Trash Lit

No headbutting?

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No headbutting?

tredmond@sfbg.com

LIT/FILM The folding travel toothbrush is a central element in every Jack Reacher novel. It’s his only possession, the only thing the wandering ex-military cop takes with him when he throws away his old clothes and buys new ones, the only thing that ties him directly to his old life in the U.S. Army. It’s part of the Reacher formula, one that consistently works through 17 books by Lee Child.

It’s not in the Jack Reacher movie.

That was the first sign that one of the best trash-lit characters to come on the scene since John D. MacDonald invented Travis McGee hasn’t translated so well to the big screen. (McGee never did, either; the only McGee movies ever made were disasters, and MacDonald hated all of them.)

But the esoteric musings of McGee, on everything from Florida real-estate development to the demise of San Francisco, were the charm that held those modest plots together. Child, who has a background in television production, offers more action-packed stories with all the elements that ought to make a great movie.

Like MacDonald, though, Child goes a bit deeper than the traditional trashy thriller writer. His books have themes of violence and redemption, of freedom and responsibility, of wanderlust and homesickness that can’t just be shoehorned into a fast-paced screenplay with Tom Cruise. This may not be Shakespearean literature, but it isn’t Mission Impossible, either.

To make it more challenging, there are long periods of silence in the Reacher book, and those don’t work will in today’s mainstream cinema — but without them, the pacing is all wrong.

I showed up at the movie ready to be let down. The diminutive and emotional Cruise seemed all wrong as the tall, taciturn Reacher; I was hoping for a more Daniel Craig approach. Child, on the other hand, was totally down with the casting, so I was ready to give it a shot. (Or, as the book title from whence this flick emerged put it, One Shot.)

The book is a classic of the Reacher oevre, with a tiny bit of 2007’s Shooter mixed in. There’s a former Army sniper named James Barr (Joseph Sikora) who gets charged with an apparently random killing spree; the evidence is overwhelming, the cops have him nailed, and the execution-mad district attorney tells him if he doesn’t confess, he’s going to get the death penalty.

Barr refuses to talk; he just takes a legal pad and writes “Get Jack Reacher.” Which turns out to be tricky; Reacher has no address, no credit cards, no car, no driver’s license … nothing to pin him down. He’s almost impossible to find.

But he shows up on his own — not to help save Barr but to tell the cops that the guy once murdered a bunch of civilian contractors in Iraq. Reacher had him nailed, but the Army, for political reasons, let the case go. He’s ready to send the guy to the chair, if he doesn’t kill him with his own hands first.

But then the DA’s daughter, Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), who is representing Barr, convinces Reacher to take another look, and together they discover a fiendish plot involving an 80-year-old mob capo from the old Soviet Gulag.

Nice movie plot. And the film version doesn’t take too many liberties with the general idea of the book.

But there’s no headbutting, which is Reacher’s trademark fighting technique. And he never has sex with the female protagonist, which is disappointing.

That and the fact that the movie’s about 20 minutes too long — and the car chase scene alone is about five minutes too long (and car chases are not part of the Reacher mix) and there’s an embarassing scene where Cruise takes his shirt off just so we can see him with his shirt off left me wondering: did Lee Child really sign off on this screenplay?

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the film is entertaining, Cruise does the best he can under the circumstances, and he delivers the key lines nicely. Pike does a fine job of being sexy without being movie-star beautiful. The fight scenes are lively and fun and not too overdone.

And Werner Herzog is just spectacular as the evil Zec, a man so tough that he chewed his fingers off in prison to avoid getting gangrene. Watching Herzog sneer and be scary, horrible, and fascinating at the same time is worth the price of admission.

No nudity. Five people beaten near death. Three cops cars destroyed. Sniper porn. Fight to the death in the pouring rain. Not a great tribute to a great character, but I’ll take it. *

JACK REACHER is now playing in Bay Area theaters.

Pop thrills

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Pop thrills

tredmond@sfbg.com

LIT So much trash lit, so little summer left. It hasn’t been the greatest of years for beach and backyard reading (seriously, more trash than lit), but we struggle on. Some selections:

THE AFFAIR

By Lee Child

Delacourte Press

405 pp, hardcover $28

Jack Reacher is one of the best action characters of our time, up there with Spenser and Travis McGee.

Child came up with a winner, a former military cop who wanders the world like Kwai Chang Caine, doing good work, sometimes reluctantly, with superior fighting skills that make him a true badass.

The Affair is sort of a prequel, and takes us back to Reacher’s army days. It’s absolutely formulaic, completely predictable, just like all the other Reacher books — but so well executed that it’s still a beautifully guilty pleasure.

There’s a murder that puts Reacher in danger, a gang of thugs who get their butts kicked, a hot woman in law enforcement with whom Reacher has what we all know will be a short-lived affair … and plenty of sharp dialogue the keeps the pages turning.

With all the pablum out there, it was nice to sit down and read the work of a master who is still in his prime.

STOLEN PREY

By John Sandford

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

402 pp, hardcover $27.95

Put this one up there with The Affair. If you love Lucas Davenport and his world of twisted murder shit in and around the Twin Cities, then Stolen Prey works fine.

Mexican drug gangs seem to be the Most Evil Fuckers In The World this summer, and in Stolen Prey, they’re particularly horrible, doing a stomach-turning murder that takes place in a nice upper-middle class town. The dead family appears to have no ties to any type of criminal activity — but ah, there is much more here.

Again, nothing radically new (except a suprising ending involving Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, who apparently has some of the step-old-man in her), but a fine read for a sunny afternoon.

THE LITIGATORS

By John Grisham

Dell Paperback

488 pp, paper $9.99

Grishman practically invented the modern lawyer novel, and most of his protagonists are brilliant (if tormented) legal advocates who fight valiantly against corporate crime.

It was getting old.

This time around, there’s plenty of evil corporation (big pharma) — but the lawyers are bumbling idiots, worthless ambulance chasers who’ve stumbled into something they’re mind-bendingly unqualified to handle. Drunk lawyers, dumb lawyers, lawyers behaving badly … it’s a grand and glorious testament to the noble profession. And it moves right along.

DON’T BLINK

By James Patterson and Howard Roughan

Hachette

365 pp, paper $9.99

Patterson has written so many books I don’t think even he can keep track. The Alex Cross series is among the modern classics in crime lit. His current M.O.: Find co-writers who can do some of the heavy lifting while he polishes. At least, that’s how much of his stuff reads. And this one, sad to say, is a snooze.

Even in his collaborations, Patterson normally manages to keep things lively. The plots are good, the characters decent, and there’s no shortage of action. He’s into seriously depraved, psychotic villains and seriously evil enemies. Never a dull moment — mostly.

