Review: Dead Men's Money

Dead Men's Money by J.S. Fletcher
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

J.S. Fletcher writes great mysteries, thrilling and not at all formulaic. This is just as good as any of his others in many ways, but I've knocked a star off because of the utter idiocy of the protagonist/narrator. Turns out I find this just as irritating in a young man as in a young woman, even though I see that variation a lot less often.

Talking in more depth about how Hugh Moneylaws, the narrator, carries the Idiot Ball involves some mild spoilers. The initial setup is that his mother's lodger has fallen seriously ill, and sent Hugh (a 21-year-old lawyer's clerk) to a lonely spot to meet someone he has an appointment with and tell the person that he can't come. When he gets there, Hugh discovers a recently deceased corpse.

(view spoiler)[On the way to the meeting, he saw a man with a distinctive mark, two missing fingers on his right hand, coming from roughly the direction of the murder scene. The man doesn't see him (it's dark, and some instinct has caused Hugh to hide when he hears him coming). Unfortunately, the same instinct doesn't prompt him to tell the police about the man when they question him. Nor, once he has identified the man as a local magnate recently arrived in the area, does he tell his wise boss, who he very much looks up to and trusts, or his girlfriend, from whom he normally has no secrets. He keeps it entirely to himself.

A dodgy local tradesman, who was poaching in the area, confides in Hugh that he saw both him and the man, and implies (Hugh realises afterwards) that they could blackmail the magnate, which Hugh of course won't do. The following day, this dodgy character is found dead from violence.

Does Hugh now talk to the police, his boss, or his sweetheart? He does not. Instead, without telling anyone where he's going, he goes to speak to the magnate, thinking there must be an innocent explanation. He informs the man that he hasn't told anyone else. The man says he has insomnia and often walks around at night, and this satisfies Hugh completely; he promises he won't say anything to anyone. Nor does Hugh smell any kind of rat when the magnate offers him a job as steward, at more than four times his current salary.

Hugh then goes with the man onto his yacht, just the two of them, far out from land. Of course the man pushes him off, and he only survives by lucky chance. But now he at least knows the man is the murderer, and will be more cautious in future. Right? Right?

No. He goes off two further times alone without telling anyone and gets into trouble, the second time having faithfully promised his sweetheart he'll do no such thing (and his sensible boss has also promised her he won't let Hugh out of his sight until everything is tied up, and uncharacteristically doesn't keep his promise). (hide spoiler)]

The rest of the book is great, full of tension, plenty of good action, a complex mystery that takes a lot of clever work (mostly by Hugh's boss) to unravel. But far too much of it relies on Hugh being dumber than bread.

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Review: Breeze Felt at Moonrise

Breeze Felt at Moonrise by Lynn Buchanan
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The good: Sanderson-style deep worldbuilding that's central to the premise and plot.

The less good: dark and tragic backstory, though with the potential to turn.

The annoying: commas after adjectives of quantity and number, which are never coordinate and should not be treated as such. Also, fortunate and unfortunate coincidence as plot drivers, though there may be an in-world explanation for why things are so conveniently or inconveniently timed.

The balance: I stopped reading at 20% because it was just too dark for my taste. I even looked at the end to see if it was ultimately completely tragic, and even though it wasn't, I decided I'm not in the mood for tragic consequences of greed and revenge visited on the next generation.

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Review: The Star of Kilnaely

The Star of Kilnaely by Grace Daly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual one, which is largely why I picked it up.

Set in the American Midwest, but in a town inhabited apparently exclusively by Irish people, so (having forgotten the blurb) I was confused for a long time about where we were. I remained confused about when we were, since the frame story and the last of the stories that it frames were apparently present day, but the majority of the stories seemed to be set in about the 1920s, based on the technology level and what was said to be new - and yet the characters, while they aged, were not over 100 years old.

There was also the occasional vocabulary glitch, which I'll mention to the publisher; I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and there may still be a chance to fix them. Otherwise, the copy editing was reasonably good, apart from "may" instead of "might" in past tense and at least one apostrophe in the wrong place.

