DAMAGE CONTROL - a Carl Brookins Review

Damage Control

by Denise Hamilton
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9674-8
a 2011 hardcover release from
Scribner. 372 pages.

More than just romance can often flower under the hot desert moon. In southern California, a lot more. In the artificially irrigated hothouse of perfectly sculpted bodies, overabundance of wealth, aggressive power and overweening ambition are a dangerous combination that leads, almost inevitably, to corruption. And it is corruption that’s at the heart of this complex, lyrically written tale, along with a strong dose of murder and mystery.

Maggie Silver grew up on the far side of the tracks. Now in adulthood with a mortgage, a failed marriage, and an ill mother, she’s scrambling for a place, if not in the sun, as near as she can get without singeing her fingers. Her values are aspiring middle class. She’d like to be one of the beautiful people, and for a while in a private school with a rich girl friend named Anabelle Paxton, the giddy, youthful exuberance of unsupervised teenaged life seems to point to a life to come of luxury and happiness.

Fast forward to today. Having lost that youthful connection to the good life, Maggie is establishing herself as a fixer. Working for the powerful public relations firm, Blair Company, she find herself once more entangled with the Paxton family, Henry, now a powerful U.S. Senator, Luke, the golden son and Anabelle, once her very best girl friend. A murder has happened and the situation must be managed. The Blair firm gets paid a great deal of money by wealthy clients to do exactly that. What happens then, to Maggie, the Paxtons, to other members of the firm is enthralling, complicated, and almost a Greek tragedy.

The author has taken a common theme, power, wealth and their corrupting influences, and infused the story with a strong dose of both good and evil. and while she carefully and fully illuminates much of the evil that resides in Los Angeles and its special culture, there is at times, a faint but fascinating aura of envy, as if the author yearns, however ruefully, for just a little taste of the life she writes about. The genius of the novel lies in part in the complex and convoluted story and the way the author infuses this story with life.

Hamilton has not penned a polemic against the culture of southern California. Rather she holds up the citizens, and the organizations to a searing light and lets readers judge the actions and the influences that result. Unlike Raymond Chandler, with whose writing she is compared, her sympathies clearly lie with all the characters, while never condoning their actions, or trumpeting the consequences. So in the end, readers, themselves having perhaps experienced a little bit of envy for the characters, can close the book and ponder the questions we all may ask ourselves, to whom do we really owe the greatest loyalty?

--
Carl Brookins www.carlbrookins.com http://agora2.blogspot.com, Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

THE ROAD TO CRIME - Lee Barwood

My guest for the next few days is Lee Barwood. She writes about the road she followed to write her excellent thrillers.

Welcome, Lee. We're paying attention!

 Sometimes the road to crime can be paved with good intentions, just as the proverbial road to Hell. When that happens, it’s a reminder that the human mind is a very complex thing. People, as well as characters, can be drawn into actions that they never thought they would take—or that, under other circumstances, they would recognize as crime.

Fiction is rife with examples, such as police officers so determined to catch a killer that they will plant evidence to ensure conviction because they know they will never nail him any other way. But that is a very dangerous road. Two real cases are that of the Nebraska CSI director, David Kofoed, who in 2010 was convicted of evidence tampering in a 2006 murder case, and that of a New York City police detective who just recently was convicted of planting drugs on innocent people.

Kofoed, as reported by the blog at the Innocence Project, was accused of planting a specimen of the victim’s blood in the car of two suspects who later proved to be innocent. His attorneys claimed he had used a contaminated testing kit, but the judge said there was no evidence of that. Kofoed, in prison, is working on appeals on the grounds that a former coworker set investigators on him.

The police case is a bit different. Detective Jason Arbeeny was found guilty November 1 of official misconduct, offering a false instrument for filing and falsifying business records, as reported by The New York Times, in the case of planting drugs on an innocent woman and her boyfriend. Testimony in the case included that of a former detective, Stephen Anderson, who said that rules were often bent or broken and evidence planted so that police could meet arrest and conviction quotas.