But Don’t Blink bored me. It’s about a reporter (good) who sees a mob killing (cool) and then gets in trouble (predictable). The protag is decent and believable, but the plot goes on and on and gets nowhere. Blink.

LET THE DEVIL SLEEP

By John Verdon

Crown

449 pp, hardcover $25

Verdon’s series hero, retired cop Dave Gurney, continues to live in his gruesome Green Acres in upstate New York, where his wife wants a quiet country life and he keeps tangling with psychokillers. I really liked the first two, Think of a Number and Shut Your Eyes Tight, and this one’s fine, although not as stone-cold sick-ass wacked-out crazy as the past two.

Here, Gurney looks into a cold case and everyone thinks he’s crazy except that the killer, who supposedly isn’t around, keeps doing things like shooting deadly hunting arrows into his garden. Between the murderer and the pain of his tormented marriage, there’s enough to keep you turning the pages. But it’s at best a B-plus.

ROBERT B. PARKER’S LULLABY

By Ace Atkins

G.P. Putnam’s Sons

320pp, hardcover $26.95

All of the knockoffs suck. Tom Clancy’s Ops Center? Worthless. The Jason Bourne sequels? Robert Ludlum’s ghost is puking. You don’t do that shit; it doesn’t work. And another writer trying to take on the Late Great Robert B. Parker and Spenser? Not a prayer. Give it up.

Except that Ace Atkins actually makes it work. And he does it not by becoming Parker but by staying true to the characters and developing just enough of his own voice that it’s not just a weak parody. You’ve got Spenser and Hawk and Vinnie and Susan Silverman and a 14-year-old terrified girl who hired the detective for a box of donuts and leads him into a fierce FBI-Boston mob frameup gig that sparkles like Parker of old.

For real. I’m amazed.

Trash Lit.: Endless summer reading edition

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash Lit.: Endless summer reading edition

So much summer trash lit. So little of note.

I’ve been reading as fast as I can, catching up on all of the beach books I can find, looking for the Great Work of Summer, 2012. I still haven’t found it. There’s plenty worth reading, some decent drivel and distractions. But overall, I can’t say anything had my head spinning.

So here’s the first installment of my rundown, the good, the fair and the total waste cases.

Against All Enemies, Tom Clancy, Berkeley Books, 799 (gasp) pages, paperback $9.99.
Tom Clancy doesn’t need to write anymore. He’s 65, firmly ensconsed in the top slice of the 1 Percent, owns part of the Baltimore Orioles, makes a killing off franchising his name for cheap and worthless spin-off books … he can chill. And maybe he should.

Against All Enemies has his name on the top, although there’s a tiny “with Peter Telep” down below. That should have been a warning. The first 100 pages should have been another one. But I soldiered on to the very end, and trust me: It was a struggle.

Say what you want about Clancy’s politics; the guy can tell a story. His characters are interesting, the action crisp, the plots intricate and engrossing … and this one’s a piece of shit. It’s actually boring, deadly dull. And that’s a thriller no-no.

Nice idea: The Taliban and the Mexican drug gangs have formed an alliance and are using tunnels to sneak terrorists into the US. Could be full of fascinating people. But it’s not. The hero is a loser, the drug lords and terrorists are weak parodies of themselves — and it goes on and on and nothing happens. Don’t bother.

Robert Ludlum’s The Borune Imperative by Eric Van Lustbader, Hatchette, 435 pages, $27.99.

Another cheap attempt to profit off a talented (in this case, dead) author, but Van Lustbader’s no slouch himself, and some of his earlier efforts at this have been at least entertaining, so I thought I’d see what he could do with his laterst effort at reviving one of the great thriller characters in history. Shouldn’t have bothered.

There’s an assassin with amnesia (sound familiar?), a Russian spy gone rogue, a terrorist mastermind, a global conspiracy and … what? People going in and out of freezing water while they get shot. This series is getting seriously slow.

The Affair, Lee Child, 405 pages, Delacourte Press $28.

This one’s just coming out in paper, and it’s worth the wait. It’s a bargain at $9.99, a bit of a stretch at full price.

Jack Reacher is one of the best action characters of our time, up there with Spenser and Travis McGee, (and that’s serious). Child came up with a spectacular mix, a former military cop who wanders the world like Kwai Chang Caine, doing good work, sometimes relucatantly, with superior fighting skills that make him a true badass.

The Affair is sort of a prequel, and takes us back to Reacher’s army days. It’s absolutely formulaic, completely predictable, just like all the other Reacher books. There’s a murder that puts Reacher in danger, a gang of thugs who get their butts kicked, a beautiful woman in law enforcement with whom Reacher has what we all know will be a short-lived affair … and plenty of sharp dialogue the keeps the pages turning.

With all the pablum out there, it was a pleasure to sit down and read the work of a master who is still in his prime. At a certain point, like Ian Fleming in the glory days of Bond, Reacher can get away with formula — because it’s such a good formula. It still works, still delivers. He’s just a great writer, and if we sort of know what’s going to happen when half a dozen of the local losers try to attack Reacher in the streets, it’s still fun to see it unfolding.

Don’t expect anything new or dramatic here (except what Reacher fans will realize is the absolutely critical tale of where he got his portable toothbrush), but The Affair won’t let you down.

Stolen Prey, John Sandford, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 402 pages, $27.95.

Put this one up there with The Affair. If you love Lucas Davenport and his world of twisted murder shit in and around the Twin Cities, then Stolen Prey works fine. Again, Mexican drug gangs, which seem to be the Most Evil Fuckers In The World this summer, and in Stolen Prey, they’re particularly horrible, doing a stomach-turning murder that takes place in a nice upper-middle class town. The dead family appears to have no ties to any type of criminal activity — but ah, there is much more here. Again, nothing radically new (except a suprising ending involving Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, who apparently has some of the step-old-man in her). But Sandford, like Child, is a master, and you can enjoy this with the guilt of a lazy afternoon of Bud Light and bourbon. Nothing wrong with that.  

Trash Lit: The Expats (almost) lives up to the hype

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash Lit: The Expats (almost) lives up to the hype

There’s an awful lot of hype around this first novel by Chris Pavone. John Grisham compares it to the early works of Ken Follett, Frederick Forsyth, and Robert Ludlum. The folks at Crown publishing think this is going to be the Next Big Thing in the thriller world. And since I’m such a huge fan of overhyped authors, I decided I’d pour a nice glass of Buffalo Trace and read the first 20 pages.

I have a William Shakespeare theory about thrillers. The way my English Lit professor in college used to tell it, Willie played to a tough room: The theater-goers in 16th Century London got bored fast, and they brought rotten vegetables, and it wasn’t pleasant up there on stage if the plot started to drag. So there’s always action in the Bard’s first scene or two.

