Lockdown by Peter May
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”You don’t have to be very smart to figure that it only takes one infected individual from Vietnam, or Thailand, or Cambodia, to fly into London, New York, or Paris, and you’ve sown the seed. In this modern age of air travel, we really do live in a global village. And we’ve created the perfect incubators for breeding and passing on infection, in the buses and planes and underground trains we travel on. We were a human disaster waiting to happen.”

What makes this novel compelling to me more than anything else isn’t the fact that it is about a pandemic, but because it was turned down by publishers in 2005 because the premise of a London locked down due to a virus was inconceivable to the publishers. The idea was improbable...nay impossible.

In 2005, Peter May was not the bestselling author we know today, but a fledgling novel writer, trying to make the transition from screenwriting to full-time fiction writing. He was baffled that, despite the extensive research he could share with them showing that a pandemic could happen on the scale that is depicted in his novel, publishers simply refused to believe it was possible.

This is rather amusing considering the fact that, as I write my thoughts on this novel, we are all in various stages of quarantine.

May’s conception of the future is not improbable or impossible, but very much a presentiment of a very real future that has become our present reality.

I did struggle at first with the book, maybe because we have all become some level of experts on pandemics. I have a bad feeling our collective knowledge will have several more opportunities to increase in the near future. Detective Jack MacNeil is investigating some bones found in a satchel at a construction site. Normally, bones found in such circumstances are more the province of a archaeologist, but given the age of the satchel, it is clear this is a modern murder. MacNeil’s marriage has disintegrated. He is on the verge of retirement, as yet not sure what a post-retirement world in a post-apocalyptic world will look like. 25% of people are getting the virus, and upwards of 80% are dying from it. It is the very worst of times without the reassurement from Dickens that these are also the very best of times.

With so many people dying, it seems almost ridiculous to be investigating the potential murder of one little girl. It reminds me of the TV series Foyle’s War; millions are dying from the ravages of war, and yet here is this man in England investigating Agatha Christie-type murders in a world gone mad. (view spoiler)[As the plot unspools, we soon learn that this little girl might be the critical tie to everything that has happened. So my mild irritation with this subplot in the course of all the madness is ill-considered. (hide spoiler)]

This large Scotsman has an improbable secret relationship with Amy Wu. A petite Asian woman, a forensic orthodontist bound to a wheelchair, who quickly becomes as immersed in the backstory of the bones as MacNeil. She is my favorite character in the book. The descriptions of the creative ways she has made her life as normal as possible despite her handicaps is truly inspiring. The characters are struggling with many of the questions that we have been struggling with in recent months.

”’We shouldn’t do this,’ he said. ‘I might give you the flu. I’m more exposed than you are.’

‘Then we might as well stop living now, because we’ll die anyway.’ Amy gazed up at him. ‘And if we don’t live life while we can, then we’ll die without ever having lived.’”

Just like the creative ways that Amy has made her life better despite circumstances beyond her control, we, too, have to figure out how to live our lives as fully as we can without endangering our lives and the lives of others. I’ve seen a lot of impatience for things to return to normal, but things may never be normal again, or Covid-19 might disappear like the influenza epidemic in 1917, but regardless, we have to understand that this epidemic might only be a dress rehearsal for something nastier. As the quote to begin this review states, we have created the perfect means for destroying ourselves. Maybe we will discover that the speed of travel is not worth the risk. Maybe we will discover things that are more important to us than running around like chickens with our heads cut off. (Yes, I’ve seen that phenomena first hand. My grandmother had her own hand guillotine to behead the next contribution to her stew pot.) I still have hope that in this new world people will rediscover armchair traveling through the magical realm of books. Peter May, for one, will be happy to guide people through the Hebrides or to China or Italy or through a pandemic.

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The Island by Peter Benchley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo!, roll over another one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to know what happened to those boats. Not to all of them...not to half of them.”

Reporter Blair Maynard smells a story, a big story. Hundreds of boats have disappeared in the same section of the Bahamas along with their two thousand plus passengers, and mysteriously, no one seems to be alarmed.

Misadventure? That’s a lot of misadventure.

The mysteries of the sea sometimes never reveal themselves. The ocean is vast and unpredictable, and sometimes even a veteran crew disappears without a trace. This feels different though. This doesn’t feel like a Bermuda Triangle. This feels like something methodical, something man-designed rather than a freakishness of nature. Under the pretense of a vacation with his twelve year old son Justin, he ventures out into this mysterious zone to find out the truth.

