FIRST GREAT
READS FOR JANUARY, 2016
Crimson Shore, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Well. Who else
would start off a novel with such deliciously florid and torrid prose but
Messrs Preston and Child – and do it so successfully? This is the latest in a long line of
adventures starring Special FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his mysterious
ward, Constance, proficient virginal player.
The plots of each book have become progressively more outlandish,
unbelievable – and HEAPS of fun, not to mention faster paced than a speeding
bullet. And let us not forget the
addictive factor: Agent Pendergast, with
his silvery eyes, inexhaustible supply of funereal bespoke suits, seeming
invincibility against everything that villains most dastardly can throw at him,
and superlative deductive powers (he has more PhDs than you can shake a stick
at) is a protagonist who has gathered devoted fans (including me) from all over
the world – he has his own website, for goodness’ sake!
We last met him in ‘Blue Labyrinth’ (see review below); now, he and Constance are persuaded by a
noted sculptor to do a little moonlighting:
someone has stolen the sculptor’s priceless wine collection from his
home in a converted lighthouse on the wild and stormy New England coast. Would Pendergast (whose stellar reputation at
solving difficult crimes has even penetrated artistic circles) care to
investigate? There would be considerable
financial reward – but our hero, after learning that a single case of wine had
survived the theft, requests just one glorious item from that case: a bottle of Chateau Haut-Braquilanges. The Nectar of the Gods. (Needless to say, for mere mortals such as I,
its virtues would be entirely wasted.
It’s just as well Aloysius knows his stuff. I’ll take his word for it.)
Anyway.
Quelle horreur! After careful examination of the wine racks,
Pendergast is able to deduce – from a tiny finger bone (!) - that behind the empty shelves is a niche
which had contained a body – a man who was
bricked-up in said niche and left to starve to death: the wine theft was a clumsy cover-up by
people who wanted to remove the body and surrounding evidence. There is a lot more villainy afoot in this
storm swept little village than the theft of wine, distressing though that may
be to its owner and wine connoisseur Pendergast.
Naturally, the intrepid team of Pendergast and Green are
soon following clues scattered everywhere like confetti; Constance is dispatched to the local
historical society, there to uncover evidence of the remains of a coven of
Salem witches who fled from the trials and deaths of their sisters, and our
Super FBI agent uncovers dreadful evidence in the wild salt marshes of a
heinous 19th century crime – but wait: there’s more!
Constance, despite her penchant for prowling in dark
basements and stubborn preference for retro garb (long cardies and longer tweed
skirts), still harbours what can only be regarded as lustful thoughts towards
her Guardian: she lays her hand on his knee as they partake
of the delights of Pendergast’s hard won bottle of Chateau whatsit. A passionate embrace cannot be avoided, but
Aloysius Pendergast is a man of superhuman self-control, and he thrusts her
from him, crying ‘you are my ward!’
Much to Constance’s fury.
(What a hussy!) In fact she is so
irate that she stalks out into the wild and stormy night clad only in her robe
and nightie, filled with vengeful thoughts:
she will show that prissy paleface that she can solve the remaining
mystery BY HERSELF. Who needs Aloysius
the Virginal (and we are not talking about the musical instrument): just you
wait, she is the ultimate Weapon of Darkness – until someone even darker makes
his big move.
Oh, oh, OH!
Constance is in the crapola, and can only be rescued by her funereal
guardian, who realises too late that an arch enemy whom he thought dead (didn’t
Constance push him into a bubbling volcanic crater?) has almost certainly
returned. Which just goes to show that
Messrs Preston and Child can be as absurd as they like; despite the presumed death of Aloysius, the
disappearance of Constance (she has returned to the reassuring darkness of the
basement) and the resurrection of Diogenes, Pendergast’s diabolical bro, we are
still hanging onto every word and furious because this episode of epic
silliness is finished. Well, buggeration is all I can say. Preston and Child had better be writing the next adventure at the
speed of light. What fun -can’t wait. FOUR STARS
Blue Labyrinth, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Special
FBI Agent extraordinaire Aloysius Pendergast returns yet again to do battle
against the forces of evil – and not before time, I say! His myriad fans have been languishing without
him, and it’s all very well for Messrs Preston and Child to throw them a bone
from time to time with various solo novels and the combined authorship of a
series featuring a new hero, Gideon Crew, BUT.
All
that secondary activity is a mere distraction until the Master resurfaces, this
time to fight a mysterious new villain, one who has hidden his identity so well
that more than half the book is (greedily) consumed before his identity is
revealed.
In
common with all the other evil ones that Pendergast has dispatched to the
hereafter, Mystery Man is festering with hatred towards our pale hero - but he is no ordinary Dastard, for he is
motivated by revenge: thanks to an awful
genetic curse wrought upon his family by one of Pendergast’s ancestors, Mystery
Man contrives through absolutely genius planning, to infect Pendergast with the
same fatal malady - but not before leaving the dead body of Pendergast’s twin
son on the Agent’s front doorstep as a calling card and to start the ball
rolling. Pendergast’s days are numbered!
