“There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads. This is one of them. – Robert James Waller
And so begins a story that you will never forget. . .”
– inside book-leaf, 1992

The Clockwork Wolf by Lynn Viehl

Review by reacherfan1909

There is quite a lot of Paranormal Steampunk on the market these days, Gail Carriger being one of the most unique voices of the genre.  More than a few authors have gone the route of turning historical or famous literary figures into vampire and zombie hunters – including Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln.  The genre is popular with authors and readers alike.  Readers like Steampunk because they have a semi-familiar setting, usually in the later half of the 1800’s to early 1900’s, and a historical context that’s slightly twisted yet remains recognizable, not unlike contemporary UF, so they don’t have to imagine the entire world.  Authors like it because their landscape and history is partially set and the reader can just mentally paint in the modifications as the author refines it.  Historical errors can be dismissed, as can technology unsuited for the time, some of which is quite ‘fantastical’.    The other advantage is the existence of magic, and/or least legendary creatures, like werewolves, zombies, and vampires.  And it is the existence of magic combined with various bits of technology that Lynn Viehl uses in her Disenchanted & Co books.

The Clockwork Wolf, the second book in the Disenchanted & Co series, came out just a few weeks after publication of her first book, which was, in turn was compiled from a series the author had e-published under the Disenchanted & Co label.  Disenchanted & Co falls a category that is part mystery, part romance, and part thriller all with a magical twist.  Unlike the uniquely stylized florid prose of Carriger, Viehl’s is cleaner and leaner, yet manages to convey the period she wants.  In Disenchanted & Co, she laid the basic world building, so The Clockwork Wolf presumes the reader knows the general history of the place.  The US is still an English colony called Victoriana, or Toriana for short, having lost the Revolution.  Mages exist side by side with inventors.  The political structure remains one that is largely British with Lords and Ladies.  The city of Rumsen seems to be San Francisco, or a similar local.

Charmaine ‘Kit” Kittredge is unique.  Her gift is the ability to undo magic, except the magic of Deathmage Lucian Dredmore, a darkly handsome man who has made his interest in her quite clear.  But Kit is an independent female and not anxious to be bound by society, especially a society that made her life hell when she arrived in the city as teen orphan.  Against her better judgment, she gained some fame among upper crust when she saved the city from an invasion.  Now she is back in Dredmore’s house awaiting another client from society, the vey group she strives to avoid.

Lady Eugenia Bestly made Kit’s life hell and now she needs her talents, talents Kit is disinclined to use on behalf of someone who saw a harmless girl tossed to the mercy of the streets.  In the end, she grudgingly agrees to help and stumbles over yet another monstrous conspiracy to destroy the city, this time using clockwork wolfmen, wolfmen that are all part of high society and have systematically impregnated females to bear their off-spring.

With the help of her Grandfather Harry’s spirit – who is really an immortal Aramanthan spirit known to humans at one time as Merlin – and a Native American shaman Blue Fox, Kit unravels the plot, though some will still pay the price.

Ms Viehl does a nice job of creating the wolfmen, a combination of gears and native magic, but what is somewhat lacking in any depth on feeling in her relations with people.  As a result, Kit feels a bit 2 dimensional as a character and the author seems more at home with problem solving and adventure than with interpersonal relationships, especially love interests.  The plot is well paced and interesting.  Kit is independent and adventurous, in addition to being intelligent and insightful.  But both character and author stumble over any real emotions.  It makes the sex a bit lifeless.

Overall, The Clockwork Wolf fell a bit short of fulfilling the promise of Disenchanted & Co.  Still, despite its shortcomings, it remains a very good read.  The dialogue is fast and often witty, Kit is a strong protagonist, and the plot holds the reader and helps cover the flaws.  It gets a B- (3.8*) rating from me and is a good addition to the series.

Recommend in addition or instead – Lauren Dane’s Witch’s Knot, de la Vega Cats, Cascadia Wolves, and Bound by Magic series, Kalayna Price’s Alex Craft series, or Jenn Bennet’s  Acadia Bell series.