They disappear without a trace.

To the world, that is true, but they are very much alive, trapped in a world that existed a couple of hundred years ago. They’ve fallen into pages that would fit better between the covers of Treasure Island. Maynard soon finds himself at odds with his son and in a desperate battle for survival. His life isn’t worth the value of a bottle of rum, and he will have to dig deep within himself to find the feral, mental toughness to save Justin and himself.

I chuckled at one point when Peter Benchley alludes to Jacqueline Bisset and her wet t-shirt, which of course is in the movie version of his book The Deep. There is a movie version of The Island as well, starring Michael Caine. I’ve not watched it yet, but intend to watch it eventually.

The book is certainly not as compelling as his signature work…Jaws, but there are some thrilling scenes that certainly grabbed me as Maynard grappled with situations requiring a lizard brain that his life as a reporter had never activated. ”A hand clawed at his eyes, fingers probing to uproot his eyeballs. He stopped one hand, then the other, then felt teeth fasten on the skin of his cheek and tear away. He released a hand and punched at the biting mouth, and the hand he released drove a pointed fingernail deep into his ear.

His brain shrieked: Overboard!”

If you have ever fancied the life of a pirate, Benchley might disabuse you of those desires. Their lives were brutal, with harsh penalties for any infraction of the arbitrary rules, and certainly the scurvy bastards that Maynard and his son encounter are indicative of the unpredictable and untrustworthy men you’d be sharing the life with.

I’ve now read the first three novels that Benchley wrote. He only wrote eight. I will most likely venture forth with the rest eventually. These novels from the 1970s and 1980s are time capsules of the era before computers were readily available and before people were glued to cell phones. The lives of people back then seem more meaningful, less passive, as they are more engaged with the world around them than the world displayed in the pixels of the glass and plastic of Chinese-made time-wasters. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than we’ve ever had before, but somehow we individually seem to know less. For those who enjoy an escape to the world before it became enslaved by technology, these Benchley books are a breath of fresh air from a past that is quickly receding in the rearview mirror, never to be experienced again except for in the pages of books, old movies, and the songs that make memories come alive again.

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The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind. Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark--that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead--that’s Chinatown. This is a book about Chinatowns: Roman Polanski’s, Robert Towne’s, Robert Evans’s, Jack Nicholson’s, the ones they made and the ones they inherited, their guilt and their innocence, what they did right, what they did wrong--and what they could do nothing to stop.”

I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie Chinatown. It came out in 1974, but it could have just as easily come out in 1944. It has that timeless quality, an old setting mixed with modern concepts. It has a more cynical understanding about the insidiousness of human behavior that remains hidden under a veneer of respectability or buried under a mound of money. The sun shines so brilliantly in Los Angeles that it illuminates the shadows if one takes the blinders off and bothers to look. Jake Gittis is the type of guy who is hired to sift through the shadows and poke his nose in where no one wants it to be.

It’s amazing that Chinatown ever made the transition from a concept in Robert Towne’s mind to the big screen. According to Sam Wasson, Towne had nothing but a muddled script that made so little sense that when Faye Dunaway read it she couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. Towne’s friend Edward Taylor, a prodigious reader of mystery novels, gave a lot of effort to the script without receiving any credit. Once the director Roman Polanski got the script, he rewrote large pieces of it as well. So the question remains, how much of Chinatown is Towne? The bulk of his reputation as a brilliant screenwriter rests on this script. There are people who disagree with Wasson’s assessment of the situation, but as I was reading this, the evidence seems pretty clear that Towne had a lot of help. Sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can ruin the sauce, but that wasn’t the case with Chinatown.

Chinatown, after all, is a state of mind.

I loved this description of Jack Nicholson’s acting skills. ”Towne literally studied Nicholson. Amazed by his staggering ability to draw out the shortest line of dialogue, to make a long meal of crumbs, he realized that Nicholson’s innate mastery of suspense, of making the audience wait and wait for him to reach the end of the line, added drama to the most commonplace speech, and Nicholson’s monotone, rather than bore the listener, inflected the mundane with an ironic tilt.” This reminds me of the time when I was watching someone discussing Billie Holiday, and he said that part of her brilliance was the way she sang slightly behind the beat. I love those moments when I hear something that crystalizes a thought that I’ve been having a hard time expressing. Both those observations explain perfectly why Nicholson and Holiday had that extra special something that made them legends.

