Sometimes reading a book leaves me green with envy. Such is the case with Matthew Norman's We're All Damaged. I believe we are. Two novels ago – three once I get Cowboys Come Home finished -- I started writing Crazy of Natural Causes as a farce. Then I immersed myself in the outrageous football coach, …
Tag: review
Nice Timing for The Year of Trump
Allen Kent, in The Wager, has fashioned a yarn based on a bet gone awry. Two giants of the mass media bet they are powerful enough to get a man of their choice elected president. Predictably, one is a liberal, the other conservative. The clash of egos lurks in the background as events unfold. A …
Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf, or, for that Matter, Virginia Woolf?
The Behrg. He's too dark for me. I admire him, though. He is what I'm not, but I revel in his skill. It's a pen name. A nom de plume. He writes horror. I'm not fond of horror, but I'm fond of The Behrg's style, not to mention his literary honesty and his dedication to …
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The Fallibility of Atticus Finch
I finished Go Set a Watchman on the first day I cut grass, and, on the first day, it's more than just riding around and around the yard. It's getting the battery charged, and a flat fixed, and trips to the Ace Hardware and the Family Dollar. Preoccupied is better than being distracted. I thought …
No Ordinary Indiscretion
In the past year, I've read a lot of chases. Hapless victims of fate, running for their lives. A young man trying come to grips with a mother both dead and outlandish. The Southwest. The Mid-Atlantic. Florida. Polly Iyer's Indiscretion begins on the coast of South Carolina and changes venues to Boston, where it …
New and Terrible Horizons
Being in an informal community of writers -- the ranks of the Amazon KindleScout winners are growing exponentially as more and more of the program's novels are released -- has led me down disparate paths. Jennifer Skutelsky led me up into the Andes in her Grave of Hummingbirds. As such, I felt a certain kinship …
How I Got Here Musically
I remember when I first heard of Don McLean and "American Pie." It was a little over forty-four years ago. I was in the library of Bell Street Middle School, reading Time magazine. At about the same time, maybe even the same day, I read an article about James Taylor. I still tell people …
The Vitality of Extrasensory Youth
Lexi Sobado -- AKA "Alex," AKA "Lynx" -- is a remarkable young woman. She is immensely educated -- none of it formal -- and has extrasensory perceptions that warn her of danger. She has a newlywed husband deployed in the Middle East, extra-official relationship with an extra-government entity, and a serial killer after her. She …
A Triumph of Youthful Self-Reliance
James Morris's fine thriller, What Lies Within, conjures up suspicions that gnaw away at the reader's psyche, which is exactly what a thriller is supposed to do. Shelley Marano is an intelligent young woman from a working-class family, a high school senior getting ready for college. As tends to be the case in a thriller, …
The Future Is Harsh and Scary, but the Kids Give Us Hope
For the first half of Jake Lingwall's action-packed, young-adult novel, Kari Tahe spends a considerable amount of her waking hours in virtual simulation, testing her drones in a wide range of combat scenarios. This is the future, when the lines between games and reality are blurred. As the story advances -- forgive the vulgarity to …
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Nightrider's Lament 