Legal Thrillers for Kids

Legal Thriller | Theodore Boone: The Abduction | John Grisham

Into every hotshot best selling writer's life, some kids or grandkids will appear. Suddenly, the writer will realise that there's nothing really good out there for these super-awesome wonders of the universe. Thus did Terry Pratchett and John Grisham turn their keyboards towards the eager eyes of the tweens of the world.

The Abduction is the second Theodore Boone book. Theo is an eighth class student, and a lawyer at heart. The son of two famous lawyers of a small town in the USA, he is in and out of the courtroom, and possibly knows more about the law than many smart adults. Having liked the first book, we eagerly reach for this, the second.

And we are not disappointed. Grisham made his name as a pacy writer of complex legal twists and turns. He maintains much of that in the new child-friendly format, and the constraints of handling a story for the adults of tomorrow are handled deftly. These are not detective stories, despite the claim of one of the publisher's blurbs that link it to Nancy Drew (come to that, Nancy Drew was more about makeup than detection, meh); no, they bring you to the law.

Theo's good friend April Finnemore, has disappeared from her house in the night. Theo knows her mother is lying about the sequence of events, and tells his parents so. In the meantime, while police hunt all over the town, and the local TV channel keeps up a high-pitched repetition of meagre facts, April's father has vanished on a band-tour, and a convict cousin-cum-penpal of hers has been found in the vicinity, having busted out of jail. While the police try to convince the convict to confess and release the girl instead of angling for 'deals', Theo's ex-lawyer uncle gets tips from the local underworld, and the two of them pick up on clues to track April down.

There are side stories about dive-bombing parrots, and other everyday trivia. Still, you end up carrying away lessons about your rights, city ordinances, abuse of power and position, and other righteous stuff in a very slickly packaged story for kids of all ages.

Does that mean I will tell you about Theodore Boone and Theodore Boone: The Accused​? Heh heh. Hang around. I read those some months ago, and may get around to telling you about them some day. Or you can just go read them for yourself.

Slow reading, fast books

Fantasy | Secrets of Goth Mountain | Gary J. Davies

As I mentioned last time, I'm slow at reading e-books, mainly because they aren't waterproof, and partly because the devices I'm using nowadays all need new batteries, and work only when connected to the mains. (Alas, technology).

So, I've just finished Secrets of Goth Mountain, and very entertaining it was, too. Like a Disney movie, almost, but with better special effects.

Johnny Goth abandons his job in a box-making company to finally find out what makes him have super-powers and why he remembers unicorns and shape-shifting friends from his childhood, while his mother insists he forget all that. Reaching Goth Mountain, he finds his Indian (native American, actually, not from India) friends are fighting a rearguard action against a logger who is salivating over all those old-growth forests that the Reservation and The Goth have been protecting. Johnny meets Elizabeth Winters, a teacher on the reservation, and a much nicer person than his cheating fiancée Angela (oh, right, I already told you about this). Mr Dark, an almost-elemental, is an evil being who loves death and destruction, and has naturally teamed up with the logger. Many shenanigans later, Gary J Davies delivers the happy ending (yess! An author who swears to create only happy endings!)

The writing is breezy and whizzes along. The backdrops are gorgeous. The spellings sometimes trip you up (proof-editor! Drink more coffee, please, and don't rely on autocorrect), but not often enough to be jarring. There are a lot of old-friend tropes, but trees hitting villains with broken-off branches is surely brand-new!

 

This book can be read by anyone above 12, for a good time. Nothing heavy at all, and you can anticipate some of the outcomes (like who's the hidden villain), but the action runs along smoothly, and there are no forced scenes. 

The thing I like better than an author who promises happy endings is an author who makes all his books self-contained, even if the same characters turn up elsewhere. With a multiverse to play in, that's reassuring. You know how much I hate falling into a series and wondering if I should press on. Okay, I'm off to read one of his other books (oh yeah, they were free on Smashwords in July 2014).

Reading three books at the same time

Fantasy | Secrets of Goth Mountain | Gary J. Davies
Legal thriller | Reversible Errors | Scott Turow
Fantasy | Mad Ship | Robin Hobb

Here's the thing about reading three books at the same time: it's confusing. Which book do you really want to read? First. (You want to read all books if you're like me). I was going through a slow patch last month, and really, didn't feel like doing anything. Even reading. (Horrors!) So I picked up three books at the same time (never take medical advice from me).

Now, of the three, Gary Davies' book moves the fastest. Unfortunately, it's an ebook, and so not as amenable to being read in all sorts of places (it's weird to open your laptop and chuckle in a doctor's waiting room, for example). So it ended up being the only one of the three I haven't yet finished. You have in it Johnny Goth, who has special powers (like extra-keen super sight, hearing and strength), but who's been taken away from Goth Mountain by his mother, since she doesn't want him to disappear, like his father did. He's engaged to Angela because she wants it that way. He has a watch with his father's image engraved on it, along with his own. The images age.

In the meantime, near Goth Mountain, Fenster the logger wants to grab the mountain so that he can cut the old-growth forests. The native Americans on the mountain will not stand for it. There is the teacher, Elizabeth Winters (we all know she will end up with Johnny Goth instead of Angela), and Johnny's childhood friends, including Dooley Simple who convinces the bark of several trees to grow in smiley shapes, the shaman Two Bears, and the shape-shifting Ned. Ranged with the villains are Skunk Fenster, the goonish nephew of Fenster the logger, the Sheriff (owned by the logger) and Mr Dark, an evil entity that feeds on humans and other beings. Of course, given that the market is for white males, Johnny is not a native American. Duh.

Yep, shenanigans all around. A Wild West story with supernatural beings. Keep tuned. I'll write it up later.

Reversible Errors refers to the legal term that gets trials thrown out on appeal. Rommy Gandolph is about to be executed for three gruesome murders. The federal appellate court (I'll never understand the USAn legal system, so I'm careful to copy-paste the terms) has drafted corporate lawyer Arthur Raven to help him draft his last appeal. Arthur used to be a public prosecutor, then moved to the richer fields of corporate practice. He's a gone case, unattractive and sentimental, and has resigned himself to never marrying. He also has a schizophrenic sister to look after, which doesn't help. Ex-judge and ex-con Gillian Sullivan had judged the case originally. She's been disgraced as taking bribes for cases, blackmailed by lawyers who found her guilty secret. Larry Starczek the detective who ran the original case, is still trying to get somewhere with his true love, Muriel Wynn, the prosecutor. Both are married to other people whom they don't love. The reopening of the case throws them together.

The story see-saws between Arthur's team proving the client innocent, and Muriel's team proving their case was solid all along. Except that both sides are being played. As each side sees an ascendant in their case, so do the two couples, Arthur and Gillian and Muriel and Larry, seem to come together. As their cases slide downward, so do the relationships. Since I'm not going to spoil the end for those who want to read the book, let me say that one relationship survives, and the other crashes, exactly in tune with the respective cases. Yeah, wait for the last chapter. It's a decent whodunit as well; don't get misled by the author's emphasis on the relationships.

Mad Ship is the second book (of three) in 'The Liveship Traders' series. As usual, I hit a series in the middle (what's with me??). This book is the slowest moving as well as the fattest of the three books. Most series authors walk a line between writing the second book for the fans of the first, and writing it for new entrants like me. Robin Hobb, aka Megan Lindholm, takes you on a round of introductions of practically every character who populated the previous book, including the liveships, so I'm guessing she chose the first option. Liveships are constructed of wizardwood, and are 'alive'. They are characters, too. A liveship with a good relationship with the crew and trader family it belongs to, can outrun any other ship on the world. Bingtown, where the Traders live, pays rates and taxes to the Satrap of Jaimillia. Unfortunately, the new Satrap is a spoilt teenager who is tying up with the villainous Chalcedeans. Along the Rain Wild River are the Rain Wild Traders, a secretive and deformed group who are the only source of wizardwood. The river eats any other wood than wizardwood, so only Bingtown trades with them. There are also pirates, led by Captain Kennit, who wants to be King of the Cursed Shores, the only human-populated part of the planet.