For a man of such small stature himself, Nicholson liked to call Roman Polanski the midget. Polanski cast a long, dark shadow over the movie set. He was back in Hollywood, after a long absence, to film Chinatown. He was back where it all happened. Where Charlie Manson and his miscreants intersected with Polanski’s life. The brutal murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, took away the last blossom of innocence, not only from Hollywood but from the whole country. People’s worst fears were realized. I think maybe Joan Didion said it best. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

Polanski often made the comment, I need to do _____ today because tomorrow I might be dead. It makes me wonder if he was able to convince himself that whatever he desired was justifiable. He’d been touched by a public tragedy that, fortunately, most of us will never experience. Something essential was shattered in him that never healed. As someone said on the film set, it became obvious as the script came together that the blonde (Faye Dunaway) had to die in the end. There is a poignancy wrapped around that thought.

We can all have sympathy for what happened to him, but still condemn him for the very bad decisions he has made. There are people who boycott this movie because of Polanski’s sexual assault of a minor or for the spectre of incest that becomes a key part of the plot. I understand these feelings, but I can’t do it. The movie loomed large in my imagination before I knew anything about Polanski. I also really like his movie Ninth Gate. I can condemn the man without condemning the director, but it isn’t easy.

There is this fabulous fight scene between Nicholson and Polanski that is described in the book involving a basketball game and double overtime. Don’t mess with Jack’s Lakers. Despite what we would expect from Jack, with that wicked grin of his, he was reportedly an easy actor to work with on the set, so this battle between these two oversized personalities was even more funny than if it had been a different actor involved.

I was also fascinated to read about how much Dunaway struggled with the role, even after they did finally hand her a script that made some sense. She was unsure of herself, and as I rewatched the movie after reading this book, I could see it. Her insecurities with playing Evelyn Cross Mulwray were evident in the quaver in her voice, her mannerisms, and the anxiety bubbling behind her mask of refined beauty. Some consider it one of her finest acting performances.

Sam Wasson brought to life the people who came together, like moths drawn to the flame of an idea, to make this film. Their friendships with one another and their desires to take a muddled mess of a script and turn it into one of the greatest movies ever made is inspiring. I do enjoy books about old Hollywood, and this one provided me with some fascinating details that helped me enjoy a film I’ve always loved even more.

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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

Aldous Huxley was prompted to write this book in the early 1930s because he feared the direction society was heading. The worship of material goods, the embracement of capitalism, the promiscuity, the growing ambivalence towards books, the self-medication to escape reality, and the overall vacuousness of people, in general.

The book begins rather awkwardly in the lab where people are being created. A massive, industrial, test tube baby factory with very little variety, after all, they have determined the very best specimens so why create anything else? Note to self: rewatch the movie Gattaca. We do meet Lenina in the lab, an uncommonly pretty woman, who feels a pat on a fanny by her supervisor is a reassurance that all is well. Note to self: #metoo movement needs a time machine.

Huxley read a book on Henry Ford, who was certainly the poster child for industry and capitalism. In this book, he has become a deity of sorts. ”Oh for Ford’s Sake!” a character thunders. Note to self: Start using Ford for Fuck and see if anyone has a clue where such a use of the word came from.

”We don’t want people attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” Rampant consumerism is the only way to keep the merry-go-round turning. Fortunately, by using brainwashing techniques while everyone sleeps, they can implant the proper desires and prejudices that will make for a united and happy society.

Lenina has become hung up on a guy by the name of Henry Foster. She hasn’t been with another man for four months. She is dangerously close to being accused of monogamy. Her friend is appalled and reminds her that ”everyone belongs to everyone else.” A woman being “allowed” and even encouraged to be promiscuous would seem like evolution, but when it becomes an obligation to be promiscuous, it feels like just another form of oppression. Sex has become a plaything to keep the masses happy.

They also have soma, which is the ultimate happy pill. Anytime things become too real, they pop a tab of soma or three. ”Christianity without tears--that’s what soma is.” It bleeds all meaning out of life, leaving the user complacent and happy and completely oblivious to whatever had been bothering them in the first place. It feels more than a bit like the opioid epidemic that we are struggling with currently; only soma is made readily available to all who need it and seems to have been carefully manufactured to avoid overdoses. Overdoses would definitely be a downer that would create some of that much feared unhappiness. #opiodcrisis

What kind of life would it be to feel nothing?

