Author Archives: caltrop-admin

Head in the Cloud

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The second of Jack Forsithe’s books is a fast-moving read that combines the genres of thriller and alien-type fantasy. It is an easier story to follow than the first volume, Heart in the Clouds, because the four original separate story-lines have merged into two at the book’s opening and quickly becomes a single plot. Naturally that would be easier to follow, although it is hard for me to assess that since I did read the first volume first, so I had already become familiar with the whole other-creature setup (and their tongue-twister moniker, the Zighorottiz). Although Forsithe does provide enough back story to pick up on the ideas, it would definitely be worth your while to read Heart also (here’s the review). Forsithe himself also seems to be more comfortable with his own story-telling style and there is less reliance on Clancy-style descriptions of equipment, and his voice is getting stronger.

At the end, Forsithe chooses not to employ the now-common device of leaving the characters hanging on a cliff in order to drive sales of the sequel (but driving readers like me away because of the cheesiness of it all). Instead, he presents a very satisfying conclusion to the installment of the tale while leaving the characters at a point from which several roads may plausibly diverge. I have a feeling that we are going in the direction of the Sith from Star wars, but that remains to be seen. I look forward to it.

As an added thrill – one I wasn’t aware of until I stumbled across it in the text – one of Caltrop Press’ other books gets a mention along with some of the great business books of our time.  Maybe you too will enjoy Let It Simmer.

Here’s a link to Head in the Cloud on Amazon:

Radiant Angel and the Cuban Affair

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Two recent offerings from Nelson DeMille explore his similar but different sub-genres and both are well worth your time.

Radiant Angel is another in the series about ex-NYPD detective John Corey, the wise-cracking hard-boiled contract investigator. As ever, the dialog owes much to Robert Parker’s Spenser books although Corey’s wry remarks tend to be more often in the nature of side observations to the reader, except when pushing some official’s buttons. This particular novel also draws on the Clancy approach with Russians and technical terminology. It is a true thriller in the sense of guns, terrorists and chases.

The Cuban Affair, by contrast, is without a doubt an homage to John McDonald and his creation, Travis McGee. With the settings in Key West and Cuba, and the inevitable maritime phases of the story, there is a great deal of mention of Hemingway and some reflection on his biography during his Cuban residence, but those are mostly color. This story is in Travis McGee’s voice and it develops by acting pretty much as McGee would have. The difference is that McDonald’s stories were pretty much straight up: damsel in distress, reluctant participation, ferret out and deal with bad guys while getting injured or having boat blown up in process; girl goes her way in the end. In DeMille’s hands, while the book follows the same general arc, the plot is broader and twistier, and the big question is whether we really grasp who the good guys and bad guys are. In addition to enjoying the thriller part of the novel, you’ll be interested in DeMille’s take on the “Cuban thaw”; for those who think socialism would be just wonderful, it offers glimpses of what life under such regimes has always been.

Amazon links:

The Reckoning, Camino Beach and the Rooster Bar

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John Grisham’s three latest offerings are sure to excite his readership in several ways at the same time.  The reviews are already in and heavily bi-modal; people like them or they don’t, and then they reverse positions on the other book/s. The reason is that the three are incompletely different voices; the good news is that you are certain to like at least one of them, and will probably not like one of them. Which is which will depend largely on you!

The Reckoning is the sort of book that Mr. Grisham wants to write. It is in the same vein as “A Time to Kill”, which was his first work and that usually indicates it’s the one he really had to write. It also went nowhere until he broke out with The Firm. The Reckoning starts out a bit weird in that the protagonist goes out and commits a very violent act pretty much in plain sight, so it seems improbable that the lawyers can get their man off – and apparently, that’s fine with him. In fact, although lawyers are necessarily involved in this type of event, they aren’t the centerpiece that one expects of a writer of legal thrillers, and the story wouldn’t change much if no mention were made of the lawyers at all. It’s a serious work, seeking perhaps to move into the “literature” category, addressing a couple of Grisham’s topics of interest (veterans’ issues and Old South racial tensions). It is not uplifting in any way. But it will probably keep you reading to find out why the protagonist did what he did.

The Rooster Bar goes in the other direction. It is indeed a lawyer story, again taking on social issues, in this case the student loan industry, private (commercial) law schools, and the effect of immigration laws on those who have decided to evade them. The base story is that four friends realize that their huge investment in law school are not likely to result in high-paying jobs immediately upon graduation. So they decide to quit law school and impersonate lawyers so they can sue the school and the industry. As many commenters have noted, this is a pretty idiotic premise, because 90 percent of the group’s problems would have been resolved had they simply completed their last semester and buckled down to pass the bar exam. For long-time Grisham readers, the more off-putting aspect of the book is the obvious catering to the stereotype of the millennial class, from the story-line to the dialog. But he’s in the commercial end of the business, and you can’t keep selling books to baby boomers much longer, so I can’t fault it as a marketing strategy; I’m just going to have to shift from automatic purchase into checking out the reviews before buying the next book.

