Maryland Books

A fascinating case study of a suburban American place undergoing striking demographic change. In a sense I think the title, subtitle and coverflap words may do Kohn a disservice. The potential reader may view this as somewhat of an academic/theoretical review of race relations rather than what it really is, a collection of intriguing stories about the loosely overlapping lives of a number of white and black residents of Prince Georges County, MD. I was pulled along simply to find out what happened to these people, as well as to what would happen to this place, as it swung from majority white and rural to majority black and urban in a few years. The most complicated story, that of Elvira White, bogged down some. But there is intrigue and pleasant surprise throughout. I would love to have learned even more detail about the racial, social and economic change in the key community, Hillcrest Heights, as well as in the whole county. It's a place literally in my backyard - I do wonder if a reader from another part of the country will find it as fascinating as I did. I still recommend it heartily to anyone eager for highly readable, anecdotal clues to the evolving co-existence of people of different races, as well as to those who just want good stories about real people.

Having flipped through this book I now have plans for several excursions once the weather improves. The book lays out a wide variety of hikes with descriptions, pictures, and maps. Based on these details and the estimated times, I expect this book will lead me through at least half a dozen different day trips. It offers just what I was hoping it would; I'm going to enjoy using this book.

I bought this book out of my love for railroad history and West Virginia history and when I can combine the two I am usually very happy.

I like this book in that it contains the facts to a very fine degree. I have two complaints though. The first is that it is like reading a time line. Rarely are two consecutive paragraphs related. The facts and events are relayed very well this way but it makes for very dry reading at times.

My second complaint is that the maps and photographs are extremely small all through the book. It is very difficult to study and enjoy a map of an entire rail line when the map is only about 2" x 2" in the text.

All in all, I did enjoy the book. I would recommend buying it, just keep a magnifying glass at your side for the photos and maps.

its ok, the very few restaurents in baltimore area should have been more cretiqued in my opinion, not all of them are ok. just a local opinion.

I really enjoyed reading this book. It put all of my favorites into one book: suspsense, mystery, romance, strong willed/strong minded heroine. I also had the joy of growing up in a close knit Italian family, so I could relate to that as well. This is one of those Nora Roberts books that after you get through the first chapter or 2 and are hooked, you have no personal life until you are finished.

Nora Roberts continues to amaze. I have read all of her novels written by Roberts and J.D. Robb. Nora is my favorite author.

I enjoyed this story very much and the convenience of listening as I went to and from work.

While I haven't read every one of Ms. Roberts works I must state that I have read quite a few. I absolutely adore her way with words and the way she moves a story along without being obvious. Since many other reviewers have given a synopsis of this book I will limit myself to comments on the whole.

Fully rounded characters were what first grabbed my attention. It is through the central character's interaction with those around her that we learn of the events that have brought her to the present day and why she is so fiercely independent.

Ms. Roberts attention to details is one of the many things I love about her writing. Not too wordy, not too sparse, just enough to give you a perfect picture of the who or where she is describing. In Blue Smoke she is absolutely eloquent in her descriptions of fire, especially how it is perceived by some as a living thing. Her heroine, Reena, and the nemesis, Joey, are actually cut from a bit of the same cloth but the fine line between madness and sanity is what sets them apart. Both are drawn to fire because of its power but one is drawn to its capacity to harm while the other is searching for a way to quench the powerful beast.

The Hale family is down to earth as they rally to protect their own. The Pastorelli family is as dysfunctional as they come. Thrown into the mix is a wonderful leading man named Bo Goodnight (with a name like that you know he rides the white horse).

Suspense piled up as this reader tried to figure out where the arsonist would set his next, premeditated fire. I literally held my breath when Reena and Joey finally confronted each other.

I truly enjoyed this book. The final couple of chapters are definitely not for the squeamish but I didn't think they were too gruesome. I've seen plenty worse on the TV set.

I give Blue Smoke five stars for keeping me up way past my bedtime on way too many nights.

