Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville

Published by Soho Crime on September 22, 2015

Two brothers, Ciaran and Thomas Devine, were prosecuted for killing the foster father with whom they lived. Ciaran, the younger brother, was convicted of beating the man to death while Thomas was convicted of acting as an accessory. At the time, Ciaran said he was protecting Thomas from ongoing abuse. The dead man's son, Daniel, never believed his father abused Thomas and has always been convinced that Thomas was the actual murderer. When Ciaran and Thomas are released from juvenile detention years later, Daniel remains obsessed with exposing what he regards as the truth.

DCI Serena Flanagan participated in the investigation at the time Ciaran and Thomas were arrested. A bit of the story is told in flashbacks as Flanagan recalls her suspicion of Ciaran's innocence and her botched attempt to persuade him to tell the truth. Most of the story, however, follows the two boys after their release, including Flanagan's suspicion that one or both of them have committed another murder. Breaking the bond between the brothers may be the only way Flanagan can get at the truth, but can she do that without placing her own life at risk?

The other key character, Probation Officer Paula Cunningham, is charged with supervising Ciaran after his release. Her role in the story is less central than Flanagan's and her character development is scant compared to Flanagan's. Having first appeared in The Final Silence, Neville is establishing Flanagan with the typical stereotypes of fictional police detectives -- her home life is troubled because she puts her work ahead of her family -- but, unlike fictional cops who are always right when everyone else thinks they're wrong, Flanagan is capable of making bad judgments. That makes her a more believable police character than most.

The most interesting feature of the plot is the question of how far Flanagan will go to get the truth from Ciaran. Is it acceptable for a police officer to question a suspect, even informally, in a way that might cause the suspect to believe that the officer wants to be intimate with him? Police deceive suspects all the time by pretending to be their friend, but at what point is a line crossed when an officer exploits the romantic or sexual feelings of a vulnerable young suspect? The exploration of that question gives the novel its moral force.

After the truth about Thomas and Ciaran is revealed, the story loses its energy. The remaining 50 or 60 pages are standard thriller fare, although the ending is intense. I appreciated the attempt to humanize Ciaran but Thomas, clearly intended as a contrast, is a shallower and less interesting character. On the whole, Those We Left Behind is not as powerful as some of Stuart Neville's Belfast novels, but it is a solid police thriller.

RECOMMENDED

Four Eyes vol. 1 by Joe Kelly

Published as a trade paperback by Image Comics on July 23, 2015

This volume collects the first four issues of a comic book series that began publication in 2008. It tells a depression-era story dominated by Italian-American characters. It is set in an alternate history that is much like our own except for the dragons. I'm not typically a fan of dragon stories, but Four Eyes is not a typical dragon tale. You could almost view the dragons as a metaphor but for the fact that they're actually flying around and eating people. At other times they're fighting each other like pit bulls in warehouses as people place bets on the outcome, much to the consternation of animal rights activists. Now that's an original twist on dragon stories.

Anyway, the story isn't so much about dragons as it is about an impoverished young boy named Enrico who sets aside the prospect of an education to help support his mother by working for meager wages after his father is killed while trying to steal a baby dragon. It's the story of a kid who wants to avenge his father's death, to hold accountable the gangsters who organize the dragon fights. It's also the story of a child who wants to please his father even after his father is dead, a child who needs to overcome fears and come of age a bit early.

Joe Kelly's prose is a level or two above the writing typically found in graphic novels. The art is strange and creepy. In other words, the art is really good. So is the story.

RECOMMENDED

A Few Words for the Dead by Guy Adams

Published digitally by Ebury (Random House) on April 9, 2015

A Few Words for the Dead is sort of like an old episode of The Avengers with August Shining playing the role of John Steed (although, alas, there is no leather-clad Mrs. Peel to titillate the reader's imagination). Steed was always tracking down evil scientists whose gadgetry produced vaguely supernatural threats to society. Shining does the same except the supernatural basis of the threats is less vague. The novel is part of Guy Adams' "The Clown Service" series.