Bernard Marx has been trying to get Lenina to do something with him for some time. He is a bit of an odd duck among these carefully designed people. A Danny Devito among a herd of Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Note to self: Rewatch Twins, just because it is such a hoot. There is much speculation that something went wrong in the lab, a bit too much of this or too little of that leaked into his test tube. Needless to say, he is testy about it. After all, why does he look like this while his siblings look like that? He finally convinces Lenina to go with him to an Indian reservation in America, where they meet the natives who have been untouched by technology. They get old. They get sick. They die young. They give birth. This is a #povertyporn trip similar to white westerns driving through African villages so they can point and say things like...can you believe people live like this? Bernard is there really to feel something. Lenina is there to become overcome by all the squalor and unfamiliar feelings of discomfort, but she is glad she came because she is going to rock her #Facebook page when she gets back.

Bernard decides to bring a white Savage back with him. He is the product of a lustful coupling by Bernard’s boss, and believe me Bernard needs all the leverage he can get with his boss. The Savage is reading, not only reading, but reading Shakespeare. Can you imagine a person learning to read from Shakesepeare being integrated into an uneducated society such as this? Note to self: Read Othello. The Savage is primitive and a thinker, and this will prove to be a dangerous combination. He will see the absurdity in everything. He will protest violently...how dare he?

”O Brave New World!”

Can one man bring truth to the masses? It will be a nearly impossible task, given that the masses don’t even know they need saving.

I had forgotten about all the humor in the book. Huxley is poking fun at nearly everything we hold sacred. Satire is the perfect vehicle for modern comedians like John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Bill Maher to make their political points and make their audience laugh as well. We seem to need our truths given to us with a dose of sugar. Even in this futuristic utopia, Huxley called it a negative utopia, the population still needs healthy doses of soma to keep up the pretense that everything is fine. The people who rebel are those who find integration to be a problem or, like Bernard, feel disadvantages from the very beginning of their life. One size does not fit all, even when everyone is manufactured to be the same. A society will always be judged by the tolerance it shows for those different than the majority.

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The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”As I sucked a lobster claw, I thought about how to do them. Always pick the easiest, quickest and cleanest method. In this case, a shot in the head was the best solution. The bullet rips apart the brain, and the victim doesn’t even have time to kiss tomorrow goodbye. The muck--blood, bone fragments, brain matter--sprays from the side opposite the entry wound. I’d sit in the back seat of their car and smoke them. First the driver. Then the guy beside him. With a silencer. When I executed Luca in Central America, the blast was deafening. Almost ruined the sense of wonder and power you feel when you pull a trigger and take somebody’s life.”

Giorgio Pellegrini is a psychopath, and like all well functioning psychopaths, he understands morals; he’s just completely devoid of morals. They get in the way. They hinder living life the way he wants to live it.

He likes older women. Well, he doesn’t like them all that much; he just lusts them. He likes them best in their forties, starting to show the first crumbling signs of aging, cellulite, crows feet, and the slackening of what was once firm flesh. He likes them feeling insecure and feeling special that this man ten years younger still wants to sex them up. He lets them pay for things. He cheats on them without regret. He’s moving through life, riding a storm of violent crime, but he likes to come home to a comfortable, pliable woman.

As he gets older, he starts to realize that all the dirty dealing with crooked cops, criminals, and revolutionaries is leading him right back to prison. It is time to go straight. It is time to open a restaurant and settle down with an upscale woman. He finds the right lawyer to help him make this happen, but he soon discovers that the lawyer needs little favors done for his friends. The type of little favors that Giorgio is oh so good at. He doesn’t really mind as long as at the end of the road he gets what he wants; otherwise, the lawyer better watch his ass. One should never renege on a psychopath.

Massimo Carlotto is the grand master of Italian noir. He has a series called his Alligator series that I’ve really enjoyed, but Giorgio Pellegrini is his first creation. A psychopath who cuts a new slice through the serial killer genre. In Gang of Lovers that I read and reviewed recently, he intersects with the Alligator crew, and that is when I decided it was time to circle back and read the books that focus on his lurid adventures. There is lots to enjoy here. The rampant sex, the crimes, the violence, and the hardboiled talk... Italian style. The next Giorgio Pellegrini book arrived at my house yesterday, At the End of a Dull Day, so I will be cuing up his next psychopathic tendencies very soon. I have a feeling that going straight is going to prove impossible for Giorgio.

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Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”’Oh, Murderbot, what did you do?’

