The Marriage Test by Suzanne Redfearn

Published digitally (Kindle) by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on November 23, 2021

If Amazon had labeled this short story as “cheesy romance” I wouldn’t have been suckered into reading it. I’m not familiar with Suzanne Redfearn, but she describes herself as a “bestselling author of captivating mainstream fiction.” I can’t speak to her other work, but “mainstream fiction” refers to fiction that is appealing across a wide audience. I can’t imagine this story appealing to anyone other than a devoted fan of trash.

After three months of dating, Ava Nicole Barnes accepts a massive engagement ring from her dream hunk, Justin. Ava loves him even more because Justin wants to get married before Ava’s beloved but cancer-ridden grandmother kicks the bucket. This whirlwind romance distresses Ava’s good friend Walton, who is steady and devoted and knows how to fix sinks but apparently lacks whatever Ava sees in Justin. Justin met Ava through Walton and instantly breached the man code by disregarding Justin’s request not to ask her out, which says something distasteful about Justin, not that Ava is equipped to understand it. Here are some examples of Ava’s description of her feelings about Justin:

• “Thick emotion wells in my throat, as it does every time I see him after we’ve been apart, like I’ve not drawn a full breath since we saw each other last.”

• “his touch sends a current down my spine that causes a blush”

• "Never before have I felt such attraction to someone, like there’s an electromagnetic connection between us that causes my skin to flame whenever he’s near.”

Trite prose like that causes my brain to flame whenever I read it, but not until a thick stew of stomach contents wells in my throat.

Paradise begins to unravel when Ava and Justin bake a cake together. Justin is a neat freak and Ava is messy. Oh the agony! The baking is a prelude to the “marriage-cake quest,” a tradition in Ava’s privileged family that, if successful, assures a lifetime of wedded bliss, or at least a marriage that doesn’t end in divorce. The tradition has something to with finding the nest of a frigate bird in a swamp, stealing an egg, and using it in the joint project of baking a marriage cake (not to be confused with a wedding cake, which can be made with  conventional eggs).

Justin, Ava, and Walton (who is present as a “witness”) go on a hike as part of the quest, giving Walton a chance to suggest that Justin (who is worried about an ill-defined merger of his business with some other business) might be more interested in Ava’s money than in Ava. Say it ain’t so, Justin! In any event, the quest produces misfortune.

Ava is too much of a ditz to gain any sympathy from a reader who isn’t sympathetic to ditzes, but not enough of a ditz to have comic appeal. She fancies herself to be an environmentalist who tries (without any particular plan that a reader can discern) to prevent the destruction of reefs, or at least a particular reef. Ava is clearly too frivolous to make any serious planet-saving effort. She’s more concerned with picturing the perfect life, complete with garden and dog, that she will soon have with beloved Justin.

Will the quest teach Ava a lesson? Of course. Will she learn that there is more to a marriage than romantic platitudes and childish expectations? Will she learn to grow up and stop being a ditz? Will she learn that she shouldn’t tell a whopping lie to her fiancé right before they intend to marry? The lesson she learns has something to do with developing twinned heartbeats like seahorses, a strained analogy at best. Sadly, it is the least important of the lessons she should have learned, making “The Marriage Test” the least important story about marriage I’ve ever read.

NOT RECOMMENDED

You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo

Published by Tor Books on November 16, 2021

You Sexy Thing might be imagined as a salad made from leftover plot elements that were tossed together in the hope that the combination would be pleasing. We have space pirates and a clone and a hive mind and a sentient ship and a mix of humans and aliens who have remained loyal to their former military leader. The novel purports to be a science fiction space opera, but it crosses over into fantasy with the addition of alien shape shifters who use magic to change themselves into lions and a mystic who is traveling on the Spiral of Destiny. Interstellar travel is powered in part by portals that were designed with magic. I guess that’s one way to get around physics. Fortunately, magic plays a relatively nonintrusive role in what is essentially an action novel with a bit of human interest, or alien interest, as characters bond while overcoming adversity.

