Review of David McCallum's Once a Crooked Man

I'm dating myself horribly when I tell you that one of my earliest crushes was David McCallum's character Illya Kuryakin on The Man From U.N.C.L.E (1964-1968). Cultured, brilliant, mysterious and oh, so handsome; how could I resist?

For the last 12 years, McCallum has played medical examiner Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard on NCIS. I hear that's the most-watched TV drama, worldwide, but here's a confession: I've never seen the show. I know, right? It seems like it's mandatory––for all Baby Boomers, at the very least. I'm a little worried that this will disqualify me from Medicare coverage. We'll see. Anyway, to me, McCallum will forever be that devastating young man of my youth.

But now I have another way to view McCallum: crime fiction author. This week saw the publication of his first novel, a crime thriller titled Once a Crooked Man (Minotaur Books, January 12, 2016).

Things go elaborately and spectacularly wrong when the Bruschetti brothers––Max, Sal and Enzo––decide to retire from the crime business, and New York actor Harry Murphy accidentally overhears their plans for murderously cleaning up some loose ends. Harry decides to warn one of the brothers’ targets, and the more the brothers try to clean things up, the messier they get. Not just for the brothers, but for Harry, for the beautiful and feisty British police agent whom Harry teams up with, and for various compatriots of the Bruschetti brothers, their other family members and law enforcement.

The action careens around like a pinball arcade game, bouncing from one catastrophe to another, and back and forth between England and New York. The violence is frequent but not too graphic, the cast of characters is huge and colorful, and it’s easy to see this being turned into a caper/thriller movie.

I’d have liked to see a bit more character development for Harry and the other main characters, and there is a sexual plot point late in the book that struck a big-time false note for me, but on the whole I found this to be an entertaining read and a winning first writing effort by McCallum.

You might think that the category of crime fiction written by actors on very high-rated TV shows would be small, but I do know that McCallum isn't alone in it. Check out Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller. Sure, he played the wildly popular Dr. House, but he's a heck of writer too.

Note: Thanks to Minotaur for providing a free advance reviewing copy of Once a Crooked Man. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites, under my usernames there.

Image sources: davidmccallumwiki, TV Guide, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.

Review of Daniel Palmer's Constant Fear

Constant Fear by Daniel Palmer (Kensington, May 2015)

I hope your Thanksgiving preparations are going smoothly. My own are chugging along. I got a little panicky when I realized my list of things to do before I leave Wednesday morning won't all fit onto one page, but, hey, I can sleep on the plane. Right now, I'm going to take a break to talk about Daniel Palmer's Constant Fear. I'll tell you about an Italian police procedural a little later.

Why is it bad action movies can still be entertaining, but poorly written action thrillers are annoying? Finding a decent thriller to read is tough. When I saw Strand Magazine's Top Ten Books of 2015 (see Note below), I was hopeful about the books I hadn't read because I'd already enjoyed some of the others. (I recently showed you Chris Holm's The Killing Kind, in which you root for a nice-guy hit man (see review here.)

In Palmer's Constant Fear, we meet a man who has suffered some debilitating losses. Jake Dent's promising pro baseball career ended when his drunken car accident injured his pitching arm. After their young son, Andy, was diagnosed with diabetes, Jake's wife left. Jake, who found comfort in taking up survivalism and teaching these skills to Andy, has brought his life under control. He's slowly developing a romantic relationship with a cop in Winston, Massachusetts, and is head custodian at the elite Pepperell Academy, where the 16-year-old Andy is a student.

Andy and a few geeky friends have formed a group they call "the Shire." They've been running a Robin Hood operation by hacking into accounts of Pepperell parents so wealthy they don't notice the theft. But now there's a problem. It's as if the Shire has cast a fishing line into a mud puddle and hooked Moby-Dick. They've stolen millions in bitcoins that need to be returned immediately, but the money has somehow disappeared. None of the kids will admit to knowing what happened to it. They realize they're in big trouble––but they have no idea. The bitcoins don't actually belong to that Pepperell parent. Some very bad men come to Winston, hellbent on getting that money back. 