Camino Island returns to the mainstream work that brought him fame and fortune. It too is not a lawyer story at all, in fact none of the major players is a lawyer. Its pacing and content places it squarely in the conventional thriller genre, and among his prior works it probably comes closest in flavor to the Pelican Brief. The situations are subtle, the locales are well-described, and the dialog is crisp. This one should find favor with fans of all types, even if no lawyers do come to grief.

Heart in the Cloud

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The back cover promises a “fantasy thriller” and it delivers. This is Jack Forsithe’s first  novel and the highest tribute one can pay to any such work is that I am looking forward to the sequel even though I am not usually into this genre. If you’re not immersed in science-fiction, you may be put off by the complexity of the other-worlders’ species name (Zighorottiz), but don’t let that scare you off: it’s about the only bit of irregular verbiage in the book.

The best advice I can give when reading this book is to try and get about an hour of unimpeded time at the start in order to work out what the various story-lines are. They do all come together in a clever and not overly contrived way, but at first the human stories are so different that it is hard to latch onto them. Once you do, you’ll find this to be a humorous and innovative romp that may in fact be more of a send-up of thrillers and fantasy writing than a faithful member of the club. Great first start, Jack, and bring on the rest.

Get your copy at: https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Cloud-Jack-Forsithe/dp/1530918006

Prussian Blue

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An excellent read in another of the Bernie Gunther series of WW2-era detective novels. As is the style for the series, the story alternates between a post-war case in which Bernie is involved as a private eye and a pre-war case in which he is engaged in his capacity as a police detective working (under slightly more degree of protest than the regime tolerates) for the Third Reich. The link between the two stories in this case is Friedrich Korsch who had been his understudy in the prewar years; after the war, as a Berliner, Korsch has to work (also with some reservations) for the Soviet puppet government in East Germany, and in that role is responsible for making sure that Bernie does not discover or undermine what his new bosses are up to.

Kerr’s trademark is flipping back and forth between the two stories. At least he always does us the courtesy of starting a new chapter and providing a dateline when he does so. In some of his books it is all a bit confusing, but the nature and settings of these two stories offer a clear distinction, so much so in fact that either one could stand on its own as an excellent adventure.   That makes the overall book a pleasure to read.

The only drawback, really, is that if this is your first Gunther read, you will really want to know more about the back story that gets Gunther into the clutches of the German Reich in the first place, in which case try “The One from The Other” first.

Get Prussian Blue on Amazon

 

The One From the Other

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If you haven’t been introduced to Bernie Gunther, a Jew who is also a former official of the SD and SS (you have to read the book to work that out) turned post-WW2 private eye, then this is the book to start with. It may not be Kerr’s first book, according to the flyleaf, but it is the book in which Bernie starts out his post-war career, so if you read one of his other books first you’ll be a bit frustrated not having the back story.

The One from the Other provides a credible (I have no grounds for saying “authentic”) description of the chaos in occupied Germany in the years immediately after WW2. Bernie has the good fortune to be regarded as someone who can be trusted, even if he is a former Nazi official. Well, in fact, and much to his chagrin, it is mostly former Nazi officials who seek him out to take care of little inconveniences. A favor turns into another which bodes well for turning into a regular practice, and although he would much rather not deal with the former regime there isn’t a lot of employment in a non-existent economy, especially when your only asset is a hotel in the town of Dachau. Bernie never explains why that is: if you’re not up on your history, it was one of the death camps, and the horrors are recent enough that it hasn’t become a memorial. And his wife has a major illness. Like it or not, the paychecks are needed.

I’m not going to spoil a very fine read by telling you how it all works out, although the fact that there are a dozen or so books in the series tells you what the ending will not be. As with any good potboiler there are fisticuffs, near-death experiences as well as encounters with corpses, and a bit of romance, but it is all done rather tastefully so you can let your older teens read it in reasonable safety.

If you get started on this series you’re going to want to get the rest of the books which are, if anything, a little deeper. So get started.

Get it at Amazon.

White Rose, Black Forest

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A superb novel combining spy thriller and troubled romance. Franka is so beaten down by the Nazi regime that she sees no point in living and heads out to end it all in a snowstorm, until she happens across a critically injured parachutist.He may be a pilot for the Luftwaffe, part of the grisly German machine of repression and war that has taken many of her loved ones away from her. Something doesn’t seem quite right, but if he is not who his papers say then he must be an Allied pilot – one of those who have taken the rest of her friends and family in air raids against German cities and civilians. Either way, whether she is right or wrong, she will bring herself to the attention of the same Gestapo which has recently released her from prison, but not from suspicion. Her efforts to solve the conundrum without getting arrested or making a fool of herself, and the inevitable entrapment of others into the web of deceptions, provide a nicely-paced story that is avoids the breathlessness of its genres to generate an aura of authenticity. The plot points are rather obvious, but the situation makes them so; the interest factor is not determining what the challenges are going to be but how those very obvious difficulties can possibly be overcome.

