Q: All the Queen's Men

All The Queen’s Men by Linda Howard
Genre: romantic suspense

Linda Howard is an immensely popular writer - as you can tell from the size of her name vs the name of the book. Like many famous genre women (Janet Evanovich, Nora Roberts/JD Robb, etc), she started out in Romance (the only genre where, traditionally, being female wasn’t an obstacle to getting published), and eventually shifted into her own niche. She was a charter member of Romance Writers of America. Her first book was published in 1980, and she’s been pretty prolific – she has over fifty books in print, and a ton of short stories.

Linda Howard will always be one of my favorite authors, though for me, her last few books (entertaining as they were) don’t have quite the same unique freshness of most of the books she wrote in the late ‘90s through about 2007 or so. She seems to be moving into paranormals, though, so maybe she just got bored. She’s still an incredibly skilled storyteller, and I’ll still buy any suspense she writes, just in case that special spark comes back.

Anyway!

General premise The last time Niema Burdock met John Medina, she and her husband were part of John’s team on a CIA Black Ops mission to Iran. It went terribly wrong, Niema’s husband was killed, and afterwards Niema transferred to a stateside desk job.

Even though John is sure Niema blames him for her husband’s death, he can’t help keeping tabs on her. When he’s assigned to stop a French arms dealer who is supplying terrorists, he insists Niema is the only communications expert with the background and skills to help him infiltrate the dealer’s circle and plant surveillance bugs…

All The Queen’s Men is my favorite of Howard’s books. I liked the hero, the heroine, and the villain. But I would also recommend Up Close and Dangerous (a sabotaged private plane crashes on a snow-covered mountainside in the middle of nowhere), Cover of Night (the bad guys decide to hold up an entire “frontier” town), and White Lies (this is kind of an older one, so the hero is a bit, um, harsh, but the concept, far-fetched as it was, was well-executed).

P: The Pillars of the Earth & Prison Break

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Genre: historical

Calling this an unusual book is a bit of an understatement. Ken Follett was already immensely popular for his political thrillers. And then he changed tracks, bringing everything about his previous books (fast-paced suspense, a deep understanding of human nature, unflinching violence, intricate political and family intrigue) to a book about building a 12^th century cathedral. It's been on bestseller lists ever since. Who would have thought?

I’ll quote the Goodreads description:

This book tells the tale of a twelfth-century monk driven to do the seemingly impossible: build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has ever known.

Everything readers expect from Follett is here: intrigue, fast-paced action, and passionate romance. But what makes The Pillars of the Earth extraordinary is the time—the twelfth century; the place—feudal England; and the subject—the building of a glorious cathedral. Follett has re-created the crude, flamboyant England of the Middle Ages in every detail. The vast forests, the walled towns, the castles, and the monasteries become a familiar landscape. Against this richly imagined and intricately interwoven backdrop, filled with the ravages of war and the rhythms of daily life, the master storyteller draws the reader irresistibly into the intertwined lives of his characters—into their dreams, their labors, and their loves: Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the ravishingly beautiful noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman of the forest who casts a terrifying curse. From humble stonemason to imperious monarch, each character is brought vividly to life.

The building of the cathedral, with the almost eerie artistry of the unschooled stonemasons, is the center of the drama. Around the site of the construction, Follett weaves a story of betrayal, revenge, and love, which begins with the public hanging of an innocent man and ends with the humiliation of a king.

At once a sensuous and endearing love story and an epic that shines with the fierce spirit of a passionate age, The Pillars of the Earth is without a doubt Ken Follett's masterpiece.

Prison Break

Genre: television

Lincoln Burroughs, already a felon with a lengthy record, is accused of murdering the vice president’s brother and incarcerated at Fox River Penitentiary. The evidence is clear (fingerprints on the gun, surveillance video, bloody clothes), and his execution is fast-tracked through the system. His younger brother, Michael Scofield (a brilliant, successful, and squeaky-clean structural engineer), believes Burroughs is innocent and is being framed for the murder of someone many high-powered people wanted to kill.

So Scofield comes up with an elaborate plan to break his brother out of prison, has the plans (and the blueprint for the state penitentiary) worked into a tattoo that covers his entire upper body – and then holds up a bank and discharges a weapon, to ensure that he ends up in the same place as his brother.

Because one can't have too
many pictures of
Wentworth Miller. :)

This show has some of the best antagonists/villains I’ve ever seen. I love John Abruzzi the crime boss (played by Peter Stormare), and Robert Knepper does an amazing job as Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell. I love how Scofield’s ridiculously well-laid plans keep taking left turns as he meets up with real-world complications, and as the number of people breaking out of prison with him gets larger and larger.

