Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves are both award winning writers.  They also both rose to prominence outside the novel arena.  Gaiman scripted the Sandman comic series that lasted 75 issues plus specials.  Since that time he’s gone on to script many other things, including novels, television shows, short stories, movie scripts, and continued working in the comics arena.  His work for Marvel Comics to create the 1602 universe when heroes similar to the present-day Spiderman, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc rose at 300 years ago has rightfully garnered a lot of attention.  He also helped flesh out the mythos of the comics industry’s best-selling title, Spawn.

Michael Reaves has written many television cartoon scripts, including Batman the Animated Series, Ghostbusters, and others. He’s also written short stories and novels.

According to the notes in the latest book they have out together, INTERWORLD, they got the idea for the book about ten years ago. Reaves joined Gaiman at his house and they sat down and wrote the book together. The idea had originally started out as a pitch for the television people. Since they had trouble explaining the concept to television executives, they came up with the idea of writing a short novel about it. Even after the novels written, television wasn’t prepared to make a series. Last year, the manuscript was given fresh life when it was shown around to some prospective publishers. Almost immediately, the book was greenlit for publication.

I enjoy a lot of Neil Gaiman’s work. His comics are great, his short stories haunt, and his novels are generally burst out loud laughing or truly epic. Sometimes both.

I’ve read some of Reaves’s books, but I’m not as familiar with his work. He seems to create some interesting worlds and some interesting characters.

When I heard about InterWorld, the premise sounded truly exciting. Imagine a boy, Joey Harker, who could literally run into several of his alternate selves on parallel worlds. I figured immediately that the book had kind of a Sliders or Marvel Comics Exiles feel. I had a lot of hopes for the book.

After getting the book in the mail today, I sat down and read it.  It’s an easy read.  The prose just sails right along.  And the story is simple.  In fact, it’s a little too simple compared to what I was expecting.  Granted that the book was written with a nine to twelve year old audience in mind, there was a lot of concentration on the architecture of the nothingness that stretched between the worlds.  And not enough focus on real character development or even a plot.  Both of those turn out simple as well.

I know the juvenile crowd will probably appreciate that, but this is the same market that has been reading Harry Potter books that were 1000 pages long with convoluted and heavily articulated plots. Still, this is Gaiman and there are flashes of brilliance as well as true emotion throughout.  When he talks about his teacher Dimas, he sounds so true I couldn’t help but wonder if Gaiman or Reaves really had a teacher like that.  The “class assignments” were terrific, and found myself wishing for more of those.

The book moves at high speed once it gets up and going, which is really very quickly.  However Joey tends to be left on his own through much of the book.  He always seems to be leaving people behind and not making any true and lasting friendships for a long time.  In fact, the story was depressing there for awhile because everybody he met seem to die.  Including himself.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the book. I wish there had been more. But it felt like an interesting cross between a Heinlein juvenile, an early Andre Norton adventure, and Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. InterWorld is a quick read with plenty of zip and provides a host of ideas with lots of action.

Since 1977, mystery author Marsha Muller has steadily produced novels detailing the life of her series character, professional investigator Sharon McCone. Her current novel, The Ever-Running Man, is the 25^th in the long-lived series that began with the first novel Edwin of the Iron Shoes. I started reading the McCone books in the late 1970s, which dates me, I suppose.  But it also speaks of the loyalties of Muller’s readers.  We tend to stick around.

In the early years, McCone worked for All Souls Legal Cooperative and handled small cases with large results. As evidenced in her latest offering, McCone is now capable of handling the jet-set crowd. During the last 30 years, our intrepid lady private eye has discovered more about herself and her family than most people ever get the chance to do.  Of course, her family has had a lot more secrets and turmoil than most families do.

In her last novel, Vanishing Point Muller married her heroine off to Hy Ripinsky, a high-powered executive working with Renshaw and Kessell International, a security firm capable of providing protection for heads of state and probably small countries. That relationship is only one of things that come under fire during the current novel.

The book opens with a bang. Ripinsky visits McCone’s office with an offer to hire her to search for an elusive attacker that has plagued the security corporation for over two years. RKI has kept the incidents primarily out of the news rather than take a black eye about not being able to protect their own people.  However, the “Ever-Running Man” – as they’ve taken to calling him because witnesses always described him as someone running from the scene of an explosion – has upped the ante by making even more blatant and destructive attempts on RKI holdings.

McCone is reluctant to take on the assignment. As she explains to her husband, an investigation like that is going to require some deep research into the backgrounds of all the corporate executives. Including her husband.