The frame story shows us a small town spoiled by the advent of a rapacious software corporation, which is degrading the environment (especially the built environment), driving up land prices and displacing long-term inhabitants who can no longer afford to live there. The inner stories, told to a hapless salaryman from that corporation in a bar, are something in between Irish legendary tales and American tall tales of the Paul Bunyan variety, except instead of a blue ox the Star of Kilnaely has an enormous dog, big enough for even him to ride on. He's a larger-than-life character, charismatic, strong, handsome and blessed, in addition, with a brilliant younger sister, who (it soon becomes obvious to the reader, if not to the slightly inebriated listener in the bar) is the person telling the stories.

The hero tales are fun, and to my mind would have worked better without the frame, but they work well enough. Some have high stakes, others low stakes, but all of them show us the Star solving problems one way or another. Again, some draw on Irish mythology and show us the Good Neighbours and gods and goddesses, while others are more general small-town situations.

Pleasant and enjoyable, if a little confusing chronologically.

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Review: Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead

Alistair Fall and the Restless Dead by Marianne Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The reason I persevere in picking up books for review via Netgalley, despite many of them being mediocre or worse, is that sometimes I get one like this.

In a lot of authors' hands, this would have been predictable and bland. The setup looks like a slow-burn grumpy/sunshine romance, based on the blurb - the FMC is actually called Sunny. But it's not that. She isn't the perky, cheery sort her name suggests; she has a dark backstory, and she engages with it, doesn't bury it under a fake sugary veneer. She's sarcastic and smart and capable, but also realistically self-doubting and slow to trust. Sure, she'd like to be a cozy fantasy protagonist - she loves baked goods, and has a favourite little tea shop and a calico cat named Butterscotch - but who she is and where she is mean that she ends up fighting a conspiracy of necromancers instead.

Her opposite number, Alistair Fall, is bad with people, but he knows and regrets it. He'd like more friends, but unfortunately almost his only real friend is murdered early in the book, and he's tasked with investigating. Sunny looks like the prime suspect, but he's a good investigator and doesn't believe it, instead recruiting her to help him find the real killer, which would clear her name. They build a partnership and what might well become a friendship over the course of the book, but it's not a romance, which I appreciate; from time to time it's nice to read about two people who are just good colleagues. Both of them bring genuine strengths to the partnership, as equals.

Solving the mystery happens well before the end of the book, because just knowing who was behind it isn't enough; the pair also have to thwart the antagonists' plot, making the last part of the book more of a thriller. They are significantly at a disadvantage in doing so, and it takes all their courage and ingenuity. And they don't do it in either of the two ways I thought of.

I'm also so used to inadequate worldbuilding in current fantasy novels that it's cause for celebration to read one with worldbuilding that actually matters to the plot, and has had some effort put into it, and is different from the usual generic off-the-shelf scenarios. In this setting, through events which aren't explored in depth, almost 40 years before the story starts the prevailing pagan religion was banned in favour of atheism, imposed by the State of Order, which... is less authoritarian and despotic and dystopian than it could easily have been, though certainly some people are discontented under it, while others are good Statists and parrot the prejudices that the State encourages. One of those prejudices is against the use of magic, which is associated with paganism, and since Fall is a sorcerer (albeit sanctioned by the State), he comes in for a lot of persecution, petty and otherwise.

Yes, the trope of oppressed mages has its problems. Here, though, it's a bit more justified than usual, more of a parallel with, say, the persecution of intellectuals under some Communist regimes. These mages are oppressed because they potentially threaten the State's declaration that the gods are mythical, and the mechanism of their oppression is not so much official persecution as encouraging ordinary people to despise and distrust them.

The worldbuilding, in other words, matters to the characters' circumstances, and it also turns out to be highly relevant to the plot (for spoilerific reasons).

Names (and phrases, and concepts) from our world did make their way in, and the names are the usual mixture of made-up fantasy names and familiar ones from various cultures in our world (including a couple of biblical ones in this world without that cultural context, which is something I should probably give up complaining about, since nearly everyone does it).

There are also married same-sex couples in this setting that's otherwise similar to our world's late 18th/early 19th century. But that's a passing detail, not a central feature as it would be in so many current fantasy books.

Other things I appreciated: Fall's sorcery is limited; not something he can deploy quickly, and it can't just do anything, so it isn't used to cheat on the plot. The editing is also excellent, unlike most books I see via Netgalley (or BookBub), with just a couple of minor vocabulary issues that I'll flag to the publisher, meaning they may well be corrected before publication.