There are plenty of avenues that lead straight to wrongdoing, and in my books the antagonists, like real people, find that various well-meaning motives seduce them into actions that under other circumstances they might find—well, criminal.

 For instance, in A Dream of Drowned Hollow, my paranormal environmental thriller, Trevor Dalton thinks he has long since shaken the dust of the little Ozarks farm community where he grew up from his shoes. But in his childhood and youth he was surrounded by poverty and violence, self-interest and hypocrisy, and these shape him far more than he knows. The orphan child of a man led down the path to despair and murder by desperation, Dalton has seen some of the worst of human nature at work.

Regarded as a charity case with “bad blood” after his father kills his mother and then himself, Trevor is taken in by a well-to-do man respected in the community who treats him as little more than slave labor. There he sees and hears much as community leaders protect their own turf and their own businesses rather than do anything to alleviate the poverty that surrounds them.

The lessons strike home but in all the wrong ways, as Trevor determines to become wealthy and powerful himself so that he can bring jobs and prosperity to the people he left behind. But his use of the power and influence he acquires is as hard-edged as what he left behind, and he becomes as ruthless as those who kept his community bound in poverty in the first place: any resistance to his original well-meaning goal is met with force—subtle at first, then increasingly obvious, though still not visibly tied to him. In his blind determination to right one wrong from his youth, Trevor becomes the instrument of far worse wrongs, until he is guilty at a single remove of intimidation, blackmail, and even murder—not to mention the environmental destruction his projects bring in their wake.

In Some Cost a Passing Bell, Tim Carthan wasn’t a very nice fellow to begin with. He had quite a sense of entitlement when it came to women and power, although he hid it well—had he lived, he most likely would have continued to deceive those closest to him that he was an all-around good guy, while those far enough removed to see him for what he was would observe how he manipulated people and used them for his own ends. In this case, however, death intervenes and takes him very far down the road of wrongdoing until he becomes a returned-from-the-grave murderer who will do anything to take back what he believes is  his—his widow, Camilla, and her psychic abilities.

And in A Lingering Passion, my most recent paranormal, Stan Richards has the ego that his show business success would seem to demand. Yet he is only following in the steps of his great-grandfather Duncan Lorean, a talented but not gifted actor who believed his acting skills to be far greater than they actually were. Both men had a heady sense of self-worth, and Lorean crossed over into obsession, committing murder when his own rise to fame was threatened. Stan, in uncovering the truth about his scandalous family history, awakens more than memories in his quest to learn why Lorean fled the country—and the line between life and death blurs even more as Stan, influenced by Lorean’s lingering presence in the theater he has bought, is unable to see his single-minded pursuit of fame for what it is: megalomania. Other lawbreakers are at work in the story, adding their own complications, as Stan goes beyond what once he would have considered unthinkable behavior and is willing to put the lives of those around him at risk to succeed in his new goal: vindication of his murderous ancestor.

Thanks, Lee for a very inciteful essay on the road to crime. Criminals might learn something, if they wre smart enough to learn anything.

Gerrie Ferris Finger

http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.blogspot.com

http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com

MURDER HAS NO CLASS - a Carl Brookins Review

Murder Has No Class

byRebecca Kent,

ISBN:978-0-425-23207-1

A Berkley Prime Crime 2010 release

Tired of the daily news of the world? Read too many grim thrillers or suspenseful detective stories lately? If you are looking for a change of pace, for an amusing, diverting traditional mystery in the best of the cozy fashion, I give you Rebecca Kent. Author of more than twenty-five novels, this one is set in the Cotswolds of Edwardian England when women sought sufferage and the keepers of tradition sought desperately to rein in rabunctious but upper-class young women.

The novel is set at the Bellhaven Finishing School, run by Headmistress Meredith Llewellyn, with the assistance of a staff of tutors. Llewellyn’s tasks are complicated by her extra-sensibility to the ghost of a hanged man who demands her attention to prove his innocence. Meanwhile, some of the girls and some of the servants are anxious to prove their support for the burgeoning suffragette movement in England.

