Many a Midnight Ship: True Stories of Great Lakes Shipwrecks by Mark Bourrie

Apparently I am kind of fascinated by the Great Lakes.  I haven't actually spent much time on or near them, but I keep finding myself picking up books about them, and especially Lake Superior.  Given that I live in Wisconsin, which is surrounded by great lakes on two sides, I suppose this is not a particularly unusual thing to be interested in.

In Many a Midnight Ship, Bourrie talks about shipwrecks and disasters on the lakes.  He starts out with a bang, literally, as he describes a naval battle that took place on Lake Erie during the War of 1812.  He then moves on to talk about November storms, especially a hurricane that took out 12 ships and nearly 300 sailors in 1913.  That chapter was absolutely fascinating, and I expected to really enjoy this book.

However Bourrie appears to have packed his best material into the front of the book.  What follows is a series of stories of the Great Lakes, some of them about shipwrecks, and others not.  For instance, there is a chapter devoted to the history of the US naval ship Michigan, which never wrecked.  However there was an interesting story to tell about how some Confederate spies wanted to hijack it in order to use it to free the inmates at a prisoner of war camp, so Bourrie went with it.  Nevertheless, the Michigan didn't wreck.  The author has written two previous books on the subject, so I wonder if he might have been stretching to find new material he hadn't already used.  He also included a long section on a ship that had been used to house prisoners in Australia, which had been removed from service and was being dismantled in Cleveland when someone set it on fire.  That really isn't a shipwreck, either.  And a description of an overloaded pleasure boat that rolled over while still at the dock on the Chicago River.  Which, while fairly interesting, also should not be classified as a Great Lakes shipwreck.

Bourrie is a journalist, and it shows in his writing.  Every chapter opens with a hook, and some of them are pretty silly.  For instance:

Jonah survived his trip in a whale, but, for more than 800 passengers on the excursion ship Eastland, the tickets to the "big event" advertised for July 24, 1915--an excursion out of the hot city of Chicago to the dune-lined beaches of Michigan City, Indiana--was an invitation to die.

An invitation to die?  Really?  Or how about this one:

Politics can kill.  The most terrible disaster that ever occurred on the open water of the Great Lakes was the loss, with more than 400 passengers, of the steamer Lady Elgin on September 8, 1860.  It happened largely because a politician insulted hundreds of loyal soldiers just before the outbreak of the Civil War.

I've got to call bullshit on that one.  The political aspect of the story explains why that particular group of passengers were traveling on Lake Michigan that night, but really, a political insult did not cause the disaster.  Those people died because they were rammed by another ship in the middle of the night, not because they were mad at the governor.

Overall I found Many a Midnight Ship a little puzzling, sometimes a little silly, and sometimes interesting.  I realize that in shipwrecks where no one survives we often don't know what happened or why (or where, in some cases) they sank.  But some of the material included seemed surprisingly far off topic.  Because it's not written in chronological or geographical or any other order that would make sense to me, the stories seemed disconnected as they jumped around through time and space, and the work felt like a series of articles strung together rather than like a book.

Embassytown by China Mieville

Embassytown is China Mieville's first work of science fiction. It is set on a distant planet, where there is a small community of humans and other aliens living in a conclave amid the Ariekei. Due to the Ariekei's unusual language, only a select few modified humans can communicate with them. It is narrated by Avice, who left Embassytown to work as crew on a series of space ships. She returns mostly to please her latest husband, who is a linguist and wants to see what the place is like. Avice settles awkwardly into an odd position in Embassytown, as one of the few who has seen the universe beyond it. She moves in higher social circles because she is somewhat unusual, but she isn't really one of the people with power or responsibility, however much she keeps trying to insert herself into everything. 

The first half of the book is spent building the setting in a very indirect fashion through flashbacks to her childhood and events that took place after her return to Embassytown. Mieville never really tells us anything, he just hints at it and we're supposed to piece it together ourselves. I found it all a tedious slog as I kept waiting for the story to actually begin.

