Higher Authority -- A Book Review

I don't usually read books that scare me -- not because I don't scare easily, because I do. But usually I know that a book is going to be scary and I don't start it. Like, I don't read Stephen King or Tom Clancy -- not because they are not good writers. They certainly are. Somehow King's horror, as far-fetched as it is, is still viscerally believable and his books are too long for me to complete before it gets dark. Tom Clancy, on the other hand, is not far fetched enough. The wars he starts in his books seem altogether too likely.

Higher Authority is the third in Stephen White's Alan Gregory murder mysteries. I started reading them because a friend recommended them and White is a Colorado author. Sort of a hometown boy, dontcha know.

Dr. Alan Gregory, the usual main character in White's mysteries, is a clinical psychologist in Boulder, Colorado. The main character in this book is Alan's fiancee, Lauren Crowder. Crowder is a particularly interesting character because of her power and because of her weakness.

She is a hard-driving lawyer and as Deputy District Attorney in Boulder, she is unafraid to go after the bad guys no matter how threatening they may be.

Her weakness? She has multiple sclerosis. To protect her tough-on-crime persona, she hides her frail health. She neither seeks nor graciously accepts sympathy even from the few who know her condition, including Alan Gregory whose proposal of marriage she accepted but about which she still harbors serious misgivings.

Lauren joins forces with an old law-school friend to litigate a sexual harassment suit in Utah against a highly respected member of the Mormon Church. Danger and death ensue.

White's website introduces the plot of Higher Authority this way.

"The sudden death of Utah's Senator Orrin Hatch propels his successor, Lester Horner, first into Hatch's Senate seat and then on to become the first Mormon associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.  Carried along with Horner is Blythe Oaks, an ambitious and intelligent woman who is also Horner's favorite law clerk and fellow Mormon.  But Blythe's reputation—and, by extension, Lester Horner's—is threatened when a female former employee accuses her of sexual harassment and career sabotage."

Are you confused yet? I surely was, because, at least as of this moment while I am writing this blog post, Orrin Hatch is alive and well holding his seat as Senior Senator from the Great State of Utah. He is Senate Pro Tempore making him third in line to the United States Presidency.

Which brings us to the book's fear-factor for me.

I knew very little about the Mormon church. My only experiences with Latter-day Saints have been with parents of my daughter's friends, with writer friends, and with seat-mates on airlines. And, of course, Orson Scott Card one of my favorite writers. Then there are The Osmonds. All enjoyable and not the least bit frightening.

I knew a little about the founding of the Mormon religion and their self-exile to Utah to escape discrimination and mistreatment first in New York, then Ohio, and finally Missouri.

I did not know so, so much. Of course, this book is fiction, but White seems to have done his research well. His book plays to my one great faith -- that all religions develop fanatics and the element of secrecy in any religion or religious order is the cloak that hides those fanatics. That is frightening to me.

Not to mention that the real, still living, Orrin Hatch holds a potentially more powerful political position than does any single member of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Let me just say this book is very well written and its plot believable enough that I must have gained five pounds in the three days it took me to read it.

U, V, and W -- Nonfiction

W Is for Writer 

I am a writer. I have one novel in print Murder on Ceres. It is available from Amazon as both a paper back and on Kindle. And I'm currently working on the next in what I plan to be a series of four.

At some point several years ago I decided to do what I've always wanted to do -- write a book.

Although my fiction reading is eclectic (some would say indiscriminate) my fiction goto's seem to be murder mysteries and hard science fiction. So I wrote a science fiction/murder mystery or maybe it's a murder mystery/science fiction like I would like to read. The story is set in the future when civilization is centered in the Mars colonies and Earth is truly the "old country" but humans are still humans and murder happens.

"Balancing the demands of his job and his responsibilities to his family, Rafe investigates the suspicious death of a Ceres Colony Consortium accountant. Suicide? Overdose? Homicide? Not his upcoming trip to Earth, not his independent and fiery wife, nothing will keep him from the case.