August Shining is a spy, employed by Section 37 of the British secret service. Shortly after the novel starts, his superiors interrogate him about a mission in Berlin thirty years earlier. An agent that Shining recruited, Lucas Robie, had stopped communicating. Shining's boss sent him to Berlin to investigate. Shining had recruited Robie because he had a "special ability," something beyond charm, that made others want to please him. As the novel moves forward, Shining tells the story of his trip to Berlin and his investigation of a mysterious killer that isn't quite human.

While Shining tells his story, his sister April is dealing with problems of her own while agents who work for August are selectively murdered. An assassin (known by the unimaginative name "the Assassin") is also out to get August. At least August isn't living a dull life. Rounding out the cast are a Section 37 agent named Toby and his voodoo-wielding wife Tamar, who occasionally show up to battle a wind demon.

A few chapters before the end, August concludes his story from the past, allowing the past and present plot threads to coalesce. From the beginning to the end, the story speeds along without wasting words. Like an old episode of The Avengers, it delivers fun without depth. This isn't the kind of story that demands depth so I don't have a problem with its absence.

The evil force that plagues Shining is a standard evil force of unexplained origin. I can't say that the evil force or the wind demon excited me. Shining and April are such strong characters that they could carry a conventional spy novel, but Guy Adams apparently likes to mix genres. If elements of supernatural horror are what Adams wants, villains of a more surprising nature would elevate the story. On the other hand, A Few Words for the Dead grew on me as I continued to read it and the intricate ending is pleasantly unexpected.

RECOMMENDED

Writers of the Future vol. 31, edited by David Farland

Published by Galaxy Press on May 4, 2015

If these are the writers of the future, I'll stick to the writers of the past. The stories are chosen from the "L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future" contest. David Farland, who judges the contest, calls them "gleaming and flawless." I'd call most of them "not quite ready to be published."

One of the few highlights in this volume is Auston Habershaw's "A Revolutionary's Guide to Practical Conjuration." It tells an engaging story about the lessons learned by a young man who endeavors to improve a dark world by mastering a book of magic that is also a magical book.

"Switch" by Steve Pantazis is a direct-link-between-mind-and-internet story about a cop who investigates a homicide. The killer took a drug called Switch that slows the perception of time, enhancing the ability to react quickly. The cop uses it too, which is the only interesting thing about the cop. The story is full of clichéd ideas and it drags on too long before leading to a predictable climax.

"The God Whisperer" by Daniel J. Davis is an amusing but half-formed story about a guy who enlists the help of a "god trainer" to help him cope with an egocentric god of war and strife who lives in his back yard. Set in a future Vietnam, Tim Napper's "Twelve Minutes to Viet Quang" would be an excellent first chapter about a heroine who stands up to an oppressive society, but it is insubstantial as a stand-alone story.

Childbirth, childcare, and the blossoming (or not) of womanhood are the focus of "Stars that Make Dark Heaven Light" by Sharon Joss. The theme of socially mandated copulation has been done before, and better, although the female who must copulate has gills, which unevolved humans might regard as a turn-off. Some of the story, about bonding with brainy alien bugs that other colonists view as a threat, is mildly interesting, but too much of the story consists of starry-eyed romantic musings that fans of romance fiction might find more appealing than I did. The ending is just cheesy.

Krystal Claxton's "Planar Ghosts" is a post-apocalyptic story. A character named Pup has a friend named Ghost who is invisible to others but "faintly purple" to Pup. Maybe Ghost isn't really a ghost but the explanation of Ghost's existence is, like the rest of the story, contrived. As an adventure story, it isn't bad, but it could have been better.

"Between Screens" by Zach Chapman has a young nerdy guy skipping around the universe with the hot girl who gives him his first kiss. If you aren't a young nerdy guy who has fantasies about getting laid by a hot girl, you can skip this story without missing anything. "Half Past" by Samantha Murray tells of a girl who must leave her imaginary friends, except they aren't imaginary since they were created by magic during moments of intense emotion. It isn't my kind of story but it does take a surprisingly clever twist. If you like stories like this, it isn't a bad one.

Martin L. Shoemaker's "Unrefined" is an undistinguished "who sabotaged my nuclear reactor?" story, which might have made for a good plot if the story hadn't gone in a completely different and tragically dull direction. "Purposes Made for Alien Minds" by Scott R. Parkin is written in sentences of exactly five words. Gimmick gets old really fast.