The Red Box by Rex Stout

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In the fourth novel starring rotund PI Nero Wolfe, three poisoning deaths bestir the immovable orchid fancier and gourmet to solve the case with the assistance of his PA Archie Goodwin and operatives Saul, Frank, and Orrie. The pace moves much faster in this one compared to the longer Fer-de-Lance and the decidedly sluggish The League of Frightened Men (which I feared was never going to end).

Stout has but meager skill in describing so readers have to be patient with the vague depiction of the fashion house at the beginning. But this lack is balanced by many quips and quotable asides. Archie’s down to earth pragmatism comes out often. “…I’m a great one for the obvious, because it saves a lot of fiddling around….” And “…As I understand it, a born executive is a guy who, when anything unexpected happens, yells for somebody else to come and help him.”

Plus, how a reader wishes our leaders read Stout so they could have thought about Archie’s sensible view of torture:

They [the cops] had Gebert down there, slapping him around and squealing and yelling at him. If you’re so sure violence is inferior technique, you should have seen that exhibition; it was wonderful. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you had done it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it.

Who says mysteries are just escapist genre fiction? The roots of the murder in The Red Box are as ghastly but plausible as in a Maigret novel by Simenon with the theme How Families Get Balled Up.

Wolfe, however, gets the best of the best lines. He loftily scolds a mouthy client, “…I know you are young, and your training has left vacant lots in your brain.” Touching on a theme dear to his fans, he chides Archie, “Someday, Archie, I shall be constrained … but no. I cannot remake the universe, and must therefore put up with this one. What is, is, including you.” He says with tongue firmly in cheek, “Nothing is more admirable than the fortitude with which millionaires tolerate the disadvantages of their wealth.” But he gets right to the pith of human relations with “The central fact about any man, in respect to his activities as a social animal, is his attitude toward women.”

I don’t read Nero novels in any kind of order so I don’t think other readers have to either. One critic said, “Stout’s material succeeds on general mood alone.” I’d agree –  it’s the characters, humor, and the fantasy nostalgia of old Manhattan  that make this one a classic Nero novel.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

By Mirah W. (mwelday)

My book club’s most recent selection, The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, was an emotional, inspiring, frightening and personal read for me.

The Cellist of Sarajevo covers days of the Bosnian War from the perspective of four characters: the cellist (unnamed), Arrow, Kenan and Dragan.  The character of the cellist was based on a real cellist who played at the site of a mortar attack that killed 22 people waiting in line to buy bread. The cellist goes into the street (amidst gunfire, mortar attacks, curious bystanders and mourners) every day for 22 days following the attack to play his cello in memory of his fallen neighbors.

How does war create different responses in different people?  How does one person decide to pick up a weapon, another decide to pick up water bottles for a neighbor and someone else to pick up his cello? This novel examines all of these questions.  For the people of Sarajevo, the cellist’s playing comes to mean different things as they come to accept their war-torn city and how they want to live during a terrible time.

On its own I think this novel would have given me pause to think about how circumstances can affect people, but it was more than that.  Reading this novel was like putting a microscope to a situation and gaining a deeper understanding.  Here’s why it was such a special read for me: a few years ago I became a sponsor sister with Women for Women International, an organization which strives to help women survivors of war, and my first sister was from Bosnia & Herzegovina, the country depicted in The Cellist of Sarajevo.  Aldina was my sponsorship sister for one year and during that year we exchanged letters and pictures.  I told her about my life and she told me of hers.  We grew very close and we’ve remained in contact since.  I can tell in her messages how important being a part of Women for Women was for her and how much she cherishes my friendship and support.

The war ended in 1995 but Bosnia & Herzegovina is still struggling.  During the war, 60% of all homes were bombed and 60% of the livestock were killed.  Even today leftover landmines make farming dangerous and very difficult.  Today almost 33% of women are unemployed and, in an area trying to rebuild from catastrophe, this statistic makes women vulnerable to becoming victims of trafficking and prostitution. I knew statistics like this before I even heard of this book but  reading it made all of these statistics feel even more real to me.

