KING CITY by Lee Goldberg

King City by Lee Goldberg was an absolute blast, an easy-reading, turn-the-pages story that took me back to the days when reading was a relaxation of the truest form. Just plug in, detach brain, and cruise through an adventure filled with good guys and bad guys and plenty of action.

I’m really glad that this novel is the first of a series. I want to hang out with Sergeant Tom Wade and his little band of do-gooders for a while longer. Wade is good company, and he’s a guy I can root for, one that doesn’t mind taking the bull by the horns.

Wade’s sense of honor propels the story, but it’s the thing that also creates the most conflict. From the opening scene where Wade decides to hand over the corrupt cops he works with, to his unflinching resolve to clean up King City, Wade never wavers from his chosen course or the kind of man he has chosen to be.

The first novel lays all the groundwork and establishes a lot of characters for Goldberg to work with in future volumes. We don’t get to know a lot of history of them, but these are larger-than-life characters, even the ones that are the poor and destitute of King City. I believe Goldberg with add layers and varnish as he continues on the series, and I’m looking forward to it.

Wade’s two patrolmen, Billy Hagen and Charlotte Green, also tend to be stock characters in this first novel. Since the concept was originally intended to be a television series, filling those characters out would have been the duty of the actor/actress chosen, but they’re so engaging in the story that it’s easy to imagine the lives they lead when they’re not onscreen. It’ll be fun to see if what I’ve imagined is close to the truth, and I do want to see more of these characters.

Duke Fallon, King City’s crime lord, is also of stock, vintage character. Lee Goldberg, like me, read a lot of Robert B. Parker’s novels while working on his writing. I see a lot of Spenser’s nemesis Joe Broz in Duke, and I’m loving how similar Duke is to those underworld figures in private eye fiction. In fact, Tom Wade and his situation, to the degree of dropping an outsider into a volatile mix, reminds me of another Parker character, Jesse Stone, as played by Tom Selleck.

Comparing Goldberg’s creation to Parker’s is high praise indeed, and Goldberg matches the books stride for stride, while still echoing the Western themes of High Noon and Tombstone.

I hope Tom Wade is in for a long assignment in King City, and I hope the crime rate doesn’t drop too quickly.

STEAMPUNK!: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FANTASTICALLY RICH AND STRANGE STORIES by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant

Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant was a mixed bag for me. Some of the stories didn’t seem to have more than a passing acquaintance with steampunk, or seemed to be too estranged from the genre to work for me. Others seemed to be the foundation stone for larger projects and didn’t quite deliver a fulfilling read.

Cassandra Clare has quite the reputation for YA and steampunk. Her offering, “Some Fortunate Future Day,” was beautifully written, but surprisingly dark. The story is a standout in the collection.

Libba Bray wrote, “The Last Ride of the Glory Girls,” which had a lot of moving parts. In fact, I’m thinking the story had too many. It was very imaginative, but I ended up feeling more distanced from the characters than I wanted to.

“Clockwork Fagin” is another of those dark stories in this collection, and the title warns you of that. Cory Doctorow delivers a good character-driven piece, but I felt depressed when I finished it. Still, the solution the handicapped kids worked out for themselves was pretty ingenious and funny, which I think was more to the point.

“Seven Days Beset By Demons” written and drawn by Shawn Cheng was just too weird for me. The artwork looked rough and I couldn’t sink into the world enough.

Ysabeau S. Wilce’s “Hand in Glove” is a different kind of story altogether, and it offers some nice diversions to the steampunk world. I didn’t care so much for the omniscient narrator and present tense because I kept stumbling over them.

The steampunk plot gets a changeup in “Ghost of Cwmlech Manor” by Delia Sherman. I enjoyed the story and the setting a lot. I really settled into this one.

Garth Nix penned a crackerjack little story in “Peace in Our Time.” You’ll have trouble figuring out what the lesser of two evils is in this one.

“Finishing School,” the second graphic story in the collection, this one by Kathleen Jennings, tends to plod along and the art is spotty. Some of the panels are well done, and other seemed to miss the mark.