"Through a whirlwind of illicit drugs, space pirates, and secret identities, Detective Rafe Sirocco chases the truth all 266,000,000 miles from the shining cylinder of Ceres Colony to the alien landscapes of Earth. But will he make it in time to save the one person that matters to him most?"






My nonfiction reading is equally eclectic -- Stephen J. Gould, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov (yes, they wrote nonfiction which I actually like better than their fiction.) David McCullough, Carl Sandburg (his Lincoln and his poetry,) Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, etc., etc., etc.

If I had written a U-blog, it would have been about the Universe just because it is so beautiful and I could use pictures from the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope like this one.

Close-up of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula

Their name for this photo. Imagine calling this a "close-up."  It is more than 1,200 light-years away. A light year is the distance light can travel in one Earth year which is nearly 6 trillion miles. Now multiply that time 1,200 and this is a close-up.  This glorious display of color is the result of an old star that has shed its outer layers. Discovered by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764, a dozen years before the Revolutionary War, it was the first planetary nebula discovered.

And had I done V-day, it could have been Voyager 1. On September 12, 2013, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that Voyager 1 had indeed left our Solar System and entered interstellar space. Where is it today? Click here for a real-time odometer of Voyager 1's distance from the Earth and the Sun in astronomical units (AU) and kilometers (km).

Better yet, The Golden Record.



It is "a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record-a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth."

     

#atozchallenge

Betrayal -- Book Review

Those of you who know me, know I like John Lescroart's police procedurals.

Goodreads calls this one a "thriller." And I suppose it is, but it's not the kind of thriller that will leave your stomach tied in knots or make you dread the morning's news. It may, however, just keep you up too late because you gotta see what happens next.

I do have the same complaint about it that I had the first time I read it. Uncharacteristically (pun intended) we don't really get Dismas Hardy or Abe Glitsky until Chapter 16. Of course, all that stuff that comes before is important to the plot.

Oh, his plots, his plots. Lescroart does really good plots. He doesn't spoon feed us readers, but if he puts it in the book, it is important to the plot. He definitely takes Chekhov's advice, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Betrayal was published in February, 2008. So Lescroart wrote it during the fourth year of the Iraq war. As a writer, I can understand the attraction of using current news stories in your work. And war seems to be a lucrative field, shot through with second-hand adrenaline for both writers and readers. Lethal flashes in the night. Explosions. Bullets peppering the ground around the new characters. Life and death -- conflict, conflict, conflict.

For me, I don't like it so much. But, it is necessary to the plot of Betrayal.

I was so glad when we got through the war part of the book. But then it was necessary to get through a trial without Dismas Hardy, our canny defense lawyer. In a courtroom not in our familiar San Francisco Hall of Justice.

The epigraph is a part of the book, I think, would better have been left out. In my opinion, there are some bits of a mystery best left to the readers imagination.

To be honest, I'd rather spend time with Lescroart's Hardy and Abe Glitsky, the dour police lieutenant, than with Lescroart himself. He's probably a very nice man, but I know his characters much better than I know him. I have a history with them.

To develop your own relationship with them, it's best to start with the first book in the series, Dead Irish. Each book is complete in itself, but the characters continue through the series -- maturing, losing loved ones, marrying, having babies, dying. And all the while searching for the truth. What really happened.

Galbraith, Robert aka J.K. Rowling -- A Review

In July of 2013 Robert Galbraith, author of The Cuckoo's Calling, was outed as J. K. Rowling. And, according to Britain's The Guardian, after Galbraith's real name became known the book shot to
No. 1 in hardback fiction, charting above Dan Brown's Inferno and Second Honeymoon by James Patterson.

I must confess, I would probably never have read Galbraith's Cuckoo without knowing that Galbraith was Rowling. But I do love murder mysteries and her Harry Potter books. 

My daughter turned eleven the year she discovered Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in her school library. That was two years after its U.S. release. Harry was eleven in the first book. She and Harry grew up together after that.