Overall, it's sound, solid, and achieves enough depth in its exploration of the characters and their society that I'm giving it five stars, not something I do often. I definitely want to read more from the author and in this world, and it looks like being a series, so I should get my wish.

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Review: A Swindler's Song

A Swindler's Song by Lindsay Bowen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a mixed bag for me.

On the one hand, I do love a heist. On the other hand, the heist crew weren't as capable or cohesive as I could have wished, and there was a lot of reliance on convenient chance to enable them to pull off the job. I'll put all the lucky breaks in spoiler tags, though some of them come out quite early: (view spoiler)[
- The crew leader physically resembles a famous singer and can sing well, giving them a way to get into the event where they plan to pull the job.
- One of the crew can play the cello, an instrument which the singer is known to have in her backing band.
- The same crew member has grown up exploring a castle which is the exact duplicate of the one they are hitting - there are three of these, on identical islands, with a handwavey story about an ancient matriarch who insisted her three sons build identical castles and cities on the three islands, but it's clearly a plot device to make the heist easier.
- The castle includes an easy back way to the vault that they figure out by being in the right place at the right time, and it's made even easier by the fact that the eldest of the lord's four eerily similar wives has a crush on the crew leader and gives her a key.
- The escape plan relies heavily on timing that there is no way to guarantee, but of course works perfectly.
- Not to even mention the elven superpowers.
(hide spoiler)]

In other words, the author stacks the deck heavily in favour of the characters. They do still have to work for their success, and one of them does so while dealing with a chronic illness, and there's genuine danger from the despotic "warlords" (I would have just called them lords; warlords implies a more improvised situation than the multi-generational rule they represent). But it reduces the characters' agency to see them helped along like this, and character agency is an important part of the heist genre for me.

The romance subplot progresses rapidly from spur-of-the-moment hookup to enemies to fake married to soulmates having outrageously blissful sex (on-page, so if you prefer not to read that, this isn't your book). I wasn't a fan of the speed-run, or really of either of the partners much. The author gave them heartstring-tugging backstories and laudable goals, but somehow I never fully warmed up to them. I also spotted the big "twist" at the end 40% of the way through.

It was far from the worst copy-edited book I've seen lately, though the author's apostrophe game is weak when it comes to plural nouns, and there's the occasional missed opportunity to use the past perfect tense. A number of idioms are not quite rendered correctly (it's subtle), and a few sentences don't say exactly what they mean. I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and there may or may not be more editing to come.

The worldbuilding is the usual not-particularly-coherent mix of standard sword-and-sorcery world with random bits of our world wherever there's a gap to be filled. The names, for example, as is so often the case, are a mix of made-up fantasy names, names out of the Bible (in a setting where such religion as there is is Basic Fantasy Paganism, but with the gods absent because of reasons), and names from specific ethnic backgrounds in our world standing in for countries in a completely different geography. There's been some effort put in - the absence of the gods and (at least theoretically) of magic, though I've seen both of those before - but it's mostly generic.

All in all, I was lukewarm on it, and it wasn't quite for me. I'd not be at all surprised if it was for plenty of other people, though.

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Review: The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

The Secret of the Silver Car Further Adventures of Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This sequel to Anthony Trent: Master Criminal is, if anything, better than the first, more of a thriller in the mould of The Thirty-Nine Steps (but without the heavy racism) than the gentleman-thief story of the first book. It starts with immediate action, a man (Anthony Trent, as it emerges) jumping off an ocean liner just as it leaves the dock and landing, unhurt, on the quay, whence he hurries off. Why did he do this? We're not left wondering for too long; there's a flashback.

The hero, who has made a fortune as a burglar, ended the first book fighting in World War I because of his sense of duty. He's been wounded and is unconscious, and another man, who has found him and bound his wounds, has dragged him to what he thought was safety. But! A shell has buried them in the ruined building, and they're running out of air. Thinking they're both about to die, Trent confesses his criminal past, giving the man his name.

But they don't die, and Trent goes in search of the man, who holds his freedom in his hands, and whose distinctive voice he had heard on the dock. There's a very substantial reward offered for the apprehension of the (to the police) unknown man who did the crimes for which Trent was responsible. What he finds quickly gets into spoiler territory, but the upshot is that Trent volunteers for a dangerous and unofficial undercover mission into Croatia to retrieve a compromising document. There, he contends with a despotic Balkan count, pulling off daring but reasonably plausible feats of espionage, theft and escape.