(I don’t even know. I suspect it has to do with the fact that I went from being told what to do and having every action monitored to being able to do whatever I wanted, and somewhere along the way my impulse control went to hell.)

‘The only way out of this was to kill them.’”

I’ve been stuck in long, droning meetings with annoying, stupid humans before where I would briefly run a Tarantino scenario through my head where I emerge from the conference room bloodied, but grinning from ear to ear. Of course, for me it is just a way to while away a few more minutes of my life while looking longingly at the escape hatches: doors, windows, and perceived weaknesses in the sheetrock, but with our favorite SecUnit, where morality can be circumvented by logic, this can be a dicey situation where murder just simply becomes the most rational option.

”Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas?”

Murderbot is stuck on a transport with too many inadequate humans, and as part of her cover as a normally functioning SecUnit, not one that has errhhh broken their governing module, she is having to intercede and mediate between squabbling humans. Their petty issues are deleted from her memory almost as quickly as they are explained to her. This takes valuable time away from viewing/reading her saved media entertainment, in particular her favorite space drama Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

Sanctuary Moon is the only thing keeping Murderbot from...well….

Fortunately, Milu Station is reached, and finally, without any unforeseen disasters, Murderbot can rid herself of these humans, like fleas fleeing a robotic dog.

The station is nearly deserted, and it soon becomes readily apparent, among these eerie, Poe-in-space corridors, that something isn’t right. There is something lethal, something insidiously devoted to a program that will make the corridors run red with blood. Murderbot is going to have to figure out how to get everyone back on the transport without getting shredded herself. She has help from an unlikely source, a robot named Miki, who provides much of the levity with a happy, puppy mentality that frequently makes Murderbot want to gag herself.

”Miki was a bot who had never been abused or lied to or treated with anything but indulgent kindness. It really thought its humans were its friends, because that's how they treated it.

I signaled Miki I would be withdrawing for one minute. I needed to have an emotion in private."

Most of the time Murderbot is too busy going... Oh Shit! Oh Shit! Oh Shit!...to worry about Miki, but regardless, as readers we quickly become very attached and very worried about Miki.

This is yet another encounter for Murderbot with the soulless entity GrayGris Corporation, whose company motto is, ”Profit by killing everybody and taking their stuff.” It isn’t as if Murderbot is the Robin Hood of the universe and wants to take down GG Corp, but the universe just doesn’t seem big enough for Murderbot to avoid getting entangled in their galaxy expansive, nefarious pursuits.

This is such a fun series with lots of jabs at the human race from the objective (well mostly objective) view of an artificial intelligence, who is somehow more moral (well most of the time) than we seem capable.

Now, I need to go cue up Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon before these annoying humans start driving me batshit crazy!

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Fire on the Island by Timothy Jay Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”The arsonist intent on burning down the village is likely motivated by a slight to him or his family profound enough to have the weight of history behind it. Only eternal guilt demanded such fierce justice, or so Nick conjectured as he descended the spiral steps into the City Hall’s archives. Otherwise, why not just slash someone’s tires for revenge, or poison his dog? No, in the arsonist’s mind, the whole village was guilty of something.”

The Greek-American, Nick Damigos, has arrived on the sun-drenched shores of the Greek Island of Santorini to visit the quiet village of Vourvoulos. He is seeking serenity so that he can focus on writing his book, or so he says.

”’Nick is a writer.’

‘Published?’ someone asked.

‘Not yet.’

‘Another one,’ a man grumped.”

I have to laugh at this exchange. When is a writer a writer? The village has obviously seen many other “writers” come and go over the years. Young men and women brimming with plots and characters seeking the right place to have those words spill out onto the page. The languid pace of this village might very well indeed allow the writer the peace of mind to finally write his masterpiece. In the case of Nick Damigos, he really isn’t a writer; he’s a special agent for the FBI... undercover.

There have been a series of seemingly random fires on the island. There have been no clues to the identity of the arsonist, but it is obviously someone harboring a dark grudge who seems so out of place in such an idyllic setting. It must be someone with a mind so twisted by animosity and bitterness that even the sun, the food, the ouzo, the beaches, and the brilliant blue water can not soothe his deep seated rancor.

There are numerous suspects. There is a lecherous priest with an agenda to save his crumbling church. There is an Albanian waiter with a mysterious past. There is a “dead” Turkish immigrant who fits the profile for a vengeful crusader. His primary suspect though is Takis, who has become his lover, much to the chagrin of Takis’s voluptuous sister Vassoula, who finds Nick’s physique much to her liking. Everyone has secrets, and everyone has a past, and as Nick discovers what people don’t want known, he starts to narrow his suspect list. Nick must find out who it is before he strikes again!

