Circle of Enemies by Harry Connolly

I didn't like this one nearly as well as the other two. Not much else to say, really. Ray goes back to L.A. and finds that his old circle of fellow criminals have been taken over by creatures from other dimensions. He wants to save them, and can't. Lots of violence ensues. Just didn't really feel this one, unfortunately.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Snuff is Pratchett's latest Discworld novel. I am a Discworld fan, so of course when I came home last night and found it waiting on my porch, I sat down and read it straight through, finishing some time after midnight.

Snuff is set in the Watch series, which is a very good thing, as those are my favorites. It features primarily Commander Vimes and his family, Lady Sybil and Young Sam, though we get some brief appearances from some of the other Watch members, including Colon and Nobby, Carrot and Angua, and Cheery and Wee Mad Arthur (who may possibly be my very favorite Discworld character, but it's so hard to pick).

I am not going to spoil the story too much, but there will be mild spoilers in what follows, so be warned:

Sam Vimes is fairly angry at the beginning of the novel, as he is being forced by his wife and the Patrician to take a vacation. They head to Lady Sybil's country estate to take the fresh air and so that Young Sam learns about the country. Vimes is a city man, and he finds the country estate to be unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. Then a crime is committed, and he is able to do what he does best: get very angry and run around threatening people.

In Snuff Pratchett takes on several themes, from the ideal of idyllic country life to the relationship between the gentry, their servants, and the common people, to deep and painful matters of human (and nonhuman) rights. As is often the case with the Vimes novels, there is a good deal of attention devoted to the important difference between legality or illegality and right and wrong. He struggles with how to do what's right while working within the law, which often has little bearing on matters of right and wrong. And, being Vimes, he continually worries that he may do wrong as he's trying to do what's right, and that is simply unacceptable to him.

The subject matter of Snuff is some pretty heavy stuff, and the moral issues Pratchett is exploring are not handled in at all subtle fashion--the message is hammered in decisively and repeatedly. In fact, even the Patrician's behavior seemed a bit out of character as he was voicing the heart of the issue to Drumknott: "In short, Drumknott, a certain amount of harmless banditry amongst the lower classes is to be smiled upon if not actively encouraged, for the health of the city, but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?" (I don't consider this a spoiler, as it's on page 12) I found Snuff a bit heavy-handed in its message, but it's still a worthy entry in the Vimes novels, and very much worth reading. I really enjoyed it, as usual.

ETA: Abigail Nussbaum has done a much better job than I did at laying out the things that bothered me about the novel.  Her review is here: Asking the Wrong Questions

Shock Wave by John Sandford

John Sandford writes a couple of regular series set in Minnesota -- the Lucas Davenport mysteries and the Virgil Flowers mysteries. He also has a series about Kidd, who is a computer hacker. I tried one of those once, and didn't manage to get through it. My favorites are the Virgil Flowers books -- Virgil is a great character, and the mysteries are set outside of the Twin Cities, all around the state. Shock Wave is the newest.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and decided that I didn't want to limit myself to listening only in the car, so I've been sitting and listening to it and knitting. It's been a pleasant way to spend the weekend.

The story is set in the town of Butternut Falls, in Kandiyohi County. There is a controversial development going in -- a PyeMart, which seems approximately equivalent to a Target. Local businesspeople are worried that they will go out of business, local fishermen and environmentalists are worried that the runoff from the parking lot will pollute the river, and some people are just angry at the sudden flip-flop from the mayor and several city council members who appear to have been bought off to make the zoning changes to approve the store.

First someone sets off a bomb in PyeMart headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and then several bombs go off in Butternut Falls, leading the ATF to conclude that the bomber is a Minnesotan. Several people are killed, and there is a lot of property damage. It's up to Virgil, working with the local sheriff's department and the ATF agents, to find the bomber and stop him before even more people are killed.

