E-Books: The Cream is Rising to the Top

After a fairly rocky beginning, with thousands of aspiring authors dumping masterpieces free of any taint of editing, grammar, spelling, or even consistent story lines on the market, e-book offerings are beginning to look up. Some are offered by traditional publishers, who saw the writing on the tablet, and these are usually as well edited as their print books.

Some new authors are soliciting beta reading groups and submitting their books to any of the numerous editing and proofreading services that have sprung up, with generally good results. The best of these new voices sometimes offer stories very different from the cautious formulaic work that traditional publishers seem to want from their authors. Finding an author new to me this way is like mining for diamonds: frustrating and often fruitless, but the occasional gem makes the search worthwhile. Here are a couple of recent winners.

Requiem (A Kate Redman Mystery) by Celina Grace

Newly-hired Detective Sergeant Kate Redman has worked very hard to distance herself from her upbringing with her drunken, slatternly harridan of a mother. She nonetheless remains fond of her half-sibs (by various fathers), and is glad to help them when she can. When her gifted younger brother Jay shows up at her house with a painting that his tutors think may win a prize, she is glad to see him and hear his news. Jay is currently into hyper-realism in his work, and his painting of a drowned girl on the riverbank looks a bit too much like the crime scenes she deals with professionally for her comfort. He proudly lends her the painting until the show, and mounts it over the fireplace in her new house. That night, Jay takes her to a club to hear Elodie, his model and member of a folk rock band, perform.

Kate and her partner, Olbeck, are called to a drowning at the riverbank the next morning, and Kate is horrified to see that the body is Elodie's. The girl had not been drowned, but strangled and dumped into the river, from which an early jogger had pulled her out. Kate faces a terrible dilemma: report Jay's eerily prescient painting to the investigative team or hide it. Jay hadn't come home with her last night, but sent a text that he was crashing with a friend.

This short, tight British procedural, second in a series, is a remarkably professional and enjoyable mystery. While it is currently available only in electronic format, it is as well-edited and -paced as most offerings from major publishers. I immediately downloaded and read the first, Hushabye, and hope that the author will write many more Kate Redman stories.

The President's Henchman by Joseph Flynn

When billionaire philanthropist Andrew Hudson Grant was murdered by radical antiabortionists because his wife Patti, former actress and moderate Republican Congresswoman, refused to support a bill that would have pressured victims of rape and incest not to abort their forced pregnancies, Chief James McGill of the Winnetka police arrested the culprits in one day. Within two years, Patti Grant married Jim McGill and began her run for the presidency, to honor a promise she had made to her late husband Andy. Much to the astonishment of the pundits and powers on both sides, she won.

The new First Family provides several unusual challenges for the Secret Service. McGill, who opens a private investigation business with his old police partner Margaret "Sweetie" Sweeney, will accept only one Secret Service agent and a White House car and driver for protection. And while Patti is childless, McGill has three children by a previous marriage––children who live with his ex-wife and her new husband and who must be protected in place. Those children are being threatened, likely by the sect led by Reverend Burke Godfrey, whose wife Erna was convicted of the murder of Andrew Grant and was sentenced to death.

The first client of McGill Investigations is prominent newscaster Chana Lochlan. An anonymous man has been calling her at her private number. He describes her freckles, moles, and birthmark perfectly, and promises a return visit soon. He calls her Gracie, a nickname used only by her father. Chana has no idea who this is or how he can describe her house and body so accurately.

President Patricia Grant is facing serious challenges of her own: a messy military adultery case that could polarize the country and derail her presidency from its onset, and a market bombing in Cuba attributed by its government to the US-supported rebel community.

The author manages to weave these disparate story lines together skillfully, while presenting a truly horrific villain in Chana's stalker. McGill is a little larger than life, as you might expect in a thriller, but the characters and political machinations of those we elect to do "the Peoples' business" were quite believable. The unusual mix of political thriller and P.I. novel will keep me reading in this series for some time. The Jim McGill books are available in both paper and electronic formats, and the author has also published a number of non-series thrillers. So if you were put off by the early deluge of not-quite-ready-for-prime-time e-books, take heart––and maybe another look. There are some undiscovered gems out there.