I read a lot of thrillers and I drink fast, so if I can’t get past the first couple of chapters, I’m done. Saves a lot of time.

I got past the start of The Expats and kept going; it became hard to put down.

Grisham is wrong: It’s not a lot like the work of Robert Ludlum or Frederick Forsyth — but I can live with that. The world only needed one Ludlum; you like his style, have at it — he wrote 25 books.

Pavone is different, in an odd way more polished. The Expats is as much a novel about a woman trying to balance a job, a husband and kids as it is a spy thriller. And while there’s a little too much Mr. and Mrs. Smith going on, it’s really a pretty fun read.

You get fake passports, big money and a gun just a few pages in. Then you get the more mundane story of Kate giving up her job as a run-of-the-mill government analyst (read: deadly killer spy) to move with her husband to Luxembourg, where he’s got a job doing computer security for a bank.

Except, of course, that’s not what he’s really doing. And the nice expat couple that happens to befriend Kate and hubby might be CIA assassins coming to take out Kate for her past indescretions, or they might by FBI agents trying to frame hubby for something that he might or might not be doing, or they might be something else altogether. But nobody is telling the truth about anything. And Kate is bored taking care of the kids and the house, so she has to become a secret agent again to find out what’s going on.

There’s a great section about what it means to quit your job so you have more time to spend with the kids and then discover that you can’t stand being a full-time parent. There’s a Paris nightclub with naked people and random sex and violence. There’s wierd almost-sex with the hubby’s new best bud who is supposed to be married but really wants to fuck her. She has to fend him off, spy on hubby, spy on the neighbors, lie to everyone involved and still get home in time for dinner.

Unusually literary for a thriller. The flashbacks got tiring after a while, but overall, it works. Put it on the spring list.

 

Trash Lit: The commies of Agent 6

Zelda Bronstein
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Agent 6

By Tom Rob Smith

Grand Central Publishing, 467 pages, $25.99

I get it: Life in the Soviet Union under Stalin and Krushchev was pretty bad. Food was sometimes scarce, spies were everywhere, people got locked up in jail for disloyalty to the State … I know all that. I read The Gulag Archipelago when I was in High School. It made me more wary of powerful governments than it did of Communism, but whatever — I’ll stipulate that the Soviet Union of that era was not exactly the great workers paradise it was supposed to be. (We had a few problems with repression here at home, too.)

But Child 44, Tom Rob Smith’s bestselling 2008 thriller about Leo Demidov, an idealistic Soviet security officer, is still hard to read. Every single person in the Soviet government is corrupt and evil. Every aspect of life is absolutely miserable. There is no hope, just bleakness; the only way anyone can do any good at all is either by mistake or by subversion. Child 44 just drips of the sort of anti-Communist propaganda I was fed in grade school, and while it’s a brilliantly constructed crime mystery, I had to put it down every few pages and say:

Really?

So I opened the sequel, Agent 6, with some hesitation. These books are long and thick, and some of the references are obscure, so you have to pay attention. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to wade through another 467 pages of Commie Plot Nightmare.

But Agent 6 is a pleasant surprise. It’s much lower on the bleakness scale and much more of a serious international novel of intrigue, with realistic characters, some good action and (of course) not much sex. I guess they don’t do that in Russia. Maybe it’s too cold.

The plot actually stretches from the Cold War to the present, but the heart of the matter occurs in 1965, when out hero Demidov (dismissed from the security service in some sort of disgrace, downgraded to a minor plant manager with a crummy apartment) discovers that his schoolteacher wife, Raisa, has been asked to take her students on a friendship tour of the United States. Of course, the couple’s two teenage daughters will be going along — but not poor Leo. He’s been such a bad boy that he can’t leave the country.

Then there’s an African American singer who was a huge star — and an outspoken commie — in the U.S. in the 30s and 40s, but has since been blacklisted and driven to poverty by the American version of Soviet repression. He, like Leo, has a shitty apartment in a slum. But the singer, Jesse Austin, gets invited by some shady crew that may be part Soviet propaganda machine and may be part FBI/CIA op, to sing at the friendship event — except that he’s not really officially invited, so he stands outside on a box — and winds up dead. One of Leo’s daughters is arrested for the murder, Leo’s wife is killed along the way — and the former Soviet cop spends the rest of his life trying to figure out what happened (and for his efforts is exiled to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan).

What happened is a good tale. The parallels between the way the Americans treated a one-time commie and the commies treated a one-time cop make this a lot more intellectually interesting than the first book. The scenes (and lessons) from the Soviet disaster in Afghanistan are a good real, and relevant to anyone who thinks it’s every possible for a foreign nation to invade that country. The depressing ending is about what you’d expect from a writer who makes his living describing depressing conditions and sad people, but it works.

I’m changing my mind about Tom Rob Smith. And while this is being sold as the last one, I suspect he’s got another Leo Demidov story in him somewhere.

Trash Lit: Too much love for Stephanie Plum

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash Lit: Too much love for Stephanie Plum

Janet Evanovich was a moderately successful writer of romance novels before she became the funniest thriller writer in the world, and I figured at some point that side of her would come out. It’s taken 17 books before the glorious madness that is the life of Stephanie Plum would start to take a turn toward the mundane normality of New Jersey polyamory, but that’s where the series is these days. In Smokin’ Seventeen and Explosive Eighteen, written and published less than 12 months apart, there’s a lot less insanity and a lot more about Plum’s love life.

At least she gets laid, a lot, once the grandmother of her sometimes boyfriend Morelli puts some type of evil-eye curse on her that makes her really, really horny. She goes back and forth between fucking Morelli, the Trenton cop, and fucking Ranger, the dangerous Cuban man of mystery (sounds like a romance novel, right?) — and she spends a fair amount of time (way too much) trying to figure it all out.

Seventeen is all about sex and dead bodies, the ones that appear in the empty lot near the trailer where her cousin Vinny’s bail-bonds business is temporarily located now that his old office was blown up. Although neither of these books is as funny as the others in the series, they both still have the Evanovich charm: In Seventeen, there’s the Gonna Gork Meter, a 72-year-old guy who thinks he’s a vampire and keeps biting women on the neck and an FTA who meets Plum and her pal Lula like this:

Merlin answered the door at the second knock. He was naked again, and he had a boner.
Lula checked Merlin out. “Must be that time of day.”