"The Graver" by Amy M. Hughes is about people who absorb memories of the dead. That's a concept I've seen before. The story isn't bad until it buries its drama in a lot of silliness about releasing a dead person's soul. Kary English's "Poseidon's Eyes" is a mundane story about spirits that failed to hold my interest.

Mental health counseling for people who do strange things under stress (like turning into smoke, becoming invisible, or increasing in mass and weight) is the subject of Michael T. Banker's "Wisteria Melancholy". Had it been played for laughs, this could have been a great story, but the author took the subject matter more seriously than I did.

L. Ron Hubbard is too dead to be considered a writer of the future but the volume includes a story and an essay about art that he wrote when he was still alive. I guess that's because his name is on the cover. Larry Niven, Orson Scott Card, and Kevin J. Anderson are not dead, but a Card essay and stories by Niven and Anderson (Anderson's is co-written with his wife) are also featured here for reasons I cannot imagine, unless the intent is to give the volume a sense of professionalism by adding writers of the past. Each story has an illustration and there's an article about illustrators of the future and another on "the direction of art" that both seem to serve as page-fillers.

NOT RECOMMENDED

The Chaplain's War by Brad R. Torgerson

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

"Humans are superior to all alien life forms because, gosh darn it, we're human" was a popular theme of 1950s science fiction. It has gradually given way to a more sophisticated view in modern sf (except for movies that imagine aliens as lizard invaders), but The Chaplain's War is a throwback to the days when a belief in human superiority was steadfast.

In the 22nd century, alien mantes (plural of mantis) rule Purgatory and have imprisoned the humans who tried to invade it. The invasion was retaliatory, following strikes against human worlds by the mantes, but was in retrospect unwise. The mantes feel a need to wipe out competitive life forms as they expand their colonization of habitable planets. Their new expansion will move through all planets colonized by humans until it reaches Earth. Sucks to be human!

But wait, since humans are superior (if technologically inferior), perhaps humanity can yet be saved. A mantis called "the professor" wants to learn about belief in God from a chaplain's assistant before the mantes wipe out the remaining human life on Purgatory, where they have imprisoned human POWs for no clear reason. The chaplain's assistant, Harrison Barlow, is nondenominational and not particularly religious, having been pressed into the role as a military assignment. At the request of the chaplain, who conveniently dies, Barlow builds a chapel on Purgatory but plays no secular role, other than explaining God to the alien professor.

There are some clever moments in The Chaplain's War. Most of them occur early in the novel. For example, some members of Barlow's congregation, believing in an angry, judgmental, Old Testament God, reason that the mantes are God's true children, dispatched on a holy mission to wipe out the sinful human race. That conclusion is not rooted in logic, given that the mantes do not accept the existence of God, but logic rarely informs religious belief.

Much less interesting are the obligatory scenes of recruitment and training that are standard fare in military sf, presented here in unnecessary flashbacks that add needless length to the novel. The flashbacks only become interesting when Barlow is trained to be a chaplain's assistant in a war zone. That, at least, is fresh.

The flashbacks eventually catch up to the present, in which the chaplain's assistant is taking a nonviolent, peacemaking approach to the war by trying to persuade the mantes of human worth. Every now and then he points out how humans are, in fact, superior to mantes. "We're better than you so you should see things our way" is not one of the better negotiating tools in the diplomat's briefcase but perhaps the mantes will agree with Barrow and stop slaughtering humans. You'll need to read the novel to find out.

The novel preaches the need to respect people's right to hold religious beliefs that are not our own, a position with which I firmly agree even if the novel's message is delivered without subtlety. More subtle is a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim bias which, fortunately, makes only a rare appearance. I was less enthralled with the assistant's sense of morality ("no, I will not have sex with the hot naked woman who just crawled into my sleeping bag because we are not in love") which seems like another throwback to the 1950s.

Cheesy sentences like "I flattened to the deck as weapons belched instant death over my head" will win no literary awards but, for the most part, the quality of Brad Torgersen's writing is reasonable. While The Chaplain's War gives a new twist to an old story, too much of the novel is an unimaginative regurgitation of stale scenes from countless military sf novels. This might have worked better as a short story or as a tight short novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS