Selfie

 

And here's an obligatory pic of the author with a copy of the book hot off the presses. It has that new book smell.

Ta Da! The Cover.

 I really have been delinquent. Here is the cover to the first of the strange cases (which I love), by the extremely talented Jennifer Do, as well as the link to its Amazon page.

Review: The Lost History of Dreams

 If you like to be on solid ground, Ms. Waldherr’s book may not be for you. But if you like unreliable narrators and the tension they create when you know they’re unreliable, she has nested one unreliable narrator inside another, so that you never quite no who you’re dealing with. And the narrators so reflect the people whose stories they’re narrating that it becomes a game of fun-house mirrors. And some of the most important characters may be ghosts, whether real or imagined by two people trapped in the past.

Robert starts with a simple task, His cousin, famous poet Hugh de Bonne, has died, and wishes to be laid by the side of his wife Ada in the stained-glass shrine he built for. There’s a strange codicil in his will, however, which Ada’s niece Isabelle refuses to bow to—and she’s the only one with a key to the shrine. Her reason is bound up in the history of Hugh and Ada, which she proposes to relate to Robert in a mock-Scheherazade style.  But instead of making things clearer, it merely draws Robert deeper into a net of doubts.

All is laid bare at the end, and I’ll leave you to decide whether it’s a satisfying denouement. But this Gothic-soaked joy-ride is worth your time one way or the other.

Review: Crashed

 Crashed is apparently the first of seven Junior Bender novels, at any rate the first I’ve read. If this is a taste of what the rest of the six are like, he can keep churning them out as far as I’m concerned. Junior is a burglar, and a smart one at that. Which is what gets him in trouble. Can his smarts to get him out? But when you’re burglar, a smart burglar at least, you also have a sense of ethics to deal with too–not a simple true-blue code, but a constantly moving target.

These are the two elements to guide our plot, and the target is indeed constantly moving. Hanging from the chandelier with a slobbering pack of dogs beneath you? It’s just another job, except it’s not just another job, it’s a setup, one which will get our hero blackmailed and dropped into the soup, and then further into the soup, till he eventually finds himself at the bottom of the bowl. Bender finds himself in the distasteful (and precarious) position of being hired out to a (female) crime boss who’s heard about his smarts, and wants him to run herd on a former child star turned junkie she’s picked out to make her porno debut–against unknown forces intent on sabotaging the production. But Bender develops a soft spot for the girl, and when a close friend winds up dead he decides to turn the tables.

There follow more curves than it takes to get to the Shady Rest Hotel, and it takes every bit of ingenuity Bender has to extricate himself, without (too much) collateral damage. If you like Elmore Leonard (and who doesn’t?) but always felt like he could be a little bit funnier and the little bit sharper, give Tim Hallinan a try.