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October 11, 2010

Investigation Discovery: Hardcover Mysteries

Investigation Discovery: Hardcover Mysteries Investigation Discovery is launching a new series tonight (Monday, October 11th at 9pm) called Hardcover Mysteries:

Hardcover Mysteries travels inside the minds of America’s most popular novelists to explore the crossover from fact to fiction. How much of today’s great mystery writing springs from the imagination… and how much of it is ripped from the headlines?

In this new series, top fiction crime writers share stories of real-life cases that inspired them to write, or captured their fascination.

Authors being featured: David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, Sara Paretsky, Lisa Scottoline, Linda Fairstein, Harlan Coben, Kathy Reichs, and Joseph Wambaugh.

For more information, visit the Investigation Discovery: Hardcover Mysteries website.

October 07, 2010

My Scorpio Soul by Claudia Hoag McGarry

“People can do nice things but it doesn’t mean they are nice people. Remember that.” – Tempest McTierney

Tempest McTierney certainly knows what she’s talking about, as it is a decidedly not nice person she and her family are dealing with in author Claudia Hoag McGarry’s debut novel, My Scorpio Soul.

Told in flashback from the prison cell where she’s been incarcerated for 10 years, Tempest recounts her family’s terrorization over a period of multiple years at the hands of a stalker.

Once a happily married woman with children on the cusp of college and a bright future of retirement and grandchildren ahead of her, My Scorpio Soul is the tale of the McTierney family’s descent into hell.

Initially, they believe the stalker is linked to a wrongful termination case Tempest’s husband won against the hospital he works for and where Tempest volunteers; someone resentful that the McTierneys “showed up” the hospital and made the board of directors “look bad.”

But as hang up calls become threatening letters, notes left on windshields evolve into sabotaged vehicles, and dead animals on the doorstep give way to actual home infiltration they realize their stalker’s obsession is something much more personal… and dangerous. That the reader knows – ostensibly – how the story turns out does nothing to take the edge off the sense of dread that builds relentlessly throughout Tempest’s recounting of events.

Between McGarry’s quick-take, diary entry style chapters and engaging premise, I literally could not put this book down and finished it in one sitting. My Scorpio Soul is a blunt look at the lengths a stalker will go to in effort to gain control over the target of their obsession, and the lengths one victim will resort to in effort to protect her family and preserve her sanity.

Claudia Hoag McGarry is a New Orleans native but presently lives in California and teaches writing. She has three adult children. Her husband is a musician and college professor. She has written ten feature length screenplays, three of which are “biopic.” My Scorpio Soul is her first novel. To learn more about Claudia, visit her website.

October 04, 2010

‘If you want to play God, be a writer.’ by Reed Farrel Coleman

I’m very pleased to welcome author Reed Farrel Coleman to Musings of an All Purpose Monkey as part of his blog tour for Innocent Monster, the sixth book in his Moe Prager series (Tyrus Books, Oct. 5, 2010).

If you want to play God, be a writer. That’s what I’ve told writing students for years. Because, when you think about it, the blank page allows you to create or recreate the universe in any way your imagination so chooses. Even if you opt to work within established parameters, the framework of a cozy, let’s say, or a PI novel, what happens within those boundaries is still completely up to the author.

A brilliant example of this is Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music (brilliant title, as well). Pretty much in the form of a classic hard-boiled detective novel—something I know a little bit about—Lethem’s book features super-evolved animals like gun-toting kangaroos. He does this and he makes it work. And that’s the trick of it. Sure, you can create any universe you want, but the challenge is making it work for the reader.

While the Moe Prager novels don’t feature gun-toting kangaroos, that doesn’t mean I didn’t make some serious choices when I started down this road. I knew the Brooklyn neighborhood of Coney Island would be the central allegorical feature of the novels. It would be Moe’s touchstone. I was weary of the morose, hard-drinking, hard-hitting, quick-on-the-draw, white loner PI. That character had been done to death. And no matter what I would do, I wasn’t going to better the masters of that character. So I chose instead to make my PI Jewish, happily married, a father, a drinker, but not a drunk. He would have a stable source of income. But the best choice I made was to have Moe Prager age in real time as the years go by. →

October 01, 2010

The Thousand by Kevin Guilfoile

“From almost the very beginning, the Thousand have been rumored to be at war with themselves. A secret civil war that has been raging for millennia and is still going on right under our noses, right across our front pages.” – Professor Cepeda

Trying to summarize The Thousand would be only slightly easier than attempting to herd a pack of cats across a rushing river. How can one adequately summarize a book that includes as major plot points Mozart’s infamously unfinished Requiem in D Minor, Greek mathematician / philosopher Pythagoras, experimental brain implants, a ten-year-old murder case, a manufactured blackout of Chicago, and an ancient conspiracy guarded by a secret society known as the Thousand?