This show has many things I eat up in fiction – ensemble cast, politics, intrigue, humor, wit, and super-smart people on opposite sides of the same issue. It won a stack of awards while it was on air. The second and third seasons were filmed in Texas. Lots of celebrity sightings around here. J

L: Lord of the White Hell, The Lion of Senet, & The Lost Painting

Lord of the White Hell by Ginn Hale
Genre: fantasy

Kiram is a mechanist prodigy, and the first of his people admitted to the prestigious Sagrada academy. Because he's not a native, he's bullied and ostracized, and also forced to room with a popular guy everyone else is afraid to sleep near - Javier Tornesal, whose family is powerful and rich, but cursed. Kiram is instantly attracted to Javier, and Javier seems to return the sentiment. But the relationship, acceptable in Kiram's land, is forbidden in Javier's, and it could get them killed - if the White Hell doesn't kill them first.

Stellar world-building, danger, adventure, forbidden love, and the pain of not belonging. Good stuff all round.

The Lion of Senet by Jennifer Fallon

Genre: fantasy

My favorite fantasy novel of all time: A brilliant mathematician calculated when the second sun would disappear, vital information for keeping the religious establishment in power. In the midst of war, he vanished without telling anyone when the Age of Darkness would begin. But High Priestess Belagren has found another gifted mathematician in seventeen-year-old Dirk Provin, and even though Dirk's mother is a political dissident who hates the High Priestess and everything she represents, Belagren's determined to have him.

This is probably my favorite fantasy of all time (oh, did I say that already?). It influenced my tastes so strongly that I no longer feel magic is a necessary element in fantasy, while I'm less likely to pick up a fantasy novel if it doesn't contain intrigue at high levels (politics or religion). I also love that “the fate of the world hangs in the balance” – and no one cares because they’re fighting to be in charge after the big catastrophe. Jennifer Fallon always takes tropes and turns them on their heads. Sometimes really upsetting people with her choices, as with the ending of her “Immortal Prince” series. But that’s a different discussion.

Dirk Provin is my favorite character under 30 (Alan from the Demon’s Lexicon books comes a close second, but we’re never in his POV, so I can’t count him.). Dirk is definitely a scholar (studying medicine) and not a warrior. He's also witty, brilliant, in serious trouble, and ten steps ahead of everyone, projecting confidence even when he's quailing inside (which makes the rare times he can't project confidence that much more powerful), thinking on his feet when things go wrong. If I recall correctly, Jennifer Fallon's premise for him was "How many bad things can a character do and still be sympathetic?" That surprised me, because there's obvious logic in all his decisions, and I was rooting for him the whole time. I've probably read this book once a year for the last ten years.

One more L book:

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr

Genre: literary? Suspense?

It’s about an Italian student and an art restorer tracking down a painting by my favorite Old Master artist, Caravaggio. Caravaggio, a 16th century painter, would have fit in quite well with some of our modern celebrities. When he wasn't annoying the religious establishment by painting the saints as uneducated bumpkins with dusty feet or using local, well-known prostitutes as his models for female religious icons, he was constantly breaking the law and getting into fights. Most of what we know of his life comes from criticisms written by contemporaries and a detailed police rap sheet.


He killed someone (over a tennis match or a girl, no one’s quite sure) and fled Rome, spending the rest of his life painting on the run (and making tons of money doing so). He was taken in by the Knights of Malta, until he pissed one of them off, and they started chasing him, too. Caravaggio was only 39 when he died (possibly from complications of being wounded by someone trying to kill him, though lead poisoning from his paints is also a likely culprit), but he left a lasting impact on the art world unmatched by many of the artists people can name.

The Cardsharps, just across town at the Kimbell Art Museum.
Caravaggio made genre paintings immensely popular at a time
when most paintings were religious or mythological in subject.
But the Church is where the money was, so most of his later
paintings were religious.

The book takes place in modern times and is more about the history of one of his paintings than about his own story. But I liked the book, and I love Caravaggio.

I've seen a handful of Caravaggios in person, and there's a luminous, storytelling quality to them that doesn't come across on the internet. This one is of an innocent boy being cheated by cardsharps. A large number of 16th and 17th century artists from all over Europe made their own versions of this painting.

Random books: All British for Christmas week

Oops. I was going to post a version of this on Christmas eve, but life got in the way. I hope everyone spent Christmas (or the holiday season) the way they wanted to spend it, with the people they wanted to be with.

