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October 19, 2010

Genesis of the Hunter by Joshua Martyr

Genesis of the Hunter by Joshua Martyr “Whoever would have guessed I would be doing what I am now… for a living. When I distance myself from the prospect it seems entirely surreal, yet here I am…” – Dr. Canterberry

Genesis of the Hunter, author Joshua Martyr’s debut novel, presents the story of a single vampire’s life during two time periods: his initial transformation in the 1400s, and his quest during modern times to fully understand the genesis of his species.

The passages that take place in Berwick Upon the Tweed during the late 1400’s detail the chance encounter with two vampires that forever changes the life of The Sentry, as we know the vampire during this time period. In fascinating detail The Sentry’s process of transformation into a vampire is chronicled, including the fact that for some reason he retains a higher level of intellectual functioning than the creatures whom he fought.

Flash forward to modern times where Gabriel, as we now know The Sentry, has employed immunologist / hematologist Dr. Canterberry to study the evolution of the vampire species. The investigations are being carried out both with urgency and in the utmost secrecy as there are people in shadowy positions of power (the CIA, Knights Templar and Illuminati are all hinted at) who seek to capture Gabriel in furtherance of their own agenda.

Author Joshua Martyr certainly has a grand vision of the story he wants to tell regarding the evolution of the creature we call vampires (a sequel is planned). As Richard Matheson’s 1954 I Am Legend did, Genesis of the Hunter contains a substantial exposition on the possible scientific explanations for the existence of the vampire, and Martyr has put considerable effort into creating a scientific backstory on the evolution of the species.

The only minor quibble I had is that the jumping back and forth was a bit distracting at times, and I believe the two time periods that alternate in the story could have stood on their own as separate books. Having said that, there is no question that Martyr’s approach is from a refreshing perspective, one that is built around neither romance nor gore but takes a more analytical approach to the legend.

So if you’re looking for a story that tackles the legend of vampires with a blend of historical setting and scientific theory, give Genesis of the Hunter a try.

Joshua Martyr was born in Toronto, Ontario. Influenced by the many childhood stories read to him, he developed an enthusiasm for literature and reading at an early age. Joshua attended York University where he received his Specialized Honours in Kinesiology. He then acquired his Bachelor of Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) of the University of Toronto in the disciplines of English and Physical Education. Genesis of the Hunter is his first novel. To learn more about Joshua Martyr, visit his website.

October 18, 2010

Draculas by Crouch, Kilborn, Strand and Wilson

He was the first. He’d been infected by the original source. That made him special. He knew he was going to change into something else. Something more powerful than what he already was. Something that would allow him to infect the whole world. – Mortimer Moorecook

If you like your vampires well mannered, well dressed, sophisticated and seductive… run in the other direction as fast as your legs will carry you.

On the other hand, if you like your vampires the old fashioned way, rude and ridiculously full of fangs and attitude, wreaking gory indiscriminate havoc on everyone in their path, Draculas is definitely the book for you.

Retired billionaire Mortimer Moorecook is dying of cancer. Convinced it has the power to somehow cure him, Mortimer purchases a hominoid skull with elongated teeth – dubbed the “Dracula Skull” by the press – which was discovered in a farmer’s field in the Romanian countryside.

Upon receipt of the skull he uses it to bite himself in the neck… and promptly goes into convulsions before being whisked off to rural, out in the sticks Blessed Crucifixion Hospital. Once there he dies on the table in the E.R. Or does he? →

October 15, 2010

Mr. Monster by Dan Wells

Being partially to blame for your own therapist’s death is a tough thing to deal with, especially because you don’t have a therapist anymore to help you through it. Sometimes irony just kicks you in the teeth like that. – John Wayne Cleaver

Yes, John Wayne Cleaver is back, dark humor intact even if his grasp on Mr. Monster is not. In his first outing, I Am Not A Serial Killer, we learned that fifteen-year-old John had been diagnosed by his therapist as a sociopath, and self-diagnosed as a (potential) serial killer.

The dark side of John’s psyche, which he calls Mr. Monster, is always just below the surface, struggling to escape while John tries desperately to keep it under wraps. That struggle became decidedly more difficult after John confronted and killed a serial killer who was stalking his town in I Am Not A Serial Killer… Mr. Monster’s now had a taste of what he wants.

As if trying to keep your homicidal impulses under control isn’t enough for a teenager to deal with, Mr. Monster finds John juggling a host of additional challenges: a mother who knows “what” John is but refuses to discuss it; an absent father; an older sister in an abusive relationship (boy does Mr. Monster want a piece of that guy); and an attempted first romance (made extremely awkward by the violent thoughts Mr. Monster has about the object of John’s attention). Oh, there are also the horribly tortured dead bodies that start turning up around town, and the FBI agent who seems a little too interested in John’s thoughts on the murders.

Mr. Monster is told from John’s point of view, as was I Am Not A Serial Killer, that first-person narrative being absolutely crucial for the reader to be privy to the war raging in John between his desire to be normal and Mr. Monster’s desire to be set free. And what a war it is. While I Am Not A Serial Killer certainly had its moments, the violence is exponentially increased in Mr. Monster. The descriptions of the damage inflicted upon the victims of the town’s new serial killer spare no detail, and the showdown depicted in the last quarter of the book between John and the killer – and between John and Mr. Monster – borders on the uncomfortable.

Rather than being gratuitous, however, author Dan Wells has developed John Wayne Cleaver with such nuance that the reader understands pulling any punches when describing the brutality John both faces and wants to commit would not be honest to the character. Wells is certainly not afraid to go places the reader may not necessarily want to, and has obviously done a tremendous amount of research into the psychology of serial killers. That John has done the same makes his level of self-awareness and struggle with Mr. Monster incredibly sympathetic… despite the fact his seriously twisted fantasies

October 12, 2010

Death Notice by Todd Ritter

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.

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