Eighteen has a really dumb theme about Plum taking a dream vacation in Hawaii with one of the two men but we don’t know which one, a gimmick that doesn’t really work. (Note to My Favorite Funny Writer Ever: The romance thing didn’t work out well, remember? Stick to gorking and vampires.) There’s a missing picture that half the crooks in Jersey seem to want to kill someone over and they think Plum has it. It’s actually a little more of a continuing plot line than a lot of the other books, and there’s still some excellent moments featuring Grandma Mazur, who loves to attend funerals and remains one of the best characters in modern American literature:

“It got better after you left,” she said. “Melvin Shupe came through the line and cut the cheese right when he got up to the casket. He said he was sorry but the widow made a big fuss over it. And then the funeral director came with air freshener and when he sprayed it around, Louis Belman got an asthma attack and they had to cart her out the back door to get some air. Earl Krizinski was sitting behand me, and he said he saw Louisa’s underpants when they picked her up, and he said he got a stiffy.”

Let’s face it: If you’re an Evanovich fan, and millions of us are, you’re going to read both of these books anyway, and you’ll enjoy them just fine. But if you haven’t been introduced to the world of this particular Jersey girl, I’d start with another selection.

Trash Lit: Robert Ludlum is (really) dead

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash Lit: Robert Ludlum is (really) dead

The Ares Decision
By Kyle Mills
Grand Central Publishing, 410 pp $27.99

The official title of this particular work of literary art, as it were, is “Robert Ludlum’s (TM) The Ares Decision.” That because the name Robert Ludlum sells — still, long after he left for the Great Bestseller List In The Sky. See, Ludlum — by many accounts the modern master of the international spy/thriller genre — died in 2001. But they made movies and they’ve made sequels and they’ve made more sequels and they’ve made movies out of stuff Ludlum never wrote. Jason Bourne is almost the new James Bond — a character who far outlives the guy who created him.

So they’ve found other writers to pretend they’re Ludlum and write stuff that maybe the Late Great might have done if he had lived forever (TM).

And as long as people keep making money on this shit, the producers are going to keep producing it.

In fact, there’s a whole lotta James Bond going on in this latest “Robert Ludlum’s (TM)” book. I can tell you this: It reads sometimes like a script for a Bond movie (which is embarassing). It reads sometimes like a Tom Clancy novel (which is not all bad). It hardly ever reads like something that Robert Ludlum would have written.

Here’s the deal:

There’s some nasty parasite that turns people into living zombies — they feel no pain, just anger, and fight and kill until their bodies are so hacked up that they can’t move any more. Of course, the little bug is very fatal; the living zombies only last a few hours before they die almost as horribly as the people they killed along the way.

Perfect bio-weapon, no?

Well, the Iranians (of course) think so, and they’re trying to force a young biologist who just wants to study ant parasites into turning this thing into a weapon. (The ant girl, Sarie Van Keuren, is the best character in the book, a gin-driniking scientist who is excellent with guns, a first-rate mechanic and a total space cadet. She has more depth than any of the rest of the sterotypes who people the sordid tale.)

Naturally, the CIA is involved, and naturally, it’s trouble: The director really wants the Iranians to use the zombie weapon so he’ll have an excuse to get the president to nuke the whole country back to the stone age. He doesn’t want too many people to die though; just a few million Americans, enough to create the political climate for mushroom clouds over the Middle East.

And he’s a bad guy, the CIA director, a nasty dude who puts secret paralysis death drugs in the General Tso’s Chicken.

There’s a looney Kurtz-style African strongman who has something of a cult. He is in the employ of Iran, and has an undergound fortress lab in Central Uganda, where the kidnapped Dr. Van Keuren is put to work. The only one who can save her is a super-secret operative who works directly for the president in an off-the-books op called Covert-One (how imaginative).

Along the way, there’s more living zombie attacks, crazed infected monkey attacks, machete attacks, a severed-head-in-the-back-of-a-pickup scene and a little bit of conventional warfare.

I read the whole thing. I liked Sarie enough to keep going. And it’s got an interesting plot, in a sick Clancy-ish way. But don’t name this stuff after Robert Ludlum; he had a lot more class.   

Trash Lit: Demon hunting with John Wayne Cleaver

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash Lit: Demon hunting with John Wayne Cleaver

I Don’t Want to Kill You, By Dan Wells
Tor, 320 pages, $11.95

One of the reviews on the back of this book says that “regardless or your age or your genre preferences, you will find this story both profound and enthralling.” The usual blurb crap, but it did make me think that this could be another series like the Maximum Ride books –stuff my 12-year-old son and I could share.

He’s pretty advanced in the thriller world; he reads Stephen Hunter and Lee Child. And this one seemed right up his alley — a shy high school kid who has to fight off a demon made of black goo that takes over the bodies (and minds) of humans. John Wayne Cleaver (perfect name for a demon hunter) is the only one who can stop the evil creature from killing everyone in town.

But I Don’t Want To Kill You is just a tad too creepy for young teens, even kids raised on today’s violent video games. See, Cleaver’s mom is an undertaker, and John lives in the family funeral home and helps with the embalming — and while I appreciate the grisly details of mortuary science, particularly the use of vaseline to plug bullet holes so the preservative fluid can be pumped through the veins, it gets to be a bit much.

So I’ll wait a couple of years before I pass this along to Michael — but I’m happy to share it with my adult friends. It’s great — weird, nasty, sometimes sick, but brilliantly written with memorable prose, a great plot and lively characters.

Our protagonist is a diagnosed sociopath, someone pretty much incapable of feeling empathy for other human beings. He’s positively beastly to his poor mom. But he’s not as cold-hearted as he seems — he knows that he has to risk his own life to save everyone else in the town, and he goes about it in a methodical and logical way.

The only problem: This depraved and confused high school kid starts to maybe, sorta fall in love. With a girl who’s hot and popular and ought to want nothing to do with him. For a while, we suspect that she might be the demon, but she’s not — she just likes John, the way cute teenage girls sometimes like boys who are so odd that they’re attractive.

The thing is, her friends, the other teenage girls, start killing themselves, for no good reason, and it’s clear that the demon is somehow at work. Oh, she (John is convinced that the demon is female) also kills a priest and a teacher — and it’s not clear exactly how or why she’s choosing her targets. Except that John Wayne Cleaver is going to be one of them.

Slashed up body parts. Gross post-autopsy mortuary scenes. Eyes gouged out, tongues cut off, bodies stuck up on poles, gunshots, death by fire … and a first date and a first kiss and some honest puberty angst. You know, to go with all the blood and petroleum jelly and body fluids and black goo.

You gotta check this one out.
 

Trash (summer) lit: Shut Your Eyes Tight

Zelda Bronstein
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Trash (summer) lit: Shut Your Eyes Tight

Shut Your Eyes Tight
By John Verdon
Crown, 509 pp, $24



Ever since Thomas Harris created Hannibal Lecter and James Patterson devised the twisted psychokillers who populate the Alex Cross novels, there’s been something of a drive in thriller lit to top even the worst, most grusome stuff imaginable. It’s the Pulp Fiction Syndrome in trash lit — and although Shut Your Eyes Tight is hardly the worst of the recent offerings, I was only about a third of the way through the book when I took out my notepad and wrote:


“This is some sick fucking shit.”