Reena Hale learned at an early age what fire could do. She was a small child when she had to watch her family's' restaurant burn to the ground thus beginning her love/hate relationship with fire. As she grew up she devoured everything possible to expand her knowledge because she continued to be tortured to fire. In college, her boyfriend was burned to death, and this is just another event that directs her to her career as an arson investigator.

Renna feels content with her life when she becomes a member of the police department, and buys her first home. She is surprised when she meets neighbor Bo Goodnight to find out he has been trying to find her since college. He saw her at a party across the room and has been trying to find her since. As they grow closer and fall in love, Renna is horrified when Bo's life is threatened again with fire. As they investigate further, it is revealed that two of her other boyfriends were touched by fire, and it is all perpetrated by the same person.

I loved this story. It is definitely one of my favorite NR tales. The characters were phenomenal. Reena and Bo are a good match, but all the supporting characters were an important part - from her loud obnoxious loving family to the creepy villain.

To The Power of Three is an excellent novel by Baltimore native Laura Lippman. I read this after enjoying another of her novels, What the Dead Know. I found To The Power of Three to be the more enjoyable of the two.

The novel opens with a shooting in an affluent high school's restroom. Two girls are wounded, one dead. The motive behind the shooting is unclear as all three girls are intelligent, popular, and best friends. Lippman takes us inside the girls' friendship and the hierarchy of the school and town, starting in the third grade and interspersing years until she reveals what happened and why. She incorporates viewpoints of teachers, fellow students, the police detectives, parents, and others in order to move her narrative along. In someone else's hands, this enormous cast of characters might have turned out unwieldy, but Lippman pulls it off with panache. As in What The Dead Know, her dialog is first rate and authentic and her sense of place and description are quite remarkable. I finished this book in a single day simply because I couldn't stop reading it until I got to the end. This is a first rate novel with well-developed characters and an intriguing plot. A must read.

The story starts with three teenage girls, Perri, Josie, and Kat, locked in a school bathroom with a gun--Kat's dead; Perri has been shot in the face and is not expected to live; Josie's been shot in the foot. It appears that Perri killed Kat, then Perri and Josie struggled over the gun and Josie was shot, then Perri turned the gun on herself.

But the evidence doesn't add up: why are there bloody footprints leading away from the locked door? Where are Josie's shoes? Where are all three girls' cell phones?

The book bounces all over place and time, between different POVs, delving deep into each one, showing the development of the girls' friendship until a year earlier when there's an abrupt break between Perri and Kat. And despite the nonlinear progression of the story, it works, for the most part, because the psychological suspense is high and the characters are realistic and familiar (at least to anyone who is, has, or has been a teenage girl).

My only problems were first, that there were a few too many characters, too many POVs. I didn't see a lot of point to teacher Alexa Cunningham's POV, for example--her scenes were very in-depth, but she seemed to be only peripherally involved, if at all, in the events leading up to the shooting.

And then there was the ending. I don't want to spoil it, but it felt flat and anticlimactic. And maybe that was the point--that life doesn't always have a dramatic point. I can accept that--it just doesn't make me love the book.

Overall, I loved the feel of the book: that somewhat dream-hazed, suspenseful, close-up portraits of how 3 teenage girls ended up dead or wounded. If it had been a movie, it would be an artsy one, with lots of out-of-focus close-ups. It's different from my usual reading, which is always a good thing, and I was really immersed in it up until nearly the very end.

I've previously read a few brilliant short stories by this author so decided to check out how well she writes a novel. Now granted her fans may point out this is a standalone story and isn't one from her most popular series but standalones are what people like me who want to sample an author check out before getting invested in a series. I have to say I won't be rushing out to buy Lippman's other work after this as it was enjoyable in parts but there's nothing memorable within these pages. The Power of Three could also have maybe been edited a bit more as it unnecessarily went into details on aspects and characters which played no central role to the storyline. Still if you've come across this book in the library or some other way where you haven't had to pay money for it then it will more than adequately pass the time.