I found the small town politics quite believable, based on some things I've seen happen around here. There were similar questions when a dog track went into Hudson about twenty years ago. The dog track went out of business after a few years, because the owners (who were in Florida) were wrong about how interested people living in the Twin Cities would be in driving to Wisconsin to bet on dog racing. Nevertheless, there was a lot of outrage and questions about whether it would hurt or help other businesses in town, and whether the city council should have allowed it, and why they eventually did. So all of that rang very true to me.

I was a little less certain about the perceived threat that the PyeMart posed to the local businesspeople, on the other hand. The town already had a WalMart, a Home Depot, a Menards, and a Fleet Farm (also like Hudson). If the WalMart failed to drive the pharmacy and the bookstore out of business, I fail to see why a PyeMart would do so.

Overall, though, this was a really good one. In fact, this may be my favorite Virgil Flowers mystery yet. I really didn't care for Heat Lightning, but have really enjoyed all the others. This one, though -- probably my favorite. I really enjoy these. Virgil is kind of a loose cannon, but he's smart and I, as a reader, can trust him not to be an idiot, which is important. The events in these mysteries can be pretty grim, but there is also humor here and there, which I always appreciate. They're just a hell of a lot of fun, and I wish Sandford would write them a bit faster, because now I want to hear about the case in Wabasha with the feet.

On the Wrong Track by Steve Hockensmith

On the Wrong Track is the sequel to Holmes on the Range, which I reviewed last winter.  It is the further adventures of Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, known more often as Old Red and Big Red.  They are brothers, and cowboys, and are all that the other has left in the world, after a flood wiped out the family farm and the rest of their family.  Otto is literate, and reads the stories in magazines around the campfire or in the bunkhouse to Gustav.  Gustav is particularly taken with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and dreams of becoming a detective himself.  In Holmes on the Range, he used his observations and his brain to solve a crime, and now he's anxious to do it for a living.

They apply to various detective agencies, and are repeatedly turned down.  Finally someone gives them a tip, and they are hired on as guards for the Southern Pacific Railroad.  They are on their way to San Francisco for training when several very bad things happen on their train, and they are the only ones handy to do something about it.  This is exacerbated by the fact the conductor despises them and keeps threatening to fire them.  A man is murdered, the train is held up, and they both get the tar beat out of them, but that's not going to stop them from getting to the bottom of things.

I had a blast with On the Wrong Track.  The narrative voice of story, Big Red, is quirky and entertaining.  Like Watson, or Captain Hastings, he often doesn't know what his smarter companion is thinking, but he is no fool himself (unlike Captain Hastings).  I appreciated the relationship the brothers have, and there's some lovely character-revealing conversation late in the book, told nevertheless in a suitably gruff and manly way.  It was also kind of cool that they were traveling over the Sierra Nevada, as I drove through there myself a couple of months ago, between Sacramento and Reno.  It's very dramatic countryside.  And Hockensmith does a nice job with revealing things about the time and setting without slowing down to lecture.  Really, these stories are just delightful and a lot of fun, even though I don't usually read Westerns and tend to avoid historicals.  If they can win me over, they've got to be good.

Rostnikov's Vacation by Stuart Kaminsky

Probably the best thing I've ever gotten from any of my book clubs was the discovery of Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov novels.  I have been reading them slowly over the last year or so, as I sometimes burn out on authors when I read too much of their work in a short time period.  This is the seventh in the series, and looking at Wikipedia I see that I missed the sixth.  Perhaps that's why this one felt a bit disconnected from the others, like quite a lot of time had passed and we'd picked up in a very different place.

And, actually, we have.  This book came out in 1991, and Rostnikov and Russia are dealing with Gorbachev's reforms, Glasnost and Perestroika.  It's an unsettled time as things have changed, but they haven't completely settled yet into a new order.  And things are quite unsettled with both the police, for whom Rostnikov works, and the KGB.

