I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, which is always a good time to catch up on my audiobooks. I’ve got a stack of great audiobooks that the good folks at Macmillan Audio sent me, and I’ve been putting them to good use.

I finished this novel sitting at home, warm and cozy with a cup of coffee — a great way to listen to a book about a blizzard. Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron is the story of Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. He’s been sent into exile, Down East, a remote outpost on the Canadian border. He’s lonely, frustrated, and not making friends. Game wardens aren’t popular with the hunters in the area, making it a very tough assignment.

Having dinner with the local veterinarian (what passes for his social life, these days), Bowditch is called to the cabin of a local couple. In a raging blizzard, a half-frozen man has appeared at their door, raving about another person, lost in the swirling snow. After a long, cold search they find the body — but it’s not the storm that did him in.

All in all, this is a good mystery. There are some holes and there are more than a few loose ends at the end. I like that about the story; nothing seems more fake than a tidy confession that wraps everything up in a bow. I found plenty of local color and enough talk of snow and ice to send me to the kitchen for a hot toddy. The mystery unfolds in fits and starts, as you’d expect. There’s danger, a little bad romance, and bad things happen to some dogs — and people.

My favorite character is Lucas, an odd little 12-year-old boy with coke-bottle glasses and the sort of bent outlook on life you’d expect, growing up in a family twisted by addiction and tragedy. His notebooks provide insight into the story and Bowditch’s affection for the boy puts them both in terrible danger.

The audio portion is excellent. The accents are wicked good and it’s easy enough to tell the characters apart. No distracting music and sound effects, just a good story, a competent reader (Henry Leyva) with voices and accents that fit the characters.

The problem with the book, for me, is Bowditch. What an idiot! He is constantly making the wrong choice, jumping to the wrong conclusion, and driving headfirst into brick walls. To begin with, I don’t have a lot of respect for guys who can’t keep it in their pants, and Bowditch knows he’s making a bad decision! Every step of the way, he tells himself it’s a bad idea and he does it anyway. The fact that things turn out okay in the end makes no difference. If he’s this thick in every book, I wouldn’t keep reading. Of course, that means I’ll need to check out a few more, just to be sure. The series includes The Poacher’s Son and Trespasser

My audiobook copy of Bad Little Falls was a review copy, provided free of charge.

Sometimes a book tells you things about the author. Douglas Nicholas is an award-winning poet, and some of that poetry seeps into his novel, Something Red. There is a certain lyrical quality to it that I appreciated, and I found that quite interesting, mixed as it was with a tale of murder and mayhem.

The story is told through the eyes of Hob (Robert), a 13-year-old orphan apprenticed to Molly (Maeve). a musical troupe crossing the Pennine Mountains of Northern England during a particularly brutal winter. Although the stop at many of their usual haunts, visiting old friends, there is clearly something lethal along the trail. There is an ominous presence in the forest and there are many who will not survive the journey. It may be that only Molly, her granddaughter, Nemain,  her lover, Jack, and young Hob will be able to save them all.

There is a bit of Irish mysticism in the story, and much about the past and future is told in hints and riddles. I had to work a bit on the language, as many of the words are obscure or regional. (Check out my Wondrous Words post on January 9, January 16 and January 23.) Maeve and Nemain have powers and there is something about Jack, something hinted at in the stories about his time on the Crusades and the horrible wounds he suffered. Hob, an orphan, was plucked from a small village where he had been cared for by the village priest; Maeve clearly saw something in him, and as Hob begins the transition to manhood, he comes into his own in this story.

I really enjoyed Something Red. I enjoyed the interactions among the troupe members and the story of life on the road, its hardships and friendships, was very interesting to me. What would it have been like to live on the road, performing for noblemen, trading your healing skills for food shelter? It’s a life modern people cannot imagine. It’s a suspenseful story, as you worry about the creature clearly stalking the travelers. Hob makes an excellent narrator — even though he spends his days walking along the trail, leading their ox, just trying to keep warm, he never seems to feel sorry for himself. Instead, he is filled with the wonder of a boy discovering life on the road, making friends, and seeing strange and glorious sights. He has Molly and Jack — and possibly Nemain — to protect him, but he does his part as well. His story kept me turning pages, racing towards the final confrontation.