Ms. Kent has got pretty much everything just right. The characterizations, the tone, the emotional turmoil are all in precise keeping with the time and with the story. The principal characters are classy and distinct and any reader tuned in to the traditional mystery will have a pleasurable experience with this novel.

--
Carl Brookins

www.carlbrookins.com

http://agora2.blogspot.com

Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky

THE GHOST SHIP, an Outer Banks romantic thriller

My beloved Hatteras Island has been cutoff from the rest of the Outer Banks because the sea breached Highway 12 when Hurricane Irene hit the cape. The same thing happened some years ago. I was reporting from the region for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the road had just been rebuilt then.

In the wake of Irene, it appears the long skinny islands will recover and rebuild as the residents have done for centuries. Seafaring people are tough as I came to witness.

I wanted to share with you the genesis of my novel THE GHOST SHIP. A couple of years ago, it wasn't a hurricane, but a severe storm that uncovered the hulk of an early 20th century coastal schooner near Cape Hatteras Light House. Honestly, it gave me the creeps. It's no wonder this part of the Atlantic Ocean is called The Graveyard of the Atlantic.

At that time, the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum at Cape Hatteras was under construction. The director told me that these wrecks were often uncovered from the sands in storms, and that in time another storm would bury my ominous ship skeleton.

While going through the artifacts and photographs at the museum, I came across the The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals. The Carroll A. Deering was a five-masted schooner. Returning from her maiden voyage to Rio and Barbados, and still in full sail, she somehow ran aground and her hull and keel buried on Diamond Shoal. This was in January, 1921. When the Coast Guard boarded her, they found no officers, crew, anchors or lifeboats. Only a six-toed cat. Six government agencies investigated the wreck, worldwide, but came to no conclusion. Was it pirates? mutiny? storms? Bermuda Triangle woo-woo?

So, my little gray cells (thank you, Hercule) conceived the idea of my own fictional solution to the mystery. I published THE GHOST SHIP at the end of June. It's not exactly a romance (which has strictures) nor a classic murder mystery. In other words, publishers loved the idea and the writing, but couldn't put it in a category. So, I had Kimberly Hitchens edit and format it for me and it's on Kindle and Nook.

I spent a lot of time on the Outer Banks reporting on the building of the museum and the controversial move of the Cape Hatteras Light House by the Park Service. I have a special affection for the mystery of the Outer Banks. It has lore galore, ghosts, legends, myths and houses made from the timbers of shipwrecks. Go into one of those, and you can sure get the spooks.

The Outer Banks survived another onslaught, as it always will. It seems the wind and sea gods also have a reverence for the The Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Gerrie
THE GHOST SHIP
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com

Review from GoodReads:"A ghost story mixed with a mystery and a love story told by an author who weaves a wonderful tale. A look into a piece of nautical history as well makes this a great read! I don't believe in ghosts but this book....has me changing my mind."

Buy: http://amzn.to/r3imp5

WHAT'S YOUR CHARACTER'S CHARACTER?

I'm happy to welcome Mark Terry. Mark is a full-time freelance writer, editor and novelist. He is the author of numerous novels including the bestselling DANCING IN THE DARK, THE FALLEN, THE  DEVIL'S PITCHFORK, THE SERPENT'S KISS and others. He lives in Michigan with his wife, two sons, dog named Frodo, and a bunch of  guitars mostly named after Greek gods: Athena, Poseidon, Ares, and Larry. His favorite guitar's name is Layla. His latest novel to feature Homeland Security troubleshooter Dr. Derek Stillwater, is THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS. When not writing, Mark runs, bikes, lifts weights and teaches Sanchin-Ryu karate, where he is training a Midget Ninja Army with plans for world domination. Of his writing The Lansing State Journal said, "Terry writes like Lee Child on steroids."
 http://www.markterrybooks.com/

By Mark Terry


I’ve been thinking a lot about characters -what makes them memorable, what doesn’t. I honestly don’t have an answer about why one character will stay in your mind and others don’t. I’m also not 100% sure why some readers – often critics – will complain about a lack of character development when readers rave about how much they like the character.