Liveships need a family member aboard. Vivacia has been taken over by Kennit, but Althea, the daughter of its old captain, still hopes to wrest it from her brother-in-law, Captain Kyle Haven (not a Trader-born), who has turned slaver to save the family's fortunes. Kennit is trying to corrupt her nephew Wintrow, but she doesn't know that. Having proven her ability to run a ship on Ophelia, she is torn between her newly rediscovered love Brashen Trell and Ophelia's captain's son, Grag Tenira, who loves her unrequitedly. There is Amber the beadmaker and wizardwood carpenter, who is on the side of the slaves and also on the side of the mad ship Paragon. Althea's sister, mother and niece are wondering whether to let her niece, Malta, marry a Rain Wild trader, Reyn. Reyn's mind is being torn up by the dragon who lives in the last dragon egg (the shell of which is wizardwood), because she wants to be freed. Sea Serpents are trying to retain their sentience, and dying out all over the planet. The Elder Race, which lived alongside the dragons, died a long time back, and only the Rain Wild people have deciphered some of their secrets.

By the time I was finally engaged with the story, I was 6/7 of the way to the end. And it bugged me that the end of the story is in part 3. Fortunately, I can guess what will happen, muwahahaha.

It's not a bad book by any means, well written. A liveship is an interesting concept. But too slow. Also, as usual, I wonder why people have to revert to Victorian customs in fantasy lands. Especially when it's clear they came from Earth at some time in the past, and well into our future.

And, drat, I read two more books in between. So I'll write them up, too, before telling you all about Goth Mountain.

Read Reversible Errors if you like legal thrillers. Scott Turow writes well. This is not his best book, though. John Grisham fans will probably like Scott Turow books.

 

Read Mad Ship if you like complex stories with lots of characters who have emotional issues that they need to resolve. Anne McCaffery readers would like these books.

 

Read The Secrets of Goth Mountain if you like fantasy placed in modern settings. Light reading with happy endings. It reminds me of Disney's Hot Lead and Cold Feet. With Added Nature Powers. Oh, and it's free in July 2014.

When is a James Bond story not a James Bond story?

Thriller | Jeffrey Deaver | Carte Blanche

If you like James Bond stories, chances are that you like the Bond movies. Every time the Bond actor changes, there is a lot of controversy. Still, Daniel Craig seems to have got the thumbs up. Until Skyfall. It may be a well-done movie, all nicely directed and shot, with a super-clever villain, nice camerawork and the like. Yet, ask anyone. Was it really a Bond movie? No. The real Bond does not age past 40.

So, does Jeffery Deaver pull off the Bond book? Take a step back. Have you actually read any Bond books? I read quite a few by Ian Fleming, and trust me, they were not worth re-reading. Almost all of the Bond fame came from celebrity endorsement. Until John Kennedy, then President of the USA, mentioned that he found them good for light reading, these books were not bestsellers. Thereafter, they became so famous that it was found churlish to complain that their writing was average, their plots jingoistic, and the humour schoolboyish. Not one of the 'Bond girls' in the books had anything like normality, neither in their appearance nor their names. Octopussy is a name? Come on!

Deaver's Bond has been updated to the 21st century, while retaining his age in the mid-30s. This Bond's history is the newer movies, not the Ian Fleming books, and so he comes with fresh backstory. Which is a good thing.

Deaver's writing is as crisp as ever. The plot fairly whizzes along. There are twists and turns in every chapter. Everyone is thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. You can almost see the movie scenes play out (I hate to say this, but they all look like Craig would fit in them, and not Brosnan). The villain has the Bond villain edge of outlandish villainy, and a name to match. Severan Hydt runs a garbage disposal empire, and loves death and decay. So much that he is willing to quietly dispose of inconvenient dead bodies for criminals.

The action starts with Bond in Serbia, faced with an Irishman, Niall Dunne, about to derail a train carrying MIC, the Bhopal chemical. But that was misdirection. Needless to say, Bond saves the day and the train. And gets drummed out of Serbia for his trouble.

The Bond women in the plot include Ophelia Maidenstone, the South African Bheka (giving her full name is a bit of a spoiler, so I'll merely say it means 'protector'), and Felicity Willing. You can't complain that the names are run-of-the-mill, but they're not as absurd as Fleming's names. One of them gets shot. What did you expect, anyway?