Each new Potter book necessitated a Harry Potter party for her and her friends and a post-midnight run to Barnes and Nobel to snag her pre-ordered copy as soon as it was released. I was also required to reread the previous Potter books to be ready for the next. Consequently, I've read the first in the series seven times, the second six times, the third five times, etc.

I can't say why I waited so long to read her Galbraith series. And truly, I only planned to read The Cuckoo's Calling, the first Cormoran Strike novel. Like most writers, I had a slew of books that I wanted to read and I intended Cuckoo to be just sort of a sample. However, within two weeks I'd read all three.

Cuckoo begins with a poem, Christina Rossetti's "A Dirge."

      Why were you born when the snow was falling?

      You should have come to the cuckoo's calling,

      Or when grapes are green in the cluster,

      Or, at least, when lithe swallows muster

      For their far off flying

      From summer dying.

The second stanza in its lament of untimely death, reflects the first stanza's description of untimely life.

A nice poem will always catch my attention, but I'm just not analytical enough to connect it to the story. And then each of the five parts of the book and the epilogue begin with a quote in Latin. I had fun trying to resurrect my high school Latin to figure them out myself. Even so, I'm glad to say she translates them for us. 

In the Prologue we get the requisite body, a wealthy, young, beautiful female. A woman who had done no harm and had a promising future.

Three months later another young woman, Robin Ellacott, not quite so beautiful nor at all wealthy arrives at Cormoran Strike's office as a temp.

Private Detective Strike's office is shabby to say the most. Private Detective Strike is shabby to say the least. ..."his height, his general hairiness, coupled with a gently expanding belly, suggested a grizzly bear. One of his eyes was puffy and bruised, the skin just below the eyebrow cut. Congealing blood sat in raised white-edged nail tracks on his left cheek and the right side of his thick neck ...." The injuries, parting gift from his long-time, toxic girlfriend.

Brad Pitt, he ain't, but he develops into an attractive character by virtue of his virtues. He's a Boy Scout -- at least the Trustworthy, Honest, Loyal, and Brave part.

Set in a crossroads of the fashion, film, and popular music worlds, Strike and Robin (his Watson) solve the mystery of the young woman's death.

Even better is the mystery of Strikes' back story and Robin's future story, which Galbraith/Rowling sprinkles in tasty bits through this book and the second and then the third.

In The Silkworm, the second in the series, the missing man is a complete scoundrel, arrogant and disreputable.  Ah, but Strike has promised a worried wife that he will find out what has become of her mean and hurtful husband.

The milieu here is the publishing industry with its writers, editors, and publishers.

Galbraith/Rowling starts each chapter in The Silkworm with a quote from writers of Shakespeare's time -- not Shakespeare, but from his time. Again quotes unnecessary as far as I am concerned, but the continuing development of Strike's character and his relationship with Robin compensate admirably.

Career of Evil, the third Cormoran Strike novel starts out with what I think my writing teacher would consider a good first line. "He had not managed to scrub off all her blood."

This one is more of a thriller. I had a feeling of dread throughout. Robin, whom I had come to like was too much in danger. Strike thought so, too.

The quotes at the beginnings in Career are from Blue Oyster Cult, the rock and roll band favored by his late mother -- known as a super groupie. Again we are treated to tantalizing tidbits as the suspects are from Strike's own background -- his stepfather, a wannabe rocker; two criminals from his days in the Special Investigative Branch of the British military; and a civilian gangster.

In Career of Evil, something completely unexpected happens for me. I developed a preference for who would, in the end, be the baddie. I won't say whom I wanted to be the perp, nor if that was who it, in fact, was.

Nor will I tell you what the last line of the novel is, but I think it's as perfect a last line as the first is a perfect first line.

T is for Terren -- Excerpts from Murder on Ceres

On Day R we were introduced to Rafe, the protagonist in Murder on Ceres. Terren is his wife, a very important part of his life and his story. He introduces her in the first chapter.

She stood at the cook table, its malleable surface formed into a griddle. Even if she wasn’t a cook like his mother, he liked to give her the latest and best. He wrapped his arms around her from behind and nuzzled her dark curls. Her hair smelled of citrus and spice. She snuggled against him and turned the bacon.  His hands slid across her white silk kimono, smooth and soft like her skin. Her stomach still flat. No change with the baby. Too early.