My oldest son, Ian, who is 17, sometimes seems to have a better grip on the theory of characterization, maybe because he’s still taking high school language arts courses. He’ll babble on about an anti-hero and I confess to being someone fuzzy on the definition. So I looked it up. Wikipedia says, “an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis.”

I find that so broad, practically speaking, as to be useless.

For those few of you who watched Stargate Universe (SGU), Dr. Nicholas Rush, played by Robert Carlyle, has been described as an antihero. Which is interesting and sort of helps me understand the concept, but during one of the episodes the military leader of the ship, Colonel Everett Young, kicked the crap out of Rush and stranded him on a planet, presumably to die. As a viewer of the show, I knew he wouldn’t stay down, but I did imagine that if I had been Colonel Young I would have jettisoned Rush out of an airlock or shot him in the head long before Young did. He might have been a genius and the person on board the ship who knew the most about the ship and spoke the language of the Ancients best, but I viewed him as a liability we probably would have muddled along without.

And he was fascinating. Arrogant, brilliant, complicated, rude – a total prick, actually – selfish, self-centered, wandering off on his own agenda, seemingly putting the human beings’ survival onboard the ship completely secondary to his own intellectual interests.

Wandering away from SGU, I think any character we think of as “memorable” probably has to be flawed. Maybe a LOT flawed. In my own thriller series featuring Homeland Security troubleshooter Derek Stillwater, I understand that on the basis of society’s standards, Derek is kind of a menace – a little bit of a vigilante, he doesn’t follow the chain of command, he often breaks the law to accomplish his ends… hell, in The Devil’s Pitchfork he tortured a woman to death (accidentally) to get information he needed. That’s not heroic or noble behavior, and prior to writing that scene I had a huge argument with myself. And my conclusion was that in that situation that’s what Derek would do. Not happily, but extremely reluctantly, with terrible consequences (that come back to haunt him in subsequent books).

That sort of thing’s a balancing act for the writer. And my way of dealing with Derek’s flaws is not to think of them as flaws or even character traits. I just figure out what Derek stands for, what it is his goals and reason for being is, and then put him in situations that test those goals. The character’s there, now let’s see how he reacts.

Put it another way, borrowing from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Captain Jack Sparrow, rather tired of Will Turner’s complaints and criticisms, puts him out on the yardarm (I guess, maybe it’s the boom) and says, “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man or you can’t.”

And as the writer of your flawed character – perhaps very, very flawed character – you need to decide what you can or cannot accept.


Thoughts?

Cheers,
Mark

DEVIL'S PLAYTHING - a Carl Brookins Review

Devil’s PlaythingBy Matt Richtel
ISBN: 978-1-59058-887-1
Released, 2011, 324 pgs,
Hard Cover.

This is a novel born of the twenty-first century. It is technology-rich,
abrupt, punchy, and filled with first-person pithy observations. It has a
modern complicated plot and some dark conspiracies worthy of flat-worlders
and those who still appear to believe the landings on the moon were merely
another government scam.

Blogger Nat Idle is drifting through life as a medical reporter and
occasionally paying attention to his rapidly aging grandmother, the only
member of his family in close proximity.  When he and Grandma Lane are on a
casual outing in a San Francisco park, a mysterious stranger, apparently
driving a Prius, shoots at him, or her, or them. How could this gentle,
rapidly aging woman, with no apparent enemies attract an assassin?  Not
possible so it must be Nat who was the target.  After all, he was engaged in
a controversy with some San Francisco cops about Porta Potty corruption.

The novel uses a criminal conspiracy of immense possibilities and
proportions to raise questions about the rising dependence on technology to
replace our individual memories, and to sermonize about American society’s
eagerness to shuttle its older generations into places where they can die
out of sight and mostly out of mind.  Those shortcomings aside, the novel
develops and carries along an inventive idea that is highly fraught with
tension and believability.

Carl Brookinshttp://www.carlbrookins.com/, http://www.agora2.blogspot.com/
Devils Island, Bloody Halls, Reunion, Red Sky
more at Kindle, Smashwords & OmniLit!