There are gadgets, international travel, fine wine, intra-departmental politicking, fiendish villains, doomsday devices, thousands of lives at stake, chases, shootings, confusion, you name it. Whatever you want in a Bond book, or a movie. Plus, a new, improved James Bond. Who's actually looking for a woman to share a life with.

So, when is a Bond book not a Bond book? When it's a typically Jeffrey Deaver book, with his signature twists and turns. Bond is incidental. Good choice of author, Ian Fleming Publications, but Deaver is taller by far than James Bond.

Which is a good thing.

Fantastically rich and strange stories

Fantasy/science fiction | Steampunk!

This book, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J Grant, promises on the cover that it is "An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories", and mostly lives up to its promise. You can go back to your other reading at this point, or you can grit your teeth and stick on to the very end.

Now, I'll take it story by story. (Mwahahah! You have been warned!)

Some Fortunate Future Day by Cassandra Clare has the typical Victorian Miss in a future world split asunder by war, left behind by father and other male relatives, and minded by an assortment of wondrous mechanicals (robots to us moderns). An Airman falls into her garden (into the rose bushes). The possibility of Romance wars with its likelihood. A surprisingly creepy story.

The Last Ride of the Glory Girls by Libba Bray is a Western. The Pinkertons armtwist the protagonist to infiltrate the gang of Glory Girls by pretending to help them to mend their broken mechanicals. The backstory carries the story into the future. The mechanicals are side orders.

Clockwork Fagin is by one of my favourite authors, the inventive and imaginative Cory Doctorow. In the original Charles Dickens story, Fagin finds lost children and makes thieves out of them. In this piece, the children mangled by the Muddy York Hall of Computing's immense brass machinery are put to the tender mercies of the Grinder, who runs the St Agatha's Home for disabled kids. The sisters piously hope that the Grinder is benign, but he breaks the kids and sends them out to beg. Things change when Monty Goldfarb, a teen entrant, challenges the Grinder, successfully, and all the children who are "artificers, machinists, engineers, cunning shapers and makers" get together to defeat the system. A surprisingly upbeat story, given its grim substance and "simple murder".

Seven Days Beset by Demons by Shawn Cheng shows (yes, it's a graphic story aka comic) a cunning maker of windup mechanical stories go through the (Christian) seven deadly sins, one a day.

Hand in Glove by Ysabeau S Wilce is a true Victorian sci fi story, withal complete with scorned woman detective. Murders have been committed, and things stolen from the murdered, while people right next to them saw no attacker. There is a chimpanzee who has been uplifted to intelligence--all the way to a doctorate, a tall woman scientist, a golden-haired blue-eyed duffer of a male detective, and a plot madcap enough to satisfy all your steampunk and frankenstein wishes. There's a zombie, too.

The Ghost of Cwmlech Manor by Delia Sharman starts with our village teen engineer aspirant working as domestic help for the newly arrived teen engineer lord of the manor. The fabled ghost does turn up, and how. There are villains with evil designs (you can almost see them twirl their mustaches and go mwahahaha), musical robots, romance, and common sense. "A mechanic, ... is only a scullery maid with an oilcan" is a pithy observation to be sure, and nobody should tell someone to aspire no higher because, ahem, she's a girl.

Gethsemane by Elizabeth Knox pits the claimed history of its characters against their true backstories. You go through belief to disbelief, to belief again. There is hubris and it meets a volcano. Not among my favourites in this book, it's still a good story.

The Summer People by Kelly Link has a latchkey kid who's left home alone (while sick) by her father, who has been hit by one of his periodic bursts of urgent religion. She's supposed to mind the summer houses he is the caretaker of, while sick abed. When she returns to school, her classmate is, well, almost bullied into helping her (what a doormat the classmate is!). Partners of her father turn up to demand recompense (you realise why the father suddenly recalled religion). The latchkey kid, unbeknownst to them, also minds another kind of Summer house. I hate to say, but I don't like the protagonist, and I really really feel sorry for the stupid doormat classmate, an emotion I rarely harbour towards doormat people. It's a creepy story.

Garth Nix contributed Peace in Our Time, a horror story that creeps up onto you slowly, slowly, slowly. There is retribution, though, of sorts. Not enough, by far.