In Power of Three Kat is dead, Perri is missing half her face and probably won't live and Jessie has a bullet in her foot more than likely putting an end to an athletic uni scholarship. There three girls were best friends so what happened is the journey the reader will be taken on to find out. Jessie says Perri shot Kat then in a struggle for the gun shot her in the foot before turning the weapon on herself. Police know this story is very unlikely, and there's other things to explain which Jessie doesn't seem to be able to, such as why are all the stall doors along with the main door locked? Why is their blood where Jessie said she never went? If this wasn't planned why is Jessie not wearing shoes and surely three teenage girls would have mobile phones but where are they? Lippman takes the reader on a journey through all the school years of the three constantly flashing between the past and current time with the investigation. She finally tells us what happened in the final pages but she could probably have gotten there a lot quicker.

I thought this book was suspenseful and thrilling. It is about a school shooting involving three best friends who began to grow apart in high school. Laura Lippman's writing style is so intriguing. I will read this again and again. Most definately one of the best mysteries I have read in years. I wish the ending would have turned out a little differently, but it is very shocking and you will never guess what happens. An awesome book especially for teen girls. It is quite long, but I never wanted to put the book down!!

I tried getting into Laura Lippman's books because they take place in or around Baltimore (I live close so I know some of the areas she is talking about). I tried reading this book and half of the "Tess" series. I just couldn't get into it. With the drugs (I don't care to read about this) and her style doesn't keep me intrested. I kept trying to get intrested but I ended up giving up.

CHARM CITY appeals to me even more than the murder mystery that kick-started this series, BALTIMORE BLUES, because it deals with one of my personal favorite issues: journalism ethics in a constantly-changing world. While CHARM CITY is clearly a few years behind us - they're still debating the importance of the internet, for example, while the debate is LONG over out here in the real world - it deals with the issues we all face, the philosophy of a newspaper as objective purveyor of information while also an impassioned watchdog for the people. That's not an easy line to walk.

The only place CHARM CITY fails is in its predictability. Alas, I pegged the whodunit far too early. I also am bothered by some of the gender stereotypes - aside from Tess herself, the women tend to be conniving and heartless, and the men lecherous dogs. Lippman's cynicism shows a little more clearly than in BALTIMORE BLUES, alas.

But even if you haven't the slightest interest in journalism ethics or the philosophy of news reporting, you'll still find CHARM CITY a fascinating whodunit. Tightly written, smart and fast-paced, I strongly recommend Lippman to any mystery fan.

As usual, Laura Lippmann has done a great job of writing the adventures of Ms. Tess Monaghan. This is a nice book to read, it's fun, easy and you'll probably not guess the ending.

Take this to the beach!

Tess Monaghan made the move from journalist to private investigator, but finds her newspaper days aren't quite behind her. She's hired to find out who released a story before it was set to be printed.

Her life and her city both seem to be experiencing dubious growth. Her Uncle Spike is beaten when he tries to stop a robbery. After he slips into a coma, Tess finds out that her uncle has left her the task of caring for a greyhound dog. While in the local politics, a local big shot promises the city a basketball team, this is under minded when he is discredited by the untimely released news article. Events don't get better when he is found dead, an apparent suicide.

There's more to her uncle's attack than is first apparent. Someone is stalking Tess, looking for something. What and why are just parts of the story.

Laura Lippman has managed to insert humor, adventure, and tension in this novel. All loose ends are neatly tied up, and with a sigh, the cover can be closed.

Review by Wanda C. Keesey (author Lost In The Mist release May 2008)

Charm City, the second installment in Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan series, has been reissued in hardcover this year, a decade after first appearing in paperback. It's easy to see why publisher William Morrow deemed this mystery worthy of republication.

Tess, a former journalist turned private investigator, keeps the narrative edgy with her quirky personality and often-cutting assessments of other characters. The novel uses Baltimore's unique mid-Atlantic atmosphere and notable landmarks to their fullest, making the Charm City as important to the feel of the story as any of the characters or plot turns.

