The Last Policeman

Roughly fifty percent of the world’s population will be dead in a few months.  You are a police detective.  People are still murdering each other for the same old reasons.  Do you really want to spend all your remaining time and energy catching the bad guys?  Is there any point?  Well, freshly minted Police Detective Hank Palace believes there is, and although everyone else is eager to call Peter Zell’s death a suicide, he is not buying it.

Maia, the massive asteroid officially known as 2011GV, is on a collision course with the earth and there is nothing anyone can do to change that.  Even the date of the devastating crash (expected to have the blast force of 1,000 Hiroshima explosions) has been publicly announced.  All that remains to be made public is Maia’s strike-point.  Surprisingly, although public services are disappearing, food supplies are shrinking, and the economy is crashing, a reasonable semblance of everyday life continues.  An increasing number of people, however, have decided to check out early by taking their own lives.  More often, they just stop coming to work, preferring, instead, to spend the remaining time with their families or doing the things on their bucket lists.

Hank Palace is not the only law enforcement officer still on the job in Concord, New Hampshire, but he is one of the few who still cares about locking criminals up now that every sentence longer than six months is effectively a sentence of life without parole.  He is certain that, as the streets become more dangerous with each passing month, the certainty of dying in jail if caught in even a minor criminal act is the only thing that keeps people even as safe as they still are.

The Last Policeman is the first book of a planned trilogy within which Ben Winters will explore what might happen when everyone knows in advance the exact date of a catastrophe that will lead eventually to the end life on the planet.  In this pre-apocalyptic introduction to the series, the United States (and presumably, the rest of the world) is already a bleak place.  Most of the characters in this dark novel reflect the bleakness of their environment, one in which nothing can be taken for granted and no individual taken at face value. 

Ben H. Winters

The Last Policeman has been characterized as a pre-apocalyptic police procedural, and that is exactly what it is.  Detective Palace’s quest to prove his hunch that Peter Zell did not kill himself - to which the bulk of the novel is dedicated - is complicated by society’s irreversible breakdown.  The crime lab is backed up for weeks, and has been falling farther and farther behind schedule as apathy becomes the norm and technicians desert their jobs.  Investigators are willing to accept the easiest, most obvious, answer for any suspicious death encountered.  Insurance companies, determined to deny as many claims as possible (in order to use the cash to pay employee salaries), make it obvious to the police that they prefer a determination of suicide to one of murder.

Through it all, Hank Palace’s determination to do right by the dead man helps to maintain a bit of order in a world that will move closer to the brink of destruction in the second book of the series.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

The Shadow of the Wind

To say that Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind was an international success is an understatement.  The novel has been published in at least 20 countries and was a number one bestseller in Spain, the author’s home country.  Part gothic novel, part romance novel, it is an ambitious story of almost 500 pages that blends several genres in a way guaranteed (in theory) to appeal to a variety of readers.  Ruiz Zafón seems to be appealing to readers that enjoy mysteries, coming-of-age novels, fantasy, historical fiction, intensely atmospheric settings, books about books, or even (perhaps, especially) television soap operas.  A complete willingness to toss aside one’s sense of disbelief is mandatory with this one.  All of that is well and good, but it is also a bit risky because it only works if readers do not also dislike some of the elements in the blend. 

The book’s first person narrator, Daniel Sempere, is ten years old when the story begins in 1950s Barcelona.  When young Daniel panics that he is forgetting his deceased mother’s face, his bookstore-owning father decides to distract him by introducing Daniel to the “Cemetery of Forgotten Books,” an underground storage facility where single copies of such books are preserved.  Daniel is encouraged to remove one book from the vast library, a book for which he will be forever responsible from that moment onward.  He chooses a novel by Julián Carex called The Shadow of the Wind. 

Daniel takes his role seriously and decides to find copies of the other books Carex wrote before his violent death on the streets of Barcelona in 1936.  He is horrified to learn, however, that the books are impossible to locate because a horribly disfigured man supposedly has been buying them for years with the sole purpose of destroying them.  Determined to protect the Carex book in his possession, Daniel becomes obsessed with learning everything he can about Julián Carex.  When this mysterious book-burner learns that Daniel owns a copy of The Shadow of the Wind, Daniel’s life – along with that of his father and closest friends – is placed in jeopardy unless he agrees to sell his book to the fiend. 

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Ruiz Zafón tells his tale via two timelines, one involving the personal history of Julián Carex and one describing Daniel’s present day effort to discover the truth about Carex’s death.  As the similarities between the two timelines become more and more evident, the mystery surrounding Daniel’s nemesis goes in and out of focus several times before the man’s identity and motive for destroying the Carex books are finally revealed.  It is a long and winding path – one that involves an assemblage of characters and villains in both timelines.