Eventually we switch into the current timeline as a new Ambassador to the Ariekei has arrived from Bremen, of which Embassytown is a colony. EzRa is very different from all the other Ambassadors, and it leads to a massive diplomatic incident that endangers everyone on the planet. The story picked up after this, but it was still hampered by the narrator. Avice's voice is oddly distant for a first-person narrator. I had very little sense of what she was like. I didn't understand her, and didn't trust her judgement, and did not enjoy spending time in her company. I really didn't like or care about any of the other characters, either, except Bren, a weird old guy who makes everyone else uncomfortable. 

This work is supposed to be about people facing likely doom, and yet I just didn't care if they lived or died. No, actually, I take that back. I would have been quite content if they'd all died, if only it hadn't dragged on so long. This was just tedious and uninvolving.

Hell Hole by Chris Grabenstein

This is the fourth in the mystery series featuring John Ceepak and Danny Boyle, police officers in the seaside town of Sea Haven, NJ.

It seems that about another year has passed since Whack a Mole.  Ceepak has married his girlfriend Rita and adopted her teenage son, TJ.  One night Boyle is on duty with Samantha Starky, one of the seasonal officers and, on a noise complaint, they wind up at a house rented by a group of rowdy, obnoxious, and drunk soldiers.  While they are there, the soldiers receive a call informing them that one of their friends has apparently committed suicide.  The sergeant is determined to go identify the body.  Because he's too drunk to drive, Boyle and Starky take him to the scene, which is outside their jurisdiction.

Boyle sees enough of the scene to convince him that something is wrong, and because it is being investigated by a man known to be sloppy and lazy, he takes his concerns to his partner, John Ceepak.  They decide to investigate, under the premise that they believe a couple of Sea Haven locals were probably on the scene committing a crime at the time.

Though it isn't too overt, Hell Hole seems inspired by the theme of September 11, from the soldiers and the war in the Middle East, to the Patriot Act, to a few members of the New York Fire Department who wander into the novel in time to save the day and then wander back out again.  This is a particularly personal subject for Ceepak, because he is a former MP who spent time in Iraq and had some bad experiences there.  Throw in a corrupt senator who aims to be president, always a favorite of thriller writers, and his bodyguards who are all ex-Special Forces, and you have a testosterone-soaked novel of crime and cover-ups.

I didn't like this one as well as the others in the series.  I think this is partly because I don't especially enjoy thrillers, and this is wandering over into that territory.  But more importantly, I was struck that Danny Boyle had a brain transplant since Whack a Mole, and is now an idiot.  Danny is young and a bit green, but in the prior books he wasn't a fool who kept doing the wrong thing.  In this book, he is.  He keeps leaping to incorrect conclusions and blurting out things to the wrong people at the wrong times, making the situation worse. I didn't enjoy it at all.  Until now, Danny was developing nicely under Ceepak's tutelage.  I have always hated stories about rookies making rookie mistakes, and in this one Danny took a giant leap back.  Very disappointing.

And then there is the bit with the drug dealer.  Apparently there is a serious drug problem in Sea Haven, and the police are stumped.  Until it occurs to Ceepak to actually, you know, ask someone who used to use drugs if they know who the dealer is and where he can be found.  Voila, we have an answer to the problem that has had the police stumped for years!  Uh, yeah, right.  That was almost as fortuitous as the FDNY guys who appeared just when they were needed to save the day and then vanished again.

Overall, this book is okay but not great.  Grabenstein is a good writer, and I like the characters and the town.  But this was definitely my least favorite of the four I've read so far, and I hope that the series goes back to its old form of being well-narrated police procedurals, rather than continuing in the vein of thrillers.

Equations of Life by Simon Morden

Equations of Life is a high-action apocalyptic science fiction novel.  It takes place in London about 50 years from now.  The background of the time and place is only hinted at, but apparently something really bad happened.  Japan has sunk into the sea, the US is trying to reconstruct (? apparently?  as I said it's never explained) and much of the rest of the world, though not spelled out in detail, is apparently dangerous or uninhabitable, as far as I could tell.