The mystery takes a while to rev up, as Lippman juggles the main story line (the mystery surrounding the unauthorized publication in the Beacon-Light newspaper of a scathing article about a businessman who has plans to bring professional basketball to Baltimore) with a subplot involving a brutal attack on Tess's Uncle Spike and its seeming connection to a greyhound dog that comes under Tess's care. While not traditional ingredients for a mystery novel, Lippman cranks up the stakes masterfully when Tess's investigation of these two capers begins to reveal a dark side behind the Beacon-Light newspaper and the greyhound racing establishment.

The ending of the novel features plenty of grisly action, along with a few somewhat-improbable twists and character motives that struck me as slightly out-of-place in a mystery that's otherwise so grounded and authentic. Overall, though, this is a strong, engaging novel that works well either as a stand-alone mystery or an entree into the series.

-Kevin Joseph (as reviewed for TCM Reviews)

The first Tess Monaghan book left me relatively unimpressed, the pacing was sluggish, the writing clunky, the heroine more annoying than engaging, and the plotting sometimes awkward. All in all it was a pretty mediocre (though not outright bad) debut, but the Baltimore setting and generally effusive praise the series has gotten was enough to make me try the next in the series to see if Lippman had improved.

Set soon after the events of Baltimore Blues, this book finds Tess still living above her aunt's bookstore, still sharing a bed with her younger musician boyfriend Crow, and halfheartedly working as an investigator for a lawyer. A meeting with a friend from her days working as a newspaper reporter is the catalyst for her latest adventure. It involves the effort to bring pro basketball to Baltimore, and the shady background of the prime mover and shaker in this effort. Somehow, a muckraking piece on his life winds up in the paper, despite having been killed editorially, and Tess is brought in to try and figure out who did it and how.

This becomes a bit more important when the subject of the article turns up dead of an apparent suicide. As Tess pokes around the newspaper and its computer system, she also investigates one of the reporters, the suicide, and more and more. Meanwhile, there's also a subplot involving Tess's uncle, who is beaten into a coma, for reasons no one can work out. He also left a greyhound in her care, whom she names Esskay (after the local hot dog brand) and becomes an important character in his own right.

Unfortunately, Tess continues to fail to engage me as a heroine. She flails around for the truth, bumbling along full of self-pity and bitterness, lucky to be alive at the end. It doesn't help matters that the book switches away to third-person narration for some scenes. Oddly, despite Lippman's career as a newspaper journalist, some of the plotting concerning the newspaper and its operations seems very artificial and false. Finally, traditional mystery readers will find it annoying that there really aren't the clues in place for the reader to deduce "whodunnit." I'm not getting what it is that others seem to love about this series, and I'm not sure I'm willing to spend time on a third book to find out.

Fritz Tullis was a successful professor at the University of Texas until he had an affair with the wrong (as in married) woman. He resigned while on leave of absence and is now living in a somewhat renovated sharecropper's shack on family property in southern Maryland. It's on the edge of a swamp where he fishes, photographs the many birds in the area and enjoys the solitude the place offers while he tries to get his head screwed on right.

One day while photographing the birds, he sees a small plane land across the water on the new neighbor's (James Roach) property. He witnesses a murder and vows to himself not to get involved. Then he learns the neighbor is the wealthy, shady assistant secretary of state. Fritz has been reckless most of his life and, against the advice of his lawyer friend, starts nosing into the life and misdeeds of Roach--to see that justice is done. He's soon in way over his head.

The story has a few twists and turns to keep your interest. And there's much more to the story than I've mentioned. This was my first experience with this author and there will be more.