“How about Cynthia?”  He suggested the name as he reached for a slice of bacon.

She smacked him with her cooking sticks and spun to face him. “Have you washed?”

“I love you.” He pretended innocence, making a second attempt at the bacon. “You are so pretty pregnant.”

“Cynthia? Certainly not, Rafael Sirocco. What if the poor baby has a lisp?” She threatened him with the cooking sticks.

“Thinthia Thirocco…” He mused, curling the ends of his mustache.

With his left hand, he caressed her bottom. She relented and kissed him. With his right hand, he snatched a piece of bacon and was out of the kitchen before she could catch him.

[Here Terren is visiting an old family friend and the plot thickens.]

She sat on the rug and felt like a little girl again. She traced the red zigzags of lightning that framed a stylized cornstalk on the rug’s blue field. Perhaps they grow corn in the ground in Denver District.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined two walls, filled with old-style books. Different sizes and colors shelved in no order that she could see. How could anyone find a particular volume?

Her mom always warned her. “Don’t ask. Any book you want to read, you can download. You won’t lose it or damage it.”

And her father would say, “Unlike real estate, they ain’t making any more of them.”

They’d been right. But she couldn’t say she appreciated it. Still, even without them there, she didn’t touch. Looking was enough.

The gate bell rang as Mark came downstairs. He spoke with Watson a moment then excused himself. A door banged open. Raised voices echoed down the hall. She set her cup down.

A man’s voice, taut with emotion. “No, I don’t want your damn money.”

“Leave now.” Mark sounded angry. Then in a more composed tone he said, “We need to be reasonable, work this out. We’ll talk later.”

“All you do is talk.” The man lowered his voice which sounded somehow more menacing. “This was your deal. You clean it up yourself.”

The closer she got to the entry hall and the confrontation, the slower she moved, not sure she wanted to see what was happening.

[Then we find her in Ceres’s Commercial Passenger Transfer Station leaving for the alien planet Earth.]

At zero g, surrounded by flashing lights and movement, her stomach rebelled.

The navigation rails into Outbound Security provided a sense of stability. Things could be worse. Head up. Eyes forward. Breathe normally. In. Out.

She handed her mobile to the security tech and passed through a scanner. She wondered what exactly they were scanning for. Weapons perhaps? Stolen diamonds and emeralds and rubies? She glanced at the ring on her little finger. Mark’s ring.

The tech held a small screen in front of her face and instructed her to look at the dot. He compared the retinal scan with her ID. Satisfied that she was who she was supposed to be, the tech confirmed her boarding pass, ticked the box next to Earth, and entered his own ID code. He returned her phone and directed her to the door marked Outbound Ferry.

As she waited, she watched people moving through the inbound side of the partition. New arrivals were scanned for identity, contraband, and illness. Tighter security met those arriving. Without the vaccinations she’d taken in the past six weeks, she wouldn’t be allowed back onto the Colony without enduring a two-week quarantine.

Watching the authorities screen arrivals made her stomach clench with fear. Where she was going, there were things that Cererians must be protected from. Diseases Cererians did not need to vaccinate against. Diseases that had no vaccines. “Perhaps dragons do be there.” She spoke under her breath, not intending to be heard.

“Frightening, isn’t it?” A tall dark-haired man with a well-trimmed beard said. “What the government thinks we need to be protected from.” He also waited.

“Sometimes they’re right.” Her voice was husky. She turned her face away, afraid her tears might show.

All too soon, the reader discovers things the government couldn’t protect her from. Available in paper back or on Kindle from Amazon, Murder on Ceres. 

S is for Sci-Fi/Murder Mystery

My first novel, Murder on Ceres, is a Science Fiction/Murder Mystery. “Why couldn’t you tell the same story on Earth, present day,” asked my writing teacher, William Bernhardt. (Please don’t judge Bill by my writing prowess. He is a much better teacher than I am student.) He has a habit of asking me hard questions. And I have a habit of getting defensive before I think about the answers to those hard questions.