At the beginning of the novel, Rostnikov has been ordered to take a vacation and sent to Yalta with his wife, who is recuperating from surgery.  He runs into and renews his acquaintance with another policeman who has also been ordered to take a vacation.  His friend cryptically tells him that he is working on something of a mystery, and then he dies under mysterious circumstances.  Naturally Rostnikov must investigate, since local authorities are anxious (or lazy enough) to declare it a heart attack.  Add to that his puzzlement at being tailed by a fairly senior KGB agent for no reason he can fathom.

Meanwhile his colleague, Emile Karpo, has also been ordered to take a vacation.  But Karpo is a man of strong duty and no social life, so he tells his superior he's headed to Kiev to visit family, but continues investigating the case that he and Rostnikov were working on when ordered to leave.  This leads to his witnessing a murder, and puts him on the trail of an unstable drug addict on a crime spree.

His other colleague, Tkach, is still in Moscow, working on a case in which computers are being stolen from Jewish men.  He behaves, as he often does, like a young idiot, and spends the rest of the book sorting out his stormy emotions because of it.

As usual with this series, I enjoyed the novel.  Despite all of his superiors' attempts to tread on Rostnikov's career and marginalize him, he keeps coming up with the answers.  But I also like Rostnikov himself.  This is very human and sympathetic writing, from his limp and near-constant pain from a very old injury, to his not always harmonious relationship with his wife, to his sympathy for many of the victims and even sometimes the criminals they deal with.  These novels are about believable people who are not hotshots or success stories, who are doing their best to get through life and generally do more or less the right thing.  A pleasure, as usual.

Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson

Crack'd Pot Trail is the latest in a series of novellas Erikson has written about Bauchelain and Korbal Broach.  They are related to his Malazan Empire series, but do okay even if read independently of the rest of the series.  Bauchelain and Korbal Broach are dark sorcerers who travel around with their servant, Emancipor Reese and get into trouble, often of their own making.

They are not featured much in Crack'd Pot Trail, however.  The story is a sort of take on The Canterbury Tales, with a group of people traveling across a dry wasteland.  Some of them are pilgrims to the shrine of the Indifferent God, some are performers on their way to a competition, and some are killers hunting Bauchelain and Broach.  They suffer hardships, and are struggling to merely survive to the end of their long trek across the Great Dry.  The killers decide that, for the good of the group, cannibalism is the only answer and, given that poets are useless, they are the ones who need to die.  As the killers are the ones with the weapons, everyone goes along with the plan.  Every few days they set the bards to compete, with the loser becoming dinner.  This is the sort of dark humor that is prevalent throughout the story.

The book is quite funny, and very, very dark.  The narrator is a bard himself, who seems surprisingly confident that he will survive the journey, unlike most of his fellows.  One suspects (and so do his fellow travelers) that he is keeping secrets.  Various members of the group die in interesting ways, and many stories are told, and we are left wondering where Bauchelain and Broach are.  Erikson does this cleverly, as I thought I had figured out what he was doing, and then it turned out I was wrong.  That was quite good, and devious, which is entirely fitting for this story.

There are nineteen characters in the group, and Erikson introduces them all in a chapter not unlike the beginning of The Canterbury Tales.  I found my attention wandering, and so gave up on that and just plunged into the story.  Once I had a better idea of the characters, I went back and re-read the bit that introduced them and took notes.  I quickly got the hang of it, except that two of them had names that were too similar--Arpo and Apto--and that sometimes tripped me up.

Overall, I found The Crack'd Pot Trail quite fun.  It started slowly, but built into a big, dark, violent, comedic romp.  I like these better than the main series.

Just Food: Where Locavores get it Wrong and how we can Truly Eat Responsibly by James E. McWilliams

First, let me make my biases clear: I am deeply suspicious of the locavore movement.  It seems very simplistic and impractical to me, as well as elitist: it's fine to be a locavore if you live in a place with good soil, a good climate, and plenty of water.  It's obnoxious and environmentally and nutritionally stupid to suggest that everyone should eat the way you do.  Millions of people live in places where it would be very resource-intensive to try to produce all their food nearby.  And you are necessarily limiting people to the foodstuffs that can be grown in their local climate and soil, unless we're going to start greenhouse-growing produce to avoid shipping it from elsewhere.  Personally, you will have to pry the bananas and peaches (two of my favorite fruits, and neither of them hardy where I live) from my cold, dead hands, asshole.  Further, in the past people lived mostly off of food produced locally, and malnourishment and undernourishment were disturbingly common.  The ability to easily eat a wide variety of foodstuffs is a vast improvement over the way things used to be.  I am puzzled why anyone would think it was healthier to only eat locally available products.