Warning, there are some spoilers in the description below.

The protagonist is Samuil Petrovitch.  He is a university student from Russia, and it turns out he's got a criminal past.  One morning while on his way to the university he prevents a young Japanese woman from being kidnapped, and that indirectly leads to the near-destruction of London.  The young woman, Sonja, is the daughter of the head of a powerful Japanese crime boss.  The would-be abductors are Russian mobsters, like Petrovitch himself used to be.  Petrovitch manages to get Sonja out of danger long enough for reinforcements to arrive, and then he has a heart attack and dies.

This is apparently not an unexpected occurrence.  Petrovich's heart apparently was damaged by radiation, and he has a pacemaker to keep things ticking along, so long as he leads a quiet and cautious life.  Running from mobsters who are trying to kill him is not a good idea. He is revived and told that he needs to get a replacement heart.  He schedules the appointment, but in the meantime he's running around London trying to stay alive and save the city, and having periodic heart problems.  It certainly adds a sense of urgency to everything.

Petrovich is, in a sense, the sort of hyper-competent protagonist that is not uncommon in science fiction novels.  I like that character type, myself.  However Morden takes it a bit far too far for me.  Not only is Petrovich tough and street-smart and a genius and the only one who can save us, he's also very, very young.  He admits to being 22, but we later learn that is part of his fake ID, and he's actually three years younger than that.  So, he's 19.  And a genius.  And a tough bastard, and very, very clever.  And, oh yeah, the only one who can save us all.

I have to say, I didn't really buy that.  He was just too competent to be that young.  Not that he'd be believable even if he were 15 years older, but he would be less unbelievable.

Equations of Life feels a lot like Jeff Somers' novels about Avery Cates, except not quite so bleak.  Not that it's cheerful, but Morden doesn't do bleak to the same extent as Somers, and that's just fine with me.  The reason the city of London is nearly destroyed seemed a bit strained to me, too, but the whole novel pushed too far past my willing suspension of disbelief, so I don't suppose that's worse than any of the rest of it.

However, though I may sound critical, Equations of Life kept me entertained.  I was fully engaged and absorbed in it, and kept eagerly picking it up again to find out what happened next.  Which makes this a far more successful work, in my mind, than the new China Mieville novel, which I am currently struggling to force myself to finish.  I want to enjoy the fiction I read, and I enjoyed Equations of Life.  And that's the only thing that matters, in the end.

High Season by Jon Loomis

As I have mentioned earlier here, I spent most of April sick. I got terribly behind at work and on household stuff, and have been scrambling to get caught up ever since. This week I got sick again. Sigh. I'm coughing and not breathing too well, exhausted and seemingly have lost half my brain function, and now it feels like I'm getting another ear infection. Peachy.

Anyway, I haven't been reading much lately, and what I have been reading has mostly been short stories and scripts. I just haven't had the time or ambition to take on a novel, and I see that it's been about two weeks since the last one I read, Whack a Mole by Chris Grabenstein. Further, I have a novel I need to review sitting on the pile, and I don't want to read it. I stalled out about 50 pages in, and I've been avoiding it all week. So when I sat down today to try to take on a novel, I naturally chose something different

Jon Loomis apparently lives in my general neck of the woods, in western Wisconsin. Ironically, I heard about High Season from an Australian blogger, Bernadette at Reactions to Reading. It sounded interesting, and my local library had a copy, so I picked it up a couple of weeks ago.

High Season is set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a small town on Cape Cod which in the summer is a vacation hot spot for gays and lesbians.  Our protagonist is Frank Coffin, a former homicide investigator in Baltimore who returned home to Provincetown after a nervous breakdown.  He has panic attacks around dead bodies, and so working in a small resort town is a good deal less stressful for him.  His peace is interrupted, however, by a series of murders, beginning with a cross-dressing televangelist.

The matter is being investigated by the state police, but Coffin's superiors lean on him to do his own investigation.  It's bad form, but he reluctantly agrees.  His life is further complicated by a mother with Alzheimer's, his girlfriend announcing that she wants a baby, and the reappearance of his uncle, the former chief of police, who was thrown out of office for corruption.