Now. Because Pendergast knows something about
absolutely everything he is able to self-medicate for a while as he searches for
his killer, but as the horrid disease starts to have its wicked way, raising
his temperature uncomfortably in his black wool suits, he realises that the
cavalry will have to be summoned – and who better to ride to his rescue than
Margo Green, anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist, doughty companion on many previous bloody
adventures at the New York Museum of Natural History. It will be her job to manufacture ASAP an
antidote from rare ingredients pinched
by none other than Constance Green, Pendergast’s mysterious ward – well, she’s
certainly mysterious to ME, as I haven’t yet found the book (and I thought I
had read them all) where she makes her first appearance.
By
any reader’s calculation she must be about 150 years old, but is as young and
glowing as the dawn; the only clue to
her advanced years is her curiously formal way of speech, and her retro fashion
sense, but – but the woman is an Amazon!
And she knows HEAPS about various acids, and how to administer them to
nasty men who should know better than to try to stop her at the Brooklyn
Botanic Garden from stealing a super-rare plant to save Pendergast’s failing
life. Constance Green is a warrior, and
she accomplishes grand larceny and mass murder in minimum time and maximum
efficiency (he’s definitely worth it!) clad only in a silk Teddy. Sorry, Constance: chemise.
Does Our Hero
survive? Well, what a silly
question: of course he does, returning
to his healthy pallor in no time at all, and enjoying a fresh supply of Armani
funeral garb. And he and Constance are
closer than ever, which is only right:
she rubbed out half an army of mercenaries that he might live! Do you suppose she fancies him? Watch this space. FOUR STARS
The
Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by Stephen King
Stephen King’s latest
collection of twenty short stories contains some that have never before been
published, plus oldies but goodies that have been revised. Preceding each is a little intro from King,
explaining to his Constant Readers his thoughts and motivation for writing the
story, and for me this was almost as entertaining as having an actual
conversation with this great storyteller.
Big
themes permeate many of the tales:
morality, guilt, greed – and fear, for what would a Stephen King book be
without that most disabling of emotions?
With accomplished ease he makes the hair on the back of one’s neck stand
and the goose bumps rise, especially in Mile 81, the tale of a car supposedly
broken down and needing assistance at a deserted rest stop on one of Maine’s
highways: those good Samaritans who stop
to help meet an awful fate, until the line of deserted cars with doors hanging
open eventually attracts attention of a more positive kind. This is vintage King at his creepy-crawliest.
‘Batman
and Robin have an Altercation’ doesn’t involve the supernatural; instead the author examines senility, its
ravages and the resentment of a loving son who dutifully takes his elderly dad
to the same restaurant every Sunday for lunch, watches him eat the same thing,
and say the same things EVERY SUNDAY – until one Sunday, when dear old dad is
being driven back to the nursing home a road-rage attack of horrific intensity
changes their lives forever: a frail,
handicapped old man still has it in him to become Batman, the Caped Crusader.
One
enormous pleasure for me when reading Mr King’s fiction is his command of the
various speech idioms throughout his vast country – and his great sense of fun. It may seem incongruous to people who see him
solely as a writer of supernatural fiction that he has such a rich vein of
humour running throughout his work; in
fact some of it is laugh-out-loud funny, and that’s as it should be, for humour
is one of the most vital weapons in our armoury with which to battle life’s pitfalls. In short (and I could
have said this first) You need the
laughs to balance the scary bits!
And
the laughs come in abundance with ‘Drunken Fireworks’, a tale of neighbourly
rivalry, initially good-natured, between a mother and son living in a little
summer shack on the poor side of the lake, versus a prosperous Italian family
living on the rich side of the lake.
Every 4th of July it is the custom for people to let off
fireworks, and what began as ‘who has the biggest sparklers’ turns into a
take-no-prisoners battle to the bitter end, the whole fiasco narrated by the
shame-faced son from ‘the poor side’.
What a gem.
To
be followed by ‘Summer Thunder’, the last story of the collection. Such was its impact that I am still thinking
about it – because it could happen so EASILY.
Nuclear
bombs have been detonated. (Mr King does
not say how many, or who did the deed, but think how many countries have
them!) The world is dying and he
introduces us to a landscape with few people left to enjoy the last sunlight. The Southern Hemisphere is buried under a
poison cloud and it is something of a miracle that Robinson and his dog Gandalf
(a stray he found after the Event) are still alive and can enjoy the sun’s
rays. Robinson is almost paralysed with grief; his wife and daughter are dead, as is most of
the population, and there is evidence everywhere in the country area in which
he lives that the wildlife is dying in droves – but he still feels that he can
carry on as long as Gandalf is OK.
There
is no happy ending to this powerful little story. With consummate skill Mr King demonstrates
why man is the most ferocious animal on the planet, destroying his beautiful
home and every life form in it to achieve dominance – over who, when there is
nothing left alive? FIVE STARS
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