My copy of Something Red was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Oh hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea.
– William Whiting

I start off every book wanting to love it. You don’t choose books to review because you think they’ll be bad. But sometimes they are.

Wilbur Smith’s Those in Peril would make a pretty decent spy novel. The problem is, he tries to make it more than that. He tries to add a romance that just doesn’t work; his female characters are painful to read. And there should be a law: that he never writes another sex scene. The other problem for me was that this was an audiobook, and the reader, Rupert Degas, did not enhance the experience of this book.

The story centers around Hector Cross, owner of Crossbow Security and his boss, Hazel Bannock. Hazel is the head of Bannock Oil; Crossbow provides security for their oilfields, shipyards and personnel, in dangerous Middle East locations. Hector is tough and worldly-wise. Hazel is beautiful and tough, worth millions, and absolutely devoted to her daughter, Cayla.

Cayla is a spoiled little bitch, and everyone but her mother can see it. She’s blowing off her college classes to spend her time in bed with her boyfriend, Rogier. While she is ensconced on the family’s luxury yacht, sailing off to visit her grandmother on her vineyard estate in Capetown, the yacht is overtaken by pirates and Cayla is kidnapped. There are no simple ransom demands, as this is no simple kidnapping.  There is far more involved here — and far more at stake — than Hector and Hazel realize.

Now, for the good stuff. The story is interesting, although it would have been better without the romance angle. The inside look at Middle Eastern pirates and radical Islamic blood feuds definitely makes an interesting read. There are some good plot twists that keep you going. However…

The female characters are terrible. Hazel Bannock does not sound like an oil company executive. Some of the things she says are so ridiculous, I literally groaned to hear them. No one addresses their college-age child by saying, “Oh, my darling daughter!” Does. Not. Happen. And the sex scenes? My god, they were painful to read. I felt bad for the Rupert Degas, the audiobook reader, for having to suffer through them.

I could have done without the detailed descriptions of torture that Smith keeps repeating. When the group is on the run and stumble upon an Islamic village where the residents are rounded up to watch the “public punishment,” I had to fast forward. There are also detailed rape scenes that were difficult to read (or listen to, in my case). Not for the faint of heart.

As for listening to it, this is one case where the audiobook doesn’t improve the story. Degas, the reader, does not do women’s voices well. Hazel sounds bad, but Cayla is even worse. I don’t know how you could hear her whiny little voice and not hate her.

All around, Those in Peril was not a good experience. I’ve got some brand new audiobooks from Macmillan Audio that I am planning to listening to on my drive to Detroit tomorrow (I am really looking forward to The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury!), so hopefully, I will have some better stuff to talk about really soon.

Father Night is the fourth book in Eric van Lustbader’s Jack McClure/Alli Carson series. These are spy novels with a bit of a supernatural twist. Jack McClure, Department of Defense special agent, has some curious abilities: he’s dyslexic, which has to be a detriment for an agent, but his unusual way of thinking lets him see things others miss.  He can solve puzzles that require thinking not just outside the box, but inside, outside, under, over and through the box. Occasionally, when things are particularly tough, he gets some help from his daughter, Emma.

Of course, Emma has been dead for a number of years, but she can still lend a helping hand from time to time.

The series has introduced a number of interesting characters: Dennis Paull, the Secretary of Defense; Edward Carson, President of the United States and his very scary brother, Henry Holt Carson; Caro, the heartless hacker; Nona Heroe,  dedicated police officer; Morgan Herr, who once kidnapped Alli Carson and tortured her; Werner Waxman, psychopath. There s a large, complex plot that has been building over the course of these four novels, and he’s not finished yet. From Moscow to Rome to Washington, puppets and puppeteers play their parts and most of these players are not who — or what — they seem.