Yep: Ritual machete decapitations (including the bride at a society wedding). Headless body in a rich man’s freezer (below a hundred chickens and some broccoli). Doll equivalent of a horse’s head in a bed. Sexual sadists taking advantage of kids at a reform school for juvie sex offenders.


Oh, and our hero gets a roofie in his drink and gets blackmailed by a fake art patron with no real vowels in his name over (possible) unconsious underage sex. And the Sicilian mob is involved. And an obscure-Elizabethan-literary-reference murderer who cites the works of  Thomas (why should this not surpise me) Kyd.


Naturally, Dave Gurney, the reluctant former homicide detective caught in the middle of all of this, is having tortured relationship problems. It’s sort of a bloody Green Acres: His wife wants to live a nice peaceful life in the country, and he can’t stop himself from getting dragged into dangerous and horrifying crime investigations. In fact, for all the gore, the scenes with the wife are some of the most painful stuff in the book.


In this case, Gurney is called to help solve the wedding-day homicide, which the husband (a truly weird psychiatrist) wants to blame on the household help, in this case a young man who — according to the police — might have been having an affair with the late lamented, or might have been mad at her husband, or might just be a crazed killer who conveniently split town and can’t be found. But the facts don’t quite add up — and Gurney has to piss off not only all of the direct players but a crew of state cops who have bungled the preliminary investigation.


He follows the threads through a bizarre world of crooks, fashion models, child molesters, billionaires, and assorted upstate New York characters until he runs into the grisly world he retired to avoid. You can imagine how his wife feels.


Somehow, it all works as a perfectly adequate (if a bit too lenghty) beach book for the lovers of batshit psychos and the cops who chase them. It’s on my recommended list.

(Summer) Trash Lit: Adrenaline

Zelda Bronstein
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(Summer) Trash Lit: Adrenaline

Adrenaline, by Jeff Abbott


Grand Central Publishing, 400 pages, $24.99


There’s a CIA agent who has a wife who also works for the CIA, and she’s seven months preggers with their kid, and life in the London Station is just dandy. Already a very bad sign: CIA agents with spouses and kids are prime fodder for thriller writers. It never works out. James Bond figured that out early, and since then, everyone else in the genre has fallen in love at his or her peril.


So naturally the wife gets kidnapped (or maybe she’s really a double agent) and the London CIA Station is blown up by a bomb that she might have planted (or maybe she didn’t) and our hero, agent Sam Capra, gets the full-on spook interrogation treatment, including all manner of fine drugs and devices, to see if he’s a traitor, too.


Of course, he’s entirely clueless. But by the time the manages to (maybe) convince CIA management that he doesn’t know where (or who) his wife is, he realizes it’s been nine months and the baby must have been born. So he sets off to find the kid, and the wife along the way, and the guy who either snatched her or hired her.


It’s a fun ride. Capra has to pretend he’s a smuggler who’s ready to steal counterfeit goods from Chinese gangs and reuse their trucks to get some nasty stuff into Great Britain. Much discussion of the modern underworld:


The postmodern criminal networks come together for a particular function — smuggling in ethnic laborers, muling heorin hidden inside televisions from China that were diverted first to ports in Pakistan, or setting up a train bombing to short-sell a transportation stock price. The cells are small and nimble, and they snap together and break into new shapes, like a child’s plane of tank or wall made from little plastic blocks. … When you cannot break a wall, you can shatter a single brick. I just needed to find the right brick.


In the weak tradition of this year’s top thrillers, there’s absolutely no sex. But Adrenaline does offer more than the usual amount of shooting, beating, and assorted personal violence:


[I] Found two Glock 9 mms, spare clips, silencers.


“What else do you need?”


“I have to fight a large number of people,” I said. “They will be heavily armed and I’ll be alone. So I guess I have to kill them all.”


You get the picture.


In the end, nothing is as it appears, the whole situation is a masterfully tangled mess that works its way through a string of bars in Europe and winds up with an ending that makes it very clear this is just the start of a Capra series. Don’t get too drunk when you read it or you’l lose track; the twists and turns require a little more concentration than the typical beach novel. But that’s not a bad thing, and this one goes on my summer list.


 

(Summer!) Trash Lit: The Profession

Zelda Bronstein
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(Summer!) Trash Lit: The Profession

By Steven Pressfield. Crown, 320 pages, $25


Wow, they still drink Rolling Rock in 2032. And they still use military laptops and handhelds and complain about bad TV reception. The web doesn’t seem to have advanced much, and people still rely on the Al Jazeera video feed to see what’s going on in the Middle East.


There’s a lot that’s jarring in The Profession, a military thriller set in the Middle East 20 years in the future. For one thing, the future looks a lot like today, except that there’s been a dirty bomb attack on Long Beach and the Chinese are starting to cash in their U.S. debt, putting the world economy into turmoil. (It takes China 20 years to figure that out? Damn.)
So it’s pretty bad sci-fi. But it’s not a bad adaptation of the Heart of Darkness/Apaocalypse Now myth of the powerful general who goes rogue with his loyal troops and tries to take over part of the world.


In this case, it’s the Middle East, where (again, bad sci-fi) they’ve just found some more really rich oil fields. And much of the military work of the major nations is done by mercenaries.


One of them is General James Salter, who got cashiered out of the Marine Corps for defying the president’s orders, but who has a MacArthur-like following in both the military and the civilian worlds. He’s a private soldier now, and he’s got this plan to take control of much of the world’s oil, and then return in triumph to Washington, where he can become president (oh, and marry the widow of the prez who cashiered him, who is also involved in this plot.


Our hero, Gilbert Gentilhomme (and what kind of name is that for an action hero?) is one of Salter’s best friends and loyalists, one of the few who can get close to the great man. And he knows he can’t let the general get away with his plan.


Lots of desert battles. Random brutality. International intrigue, of sorts. A bleak and dusty vision of the future — but one where there’s no climate change or peak oil. No sex (and how come none of this summer’s thrillers have any sex?). But not bad for a quick beach read.
 

Trash Lit: Doo-dah, hoo-hah, winkie, and cooter with Janet Evanovich

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Trash Lit: Doo-dah, hoo-hah, winkie, and cooter with Janet Evanovich

Finger-Lickin’ Fifteen
Janet Evanovich
St Martin’s Press, 318 pp, $27.95

I’m just going to come right out and say it: Janet Evanovich is the funniest writer to come along on the scene since Carl Hiassen, and in some ways, she’s got Hiassen beat. He writes about Florida, where unreal people do some bizarre stuff; her turf is Jersey, where the characters are pretty close to normal life. Which is to say, totally strange and fucked up. She is my favorite living writer, and after fourteen previous novels, the tales of Stephanie Plum and her cohorts just seem to get better.


