Fiction Review

Bill Crider’s 24th Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery, Dead, to Begin With, is due out Aug. 8. You can pre-order it through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2sQQSA2

Here’s the summary from the Web Store.

Sheriff Dan Rhodes is back again in Bill Crider’s thrilling Dead, to Begin With.

Readers will cheer Rhodes along as he sorts through a tangle of old secrets and personal relationships en route to the satisfying solution.” Publishers Weekly

In Clearview, Texas, a wealthy recluse has joined the community and is leading the restoration of an old opera house. When he falls to his death, Sheriff Dan Rhodes suspects that he’s been murdered, but there doesn’t seem to be a motive. Who would want to kill someone who’s helping the town and hasn’t been around long enough to make any enemies?

The Sheriff’s suspicion proves to be true, however, and he begins to look for motives buried in the past, meanwhile having to deal with people fighting over baseball cards at a yard sale, writers who want to talk to him about his sex life, and the Clearview Ghost Hunters, headed up by Seepy Benton, who believes that the old theater is haunted. Clearview might be a small town, but there’s no shortage of excitement.

*****

And, here’s my favorite feature from Criminal Element, Adam Wagner’s .GIFNotes Guide to Dead, To Begin With. https://bit.ly/2sQtqDj

Congratulations to Poisoned Pen Press for the mention in Michael Dirda’s article in The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/2sQtliO

Dirda mentions The Incredible Crime by Lois Austen-Leigh. It’s available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2utXfeT

And, just to tempt you, here’s the description of the book.

Prince’s College, Cambridge, is a peaceful and scholarly community, enlivened by Prudence Pinsent, the Master’s daughter. Spirited, beautiful, and thoroughly unconventional, Prudence is a remarkable young woman.

One fine morning she sets out for Suffolk to join her cousin Lord Wellende for a few days’ hunting. On the way Prudence encounters Captain Studde of the coastguard – who is pursuing a quarry of his own.

Studde is on the trail of a drug smuggling ring that connects Wellende Hall with the cloistered world of Cambridge. It falls to Prudence to unravel the identity of the smugglers – who may be forced to kill, to protect their secret.

This witty and entertaining crime novel has not been republished since the 1930s. This new edition includes an introduction by Kirsten T. Saxton, professor of English at Mills College, California.

Keith McCafferty will be at The Poisoned Pen on Tuesday, July 11 at 7 PM to discuss his latest Sean Stranahan mystery, Cold Hearted River, and the Ernest Hemingway connection.

You can order a signed copy through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2uPGQkg

Before I give you the Web Store’s summary of Cold Hearted River, let me add the note that McCafferty sent Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen.

“I did get to go to Cuba for Field & Stream, and thanks to my friendship with Valerie Hemingway, I was able to walk freely inside the Finca Vigia, where he lived with Valerie and also his fourth wife, Mary.  A beautiful home.  Many of the artifacts in the novel, in the cabin where Per Jackson lives, are described exactly as they are in the Finca. It was a scary novel to write.  I had the premise dropped into my lap nearly 40 years ago, I had the long first chapter which also was inspired by a true event, but when you write a character who resembles Hemingway you do run the risk of making a fool out of yourself.” McCafferty will be bringing Barbara Peters a gift of a hand-tied fly, the McGinty fly pattern that was Hemingway’s favorite, and is described in the novel.

*****

Here’s the description of Cold Hearted River.

In the sixth novel in the acclaimed Sean Stranahan mystery series, Montana’s favorite detective finds himself on the trail of Ernest Hemingway’s missing steamer trunk. Buffalo Jump Blues, fifth in the series, is now available.

