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By Nico Vreeland, on February 3rd, 2012 [This unbearably bad sci-fi disaster is the latest babytown frolics.]
 Author: Rod Rees
2011, William Morrow
Filed under: Sci-Fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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This was my own fault. I’d been reading a lot of books that were good, but not very memorable. I wanted something that would get my juices flowing, and that meant either a really good book… or a really bad one. Bad books are much easier to find.
I’d taken a look at the The Demi-Monde: Winter a few weeks before, and I’d given up because its writing, even in just the first few pages, was wretched—full of cliches and clunkily unpoetic. But then, wanting a bad book, I turned back. And I got a bad book. I got everything I was asking for and much, much more. I barely made it through a hundred of Rees’s dense, awful pages before I had to put it back down. This review will be less a review than a catalog of what makes this book so bad. Take a deep breath.
Premise
In the year 2018, the “Demi-Monde” is an elaborate computer simulation made to train military cadets to fight in “asymmetric warfare environments” like Iraq and Afghanistan. The bulk of the action, as you might guess, will take place inside the simulation.
So far, this is a solid, if boring, idea. It’s also rather dramatically weak. Militaries use a lot of simulations, and they use them because there’s no risk for the participants. But “no risk involved” is not a good recipe for a thrilling novel, so Rees has to turn up the heat. Unfortunately, a concussed 5-year-old could come up with a more coherent imaginary world.
First of all, there’s a critical flaw in the Demi-Monde itself: if you die inside it, you die in real life, much like the Matrix. That makes it a more interesting place to set a thriller, but an utterly ludicrous method of training your army personnel. If a simulation is actually life-threatening, what’s the point of it? Just send your recruits straight into battle, where at least their deaths might not be entirely in vain.
Next up in Rod Rees’s cavalcade of bad ideas: the fact that the Demi-Monde is restricted to technology from the 1870s. A military simulation in 2018 teaches its participants how to use muskets. By gaslight. Ugh.
…
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By Sean Clark, on August 18th, 2011 Author: Gordon Williams
 1969, Titan
Filed Under: Horror, Thriller.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
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2 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
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This is a book that is (to the best of my knowledge) being reprinted for the first time since its original 1969 release. This is because it’s the basis for the movie Straw Dogs (1971), which is getting the remake treatment and hitting theaters this fall–with Dustin Hoffman being replaced by James Marsden. In fact, “Straw Dogs” is presented on the new cover in much larger type than the book’s actual title. This makes sense to me: with it’s one-dimensional characters and blindly stumbling plot, Trencher’s Farm would make a better horror movie than a book. …
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By Samantha Warburton, on August 9th, 2011 Author: Nora McFarland
 2011, Touchstone
Filed Under: Mystery.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
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Hot, Shot, and Bothered is the second installment of a planned trilogy of mysteries featuring Lilly Hawkins, a camerawoman for a local news station. (Although I haven’t read the first Hawkins story, the plot of this novel stands on its own just fine.) I’m no stranger to mystery series like this: churned out quickly with little pretense of literary quality. Such books can be high on mindless entertainment and great to read by a pool or on a plane. So I picked this up expecting Janet Evanovich, not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even by those standards, Hot, Shot, and Bothered fell pretty short.
The story opens with Lilly covering a wildfire in the mountains a few hours east of LA and spotting a coroner’s van on its way to the site of a drowning accident. Fifty pages of unnecessary and convoluted detail later, it’s finally revealed that Lilly knew the victim from her own “shady” past.* Despite more pressing news coverage of the fire and her boss’s direct orders to drop it, Lilly becomes increasingly determined to solve what she is certain is a homicide case. Her suspicions are founded entirely on believing that the victim was so wholesome when Lilly knew her thirteen years prior that she couldn’t possibly have been the “party girl” that she is now alleged to have become. Later, these suspicions are confirmed by a decidedly weak “aha!” type of reveal.
There is also a subplot around Lilly’s career aspirations and the development of her romantic relationship, which is woven nicely into the larger plot, adding some substance without ever taking over the main stage. And, having lived in a town bordering mandatory evacuation zones of a serious wildfire not too far from the setting of the story, I can say with confidence that McFarland’s treatment of the fire is the book’s strongest aspect. It was both well-researched and true to experience. It would have been an easy mistake to use the fire to drive plotlines by manufacturing urgency or manipulating situations, but to her credit, McFarland rarely did.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 14th, 2011 [This poorly written mystery is the latest babytown frolics.]
 Author: Will Lavender
2011, Simon & Schuster
Filed under: Mystery
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
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| Entertainment..... |
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Dominance is one of those books, like a bad one-night stand, that fills you with shame every time you remember another detail. Oh, and the flashbacks, I’ll think to myself, even now. Just awful. What was I thinking?
The plot goes like this: in 1994, Richard Aldiss—a professor who’s been convicted of two murders—teaches a literature class from jail by remote CCTV. The purpose of that class is to find the identity of a mysterious author named Paul Fallows, whose two puzzlesome books hold secrets, and might also hold the key to Aldiss’s freedom.
One of the students, Alex Shipley, does just that. She unlocks the mystery of Paul Fallows, which leads her to the real killer and helps her free Professor Aldiss. Fifteen years later, members of the “night class,” as the CCTV Fallows seminar is called, are being killed in the same manner as those two long-ago murders. It’s up to Alex to reconvene the members of the night class, and figure out which one of them is the killer.