Again I feel the editorial reviews summed the plot up enough, it would be redundant if I gave an additional summary.
First though let me say I am a big fan of Freedman's works, however I couldn't in good conscience give this offering more than 3 stars.
As thriller's go it is interesting, and has many elements I look for in thrillers namely excellent characterization, after all if reader doesn't feel he/she can genuinely care or sympathize for characters why read the book? Freedman again presents an anti-hero worthy of readers' emotion, and it is not there I failed to totally fall for this story.
It is just not exceptional. The tie-in with Ollie the Crane was nice play on title, but the overall plot didn't make me go wow I've gotta stay up all night reading. I know Freedman is an extrememely talented writer and although this could be he most mature work I can't claim its his best. Having said that I am reviewing it not necessarily to give it the ol' 2 thumbs up but to at least praise it as being worthy for a quick read.

My wife and I both liked this novel, and we're really not sure why anyone else wouldn't. The main character is slightly damaged goods, setting aside career and life's other ambitions, and hiding away in the boonies enroute to an undecided future. Not sure why that's apparently such a poor choice for a protagonist who is cast as an unlikely hero, but it did work for us. It's not realistic for all storybook heroes to be alpha male over-achievers who never take a step back to recover from their failures and disappointments.
I appreciated the author's brevity of language, and ability to make the characters accessible and real. The storyline kept me interested all the way through.
When I finished the book, I went looking for more by the same author. I was happy to add this one to my list of favorite authors.

Freedman wrote one of my favorite thrillers ever--Against the Wind, and several dynamite follow-ups. This is not one of them.

The basic plot elements are all great. Ordinary guy falls on hard times, too much alcohol, too much self-pity, too much self-absorbtion. Then a series of events, rooted in gun running in decades past, mixed with political intrigue, conspire to intrude into hero's neat little self-contained world.

The plot twists and turns; no one is quite who we thing he (and, most significantly, she) is. The story unfolds with Freedman's great writing, and the pages keep turning.

Two problems. First, the scenes between Maureen and Franz feel extremely forced, and even to the point of being long winded. Second, the story simply peters out at the end. We don't know if the bad guy gets away with it. We don't know if true love will out. We don't even know what happens to the birds.

I suspect that Freedman got bored with thrillers, and tried to do something more "literary". The title is an excellent double (triple, more?) entendre--it is by viewing his birds that Franz gets sucked in; but it is also by trying to live life from a bird's point of view--above it all, with no cares about the world--that Franz gets sucked deeper and deeper into trouble. Finally, the whole problem is caused by the fact that Ollie (our hero's whooping crane) is not where he belongs--several thousand miles from Texas, where he "belongs". This is also Franz' problem, who got lost in Texas, and ended up a few hundred feet away from Ollie in the Maryland swamps.

Good read, but not as good as the other Freedman's I've read.

Freedman has six prior novels, but was unknown to us until a friend insisted we read "Bird's-Eye". We weren't sorry, as our author combines solid writing skills with the ability to capture our interest immediately and keep us turning pages in a hurry with mystery and suspense. Already in Chapter One, we meet our leading man, Fritz Tullis, but have no idea why this thirty-something high-achiever, from a land-owning family wealthy for generations, is living in a shack on his mother's property in the swampish backwoods of the lower Chesapeake Bay. He spends his days doping, drinking, and enjoying ready sex partners, with occasional forays into the swamp to photograph birds (hence the title) with long telephoto lenses. By chapter's end, his camera catches a murder on a nearby property with a private air strip from a concealed, on the water, vantage point no one would ever know about.

Tullis spends much of the first half of the story staying uninvolved - but as he learns more about the potential culprits, or at least the conspirators involved, he cannot resist doing the right thing (solving the crime) while seeking little help from the authorities, with whom he knew he would have little credibility. Meanwhile, another new lady friend takes just a little too much interest in both the birds, one of which is a rare whooping crane, as well as the murder mystery; and we readers get enough info to smell a rat much sooner than does Tullis. Corruption and politics soon enter the fray as an Assistant Secretary of State, James Roach (presumably no pun!) turns out to be the neighbor who owns the air strip. Along the way, another murder or two adds to the intrigue and the dangerous nature of the chase, with the action and affairs of the heart reaching crescendo pace by book's end.