The plot of this novel is set against the backdrop of the refugee crisis in Greece that continues today. Desperate people are seeing Greece as the entry point into the rest of Europe. There are over 50,000 refugees in Greece presently, and the strain on the economy of Greece has been troublesome. We see it affecting this small village as boats of refugees flow onto their island continuously. The rest of Europe has shown little interest in these refugees, so Greece is faced with a crisis of how best to absorb these people into their economy when the natives are finding it so difficult to find jobs and sustain their own families. This adds additional stress to a village already under siege from a vengeful arsonist.

The population exchange between Turkey and Greece back in 1923 is also part of the background of the novel. This involved denaturalization of over 1.6 million people, who were forced to become refugees by returning to a homeland they did not know. It blows the mind to think about how a few signatures on a piece of paper in Lausanne, Switzerland, by the governments of Turkey and Greece could result in so much upheaval in the lives of so many people. It is a terrifying thought to be thrown out of your country and sent somewhere you no longer have any ties to, except for a portion of the blood that flows through your veins.

Timothy Jay Smith also talks about the implications of being gay, or really anything other than heterosexual, in a small town. The homophobia is palpable and crushing and drives away those who identify with a different orientation to live in places better disposed to be accepting.

Despite the heavy overtones of the current affairs, sexual politics, and the historical catastrophes that still loom over the island, they are really more what I would call undertones that create a vibe without weighing down the plot. This is more like a mystery that any of us might find ourselves caught up in on vacation, a diversion to add spice to a beautiful backdrop of vineyards, meadows, and shores. Timothy Jay Smith is a lyrical writer who can describe the murmurs of the locals at the bar or a moonlit serenade and make you believe you are there. One might think this is a plot worthy of a meaty red Agiorgitiko, but really, this sun-drenched plot is better suited to a spritely glass of Assyrtiko.

This will prove to be one of those perfect summer reads that will allow you to escape to another place during a time when it isn’t prudent to travel abroad. Let Smith be your guide this summer, and see Greece through the eyes of a writer who has been seduced by the wonderful nuances of Greece.

”’Timothy is a writer.’

‘Published?’ someone asked.

‘Yes he is.’

‘Vassoula, bring this man an ouzo...no a brandy,’ one of the men says with enthusiasm. He motions Timothy over to his table and pushes out the chair across from him with his foot.

‘So Timothy, does your book have intrigue?’

‘Yes.’

The man leans across the table with a grin. ‘Romance?’ he asks.

Timothy laughs softly and winks at the man.

The man guffaws loudly and slaps the table top hard enough to make the glasses rattle and shake. ‘Well then, I’ll just have to read it. Drink up, Timothy. The night is young and we must celebrate your novel.’ He raised his glass and clinked it against Timothy’s hard enough to make the liquid leap out on their hands. ‘Stin ygeiá sas,’ he thundered.”

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The Final Programme: The Cornelius Quartet 1 by Michael Moorcock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”’I think I’d like to leave London for a bit.’

‘The smell,’ she said. ‘I suppose we are indirectly responsible for that.’

Jerry grinned at her somewhat admiringly. ‘Well, yes, I suppose you are.’

‘This was a gift-wrapped, throwaway age, Mr. Cornelius. Now the gift wrapping is off, it’s being thrown away.’

‘It’s certainly perishable.’ Jerry wrinkled his nose.

‘Oh you!’”

Jerry Cornelius is a Renaissance man of all that is hip and cool, baby. There isn’t a hipper cat in all the kingdom. He is so stylish, so ahead of his time and place that the trends he sets are outdated before anyone else can catch the vibe. He is gay, straight, bi, and everything in-between. If it is physically possible, he has done it. To try and define him by his sexuality is an impossibility because once you put a label on it, baby,...it gets stale.

Life isn’t just about looking good and feeling good. A person must stretch her mind, not just with drugs, but with science. Jerry gets high on science. He writes about it. He plucks the strings of the known universe and then chains together some chords that open up new vistas of understanding. Oh, he’s a musician, too. You can call him a rock star, but he is really something more cosmic. The minute you decide he is one thing, he has become something else.