Finger Lickin’ Fifteen is among the best of the series. Before you even get to page five, there’s a decapitation, witnessed by Lula, the ‘ho turned bounty hunter who works with Plum. And not just any decapitation: A guy swings a meat cleaver, the head hits the ground, blood spurts up like Old Faithful, Lula tells the story in vivid detail, Stephanie throws up … it’s glorious.


The scene in Trenton hasn’t changed much since the last book, except that Plum has temporarily broken up with her boyfriend Morelli. She’s still working for her cousin’s bail bonds agency, still trying to make a living catching deadbeats, still trying to figure out which hot guy she wants more, Morelli the cop or the mysterious (and even hotter) Ranger, who’s an insanely cool and tough private security mogul.


It turns out that the headless guy is a celebrity chef, and Plum and her gang think the hit may be all about barbecue sauce, and wind up investigating, sort of. And of course, Plum’s Grandma Masur, one of the great characters in the history of American literature, gets deeply involved.


I’ll just give you a few tidbits of why I love Janet Evanovich. Here’s Lula on men: “You don’t want to go around thinkin’ shit is your fault. Next thing you know, they got you makin’ pot roast and you’re cutting up your Mastercard.”


Grandma Masur on a neighbor girl: “She was Mary Jane Turley then. Up until the fourth grade, she quacked like a duck. Never said a blessed word in school. Just quacked. And then one day she fell off the top of the sliding board in the park and hit her head and started talking. Never quacked again. Not to this day.”


Some of the things that happen in this book: An exploding back yard gas grill sets off a huge fire in her family’s back yard. A toxic barbecue sauce gives everyone horrible diarrhea. An exploding pressure cooking puts a dent in Plum’s ceiling. A cross-dressing chef works days in a chicken outfit. Plum goes on a blind date with a man named Peter Pecker. Two guys in Zorro masks toss a fire bomb into her building. A car bomb blows up Lula’s ride. Grandma Masur shoots a guy’s ear off. Lula is stuck in a car window until she farts for a minute straight. There’s a lot of talk of doo-dah, hoo-hah, winkie, cooter, wangers, boners, and the knicky-knacky.


It’s enough to make me proud to be an American.

Trash Lit: Nellie Bly meets old-school hacker in “The Alchemy of Murder”

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Trash Lit: Nellie Bly meets old-school hacker in “The Alchemy of Murder”

The Alchemy of Murder
Carol McCleary
Forge, 365 pp. $24.99

Nice effort for a first novel. A fun premise, fairly well executed. Nellie Bly, the famous (for real) investigative reporter for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, goes to Paris in 1898, just as the World’s Fair is attracting throngs of tourists, to catch a brutal murderer.

The guy’s apparently a doctor, and has been hacking up girls and taking away parts of their bodies. Now he’s going about his nasty business in a city that’s not only overwhelmed with the fair (and trying to hush up the killings to avoid bad publicity) but in the throes of an epidemic of something called Black Fever.

The authorities think the fever is spread by miasma rising from the sewers. The anarchists, who control the Montmarte section of the city, think it’s a plot by the rich to kill the poor. And of course, as McClearly points out about Montmarte, “the immorality and depravity of its bohemian inhabitants is a scandal known throughout the world.” Bly runs into Louis Pasteur, Jules Verne (who she eventually sleeps with), Oscar Wilde, Louise Michel and a host of other characters from late 19th century Paris as she chases around, putting herself forward as bait for the killer.

McCleary isn’t terribly kind to the anarchists, but there’s a lot of (relatively) accurate historical description of the politics of the time, with ample references to Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Haymarket Square. And the scenes in Montmart, the Pasteur Institute and the Parisian sewers are worth the price of admission – even if the eventual plot twist, involving an anarchist attempt at biowarfare with anthrax, plague and cholera – is a bit of a stretch.

Lesbian sex in a café with ample absinthe. Blow jobs in another café. A bladder filled with plumbers acid that gets sprayed on a bad guy’s dick. Sex with Jules Verne. Lectures by the radical Ms. Michel. I wouldn’t sell it as a history book, but as an entertaining mystery, it actually works.

Trash Lit: ‘Reckless’ could be ripped from headlines (minus a couple murders)

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Trash Lit: ‘Reckless’ could be ripped from headlines (minus a couple murders)

Reckless
Andrew Gross
William Morrow, 404 pages, $25.99

Imagine if the head of a powerful banking company with close ties to the federal government conspired with some shady Saudi billionaires and a cruel Serbian ex-military thug to bring down the American financial system in a Darwinian plot that would allow the one firm with insider knowledge to emerge even stronger. How would it play out? Well, minus a few murders, more or less exactly the way the financial-sector meltdown of the past couple of years has played out.

That’s what makes this such a fun book. It’s not the most brilliant thriller ever – the structure involves a lot of flicking back and forth between parallel plots, and gets confusing at times. But the premise is delicious, and the execution is good enough to make it eminently enjoyable.

Reckless starts off nicely, with a Middle Eastern banker set to launch world economic ruin, an American private dick fucking his girlfriend as doom approaches, a Greenwich, Connecticut society divorcee fucking a sexy European stud with a dubious background and a brutal, bloody murder of a securities trader, his wife (who was an old pal of the PI) and one of their kids.

It slows down a bit after that, but not much.

Turns out the dead guy was way underwater in a complex deal. A few more traders, also underwater and scrambling, wind up dead, too. And then the economy really starts to fall – AIG goes under. Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac go under. There’s panic at every level of government.

Meanwhile, the bad guys try to kidnap the mildly retarded son of the PI’s girlfriend after a hockey game, leading to a spectacular hockey-stick-and-knife-in-the-locker-room fight that ends with the PI shoving a sharpened skate into the kidnapper’s chest (neat trick; I always wondered if that would really work).

By the time it all gets sorted out, there’s railroad trestle gun play, a federal agent who’s bleeding to death but still makes a spectacular shot, and an utterly predictable power-out, stuck-in-the-elevator sex scene. Maybe even worth forking over the hardcover price.

Trash Lit: Spenser says goodbye in ‘The Professional’

John Elberling
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Trash Lit: Spenser says goodbye in ‘The Professional’

The Professional
Robert B. Parker
Penguin Books, 289 pages, $26.99

I just read the last Spenser novel, ever.

That’s a hard sentence to write. Spenser’s been around a long time, and I’ve read all 37 of Robert B. Parker’s classic tough-guy detective books, and even though they all have the same characters, similar plots, similar dialogue and similar themes, they’re all good. Every last one of them.