Ripinsky already admitted to having several skeletons in his personal closet.  He’s been something of a bad boy, which is one of the reasons that McCone is interested in him.  However, before her journey through this novel is finished, she has to ask herself if he’s told her all the truth. Before McCone can even officially start the case, the building she’s in gets bombed.  She escapes injury, but two people aren’t so lucky.  The Ever-Running Man’s body count has gone up.

Over the years, in addition to heading up her own agency with several operatives, McCone has also gone high tech. Readers get to see a lot of that in action in this novel, and Muller delivers it in a way that is not dry and boring. The secret does lie in the past, and that’s where Muller finds the motivation that has ultimately set the killer in motion. The problem with secrets is that once they start tumbling out of closets, you don’t get the chance to choose which ones you see and which ones you keep hidden.  

Before long, one of Ripinsky’s secrets has tumbled free and causes a rift in his relationship with McCone. The novel is very well written and keeps the reader on his or her toes as the pages flip. A lot of information emerges quickly and causes consternation and confusion. Much of what McCone thought she knew about Ripinsky’s secretive partners comes to light and is even worse then she believed. One of them was involved in illegal arms shipments into Asia after the Vietnam War.

But, since this is a McCone novel, family has to figure into the mix along the way. This book has got family in spades. Hardly a scene goes by that some family member longtime readers have gotten to know over the last 30 years doesn’t put in appearance. And some of them are still dealing with their own problems, which helps McCone deal with her own situation with Ripinsky as well as better put it into perspective. (For the really diehard fans, she even mentions Wolf, the series character called the Nameless Detective by Bill Pronzini.  Pronzini is Muller’s real-life husband.  See?  It’s all about family.)

I had a great time with this book. Part of it was because of the puzzle, which is played pretty fairly.  I had most of the twists and turns figured out before McCone unveiled them for me. But the other part of the enjoyment was correctly attributable to McCone’s character and her family problems. This mystery felt like sitting down to the table with an old friend and listening to her troubles as well as her success in dealing with them.

If you’re an old fan of the series, you’re going to love The Ever-Running Man. I will offer a caveat to a newcomer reader: this book will go down much better if you read some of the earlier books in the series. You don’t have to, but I do recommend it. And if you love mysteries but haven’t read the Sharon McCone series, you should really give one a try.

Joe Hill is a pseudonym. Most everyone, editors and the book-reading public, know that he’s actually Stephen King’s son. It was never a well-kept secret except when he was doing award-winning short stories. His skill as a writer, a good writer, was a better kept secret because as everyone knows very few short story writers really get a lot of notice. All that changes with the publication of that new writer’s first novel if he or she hits one out of the park.

Joe Hill has done exactly that with his first book. The premise of Heart-Shaped Box is deceptively simple. It sucked me right in. Imagine in this day and age of being able to buy anything and everything on-line that you could buy a ghost. What kind of ghost would you get? A chain-rattler? A friendly ghost?More than likely, you wouldn’t get what you were planning on.  And if the characters had in the novel, the excitement and borrowed fear would never have kicked in.

Even with a premise like this, I wasn’t convinced that Joe Hill, no matter whose son he was, could pull off an entertaining story.  Even with the legacy and the premise, I put off getting the book for a while. And for time, while reading the novel, I wasn’t convinced I’d spent my money wisely. Of course, book readers aren’t so much worried about the money they spend on a book as much as they are the time they spend on a book. I just don’t get that many free evenings to read, and each one is precious to me.

Hill’s prose flows smoothly but he didn’t seem to be going anywhere very fast at the beginning of the book. I got bored from time to time and just wished he would get on with the story.

To make matters worse, I didn’t like his main characters. Judas Coyne, called Jude by his friends, is an aging rock-and-roller whose days on a stage are gone. He’s in his early fifties and has become pretty much a social cripple. He’s not interested in meeting people anymore and he has all the money he needs. The only thing they gets him up in the mornings is his dogs.

But it’s during this early section that I found out how horrible Jude’s life was when he was a child.  How it had shaped him. I understood why he was the way he was, but I still didn’t really care. He didn’t have anything to prove to himself, and he didn’t have anything to prove to me.

It wasn’t until his personal assistant bought the dead man’s suit on eBay that the story really started picking up the pace and getting more interesting. The menace was there, lingering on every page, but not really picking up the momentum for a while.

During this time, the reader also discovers that Jude has a live-in lover that’s half his age and appears to be every bit as emotionally damaged as he is. Jude calls her Georgia, but her name is really Mary Beth. She was a stripper and a band groupie when Jude found her. Their relationship is tempestuous and rocky.