Jerry assassinates people. He doesn’t just carry that needle gun as a menacing accessory. Jerry has a brother named Frank, brilliant and demented,r who is trying to build a super computer to either take over the world or destroy the world. It probably depends on his mood at the apex moment. Think super villain. Jerry has a sister named Catherine, the love of his life. I mean to say looovvveee of his life. Is he immoral or just refusing to be defined by something as mundane as morality?

Once the rest of us put a label on it...Jerry has moved on.

He has a partner, an arch-villain type partner...friend or foe? We’ll call her Miss Brunner because we have to call her something. She is constantly hiring new assistants because they mysteriously disappear. She wants to create a superhuman by merging a male and a female, and who is better suited for androgyny than Jerry Cornelius? Keep your needle gun close, Jerry. Those aren’t rubber teeth glinting in her mouth.

It is frustrating to see the future so clearly while everyone else is sinking in quicksand. ”Jerry sighed and thought that the true aristocracy who would rule the seventies were out in force: the queers and the lesbians and the bisexuals, already half-aware of their great destiny which would be realised when the central ambivalence of sex would be totally recognized and terms male and female would become all but meaningless.”

By the end of the book, we are venturing into a post-apocalyptic age. London is sinking. Jerry has evolved into something quite different. The 1960s are over, and a new party needs to begin. By the time we arrive at the festivities...Jerry will already be through with the 1970s and be looking longingly at the next decade. If we don’t evolve quicker, Jerry is going to lose patience with us.

What a mind bending blast it is trying to keep Jerry’s warp signature on the radar.

Before you decide to start reading this book, you’ve got to relax, man. If you don’t relax, you’re going to get all twitchy and self-conscious. You’re going to start trying to cram this book into that box in your brain that you call the known universe. It ain’t going to fit, no matter how you fold it or crush it. Disengage the gears, and let your mind glide for a while. Strip away all of your inhibitions, and let your tongue taste the bitter fruit of the unknown.

If you are too square, let Jerry round off your edges.

If you are saying to yourself right now, I’m not going to read some old book from the 1960s, you need to understand that you can’t put a date on this book, man. It’s time hasn’t come yet.

I’m a little giddy that there are three more books in the series. Where will we go from here?

Needless to say, Michael Moorcock struggled to find a publisher for this book. He wrote it in 1965 and finally found a publisher for it in 1968. That edition was censored by the American publisher; the ghosts of the Puritans still haunt us today. The book was later published in Britain in 1969.

Take a trip, man, blast back, blast forward. It doesn't matter. Time is all relative.

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Shorefall by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

”’You don’t know how many empires I’ve crushed in my day,’ boomed Crasedes.

As the soldiers struck the walls they just kept screaming, pinned to the stone, and Orso realized that whatever force had pushed them there was still pushing, still growing stronger, pushing and pushing until the soldiers began to collapse, like they were being compressed by a giant, flat surface…

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Orso.

‘The thing that irks me the most,’ said Crasedes, ‘is that you all think you’re so special. So unique. So deserving.’”

He made a gesture, and the crushed soldiers rose to levitate in the air like a mangled wall of human bodies.

And then the wall began to fold inward, forming a ball...which shrank, and shrank…

‘But to be honest,’ said Crasedes, ‘your empire isn’t even terribly inspired.’

There was a long, long silence.

Crasedes hovered in the air, still seated in a queerly meditative position. Then he slowly turned to look at Orso.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time since I did that.’”

HE is back in town!

The original bad boy of scriving. The maker and shaker of the universe. The man who convinced reality that he was immortal. A man worshiped as a God. The Hierophant who has returned to save humanity from themselves.

He is Crasedes Magnus.

All the petty rivalry between the grand camposes of Trevanne. All the intrigue, jealousies, and the ongoing sigil-striving Cold War for power is all suddenly meaningless. Combined, these robber barons can do next to nothing against Crasedes. Separately, they are mere bugs hitting the windshield of the cosmos.

So you might be asking yourself, what is this scriving you speak of? ”The art of scriving was almost always a two-step process. The first step seemed very simple: a scriver placed a small, imprinted plate on the object that they wished to alter, often somewhere inside it--mostly to keep the printings from being marred. The plate was stamped with a handful of sigils, usually anywhere from about six to ten, and once the plate had been adhered to the object, these sigils would begin convincing it to disobey reality in very unusual ways--hence why this component was called the persuasion plate.”

