Review: A TRACE OF SMOKE, Rebecca Cantrell

A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1931 Berlin, crime reporter Hannah Vogel discovers her brother's photograph in the police station's Hall of the Unnamed Dead. Her brother, a homosexual, cross-dressing lounge singer, had a number of shady connections and numerous liasons with powerful and dangerous men, and when Hannah sets off to find his killer, she runs afoul of one of the scariest real-life figures of the days before Hitler's rise to power.

This is a great historical mystery. I especially liked the contrasts between the supposedly public morality of late Weimar Germany and the decadence of the underworld in which its movers and shakers played, often openly. The plot moves along well, with unexpected twists and turns and a nail-biting ending. Hannah is an engaging character, tough when she has to be, yet soft-hearted. The bad guys are truly three-dimensional and well-drawn, and even more frightening because at least one of them actually existed (try to imagine a guy that actually worried Hitler).

A fine debut. Can't wait to read the next one.

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Review: ARMOR, by John Steakley

Armor by John Steakley

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


About a week ago, a friend of mine walked up to me and handed me this book, saying "you ought to read this, it's not what you'd expect." Since this was someone whose opinion I generally respect, I took the book home with me.


So...it's an interesting book, and no, not what you'd expect from the cover art or the back cover description. It starts off looking like a military sci-fi novel in the mold of Robert A. Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS, but without all the military cheerleading (or as I call it, the RAH rah-rah).

Then, suddenly, we're someplace completely different with a completely different protagonist, the cynical space pirate Jack Crow. Crow's arrived on the planet Sanction with a mission of his own, one he's not completely happy with, but he's got debts to pay.

The story eventually gets tied together when Crow and Sanction's project director start delving into the secrets of the original protagonist's armored battle suit. There are some surprises and reversals right at the end.

The book drags quite a bit in the middle, and the prose gets a more than a bit overheated and melodramatic, but on the whole, I liked it. Didn't love it, but liked it.

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Darn - The World Didn't End

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Well, they did it to me again.

You may remember how bummed I was back in 2000 when the Y2K bug didn’t cause the complete collapse of civilization. I wrote at the time that I’d been getting all psyched up to grab my assault rifle and engage in a grim, bloody fight for survival in the smoldering ruins of civilization. After gearing up for that, it was kind of an anticlimax to just have to go in to work on Monday.

So you’d think I’d know better than to get all psyched up again for the end of the world as predicted by Harold Camping.

In case you missed the story, Camping is a California radio preacher who predicted that the world was going to end last Saturday promptly at 6 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time). Specifically, at that time, all good Christians were going to be taken up to heaven.

Immediately following this event, we’d have massive worldwide earthquakes that would make the recent Japanese temblors look wimpy, and the entire planet would be plunged into chaos (even more than it usually is), with everything culminating in the destruction of this world, the triumphal return of Jesus Christ, and the establishment of a new heaven and Earth on Oct. 21.

Camping claims to have backed this up with biblical passages, combined with actual math. The math part may explain why I found his theory incomprehensible.

Although Camping had previously (and, it appears, incorrectly) predicted the end of the world back in 1994, a startling number of people bought into the prophecy. Some quit their jobs. Some sold everything they owned and gave away their pets. One deranged woman even tried to slit her own throat and the throats of her daughters to keep them from having to live though the “coming tribulation.” Fortunately, the kids survived.

Well, 6 p.m. came and went, as did 7, 8, 9, and so on. Everybody stayed put. No earthquakes, no seas turning to blood, no Four Horsemen, none of the stuff that you’d expect to see after even a cursory skimming of the book of Revelations or a few Grade-B horror movies.

Once again, I felt a little let down. I didn’t totally believe Camping, of course. And let’s face it, it’s not that I, heathen that I am, was expecting to get taken away Saturday if the whole thing was true. But there was a part of me that was looking forward to a lot of free stuff lying around.

When the Final Hoedown didn’t begin as scheduled, you’d expect the “prophet” who originally predicted said Apocalypse to mumble some vague excuse, grab the collection box and hop a plane to someplace with no extradition treaties. This is not, however, how a pro like Camping plays the game of big-time preaching. When he gets caught, he doubles down.

After some time in hiding — sorry, meditation — Camping announced that the Day of Judgment actually had come and gone on the 21st, but it was a “spiritual judgment,” unseen by humanity, and performed, as it were, behind closed doors. The end would still come as scheduled on Oct. 21. Perhaps more time was needed for all the heavenly department heads to sign off on the final paperwork or something.

I’m sure Pastor Camping has read the Bible more times that I have. I’ve only read it cover to cover twice (I know, that surprises a lot of people). Well, I confess, I cheated a little and skipped all the “begats” the second time. Which is why I’m somewhat bemused to find that I apparently know some Scripture that the good minister seems to have missed.

Passages such as Matthew 25:13: “Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man comes.” Or this one, from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians: “For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.” And then there’s this, from Matthew 24:11: “And many false prophets shall arise and lead many astray.”