And I think it’s probably a good thing that this was the last one of them. I don’t know if Parker realized he was coming to the end of his life as he wrote The Professional, but you get the sense that Spenser is coming to the end of his. Not that the guy’s going to die – like Travis McGee, Spenser will long outlive his creator. But this book has a sort of melancholy sadness to it, a sweet sort of swan song feeling, and by the time you get to the end, you sense that Spenser’s pretty much done.

The plot is typical Parker: A sleazy con man is seducing young women who have rich older husbands. He videotapes the encounters and then threatens the clueless chicks with blackmail. He wants money, big money, or he’ll tell the hubbies – and the days of living large (and waiting to inherit the cash) will come to an end. The women are afraid to go to the cops, of course, so they go to Spenser. His job is to make the con man back off.

It’s the sort of thing that in an earlier version of Spenser would have been too simple to drag out into an entire novel. He’d go with his buddy Hawk, warn the sleazeball that the future was looking pretty shaky, maybe smack him around a bit just for good measure, the dude would split town and all would be well.

But this time, Spenser can’t do it. He almost kinda likes the creep, who is utterly straightforward about his lust for young women, his love for the chase and the score and his gleeful wonder at the fact that he’s figured out a way to make money at the game. Spenser and his main squeeze, Harvard shrink Susan Silverman, puzzle over the bad guy, polyamory relationships and the ethics of sex, while one of the rich hubbies, who has figured things out, sends two dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks thugs to kill Mr. Smooth. So Spenser has to stop them, but as it turns out, he kind of likes the thugs, too, since they are, after all, totally authentic: Marginal men who realize they have no value to society except for their ability to be half-rate muscle.

In the end, there’s a murder, and Spenser makes everything (almost) right. But his heart really isn’t in it.

In fact, this is the first and only Spenser book I’ve ever read that had an overdone edge to it. The dialogue is what makes Parker’s stuff work, and the interactions between Spenser and Silverman and Hawk in The Professional were predictable and dull. It’s as if the master of modern pot-boilers, the Man himself, Robert B. Parker, author of more than 50 top-rate books, was finally running out of steam.

There are the usual literary references (including a nice plug for Janet Evanovich, one of my longtime faves), but they seemed forced. The violence is tired. I was almost ready to give up, but I stuck around for the end, which was worthwhile – if only because it told me that this was the last we’d be hearing from Spenser.

The Professional reminded me of The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald’s latter-era McGee book, where the author is clearly done with the character but cranks him up for one last stand, one final favor to the fans, a victory lap that gets more and more painful as it nears the finish line.

If you’re a Parker fan, you need to read The Professional. It’s a wake, of sorts; a chance to say goodbye. And it may have been Parker’s way to telling his fans that the fun is finally over.

Trash Lit: Grafton’s craft in ‘U is for Undertow’

John Elberling
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Trash Lit: Grafton’s craft in ‘U is for Undertow’

U is for Undertow
Sue Grafton
Putnam. 403 pages, $27.95

I love the Sue Grafton books. I bought A is for Alibi in 1983, when it came out, and I’ve read every one of them since. Unlike, say, Patricia Cornwell, whose characters age (and get crabbier) as time passes, Kinsey Milhone is eternal, always young, always living in a town called Santa Teresa that’s a lot like Santa Barbara, always living with her old (but never dying) landlord, Henry, always eating at the foul Hungarian restaurant down the street. Milhone is a comfortable protagonist, never deeply tortured, but never exactly adjusted either, and even her OCD habits (locking her car – and telling us she locked her car – about 50 times a book) are endearing.

This one’s set in 1988, where Milhone is quite at home, and in 1963-1967, where Sue Grafton is less so. Grafton’s got a problem with hippie chicks – one of the central villains in U is for Undertow is a girl named Shelly who later changes her name to Destiny. She’s an almost embarrassing parody of how middle America saw flower children in the late 1960s – except that she appears in 1963, before there were a lot of real hippies about in the land. To make matters worse, she brags that she was part of the beat scene in San Francisco and slept with both Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg – which is fairly unlikely, even in fiction; I don’t know who Allen Ginsberg, a proudly gay poet, was fucking in 1963, but I don’t think there were many hippie chicks on the list.

The horror of the dirty girl is almost too much to believe! Destiny is living in a bus with the son of a respectable family who dropped out of college to join her – and she has a child by another man who’s left the picture! And she’s raising her child (gasp) a vegan! And he runs around naked! And she’s preggers again, this time with his kid, and she insists on natural childbirth! She is, of course, also a total beyotch, who doesn’t respect the mother of the once-nice-young-boy loser who is under her hippie-chick spell.

There’s other stuff I didn’t love in here – one young character, who hates his stepmom, gets in trouble at his fancy private school and is forced to transfer to the horrors of a public school, where he of course meets awful bad kids who corrupt him entirely and turn him into a druggie.

In and around all this, though, is a fascinating mystery. It involves two kidnappings from the ’60s, a guy who might or might not have fabricated repressed memories, a dead dog in a dead girls’ grave, and a tangled tale across three decades that weaves the lives of the good and the bad (and it’s deliciously hard to tell which is which) into a first-rate detective story.

We also along the way learn some new clues about Milhone’s past (great trivia about Aunt Gin for serious fans of the series) and get a couple of excellent Grafton comments about the important things in life:

“At the time, I’d introduced [cancer patient] Stacey to junk food, which he’d never eaten in his life. Thereafter, I tagged along with him as he went from McDonald’s to Wendy’s to Arby’s to Jack in the Box. My crowning achievement was introducing him to the In-N-Out Burger. His appetite increased, he regained some of the weight he’d lost during the cancer treatments, and his enthusiasm for life returned. Doctors were still scratching their heads.”

Hippie-chick sex. Hippie chick seduction of a high school kid. Sweet Kinsey-shoots-murderer scene. (“It’s only in the movies the bad guys keep firing. In real life, they sit down and behave.”) I almost gagged on the ’60s stuff, but I stayed up way past my bedtime to get to the end.

Trash Lit: Things are weird around ‘Mariposa’

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Editor’s note: Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he may as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here. 

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Mariposa
By Greg Bear
(Vanguard Press, 340 pages, $25.95)

By Tim Redmond

Good science fiction has a moral, of sorts. Frank Herbert wrote about the scary power of a charismatic leader. Robert Heinlein gave us the fun of free love and the lie of religion. William Gibson outlined the weird dangers of a digital society. My favorite sci-fi movie ever, RoboCop (1987), was all about the perils of privatizing public services.