Also, it would cause an ecological disaster to try to feed the populations of dry states by wasting ground water on irrigating the land to grow crops there.  It is much more practical and efficient to ship food from places actually suitable for agriculture.  And as for the argument that it's important to support the local person who has always wanted to have their own farm/orchard/etc. and they deserve to make a living, so you should be willing to pay a premium to help them out -- do you think that the farmer in a relatively poor, warm country who makes their living by growing produce for export is less deserving of making a living?  They also probably have a lot fewer options than the person in the US.  (Which is not a slam on US farmers, it's just a slam on a certain sort of grower who shows up at farmer's markets, charges a lot, and opines that it's our social responsibility to help them fulfill their dream of selling organic fruits or vegetables, and the people who actually buy into it)

So, naturally I was interested in what McWilliams had to say.  I found the chapters on the locavore movement and organic foods very interesting.  McWilliams points out that food miles, per se, are not a useful indicator of how energy efficient a foodstuff is.  That, for example, "German apple juice imported from Brazil, which racks up over 10,000 miles on the odometer, is also less energy-consumptive than apples grown and processed locally."  Further, of all the fossil fuels used related to food production and preparation, transportation to market is the smallest portion -- 11%.  On the other hand, consumers making extra stops to buy their food instead of getting it all at the grocery store, consumes significant amounts of extra fuel.

McWilliams occasionally gets a bit sarcastic, which I am sure irritates some of the people whose lifestyle choices he is questioning.  Personally, I found it entertaining, but I'm not personally all that invested in locavorism.

Indeed, these findings leave one wondering how much energy could be saved if we threw out less food, cooked smaller amounts, ate less in general, used energy-efficient ovens and refrigerators, composted all organic matter not eaten, and developed more energy-efficient menus (say, by eating more meals that did not require extensive and prolonged applications of heat).  In short, if we were really paying attention to the numbers yielded by life-cycle assessments, we'd be better off focusing on what happens to our food after we buy it than on its place of origin.  But of course it's hard to turn a variety of small, energy-saving domestic tactics into a token symbol of an eco-correct food philosophy.  "Cook efficiently" just doesn't have the same rousing ring as "eat local." 

It should be clear, I think, from that paragraph that McWilliams himself is deeply interested in the environmental impact of our food choices.  He is a former local- and organic-eating person, himself, who began to question whether the things he was being urged to do were actually all that productive.  He cares, deeply.  He has looked into the real numbers, though, and drawn his own conclusions about the best way to feed our huge and ever-expanding global population nutritiously with minimal damage to the environment.

I also agree with this, from what I have seen in the people around me who espouse the local, organic, co-op and farmer's market lifestyle: "When we survey the expansive literature supporting the food-miles approach, one thing becomes evident: the prevailing argument for stressing food miles is driven less by concrete evidence of improved sustainability than by a vague quest to condemn globalization.  In this respect, buying local is a political act with ideological implications."  That is certainly evident among the local or organic cheerleaders I know.  (Of course, the other people who are totally on the bandwagon and singing its praises are the ones who expect to profit from it, and McWilliams addresses that, too.)