Books! More specifically, British books!

The Atheist's Guide to Christmas by Ariane Sherine
Genre: nonfiction

We read this collection for one of my book clubs. Many (if not most) of the comedians, philosophers, scientists, and authors who wrote chapters for it are English. Some entries are stellar, some I just skipped because I was falling asleep. As one would expect with any semi-random group, the authors are split about half and half between those who enjoy Christmas and those who don't.

My favorite chapter is "How To Escape From Christmas" by Andrew Mueller. People trying to opt out of Christmas dinners/shopping/decorating/craziness are usually either dismissed as Scrooges or immediately invited to the house of everyone with an extra chair, which means instead of guiltlessly sitting by the fire at home, you now have to delicately make your excuses, or lie to your thoughtful friends.

I LOVE Mueller's suggestion for getting out of this predictable discomfort - get on a plane late on December 24th that will be refueling in some conveniently non-Christian spot, and arrive in Australia on December 26th for beaches and sunshine. I think I'll try this next year.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: historical fiction/suspense

This one's going to take a while. And while it still has the big issue I can't ignore (solving everything using clues not mentioned before), it turns out Sherlock isn't boring at all. I'm really entertained by the character-in-print in a way I'm not by the popular-culture version of him.

For one thing, he doesn't instantly know everything. He doesn't know the earth orbits the sun, for instance, because the information is of absolutely no use to him. And once Watson told him, he resolved to instantly forget it, because "Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." (A Study In Scarlet, Page 21). Specialization, folks. Sherlock said it first-ish.

I must admit I'm slogging through a WTF section right now about the misdeeds of a particular Mormon sect. But I'm hoping it'll eventually make its way back to 19th century London.

Unraveled by Courtney Milan
Genre: historical romance

Courtney Milan is my favorite romance author (I believe she's American; her characters are English, hence the inclusion in this post). I don't say that lightly, because the Romance genre is teeming with great writers who are routinely dismissed because they are often women who write about romance (men who write romance but call it something else, like Nicholas Sparks, get glowing reviews, accolades, and movies based on their books). Milan is not only an expert in Georgian/Regency/Victorian-era English law and law court decisions (and is (or was once) a lawyer in her day job), but she writes the most intriguing characters working through gut-twisting situations.

For instance! Unraveled is part of a series about three brothers. Their deranged mother abused them relentlessly. They couldn't go to anyone for help because their mother was the respected widow of the local lord, and very charitable, besides. She let their sister die because it was "God's will". She named them each for Bible verses. Not Biblical characters. VERSES. Of course they all go by shortened versions - Ash, Smite, and Mark.

When Ash takes off for India to make his fortune, their mother tries to kill Smite by starving him in the flooded cellar. Mark rescues him, and they run off, surviving on the streets of Bristol before their brother comes back and finds them. Ash is rich now, and determined to give his younger brothers everything he wanted and didn't have - an education at Eton, big houses, power. But Smite and Mark have now formed a bond that seems to exclude Ash, no matter what he tries. This is all backstory, but just think of what a skillful writer could do with characters with this sort of psychological damage.

Ash's story is Unveiled. He's set himself a mission to destroy the wealthy distant relation who refused to help them when they were in need. His love interest? The daughter of that family, who is equally determined to save her family from social and financial destruction.

Mark's story is Unclaimed. Mark is a sincere, funny, likeable guy who writes a hugely popular book on chastity. His love interest? A courtesan who's been hired by a political rival to take him down.

Smite's story is Unraveled. He is a dedicated magistrate. His love interest is a runner for the local crime boss.

Which brings me back to what I think is the oddest criticism made of romance novels. I don't hear complaints of fantasy for being stories where the hero always fulfills the quest. No one criticizes the police or detectives in suspense thrillers for always catching the bad guy. Why is the idea that two people are going to end up together at the end of the story so unpalatable? The question in genre stories is almost never If. It's How. And Courtney Milan is a master at the how. LOVE these books. Fiction doesn't get any better than this.

Kate: the Making of a Princess by Claudia Joseph
Genre: biography

Thirty pages in I was a little worried, because all I'd gotten was a detailed account of all her relatives who had suffered horrifying deaths in 19th century coal mines. But I'm in the WWII era now. It's a fascinating part of British history that's sobering and humanizing to me, because I tend to think of Britain as historically wreaking havoc on the rest of the world.

And that's last week's post!