The novel—the present timeline, at least—is a fairly basic locked-room mystery, with a lit-class face on it, presumably because Will Lavender was a literature professor. But none of this was why I started reading Dominance. Instead, it was this detail that seduced me: the way these students engage with the Fallows books, the way they unlock the secrets therein, is by playing a game called the Procedure.
What does such a game look like? How does it work? How does a book function as a puzzle? This, rather than who killed so-and-so, was the mystery that led me to pick up Dominance. I should’ve known better.
[Minor spoilers ahead regarding the Procedure and how dumb it is.] …
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By Eric Markowsky, on June 28th, 2011  Author: Richard Goodwin
2011, Seedpod Publishing
Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Short-Run.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Here’s a pretty good set up for a short story: Wicker, a down-on-his-luck hitchhiker trying to get to Vegas, scores a ride from Edna, a senile retired school teacher looking for the Pacific Ocean. There’s plenty of comic potential in the contrast of characters, but more than that there’s an opportunity to explore the strange ways that people use one another, taking turns lending direction and meaning to each other’s lives, helping and being helped, exploiting and being exploited.
Scattershot is what happens when you stretch that premise into a rambling novel by adding an irrelevant subplot about Edna’s unhappy son, Andrew, and refusing to see her senility as little more than a punch line. She bumbles along, always certain that she’s doing just what she means to be doing, never doubting, never angry, never afraid, ready to follow Wicker wherever he thinks they should go. The problem is, once he loses his bankroll in Vegas, Wicker is just as aimless as she is.
After that, all the aptly named Scattershot has to offer is the impulsive leading the senile with the sad tagging along. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on January 27th, 2011  Author: Gerald Elias
2010, Minotaur
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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These days, writing a solid mystery is often not enough for an author trying to distinguish himself from the pack—he has to include a gimmick. Of course, I only call it a gimmick when it doesn’t work, such as the annoying Indian detective Vish Puri, or the defense attorney who becomes a special prosecutor for just one case. When there’s an interesting book behind it, a gimmick feels more like a unique frame for a good story—such as Millard Kaufman’s excellent tale about a real estate agent who gets embroiled in a murder.
As these things go, Gerald Elias’s Danse Macabre is extremely gimmicky, because the story at its core is cliched and poorly written. Instead of framing an interesting story, the gimmicks, plural (there are three), only draw attention to Elias’s poor judgment. …
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By Sean Clark, on January 21st, 2011 Author: Ben H. Winters and Leo Tolstoy
2010, Quirk Classics
Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Humor
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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At least one of the following statements is true: 1) The “literary mash-up” genre had its flash-in-the-pan moment with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and is no longer interesting. 2) Ben H. Winters isn’t very good at writing literary mash-ups. I’m pretty sure the second is true, but I wouldn’t fight very hard if you argued for the first or both. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 9th, 2010  Author: Andrew Vachss
2010, Pantheon
Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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This is going to sting a bit. I like Andrew Vachss a lot, and I’ve been reading his novels for 15 years. This is by far the worst book of his that I’ve ever read.
My favorite Vachss novels star Burke, a private eye with a group of friends who are ridiculous characters but great fun. For instance, there’s a silent assassin with whom Burke talks in pidgin sign language, and there’s a genius hacker who lives in a junkyard cave with a transsexual hooker and the child they adopted together. Every Burke novel plays out the same (gratifying) way: Burke and his band of merry misfits hunt down and punish child molesters and rapists.
For the past 40 years, Vachss has been an attorney specializing in helping children who’ve been abused. He wears an eyepatch. He’s a badass. He’s always used (I’m guessing) his experiences with scumbags, but the engine of his best work has always been his own personal fury and his outrage that things—and people—as dark as he’s seen are allowed to exist in the world. Burke is righteous and unstoppable, and unabashed wish fulfillment, written by a man who deserves some fulfilled wishes.
The Weight, on the other hand, is a half-plotted pamphlet about jail. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on November 18th, 2010  Author: Michael Connelly
2010, Little, Brown and Company
Filed under: Mystery, Thrillers
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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They say that great novels teach you how to read them. Evidently, so do terribly written bestsellers. I labored through the first 50 pages of The Reversal, bogged down by Connelly’s atrocious, middle-school-level writing; but by halfway through I’d learned his stumbling rhythm, and I cruised through the last 200 pages in a day.
This book is exactly what literary snobs mean when they deride “plot-driven” novels. Connelly’s a pretty good plotter, and he’s simply horrible at everything else. But if you’re trapped on a plane and you desperately need to kill a few hours, this book will keep the pages turning. You’ll forget it soon after and it will never create a lasting impression, but for the brief time you’re reading it, it’s probably better than staring at the back of a seat. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on June 23rd, 2010  Author: Declan Hughes
2010, William Morrow
Filed under: Mystery
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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In an early scene in City of Lost Girls, the crew of the movie Nighttown falls all over themselves trying to find an extra who hasn’t been seen in several hours (nearly half a day!). This extra is crucial to the making of the movie, and, if she isn’t found, millions of dollars could be wasted on reshoots. Luckily, private eye Ed Loy is already there, and already working for the director on a different, unrelated matter.
And so, it’s only page 12 and we already know the lay of the land: City of Lost Girls will be a mystery founded on thin logic, absurd coincidences, overstuffed gestures, forced authorial machinations, and plain old unimaginative writing. It only gets worse from here. …
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