Niko Larsen operates a restaurant on a remote space station. She has managed the difficult task of retiring from a military organization called the Holy Hive Mind, taking some of the company that she once commanded with her. As the name implies, Niko shared consciousness with her company before she pulled it from the Hive Mind. Notable members of the former company include Dabry, the restaurant’s extraordinary head chef; Skidoo, who resembles a squid; Thorn and Talon, twins who use magic to shift their shapes to those of lions; Gio, a former quartermaster assigned to food prep; and Lassite, a mystic who keeps a bag full of ghosts. Milly, the pastry chef, is a newcomer.

Fortunately, the novel doesn’t take itself too seriously, although the story isn’t played for laughs. Niko is trying to make enough money to buy a ship, the first step in her long-delayed and ill-defined plan to rescue a Florian named Petalia from space pirates who are holding her in captivity. Florians might be described as sentient, mobile plants who have some of the qualities of mystics.

Before joining the Holy Hive Mind, Niko escaped from the space pirates, making an enemy of the pirate leader named Tubal Last in the process. She also seems to have made an enemy of Petalia, given her stint with the Holy Hive Mind and the restaurant gig, neither of which involved any obvious effort to make good on her promise to rescue the Florian.

The plot shifts into gear when a food critic visits the restaurant just as a wealthy patron arrives. The patron owns a rare bioship called You Sexy Thing. One thing leads to another and Niko’s company, along with the critic, end up on the bioship as their space station is being destroyed in a reality-based version of a video game. Nico’s people are joined by a princess named Atlanta who was packed into a box and delivered to Nico by the future version of FedEx for reasons that never make much sense. A couple of adventures later, the ship (oh happy coincidence!) travels to the pirate habitat, where Nico will reunite with the unhappy Petalia. Action ensues, occasionally interrupted by hard feelings and gourmet meals.

The story makes a surprising amount of sense, given the odd mishmash of B-movie sf themes, including hive minds and plant people and sentient ships and space pirates, not to mention the fantasy themes of magic, mystics, and ghosts. Cat Rambo asks the reader to accept a number of underdeveloped plot elements, perhaps to avoid bogging down the story with contrived explanations. This isn’t the kind of story a reader will want to overthink. The best science fiction encourages readers to think, but there is room for slightly silly stories that are meant only to entertain. You Sexy Thing falls into the latter category. I assume a sequel will follow. I’m on the fence about reading another of these, but this one had sufficient entertainment value to mert a recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Published by ‎Tor.com on November 16, 2021

Apart from writing a couple of science fiction’s most memorable novels, Arthur C. Clarke is remembered for his observation that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Many sf writers have quoted Clarke in their fiction, but few have illustrated the point quite as deftly as Adrian Tchaikovsky does in Elder Race.

Lynesse Fourth Daughter is least respected daughter of the Royal Line of Lannesite. Her mother has dismissed her as a dreamer, a child who has not embraced trade and diplomacy but clings to old stories of sorcery and demons. It naturally falls to Lynesse, as her ancestor once did, to seek the help of a sorcerer when demons begin to plague the territory to which she has been relegated.

Lynesse sets off to see the sorcerer in the Tower of Nyrgoth Elder who, like the Wizard of Oz, is a creation of technology and imagination rather than magic. Nyr Illim Tevitch is actually an anthropologist second class who spends most of his time in cold storage. More than a thousand years earlier, Earth entered ecological bankruptcy after sending out generation ships to colonize other planets. One of those colonized worlds is Sophos 4. Lacking resources to support them, Earth abandoned the colonies to their own devices. Many centuries later, Earth revitalized itself and sent new, faster ships to the colonies, not to reacquaint them with Earth but to study their societies without interfering with their development.

The Tower is the outpost on Sophos 4 that Nyr occupies while he studies the feudal society into which the colonists devolved after being cut off from Earth. Nyr hasn’t heard anything from Earth in almost 300 years and is doubtful that anyone on Earth will ever visit his outpost again, much less read the reports he occasionally writes. Nyr is almost fine with that, given his suspicion that he isn’t much of an anthropologist. Having come to the rescue of Sophos 4 a couple of generations earlier at the request of Lynesse’s ancestor, he decides that he might as well do it again when Lynesse asks for his help.