Nowhere Fast by Christopher Rowe is a world where only the feds use cars (and coal burning mechanical horses with claws). In this world, a young man drives his homemade device (not really a car, he insists) across a USA where luddites rule local governments. He hits a town, finds friends, and enemies. Bicycle riding youngsters confront old choices made by ancestors and some of the eternal questions of democracy.

Finishing School by Kathleen Jennings is also a comic. Narrated by an aging orthodontist, we see her and the legendary Gwendoline Byrne at school, where the colonial masters rule by airship, and the "outspoken, left-handed daughter of an Irish outlaw and a Chinese publican" proves, against odds, that heavier-than-air flight is possible.

You know, neither of the two comics really made much of an impact on me.

Steam Girl by Dylan Horrocks is the least steampunkish story, set as it is, in the real world of today, in a school. A nerd boy and a geek girl seek hope, and perhaps find it.

Everything Amiable and Obliging by Holly Black is a Victorian romance with grasping relatives, a shy heiress, a maybe-heroic object of her childhood infatuation, taking place within a House of Automatons, all run by a Hub. The daughter of the house falls in love with one of the automatons, with what disastrous outcome, remains to be seen.

The Oracle Engine by MT Anderson is placed in ancient Rome, where Marcus Furius makes a place for himself in history. Starting from improving the solar platters for the quinquiremes, to the greater glory of creating the first oracle engine. He creates this for one of the triumvirate of: Crassus, rich and ruthless, Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Crassus had held off his fire-engine airship when Furius' childhood house burned down with his family, and the reader wonders why he is doing this for Crassus, who will use it to get guaranteed military victories. Crassus remains evil and ruthless as ever, which gives the story its inevitable end. Okay, I anticipated it, you may not.

This book was published in 2011. Steampunk remains alive and kicking heartily. It's a great collection, though I suppose I will go back to my true love (hard sf) at the earliest, as usual.

My thanks to Gord McLeod, whose "Price of..." stories were my first introduction to steampunk. Had I not read and liked those, I may not have picked this one up.

Justice, helped along by humans

Books | John McLaren | Running Rings

One of the things I like about John McLaren books is the 'poetic' or ironic justice that always gets the villains by the end. The good guys may do stupid things along the way (and usually do), but they remain essentially just. They have their foibles and weaknesses, and the villains have things going their way much of the time, but in the end, justice prevails, helped along by the good humans.

This is roughly what the story is about: 

It's not a spoiler, because I've lifted it off the back cover. Thing is, it's not fully accurate. Primrose is not the one who works with Rupert on the crime side. It's her dad who does.

Primrose starts off as a doormattish woman, whom Rupert winds around his little finger. Later on, she does show signs of fury and spine, more like a hotshot lawyer should be. Her brother Lee is a thug of the first order. Her brother Dan spends most of the time off-stage. Ronnie, her dad, is a likeable character all around. Kudos to McLaren for this, since most drug-lord characters in thrillers rarely engage the readers' sympathies. 

This despite the fact that McLaren has a very spare writing style, almost like Icelandic sagas, in which you get to know a lot about the facts, the things that happened, and little about the inner workings of the characters unless they mention something in dialogue. Well done, McLaren, and I will continue reading your books!

You should, too. These books written around the turn of the century have references to cutting edge technology, and cutting commentary on the style of management consultants and VCs. I found those sections hilarious, knowing quite a bit about how companies really do work with management consultants. Totally spot on, and why not? The author used to be a venture capitalist and director of two investment banks, where he must have closely worked with all kinds of people in that realm, the good, bad and ugly.

Yes, there is humour, all integral to the plot, which chugs along at decent clip. You find you warm up to the 'right' characters, which is a tribute to the author's skill (okay, I'll stop belabouring this point). There are also a lot of surprises along the way.

There is a happy ending, which is de rigeur for me to really like a book (necessary but not sufficient condition), and I really liked this one. Some day I'll get along to reviewing Press Send, which I read before this one, and which made me pick out John McLaren books when I can get them. But take it from me, that one was good, too.

Hmm, for those who need more help in making up their minds, I should give you an 'if you like x, you may like these'. So, similar stories but a more famous writer would be Sidney Sheldon. Plus of course if you made good in the dotcom era, or even if you were close to it, you can relate to fellow geeks in the story.