Get it on Amazon

3 Weird Marketing Secrets of Successful Authors on Amazon

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This is a very useful reference for Amazon authors. While the secrets are not particularly weird (or, for that matter, particularly secret), you don’t often find them all nicely bundled into one place, and Shaun Hibbs isn’t pushing any products.

It can be applied to revitalize the track record of an existing book or to help the launch of a new book;perhaps the most profound observation is to consider writing the online book description first and then making the book fulfill that commitment, thereby keeping its focus on what the reader wanted to get out of it instead of diving down into irrelevant rabbit-holes.

The book provides a fairly thorough description of how to go about setting a book up for success on the Amazon platform, with step-by-step instructions for key activities such as identifying current on-line search trends and hints when going through the Amazon publishing steps. Those instructions, where they apply to automated tasks, are in some cases better than those offered by the makers of the tools.

If you learn nothing else, the fact that Amazon only offers you about 40% of their actual categories, and the explanation of how to get at the rest which may be better sellers for your particular book, are worth the price of admission.

Shaun is not flogging any product, and some of the tools he points out are free, but I will say that KDP Rocket (which I do own) is an indispensable way of doing in minutes the tasks described here that would otherwise take many hours to accomplish yourself.

Truman

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While this is not a myth-creating book, you will find it impossible to read this biography and come away as anything less than a fan of a decent man who did his best under difficult circumstances. I have always respected McCullough’s research and attention to detail, but this book is also just a cracking good read.

Many have been brought up – perhaps by the educationocracy that still worships at the altar of Marxism and FDR – with the caricature of Harry Truman as a bumbler selected for his insignificance who fell into office and then screwed it up. He has also been portrayed in pro-military circles as the personification of foolish political interference in military matters; yet with his experience in World War I he had as much military experience in the most brutal conflict on record as any prior or subsequent President except those few who were career military men. FDR, by contrast, winner of the greatest war this nation ever fought, had no military service except as Secretary of a peacetime Navy, and as one of the richest men in America was hardly in a position to sincerely understand the problems of regular people.

We all know of the Truman-Dewey polling fiasco, his decision to use the atom bomb, and probably of his conflict with MacArthur. But unless you are a history buff of that era, you do not know of his reluctant climb through the party machine, his financial dependence on his parents-in-law, his valiant service in the short but ugly experience of World War I, his creation of and service on the highly-effective committee for overseeing waste and abuse during World War II, and Bess Truman’s total unsupportiveness in his White House years. McCullough does not gloss over any of this, and indeed it is these experiences perhaps that shape Truman’s character (something that many of our recent politicians lack utterly).

Those of us who are accustomed to the imperial Presidencies, and the strange but never-investigated accrual of wealth by politicians of all classes who come into office as middle-class and leave office as multi-millionaires, will be astounded to learn that when he completed his term as President, he just went home to Independence and lived more or less on the financial edge, with a minimal pension after a lifetime in public service, and he was politically persecuted for the rest of his life by the Republicans because he was all that was left of the FDR administration that had persecuted them, and by the Democrats because he was all that was left of the FDR administration but he was not FDR.

Truman was a plain-spoken person who never lost track of his farming roots. For this reason the Eastern aristocracy looked down on him, even as they were embracing the principles of Marxism, and in the scholastic presses (which until recently were based almost exclusively in Boston and New York) he was denigrated because he was not the demigod Roosevelt (who as we now know was himself mostly a caricature by 1940). Since 1970 or so he has been overlooked by Republicans because they were not in search of a Democratic role model, and by today’s anti-American Democrats because he inconveniently seemed to be quite sincere in actually believing in truth, justice and the American way.

Perhaps the status of limitations for political correctness is about 50 years. In that case, now is the time to read McCullough’s balanced portrait of a great American.

The First 90 Days in Government

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This book is a partial rewrite of the earlier “90 Days” book that applies to commercial ventures. While the initial scenario on page 1 and 2 are right on the mark, the rest of the book basically says: define the role and mission, gather the support and resources, and then go off and achieve. Or, as the initial scenario suggests, you may find yourself marginalized and drifting. That’s a good theory, but I never saw it work in 7 years on the inside as a senior Federal manager, nor in over 20 years as a management consultant working with hundreds of managers in dozens of agencies. If you’re in an agency that isn’t aligned to this book (and few of them are), its advice is more likely to hurt you than help you, and you will in fact end up marginalized and drifting if you move out too quickly on what you think (or are told) the mission is. In such agencies you will never get the candid conversations and extended discussions of values and priorities that the book depends on, and such words as you do hear may be misleading because those aren’t really the priorities after all.

To be really useful, this book ought to be entitled “The 90 Days Before Getting Into a Public Sector Job”. Find out as much as you can about the agency, its mission, its organizational politics and its pain points, during the job interview period. You may never get as much face time or candor again, even if you do get hired.

See a much longer version of the review, which was somewhat controversial, on Amazon.