Publisher blurbs that don't sell the book (at least not to me

"Calamity (Callie) Barnstable isn't surprised to learn she's the sole  beneficiary of her late father's estate, though she is shocked to discover  she has inherited a house in the town of Marketville--a house she didn't know  existed. However, there are conditions attached to Callie's inheritance: she  must move to Marketville, live in the house, and solve her mother's murder.  Callie's not keen on dredging up a thirty-year-old mystery, but if she  doesn't do it, there's a scheming psychic named Misty Rivers who is more
than happy to expose the Barnstable family secrets. Determined to thwart  Misty and fulfill her father's wishes, Callie accepts the challenge. But is  she ready to face the skeletons hidden in the attic?"

That's the blurb for a book titled Skeletons in the Attic.  My immediate question:  Did the author think to ask a lawyer if such a condition to an inheritance would be accepted by a probate judge?  My instinctive response:  No way.  Even if the "move to Marketville" condition might be enforceable (but does that constitute a condition prohibiting sale of the house?), there's no way that the "solve her mother's murder" condition is possibly enforceable, especially given that the murder occurred 30 years before the story begins.  (And that's leaving aside the scheming psychic, which sounds like part of the title to a bad Perry Mason pastiche:  The Case of the Scheming Psychic.)  Faced with that as a set-up, I don't care how well-written I am told the book is, I'm not buying.

Michael Bowen, Damage Control

Michael Bowen, Damage Control
Poisoned Penn Press, 2016
ISBN 978-1464206078 (paperback)

I am, in general, a fan of Michael Bowen’s books.  The first two Thomas and Sandrine Curry books are amazing, but the set-up for the books severely limited how long a series it could be.  (Thomas Curry is a lawyer who voluntarily surrendered his law license for good and sufficient reason; Sandrine is his fiancé-and-then-wife; Thomas does legal research for his father’s firm, as does Sandrine betwixt working on her treatise on geology.)  The five Richard Michaelson books are even better (Michaelson has retired for the foreign service and has a position at the Brookings institution while waiting for someone to persuade the President to make him secretary of state of the director of the CIA).  (Interestingly, one of the titles in the Michaelson series is Collateral Damage.) The set-up is, again, somewhat limiting.  His third series (Rep and Melissa Pennyworth—Rep is an intellectual property lawyer in Indianapolis, Melissa is an assistant professor of literature at a local university) is not (in my opinion) as good, but all five are worth reading.  The last one of these was published in 2009, and I had given up hope for any more.

But he has returned with Damage Control, just published and apparently the first book in a projected series.  Josie Kendall (age 27) works for a NGO as a fund-raiser, and has been working on a somewhat shady venture capitalist (Jerzy Schroeder) for a $1 million donation to fund activities in support of wind power.  As they are leaving his home for a meeting, Schroeder is shot, obviously from a distance, with a high-powered rifle.  Suspicion falls pretty immediately older husband, Rafe (mid-50s), who is a literary agent.  Josie, born, raised, and educated in Louisiana, has an uncle whose political career is somewhat unorthodox.  Josie and Rafe take it upon themselves to shift suspicion away from them and, if possible, to identify the actual killer.

And there are a sufficient number of suspects—another venture capitalist with a reputation for taking no prisoners, whose solar power scam is the target of Schroeder’s machinations; and Schroeder’s ex-wife, who has an interest in taking over where Schroeder has involuntarily left off are the main two.  There’s also an ex-CIA agent-turned-thriller-author (represented by Rafe), who is Rafe’s alibi.  In the course of trying to save herself and her marriage, Josie also has to continue trying to do her job, which involves a fairly ethically sleazy pitch to the NRA.  Not surprisingly, all ends sort of well, if also sort of unexpectedly.

I’m not sure Bowen quite has a grip on Josie as a character yet, and his skepticism about D.C. politics (evident in the Michaelson books) has, if anything, become greater.  But the book flows well, and he does well enough with his principals to make me willing to see what comes next.

A note on barbershop music

Eric Loomis has a post at Lawyers Guns and Money mostly bout country music.  In the course of it, he writes:

None of this is to say that modern country radio-friendly country music is good, or at least I don’t think most of it is. I was getting my hair cut this week and country radio was on. One song was literally a namecheck list of all the nostalgic points of the genre (pickup trucks, summer days, the lake, mom and dad, the dog, etc). It was utterly awful.

And I wondered if the song he heard was this Steve Good man song--"You Never Even Call Me By My Name"-- about which Wikipedia had this to say:

In a spoken epilogue preceding the song's iconic closing verse, Coe explains that "a friend of mine named Steve Goodman" wrote the song and considered it "the perfect country and western song". Coe, upon receiving the song, explained to Goodman that he was wrong; there was no way a song could be "the perfect country and western song" without mentioning a laundry list of clichés: “mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.” Goodman then proceeded to add the final verse, incorporating all five of Coe's facetious "requirements," whereupon Coe agreed that now it was "the perfect country-and-western song" and felt obliged to add it to the end of the record:

I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick'er up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned ol' train

(Not that it's relevant, but I would have posted this as a comment at LGM, except that I can't seem to get registered there,)

Daniel Stashower, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Ectoplasmic Man

Daniel Stashower, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:  The Ectoplasmic Man
Titan Books, 2009 reprint of the © 1985 original
ISBN 978-1-848-56904-1

This appears to be Stashower’s first mystery; he subsequently wrote a nicely done series of mysteries featuring Houdini (beginning with The Dime Museum, 1999).  Houdini appears in The Ectoplasmic Man, but it is really a Sherlock Holmes mystery—Houdini is suspected of, and arrested for, the theft of a series of letters that could compromise the Prince of Wales and the subsequent murder of the woman involved, a German Baroness.  Stashower does a creditable imitation of Watson here, even allowing Watson to express his pique at Holmes’ disregard of his feelings.  All this in 1910, with tensions rising in Europe by the day.