For instance, someone could scrive a program, for lack of a better word, that would convince a wooden door that it was made of impenetrable steel. This works fine as long as a more talented scriver doesn’t come along and write a program that changes the reality of what the door believes. Maybe the door is now convinced it is made of rice paper, and the scriver, who also is a thief, steps effortlessly through the door and steals the precious objects that someone is trying to protect.

With the proper sigils in the proper order, you can alter the reality of anything and make it do something greater or lesser than its original capabilities.

If your mind feels a little blown, no worries; you're in the hands of the necromancer himself, Robert Jackson Bennett. This book is a product of the art of scriving, and you will magically come to understand everything.

Fortunately for Trevanne, they haven’t managed to destroy the ragtag gang of talented outcasts at Foundryside because it soon becomes apparent that the only hope of sending The Hierophant back to whatever dark corner of the universe he came from will be through the efforts of these genius outlaws.

CLEF is back, the enchanted key that steals the show every time he comes on stage. He is a supporting actor, but for the part he plays, there is no back row chair for him. The repartee between him and Sancia Grado in book one is very entertaining. We find out much more about him in this book and how he became locked inside a key.

Sancia Grado is our reluctant hero, a brain altered ex-slave, who can see, read, and manipulate the invisible sigils around her. She will have to do the impossible once again. She is helped by Orso, her girlfriend Berenice, and the son of one of the leaders of one of the great camposes of Trevanne, Gregory Dandolo. He is cursed/gifted with the ability to never die. When the blue screen of death appears before him, he merely reboots to a previous instance in time.

This is a world where nothing is quite what it seems. Where people are willing to kill for the right piece of scriving magic. Where inventions are conceived to make life better for everyone, but are accumulated by the rich and powerful to use to further enrich themselves, consolidate their power, and in some cases to slaughter their enemies. It is always baffling why there are always too many people who are never content with just what they need.

Their desire for more is never satisfied, and they are willing to crush as many people as it takes to achieve their goals.

It is so annoying that, just as the Foundryside gang has launched a plan to unravel the power and the influence of the great families of Trevanne,... this Hierophant shows up and mucks it all up.

Will the castoffs, the muckers, save Trevanne once again? Will Clef ever speak again? Will humanity be subjugated to Crasedes Magnus? Will anyone survive the coming conflict?

This is an intelligent, mind-bending, gritty version of a world with so much potential to be a utopia, if only the many can overcome the greedy few. The characters are fantastic and are so deftly drawn that they continue to live in my mind in 4K resolution. The twists and turns kept me turning the pages so quickly that sparks were flinging from my fingertips.

***I want to thank Crown Publishing and Kathleen Quinlan for sending me an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.***

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Borderline by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

”I’m sex-mad, she thought. I’m a thrill girl with her brains between her legs.”

Meg Rector is in Mexico for a quickie divorce and can’t wait to explore all the possibilities of her new found freedom. Juarez, Mexico, is the perfect place to indulge any nefarious predilections she can think of and even some she didn’t know existed. Meg meets Martin Granger, a professional gambler who is coming off a night of winning big. He wants to celebrate, and the horny, long legged, pretty, brunette with an itch that needs scratching is the right companion for a night of debauchery.

There is Lily Daniels, who is a 19 year old hitchhiker who is lured into a live sex show. She has the face of a cherub, but the body of a sex goddess. Men and women are lining up for a chance to boink or doink or shag or diddle away some of her precious essence. Lily is an entrepreneur, and she is smart enough to know that someone somewhere will pay a lot more for her physical allure than what she is earning in tricks in Juarez.

Weaver is a man on the run, and Mexico looks to be his only chance to keep turning his razorblade red. He is an ugly, little man, angry at the world, and determined that everyone will know his name before the cops can take him down. ”It was better to be loathed as a fiend than to be thoroughly ignored, better to be hated than not be known at all. One act of horror had given direction to his life, had elevated him from nobody to somebody.”

All of these people are going to float around each other like inebriated bees until finally one fatal night they all end up at the same latitude and longitude at the same moment, and their futures will take a sharp turn for the worse.

There are a plethora of graphic sexual situations. This story, originally published in 1962, is billed as an erotic crime novel. Well, there is certainly crime, and there is certainly plenty of erotica. Hardcase Crime includes three hardboiled short stories that are also entertaining, gritty reads.

If you are prudish, you better just keep away from Juarez in 1962 and find yourself a good cozy to curl up with, but if you like your novels to have some grit with a side order of brazen, seductive, uninhibited, zip and zing, then Borderline will be the right splash of spirits to warm up your coffee.

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