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Friday, June 30, 2017

Review: The Huckleberry Murders by Patrick McManus

This is a marvelous series: delightful characters, humor, a decent mystery. What more could you ask for.

Sheriff Bo Tully is off to collect huckleberries so his mother can bake him some pies when he meets three hysterical women who have discovered three bodies. There are three hard looking men in town worth investigating. And a local wife who insists her ex-husband has been murdered. Because the bodies were found on federal land, the FBI sends an agent to verify that the investigation is done properly. She soon falls under the spell of doing things the "Blight" way. There's also some raft poling. :)

Series keeps getting better.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Review: Jig by Campbell Armstrong

Being sucker for Irish mysteries, I picked this one up. It's first in the Frank Pagan series. Pagan is a British cop sent over to the U.S. in pursuit of an IRA assassin, nicknamed Jig, who, in turn has been told to track down those who had stolen $10 million intended for the IRA. Throw in a psychotic Protestant minister with his own agenda and the FUV (Free Ulster Volunteers) and things get surprisingly messy with colliding agendas. Pagan and Jig are forced to link up in order to sort things out as ostensible IRA terrorism comes to the United States. To say more would ruin the surprises.

While I wouldn't say this was a favorite book, I will look for more titles by Campbell Armstrong, whose books are being reissued by OpenRoadMedia. Armstrong died in 2013.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Review: Avalanche by Patrick McManus

This is the second Bo Tully story I have read and it's even more enjoyable than the first. The interplay between the characters, Bo father and ex-sheriff who made a fortune as a corrupt sheriff, Lurch, his CSI, Daisy, the secretary, and Herb, the under-sheriff, is charming and humorous.

Bo is called to a resort in the mountains to investigate the disappearance of the co-owner. On the way they are barely missed by an avalanche which we soon learn was deliberately aimed at his vehicle. No more spoilers. The series is a lot of fun, and I intend to read all of them. Reminiscent of the delightful "liturgical" mysteries by Mark Schweizer that are often laugh-out-loud funny.

Sunday, June 04, 2017

Review: Afterthoughts by Lawrence Block

This is a collection of afterwords taken from an assortment of Block reissues in which Block (one of my favorite crime writers) discusses the genesis of many of his earlier works and includes autobiographical details that surround the writing.

If you have ever heard Block read one of his own books (he is a master narrator, by the way) you’ll hear his unique cadence even in some of these short essays.

Reading the book is like sitting with Block in a dimly lit bistro and having a lovely chat with an old friend.

Review: The Sledge Patrol: A WWII Epic of Escape, Survival, and Victory by David Howarth

The east coast of Greenland is a vast wasteland inhabited only by a few intrepid hunters. Technically a Danish colony, some 2200 miles away and geographically part of North America, the Greenland governor decided to cast the island’s lot with the allies, after Denmark was overrun by the Germans. It was of strategic importance to the United States and Britain who needed weather reports in order to predict weather over Europe. I didn’t realize just how far north the country is until I looked at a globe. It’s a forbidding country, uninhabited by only a few natives, and with severe weather.

A small group of Arctic-loving Norwegians and Danes protected the vital radio and weather equipment under very difficult circumstances. Ironically, the German captain sent to invade and seize the station was an Arctic climate lover himself and was sympathetic to those who lived and worked there. One cannot help but admire the hardiness of these folks who thought nothing of walking, often with hardly any supplies but a rifle to ward off polar bears, hundreds of miles in horrible conditions, thinking nothing of it.

The culture of these Arctic lovers and Eskimos was the antithesis of what was going on in the rest of the world. To survive they needed to be able to help each other and to count on that assistance. The prospect of shooting someone else or anything not for food was completely foreign to the Eskimos, especially, who had no comprehension of why the fighting was going on hundreds of miles away. The entire Greenland “army” consisted of nine (!) men tasked with patrolling an immense coastline. That they ever ran into anyone else is simply astonishing.

David Howarth has done a service of showing us how WW II was truly a *world* war and how it affected even desolate parts or the globe. Fascinating. I suspect some of it was fictionalized as the internal monologues and thinking of some of the participants must have been impossible to document.

N.B. The Wikipedia article on Greenland is quite interesting. It had been populated by people from Iceland until the Little Ice Age of the 13th and 14th centuries when settlements were abandoned. Study of bones shows the populace had been very malnourished. Growing anything must have been close to impossible. One theory, though, holds that they failed because of their Euro-centric thinking driven by the Church and large landowners, when to be successful they should have adopted the culture and ways of the Inuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland The article on Greenland in WW II (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_in_World_War_II) provides additional detail and led me to Sloan Wilson’s Ice Brothers which I will start this afternoon. (Gotta love Kindle and credit cards.)