Writers like to hang out with other writers. Rest assured,
we watch people, study their mannerisms and speech patterns, the way they walk
or how they hold their fork or cell phone. But that is research, mostly. When
we gather to hang out, we commiserate with one another about the difficulty of the
process, the frustrations of a constantly changing marketplace, and the
shifting sands of creating a ‘platform’ from which we shill our work. But we
also share the euphoria when someone just kills (in a good way) ten thousand
words in a marathon session of writing where gold flows from the fingertips in
such an intense fashion that nothing else exists except the story (Here’s a
hint to aspiring writers: If you write every day, sessions like the one just
described happen a lot more often.).
Besides your mom (who has to), or your spouse, if applicable,
(who sacrificed a lot by leaving you alone-or kicking you in the butt-when you
needed it), no one is more likely to stand on a chair and cheer for you when
succeed than your friends in the writing community. It gives all of us hope.
Hope for those who haven’t broken through that we can, and hope for those that
have, that they can keep doing so with better results each time.
With all of the above in mind, here are three reviews of
books written by writing colleagues ranging from a self-described ‘almost
famous’ author to two who are getting legs in what promise to be nice careers.
William Dietrich, a NY Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author has written
twelve novels and five book-length non-fiction titles in his career.
The Barbed Crown is the sixth in the series starring the roguish American ex-pat
Ethan Gage. A devotee
of Benjamin Franklin, he is a scoundrel, a gambler, an adventurer and
pseudo-savant who finds himself sometimes being the grease and sometimes the
grit between England and France during the Napoleonic Wars. In this highly
entertaining book Gage finds himself slipping past the English naval blockade
of France in a tiny boat on storm tossed seas with bullets and cannon balls whizzing by
his head. He is doing so to seek out and kill Napoleon himself, whom, in a roundabout way, he has
blamed for the death of his beloved wife, the exotic Astiza. Failing that, then surely he can abort the general's coronation!
Complications
ensue, as they must, and poor Ethan, who never seems to catch a break, still manages
to survive by his wits, luck, and marksmanship. This book (and all in the
series) are like a scrumptious bowl of nourishing cereal, chock full of
scrupulously researched and fascinating history baked into a story that snaps with humor and crisp
dialogue, crackles with page turning actions and pops off the pages with
unlikely but entirely plausible ways the fictional Ethan Gage might have ended
up near the heart of the biggest players of the era while everyone seems to be playing one side
against the other. This book is a great stand-alone read and I highly recommend
it for your reading list. But for maximum fun invest in starting at the
beginning (after all, with the age of the internet nothing is really ever out
of print) and read them all. You can thank me later.
Now let’s
leap forward a century and half a world away from Napoleon to the Age of
Electricity, shall we?
Capacity for Murder is the third installment of the Professor Bradshaw Mysteries by
Bernadette Pajer. An electrical engineering professor at the University of
Washington in frontier Seattle, Bradshaw is introduced in
The Spark of Death
enmeshed in defending himself against a charge of murder in the electrocution
death of a flamboyant colleague. In an era of titanic egos and society-changing
advances in technology, his effort to prove his innocence eventually lead to a
consulting detective role in
Fatal Induction. This hobby of a sort expands in
Capacity for Murder, and the sometimes absent-minded, occasionally OCD and always proper
professor is summoned to the distant ocean beaches of western Washington. Beyond the reach of railroads or even much in the way of roads, his task is to unravel the
cause of the accidental frying of a patient at a health spa sanatorium. Or is
it an accident?
Trying to balance a romance not acted upon, his engineering students along for the journey and a cast of characters as rich as they are quirky, Bradshaw goes from being the central investigator to a dismissed "we'll call if we need you" persona non grata. But when big city law enforcement arrives he perseveres when he sees the investigation headed in the wrong direction and nearly gets himself killed in the process.
This is an homage to the ‘closed
room’ style mystery-as much a
how dunnit as a
who dunnit-in the grand tradition of
Agatha Christie. Having been reviewed and receiving the Washington Academy of
Sciences seal for scientific accuracy, this book and the series are just plain
great fun to read, without a single static moment. Chock full of early Seattle,
science and sparks in the age of Tesla. Read the series if you can, or
Capacity for Murder if you can’t. You’ll get a charge out of them! (Ohm dear, I have
punned. Resistance is futile.)
Occasionally
I have the excellent good fortune to review a writer early in what promises to
be a gifted career. Such a writer is
Laurie Frankel.
Goodbye for Now is a
wholly original and yet somehow inevitable novel that charts the intersection
of life, love, death and technology. If you could talk to your DOL (departed
loved one) one more time, would you? How about ten times? Perhaps you could with a genius programmer,
his beloved girlfriend (found with just the right programming algorithm in a
dating service), and her unexpectedly and suddenly deceased grandmother at the
center of this wondrous book.
At times
funny and heartwarming, at times heart wrenching and through some mystical
alchemy sometimes both at the same time,
Goodbye for Now is a polished gem of
prose really deserving a wide audience. Sometime in the future, maybe, just
maybe, a long-departed great-great-grandpa will be giving fly fishing tips to
generations he never lived to see because
Laurie Frankel wrote this novel. For
me this was one of those standing on my chair cheering reads that instantly
made my must-read list for this year.
Disclaimer notice. Each of these books was purchased at full retail price before review and while the authors are known to me, if the work wasn't good, it wouldn't be on my blog.
