Iron Man

I wasn't charmed, I'm afraid.

In fact, I was bored.

That was a waste of an afternoon.

Bone Song by John Meaney

Bone Song is a noir police detective book set in an alternate universe that runs on necromancy. And it totally rocks.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, because I would really strongly recommend that you go out and find a copy and read it yourself. The protagonist, Donal Riordan, is a lieutenant in a police department in a large city. The police have noted that someone is killing great artists and stealing their bodies, and Donal has been assigned to protect an opera singer so that she isn't the next victim. Naturally, things don't go smoothly.

The world Riordan lives in is run on dead people. Spirits animate and operate a lot of machinery, and power plants run on the corpses of the dead. There are also the Bone Listeners, who can extract information from dead bodies, and there seem to be sorcerers as well. Riordan does his daily run in the catacombs under the street. It's all quite dark and moody but bunches of fun. Meaney has also thrown in some fun details--for instance, in this world, there is no YMCA, they have the Agnostic Men's Association. And he regularly flirts with Gertie, the elevator.

I haven't had this much fun since...well, last week when I read Emissaries from the Dead. But it's a great, moody romp and a ton of fun. Highly recommended.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer

I picked this one up because it's a Hugo nominee this year, and I will be voting.

Rollback is about an elderly astronomer and her husband (he's the protagonist) who are offered a life extension, or rollback, to make them young again so that she will live long enough to continue her work communicating with aliens. It's full of moral questions as they consider youth, age, dying, and what one should spend one's life doing.

Without spoilers, let me say that it's a fairly boring book about very boring people leading boring lives. The protagonist is kind of an asshole. The text is peppered with popular culture references, from Seinfeld to Star Trek, Conan O'Brien to Pamela Anderson. And I found that distracting and pointless. Yes, these characters lived through our current times and so they would know these things. But the book is set in 2048. I never noticed my 90+ year old grandparents talking all the time about Glenn Miller or Ed Sullivan. They lived through those times, they don't live in them. And I thought it amazingly clumsy when they sat down and watched a rerun of the movie Contact, which allowed them to think about SETI. These people sit and watch movies and we are treated to their reaction to the film. Amazingly boring. Or the scene in which Sarah remembers the opening of a Star Trek film which referenced the Challenger explosion, which led her to think about the future of space exploration, or something. They spend a great deal of time talking about moral questions, and very little actually happens.

Much as I love a good violent space adventure, I do not require that all SF works I read have a high level of action. I require more events than this book contains, though. Which is unfortunate and a bit surprising, because I liked the other two of Sawyer's novels that I've read.

Not terrible, just rather dull and pointless.

Emissaries from the Dead by Adam-Troy Castro

I went to Borders yesterday with a list of books I wanted and a coupon for 40% off one item if I spent $20. Rather to my surprise, they didn't have any of the books I was looking for. I wanted something new to read, though, so I bought Emissaries from the Dead. I'd looked at it last time I was at Borders, and I recalled reading a good review of it somewhere online, so I decided to try it.

I loved it.

I like both science fiction and mysteries, so I'm always happy to find a good SF mystery. It takes place in a cylindrical artificial habitat called One One One which has been created by an artificial intelligence. A party of humans has been allowed in to study a sentient race the AI created called the Brachiators. They live at the very top of the cylinder, clutching the foliage for dear life and eating the fruit that grows there. The human party's living conditions are equally precarious, a series of hammocks and ropes hainging from the ceiling of the cylinder. A fall means certain death, both from the distance of the fall and because the lower levels of the cylinder contain other environments which are poisonous to human and Brachiator life.

Our protagonist, Andrea Cort, is an investigator for the Diplomatic Corps Judge Advocate. She is sent to One One One to investigate the deaths of two humans. It appears that they may have been killed by the AI, but it would be diplomatically disastrous to accuse the AI, so she has been ordered to find someone else to accuse. Andrea, following in the long tradition of dark horse investigators throughout the mystery genre, is more interested in finding out what really happened than in finding someone to pin it on. She has quite an adventure along the way.