There is less of a supernatural element in this book, and I generally think that’s a good thing. McClure’s chats with Emma can be illuminating, but it’s a device that could over-used very easily. Jack’s bond with Alli has grown over the course of the series, but Alli is less dependent on him, while Jack recognizes her strength. Jack has fallen in love with Annika Dementiev, who is a hot-blooded woman, a cold-blooded killer, and has motives that even Jack’s puzzle-solving skills can’t unravel. She’s an interesting character — they’re all interesting characters — and this book takes her in a direction I did not expect.

Like any good spy novel, this is 2 parts totally believable and 1 part completely preposterous. You want to believe that there couldn’t possibly be these sorts of cover-ups, secret brotherhoods and decades-old conspiracies operating in our government…but you can’t be totally sure about that. Each book — First Daughter, Last Snow, Blood Trust and now Father Night – has built on a crazy conspiracy theory involving Cold War legends, Nazi war criminals, billions of dollars in hidden cash, and the legacy of two powerful men: Henry Holt Carson and Dyadya Gourdjiev. Their descendants are left to finish the game, and even four books in, I can’t be sure where the next book will lead us.

If you like spy novels, this is definitely a series to check out from the very beginning. My copy of Father Night was a review copy, provided free of charge.  For more about the books, check out the author’s website, EricvanLustbader.com

I wanted to read Buried on Avenue B as soon as I read the premise:

When a home health attendant, Paulette Williamson, appears at Homicide South in Manhattan, she’s introduced to the NYPD’s Detective Darlene O’Hara and skeptically reports the confession of a senior citizen struggling with Alzheimer’s. Gus Henderson, a former junkie and petty criminal, claims he murdered and buried his former partner-in-crime in a park off Avenue B more than a decade ago, a lowlife who fell off the grid and hasn’t been seen since. The city agrees to excavate the alleged scene of the crime, and the police find a body—just not the one they were looking for. The cops unearth the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, neatly dressed and buried ceremoniously with a comic book, a CD, some pot, and booze.

There has to be a great story there! And it turns out, there is. Darlene O’Hara is a great character. She’s got so much spunk and such an interesting life! I love the way she jumps into promoting her son’s band, the way she takes off on a Florida road trip with a tattooed lesbian detective in a hot car and the logical leaps she makes are pretty amazing. She’s a fun character and definitely one that will keep me reading the series.

The story was a little far-fetched, but that didn’t stop me from really enjoying it. This is the sort of mystery where nothing comes easily, and answers have to be ferreted out. Darlene’s ability to think her way around a problem and come at it from all sides really serves her well. She talked her chief into investigating this little mystery because it seemed like a slam-dunk; now, she has to solve it. Or else.

I also want to recommend an earlier book by Peter de Jonge that I read, Shadows Still Remain. I was sure that I reviewed this, but apparently not. Gonna have to correct that soon.

My copy of Buried on Avenue B was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

When I received the offer from the folks at Galaxy Press, I was a little reluctant. Great writing isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name L. Ron Hubbard. But the audiobooks sounded like fun and I love old science fiction, so I figured I would give it a try.

The books are a hoot! This is cheesy, old-school adventure writing. The characters and dialogue are so old-fashioned and over-the-top that the stories are unintentionally hilarious. Add in some dramatic music and sound effects, and you’ve got the audiobook equivalent of those Saturday afternoon movie shows. The writing is so florid, it should be printed on purple paper:

Rising to a crescendo of stark horror, a scream of death hacked through the gaiety of the night. It came from the sideshows, from directly beneath the lurid banner that depicted ferocious African headhunters at their feasting.

In spite of the babble of the pelasure-seeking carnival crowd, the sound lingered eerily for an instant

Gaming wheel stopped their monotonous whirring. Faces in the crowd grew blank and then frightened

The hardened barkers whirled in their stands and then stared.

The gay ferris wheel stopped, its motor coughing and spitting in idleness

Grifter and rube alike, they all seemed to know that death stalked upon the midway

Seven stands away from the lurid banner, Bob Clark, Carnival Detective, paused for a second, held by the seeping terror of the shriek. Into his steel-colored eyes came a look of certainty. Then, before the crowd had recovered from that first shock, Bob Clark began to run.