Try this contraption while thriller reading

The mouth breathing you need to do while reading this book is kinda hard when you're also gulping at some fairly grim scenes. Constant Fear isn't actually as brutal a book as one I told you about yesterday, Jason Matthews's Palace of Treason. The tension feels almost unbearable, though, because of Palmer's skill at conveying the threat of violence. Despite some curveballs the writer throws us, the plot is sometimes predictable, and the characters, physical setting, and events very contrived. I actually found myself exclaiming, "Oh, c'mon! What are the odds?" But those occasional objections to unreality really didn't matter. I liked Jake and the relationship he has with his son. Palmer had me staying up late, breathlessly turning those pages, and I didn't once feel like throwing the book across the room.

Note: Here is Strand Magazine's Top Ten Books of 2015. (Don't ask me why there are twelve on the list.)

The Killing Kind by Chris Holm (Mulholland Books)
Solitude Creek by Jeffrey Deaver (Grand Central)
The Fixer by Joseph Finder (Dutton)
Broken Promises by Linwood Barclay (NAL)
Dark Places by Reavis Z. Wortham (Poisoned Pen)
A Pattern of Lies by Charles Todd (William Morrow)
Constant Fear by Daniel Palmer (Kensington)
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)
All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer (Minotaur)
The Stranger by Harlan Coben (Dutton)
The Hot Countries by Tim Hallinan (Soho)
Dead Student by John Katzenbach (Mysterious)

Sleepless in Scotland

I looked for Nervine in my bathroom cabinet without success.

It's Friday night at the end of a head-spinning work week, the sort of week when you crawl home and you're too tired to even think about what's in the fridge, so you eat vegetable soup straight out of a can without heating it up; and then you collapse onto the bed, but when you close your eyes, the gears in your brain are still clicking and clacking away, and there's no chance you can simply slip into slumber. This is when you face the facts: sleep will no doubt come later, but what you need to do in the meantime is flush work out of your head by picking up a book and pouring yourself something to wash it down with. Since the big news this week is the Scottish decision to remain in the UK, I vote we decide on a setting in Scotland.

Now, you can go several ways: you can go quiet with a visit to a private girls' school in Scotland in the 1930s with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Or, you can tell yourself your head is already whirling any way, so why not make it really gyrate with the fantastical Lanark: A Life in Four Books, by Alasdair Gray, set in Glasgow and a hellish version of that city called Unthank. Or you can opt for a charming and relaxing read with Compton Mackenzie's 1947 book, Whisky Galore, in which the S.S. Cabinet Minister, carrying a cargo of 50,000 cases of whiskey, is wrecked off the remote fictional Scottish islands of Great Todday and Little Todday during World War II. Happily, unlike those scrambling Scottish islanders, we can pour a glass of Macallan before the bottle threatens to disappear under the ocean surface.

If none of those books sound good, how about an unusual thriller? The protagonist and some-time narrator of Steve Alten's The Loch is Zachary Wallace, a brilliant young marine biologist, whom we meet during a catastrophic encounter with a giant squid in the Sargasso Sea. This experience is Zack's second near-drowning (his first came on his ninth birthday in Loch Ness), and the trauma sends him into a downward spiral in South Beach, Florida. Zack is suffering from hydrophobia and night terrors when he receives a message from his father, Angus, in the Scottish Highlands.

Zack hasn't seen Angus since his parents divorced, and his mother took Zack to America when he was nine. Now, 17 years later, Angus is on trial, facing the death penalty for the murder of an Englishman, Johnny Cialino. Angus's defense? Basically, "I punched Johnny, and he fell into Loch Ness, where he was eaten by you know who." Once Zack arrives, Angus asks his hydrophobic son to prove the Loch Ness monster's existence. Grisly events ensue, and a media circus develops. The Loch is soon swarming with searchers. Templar Knights even appear. Oh, boy!

It's hard for me to convey the flavor of this 487-page book. It's not one of those short-chaptered page turners that make you feel as if you have ADHD. Writer Alten is interested in ancient Scottish history and the roles of mutation and natural selection in evolution. This is not to say this thriller isn't far-fetched; however, given its premises, it hangs together in a stew of history lessons, swashbuckling action, pulse-racing horror, and budding romance.

It begins with a prologue set in 1330, when Sir Adam Wallace possesses Robert the Bruce's heart in a silver casket. From time to time, several pages of hard-to-read print appear, giving us Adam's 1330 journal entries. They explain how Zack carries the curse, "wrought by nature," that's haunted the Wallace men since the passing of Robert the Bruce. Chapters close with quotations from scientists about evolution and from eye-witness accounts of the Loch Ness monster. It's a long way to the end; shortening could have been done. There's not a whole lot of dialect, but what's there is annoying. Zack occasionally irritated me, too. But, give the guy his due. He returns to Scotland and faces his demons, and I enjoyed losing sleep reading about it.