One of the demons is a forgotten and malfunctioning piece of technology used by the original human colonists (the elder race). The more consequential demons are something else, something Nyr can’t quite understand, although he knows they aren’t demons. The story follows Nyr and Lynesse as they face the challenge in their own ways.

The story is filled with clever riffs on the theme that magic is simply misunderstood science. Nyr’s decision to break the rules and tell Lynesse the truth about her society’s origin gives rise to my favorite passage. Nyr’s story about the planet’s colonization is juxtaposed with Lynesse’s understanding of history as it has been passed down through the ages. The only difference between the two versions of the same story is that Nyr understands it to be a story of science while Lynesse regards it as a story of magic. The side-by-side recounting of the same story from two different perspectives is brief but brilliant.

Nyr is a sympathetic character. Apart from his understandable doubts that his occupation has value and his fear that he might never return home, he is ambivalent about the emotional suppressor that is wired into his biochemistry. He can turn off his emotions when he needs to make rational decisions, but he isn’t sure that his decisions are really any better when they are devoid of emotion. He eventually makes a self-sacrificing decision that would probably be the same whether or not it is influenced by emotion. Sometimes rationality and love of humanity lead to the same end, at least when people are decent.

Elder Race is a smart, thought provoking story that doesn't waste words. In the final pages, when Nyr faces a crossroads about the remainder of his life as a scientist/sorcerer, it seems clear that any choice he makes will be fine, simply because the choice is his to make.

RECOMMENDED

High Stakes by Iris Johansen

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 7, 2021

Credibility is not a prerequisite for the modern thriller. Writers know that they can ignore credibility if they craft a plot that encourages the reader to gloss over the story’s more unlikely events. Iris Johansen manages that task, albeit just barely, in High Stakes.

The novel begins with two hunters in a Russian forest trying to find and kill a 19-year-old woman named Lara. Fortunately, this isn’t another novel that spins Richard Connell’s famous story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” The hunt occurs early in the story, ends quickly, and sets up the action that follows.

The hunt is one of many contests created by Lara’s father, Anton Balkon, and a Russian crime boss, Boris Volkov. The two men wager on whether Lara will prevail. Sometimes she’s tasked with stealing things. The latest wager is on Lara’s survival. It resulted from Volkov’s displeasure at his recent losses to Anton as Lara used cunning and planning to succeed in her tasks. Her death will be Volkov’s revenge.

Lara is an improbably competent person. She has mastered a variety of life skills at a young age, from lock picking to hand-to-hand combat, but she is also a world-class pianist. Her ability to play Tchaikovsky attracted the attention of a Russian criminal named Kaskov, who (for multiple reasons) wants to extract Lara from Russia before Volkov manages to kill her. To that end, Kaskov hires Logan Tanner, the world’s best poker player. Tanner owns several casinos but he used to make a living extracting individuals from dangerous environments. Tanner is willing to do a favor for Kaskov if Kaskov will use his connections to locate Tanner’s mentor, a fellow named Sandrino, who has disappeared. By the kind of happy coincidence that only a thriller writer can imagine, the Sandrino story and Lara’s story are linked.

The plot follows Tanner as he extracts Lara and deals with the aftermath as Volkov and Anton come looking for her. Tanner and Lara travel to a compound in New York and then to a safe house in Vegas with Lara’s feisty mother in tow. They thwart killers while making a plan to take down Volkov and Anton. The plan leads to a climax that is filled with gunplay and explosions, including the obligatory helicopter crash.

Tanner would be shallow but for the depth of his testosterone. He spends about half his time setting up the much younger Lara for seduction while nobly claiming that he can’t seduce her because it just wouldn’t be right. Whether they will end up in bed is never a serious question. The story’s romantic angle is a bit cheesy, but even if Tanner had conquered Lara and then dumped her, it wouldn’t have bothered me. Lara is impossibly petulant. She manages to manipulate Tanner into doing everything her way, which usually involves taking Lara into dangerous situations, and then makes Tanner apologize for ever thinking he should do things his own way instead of deferring to a 19-year-old’s wisdom. It seems clear that Tanner only acquiesces because putting Lara’s life at risk is necessary if he ever expects to get her into bed.