Dylan Horrocks wrote “Steam Girl,” the longest story in the collection and one of the most compelling tales because it spins around a relationship.

Overall, people who are fans of steampunk will find something in this collection to enjoy, but they may not enjoy all of the stories.

THE DROWNED CITIES by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love Paolo Bacigalupi’s novels, especially his YA stuff. His books are written with a real sense of adventure and wonder. His characters don’t just struggle with problems, they live and breathe in a world that seems just right around the corner if things go badly.

Kids are probably drawn to the post-apocalyptic feel of the books because that is all the rage at the moment. They might not notice the craftsmanship Bacigalupi brings to the page consistently. His characters spring full-born from the words, and they snare the reader in a death grip until the final page is turned.

On the surface, The Drowned Cities appears to be in the same world as Ship Breaker. I loved that book, and I’m glad to see that the author is making a return trip to the world, even if it is so bleak and hard. The life and death struggles in these stories is very real, very gripping, and the characters are at once understandable and mesmerizing even in a world so different from the everyday one currently present.

The characters in The Drowned Cities include Tool, who’s a genetically enhanced warrior supposedly made from animal DNA (or at least DNA that gives him some of those abilities), Mouse and Mahlia, who are simply surviving in this bleak world, and Ocho, a military warrior who has had most of his humanity and hope beaten out of him.

All of the characters are rich and deep, and Bacigalupi explores their backgrounds just enough to make them real to the readers. I loved Tool, and I really want to see more of him. He was by far the most interesting when it came to being new and different.

But I love the humanity that the author gives to Mahila and Ocho. Those characters, at one point or another, do things that are inherently wrong, but they do them for complicated reasons. The result is that you don’t know who’s going to end up on what side.

The world drew me in and wouldn’t let go. When I turned the last page, I wanted more. I want the next book.

If you have a reluctant young male reader you’d like to entice over to the literary side, The Drowning Cities is a great book. Some of the violence can be hard, though, so be advised that this is a compelling and edgy read.

RIP TIDE by Kat Falls

Rip Tide is the second book in Kat Falls’s action-packed science fiction young adult series. I’d been blown away by her first book, Dark Life, and my son had been too. My expectations for this second book were high, and I was afraid that I’d been expecting too much. But that was a needless worry. Falls zipped right through this adventure with the same confidence and skill that she had in the first book.

I love the way she renders the world. In the post-apocalyptic world she’s imagined, the polar ice caps have melted and the oceans cover over most of the world’s land masses. The natural balance of the world has changed and now most of the people that had lived on dry land are trying to make new lives on and under the sea.

This book gives the reader more information about how this new world is divided and how far apart the two groups are. She also gets into some of the more savage arenas of the world as well, and there were some really well done scenes, especially the fight scene and the alligator sequence.

Falls has taken a really innovative approach to the storytelling. The main character, Ty, tells the reader everything in first-person narrative, but his voice is sprinkled with jargon straight out of a Western movie. “Pioneers,” “outlaws,” and other terms are constantly on the stage, and the feeling of the wide open spaces of the sea – like the rolling hills and grasslands of the Old West – speak of a world that is larger than anyone knows.

Ty’s quiet love for his best buddy Gemma comes out in this one maybe a little more heavily than some of the youngest readers may want to deal with (all that kissing stuff), but Falls keeps that relationship fresh and innocent.

This novel travels around the world below and above the ocean more than the last one did, and the reader gets a better view of the world that’s out there. There’s a lot more action and Ty gets to play the hero on several occasions, which will make young male readers happy.

But Gemma holds her own, too, despite her fears. And we even get to see more of her relationship with her brother. As it turns out, he’s got some secrets of his own.

Librarians are forever looking for books to give to young male readers. I recommend this one whole-heartedly. Both of these novels have kept my son – and me – glued to the pages. So if you’ve got a reluctant male reader around the house who prefers science fiction to fantasy, these are books that will introduce him to brand new adventure.