Hammock Reading: The Last Refuge by Ben Coes

Do you have a favorite spot for summer reading? I like sprawling in a hammock or bracing my back against a big pine tree. Give me some shade and an icy drink, and then all I need is the right book.

Warm summer nights call for action movies; sweltering afternoons for action thrillers. There's nothing so relaxing as lolling about while a book's characters vie to doom or save the world. Real flies need to amscray, but people need to drop like 'em on the page. And if the plot unfolds in a place where folks are sweating buckets, well, all the better. My hammock feels arctic in comparison.

You just KNOW Ben Coes writes thrillers

Recently, I visited some Iranian bad guys in the company of a good-guy hunk named Dewey Andreas, former U. S. Army Ranger and Delta officer, courtesy of thriller writer Ben Coes. Coes has an interesting history. He was a speechwriter for the George H. W. Bush White House, a fellow at Harvard's JFK School of Government, and the campaign manager when Mitt Romney ran for Massachusetts governor in 2002. Coes is currently a partner in a private equity firm and a Barry Award for Best Thriller-nominated writer for Coup d'Etat, the second Dewey Andreas book. (The first is Power Down.) I read the third, The Last Refuge.

I had no sooner become fond of U.S. President Rob Allaire when he suffers a stroke and dies. He refused to participate in a summit meeting with Iranian President Nava, but Allaire's successor isn't ruling it out. The CIA's director and Jessica Tanzer, the national security advisor, feel a headache coming on. Jessica's lover, Dewey Andreas, is at rather loose ends. He's no longer in the service and is looking for a private sector job. Israeli Special Forces commander Kohl Meir has also asked Dewey to meet with him, while Meir is in the United States. He hopes to recruit Dewey for a top-secret mission involving an Iranian nuclear bomb.

Plans for Dewey and Meir's get together are interrupted when Iranian agents capture Meir, the grandson of Golda Meir, and smuggle him to Iran. There, he is held in prison and tortured in preparation for a show trial. Dewey owes his life to Meir and his Israeli commando team and feels obligated to rescue him. It appears impossible: help can't be recruited from the American or Israeli government because the Iranians can't be alerted. Time is running out. Then there's the matter of that Iranian nuclear bomb.

Dewey's mission against all odds is recounted in smooth style by author Coes, who knows how things get done above and below board in government. Given the Iranian nuclear program and the sanctions squeezing that country, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that this book has a timely subject. It was interesting to read a thriller involving two heroes, one American and one Israeli, written by Mitt Romney's former gubernatorial campaign manager. The book's Iranians aren't all bad; a few are good guys, and Coes states that the Iranian people are likable and admirable. Some of their leaders are definitely no candidates for Mr. Congeniality: Abu Paria, the head of VEVAK (the Iranian secret service), is spectacularly nasty, and President Nava is a liar. The torturing of Meir is strenuous for him and the reader.

The Last Refuge doesn't attempt to be literature. It doesn't make you contemplate your navel or marvel at a writer who rides words bareback. It doesn't have an overly serpentine plot or characters whose thoughts are examined under an extraordinarily sophisticated microscope. Nope. It's action, baby. Straightforward action spiced with underhanded dealings, written by a very smart guy, whose women are accomplished and beautiful and whose men are men, whether they're incredibly brave heroes or relentlessly cruel villains. You'll forget you're sweating in the heat because you're watching the characters sweat bullets.

This book is an action pleasure, but it's not a mindless guilty pleasure. The writing doesn't insult you. You don't need to hide the cover under a brown-paper wrapper or laugh in embarrassment if your friend picks it up. I'd like to see what Dewey was up to before, and I'll be curious to see what Dewey gets up to next. I hear that Coes is working on another one. I'm making a date with Book 4 in the Dewey Andreas series and the hammock for next summer.

P.S. The Last Refuge is now available in various formats: hardcover, audible, audiobook, and Kindle. Here's a sample clip from Macmillan Audio:



Note: I received a free advance reading copy from Macmillan. We'll be featuring an interview with author Ben Coes soon and giving away a copy of this book to one of our readers.