Mariposa is part science fiction and part action thriller, and the mix works. I liked this book a lot – it’s got creepy tech advances — digital storage devices that dissolve in your blood; tattoos that allow you to exchange information by skin-to-skin contact; monitoring chips that follow your every move; roller bots; a new drug that makes you a near-legendary fighter and totally fucks up your brain – as well as a message that’s eerily relevant.

Mariposa‘s opening is bizarre. The first chapter seduces you in a way that reminds me of Neuromancer. It’s the second decade of the 21st century. Oil prices have collapsed, destabilizing much of the Middle East. The United States is $30 trillion in debt and the president has had to accept IMF-style international receivership. “And it’s all our fault,” one character notes. “We do hate paying taxes, and we do love our government services.”

And the news media? “The dwindling national press – those journalists who still worked for networks or newspapers or the five prime news sites and could afford to travel rather than just sit in front of a screen and suck coffee and pontificate on what others saw and wrote – was as worn out and discouraged as the rest of the nation.”

Most of Texas is no longer under effective federal control. The FBI is in the process of being dismantled.The real, emerging power in the nation, and perhaps soon the world, is the head of a giant private security company that got rich off military contracts. In fact, he’s trying to prove how powerful he is by orchestrating the death sentence of a 15-year-old kid who has the misfortune to be the son of a federal agent.

Into this nightmare step a handful of still-loyal FBI operatives working directly for the dying president, who has been shot with a bullet laced with deadly engineered proteins. They’re trying to rescue a deep cover agent planted in the Talos Corporation — someone who is trying to sneak the explosive data in the company’s files out of a tightly controlled compound. They’re also out to save the 15-year-old’s life before the Texas corrections system, which pretty much reports to Talos, gets to stick him with a lethal injection.

Syntobe proteins that turn Coca Cola syrup into bombs. Desert car chase with hellfire missiles in drone planes. Robot snakes retrieving blood laced with digital downloads. Slightly lame FBI sex. Wicked drug-addled martial arts fighting. A hero who fights off powerful sedatives to take out six guys with a pole ax. I have to say: This one goes down as one of the best action books of the last year.

Trash Lit: ‘Nine Dragons’ is trustworthy

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Editors note: Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he might as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here.

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Nine Dragons
Michael Connelly
Little, Brow;, 374 pages, $27.99)

By Tim Redmond

Harry Bosch, Michael Connelly‘s fictional detective, is the best continuing-series character in the genre (well, there’s Spenser, but he’s a special case). Bosch lives in L.A., where he’s a cop. He’s a little bit tortured — what can you say about a guy named Bosch whose dad thought it would be funny to name him Hieronymous? — but not so bent that it takes over the storyline.

And there’s always a good storyline. Connelly, a former newspaper reporter, knows how to work the real world into top-fight fiction, and his books give you a great feel both for the seedy side of Los Angeles and the world of a police detective. He doesn’t glorify cops — they come with plenty of warts, and some of them are sleazebags and some are thugs and some are crooks. And he doesn’t make violence seem anything but ugly, pathetic and painful.

Nine Dragons takes on a scene that Connelly doesn’t know that well — Chinese gangs and the Hong Kong underworld — but instead of pretending to be an expert, he works his learning curve into his hero’s head. Bosch, after all these years, has never quite recovered from his time as a tunnel rat in Vietnam, and is painfully nervous that his attitude toward Asians remains colored by that experience. From the first chapter, he’s having trouble with his partner, Detective Chu, someone he desperately needs but can’t entirely trust.

Trash Lit: Wild times in ‘Rough Country’

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Editors note: Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he might as well put this terrible habit to productive use by writing about these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature. Read his last installment here.

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Rough Country
John Sandford
(Putnam, 388 pages $26.95)

By Tim Redmond

Let us stipulate: It’s difficult for a male writer who specializes in straight male lead characters (and in this case, in a straight male lead character who spends a significant portion of his waking hours trying to get women into bed) to write a credible novel that centers around a lesbian resort. James Patterson, a white guy, has a wonderful black lead character named Alex Cross who works, perfectly, but that’s the exception; most people screw up when they try to reach like that.

And at the beginning of Rough Country, I had to wonder. I love John Sandford, but after the first chapter…well, you’ve got a straight girl getting hot watching lesbian lip-lock, you’ve got sordid lesbian drama that turns into a lesbian bar fight, you’ve got a weird business going on with really young men working at the women-only resort who may be on-the-side fuck-candy for bisexual girls (or may be underage hotties fucking older women for money)…and a little too much talk about “rug munchers.”

But by the middle of the book, it’s pretty clear that this is not just a great Sandford novel, but a wonderful portrayal of a fictional Northern Minnesota town where nobody gives a shit who fucks who. The owner of the resort is a respected local businessperson. The old straight guys who run bars and work as fishing guides treat the women just like any other (money-carrying) tourists. An old lady who’s part of a horticultural preservation group wonders aloud why anyone would care about another person’s sexuality, save for “a bunch of stuffy old men.”

Trash Lit: A delusional ‘Pursuit of Honor’

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Editors note: Bay Guardian Executive Editor and acrostic master Tim Redmond has a bad 30-year addiction to mystery/crime/thriller books. He’s decided that he might as well put this terrible habit to productive use by giving these sometimes awful, sometimes entertaining and — on rare occasion — significant works of mass-market literature the Joe Bob Briggs treatment.

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Pursuit of Honor
Vince Flynn
(Simon and Schuster, 431 pages, $27.99)

By Tim Redmond

This deeply delusional author seems to think he’s the next Tom Clancy, with a counterterrorism-operative hero named Mitch Rapp, a love for all that is military and secretive, and a political agenda that leans toward Attila the Hun. He once devoted an entire book to the premise that the president of the United States should be murdered because he refused to de-fund the Rural Electrification Administration. In case you need any perspective, Glen Beck calls Pursuit of Honor “fantastic.”

Rapp starts out this episode by beating up a stereotypical liberal would-be CIA reformer who — guess what — turns out to have a “personality disorder.” In fact, Rapp discovers, “It’s not uncommon for people with this disorder to hire lawyers.” Then he beats up his best buddy who is too much of a wimp to kill the CIA inspector general, who isn’t with the program.

It gets better. You’ve got bad Arabs right from Central Casting, paranoid terrorists who kill innocent federal (CIA) employees, female senators who love abortions and hate the CIA, and a nifty reference to ol’ Joe McCarthy, who “may have been a drunk and an ass, but that didn’t make him wrong.”

Two broken Russian knees. One broken Russian nose. Glass-tube-up-the-dick-and-break-it torture. Nutty Al-Qaeda guys shooting Midwesterners from an RV. But not enough plot to even make this feel like waste-of-time fun.

Clancy’s a right-wing loon, too, but at least he has a phenomenal talent for constructing a story. Poor Mr. Flynn isn’t in that league.

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