We begin with Lestrade coming to ask Holmes for assistance, specifically asking him to attend Houdini’s up-coming performance in which he will apparently pass through a solid brick wall, because Houdini is suspected of the theft of the letters.  Lestrade fears that Houdini has extra-normal powers, especially since he has already escaped from a cell at Scotland Yard (staged as a publicity stunt).  Lestrade’s visit is followed by a visit by Houdini’s wife Bess, who is concerned by the police interest in her husband.  Holmes blows her off, but Watson makes up his mind to attend.  At the performance, Watson is called up to the stage to assist (and manages to blunder his way to wrecking the illusion).  And Houdini is arrested, taken to  cell, and wrapped up to the best of the Yards ability. 

Holmes, of course, involves himself, and finds evidence rather quickly that Houdini could not have stolen the letters (evidence that Lestrade, in a greater than usual fit of incompetence, ruses even to consider.  The mystery is really fairly straightforward, but it takes a while for it all to unfold.  We close with Houdini triumphant, Holmes brilliant, the Empire saved again (for a while).  Not a masterpiece, by any means, but nicely done.  And you will learn some things about the art of escape, as a side benefit.

Susan Spann, Blade of the Samurai

Susan Spann, Blade of the Samurai
Minotaur Books/A Thomas Dunne Book/St. Martin’s Press, 2014
ISBN 978-1-250-02705-4

Matsui Hiro is awakened by a sound—someone has surreptitiously entered the home (and church) of Father Mateo, a Portuguese Catholic priest.  And it’s Hiro’s job to see than no harm comes to him.  And he is good at his job.  But when he confronts the intruder, it turns out to be his friend Kazu, who works in the Shogun’s compound for the Shogun’s cousin.  And the cousin, Saburo, has been murdered.  Kazu, with good reason, believed he is likely to be accused of the murder.  Hiro accepts Kazu’s story, tentatively, and arranges for him to leave Kyoto.  But before much can be accomplished, an emissary of the Shogun arrives asking (really, ordering) Father Mateo and Hiro to the compound to investigate the murder.  (They have a reputation, already, based on the events in Claws of the Cat.)

The investigation is urgent, because Lord Oda, a feudal lord who might have designs on the shogunate (and for whom a murder in the compound will look like weakness or incompetence) is due to arrive in three days.  As so the investigation begins.  Saburo, a relatively high-ranking official, was killed about midnight in his office.  There’s a lot of blood—and a hairpin on top of it all.  Because of the timing of the murder—after almost all the compound’s workmen (a master carver and the stable-master are the primary exceptions) were gone.  No one entered after the gates were closed (and so we have a variation of the “country-house” murder—a limited number of possible killers in a confined, and isolated space).  And Kazu is, of course, at the head of the list.  No one saw him leave the night before, but now he is nowhere to be found.

Not that he’s the only suspect.  Saburo has a mistress who could have killed him because he would not leave his wife.  His wife might have killed him (or had him killed) because of his mistress.  Kazu could have done it.  Another official looking to move up is always a possibility.  Someone working secretly for Lord Oda might have done it, in order to weaken the compound’s security (and the guard roster has been altered for the time of Oda’s arrival).  And more.

Hiro and Mateo undertake the investigation unwillingly, but they recognize the necessity of it.  We learn a bit more about Hiro’s presence in Kyoto (but not much), and the role of the Portuguese in arming the potentially warring factions in the country.  Saburo’s young son, Ichiro, becomes an important part of Hiro’s investigation, and he is a vital part of the story.  We are also reminded that, in a time when all documents are hand-written, being able to recognize the script of an individual is an important skill.

The second book in the series (and I liked the first book a lot) makes me even more interested in seeing what comes next…although I don’t quite understand the title (which doesn’t mean that it must have a meaning…).

Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows

Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows
Chicago Review Press, 2016 reprint of © 1971 original
ISBN 978-1-61373-524-4

A mess.  The story is set on a planet on which one half is turned permanently toward the sun, and the other half is permanently in shadow (I think Asimov has a story like this somewhere).  Jack, our protagonist, is out to achieve something, although we do not learn what until very near the end.  Jack is somewhat reminiscent of Corwin in the Amber books, in that he moves between the shadow and the light, but Jack is, to my mind, a thoroughly unpleasant person.  Also, although magic is invoked, we mostly don't get a sense of it.  Much as I like Zelazny, this was just barely worth my time.

Helen MacInnes, Cloak of Darkness

Helen MacInnes, Cloak of Darkness
Titan Books (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-7811-64310

A competent espionage novel.  Robert Renwick, the founding partner of a private intelligence outfit (InterIntell) located in London is drawn into an investigation of two businesses, Exports Consolidated and Klingfield & Sons, and the hunt for a radical-leftist terrorist (Erik) who has escaped from prison.  The businesses have moved from legitimate activities into smuggling weapons (and arming terrorists); Eric seems to be hooked up with the boss of Klingfield, Klaus Sudak.  The investigation and the chase take us from London to Washington to Geneva to Zurich.  MacInnes always did this sort of thing well, and although I am somewhat skeptical of two longstanding businesses with good reputations (and obviously not corporations, probably proprietorships) getting involved in something like this, the narrative moves right along, providing a sufficient amount of suspense to make it worthwhile.  The pace is not as frantic as in a couple of this sort of book I've read lately (and I’m not sure where the title came from), but neither does it drag.  Worth the time.