Freedman develops a fine plot without engaging so many characters we lose track. The suspense is realistic, as are the players and their thoughts and feelings. In sum, we not only enjoyed this novel immensely but will seek out his earlier works soon. Enjoy!

I loved this book. The main character Morgan is such a funny fellow. A hardware store manager, he enjoys dressing up and pretending to be other people. This leads his life down an entirely different course one day while he is pretending to be a doctor, and is called upon to deliver a baby.

All of the characters in this book are so well developed and comical in their own right. Morgan's wife, whom he eventually leaves for a younger woman, is spiteful but in such a lighthearted manner that the tricks she plays on Morgan come off more as harmless pranks than malice. I would highly recommend this book.

Having read a half dozen, I have mixed feelings about Tyler's books. Part of me admires and enjoys the way she can write engrossing sagas about ordinary people not necessarily doing much of anything. The other part is left feeling exhausted, like I just lived through someone else's entire life for them...and not quite sure if I got it.

Essentially, Morgan's Passing follows the story of Morgan Gower, a middle-aged man who becomes infatuated with a young couple after assisting in the emergency birth of their daughter. Gower - a married man with seven daughters - dreams of living Emily and Leon's frugal life, just as he's taken on the "roles" of many other persona in the past. As time passes, he also become obsessed with Emily, who begins to represent everything that he believes his own wife isn't, and everything he would want. Eventually, of course, Gower learns that people are just people, and not always what we think - or want - them to be. It just might be too late when that realization occurs.

Like Melville's "Confidence-Man," Morgan Gower wanders through life--and through this novel--as a chameleon, taking on whatever persona people expect, hope, or need from him. Now a priest, now an exile from the Klondike, now a French artiste, always an actor on the stage of other lives, his closet filled with Daniel Boone outfits and riverboat-gambler costumes--he is happy to play anyone but the middle-aged man with a wife and seven daughters and a dead-end job at a hardware store. Morgan is surely one of the most eccentric characters in recent fiction, and at first it's not quite clear if he's menacing, creepy, bonkers, or simply immature.

Morgan's lives--all of them--seem to shift when he meets Emily and Leon Meredith, two puppeteers who perform their shows for children; he poses as a doctor, delivers their baby in the back seat of a car, and mysteriously vanishes after dropping the couple off at the hospital. Just as the grateful pair imagine him as a harmless, if eccentric, guardian angel, Morgan idealizes the young couple and their daughter as the echo of his lost family life, when his daughters were still children he could protect and adore and not strangers who bother him with their marriage plans. ("You don't stop loving people just because they change size," says his exasperated, long-suffering wife.) While Emily and Leon's marriage deteriorates, they're not quite sure what to make of the eerie man who not-very-surreptitiously spies on them and whose attentions become more and more intrusive, until he insinuates himself fully into Emily's and Leon's household.

"Morgan's Passing" is perhaps Tyler's most unruly, wacky, even Dickensian novel; its fabulist plot and characters flirt alternately with the surreal and the extreme. It is also, I think, one of her most underrated works of fiction, an offbeat tale of love among the ruins of tedium, of a life still "rich with possibilities." Yet, as unique as it is among her oeuvre, the novel features a hero with a peculiarly Tylerian trait: while passing through the lives of others and transforming them all irreversibly, Morgan ends up exactly where he began.

If you live in a city without English in its bookstores, what do you read? Well, odds are you encounter a Westerner from time to time and exchange books you've read for books you haven't. You never know what you'll wind up with. It's Book Crossing, taken to a much higher level.

And so it was that I found myself looking at a battered copy of MORGAN'S PASSING, with no memory of who gave it to me or what book(s) I gave up in return. Pages brown and falling out, cover falling off, blurbs that make it sound like something I didn't want to read. But, a desperate junkie in need of my reading fix, I gave it a shot.

