Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age by Raphael Cormack

 

Started this little book in a coffee shop this morning, finished it this evening. It's a weird book, there's a veneer of scholarship to it but it's so uncritical, bordering on credulous, about the putatively magical things the guys it's about are purported to have done that it's almost like reading a "lives of the saints" book. It's not literally a hagiography: At least, the guys it's about weren't particularly good guys, and they were pulling scams that even the author doesn't see the point in denying. I was hoping for a book that was weird, and the credulity here actually makes the subject matter less weird in a lot of ways, definitely not what I wanted or expected. Reasonably well-written, and has extensive sources, but still not particularly credible.

Say Nothing by Brad Parks

 

This was a reasonably decent thriller, nothing mind-melting. Started kinda slowish, with some kinda not smart, not proactive behavior on the part of the POV, but things do get better, he does start showing wit and spine and he does do some thing to turn his blackmailers' demands into unexpected results. The ending is probably a little too-happy for just about everyone concerned, but there's some bittersweet going on, I'll give that a pass. Decent, believeable, distinguishable characters, competent-enough prose that seemed a little ill-served by the editors (some obvious wrong words). There are some twists, and some red herrings, but the path is pretty easy to walk, I started to see where things were going relatively quickly--it's always a good idea to expect the big investors, especially hedge fund types, to be the villains.

Farewell, my Lovely by Raymond Chandler

 

It's always refreshing to read a classic that actually deserves the designation. This does. The story gets a little ... something (cluttered or jumbled or disjointed) in middle-end, but eventually comes together reasonably well, and Chandler's prose is a pure joy to read, laden with nifty unexpected turns of phrase. It's not perfect: The characters--other than Marlowe--often don't have much to distinguish them, and there are often attitudes bandied about that grate harshly on modern nerves. It's a grimly cynical book, pretty much everyone is some shade of corrupt, but that's kinda table stakes, here. I'm happy to have come across this in the local library of our choice.

White Fox by Owen Matthews

 

This is another book in a series, but it's labeled as Book Three in a Trilogy, so I believe the stories the author has told all the stories he had to tell in Soviet Russia. At least, his main has escaped, more or less. Which is about as good an ending as he was going to have, really: I was wagering on his being murdered by his colleagues in the Committee for State Security. The characters in the three books are progressively more scarred (and more scared) by their time in the machinery of the Soviet state, and by the end, here, many of them have entirely given up hope. These are progressively less happy novels, though they do all read pretty well on their own--while the characters do continue to evolve, and their past/s do continue to accrue and to matter, there aren't big overarching stories. Matthews writes well, knows his characters and their milieu, and knows the broader history these stories are in (and in this last novel, where things really do veer off). All good stuff, all very worth reading.

Chain Reaction by James Byrne

 

And with this I'm caught up on this series. Still witty and quippy-breezy, engaging prose and characters. There were some weird, offputting editing errors in this book--instances of mixed-up homophones, mostly, I think, and something that jumped out at me as like a continuity glitch--but Byrne's prose does sparkle and pop. I'm probably not going to stress on trying to keep up with the series, it looks as though it might be settling to something like a status quo, or at least a holding pattern. If I see a new book and I remember the author, I'll plausibly grab it, but I don't really try to keep up with series. Still, these are entertaining reads.

Our Winter Monster by Dennis Mahoney

 

Unlike last night's novel, tonight's comes from a very genre place, very Horror, complete with barely explained snow monster and other oddments, but it ends up having a lot to say about real world things--the snow monster is basically a side effect of a cracking (but not broken) relationship, and it reflects in many ways the feeling of being in a relationship that's threatening to unravel after a shared traumatic experience, all trapped and frozen and brittle. There is some healing, at least for the couple at the center of the novel, though it takes another traumatic experience with a much more human monster to make the healing happen and work. There are some other characters who just get hosed, but that's kinda a thing in Horror. Well-written, nicely paced, the trauma at the heart of the monster-couple turns out to be achingly real. I get the feeling the author has recently shifted to Horror, can't say how long he'll stay, can't say whether anything else will be worth reading; this very definitely is.

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

 

So, on the one hand, I don't have a lot of patience for the distinction between "literary" and "genre" fiction; on the other hand, you can usually tell which direction a given author working in this particular hinterland is coming from, and Michel is clearly coming from "literary"; on the gripping hand, this is something like 330 pages of punching down at fandom in many of its scruffy forms, and I ran out of patience about 200 pages in and switched to power-skimming. Michel demonstrates an impressive ability to shift his authorial voice into several different registers, but he never shakes the sense that he's mocking his characters, laughing at them (not with them). Really good on the prose level, but kinda an insulting nothingburger on every other.