I don't know why, but I often like books with damaged protagonists. They tend to be more interesting to me than happy, well-adjusted people. Andrea Cort has a dark event in her past that ruined her life, and she carries around a lot of anger and hatred, both for herself and for her situation. That anger helps drive her and keep her alive, even as the killer is now gunning for her.

I gulped down Emissaries from the Dead in one sitting. It kept me interested, and I wanted to know what happened next. This is why I read SF--for the books that grab you and won't let go until you find out what happens. Such reading experiences are increasingly rare for me. Highly recommended.

Thin Air by Gerald Hammond

Thin Air is another of the books I bought at the Hasting Library book sale over the winter. It is a mystery novel set in the Scottish Highlands.

The point of view character is a mystery novelist, an Englishman who had moved to Scotland years before when he inherited his uncle's house. He has since settled down, married, and had two children. He writes novels from his own imagination, but also has a side line writing up old cases of Keith Calder, a friend of his who is a ballistics expert who has worked with the police many times.

The novel opens with our point of view character being invited to go rabbit hunting by three friends of his. Or rather, they ask if they can take his hunting dog, Boss (also inherited from the deceased uncle), and he decides to go along. They are rabbit hunting on a nearby farm, where they are clearing out the rabbits to keep them out of the farmer's crops. The farmer, Old Murdo, is an extremely unpleasant man. He argues with everyone including, on that day, his neighbor, his sons, a roofer, and a veterinarian. Naturally by the end of the day Old Murdo winds up dead and there are plenty of people who might have a motive to kill him.

However, no one went near him, and the forensic evidence doesn't make any sense, so the the novel is really a puzzle mystery. Our protagonist gets recruited to sit in on the interview and take notes, and he and his friends speculate endlessly on what might have happened. It's all a mystery until Keith Calder arrives on the scene. He reads the case notes and immediately knows who did it, and how. He's a bit like Sherlock Holmes, I suppose, and the protagonist his Watson.

Thin Air isn't a terribly good mystery, but it was a quick and fairly pleasant read.

A Sensitive Case by Eric Wright

This is one of the twelve books I got for $2 at the Hastings Library book sale over the winter. It is a mystery novel set in Toronto.

Linda Thomas, a typist and massage therapist, is found dead in her bathtub. It is quickly determined to be a homicide, and the case is kicked over to the Special Affairs Unit, headed by Inspector Charlie Salter, because her clientele included a government official and and a television personality. Salter is buried under other work, so he recruits Sergeant Pickett, who is nearing retirement and could walk away from the job any time he likes, to do the legwork on the case for him. Many people are lying to the police, but ultimately they determine who the killer was.

A Sensitive Case was a quick read, and moderately entertaining. I like police procedurals, and this one was competently done. It featured rather more of the detectives' personal lives than I like--especially Salter's marital troubles--but I didn't find it too annoying. I quickly guessed who the murderer was, and later revised my opinion to the next most obvious person. The police eventually came to the same conclusion I did. It wasn't a tricky case, but as I said, it was competently written and fairly enjoyable, which is all I ask of a mystery novel.

Avalanche by Patrick F. McManus

For years I've been reading funny tales of outdoor misadventures written by Patrick McManus. They have been issued a volumes such as Never Sniff a Gift Fish, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, and The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw. For years I have been enjoying these stories, and occasionally laughing until I hyperventilated. McManus has now turned his hand to mysteries.

Avalanche is McManus's second mystery novel featuring Sheriff Bo Tully of Blight County Idaho. I reviewed the first, The Blight Way, in April 2006 on my old blog on Yahoo, which I no longer maintain. I generally liked it--gently funny in places but also quite violent, and even though it was obvious who the killer was, it still managed to surprise me in the end.

In Avalanche, Bo is back, accompanied again by Pap, his obnoxious septagenarian father; Dave, owner of Bo's favorite restaurant, who likes to pretend he's an Indian; and Lurch, the CSI whom Bo frequently tortures. Bo, Pap, and Dave head up to an expensive lodge to search for a missing man, and everyone gets trapped there by an avalanche that blocks the road and takes out the phone line. While there, Bo investigates, and then has to solve a double homicide before the road gets cleared and everyone leaves.

