Books I Read April 2023 (Part Two)

 

This is the second installment of the books I read, or tried to read, in April 2023. There were nine books altogether in April, seven of which I completed.

Out of Time by Dave Sinclair B-

I had a reason to have a look at the top 100 free thriller-espionage books on Amazon this month – my book, The Girl on the Kerb was as high as #5 on the list. So while I was there, I decided to pick up a few, just to see what an actual espionage thriller reads like. This is the first one I read, and surprisingly, it had a SF premise, that being that a black MI6 agent, Atticus Wolfe, from 2024 finds himself back in 1963 as a result of a “terrorist” that he was attempting to capture, setting off some sort of time-bomb (a pun) device.

Atticus Wolfe is knocked out in the time-blast and awakens in the 1963 hospital. Because of his MI6 ID in his wallet, a contemporary MI6 agent is called in. Wolfe convinces this agent that he has some how traveled back in time, showing him his cell phone and smartwatch. This agent recruits him for M16, but for fear of disrupting the time lines, keeps his time-traveling aspect secret with forged paperwork saying that he was a transfer from Naval Intelligence. As I mentioned, Wolfe is a black man, so he faces the prejudices of the day as well as the snotty attitudes of the upper class employees of the MI6 of that day. Because he is an outsider, he is given the task of finding a possible mole in the organization, and collects a team of similar outcasts, a woman, a gay man (still a crime in England at the time) and a young man who operated the elevator. In addition, Wolfe is still concerned that his appearance is changing history, as he knows of no incident in the history of the MI6 of his time to explain his appearance or the current mole situation.

I thought it was well written with an engaging lead character. While the time travel aspect was interesting twist, but the gee wiz, I can’t do this because it hasn’t been invented yet, and all the cultural references struck me, as someone who was actually alive in 1963, as little too much wikipedian, i.e. cherry picking facts of the era from wikipedian articles. Still, there were aspects of the story I really like, along with others that I felt were a bit over the top, and may not have made sense. Now, having just read Raymond Chandler, where the same thing can be said, I can only say that I read Chandler for his writing, and can forgive him for his plots. I can’t say the same for Sinclair, but in his defense, I have a feeling that the parts I thought were a bit over the top were probably the expected tropes and story beats for this type of story. In any event, we’ll see as I picked up half a dozen free thriller-espionage books, including two more by Sinclair; all the first book in a three book series.

Goliath, A Ryan Mitchell Thriller by Richard Turner DNF 8%

Another free title, this time in the free Thriller-adventure list. By page 14 the body count exceeded the page number. And if that wasn’t enough, in an opening scene set in 1931 he writes “...had ensured that all the major media outlets throughout the country…” “Media outlets.” Nothing bumps me out of the story more than using modern lingo in story set in the past. Between the body count and the hokey, tropey writing, DNF.

A Book of Truths, A Mui Thriller Book One by Ty Hutchinson C

Another free thriller-adventure book. A story with a combination of a first person narrator, Mui, a 14 year old girl who has been trained to be an assassin, combined with a third person parallel story about a book used as a courier of secret information that people are being killed for which all gets tied together near the end. It read like a B grade story until the D grade ending. 

The more I think about it, the more I'm disappointed by the book. First because everything was too convenient for the author. But I’ll get to that in a moment. The first thing that you need to know is that this is only the first of seven books featuring the Mui, a 14 year old assassin in training, so that the mystery of the deadly book isn’t solved. The second is that the protagonist, Mui is a cold blooded murderer. Not my cup of tea. But going beyond that, I found it really hard to suspend my disbelieve about the story. The narrator, Mui, is supposed to be a 14 year old girl, I guess so that the series can use the boarding school trope. Mui is said to have spent her first 12 years training to be an assassin in a remote Azerbaijan mountain with a secret set of assassins, until her mother, also a retried assassin, (who has her own series of books) finds her and takes her to Greece and a small hotel she now runs. There she interacts with the natives until she’s sent to the boarding school in California. Everywhere she goes she seems to be speaking, and being understood, in English like a native speaker, as does her best friend Nanuli, a girl from a small village at the base of the mountains in Azerbaijan, (with an internet connection that allowed video calls). Really? How did she, and her small village friend learn English? And if the assassins all spoke English, how did her friend, and how did she learn Greek? She shipped off to San Francisco, and seems perfectly at home in a big American city, shopping apparently with credit cards… In short, save for the backstory, she’s acting like a like an American girl several years older than her actual years. It seems to me to be a cheat to give your character an exotic background for a story, and then ignore all the implications of it. Not for me, but if you don’t think to hard, and don’t care about rooting for a cold blooded killer – who wants to be a cold blooded killer for hire – then this is not a bad book, and you will have a lot more stories to enjoy.

The Black Tongued Thief by Christopher Buehlman B-

Another fantasy book. For someone who doesn’t like fantasy, I’m certainly reading enough of them these days. I forget what inspired me to put this on hold at the library, but when it became available I downloaded it and read it. Not a bad book. It is a first person narrative with an engaging rouge, the title character, and is written with a lot of wit and humor. Plus it is a quest story, and though the stakes are high, there is no all-powerful black veil of pure evil threatening the land. It is also the first of a series, but does have a fairly closed plot. So we start with an A rated book. What are its characteristics that knocked it down to a B-? First, being a fantasy, you can have your magic do anything, and use it for the hero pull some magic out of his or her hat to get out of any situation. And the author did. I don’t like that, I can’t help but think its sort of cheating. Second, and this one is on me, I’m a rather impatient man, and reader, so that with too much elaborate world-building lore, history, and politics the author includes, I can get a little impatient to get on with the story. You need that for a fantasy, but a lot thrown in without context, can be a bit overpowering. And, without apology, I tend to skim or skip over battle and fight scenes, songs and poems, which this story had many instances of. In some cases, needlessly so, I thought. Indeed, there was one instance where one chapter ends before the fight, and the next opens after the fight so that we know the result, any yet, the author takes us back over the entire fight. I skipped that entirely. In short, I found the story well written, maybe just a little too elaborate, too magical, too violent, and simply too long to give it more than a B-  I'd also knock off points for that extremely cheap looking and ugly cover, but it wasn't likely the author's fault. I hope.

Next week, yet another book review post; Part One of the Books I Read in May. I'm reading a lot of books these days since I am not writing anything at the moment. When I am writing, I like to keep my head clear of other stories, so I do not read much, if anything, while I am writing my own.