Ice vs. Heat

Earlier this week, I was stunned when my fellow Material Witnesses began making lists for our upcoming summer books post on June 28th. Is it summer time already? My kids are out of school, but it's still hard to believe when the weather has been zigzagging between hot and cold. I've been pulling sweaters on and off and switching from hot chocolate to iced tea accordingly. But the decision to apply heat or ice can be trickier than that. Take the debate between applying a cold pack or a heating pad to a sports injury. And how do you pick a book when the thermometer ranges from 95° to 55°? A book like Robert Aickman's Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories (the title's got that right) raises your temperature by making your heart pound, but also gives you goosebumps that chill. A better bet might be one of these two books:

When Beluga narrator Nick Reid tells himself out loud, "I'm not having the week I'd hoped to have," he hasn't seen the half of it. He and his ginormous best friend, Desmond, were "taking time off" after robbing a meth lord of $300,000 in Rick Gavin's first series book, Ranchero (reviewed here). To keep up appearances, Nick and Desmond have returned to repossessing rent-to-own furniture when Kalil's customers, many of whom live in the type of houses where dogs boil out from under the porch and a shotgun pokes out of a window, don't make their payments.

Therefore, life could be pretty routine in Indianola, Mississippi but for the fact that Desmond's ex-wife Shawnica still has him in her clutches. Her shiftless brother Larry, fresh out of Parchman Prison, wants Desmond to lend him money for a criminal scheme. A hidden trailer-load of already-stolen Michelin tires is just waiting for Larry and his friend Skeeter to steal and sell on the black market––but they need money to buy a truck. Desmond's $30,000 buys not only transportation, but also the terrible vengeance of the man who originally stole the tires, a well-connected Mississippi Delta crime lord, Lucas Shambrough. Between helping Desmond deal with that god-awful sniveling Larry, Shambrough's deadly "ninja schoolgirl assassin" and his dumber-than-two-sacks-of-hair hired cracker villains, it's a wonder Nick has time to court pretty Greenville cop Tula Raintree, although it is convenient that their first "date" happens when she's placed Nick under arrest.

Author Rick Gavin, who lives in the Delta and writes when he isn't doing construction work, combines the charm of appealing characters with insightful observations of Delta residents and traditions. The dialogue is pitch perfect. Watching Nick, a former Virginia deputy sheriff, scuff up no-goods, and Desmond squeeze relish onto his Sonic drive-in hot dogs goes well with ice tinkling in a glass of lemonade and the drone of a ceiling fan. This entertaining Mississippi Delta noir, both gritty and funny, is perfect for hot days of summer reading.

On the other hand, Richard Crompton's 2013 debut, Hour of the Red God, is a great pick when it gets chilly. It's a book set in Nairobi, Kenya, "a landscape of corrugated iron, concrete, and thatched makuti roofs."

The title is the English translation of Enkai Nanyokie, the Maasai tribe's name for the time when people turn against each other in anger and madness descends. In his criminal investigations and the loss of his wife, Detective Sergeant Mollel is much more familiar with the vengeful and capricious Red God than the loving Black God.

Mollel is a conscientious man who never seems to feel at home, even with his young son. He has long and looped ears that are a mark of pride among the Maasai but an object of ridicule and prejudice elsewhere. His boss, Otieno, has brought him back from traffic duty in Loresho to Nairobi Central CID. The mutilated body of a young Maasai woman has been found in Uhuru Park and Otieno expects Mollel to solve what he calls "a Maasai circumcision ceremony gone wrong."  Mollel disagrees. He says it's deliberate murder.

He and his colleague Kiunga, a Kikuyu, investigate against the backdrop of the 2007 election, with its ethnic violence and the involvement of mungiki gangs and the government's paramilitary General Services Unit. Evidence leads the two policemen to Orpheus House, a recently closed refuge for women who wish to leave prostitution, and to powerful political and religious leaders.

Former BBC journalist and Nairobi resident Crompton's book is nothing short of stunning. His prose, with a lack of quotation marks, takes some getting used to, but it fits this complex story about crime set in an exotic Nairobi. Mollel reminisces about his tribal childhood and shares various Maasai myths. Even in the city center, Mollel doesn't escape tradition. At night, there are rumors of night runners with supernatural speed and strength who, when killed return, to their forms as normal humans. The stories about scavengers that Mollel's mother told him influence how he solves a crime. Crompton's characters are caught between modernity and traditionalism. How does tribal identity survive in a changing world?