Right, you can’t. So let’s just get on to why it all works. Brilliantly. Author Kevin Guilfoile has the amazing ability to create perfect order out of what should rightfully be utter chaos. He takes multiple, complicated plot lines and seamlessly weaves them into an almost suffocatingly intense blanket of action and suspense.

He does this in large part with his absolutely pitch-perfect characterizations, both of the people and locales. The story takes place in Las Vegas and Chicago, both of which are described with such vivid detail the reader feels as if he was actually there. The descent of Chicago into rioting and disorder during a blackout manufactured by the Thousand as cover for their activities is particularly harrowing.

But there is no question that the star of The Thousand is Canada Gold, Nada to her friends. As a young teenager Nada was the recipient of an experimental neurostimulator implanted directly into her brain as a last ditch effort to control her severe attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Not only did it cure her, it left her with some powerful unintended side-effects which the adult Nada learned to use to her benefit, first as a gambler then as a private investigator. As described by an attorney whose client is on the wrong side of a Nada investigation:

Ms. Gold, who grew up in the same house as a cold-blooded killer, possesses a unique set of abilities. She reads lips in two languages. She can hear conversations from across a crowded room. Allegedly she has a photographic memory, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that her idle thoughts can bend spoons. She’s a freak of nature, and my firm has been burned by her so many times we seriously discussed conducting all our business in Navajo.

Unfortunately for Nada, because of the unique abilities it has the power to bestow there are members of one faction of the Thousand who want her implant – over her dead body if necessary – so they can give it to someone handpicked by them who will use its enhancing powers to help the Thousand achieve their goals. The resulting race between the two factions to get to Nada first, and her dawning

October 01, 2010

Bog Man by John McAllister from Requiems for the Departed

Combining ancient Celtic legends and the amazing powers of preservation found in peat bogs, John McAllister has created in “Bog Man” a wonderfully atmospheric murder investigation set in the lowlands of Iron Age Britain.

Thrust directly into an investigation already in progress, the reader joins Tarlóir, a displaced hill-man whose job it is to bring order to the lowlands, in his search to identify who killed the “bog man” body he’s been called to investigate. Was the man a victim of murder, or a ritual sacrifice? In order to find out Tarlóir will have to confront a secretive, closed community known as the Morrigans (surely a nod to the anthology’s publisher, Morrigan Books).

A man once young and wild for whom “upholding the law of the Feni was lifetime penalty for his own youthful revolt,” Tarlóir has finally reached a thoughtful, contemplative point in his life. Patiently picking through the clues left for him by the bog man’s corpse and surround articles Tarlóir brings to mind Gil Grissom (CSI) as an ancient Highlander or an Iron Age Sherlock Holmes.

McAllister has great skill at evoking powerful images and vividly brings to life a very different time and place. Readers can almost feel the peat bog sucking greedily at their feet, and will sympathize with Tarlóir’s longing for the “honest cold” of the highlands, not the sneaky “persistent wind” of the lowlands that’s always finding “a gap at his neckline and chilling his back.”

As can be the case with a short story the experience felt a bit stilted, with the ending in particular seeming rather abrupt. All in all, however, I found “Bog Man” to be both an enjoyable read and a refreshing change of pace as far as the setting for a murder investigation goes.

Note: This review was originally published on the Spinetingler website as part of their Requiems for the Departed anthology review project.

September 29, 2010

Think of a Number by John Verdon

“The worst pain in our lives comes from the mistakes we refuse to acknowledge – the things we’ve done that are so out of harmony with who we are that we can’t bear to look at them.” – Mark Mellery

Former detective Dave Gurney is a man trying desperately to be in harmony with himself. Recently retired from the NYPD as their top man in homicide, he and his wife, Madeleine, have retired to an idyllic little town in upstate New York.