There's a love interest, too, who Trent considers himself unworthy of because of his criminal past. All of it is good, solid stuff, unfortunately marred by another terrible editing job by the original publishers (see my review of Book 1). I really am seriously considering editing these public-domain books myself to a decent standard, so that others can enjoy them in the state they deserve to be in. They're entertaining, they're not anything like so far-fetched or reliant on coincidence as most action thrillers of the period, and they have sound emotional beats and a strong character arc. They just need several hundred more commas and a few other relatively easy fixes.

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Review: Anthony Trent, Master Criminal

Anthony Trent, Master Criminal by Wyndham Martyn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the "clever gentleman thief" subgenre that started in English with Raffles, though I think Arsene Lupin was before him in French. Trent is closer to Lupin, who, in a long and varied career, was often a helpful vigilante or even a detective, not just a master criminal. He works alone; Raffles corrupted his old schoolfellow Bunny, who had a hopeless crush on him, and treated him worse than a dog, while Lupin often had confederates, who he looked after, but Trent has studied how criminals fail, and feels that working alone is safest.

He's studied criminals as part of his original occupation as a writer of crime fiction. He wanted to do this really well, and went so far as to work for a burglar alarm manufacturer in order to research how their devices work. But this means he wrote only about a story a month, and his publisher couldn't pay him more than two cents a word for them, so when the story opens he's living in a boarding house with a rented upright piano and dreams of someday having a big house with a grand piano so he can compose. (His musical ambitions and abilities don't really come up again after this.) He concludes that his dreams are only feasible if he turns to crime, which he believes he can get away with, given his studies.

He's a man of some contradictions. Apart from being a thief (targeting the rich and unworthy), he maintains the moral code of his Ivy League background; he also steals things he knows he can't sell, because dealing with fences would make him vulnerable to detection. Several of his heists are for jewels which he substitutes for the coloured glass in his brass Benares lamp, simply because he fancies the idea.

Ultimately, he refuses to compromise his principles, and is saved from public disgrace only by a combination of good fortune and the loyalty of his housekeeper, who has divined his secret but knows him to be basically a good man. He then decides he will join the army and go to fight in World War I, having a couple of times foiled German spies. This also nearly leads to his exposure, and sets up for the start of the second book, which I read immediately after the first one.

Trent is a privileged protagonist. I use this term slightly differently from "spoiled protagonist," by which I mean a protagonist who's showered with unearned help from unlikely quarters. A privileged protagonist is someone who is firmly convinced, and perhaps convinces us, the readers, that anything they do is all right, even if it's illegal, because it's them doing it, and they are One of the Right Sort. Not only that, but they get away with it, essentially because they're the protagonist. Harry Potter and his friends are privileged protagonists; they break the rules all the time, and end up being commended rather than punished. Even though Trent does have his moral qualms about his way of life, he doesn't actually stop, at least until (in Book 2) he meets the love of his life, which is what usually reforms these characters. Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces is another example, though I found Trent's adventures more plausible than Cleek's. There are all kinds of obvious issues with privileged protagonists, and I plan to explore them in a blog post sometime, but personally I'm still able to enjoy stories that feature them, even as I note the trope and its problems.

This book was clearly cheaply produced by a slapdash publisher with a typesetter who should not have been employed in that field. The Project Gutenberg edition has an extensive list of obvious typos at the back that were corrected during the conversion process; it includes an "it's" that should be "its," but they missed a "who's" that should be "whose." Unfortunately, they haven't attempted to insert the many missing commas, mostly the ones that provide subtle grammatical pointers to help the reader parse the sentence, but also the vocative comma (the one that makes the difference between "let's eat Grandma" and "let's eat, Grandma"). Also, a good many of the apostrophes are in the wrong places. Some of this is probably down to the author, who has also mistakenly used the name of Trent's fictional criminal a couple of times where the reference is to Trent himself.

It's so dire that I'm seriously tempted to create my own edited edition so that people can enjoy it as it should be enjoyed, though I'm not sure how I'd distribute it. If this kind of thing bothers you as it bothers me, perhaps listen to the Librevox recording; my wife did, and recommended the book to me, which is why I picked it up.

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