And, at last, the review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The story of how I obtained it is much like the character of Morgan himself. He just kind of appears -- you don't know why -- but you're glad you met the memorable eccentric. This book is witty, original, and well worth reading. Ignore the [...] on the cover about "the love story." The book has one, but it's incidental. Some marketing bozo didn't know how to describe true creativity.

Okay, time to go broke ordering more Anne Tyler books from Amazon. All the way from China. There's even a Putlizer Prize winner in there.

I just finished another Anne Tyler book that was written earlier in her career. Once again I feel like I've lived with another group of people/characters for the few weeks that it took to read this story. It was a slow read. I wished the first three quarters of this book flowed with the same dramatic intensity that the last quarter did. I didn't fully understand lead character Morgan until then. But maybe that's the point. Once the plot twisted, the characters seemed to come into view more. All in all I enjoyed it and recommend it for Tyler fans.

This book is a pretty amazing example of how much harm you can do to yourself with a bad "about the author" blurb. The book itself isn't half bad -- it's not memorable, and it's certainly cliched, but it's solid and it pulls you through easily. It's about a cop who has a secret sniper-in-Yugoslavia past and a headwound that will give him an epileptic seizure if he stops taking medications. It's clearly meant to start a series. The twists and turns are standard, and the writing is a notch above standard. But then, at the end, you come to the "about the author" blurb, which, as you can see from the reviews here, infuriates people. Allow me to quote it in full:

"MICHAEL CROW is the pen name of a prize-winning, critically acclaimed novelist whose works have been translated and published in nine languages."

Let's leave aside the issue of whether "Michael Crow" can correctly be called THE pen name of someone who also writes under another name. (I notice it's been changed to "pseudonym" on a couple of websites.) A quick web search turns up the fact that the guy self-consciously slumming as "Michael Crow" won a prize I've never heard of and was nominated for the Pulitzer for journalism. Since fan-favorite "John Sandford" actually WON the Pulitzer for journalism under his real name (and has never implied that he's stooping or embarassed by writing the "Prey" series, just that he needed to keep his careers separate until both were established), "Michael Crow" starts looking pretty weak. He sure has an amazing ability to irritate people with an "about the author" blurb, though!

one gets the sense that the author analysed a bunch of best selling mysteries, and then dashed off one of his own. which he could have pulled off fine if he came across as someone who had actual experience, first hand or close to it, with the material. instead it feels like like he went straight from a university writing program to writing about lives he never came closer to than reading other novelists describe.

his details about guns are play army gear geek detail, not something most ex military special ops types would obsess about.

lastly, he's always using BRAND NAMES, often multiple times on one page. i assume he's doing it for artistic effect of some kind, not for payola, but if i wanted to get bombarded w brand names i'd watch tv.

I have to say I was a little disappointed with this book. I had to work very hard to locate a copy (maybe that should have been my first hint) but I was very much looking forward to it for some reason. I had seen some blurb here on AMazon that made me go track it down, but I can't remember what it was now. I think most of the reviews here are on target; in general this book is very formulaic and there is a disappointing lack of character development. Over all nothing within it will make it memorable for me so I gets my "OK" three starts rating.

Since it was so formulaic, I found the coyness of the author's pseudonym extremely irritating; understandable but irritating. Mr. Crow is billed as being a prize-winning novelist on the dust cover, and having made that claim I can see why another reviewer has decided that the author is contemptuous of the audience. He is billed as being so capable, yet he delivers a product that is very average. Ergo irritating, but understandable why he doesn't want his own name on it. So this feels like simply another hack writing job someone had to do to make a mortgage payment. I don't sense a true attachment bewteen the author and the characters and the world he has created within these pages.

All that being said though, I did read the whole thing, and read the two sequels, mostly because I was having a week where a little gratuitous violence sounded cathartic and I didn't have anything else to hand. So if you want a standard story of tough guys whupping up on other tough guys and don't have any Robicheaux or Repairman Jack novels available then this might fit the bill.

