Tag Archives: fiction

By the Rivers of Babylon by Nelson DeMille (1978) – BR00014 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
February 18 2001

Plot or Premise

Peace in the Middle East is almost assured and two Concordes fly to New York with delegates for final negotiations. Terrorists try to derail the peace conference by planting bombs on board and taking the passengers hostage. After one plane is destroyed, killing all on board, the second plane is forced to land near Babylon. At the last minute, the hostages manage to escape to the top of a small hill from which they attempt to defend against the terrorists through several days of sorties, knowing that the military probably doesn’t know where they are and therefore can’t swoop in and rescue them.

What I Liked

Long before there was Clancy, there was DeMille. This book takes the international realm and stands it on its ear — there are (excruciating) details of the relations between the characters on both sides of the peace conference who are forced to work together to fight the terrorists. In addition, the battle tactics are first-rate, the writing is almost perfect, and the story is superb as the “hostages” fight in small groups with every weapon they have — gas bombs from the plane’s fuel tanks, sounds from a war movie blasted over speakers to simulate larger weaponry, etc.

What I Didn’t Like

There are a LOT of characters at the start of this book and it is hard to keep track of them all. Up until the end, there are too many small sub-plots — some are good, and necessary to flesh out the experience, but not all of them. There are fewer characters by the end though and it helps speed up the plotting. However, the ending is a little over-the-top, resembling a scene from a Die Hard movie more than keeping with the slightly more realistic tone of the rest of the book. As well, there is a meeting between the hostage-leaders and the terrorist-leader that is absolutely surreal. The likelihood of both parties treating it like a military battle with truces, etc., is virtually nil but it was at least interesting to read.

The Bottom Line

DeMille is the master of the game.

The House on Mulberry Street by Maan Meyers (1996) – BR00012 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
February 18 2001

Plot or Premise

Esther Breslau is a Jewish immigrant who has found a job working as a photographer in the graft-filled world of 1895 Manhattan. John Tonnerman is an honest cop, a rare commodity on a police-force filled with those on the take and in a city where your innocence depends on the size of your pocketbook. Esther takes a picture during a riot and the thugs notice and come after her. A reporter she has been working with has the plates but the thugs worry about what he knows and take matters into their own hands to silence him forever. John and Esther try to figure it all out.

What I Liked

The research was impeccable, and the epilogue is a nice touch to separate fact from fiction. The writing is first-rate and the settings are alive with the time. Each image portrays the world of the time, and the reader is transported easily with each page.

What I Didn’t Like

A couple of small nit-picky points — there are a lot of characters, which can be a problem to track in mystery stories, but they are sufficiently different here that they don’t run together as much. A few of the characters (such as the reporter) were fleshed out a little TOO much, but I’m assuming part of that was with a view to them showing up in future stories too.

The Bottom Line

One of the best historical mysteries I have read.

Hit Man by Lawrence Block (1998) – BR00015 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
February 18 2001

Plot or Premise

Keller is a hitman. The contracts come from White Plains, from an unseen man upstairs and the man’s assistant named Dot. He gets the jobs and he does them. A pro…no mistakes. Life is good. And every time Keller goes to a new town, he gets real estate agents to show him houses he’ll never buy. Then he kills the target and goes home. And goes to therapy, gets a dog, gets a girlfriend, meets an agent from the government, and generally cruises through life piling up bodies. But there are always little problems — like the man who hires him through a front and then neglects to pay the second half. Or the two rivals who both hire Keller to kill the other and he has to choose which one. Or the three “innocents” that the government has him kill. In the end, he decides to retire. And find a hobby. And even that doesn’t work out as planned.

What I Liked

The character is interesting and business-like. He has trouble killing a man he likes because he knows the man is waiting for it and Keller had saved his grandson from drowning, so he is somewhat conflicted. And the search for explanations about his life and his past are at once both deep and superficial — deep questions that Keller can turn away from any time he wants and simply shrug. And mean it. On the lighter side, he uses various identities when he travels, identities of real people. So, just for fun, he occasionally calls the wives from the hotel he is staying in so that when the couple complains to American Express that they weren’t there, the call appears to be from them to their own home, just to mess with them. But then he feels guilty, so he sends the wife flowers from the husband – charged to the husband’s card, of course. And his depictions of some places in New York City were a nice “”homecoming”” since I was there a while ago and know all too well the places he was describing. Favourite lines:

  • “Keller, what difference does it make how Lyman Crowder pronounces his last name?” “I just wondered.” “Well, stick around for the funeral. See what the minister says.”
  • There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and he was one of them.
  • “He had killed a thousand miles to ride a woman he’d never met” (A deliberate misquote of a Louis L’Amour advertisement: “He rode a million miles to kill a man he’d never met”).
  • It was an unusual experience for him to travel under his own name and use his own credit cards. He sort of liked it, but felt exposed and vulnerable. Signing it at the restored downtown hotel, he wrote down not only his own name but his own address as well. Who heard of such a thing?