Imagine it in the most melodramatic voice you can imagine, and you’ve got The Carnival of Death.

My Stories from the Golden Age collection included The Carnival of Death, Spy Killer, Under the Black Ensign and False Cargo. The stories are full of action and adventure, manly heroes and beautiful damsels in distress. They are also full of racial and ethnic stereotypes that would put an author out of business today. It’s the sort of casual bigotry you often find in old novels — not particularly distressing, if you understand it as a function of the era, but definitely something you would want to discuss with younger listeners.

These audiobooks would be great for a road trip. They’re short — only about 2 hours each — and entertaining without taking your attention away from the road.  These special audiobook collections can be ordered from Galaxy Press. My collection was provided free of charge for review.

This is a tough review to write. The Code, by sportswriter G.B. Joyce, has a lot of things that I love — a good mystery, a flawed hero, and a bit of action. But it is all somehow a bit awkward.

First, the story: Brad Shade is a former hockey player with a sad-luck story, now a scout for the team in L.A. While scouting a particularly hot young prospect, a beloved coach and team doctor are brutally murdered, and while Shade isn’t a suspect or even a witness, his scouting duties keep leading him back around to the investigation. To get the story on his prospect, he may have to solve the murder.

For the most part, I enjoyed the mystery, although it’s a little slow to get started. For the first 150-200 pages, the murder is peripheral — Shade isn’t even questioned by the police — it sort of lurks in the background, and while the scouting stuff was interesting, it wasn’t riveting. But the story keeps circling back, the murder always in the background, the questions surrounding the deaths always kind of caught up in the questions surrounding Billy Mays Jr., the hot prospect, always on the back burner. The story builds to a showdown on the floor of the NHL draft that is worthy of any courtroom drama.

I did have some problems with the book. First, the jargon. Insider jargon can be a great tool. It can make people feel like part of the club, people in the know, sharing the little inside jokes and shortcuts, but that only works if they understand it, if you provide some context. I shouldn’t have to go to Wikipedia to figure out what a major junior is. Early on, I got frustrated and called up my Secret Hockey Source (also a professional sports writer/editor who knows a LOT about hockey), to get a few questions answered. Unless you want your only readers to be hockey fans, you need to give them some explanation of why a 17 year old kid is playing on a team alongside a Russian professional player. (The answer: major junior leagues are a bit like baseball minor leagues and the traveling soccer teams you see in the US. More than a high school team, but not quite the pros.) Shade makes several references to his “old friend Arthur” before I figured out he was talking about his arthritis. (I couldn’t find anyone who had heard that nickname in years.) Instead of letting the jargon bring me into the story, it made me feel excluded.

The other thing I really had a problem with: the title. I hate titles that seem to come out of nowhere, and this one really did. Late in the book, a sportscaster made a reference to The Code (basically, the unwritten code regarding player conduct on the ice) but it still doesn’t tie into the story for me. Not only that, it’s a title that’s been used before. When I was chatting with my Secret Hockey Source, she originally thought I was talking about The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the NHL; she couldn’t figure out why I thought it was so “mysterious.” Using the title of another well-known book is kind of a no-no, especially one so close to your subject matter.

Overall, not a bad book. I was interested in the snapshot of life as a hockey scout, and that’s far more the focus of the book than the murder. The murders are a side note — Shade was not really involved in the investigation, except as it concerned the player he was scouting. He doesn’t set out to solve the murders, and you don’t get the feeling he would care one way or the other, if it wasn’t for the fact that his team is going to invest millions in this player. It’s a fun book for hockey fans (and if you aren’t a fan, it helps to have a Secret Hockey Source, for when you get stuck). I wouldn’t be opposed to giving Joyce’s fiction one more try, but I hope next time around he’s more invested in the actual mystery.

My copy of The Code is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Shake Bouchon was livin’ the dream.

For years, he’d been a wheelman for the Armenian mob, but he’d gotten away clean. He bought restaurant on the beach in Belize, where he hoped to start fresh. The location was postcard-perfect, sea breezes and tiki torches and tourists with credit cards. Should have been everything he needed for a perfect retirement in Lou Berney’s Whiplash River.