After his takedown of the automatic superiority of local eating, McWilliams then moves on to organic farming.  He points out it is less efficient and requires more land under cultivation to produce similar quantities, and that many of the fertilizers and pesticides that are acceptable in organic farming are more harmful than the newer ones used in conventional farming.  The overwhelming majority of organic food in the US is factory farmed, just like large conventional farms.  A few quotes:

Agricultural sprawl is an insidious form of development that threatens the world's remaining natural resources.  "If organic farming were to be widely adopted," write two scientists in the 2004 Proceedings of the International Crop Science Congress, "lower yields would require more land (25 - 82%) to sustain production."  The Tuskegee University plant microbiologist C.S. Prakash puts it this way: "Converting from modern, technology-based agriculture to organic would mean either reducing global food output significantly or sacrificing undeveloped land to agriculture."

 Consumers, swayed by the "chemical-free" reputation of organic foods, tend to take false comfort in the impression that organic products lack potentially harmful external inputs.  However, organic agriculture struggles with its own demons of chemical dependency.  The fact that farmers have been applying natural chemicals to agricultural systems for thousands of years does not mean that these applications are innocuous, especially when they're used to promote the interests of commercialized organic agriculture.

Organic growers are also allowed to use copper, sulfur, and copper sulfate as natural fungicides.  According to Julie Guthman, a geographer who writes extensively about California's organic culture, "Sulfur is said to cause more worker injuries in California than any other agricultural input."  Miners who harvest sulfur dust to  be sprayed on organic grapes tend to suffer chronic respiratory problems....The dust is generally harmless to land animals, but the Department of Health and Human Services has found that it is toxic to fish.

And so on.   McWilliams then moves on the genetically modified crops, which many people fear are dangerous, harmful, and unnatural.  He points out that they tend to be more disease and pest resistant, which means that they can be grown with fewer chemicals applied.  These new varieties are instrumental in being able to feed more people with less land.  He makes many good points in this chapter, but nevertheless I found it rather dull.

I was going along with him quite well until we hit chapter 4, in which McWilliams moves on to what he thinks we should do to feed the world's population with minimal impact on the earth.  By this time I was getting a bit bored and restless, and I ended up reading the last three sections, on meat, fish, and government subsidies and a fast skim.  These are important topics, just less interesting to me than the first few.

Lest anyone think that McWilliams is an apologist for big business farming, in chapter four he says that we should stop eating land-dwelling meat.  He points out the damage that livestock can do to land, the huge resources entailed in raising and feeding meat animals, the horrible living conditions in feedlots (though not all meat-producing animals come from feedlots, of course), the pollution from large animal-producing operations, and the greenhouse gas that come from the digestive tract of bovines.  In fact, if we really care about reducing carbon emissions, we should be looking at cow farts.

In terms of general biodiversity, it's also worth noting that cattle dictate the destruction of a wide range of indigenous animals, even when they do not trample riparian zones or damage grasslands.  Rangeland management, whether informal or formal, automatically threatens and often substantially diminishes surrounding wildlife....In the United States, to cite a well-documented example, ranchers have legally killed billions of animals, including prairie dogs, wolves, bears, coyotes, rattlesnakes, and, most notably, buffalo.  In 2005 alone, the USDA's Wildlife Servies killed 86,000 coyotes at the behest of ranchers grazing cattle and sheep.  From a less obvious perspective, millions of pounds of insecticides have been deployed to combat cattle ticks, fleas, and flies.  Interestingly, however, the attempt has more often than not backfired, with insects proliferating beyond their original numbers as a result of their insidious ability to resist conventional insecticides.  Either way, the ultimate result is the same: biodiversity is compromised, the predator-prey balance is upset, and the environment suffers the consequences.

All of these are valid points, but where he lost me is that I don't think eating a grain-heavy diet is all that healthy, and when he talks about a primarily plant-based diet I don't think he means we can all sustain ourselves on fruit and green vegetables.  However he has certainly given me something to think about, and it is likely that I will make some adjustments to my eating habits, consuming fewer animal products, trying to waste less, and after reading the chapter on seafood I will probably never eat it again, not that I was much of a fish-eater to begin with.  I wish that McWilliams had managed to make the later chapters as interesting and entertaining as the early ones, but still I think this is actually a quite important book that everyone who is interested in making ethically-conscious choices should read.  I think it also could be very instructive for people who aren't all that interested in the ethical choices of food, because it could lead them to think about things differently.  I certainly do not enthusiastically embrace all of his suggestions, but it was a fascinating and worthwhile read.