When a woman goes missing in a spring snowstorm and is found dead in a bear’s den, Sheriff Martha Ettinger reunites with her once-again lover Sean Stranahan to investigate. In a pannier of the dead woman’s horse, they find a wallet of old trout flies, the leather engraved with the initials EH. Only a few days before, Patrick Willoughby, the president of the Madison River Liars and Fly Tiers Club, had been approached by a man selling fishing gear that he claimed once belonged to Ernest Hemingway. A coincidence? Sean doesn’t think so, and he soon finds himself on the trail of a stolen trunk rumored to contain not only the famous writer’s valuable fly fishing gear but priceless pages of unpublished work.

The investigation will take Sean through extraordinary chapters in Hemingway’s life. Inspired by a true story, Cold Hearted River is a thrilling adventure, moving from Montana to Michigan, where a woman grapples with the secrets in her heart, to a cabin in Wyoming under the Froze To Death Plateau, and finally to the ruins in Havana, where an old man struggles to complete his life’s mission one true sentence at a time.

Marilyn Stasio. If you read mystery reviews in The New York Times, you’ve seen her name. She writes the bi-weekly crime fiction roundup for the newspaper. Now, discover a little about the reviewer herself. https://nyti.ms/2u3sj49

This week’s Hot Book of the Week at The Poisoned Pen is Dean Koontz’ The Silence Corner.

Here’s the summary from the Web Store.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “¢ A dazzling new series, a pure adrenaline rush, debuts with Jane Hawk, a remarkable heroine certain to become an icon of suspense

“I very much need to be dead.”

These are the chilling words left behind by a man who had everything to live for—but took his own life. In the aftermath, his widow, Jane Hawk, does what all her grief, fear, and fury demand: find the truth, no matter what.

People of talent and accomplishment, people admired and happy and sound of mind, have been committing suicide in surprising numbers. When Jane seeks to learn why, she becomes the most-wanted fugitive in America. Her powerful enemies are protecting a secret so important—so terrifying—that they will exterminate anyone in their way.

But all their power and viciousness may not be enough to stop a woman as clever as they are cold-blooded, as relentless as they are ruthless—and who is driven by a righteous rage they can never comprehend. Because it is born of love.

Jane Hawk’s story continues in The Whispering Room.

*****

At the time of this writing, The Silent Corner is #2 on The New York Times best seller list. Here’s what Dean Koontz had to say about Jane Hawk and his new series. https://www.deankoontz.com/the-silent-corner/

Interested? You can order a signed copy of The Silent Corner through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2tnEQQQ

Because it’s the holiday, I’ll link to Nora Krug’s article in The Washington Post in which she suggests books for the beach – “17 thrillers and mysteries worth toting to the beach (maybe not all at once)”. If you’re a regular at The Poisoned Pen, of course you’ll recognize many of these authors and titles. Here’s the article. https://wapo.st/2tC1qrw

Don’t forget to check out the Web Store. We have signed copies available of some of these titles. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Daniel Price, author of The Flight of the Silvers and The Song of the Orphans, the first books in a science fiction trilogy, agreed to answer a few questions. He’ll be appearing at The Poisoned Pen on Thursday, July 6 at 7 PM. I enjoy the humor shown by so many science fiction and fantasy writers. I hope you check out Daniel’s answers.

Daniel, would you introduce yourself to readers?

Of course. My name’s Daniel Price. I was born and raised in New York City, but I spent most of my adult life in Los Angeles. Two years ago, I fell in love with a fellow writer and moved to Arizona to be with her. She promised I’d get used to the heat out there. That has yet to happen.

I’m a cancer survivor, a graphic designer, an unabashed liberal, and an incorrigible nerd. I also write novels. Penguin has published the first two volumes of my science fiction trilogy, and they’re waiting anxiously for the third one. I’m working on it. I swear.

Would you introduce us to Hannah and Amanda Given and their companions?

The main characters of my series are two sisters and four strangers who were all just ordinary people on our world. Then, without warning, the sky all over Earth turns a bright shade of white and begins descending in a sheet of solid force. Everything’s gone in a matter of moments, but our six heroes are saved by mysterious beings who slap a silver bracelet on each of their wrists.