But I do think about them. And why write my murder mystery as science fiction? That answer is “Because.”

Because I like murder mysteries. I like them as puzzles. They are all puzzles. Some are more puzzle than anything else.

John Lescroat adds the enticement of characters I would like to know personally. His characters age and change and grow from one book to the next in his series. (Plural – I tried ‘serieses’ and Word didn’t like it so I looked it up. The plural of series is series, just like deer is deer.)

Some mystery writers take me places in a way that makes me feel like I’ve been there. I’ve seen Venice, Italy, through Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti’s eyes. And I’ve visited many of the National Parks while following Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon who is a Park Ranger and apparently gets transferred a lot. Luckily for us readers.

Diane Mott Davidson has the murder mystery puzzle plus identifiable characters plus good recipes. And I like to bake.

When I was deciding what kind of murder mystery I wanted to write, I knew I wanted to follow a set of characters as they grow and age. That I can do. I like the idea of an exotic setting. As much as I love Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, those are the only locations I’m familiar enough with to write about. None of them seem very exotic to me. And I didn’t write recipes. I have family members who will tell you that I don’t even follow recipes very well.

So the search was on. What else did I like to read? Of course there were literary writers like John Irving and Margaret Atwood. Now I may have illusions of grandeur on occasion, but that is just not gonna happen.

And because I love Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. I love their nonfiction even more than their fiction.

They inspire imagination. What will it be like to live off-planet, to emigrate from Earth to colonies scattered through the Solar System? How will humans be different? How the same? What will their everyday lives be like? Their problems? Their solutions? What will they call their washing machines?

These are subjects that could keep me interested enough, long enough to write a novel. And, in fact, these things are keeping me interested enough to get me well into my second novel. With concepts bubbling on the back burner for at least two more.

What I want to write are books I’d like to read. With my Sci-Fi/Murder Mystery crossover, I can develop my characters realistically in about as exotic a location as possible. And I believe readers will enjoy thinking about how things will be as much as I do.

Character Building -- An Essay

While I went about my daily business after posting yesterday’s “Briers and Brambles,” I couldn’t get the character out of my mind.

I often write flash fiction to practice some aspect of writing – world building, dialog, scene setting. Rather like an artist does studies of hands or ears or faces.

Yesterday was an exercise in tension building. At least that was the intent. As it turns out, there was the beginning of a character in that piece. A character that I think I’m going to like. At first I thought she’d make a great protagonist for a detective novel. Maybe a whole series of novels. Do I sound like a writer or what?

She was alive in today’s world. But I don’t write in today’s world. I write sci-fi/murder mysteries. I built my world in Murder on Ceres. It’s fully populated with characters I find interesting and satisfying. Dead and Gone is my next novel, currently a work in progress, as they say. It has the same characters in the same world. I didn’t need another character. There’s a new antagonist, but considering what happened to the antagonist in Murder on Ceres, that’s to be expected. 

So I put this woman out of mind. After all, I had important real world activities to perform – dishes to wash, appointments to schedule, an expired auto license plate to renew.

But she wouldn’t go away. So I'm giving her a chance to adjust to my world. She’ll have to move to the Denver Region and to the future where civilization is centered in shiny metal cylinders orbiting Mars. Can she give up her attachment to the Colt 45 Automatic, Model 1911? She’s just old fashioned. But is she too old fashioned?

Any new character sends me back to the basics I learned from William Bernhardt. He writes thrillers and other things. Most importantly for me, he teaches and he’s written The Red Sneaker Writers Book Series. And more particularly, Creating Character: Bringing Your Story to Life. (Available from Amazon. Click here.)

Its Appendix A: Character Detail Sheet is a revelatory exercise. I’ve learned that my new character was born on Earth; her name is Madeleine Denise – a name she hates; she’s generally brown like most people on Earth at this time; she doesn’t suffer fools; and she’s a damn good cop.

Look out Joe and Rafe and Terren. There’s a new character on the block.