My problem with The Shadow of the Wind is a “technical” one.  I am always willing to suspend my sense of disbelief when I enjoy a story, allowing an author plenty of room to use coincidence and cliché to move a plot forward, as is certainly the case here.  What made reading The Shadow of the Wind a chore for me was the author’s insistence on slowing the pace to a near halt several times by inserting secondhand accounts of action that had taken place “off stage.”  When I realized the memories being recounted by the book’s characters contained a level of detail - and facts - that the immediate speaker had no way of knowing (either at the time of the actual events or in the present), I began to dread losing my reading momentum to them.  Not only does this literary device not work, it is distracting and lessens the impact of the rest of the book - and it is a lazy way to tell a story. 

That said, the book does contain one of my favorite passages of all time regarding books and readers:

            Every book, every volume you see here has a soul.  The soul of the person who wrote it and those who read it and lived and dreamed with it.  Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.

That thought makes me happy.

Grammar Humor

For a lazy Sunday afternoon, here's a little grammar humor from around the web:

I'm shocked.

Not grammar humor, but good advice from a writer's spouse.

The Grammar Police will tell you which you are.

Stupidity in permanent ink is cute, but this one does looked photoshopped.

Book Trailer of the Week - Kill You Twice

I have to confess that I am unfamiliar with Chelsea Cain's work, but I do love this book trailer for her Kill You Twice enough to choose it as my latest Book Trailer of the Week.




 It's very short - if not very sweet - and to the point, and it's perfect for my mood this week.  More importantly, it got my attention and put a new-to-me author on my radar so it does its job very well.

9th Book Trailer of the week in a continuing series of unusual and memorable book trailers spotted by Book Chase  (even though I am only finding one or two a month lately).

The Vegas Knockout

If there is not already a subgenre of noir fiction called noir comedy, there should be – and Tom Schreck’s The Vegas Knockout is a good example of how it should be done.  Noir fiction always seems to be set in the shadows of the real world, places where the best and worst human characteristics are on display in settings that are a little starker and more intimidating than they might be in the real world.  Las Vegas, a city with a long history of mob connections and fast money, is one of those places one can easily picture in noir terms, and Vegas is the setting of Schreck’s sixth (by my count, at least) Duffy Dombrowski mystery.

Duffy Dombrowski is a social worker for a New York Jewish nonprofit organization.  At least that is how Duffy pays the bills, but if asked about his occupation, he would identify himself as a professional boxer – and a pretty good one, at that.  The problem is that his natural ability only makes him good enough to serve as a professional sparring partner for the guys making all the money.  Duffy’s own professional matches usually pay a few hundred bucks at most.

Tom Schreck

Surprised by an out-of-the-blue offer of a job in Vegas to help prepare a Russian heavyweight for his title match, Duffy jumps at the chance, arranges to scuttle his social work responsibilities for two weeks, and makes his way to Vegas – with Al, his rescued basset hound, in tow.  There he learns that nothing is quite what he expected it would be.  His first surprise -that the Las Vegas house he was promised, and which he has invited his four favorite drinking buddies to share with him, is a trailer on the grounds of a brothel - will prove to be the least of his problems.

If Duffy is to leave Vegas in one piece, he will need some help from his friends – all five of them, including his dog.  Al has a way with the ladies that even Duffy has to admire, and the protective hound is sometimes a better judge of character than his supposed master (I say supposed because Al really has no master).  Al and the four New York barflies are the source of most of the book’s comic moments but they also play key roles in moving this wild tale along.  Bottom line: The Vegas Knockout, despite its violent backdrop, will make you laugh more often than it will horrify you.  This is noir comedy with the emphasis on the comedy part of the equation – and I loved it.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)

Status Check: Lack of Sleep Makes Me Whiny

It always feels a bit awkward to do these "personal posts," but I don't have the energy, or more importantly, the time to do much more at the moment. I am five months from retirement, so things should be easing up at the office for me - but just the opposite is happening because my key employee gave the company her two-week notice 12 days ago. That has meant a lot of scrambling to get someone in place soon enough to have her do some training and orientation work before she heads out the door. And, that has translated into longer hours for me - mainly on the front end of the day even though I am almost always at my desk by 6:20 a.m. anyway.

Then, yesterday morning about ten I received a phone call from the assisted living facility my father has lived in for the past two years saying that they found him on the floor of his unit.  So the last two days have seen me spread pretty thinly, as I try to find time to be at the hospital with him for the battery of tests he is undergoing, at the office during this critical handover week, and to get a little sleep at the end of the day.  All of that has left me constantly tired and drowsy, so writing anything of substance or interest is beyond me at the moment.

I just wanted to check in with the regulars so that I didn't give the impression that I am losing interest in Book Chase after 6 1/2 years.  As if...and the good news for me is that I am reading lots of pages while waiting for my father to return from tests and while he naps.  I am, however, starting to wonder if much is really sinking in, and hoping to be back to a normal schedule very soon.