Tag Archives: Kobo

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 Eleventh Commandment by Jeffrey Archer (1998) – BR00057 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
June 5 1999

Plot or Premise

Connor Fitzgerald is an assassin for the CIA. Black ops at its best. But when the CIA director orders a hit, and then wants to hide her involvement from the President, she tries to send Fitzgerald on a one-way futile assignment to Russia to prepare an assassination of the Russian Premier. Fitzgerald’s ex-mentor gets involved and figures out the plan, but too late to save CF from getting caught. A couple of twists later, however, and Fitzgerald is back in the States with the same mission — kill the Premier while he sits next to the President.

What I Liked

The storylines were inventive and well done. Not quite at the level of Clancy or De Mille, but well done still. The writing is first-rate and the story moves along at a good clip.

What I Didn’t Like

The relations between the CIA and Fitzgerald, and between the CIA and the Oval Office are not sufficiently fleshed out, leaving the story as having a little too light touch for the genre. Also, a couple of the twists are too well-telegraphed and you see them a mile off. And a small twist at the end, although expected, is handled far too lightly for the likely reality of the situation.

The Bottom Line

The story moves along at a good clip.

Hush Money by Robert B. Parker (1999) – BR00052 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸🐸⚪

The PolyBlog
June 5 1999

Plot or Premise

Spenser has two cases, one from Hawk and one from Susan. Hawk wants him to help a black college professor who was refused tenure on the basis of rumours that he was gay, he had an illicit affair with a student, and the student committed suicide as a result of a broken heart. Susan wants him to help a friend who claims she is being stalked.

What I Liked

The plot surrounding the black college professor is a typical Spenser novel — take a case for no pay, find there is something weird, start investigating, push some buttons, find out suspect number 1 is connected, and get a visit from some heavies. However, the handling of discrimination issues based on sexual orientation or colour of skin is well done, and that alone raises the story above a typical novel. Of course, the writing is first-rate, as Parker’s work always is, and the story proceeds at a fast clip, with enough twists and turns to make it interesting.

What I Didn’t Like

The second case involving Susan’s friend is ridiculous. Susan is a first-class shrink — yet she apparently is surprised when she finds out that the friend has attached herself to Spenser as her white knight coming to save her, whether he wants to be rewarded or not. Not well handled by Spenser’s character or Susan, doesn’t fit either’s characters’ background in previous novels, and just rings false with each development. Mind you, the resolution of the problem by Susan is first-rate. It just takes a long time to get there.

The Bottom Line

First-rate solid story

The Edge by Dick Francis (1988) – BR00056 (1999) – 🐸🐸🐸⚪⚪

The PolyBlog
May 6 1999

Plot or Premise

An arrogant horse-owner in England joins The Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train across Canada, with the train stopping at several sites along the way for horseraces, with an actors troupe on the train posing as real passengers.

What I Liked

Francis is a master at moving players around in the story and having them interact in interesting ways. His descriptive prose and his keep-it-simple style make it easy to both imagine the scene and understand the characters. The sports element is there, as it is in all of Francis’ books, but he again shows his mastery in leaving it as the backdrop against all the other characters’ interactions.

What I Didn’t Like

The overall feel of the book is similar to that of a play or film with an ensemble cast — no one is really well done, but most are sufficiently interesting to hold our attention for awhile. However, some characters are still left hiding in the background as mere caricatures. As for the villain and the protagonist, both needed to be better developed, and I never felt the villain was particularly evil nor the protagonist particularly interesting — too much on their actions and not enough of their thoughts to reveal their true character. Unfortunately, I also figured out the plot fairly early, although there was one character at the end who was slightly different than expected. I also saw three or four points in the story where Francis could have easily taken the reader down a darker or more interesting path, yet the opportunities were left abandoned alongside the tracks in the story.

The Bottom Line

Another good mystery from Francis.

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