Eggsceptional EGGSECUTIVE ORDERS - Happy Easter

EGGSECUTIVE ORDERS
Berkley, 2010
352 pages



If you like light reading, and who wouldn't at Easter time, give Julie Hyzy's award-winning culinary series a hop and skip through the pages as she prepares for the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House.


Make no mistake this is cozy writing at its best with a series that began with State of the Onion (Anthony award winner).



In Eggsecutive Orders, a White House dinner guest has died. Was he poisoned? Suspicions point to Executive Chef Olivia Paras, the first female White House Chef, and her staff. Even her Secret Service lover, Tom, is no help because he's been told to keep her out of the kitchen, away from the first family's food. She must clear her name to keep her job and boyfriend, to say nothing of staying out of jail, or worse.
This wonderful souffle is funny and mysterious at the same time.

From Booklist
The ever-burgeoning culinary mystery subgenre has a new chef-sleuth. In her second adventure (following State of the Onion, 2008), Olivia Paras, the first female White House Chef, just wants to focus on her job: cooking for the president’s family, preparing state banquets, and getting ready for the annual Easter egg roll. However, when one of the guests at a state dinner dies, everything changes: Olivia and her staff are banned from the kitchens. Her boyfriend, Tom MacKenzie, part of the Secret Service’s presidential detail, has been assigned to keep Olivia from meddling in the investigation. Her mother and grandmother are about to arrive for their first visit to Washington, D.C., and tensions are rising among Olivia’s staff and guest chefs. Hyzy does a great job of keeping us interested in all of these problems, and the back-stage look at the White House proves fascinating. Recipes are included for Eggcellent Eggs. --Judy Coon



Gerrie Ferris Finger
THE END GAME
THE LAST TEMPTATION out 2012
http://www.gerrieferrisfinger.com/

HONORED DAUGHTERS

Honored Daughters

Laura Kate Plantation Series Book 2

Author: Gerrie Ferris
Publisher: Desert Breeze Publishing
Genre: Contemporary, Suspense/Mystery
Length: Full / 183 pgs
Heat: Spicy
Rating: 4 Books
Reviewed by Snapdragon

Laura Kate O’Connell is a super-star of a clever southern bell with quick wit and a nice way with horses.
Honored Daughters is truly more mystery than romance, but the romance matters and readers will really enjoy Jack Rhodes when they finally meet him. It won’t be a painful wait though, as from the first moments, interest and intrigue build.
Overall, the quality of the story is excellent. Epic-like adventures – and love – befall our heroine, who seems pulled in several directions most of the time. Her personal life, her decisions and future plans are complicated; Jack Rhodes is her distant, if still true love. He seems to envision an ordinary, predictable sort of future for the two of them, a future Laura Kate isn’t enthused about at all. (Although after meeting him, we do realze he’s more insightful than Laura Kate gives him credit for.)
Before we even get to questions of romance; Agent Nyan Hill complicates her life, with his desperate effort to see the murder of his niece Dari solved. Nyan & Laura Kate’s antagonistic relationship, and occasional sharp dialogue, really make reader’s admire our heroine. She’s nobody’s fool, but is at heart a caring, almost driven person.
Ferris has a distinctive voice, giving Honored Daughters a continuous, rather evocative aura. She creates a time, a place, and a series of characters that seem utterly original, yet also familiar and appealing. There are some seriously suspenseful moments, as well as more tender times; and the mystery is a real mystery, both intriguing and heart-wrenching from the start.
I don’t give it top drawer on rating, only because sentence fragments and frequent odd turns of phrase slow this story one too many a time. It may be a stylistic thing, but it’s annoying and often grammatically incorrect (one example: Moving away from the window, she dressed in riding breeches and … one can't do both things at once, yet this is what this sentence implied).
Although this is contemporary, there is a certain historic feel to it. The horses, the hunt club, the southern-bell comments, and Honored Daughters School itself. Although contemporary, it all has an old, old feel to it. Fans of any southern-style epic will really love this story; perfect reading by a cozy fire.
Finally, Kudos to the artist that got this cover so perfect for the story.