But perhaps the most appropriate quote comes from the Book of (P.T.) Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

Target Fixation

Balloon Juice » Shorter Eric Cantor: Suck it up, Missouri!

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Monday that if Congress passes an emergency spending bill to help Missouri’s tornado victims, the extra money will have to be cut from somewhere else.

“If there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental,” Mr. Cantor, Virginia Republican, told reporters at the Capitol. The term “pay-fors” is used by lawmakers to signal cuts or tax increases used to pay for new spending.

I've heard that fighter pilots have to beware of what's called "target fixation": they get so intensely focused on one thing, like a target they're firing at, that they literally fly into the ground. I think the GOP's got a bad case of it. They're so focused on spending cuts that they forget that there's a time to put that aside and get relief to victims of disasters without worrying about who to take money away from.

RUNNING COLD, Harry Shannon

Running Cold by Harry Shannon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Counselor and former TV shrink Mick Callahan attempts to help a client resolve a gambling debt with some seriously bad people. It goes badly. Mick starts to investigate, with an eye toward payback. But the situation’s more complicated than he expects, and pretty soon he’s up against someone a lot more dangerous than a sleazy bookie. The dead client’s son, who blames Callahan for his dad’s brutal death, complicates things even further.

Mick’s got a few demons of his own to battle along with the bad guys, including some hefty anger and addiction issues. If you like your heroes flawed, complex, and multi-dimensional (and I do), Mick Callahan’s right up your dark alley.

Harry Shannon’s tight, clean prose keeps the story moving quickly, right up to an ending with enough double crosses, surprises, and gunplay to satisfy the most jaded thriller fan. A great read.

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Wow, That Was Quick: The Newtster Implodes

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Thousands of political humorists were plunged into near despair last week as real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump announced that he would not, after all, be seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency.

It's true that the move was not totally unexpected. After the cornerstone of Trump's candidacy (pandering to the birther lunatics) was dealt a mortal blow by the release of the president's "long form" birth certificate, one might expect he would have quietly folded his tent and slunk off in shame.

But let's face it, a guy with hair like that doesn't have much of a sense of shame. Plus, The Donald still had his special appeal to that breed of so-called "conservative" whose sole political principle is "whatever upsets liberals is good," and who also suffer from that weird cognitive defect that causes them to mistake "highly amused" for "upset."

(I've often wondered what watching a comedy show with people like that must be like: "Look! That man is scaring those people!" "Um, no ... he's a comedian. They're laughing at him." "No, no, they're terrified!" But I digress.)

Anyway, there was still some hope that Trump would stay in and keep the laughs coming. Unfortunately, the lure of TV money from "The Apprentice," not to mention the cachet of working with stars like Gary Busey and Meat Loaf, turned his head away from the path of public service and low farce. Things looked dark for a little while there.

And then along came Newt.

No sooner had the former speaker of the House announced his candidacy than it began to implode. He started off by calling for something that sounded a lot like the Obamacare individual mandate: "We ought to have some requirement that you have health insurance, or that you post a bond, or show in some way that you're accountable."

Then he really stepped in it by criticizing the budget plan of the tea party's new fair-haired boy, Congressman Paul Ryan. Ryan, who's being touted as if he was the Second Coming of St. Ronnie Reagan, drafted, and the Republican-controlled House voted for, a plan to dismantle Medicare and replace it with a voucher system.

Gingrich, like a lot of Americans who've been giving their congresspeople an earful recently, called the plan "too radical" and "right-wing social engineering."

Ryan immediately fired back, asking, "With allies like that, who needs the left?" House Speaker Eric Cantor called the remarks a "misspeak" and noted that "I think that many have said now he's finished." Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer was one of that many. "He's done," Krauthammer said unequivocally.

In a video seen across the Internet, an angry man walked up to Newt as he was campaigning in Iowa, called him "an embarrassment to our party," and told him "get out before you make a bigger fool of yourself."

After that, the Newtster did the only thing a shameless political hack such as he could do: He began backpedaling so fast he left skid marks. He called his comments a "mistake." He denied supporting an individual mandate. He publicly apologized to Ryan.

Then he went even further by going on Greta Van Susteren's show on Fox and warning Democrats not to use his own words against him. "Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood," he said, "because I have said publicly those words were inaccurate and unfortunate."

Yes, that's right. Gingrich actually said that accurately quoting what he said, on camera, for all the world to hear, would be "a falsehood." But you know what, Newt? That's OK. Because "any ad which quotes what I said is a falsehood" is a much better quote for Democrats to use than anything you could have said about Ryan.

Actually, though, I'm thinking of using this tactic, which I've started calling "Newtralization," in my own life. "Any statement that quotes me as saying I was at work rather than enjoying a few cold ones at the bar is a falsehood, because I've now said publicly those words were inaccurate." The possibilities are endless.

I just hope Newt doesn't crash and burn too fast, like Trump. I want him around, twisting and turning and tossing off glorious gaffes (or as I call them, "column material") for a while. But if he does go away, I've learned to have faith. The Lord, as they say, will -provide. And if the Republican presidential field is any indication, he's got a fine sense of humor.