The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church

The Man with the Baltic Stare is the third novel about Inspector O, a North Korean detective.  I have not read the previous two books.  O had retired from service and lived in a little hut he built himself on a mountain out away from the capital, which suited him fine.  He is very perturbed to be called back to Pyongyang in placed under the command of Major Kim, a South Korean whose motives he does not understand at first.

Indeed, a good deal of this novel involves things going on that O does not understand.  He wavers between refusing to listen and being quite uninterested in what is going on to trying to figure out enough to stay alive while refusing to cooperate with any of the people who are trying to get him to work for them.  Despite all his efforts (and, really, he is a frustrating character, always talking back and refusing to go along with anything) he gets drawn into the middle of some dangerous events.

The novel is set largely in North Korea, though O does some traveling during the course of the novel.  I found it interesting that Church makes no effort to explain things or ease the way for the reader to understand the setting.  This does not bother me, as I noted a few months ago in my review of The Case of the Missing Servant.  I prefer that the author not feel the need to hold my hand and explain everything to me when the setting is unfamiliar.  Nevertheless, I was just having to guess from context what MSS or SSD were, for instance.  There are many things that happen that are not explained, or things that left me a bit fuzzy on who did them and why.

And despite this, I nevertheless found it a quite absorbing read.  Even though O spends too much time being irritatingly philosophical.  Even though I'm quite certain I didn't understand everything that was going on.  I really had no idea what was going to happen next, which was refreshing.  I appreciated that the setting, which to me is quite alien, was not spoon-fed or made too easy to process.  All in all, it was a somewhat challenging but very interesting read.

Bubba and the Dead Woman by C.L. Bevill

This was a free ebook.  It is available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.

Our protagonist is Bubba Snoddy, a big, quiet Texan who lives in a little town that loves to gossip.  As the story begins, Bubba has a particularly bad night at work, as all his coworkers at the garage/convenience store either quit or are unavailable, forcing him to man the place by himself all night.  After this singularly frustrating evening, he returns home to discover a dead woman in his front yard.  Worse yet, it turns out to be his ex-fiance, with whom he'd had a bad break-up a few years previously.  As she is dead in his front yard, and no one else in town knew her, the police assume that he must have killed her.  The problem is that Bubba didn't kill her, and the police seem very uninterested in looking for any other suspects.  So he decides that, unless he wants to end up on death row, it is his responsibility to find out who the real killer is, with the aid of his loyal basset hound, Precious.

This is actually a story type I usually avoid.  I don't like mysteries whose premise is that the detective is the suspect and trying to clear their name, or some friend or relative is the suspect, and they must find the real killer to save their loved one.  But I was feeling a bit uninspired this afternoon when trying to figure out what to read, so I decided to look at the free books on Barnes and Noble.  I downloaded three stories, and this was one of them.

I am happy to report that, in spite of being a story type I generally dislike, Bubba and the Dead Woman is a funny and very enjoyable mystery.  This is largely because Bubba, himself, is a very likable character.  He's a good guy, and he cares about his crazy and irritating mother, and has funny exchanges with Precious.  He gets along with everyone in town, many of whom are quite colorful characters themselves.  It's a funny, quirky little town, and Bevill manages to pull that off better than a lot of writers.

The mystery is not too simple, in that lots of related stuff is going on, and so it takes Bubba a while to sort it all out.  But it's also not surprising (to me, at least) when it's revealed who is framing him.  There are enough hints to figure that out, without it being too obvious or too surprising.  Bubba and I figured it out at about the same time, which is good.

Overall, Bubba and the Dead Woman was a very pleasant surprise, and I enjoyed it very much.  I see that Bevill has other work available, and I intend to read more by her.  Recommended.