But the ghost of Craddock McDermott quickly terrorizes and unites them. The ghost was the stepfather of another young woman that Jude took as a live-in lover. He called that young woman Florida, but her real name was Anna. What Jude discovers is that Anna slit her wrists in the bathtub and committed suicide after he made her go back home.

Anna’s sister, Jessica, sold the suit on eBay to set the trap for Jude. Jessica and her dead stepfather blame Jude for Anna’s death. Craddock McDermott has come back from the grave for vengeance.

Even with the hook set and knowing that Jude was facing the worst thing that ever happened to him in his life, the interest level for the novel had not peaked for me. It wasn’t until Jude and Mary Beth got on the road and tried to outrun the ghost that things really started get interesting.

At first all the action seemed to be merely rote. The things that Jude did would be expected of anyone trapped in the same fictional situation. However, somewhere in there Jude and Mary Beth came alive to me.

They weren’t merely dysfunctional people anymore. They became people I cared about because they started to care about each other. Once that happened, everything mattered. That change in my opinion is indicative of the level of writing that Joe Hill is capable of.

As a young writer I think he deliberately gave his readers characters they wouldn’t care about, people that most readers with felt were unworthy of the time they spend with them, just so he could redeem them. He twisted all those views and those negative feelings into something strong and passionate. That’s the writer’s gift, and is probably what Hill picked up from the best of his father’s books.

Heart-Shaped Box makes a lot of familiar moves to confirmed horror readers. But that’s the author just making sense within the fictional story. The writing may feel a trifle overdone, but Hill’s prose builds atmosphere and narrative tension in the latter half of the book that makes the story just sing along at a frenetic pace.

If Hill hadn’t taken the time with the characters in the first half of the book, I wouldn’t have cared as deeply about them by the end. Too many times writers depend on action to carry a story forward. Hill depends on characters to carry the story forward.

If you’re one of the readers that bought the book expecting Stephen King, then put the book down and didn’t finish it, I really advise you to go back and put the time in to at least read a little while longer. You’ll be rewarded for the time and effort.

Although the book could be considered beach material, I think you’ll find the beach will seem a little more desolate and a little more chilly while you’re turning pages. And if you make the mistake of staying up late to finish this novel, you might use find yourself reading while pulling the covers up to your chin and sleeping with the light on well after you’re done.

I’m looking forward to Joe Hill’s next book. As it is now, I’m going back and picking up some of his short story collections. This is definitely a young new writer to watch. 

Robert B. Parker’s sixth Sunny Randall mystery novel is one of his most introspective yet. The hook is very well set, opening up with Sunny and her retired father going over a cold case that he never quite solved while he was with the Boston Police Department.  Phil, her father, was troubled by the case for several years before he retired.

Nicknamed the Spare Change Killer because he left spare change – usually a nickel, dime, and quarter – at each murder scene, Spare Change hasn’t struck in almost twenty years. No one knows what has brought Spare Change out of retirement, or why he or she started killing all those years ago.

As lead homicide investigator from the initial investigation, Phil Randall is brought back on to consult. Martin Quirk, longtime permanent fixture of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, holds down a serious cameo role in the book and once again shows that Parker’s world are not as divergent as readers might believe.The theme of this novel, and several of Parker’s books do have themes that are often repeated with different twists, centers on family relationships and how those family relationships affect and change the individuals within them. Susan Silverman returns as Sunny’s counselor and often serves as a foil for both Sunny’s personal growth.

The pace of the story is quick and eventful. Bodies fall quickly, and the police react almost hopelessly.  In a round up at one of the latest murder scenes, Quirk and his people get a list of names up of people who happen to be in the neighborhood are passing by at the time the body was discovered. Then they begin a painstaking and grueling interview process that Sunny and Phil take part in.

Almost immediately Sunny identifies a man she believes is the culprit. His name is Bob Johnson and he’s an innocuous man who has no prior convictions or seemingly any reason for killing anyone. Yet he stands out to Sunny because he is flirtatious, chatty, and too arrogant while taking part in the interview. Quirk and her father aren’t as quick about making that decision. They want more information.

Sunny gets more information by breaking into Bob Johnson’s home.  This is Parker’s tried-and-true detective method that is repeated in several of his novels. The mystery of the killer’s identity isn’t as mysterious war involving as it could be.  Instead, Parker works his magic around his characters.

I loved the candid shots of Sunny’s family at home and at dinner. If these people didn’t dine at your house, you at least knew people like them. Longtime readers of the series get more insight into why Sunny wasn’t able to remain married to Ritchie, her ex-husband. It isn’t all that revealing to see this in action, but it is heartfelt and real.