High Season provides an interesting contrast to Chris Grabenstein's Ceepak & Boyle novels, which I have been reading recently.  Both take place in seaside tourist towns, but the mood is very different.  The Grabenstein novels are smart and fun, while High Season is a lot more depressing.  Despite his hot younger yoga-instructor girlfriend, Coffin is otherwise a fairly miserable guy.  His mother's nursing home bills are high, he is broke and drives a car that's going to collapse at any moment, he has panic attacks and bad dreams, his relatives are incompetent or corrupt, and he lives in a funk of gloom.

Despite his local connections, Coffin doesn't figure things out very quickly.  Several murders are committed, and Coffin himself is almost killed.  There is a parallel storyline I didn't really care for in which his girlfriend is being stalked.  Ho, hum.  There are a lot of good things about the novel, though, that balance them out.  There are a couple of strong female characters who get themselves out of danger without needing to be rescued or being the crazy angry super-powered chick that seems to be the common conception of a strong woman in urban fantasy these days (shudder).  Gay and lesbian characters are numerous, and treated as real people instead of tokens or stereotypes.  I figured out who the killer was before Coffin did, but it didn't annoy me.  Overall, it was worth the few hours I spent on it, and I will probably seek out the sequel.

Sorry, nothing new to review

I'm reading my way through a pile of scripts at the moment for play selection committee.

I am certainly discovering that, just because I've read and liked plays by a particular writer, it's not guarantee I'll like their other work. Sigh.

Whack a Mole by Chris Grabenstein

Whack a Mole is the third in Grabenstein's mysteries featuring John Ceepak and Danny Boyle.  Ceepak and Boyle are police officers in the town of Sea Haven New Jersey, where the tourists swarm in the summer months.

This one is set about a year after Tilt a Whirl and about 10 months after Mad Mouse.  It's the middle of summer, and the town is planning a sand castle competition to try to draw in even more tourists.  The preparations are disrupted, though, by several grisly discoveries that lead Ceepak and Boyle to the conclusion that there has been a serial killer working in Sea Haven for a long time.  The police chief initially wants to push off the investigation until later, thinking that the killings were in the past and pose no current threat, so there is no point in disrupting the festivities.  But he is forced to change his opinion when it becomes clear the killer is still around.  He still wants to keep it quiet, so they do not call in the FBI, and it's up to Ceepak and Boyle to resolve this, quietly and discreetly.

The novels are narrated by Danny Boyle, who is a young and relatively inexperienced officer. He is still learning the ropes and developing as a person.  His partner Ceepak, a retired MP with a strong personal code of behavior, is a good influence on Boyle.  The narrative voice of these novels is great.  It's not that common to come across witty and amusing books dealing with murder, but Grabenstein has pulled it off.  The subject matter of Whack a Mole is dark, but the book zips along, well paced and compulsively readable.  There are several possible suspects and as different characters were introduced I was imagining how each of them could have done it, but in the end it turned out my speculation was wrong.

This series is great and entertaining, and I think I could gulp them all down very quickly and not get tired of them, as sometimes happens with series if I don't space them out far enough.  Seriously, go out and read these.

Ten Years Ago Today

A massive hail storm hit the town where I live.  I didn't experience it -- I was at work at the time.  I had just moved into my house a week and half previously, and was quite new to the whole homeowning thing.  The windows on the north side of my house were broken, and hail and broken glass were scattered in the bedroom and living room.  The siding on the north side of the house had holes punched in it, and it all needed to be replaced.  The screens on my porch windows were shredded, and all needed to be re-screened.  And the house and garage needed new roofs.

This was a lot to take in, and I had no idea where to even start.  But I spent the summer dealing with the insurance company, my bank, contractors, and roofers, and eventually got everything fixed, with a bit of money left over, which came in handy when my refrigerator died that fall.  And at the end the house was probably a bit better than it had been when I bought it.  It was a hell of an introduction to being a homeowner, though.