Try as he might, however, he just can’t completely detach himself from his deep-seated desire to solve puzzles and figure out what makes killers tick. And so it is a double-edged sword that lands in his lap when an old classmate, Mark Mellery, seeks him out for help with some mysterious, threatening letters he’s been receiving.

The letters are all in the form of poems that set forth a puzzle, the first of which also included a “game” – think of any number between 1 and 1000 and then open the small envelope included. Mellery was understandably freaked out when after picking 658, he thought at random, he opened the envelope to find written on the paper inside it… 658.

As the letters are thinly veiled threats against Mellery’s life, Gurney tries to convince him to take them to the police. Mellery refuses and makes Gurney promise that he will not either. When Mellery is brutally murdered in his home a few days later, however, Gurney has no choice but to take all the information he has to local law enforcement. When more people are killed, including a police officer, Gurney is reluctantly invited to join the investigation as a consultant. →

September 27, 2010

Banned Books Week: 10 Most Challenged Books of 2009

Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

According to the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the following were the 10 most challenged books in 2009 as reported to them:

1. “TTYL; TTFN; L8R, G8R” (series), by Lauren Myracle. Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs

2. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. Reasons: Homosexuality

3. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky. Reasons: Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Anti-Family, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide

4. “To Kill A Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee. Reasons: Racism, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

5. Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer. Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group

6. “Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger. Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

7. “My Sister’s Keeper,” by Jodi Picoult. Reasons: Sexism, Homosexuality, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs, Suicide, Violence

8. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things,” by Carolyn Mackler. Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

9. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker. Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

10. “The Chocolate War,” by Robert Cormier. Reasons: Nudity, Sexually Explicit, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group

The American Library Association has also put together an interactive map drawn from cases documented (2007-2009) by ALA and the Kids’ Right to Read Project, a collaboration of the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. The map details specifically where each challenge came from, what book(s) it was for, and the reason given for the challenge.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, visit their official website.

September 24, 2010

Banned Books Week 2010: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

CBanned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Tomorrow marks the start of Banned Books Week:

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings. Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, visit their official website.

September 22, 2010

Numb by Sean Ferrell

“You’re not even sure of who you are, let alone what you want to be.” – Mal

When a bloodied stranger with no memory of who he is or how he got there wanders into Mr. Tilly’s Circus in south Texas, the only thing the battered and confused man can think to tell the curious workers who surround him is, “I’m numb.” Though he means it literally, that proclamation also comes to be his name.

Numb’s ability to absorb physical punishment without feeling the resulting pain makes for a highly successful circus act, one that finds him pounding nails through his hands and feet, making creative use of a staple gun, and acting as a human dart board for members of the crowd.

Yet it’s only when he finds himself thrust into a wrestling match with a lion that Numb finally realizes his future is going nowhere, in large part because he doesn’t know his past. And so, along with best friend and fellow circus performer Mal, Numb heads to New York City in search of his identity.

Once in New York Numb’s life changes dramatically, as what had previously made him a freak and outcast in the circus garners him popularity and fame in the big city. Be it doing television commercials, magazine cover photo shoots, or even appearing on Letterman, Numb’s problems appear to be over. And that’s when author Ferrell pulls a brilliant slight of hand, taking what initially appeared to be on the surface a straightforward “Hey, look at the freak!” story and downshifting into a much more serious gear.

Through his interactions with those he meets in NYC (his agent, who may or may not have Numb’s best interests at heart; an ambitious, and slightly psychotic, model he meets on a photo shoot; the beautiful – and blind – artist who appears to be the only one to “see” him for who he truly is) Numb comes to understand the necessity of pain; its role as the counterpoint to pleasure. Despite all his apparent success, Numb realizes he’s stuck in a limbo world of sorts, wondering if he’ll ever really be able to feel joy if he doesn’t know what it is to experience pain.

Numb is a clever, offbeat tale of a man searching – both literally and spiritually – for the answer to the ultimate question: who am I? I’ll leave it to you to discover whether Sean Ferrell allows Numb to figure out the answer to that age-old question, but I will tell you that Ferrell sure as hell has served up a book that makes you think about how we define ourselves. Is it by what’s inside, or by what is reflected back to us by others? And when an author has the chops to both entertain readers as well as make them think, that’s a beautiful thing.

Numb

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