SLEUTH OR DARE by Kim Harrington

Sleuth or Dare is the first novel of a new middle grader mystery series featuring two young girl protagonists. Norah and Darcy are two best friends, but they couldn’t be more different. Norah tells the story in this first book, and she’s bookish and into all things astronomy. Darcy is deliberately different, a free spirit in clothing and attitude, and a dedicated armchair detective and cyber nerd.

They set up a detective agency as a school project, one of those make-believe businesses that get assigned in different classes to make kids think. Norah wants something different, but not wildly so. However, before she knows it, she gets sucked into Darcy’s fantasy world and they establish a detective agency (Partners in Crime), complete with an on-line web presence.

Shortly after their debut during class, they get their first email. A mysterious person wants the duo to find her missing twin sister.

As an adult reader, I love traipsing through kids’ books. Given the fact that sales of kids’ books are way up these days (showing more of an increase than adult books), I feel confident in the knowledge that I’m not the only dedicated reader who pines for the good old days of curling up with a crackerjack story peopled with fun characters.

Kim Harrington’s first person narrative throughout the book is fun and breezy, never taking itself too seriously. There is plenty of crushing, nervousness, and near-social disasters to keep the younger crowd happy, but it doesn’t get in the way of older readers either.

The mystery is plenty of fun, and Harrington keeps the reader on his toes because there are a lot of things going on in this book to keep the pot stirred. There are plenty of characters on stage in this one that I feel certain will be back again and again throughout the series. Looking to see more of them, and I’m curious about what Zane is really doing. That’s one mystery that didn’t get resolved in this book.

However, I was surprised at how adult the actual mystery turned out to be. I put it all together well before the final reveal, but I thought it was an ambitious plot with fairly placed clues.

As someone who grew up on Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boy, I’m always going to read mysteries about young sleuths. Norah and Darcy are an enchanting pair and I’m already looking forward to the next two volumes, both of which will be released in subsequent months over the summer.

This is definitely a book for that young detective in your household, and a great book to purchase for a school library.

CARPATHIA by Matt Forbeck

The plot is so good for this one that I wish I’d thought of it first. Imagine the Titanic sinking only to have part of the doomed passengers rescued by a ship filled with bloodthirsty vampires.

Cool, huh? Real movie potential.

Matt Forbeck is a good writer and world builder, and he’s learned how take a singular event in history and salt the mine with the stuff of great fiction. He’s contributed to a ton of role playing game franchises and sharpened his skills.

The book, Carpathia, is named for the ship filled with vampires. I really enjoyed Forbeck’s main three protagonists and the romance triangle going on between them. Usually I don’t like such things because there’s way too much angst going on, and I’m not in favor of people who can’t make up their minds about such things. However, this particular triangle is presented more in the way of how the friendships will be affected, which I thought was legitimate.

Forbeck delivers some good villains who have their own triangles and tiffs as well. I particularly liked the vampiress Elisabetta Ecsed and Brody, the blue-collar vampire, because they were every bit as violent and bloodthirsty as I like my vampires.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and the sense of adventure, along with the homage to Bram Stoker’s original cast of characters. However, the overall mix of the story threw me off. The buildup to the wreck took quite a bit of time, and we all knew what was coming. Then, when the vampires arrived, things seemed to accelerate almost like a speeding bullet. I blazed through the pages at the end, but I caught myself having to go back to make certain of what I’d just read.

Forbeck does a good job of mixing in the Victorian world to readers. I got a good feel for the life and times of those people, but – again – that seemed to be lost in the final movements of the novel. This is a solid horror novel wedded to a tragic event that was pretty horrific all on its own.

DRIVEN by James Sallis

I read James Sallis’s first Driver novel before it had even been optioned for a movie, or made into one starring Ryan Gosling that became an eye-catching movie that captured moviegoers everywhere. I’d hoped that Sallis would follow up with a sequel and was glad when he did.

Driven is another slam-bang feast of action and violence scored to a heavy metal riff featuring a full-bore V8 bassline. Sallis wastes no time at all in getting us into the action, and Driver’s life is on the line from the first page. Killers leave Driver’s wife dead on the first page. Anyone who’s read the first novel knows that retribution is coming.