Next thing they know, these Silvers (as their rescuers call them) have been transported to an alternate Earth, one where history took a sharp left turn in 1912. Now restaurants hover through the air like flying saucers and the fabric of time is manipulated by common household appliances. Our heroes have no idea where they are, what they’re doing, or why they all suddenly have freakish time-bending abilities, but they’re eager to find out. Unfortunately, there are no shortage of people on this world who want to kill them, study them, or simply get revenge. There’s one man who, thanks to extreme temporal manipulations, has a long and fractious history with the Silvers. They don’t remember him at all, but he remembers everything about them.

And just that’s the start of our heroes’ problems.

I’m sure it’s hard to summarize The Song of the Orphans without background information from The Flight of the Silvers.  What can you tell us, without spoilers?

The Flight of the Silvers serves as a frenetic introduction to our six main characters and the strange new world they find themselves on. It’s centered around their cross-country quest to find the one man who can help them sort out the mess they’re in.

In The Song of the Orphans, the Silvers are more firmly situated. They have a clearer sense of what’s going on and the stakes of the conflict they’ve been pulled into. But their enemies are getting smarter too, and the mysterious beings who saved our heroes from apocalypse didn’t just do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They have their own plans for the Silvers, and now they’re finally ready to act on them.

Wow. You’re right. It is hard to summarize this stuff. Just read the books, people. You won’t regret it. (Unless you do.)

I’m not going to ask you about the third book. Instead, I’m going to ask you to talk about the use of time in your books.

Yeah, there’s a lot of time-bending going on in my stories, either by superpowered people or by high-tech devices. In writing the Silvers series, I challenged myself to come up with as many different forms of temporal manipulation as I possibly could without relying on time travel. There’s a woman who can slow down time and move faster than everyone around her. There’s a boy who can see the past of any area and reproduce it as holograms. There’s a girl who gets handwritten notes from her future selves, both helpful and not-so-helpful. And those just a few of the ways I screw with time in my books.

More than that, I explore the complex relationship that human beings have with time. Our heroes all survived a devastating apocalypse and are now hunted people on a dying Earth. Needless to say, they’re thinking a lot about their own mortality. The big question is how do you spend your limited time? Do you aim for quality or quantity? Do you settle for contention or do you fight to live a perfect life, enemies be damned? The time-bending takes a back seat to the struggles of my characters.

When did you first realize you wanted to become a writer?

When I first saw Star Wars in the theaters. Like most kids at the time, I became fanatically obsessed with the world, the characters, the sheer emotional power of the story. I spent the next two years rewriting the screenplay in my head, mostly to incorporate myself into the plot. I was Luke’s plucky little brother (a Jedi, of course), with my own side story and character arc.

It turned out I really liked storyelling. There was nothing else I ever really wanted to do. I was writing my own sci-fi at the age of nine and I never stopped. If my critics are right, then I never improved either.

Tell us about your first experience at a Con.

It was the San Diego Comic-Con of 2004. I went into a restroom and saw a guy dressed as Batman helping a guy dressed as Joker with his lipstick. If that doesn’t sum up Comic-Con, nothing does. It also confirms some long-held theories I’ve had about the Batman/Joker dynamic.

What authors have inspired you?

Oh God. There are too many to count. I’ll just list three:

Kurt Vonnegut. One of my favorite authors of all time. He didn’t consider himself a sci-fi writer, but the Sirens of Titan ranks up there with the best SF classics. He also did some mindblowing time manipulation in Slaughterhouse Five. But between all his high-faluting concepts, Vonnegut never lost sight of the characters. Every one of his novels has something deep and profound to say about human nature. He was just a genius all around.

Chris Claremont. He wrote X-Men comics for Marvel for 17 years, and turned them into the greatest superhero team of all time. (Come at me, nerds. I can argue this for days.) There’s a lot of his influence in my Silvers series, from the superpowers to the group dynamics. It’s not easy to take a group of spandex-wearing mutants and make them seem like real people, but Claremont did it.

