draws his attention as a subject for an article or story. During the course of his researches, he receives telephone calls in which a cultured voice urbanely warns him off. When Compton persists in his amateur sleuthing, the threats become more overt and frightening. Like Ruth Rendall writing as Barbara Vine, Bingham creates an atmosphere of menace.

Unlike the plucky amateurs in Eric Ambler or Andrew Garve’s novels, Compton is no match for the villains that want to stop his poking his proboscis into matters that don’t concern him. Bingham liked a little too much to explain behavior with so-called “national characteristics” so he has Compton, who tells the story in first-person, explain his stubbornness with “Irish bloody-mindedness and combativeness.” The irony, too, is that though Compton is a mystery writer, he can handle neither the bad guys nor the cops, who attribute his paranoia to the trauma of the car accident.

Like William Haggard’s gladiatorial arenas of board rooms, swanky clubs, and bureaus of espionage, Bingham’s world – that is, the Hobbesian state of nature — is fraught with danger. Bingham’s day job was, after, in counter-intelligence, where they are paid to anticipate the worst case threats to the realm. Near the end Bingham has Compton reflect, “the peasant is surrounded by more than he imagines. Behind the eyes which observe him are yet others, which observe those eyes in their turn, and behind the predators slithering in the undergrowth are yet others, stalking the predators …. We live in dangerous times. All one can do is to keep the spear ready…touch the amulet, and hope for the best, and trust that, as in my case, the tribe can after all protect not only the tribe but the individual.”

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Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout

Review by Matt B. (buffalosavage)

This mystery is the sixth in the Nero Wolfe series, first published in 1939. Like many Golden Age mysteries, it is rather long but it’s not “stamp your foot” too long like the first four (Fer-de-Lance, The League of Frightened Men, The Rubber Band and The Red Box).

The draw of Some Buried Caesar is that Lily Rowan makes her first appearance as Wolfe’s sidekick Archie’s love interest. Also, Wolfe has to leave the brownstone, which is always a treat for fans of the agoraphobic Wolfe. Archie and Wolfe are taking a road trip to fictitious Crowfield, NY where Wolfe is showing off orchids (his hobby) when they have a traffic accident. Archie and Wolfe end up in a paddock being chased by a bull. It’s pretty funny.

While the car is being repaired ($66.00, i.e. $1,100 in our 2016 money). He is hosted by the founder, Pratt (as in pratfall, to the word-loving Stout) of the fast food chain called Pratteria. The vulgarian’s plan is to barbeque a $45,000 ($755K now) prize bull, Hickory Caesar Grindon, as a publicity stunt. His neighbor abhors this plan and then hires Wolfe to find the killer of his son who was found dead, apparently gored by the bull.

As mentioned above, this novel never feels too long except in one place near the end when Archie is jailed by local cops as a material witness (I assume this novel was first serialized in a magazine, thus the pressure to spin things out). The incidents are consistently funny.

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HOT SEAL Rescue (HOT SEAL Team #3) by Lynn Raye Harris

Review by Cynthia F. (frazerc)

With a Lynn Raye Harris I expect several things:

* There are going to be a lot of hot, alpha guys with protective instincts [many of whom you’ve met in previous books] in the plot and the hero will be front and center.

* The heroine will be in jeopardy but NOT a shrinking violet or a whiner, she’ll be up front and doing her best – which is usually pretty damned good.

* There will be bad guys who deserve what they get.

* There are going to be a LOT of page turning action scenes, both in and out of the bedroom – scenes that keep you on the edge of your seat and up past your normal bedtime.

* There will be stubborn refusals to admit the truths of their relationships and emotional, heart-touching moments between the hero and heroine when the light finally dawns.

So how does HOT SEAL Rescue stack up? It nails every one of them.

Our hero is Cody “Cowboy” McCormick and the heroine is CIA agent Miranda Lockwood. Miranda ‘kidnaps’ our hero by sticking a gun in his side and he goes along with it because she looks like she’s in trouble. And she is, of course, and some of the trouble is caused by her decisions throughout the book. Trying to avoid spoilers here but there are blown covers, hot sex, deaths [faked and otherwise], CIA moles, differing agendas, hurt feelings, and a truly satisfying happily ever after.

Thank you Ms. Harris, it’s another winner. I loved it.

Note: Apparently an abbreviated version of this story appeared in the anthology SEALs of Summer 3. This is the full story.

HOT SEAL Team series

1: Hot SEAL

2: Hot SEAL Lover

3: HOT SEAL Rescue

And, of course, there’s the original Hostile Operations Team series:

Book 1: Hot Pursuit (Matt & Evie)

Book 2: Hot Mess (Sam & Georgie)

Book 3: Hot Package (Billy & Olivia)

Book 4: Dangerously Hot (Kev & Lucky)

Book 5: Hot Shot (Jack & Gina)

Book 6: Hot Rebel (Nick & Victoria)

Book 7: Hot Ice (Garrett & Grace)

Book 8: Hot & Bothered (Ryan & Emily)

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