I enjoyed Avalanche. I figured out how the first murder was committed before Bo did, as the clue-dropping was pretty obvious to me. And I'm not sure that the solution would actually have worked, but I won't spoil it in case someone else wants to read it. But I prefer to be given the clues to chew on myself rather than have the detective (or sheriff) pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute with information the reader wasn't given. It had a decent story and a couple of laugh-out-loud moments. Recommended.

The Electric Church by Jeff Somers

I picked this one up because there was an excerpt of it in the back of Debatable Space, and I was sufficiently interested to want to read the rest. So good job by the publisher, it worked on me.

The Electric Church is set some time in the future, though I don't believe that a year is given. It takes place about twenty years after the world was united under one government, and it was not a good change. Riots followed and cities burned, and nothing has really been rebuilt. The police wander the streets beating and killing people without much reason.

The protagonist, Avery Cates, is a Gunner, or hit man. He has managed to reach 27, which is an advanced age for someone in his profession. He kills people, tries to stay out of the way of the police, and drinks, incessantly, at illegal gin joints. One night as he and a friend are staggering home drunk, they are approached by a Monk, a cyborg member of the Electric Church. His friend ends up dead and Cates barely escapes with his life. Soon after, Cates is hired to try to assassinate Dennis Squalor, the head of the Electric Church. With an army of cyborg Monks to protect him, killing Squalor is going to be a very tough job.

The Electric Church is the sort of novel in which the situation goes from bad to worse to ridiculously terrible, and just keeps sinking lower. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, then I thought it stalled a bit in the middle, and then it picked up again in the run toward the end. A good deal of it is lengthy action scenes as Cates keeps running from people who want to kill him, or alternately he tries to kill people who want to kill him.

I didn't really buy the world that Somers has created: a unified world government followed by riots twenty years earlier doesn't explain why almost the entire population is unemployed and starving. The fact that Cates moves in a world of criminals doesn't change the fact that they need employed people to steal from--you can't steal from people who have nothing. And if no one has anything, how does anyone survive? And where do they get the yen to spend at the illegal gin joints? Other than the crooks and the bars, the only business I recall being mentioned in the poor part of town was someone selling rat sandwiches. I think that the world as portrayed would not actually work, even if you factor in a short lifespan and a large number of criminals.

Nevertheless, I found The Electric Church moderately entertaining. It was a pleasantly quick read after my slog through The Dragon Never Sleeps, and it's kind of fun if you don't think too hard about it.

The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook

For years I've been hearing people online praising The Dragon Never Sleeps. It came out in 1988 and has been out of print for some time, but now has been reprinted by Night Shade Books. I bought it recently and was looking forward to reading it.

Contrary to its title, The Dragon Never Sleeps is a science fiction novel. It is set in some distant and far-future setting in which humanity has managed to carve out a section of space to call their own, and the borders are strictly enforced by a fleet of Guard Ships, whether anyone wants them to or not. This is the story of a greedy, rich family who wants a Guard Ship of their own, and ally themselves with forces greater than they understand to try to gain their objective. Which turns into an interstellar war with millions of casualties.

I found it a very slow read, because there is a lot packed into 290 pages--in fact, this is a rare occasion where I think a book would be better if it were longer. There are too many story lines with too many people trying to outsmart and backstab one another, and the writing style is so terse that it leaves out a lot. This was exacerbated by the fact that several of the characters had cloned themselves, so there were multiple versions of them to keep track of. It's a complicated slog.

Did I like it? Hmm, somewhat. I enjoyed the Guard Ships. I was moderately entertained by watching one of the masterminds try to outmaneuver everyone else. I was bored by the war, and the book continued past the logical stopping point so that we could see just a few more nasty people and their grubby plots. Really, it was a book full of horrible people. It was interesting that the Guard Ships at first came across a lot like the Evil Empire from Star Wars, but before long I was cheering for them as the least bad option. It was an interesting book in its complexity, but I didn't like it as well as I had expected I would, hearing the praise it has received.