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Extreme Justice by William Bernhardt (1998) – BR00078 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 10 1999

Plot or Premise

In the seventh in the series, lawyer Ben Kincaid has become disillusioned so he runs away from the law and takes up jazz music full-time. When a body shows up on stage (literally falling on Ben), Ben has to step up as a lawyer again to save the owner of the club who has been framed for the murder. Working against the owner and against Ben is the fact that the owner served time for the murder of someone else from the old days, a friend of the owner — and an old friend of the new victim! A few too many links and the police think they have their man. Ben wants to see justice done, but his return to the law is only temporary, supposedly.

What I Liked

The story-telling is first-rate, and the mystery aspects of it become almost secondary. Loving, Jones and Christina are all back on the scene, and you get to see one sub-mystery involving Christina.

What I Didn’t Like

Everyone is impatient with Ben and keeps telling him to wake up and realize who he is (a lawyer, not a jazz music) and the constant angst grates on the nerves. Loving and Jones don’t have much to do, and Christina’s mystery drops several GIANT clues that Ben doesn’t see. The ending reads more like an action / movie ending, and all three of the sub-mysteries are easily figured out by the reader well before they are unveiled in the story.

The Bottom Line

Stronger story-telling than mystery.

N is for Noose by Sue Grafton (1998) – BR00077 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
October 10 1999

Plot or Premise

Kinsey Milhone takes a case in a small town. Dead is a cop, apparently of a heart attack. But his wife, unloved by the community and perhaps deservedly so, knows that something had been bothering her husband before he died, and now she wants to know what, for her own peace of mind. So she hires Kinsey to find out what was going on, but not everyone shares the wife’s desire to know. Kinsey finds out relatively quickly that the cop had been investigating a year-old murder case, that originally looked like a suicide by hanging (hence the title). However, the method of suicide exactly matched another case, so he knew it wasn’t suicide — hence an investigation that had been going nowhere. Worse still, the only suspects were in the small town, and most of them were friends. Kinsey searches, finds the original path of inquiry and starts digging. In the process, she gets beat up, warned off, almost fired, belittled by her client, and pretty much treated badly by everyone in the town when they find out she isn’t the innocent little camper people mistook her for at the beginning.

What I Liked

The story is pretty linear, although Grafton takes her own sweet time bringing Kinsey to see it. There’s a short intro to some problems with Rosey back home, obviously something to come up again in a later book, but most of it is just Kinsey alone in the small town getting nowhere. Once she cottons on to the real path, the investigation is pretty straight-forward, but she doesn’t see the result until it is almost too late. There’s some really weird stuff at the end to do with some drugged-out hallucinations, and it makes for an interesting incapacitation plotline.

What I Didn’t Like

Grafton takes a little too long to get to the investigation, almost like the story started out as a short story, with all the stuff at the start added to expand the length. Although the tightness of the ending makes the story move along, it all wrapped up too quickly.

The Bottom Line

Solid entry, a different location than most of the stories.

Striking Out by Alison Gordon (1995) – BR00062 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸

The PolyBlog
October 10 1999

Plot or Premise

This is the fourth in the Kate Henry series and is the best so far. Kate is bored — there is a strike in the major leagues and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. So she focuses on her home life. Then Andy Munro gets shot in the line of duty, and Kate is pretty much on her own while Andy recuperates. Lots of tension as Andy deals with the aftermath of being shot.

What I Liked

The focus of the story is on a homeless woman named Maggie who has disappeared, and one of her favorite resting places is covered in blood. On top of that, a mutilated corpse turns up with a very large knife that Maggie used to own. A corpse of someone who knew who Maggie really was, knew her past, and was therefore a threat to Maggie’s security. Some really seedy characters populate the story, including a two-bit child pornographer who has a heart of gold for helping street people.

What I Didn’t Like

Of course, there is the requisite protagonist-in-jeopardy part, but at least Andy isn’t automatically there to save the day.

Disclosure

I was am not personal friends with the author, but I did do interact with her online.

The Bottom Line

Well done and the best so far

Beyond the Great Snow Mountains by Louis L’Amour (1999) – BR00050 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
August 11 1999

Plot or Premise

A collection of ten short stories.

What I Liked

  • Crash Landing — A great twist story, about a crashed plane and the man who takes charge to get everyone off before the plane slips off the edge of the snow-covered cliff.
  • Sideshow Champion — A brawling boxer gets the championship fight of his life, but he knows the ones backing the champion are all crooked and will stop at nothing to bring him down. And he knows he has to get out of the limelight to train, so he goes back to the circus as a sideshow boxer to practice for the weeks before the fight.
  • The Money Punch — Another boxing story about a kid who’s up against the rackets and an ex-trainer who is more than a little crooked. Add in a missing new trainer, and the fact that he needs training — he’s got a great right but his left needs to be developed so he can be a better fighter. Oh, and he wants the girl who owns the fight farm.
  • Roundup in Texas — A typical western story where cattle rustlers are lowering cattle estimates, and the foreman looks to be a chump who simply over-estimated. Gun battle at the end, and lots of story in a short timeframe.
  • Under the Hanging Wall — A private-eye story about a man hired to go to a town and find out why his brother would have killed a mine owner. The Sheriff is no help, and there’s a woman who belongs in the big city, not in a bus-stop town along the highway. Set in the early 20th century.

Other stories include: By the Waters of San Tadeo (town bully holds village hostage on island); Meeting at Falmouth (ambushing a traveling gentleman); and Beyond the Great Snow Mountains (woman taken prisoner in Chinese mountains by a tribe).

What I Didn’t Like

Two stories weren’t that great — Coast Patrol (WW II story about a freighter captured by Germans and an Allied pilot) and Gravel Pit (thief gets extorted and wants to kill the extortionist).

The Bottom Line

Decent but eclectic bunch of shortstories.

The Dead Pull Hitter by Alison Gordon (1988) – BR00061 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
February 3 1999

Plot or Premise

Dead Pull Hitter feels like it picks up where Gordon’s non-fiction left off: the Toronto Titans have finished in fourth place the previous year and are starting to pull it together for a pennant race; the protagonist Kate Henry is a woman sportswriter who’s covered them for five years; she works for the Toronto Planet which is sandwiched in the news market between the stodgy World and the bimbette-littered pages of the Mirror. At times it was hard to remind myself that this was the fiction category!

What I Liked

The fun doesn’t really take off until after the first body arrives. Up until then, it is basically a baseball story. After that, the murder mystery takes hold. The clues are there for the finding: some obvious, others more subtle. Nicely written, and combines the baseball storylines with an appropriate emphasis on the mystery. And the cop-as-a-romantic-partner and mystery-antagonist-theme is alive and well in the book.

What I Didn’t Like

The start on the baseball story gives you a fairly large cast of characters that may be easy for a baseball fan to keep straight (i.e. player X is a catcher), but the names all seemed to run together for me. The baseball players also seem to have an enormously large and direct role in Kate’s life, which doesn’t seem to fit with her being a member of the objective sports press that covers them regularly.

Disclosure

I was not personally friends with the author, but I did interact briefly with her online.

The Bottom Line

Nice start to the series