Lottery winners

In writing a completely different post about this book, I realized I'd read other books about lottery winners. This is my favorite, though...

The Rich Part of Life by Jim Kokoris

Genre General fiction

How it starts Teddy's mother played the lottery for years before she was killed in a car accident. On a mournful whim, Teddy's father plays her lottery numbers - and wins $190 million. Eleven-year-old Teddy starts planning out what he wants to buy, beginning with two mountain bikes for himself and one for five-year-old Tommy, and a farm in Wisconsin.

General premise Teddy's father, a civil war historian, hasn't yet recovered from his wife's death, so Teddy takes care of little Tommy and keeps an eye on his dad. When they win the lottery, in swoop his uncle (a director of failed vampire movies), and his great-aunt (who constantly exclaims in Greek even though she's lived her entire life in Chicago). Everyone in the small town wants a share of the money. Since his father isn't around much, Teddy gets to relay the requests, including those from a classmate who regularly writes his African penpal to ask for money; the school officials who want a new furnace; and the hot woman across the street, whose son has warned Teddy that if their parents sleep together, he's going to kick Teddy's ass.

Page 12 Quote

"When did your wife die?" a reporter asked.
"A year ago. A year ago today actually. Yes, today."
"She's up in heaven though," Tommy said. "She's up in heaven and we're going to to pay some money to get her to come back."

Lottery winners

I've known people who won the diversity lottery, but not millions in cash - not that I can think of, anyway. Apparently more lottery winners are back in debt in a few years than go on to live a long life of luxury. This American Life had a piece about a guy whose job was buying the remaining annual payments off broke lottery winners so they could pay their current bills.

The Rich Part of Life isn't exactly a rags-to-riches story, and the lottery is mostly a catalyst for change. Teddy's dad is the only one in town unaffected by the money, since, except for his wife's death, he already has the life he wants. Because his father can't - or won't - pay attention, Teddy gets a lot of the attention his dad should be dealing with: the confusion (and scorn) because they haven't bought anything extravagant, the concerned questions when little Tommy starts acting up in school, and the plethora of outrageous requests that is the daily life of lottery winners.

I'll write about child narrators in a different post, because that's a fascinating part of this book and where the constant humor comes from.

Pot of Gold by Judith Michael
Genre: single title romance? Romantic suspense?

I haven't read Pot of Gold in years, but it also revolves around an introvert whose lottery win upends her life. Claire's biggest problem isn't managing the money or the requests for it, but the rich parasites who want to prey on her and lure in her gorgeous, underage daughter with fame, fashion and drugs.

Claire is a thirty-four-year-old woman, and not particularly stunning or take-charge. Kind of rare in this golden age of aggressive YA fiction. How often do you see a fully-dressed adult woman (including her face! Sort of) on a fiction cover these days?


Burn by Linda Howard
Genre: romantic suspense

Jenner has finally gotten used to her massive lottery win. But a vacation with her best friend turns into a nightmare when they're taken hostage by a group that doesn't seem interested in money.

Leaving aside the Stockholm Syndrome aspects, this was an interesting experience for me. I read a lot about finance in school and beyond. Seeing the same information over and over in articles and web clips always made me wonder if people really needed to hear such basic things about accounting and debt. Near the beginning of Burn, Jenner's fumbling with a phone book, trying to figure out under what she should look up a money manager. The scene was masterfully set up, and eye-opening. More knowledge is available to us now than at any other time in history. But only for those with access to it.

Siblings!

Siblings aren't celebrated nearly enough. And when they are the focus of the story, rivalry comes up far more often than devotion. So, in honor of siblings with the kind of bone-deep love that fiction often assumes is only possible between young women and supernatural beings, or only runs one-way from mothers to their kids, I give you:

The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

I've looked all over Sarah Rees Brennan's site and can't find the reference, but I believe she said Nick was supposed to be that hot, dangerous guy women are always falling for - except he's exactly what he seems. No heart of gold, no nice-guy-faking-gruff-exterior-to-hide-pain.

Nick is one of the most fascinating protagonists I've ever read. I think it would be more accurate to say Nick presents as a psychopath than that he is one. Like psychopaths, Nick lacks empathy, doesn't care what others think of him, and can be charming (in his case, seductive) when he feels like it. Unlike psychopaths, Nick never lies, and he doesn't make excuses for his actions.

The only person Nick cares about is his older brother Alan. And while Alan will do literally anything for Nick, he's a warm, friendly people-person, and so is often confused and disappointed by the way Nick chooses to show his love (usually by calling him stupid and fleeing at the first sign of affection). I'm not making this sound like the witty, heart-warming, amazing book that it is. Sarah Rees Brennan does a much better job with her characters than I do describing them.