As per usual, I came into this series after the lead-in novel. I had my first Luther Ewing experience with Crow's second book, The Bite, and I was pretty underwhelmed. Ewing, an ex-special forces/ex-merc sharpshooter who was shipped back to the U.S. after getting half his skull blown apart by a Serb sniper - along with his entire supporting cast of Baltimore Police - well, the characterizations are as derivative as they come, and the uber-hardboiled writing of author Michael Crow (the nome de plume of a - ahem - prize winning, critically acclaimed novelist) is as cheesy as week-old Velveeta.

Read it, said, 'Huh'. Been there, done that. Tossed it.

Okay, fast-forward a year. Something in The Bite must've struck a nerve, 'cause now I'm bored, desperate with a need to read. Stalking the local mega-used book store like a heroin junkie looking for a street-corner dealer, I see a used hardcover copy of Crow's first Ewing thriller, Red Rain, and I think, 'Huh. The other one wasn't so bad... Was it?'

Maybe it wasn't. Red Rain opens with Ewing and his first assignment with the Baltimore Narcotics squad, and his soon-to-be partner, Ice Box (Seriously. Imagine a white, falsetto-voiced version of The Fridge...), as they help bust a pathetic ring of suburban white-boy dope dealers. Ewing's boss, Lt. Dugal, labels Ewing a wild gun ('natch, since Ewing throws down with a non-reg, Israeli made, .50AE Desert Eagle equipped with an Aimpoint attachment), and promptly hooks Ewing up with Ice Box as his senior partner, sort of reverse Lethal Weapon style. The fun begins when more and more drug busts come down, all suburban kids, the drugs getting heavier and heavier, and suddenly all the trails lead back to one of Luther's old merc buddies: a Russian mafioso, ex-Spetsnaz psycho called Vassily who's quickly taking over the Baltimore drug trade. The bodycount builds fast after 'The Big Bust' goes south; Vassily goes after Luthor and his homies. In the end, after Vassily almost drops Luthor's city detective buddy Dog, well - not to give anything away here, but Luthor goes Rambo on Vassily and his cronies, even going so far as to smear on the war-paint during the finale.

Okay, yeah, yeah, it's derivative of just about any other thriller out there. But there's something endearing about Luthor and his crew, and until the cheese factor ramps up a notch with the lipstick war-paint at the end, Crow barrels gleefully along, tossing in enough sex and spilling enough blood to satisfy any adolescent teenage boys' hormonally charged action fetish. Just read - don't think, 'cause Red Rain really is as big and bombastic and... well.. dumb as a Shane Black flick. Get past the silliness and into the adrenaline, and you might suddenly find yourself having a blast.

Well. I thought it was pretty good. Most reviewers sound like an ex . . . "How dare you?" and "We're supposed to be impressed by THAT!" and along the lines of "if you had any guts you would come out from behind that nom de plume."

I like Luther Ewing, don't care that he's half black-half vietnamese, has the usual arrogance for authority that . . . let's see, Joe Pike, Spenser, Robicheaux, Hawk, Lucas Davenport, Frank Corso and Sunny Randall have, likes to have sex (wow; what an anomaly), and knows his guns. The anti siezure drugs have me a little perplexed but, what's your point?

I think the guy behind Michael Crow wanted to test his limits. People get irritated that he does that and I suspect it was a little too heavy handed that crap about 'he's really an international author blah blah.' Sounds like one of those 'game show annoncers.'

But that's a publishing decision. The guy goes to his publisher and says "I want to do this, will you back me?" and Pub says "yeah but we want to make some dinero on it so we're going to do it this way." That's what went down. Viking didn't want to spend muy bucks on some author's whim. You guys are nuts.

So I give it 5 stars. Exciting dialogue. Good plot, and yes, the guy knows his street slang (I think only Pelecanos does it better) and his guns. Interesting character. I've read them all. I got no beef, dog. Larry Scantlebury