I wasn’t surprised to see how quickly Driver put aside his feelings for his dead wife. He’s a born survivor. He would have saved her if that had been possible, but it wasn’t. And he doesn’t start tracking down the men that killed his wife out of revenge – it’s to stay alive. Whoever sent them isn’t going to rest until Driver is in the ground as well. Still, for those not familiar with Driver’s harsh view of life and death, this could be jarring, but, man, Sallis ultimately makes the most of this.

One of Sallis’s most interesting creations in the Driver books is Felix, the ex-military warrior that lives in the shadows and has his fingers in a lot of pies. I love the mystery of Felix and don’t want to see it stripped away, but at the same time, I want to know more about him.

I also enjoy the relationship Driver has with his screenwriter friend, the guy he goes to in order to untangle logic knots because the guy lives inside his own head by twisting reality and reducing things down to a single plot beat. There’s a lot of psychology and philosophy in the book, primarily coming from Felix and the screenwriter, but Driver is the guy steering through the murky streets staying one step ahead of the killers.

I loved the female mechanic and wished there could have been more going on between them, but Sallis doesn’t allow for much downtime in the book. Or maybe he could write a book about her, because she has a lot of layers that we barely see in this novel.

But that’s one of the joys of Sallis’s writing: his characters are all deep and well worth revisiting. I hope we’ll see more of Driver in the near future. His story can’t be over.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN #1 by Brian Wood, Becky Cloonan, and Dave Stewart

The romance between Conan the Cimmerian and Belit, Queen of the Black Coast was a big part of Roy Thomas’s run on the barbarian hero at Marvel Comics. I remember reading those issues and looking forward to each one with anticipation. Conan had hung out with Red Sonja for a time, but there had never been a woman who so closely matched his skills and his zest for adventure.

I’m surprised it took Dark Horse this long to get around to their take on that saga. Maybe they were leery of it, maybe there were licensing complications, I don’t know. However, I am totally loving what writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan are doing with the story. I’d read a couple interviews about the upcoming project and was interested enough to pick up a copy, to see what was going on, but I didn’t have any really high expectations.

The first issue has me solidly hooked, though, and now I’m going to dread having to wait a month between each installment.

Brian Wood has a great grasp of Conan, though he may be writing him as more talky than most versions of the barbarian I have read. At least in the beginning. Roy Thomas got more loquacious as he went on with his run on the strip. But this is a Conan I can really get behind, a warrior who talks to other warriors about his exploits and adventures.

From the opening pages where Conan is fleeing for his life, till he’s aboard the ship recounting the tale that brought him there, till his potential confrontation with the pirate queen, the story is expertly paced. Cloonan brings the scenery and action to life. Her version of Conan is a little on the thin side, but the barbarian is still young, still has his full growth ahead of him at this point in his life.

Cloonan’s version of Argos and Kush are fully realized. The marketplace on page one is well-developed and drawn, and it’s just a throwaway piece. Likewise, the seaport and the square buildings and homes that line the coast are detailed and compelling. I felt like those worlds were real, that I could just step onto the page and breathe the salt air.

Belit is going to be a strong character. She’s not even active in the book yet, but you can feel her presence in the pages. The men whisper fearfully about her, and the vision/dream sequence Conan has of her and the conquered ship at the end of this issue is the stuff movies are made of. Just leafing through those pages makes a film version pop into my head. The way Belit looks back over her shoulder at Conan is chilling. I can’t wait to read how the rest of the story goes.

DEAD ON THE ISLAND by Bill Crider

Bill Crider is a friend of mine, so I read a lot of his books because they hit my radar more often. However, the friendship isn’t why I read the books. He a really good writer and he writes horror, suspense, Westerns, and mysteries. He’s a natural storyteller and understands the conventions of the genre he’s working in.

Truman Smith is a Galveston, Texas, private eye and stars in five of Crider’s books. I picked up the first couple Smith books back when they first came out, but had trouble finding the last three. The ebook hadn’t been invented back then and getting hold of some books could prove difficult unless you haunted bookstores. Unfortunately, I was busy coaching little league baseball and basketball teams, so I didn’t get to do the haunting.