This isn't the only sibling relationship in the book. There's also Mae and her younger brother Jamie. Unlike Nick and Alan, who take care of their mother and can barely make ends meet, Mae and Jamie have rich, busy, absent, divorced parents. When it comes to familial affection, all they have is each other.

Genre Urban fantasy

How it starts First lines:

The pipe under the sink was leaking again. It wouldn't have been so bad, except that Nick kept his favorite sword under the sink.

Someone who could read that and not keep going has more willpower than I do!

General Premise Nick and Alan have spent their lives running from magicians who want the charm keeping their mother alive. When Mae and Jamie arrive on their doorstep looking for help, Nick wants to kick them out, but Alan's attempt to help leads to his being marked by a demon. Now the only way to save his life is to fight the magicians hunting them.

Ugh. I hate trying to summarize gorgeous books with a few sentences. This isn't consomme. You can't reduce books like this to something retaining the richness of the whole.

Siblings

I'm all for messed-up relationships in fiction, but occasionally you want the conflict to be somewhere else. You want the character to have a solid bond with someone who has a well-rounded life of their own, not just a cardboard cutout whose death (or whatever) motivates the main character into action. Mae and Jamie are friends as well as siblings, and it makes you smile to see them interact and protect each other. Nick and Alan are just as witty and entertaining, but the dangerous lives they lead have resulted in personality quirks making for amazing characterization.

Two more books with a strong sibling bond:

The Millionaires by Brad Meltzer
Genre: suspense

As you can tell by the size of his name versus the title of the book, Brad Meltzer is pretty hot stuff. He's currently hosting a History Channel show called Decoded. It largely consists of him standing in front of a black background with sciency-looking symbols moving around on it, explaining the mystery-du-jour to us, while his team (an attorney, an engineer, and a historian) tracks down crackpots with "proof" for their conspiracy theories and tries to pretend they're taking these people seriously. I think the engineer has the hardest time with this pretense - she spends most of the meetings failing at faking that wide-eyed awe that the historian does so well. She totally has my sympathies, because I couldn't do it, either.

Still, they've done episodes on the missing White House cornerstone, the Spear of Destiny (the spear that pierced Jesus's side on the cross, which megalomaniacs like Justinian, Charlemagne, numerous emperors and popes, and Hitler have supposedly owned at one time or another), D.B. Cooper, and General Patton's death, among other things. I'm perfectly willing to sit through conspiracy theories if they come cloaked in histo-tainment.

I read The Millionaires in college, thought it was great, and forgot about it until years later when I found myself breathlessly listening to a book review on NPR. It was Brad Meltzer talking about Replay. I immediately rushed to Amazon to buy the book, but it was sold out (pretty rare for a twenty-year-old book), and thanks to the review, remained sold out for weeks. I didn't even know that many people listened to NPR!

As it turned out, the most fascinating things about Replay were the premise and what Meltzer managed to see in it. Yes, in case you haven't guessed, author Ken Grimwood is dead, so I don't think it will get back to him that I was a bit let-down by what he did with his fascinating premise - a 43-year-old man keeps dying of a heart attack, going back into his younger self and reliving his life. Because he knows what's coming, he makes different decisions each time, resulting in consequences he hadn't anticipated. He's also running out of time. Each repeat goes back less far than the one before it, but he keeps dying at 43, and now he's desperate to figure out how to change his future, not just his past.

None of this has anything to do with siblings! Back to The Millionaires. Oliver and Charlie are brothers working at the same private bank, Oliver as a junior partner, Charlie in the back office. Charlie has a chronic disease requiring expensive medication, which is why Oliver is still stuck at a job he should have moved on from long ago. When Oliver realizes he's being sabotaged by the senior partner he trusted most, he succumbs to Charlie's urging and commits the perfect crime - stealing money no one knew was there. But it turns out they weren't the only ones with that idea, and soon they're running from the bank, a private investigator, and shady secret service agents who not only want the money, but want them dead.

Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern
Genre: YA

This book really surprised me. Long after I forgot what happens in it, the family dynamic stayed with me. Jessie was doing well in school, both parents were present and active in their kids' lives, and her older brother genuinely liked and cared about her, just like she did him. There's room for all kinds of books, of course, but I wish there were more like this. It's okay to like your parents. Siblings can be fascinating without being a menace.







Other books featuring great siblings?