Unfortunately, the dream has a mortgage. Shake owes an arm and a leg and possibly other vital organs to a local gangster named Baby Jesus. Business at the restaurant has taken a turn for the worse and Baby Jesus is always lurking in the background, looking to collect. When Shake thwarts what looks like a professional hit on an elderly patron, things get really weird.

Shake’s biggest problem is a beautiful FBI agent named Evelyn Holly. She has big plans, plans to bring down the Armenian mob and she thinks Shake can give her the inside intel to do it. She’s ruthless; she doesn’t care if Shake doesn’t want to cooperate. Evelyn is perfectly capable of blackmailing him, putting him in danger, anything that will force his hand, but she isn’t the only one looking for him.

This is one of the books I read in Key West and it was a treat. Plenty of action, lots of plot twists, a little romance — great beach book, or maybe a book to read when you wish you were on a beach. Great fun.

My copy of Whiplash River was a review copy, provided free of charge.

Yesterday, I reviewed 1222 by Anne Holt, the first book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. Blind Goddess jumps back in time, back before the shooting the left Hanne in a wheelchair. This gives us more background on Hanne and what she was like as a detective, before she became the bitter woman we met in the first book.

There’s an interesting mystery at the heart of this, though I admit I got a little mired down in the middle. A drug dealer is found battered to death in a part. A deranged man, covered in blood, is found wandering in the middle of downtown Oslo. He insists on having Karen Borg as his court-appointed attorney — the same woman who discovered the battered body of the man he apparently killed. And then things get really strange.

There is clearly a conspiracy here. Borg is not a criminal lawyer, but the suspect still insists on having her help. The case attracts the attention of a variety of characters, including other attorneys who seem very insistent on being allowed to represent the accused killer. Throw in the rumors that the narcotics squad has been investigating about a drug ring run by lawyers, and you’ve got a lot of potential.

I did not enjoy Blind Goddess as much as I did 1222. The story seems a little more forced, even though there are a lot of good aspects to the puzzle the detectives are working on. The romance angle was unnecessary and seemed out of character to me. Still, it is interesting to get a look at Hanne’s past. I am curious about how the rest of the series will work — where in the timeline new stories will fall. I am definitely going to give the next one a chance.

My copy of Blind Goddess came from my personal library.

The first thing I thought when I read the blurb for 1222 was, “Oh! It’s a Norwegian And Then There Were None.” I love a good mystery, and a good locked room mystery? Even more fun. Put that locked room in a snowed-in resort high in the mountains? Love it.

The interesting thing about this is that Anne Holt’s detective, Hanne Wilhelmsen, is about as unpleasant a main character as you have read lately. She has good reason to be cranky — she’s been injured in a train wreck, she can’t get around the resort all that easily in her wheelchair, people keep turning up dead and the folks in charge expect her to help. Hanne doesn’t feel like helping. She left the police force after the shooting that left her disabled and she has been something of a hermit since then. Now, she has no choice but to lend a hand, whether she wants to or not.

I hated Hanne for the first few chapters! She kind of grows on you, especially as you find out more and more about her backstory. She takes a young man under her wing, Adrian, who might be a runaway. She struggles with her limited mobility in a very difficult situation. She is churlish and rude and yet people still seek her out. She’s going to be a very interesting character.

In terms of the mystery – I really enjoyed it. Plenty of plot twists, plenty of misdirection, and characters to both love and hate. It’s a variety of locked room mystery — they are stranded in a remote cabin, no way in or out, so the murderer must be among them, right? I don’t want to give anything away, but let’s just say that they may not know everything about the resort and their fellow passengers.

This is the first in Anne Holt’s Hanne Wilhelmsen series. The next book, Blind Goddess, goes back in time to before Hanne’s injury, and it will be interesting to see how it proceeds in terms of time line. Just what I needed: another mystery series to follow.

My copy of 1222 is a review copy, provided free of charge.