What I Didn’t Like

Some of the chapters seem somewhat disjointed, which is likely a reflection of the fact that many of the chapters appeared “as is” in magazines as short stories. The only other complaint is that in a couple of places the story jumps back to New York City a little too fast and the reader is left wondering exactly what happened and how he killed the target. Particularly for the guy who initially stiffs Keller on the second half of his fee — there is no explanation as to whether Keller kills him or not. He plans it but then has to go back to New York City suddenly. No explanation. A good set of stories overall, although it’s hard to get into the character since the character is presented as rather cold and superficial. Almost like a description of someone’s life in the past, it’s hard to feel tension or great interest in the day-to-day happenings.

Disclosure

I am not personal friends with the author, but I have interacted with them briefly on social media.

The Bottom Line

Maybe you’ve met a hitman and didn’t know it.

Deathright by Dev Stryker (1993) – BR00006 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
January 21 2001

Plot or Premise

Amelia Pearce has a normal enough life, but with a soon-to-be ex-lover, she heads home to her parent’s house to heal her ego and ease the transition. However, she finds her life shattered by the truth about her father — he is not a simple journalist, but an operative for “The Network”, an ultra-secret organization of operatives on loan from the major intelligence agencies of the various countries with one goal: combat terrorism. It’s like James Bond and his counterparts working for Interpol, with only one person knowing all the agents. The father is killed by an assassin, as is Amelia’s mother, but Amelia manages to escape and starts using all the skills her father taught her as a child (through a long-running series of “survival” games).

What I Liked

The book was written by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran, two of my favourite authors whether they use their own names or the “Dev Stryker” nom-de-plume. So, the style, the dialogue, the plot tools…all are superb, but I’m a little biased. This book is also unique in the field — the main character (Amelia) doesn’t even make an appearance until several chapters into the book. And seemingly-major characters keep getting killed off! There are not a whole lot of people left by the end of the book, so it becomes somewhat easier to follow. And killing off major characters does keep the reader guessing all the way through.

What I Didn’t Like

The bad guys are mostly one-dimensional except for the assassin, with the plot revolving around plans for Libyan terrorists to poison the water supply of America. And Amelia has the added problem that she can’t seem to trust anyone, even the head of the Network. Yet as much as I liked the writing, and as much as I liked the plot twists with the death of major characters, it made it very hard to care about some of the characters — why bother if they are killed off halfway through the book? As I said above, Amelia is the main character but doesn’t appear until several chapters into the book. Her father seemed to be the main character for the first few chapters, and then he dies. Four other key characters bite the dust before the end of the book too, nicely spread out through the book so you lose a character every couple of chapters. Too bad if you care about one…but after the first two check out, it’s hard to keep your interest.

After the death of the father, you find out that Amelia isn’t quite the helpless person she is initially portrayed as, because her father taught her survival skills — and yet she never wondered about her father? She always wrote him off as a small CIA bureaucrat or journalist, yet in the next breath talks about him with almost superhuman qualities? The collaboration between Murphy and Cochran is usually excellent — in this book, it reads more like they disagreed about the characters and maybe wrote chapters on their own. Kind of like the classic writing game where one person writes one chapter with twists and turns, and then asks the next person to pull the next chapter together, mesh the various elements, and give their own spin to it.

The Bottom Line

Too many plot twists, too many deaths.

End Game by Dev Stryker (1994) – BR00008 (2001) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
January 21 2001

Plot or Premise

A body is found with the letter “P” carved into its forehead. P stands for pawn, and it is dumped in upper Manhattan, using the streets as a chessboard. The Knight and Bishop follow. And the chess game begins.

Inspector Regal has been chosen by the killer to play the game, which he does through moves placed in the New York Times. As long as the game is interesting, no more bodies. But Regal is not a very good chess player, the game becomes dull for the killer, and another body appears. But Regal has an ace in the hole: a retired master player named Billy Abbott who left the chess world behind and disappeared before it took over his life. Abbott tells Regal the moves to make the game interesting, and for a while, he does — even turning the game around and winning. But having Regal win the game is not the object of the killer who targets Regal personally.

A series of sub-plots involve a cop working for Regal who had been killed during the line of duty while hunting down Panamanian drug runners, and a female cop who loved him and wants justice; a political side with Regal butting heads with his departmental rival who is in charge of both investigations; and a personal side, with Regal suspecting his wife of having an affair with a power mogul. This is the second “Dev Strkyer” novel, a nom-de-plume for Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran.

What I Liked

I love Murphy and Cochran’s work, and this one is no exception. Well-written, the chess strategies are well-mixed, and the story moves along fast enough with a lot of sub-plots mixed in to keep life interesting when the bodies are on hold. Even the political manouevering is interesting. The ending, although pat, is not a typical “everybody lives happily ever after” finish.

What I Didn’t Like

The climax is too pat, and too action-oriented rather than detection-based. I knew who the killer was long before they were revealed, and I’m not even sure why the authors chose to reveal the killer when they did, other than the realization perhaps that the reader already knows by then so the mystery is really gone. The only question was when and where they were going to be caught, if at all. As well, Stryker doesn’t really play fair with the reader at the start in terms of the depiction of the killer, but I still figured it out before the end despite the intentional misdirection.

The Bottom Line

You’ll never look at chess as boring again.