JK Rowling. Yeah, I know it’s cliché to cite her as an influence, but her Harry Potter books are a master class in storytelling, especially Books 4 and 5. Not only is she amazing at worldbuilding and characterization, she knows how to get out of her own way. One sentence into any chapter and you forget she’s there. By the second sentence, you forget you’re even reading a book. You’re in the scene. You’re there.

What author would you like to recommend who you think has been underappreciated?

My fiancée, Nancy Price. Four years ago, she wrote a time travel novel called Dream of Time that was absolutely fantastic. It got lost in the clog of Amazon indies, which is a shame. She brought the San Francisco of 1900 to life with insanely detailed research, and she wrapped the whole story around a smart and endearing main character. Her book also had one of the best endings I’ve ever read. She’s brilliant.

And if you’re wondering why my fiancée and I already have the same last name, it’s just odd coincidence. I’m trying to convince her to change her name to Price-Price when we get married. She’s stubbornly resistant to the idea.

And, now that you’ve moved to Arizona, where do you take people when they come to visit?

Inside, where it’s air-conditioned. Seriously, how do you people live in this heat?

As I mentioned, Daniel will be at The Poisoned Pen on Thursday, July 6 at 7 PM. You can order his books through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2ui7cuL

Daniel Price’s website is https://danielprice.info/

It’s a holiday weekend, so let’s have a little fun with C.J. Box’ forthcoming book. C. J. Box will be at The Poisoned Pen on July 31 at 7 PM. The final book in his Highway Quartet, Paradise Valley, comes out July 25.

Here’s the summary, as it appears in the Web Store.

She almost caught him once. Now, he’s back.

For three years, Investigator Cassie Dewell has been on a hunt for a serial killer known as the Lizard King whose hunting grounds are the highways and truck stops where runaways and prostitutes are most likely to vanish. Cassie almost caught him… once.

Working for the Bakken County, North Dakota sheriff’s department, Cassie has set what she believes is the perfect trap and she has lured him and his truck to a depot. But the plan goes horribly wrong, and the blame falls on Cassie. Disgraced, she loses her job and investigation into her role is put into motion.

At the same time, Kyle Westergaard, a troubled kid whom Cassie has taken under her wing, has disappeared after telling people that he’s going off on a long-planned adventure. Kyle’s grandmother begs Cassie to find him and, with nothing else to do, Cassie agrees – all the while hunting the truck driver.

Now Cassie is a lone wolf. And in the same way that two streams converge into a river, Kyle’s disappearance may have a more sinister meaning than anyone realizes. With no allies, no support, and only her own wits to rely on, Cassie must take down a killer who is as ruthless as he is cunning. But can she do it alone, without losing her own humanity or her own life?

*****

And, here’s Adam Wagner’s .GIFnotes Summary as it appears on Criminal Element. “GIFnotes: Giving you the basic plot summary of an upcoming book with the help of the Graphics Interchange Format.” https://bit.ly/2u82qkk

We’re a month out, but, if our summary, or Wagner’s, entices you, you can pre-order a signed copy of Paradise Valley through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2usS9yF

 

Atlas Obscura always has such interesting articles. It seems that book clubs have always been about the social aspects, not just the discussion of books. Check out this fun article by Sarah Laskow.  “Even in the 1700s, Book Clubs Were Really About Drinking and Socializing.” https://bit.ly/2t9KKVk

Meg Gardiner, author of UNSUB, and Spencer Quinn, author of The Right Side, appeared together at The Poisoned Pen.

You can watch and listen as Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, talks with the authors on Livestream. https://livestream.com/poisonedpen/events/7512824

Gardiner talks a little bit about the background of UNSUB. For an in-depth article, check out the cover story in the July issue of BookPage. https://bit.ly/2toMA7E

You can order signed copies of The Right Side and UNSUB through the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/