Now, though, the entire series is being reprinted in ebooks on the Kindle and the Nook. The fifth book is due out next month and The Prairie Chicken Kill was just released. Sadly, at the moment, that is the last Truman Smith book.

I love Truman Smith. He drinks Big Red, has a bum leg, and reads constantly. What’s not to love? He’s an everyday hero who’s easy to understand and get to know. Also, he’s got a big mystery in his life that he hasn’t solved. His younger sister Jan went missing a year ago and he hasn’t been able to find her. Smith’s whole private eye business had been based on him being able to find people that couldn’t be found.

Broken, Smith returned home to Galveston and started painting houses, shutting himself out of the detective business. But he’s around his past and it doesn’t take long to come calling in the form of Dino and Ray, guys he played football with and against when he was younger.

Dino is the son of criminal royalty but really isn’t involved in his father and uncles’ business these days because he’s pretty much gone legit. However, he presents a missing girl case to Smith and asks Smith to look into it as a favor for the old days.

Smith reluctantly agrees, but soon finds that he’s missed the detecting work. He steps back into the traces and gets underway. The path quickly turns deadly and bodies start piling up, some of them dropped by Smith himself, which is something he’d never had to do before.

I really enjoyed this book as much the second time around as I did the first. Of course, I knew who did it the second time and what was truly going on, but Crider brings Galveston to life and I love the small-town feel of the city. Crider is an easy to read writer. You just sink into a chair and start, and within minutes you’re plugged into another world and someone else’s problems and mysteries.

THE MAN OF BRONZE by Kenneth Robeson

In my early teens, I grew up reading Doc Savage novels. I discovered them when I was in 7th grade, a very impressionable time for a boy. I didn’t know what “pulps” were back then, but I totally grooved on the action and adventure.

That would have been in 1969 or 1970, the heyday of the Bantam reprints. I went to the story and man, they were everywhere. At first I saw that fierce face and I figured that Doc Savage was an evil guy, a villain that the rest of the world was trying to bring down. Kind of like Fu Manchu.

I picked up my first Doc, The Sea Angel, and it sounded like Monk Mayfair was a bad guy. Really weird experience for me. Then I got into the book, read it in a day, and was dying for more. Luckily The Sea Angel was the 49th reprint in the series, so I had plenty to catch up on.

However, the first book, The Man of Bronze, remained elusive for years. I chased after them through book stores, drug stores, and swap shops and couldn’t find it. Thankfully, my parents finally let me order a few books directly from Bantam (an unheard of thing at the time because nobody ordered BOOKS through the mail in my house).

I sat down and read that novel from cover to cover and was blown away. All the little snippets of how Doc and his aides went on their first adventure after Doc’s father’s murder fell into place. I even took my brothers to the Doc Savage movie in 1975. We all sat at the drive-in and took it all in. It wasn’t Doc, but I liked Ron Ely enough from his Tarzan years to be mostly forgiving. After all, nothing could live up to my imagination.

The books are getting excellent reprintings from Anthony Tollin’s Sanctum books and you can buy them on Amazon. The first one is paired up with The Land of Terror, which was the second Doc book chronologically, but the eighth published by Bantam Books and the fourteenth published by Sanctum. It gets confusing and you need a scorecard to keep up.

I read this book again because I wanted to review it. Years, a lot of them, had passed since I’d last read it, and I wondered how it would stand up. I ended up reading the novel in two nights, three sittings, and was once more swept away into the exciting world of Doc Savage.

I love how Lester Dent (the real author, not the Kenneth Robeson pseudonym) keeps the pacing up. I turned pages effortlessly again, and even though I’d read the story a couple times before, and again in the comics adaptations, I was enthralled.

The characterization is scant for the most part, but there’s enough there to anchor you as a reader and keep you motivated to read. But the charm is the action, unrelenting, and the twists and turns as the author ropes in a lot of what was then unknown territory of the world. In short, the novel remains a grand adventure, much like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter or Tarzan novels. If you don’t allow reality to stand in your way, if you can remember the time was 1933, not 2012, you’ll probably have a blast with this one.