This introspective analysis of Sunny plays largely into the history of Spare Change. Family and the sense of belonging within the family resonate within the story. Ultimately family issues are the reasons why everything is done by everyone involved. Sunny sees that in her father and comes to realize how much that dynamic is a part of her life and world as well.

As always, Parker delivers the kind of story he sets out to tell. Over the years he’s built a large and faithful audience for all of his characters. I pick up the books every time they come out just for the chance to sit down with an old friend and see how he or she has been.

The books aren’t cutting edge or even really surprising these days, but they are dependable and offer some insight into my life in the world of large. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything Parker has to offer, but I do enjoy his characters and storytelling.

Spare Change is a great beach read or a book for one of those lazy rainy afternoons. If you’re a fan, you can curl right up with this one and be at home within minutes.

Revenge novels are always among the top of my Must-Read list. The excitement of a well-written book with a dangerous hero shoved in the underdog’s role and up against impossible odds hooks me every time. Throw in a great character with a – mostly – realistic history and abilities and I’m a happy guy.For the last few years, Lee Child has been writing about a character named Jack Reacher. Reacher is an awesome hero, not only is he incredibly physical (6’5” tall and 250 pounds), but he’s also canny as a fox, something of an idiot savant when it comes to numbers, and has a near-photographic memory for people and places. Oh, and then there’s the personal radar system that signals him whenever he’s on dangerous ground.

After leaving his military career, Reacher has become something of a vagabond near-do-well. He hasn’t ever married, never had children, doesn’t own a house, and doesn’t even have a driver’s license. He has a habit of getting on buses and just letting them take them wherever they’re going. Footloose, fancy-free, and always in trouble. He works just enough to get by. The only things he owns these days is a folding toothbrush, and – as a result of the 9/11 crisis – a passport and an ATM card.

The novels are always over the top when it comes to plot and action, but Child writes them so well that if the characters were real and the situations were true, fans just know this is how it would be. Bad Luck And Trouble is the eleventh Reacher novel and just came out in hardcover. The other ten are all in paperback. Child is so good that he’s moved onto my hardcover buy-list because I don’t want to wait a year for the paperback. It takes a lot to make that list because space in my house is at a premium. He’s already working on his twelfth Reacher novel, Play Dirty.

When Reacher was a military policeman ten years ago, he headed up a special team of eight trained investigators. Their jobs then had been to catch the bad guys – murderers, black marketers, con artists, and runaways – that operated within the United States Army. Over the two years the unit was together, they went up against some true hardcases and put their lives on the line nearly every day.

Back then, they’d had a motto: “You don’t mess with the special investigators.” That motto became a lifeline for them. No one was allowed to attack any member of the unit without the other seven taking part. During those two years, they’d covered each other’s back through a number of close calls – against bullets and against commanding officers who hadn’t cared for their investigations. They’d never lost anyone.

Now someone had killed one of them. Reacher and the survivors of the unit get together for one more special investigation, and their whole mission is to rock and roll the killer’s world.

I loved the whole revenge concept, and Child starts the action off with a cinematic murder. A man is loaded onto a helicopter, flown out into the Nevada desert a short distance from Las Vegas, and dropped three thousand feet to his death. Later we find out this was to strip all forensic evidence from the body. (It’s an interesting idea, but I’ll have to do the research on that one to find out. I’m something of an amateur forensics person.)

Immediately Child shifts to Reacher, who has just discovered that someone has deposited $1030 into his bank account. After a little bit of headwork, Reacher draws the conclusion that someone has sent him a message. He knows it could only have come from his old crew. A 1030 call signified that an agent was in trouble.

Child’s writing has always been economical. He’s never used six words when five would do. Or one. His plotting is quick and tight, and if you don’t pay attention you’re going to miss something. He is, by turns bashing the reader with action and subtle about character interaction, history, and back story for the plot. Everything matters in his books, and he uses everything he develops.

Bad Luck And Trouble is written so lean and frantic that I read it in two sittings. Since the book is almost 400 pages long and has smallish print, that was a lot of reading. Several hours, in fact. But Child kept me nailed to the seat because I could never quite put the book down once he had it up and running. I finally passed out with it on my chest at night, then got up the next morning and finished it.

Child doesn’t write books that let facts or reality get in the way. He stays close to the bone in those areas, but he’s an excellent thriller writer and knows when to trust his instincts and let the story have its head no matter how wild it gets. He’s also got a great grasp of Reacher and the other characters, because even though this is thriller material, all of the old unit came to life on the pages.

With its June release, Bad Luck And Trouble is an excellent beach read. It’s got short chapters, short scenes, and terse clean writing with a plot that never breaks stride.