The Bosnia in the novel is the Bosnia my sister Aldina had to live through.  The thought of it makes my heart ache.  I joined Women for Women so I could make some difference to someone. I think the cellist might have played in the street for a similar reason:  just to know he was making a difference during a time that seemed so bleak. Through Aldina’s letters I know I was able to help her more than I could have imagined; and, in turn, she opened my eyes to a world outside of my own. Aldina gained hope things in her life could improve and learned there were caring people in the world and I learned even the smallest gestures can seem immense to someone else if they are done with a caring heart. There is no way to know how the real cellist this novel is based on affected the people of Sarajevo.  Perhaps he gave them a renewed sense of humanity or hope. Regardless of where we live and what language we speak, hope is something we all understand.  For me, The Cellist of Sarajevo is about having hope we can overcome tragedy.

Bury Me Deep by Harold Q. Masur

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Woo-hoo, it’s a humdinger of an opening scene. Returning from a business trip in Florida, lawyer Scott Jordan enters his New York City apartment. On his couch he finds a scantily-clad blonde, listening to his radio and sipping brandy from snifter. But Scott smells a rat and bundles the boozy beauty into a taxi. The honey turns up dead, embroiling Scott with iffy lawyers, snarky cops, dense bully boys, a rich girl that wants to be a Broadway star and her sleazy singing coach, a drunken bon vivant and his angry wife, a smooth villain, and a snow bunny. Scott also finds the love of his life. As if the cast of scores was not enough to grab and hold our interest, the episodic action includes poisoning, a fatal car accident, shootings, and assorted fisticuffs.

A contemporary critic summed up this novel with this telegram of a review, “Fast and tough by rote but played so effectively that it slips past the eyes.” This is true. Like a noir movie from the same period, this mystery is simultaneously realistic and implausible. The hard-boiled characters strike familiar poses and their capers are pretty zany. The reader gets the feeling that in this first novel, the writer is jamming in every character and plot twist he can think of, in the most shiny prose possible. It’s appealing as a glittering, fast-moving story. I won’t remember it after a month.

Probably because I read two novels by Raymond Chandler before this one, I felt Chandler’s influence on Masur. For example, Masur takes up Chandler-like dazzling expressions  – “Broadway had pulsed into neon-glaring night life. Swollen throngs milled restlessly with a rapacious appetite for pleasure. Box-office windows spawned long queues, and the traffic din was a steady roar in your ears.”

Released in the same year as the notorious I, The Jury, this best-selling novel is regarded as “a cut above many of the American detective novels churned out at the end of the Second World War.”  Masur later wrote nine mysteries starring lawyer Scott Jordan. Masur once described Jordan: “The series character, Scott Jordan, a New York attorney, was first conceived to fall somewhere between Perry Mason and Archie Goodwin . . . with the dash and insouciance of Rex Stout’s Archie.” Therefore, readers that like the novels of Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner would like Masur’s work.

The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This inverted mystery was made into two movies, The Big Clock in 1946 and No Way Out in 1987. It was a best-seller when it was released in 1946 and has morphed into a cult classic since the late Forties, so the New York Review of Books published it in 2006 as one of its well-regarded re-issues.

I don’t want to risk spoiling this unique noir mystery with a plot description. Suffice to say, this “whodunit in reverse” provides plenty of surprising plot twists. What really sets this novel apart is the mild satire of corporate conformity. In the late Forties and early Fifties many social critics, malcontents, and beatniks were expressing their distaste for the Organization Man. Fearing gets in his whacks, as a character describes the ideal writer for Futureways, a take-off on a Time-Life type of weekly magazine:

First place, you’ve got to believe you’re shaping something. Destiny, for example. And then you’d better not do anything to attract attention to yourself. It’s fatal to come up with a new idea, for instance, and it’s fatal not to have any at all, see what I mean? And above all, it’s dangerous to turn in a piece of finished copy. Everything has to be serious, and pending. Understand?

Another interesting theme is existentialism, another intellectual fad after WWII. The narrator of most of the chapters is George Stroud. Like a character in a Simenon novel set in the Fifties, he leads a routine tepid existence, not stunted but not contented either. Rejecting the illusion that life gives a “big prize,” he thinks, “The big clock ran everywhere, overlooked no one, omitted no one, forgot nothing, remembered nothing, knew nothing. Was nothing. “ Wanting to beat the big clock, he takes the usual Simenon way out by having an affair. When his adventuress-mistress is murdered, George finds himself facing that darn old hostile universe.

This is an excellent novel that I’d recommend to any reader into vintage mysteries.