I can’t say I liked any of the characters, with the possible exception of a gruff fellow who was also Sandrino’s friend and who threatens Tanner with death whenever Tanner admits that he hasn’t yet learned Sandrino’s fate. Like Tanner, he’s one dimensional but the dimension is entertaining.

Johansen has written a couple of dozen novels in the Eve Duncan series and a few novels in each of two other series, as well as several standalones. I don’t know whether High Stakes is intended to launch a new series. It isn’t one I would be excited about, simply because Lara is both annoying and too perfect to be real, while Tanner suffers from a serious personality shortage. I can recommend the book as an average modern thriller simply because it moves quickly and the action is fun, but it isn’t a book that thriller fans need to place high on their stack of unread books.

RECOMMENDED

Welcome to Cooper by Tariq Ashkanani

Published by Thomas & Mercer on October 1, 2021

Cooper is a desperate, desolate town in Nebraska, a place where people live when they are out of options. For being a nothing town, Cooper is a hotbed of criminal activity. Much of it is controlled by a gangster in Omaha named Marchenko, who also controls a local police detective named Joe Finch.

Joe is partnered with a new arrival in Cooper, a former DC detective who made drug busts, stole the drugs, and used them recreationally with his girlfriend before she died. Thomas Levine saved his skin by giving evidence against his partner in DC, who was selling his share of the stolen drugs. With help he probably didn’t deserve, Thomas found a new home in Cooper. History repeats itself as Thomas discovers that his new partner is corrupt.

Joe commits a murder, frames Thomas for it, and uses the threat of Thomas’ arrest to coerce Thomas’ assistance in an armed robbery. The man Joe kills may have murdered a woman whose eyes were gouged out — the latest in a series of similar murders — but Thomas comes to believe that the murder victim wasn’t the killer at all. Thomas attempts to find the true killer while dealing with his corrupt partner and a state cop who threatens to expose Thomas’ crimes.

The novel is written in the first person, although it isn’t always narrated by the same person. Most of it is narrated by Thomas, but the shifting perspectives add another layer of interest as the reader tries to identify each storyteller. Only at the novel’s end do we understand the significance of the narration.

Welcome to Cooper initially struck me as an attempt to emulate the classic noir of the 1930s to 1950s, but this is noir on steroids. The story is gruesome and gory at times, but not particularly graphic. Life is bleak for Thomas. He remind us of his darkness more often than is necessary. He blames himself for his girlfriend’s death and for all the other tragedy that comprises his life. Near the novel’s end, he seeks a form of redemption but Tariq Ashkanani doesn’t give Thomas the kind of life that leaves room for a lightened soul.

At its best, Welcome to Cooper is the story of two damaged loners who briefly find each other. We don’t see much of Cooper — this isn’t an atmospheric novel — but we’re told that the town is pit, a haven for the lost and abandoned. A bartender named Mary illustrates the kind of life that condemns someone to Cooper. Mary befriends Thomas, almost against his wishes. They form the kind of momentary connection that can change a life just by suggesting possibilities, even if the possibilities will never be realized.

Welcome to Cooper grew on me. I wasn’t expecting much after the first chapter, but as the story accumulates force, it becomes impossible to look away from the crash and burn that the reader anticipates.

Ashkanani’s characterization of Mary and Thomas is the novel’s strength. The key villain, a killer who Thomas ends up chasing, is an underdeveloped stereotype of evil, but the relentlessly bleak plot is compelling in a cringeworthy way. “Life sucks, then you die” isn’t the philosophy that drives bestsellers, but it describes the reality of certain noir novels, including Welcome to Cooper. Yet the novel’s ending, while far from happy, does suggest the slightest bit of hope for a better future for those who survive the present, the possibility that even the worst villains might feel empathy under the right circumstances, and the recognition that connections with other people, even fleeting connections, are all that really matter.

RECOMMENDED