Fortune's Pawn by Rachel Bach

Published by Orbit on November 5, 2013

Devi Morris has quit the Blackbirds (which sounds like a Brownie troop but is actually an elite group of mercenaries) and now she wants to serve the Sacred King as a Devastator, but she's only 27. Needing more experience, she takes a security position on Brian Caldswell's trading ship. Devi is from Paradox, a world of humans ruled by a monarchy that, for the most part, remains undescribed. Apart from the fact that Devi wears powered armor (a battle suit that is borrowed, without modification, from standard military sf) and flies around in a spaceship, I had no sense that she was living in the future or, for that matter, on a world other than Earth. She might as well have been one of Arthur's Knights (her co-worker cuts down enemies with an axe, and no I'm not kidding). The ship is equipped with canons (still not kidding) to ward off space pirates, so you can add seafaring sagas to the uninspired inspirations for Fortune's Pawn, as well as gladiator movies and romance novels. To the extent that the trappings of science fiction appear in this genre mishmash -- for instance, in a passage that explains how gates are used to travel through hyperspace, or its incorporation of "the Force" from Star Wars (and calling it plasmex) -- the trappings could have been written twenty years ago. It's all a bit stale.

The ship's doctor looks like a lizard because he belongs to one of the alien races that populate Hollywood movies and television shows. Of course, lizard races are always evil human-eaters and these aliens are no exception (except for the doctor, whose change of teams is not credibly explained). Is it possible to imagine an alien that doesn't look like a lizard? Yes, it's possible to imagine one that looks like Big Bird (that would be the ship's navigator) and an invisible alien predator with tentacles and aliens with a hive mind, but those have also been done before. (The glowing bugs that live in space might be aliens but they might be hallucinations -- or something else entirely -- so they don't really count.)

Fortune's Pawn is likely to appeal to fans of romance fiction more than it will to hardcore science fiction fans. Devi has the hots for Rupert, the ship's cook who is, of course, not what he appears to be (although he is a good cook). Rupert's true nature and that of another crew member, as well as the mysterious mission upon which Caldswell's ship has embarked, gives the plot more spark than the cheesy romantic entanglement between Devi and the dreamy cook. The action scenes are repetitive and are not improved by the names Devi has given her weapons ("Sasha was empty so I pulled out Mia").

Rachel Bach's prose is too dependent on cliché but she writes with good pace. The story held my interest in anticipation that the mysterious nature of various crew members would be revealed. That happens, to a degree, but as the first book in a series a good many questions are left unanswered. I suppose that's to be expected but it's rather unsatisfying, particularly since I'm not interested in reading the next one.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Snowblind by Christopher Golden

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 21, 2014

People die in blizzards, usually by crashing their cars, freezing to death, or having heart attacks while shoveling heavy snow. But during the worst blizzard that Coventry, Massachusetts has seen in many years, people die for mysterious reasons, after hearing whispers in the wind and feeling the chill of icy fingers. Twelve years later, people in Coventry still get nervous when it snows, remembering the eighteen deaths. The dead have an impact on the characters who make up the ensemble cast of Snowblind, an imaginative and (pardon the expression) moderately chilling horror novel that makes me glad I no longer live in blizzard country.

Having lost his job and then his wife during the blizzard, Doug Manning has focused his disintegrating life on a series of small-time burglaries. He attracts the suspicion of Joe Keenan, a police detective who is haunted by memories of the child who died in his arms when he was a uniformed cop on patrol during the blizzard. Jake Schapiro, whose little brother died in the blizzard, is now a part-time police photographer. TJ Farrelly, a musician/electrician, was thrown into the arms of the woman who is now his wife during the storm, but that relationship is fraying and their daughter ... well, when another storm comes, their daughter's behavior is unsettling -- as is true of many of the people who interact with the main characters.

I don't go out of my way to read horror fiction but there are good stories to be told in every genre. Snowblind tells a good story. It does so by putting characters first, by creating people who seem real, who are easy to care about, and by letting the reader experience vicarious fear when those characters are endangered or encounter the unknown. Christopher Golden relies on psychological horror rather than blood and gore which, for me, is a more effective means of triggering emotions.

Much of the novel revolves around the low-key domestic dramas in which the central characters are involved. Tension builds slowly as the characters confront the dangers that lurk in the new storm, but it never climaxes in a truly frightening moment as does the best horror fiction. It does, however, reveal the turmoil of the characters as they wrestle with their inner demons, and those provide better drama than the creatures that inhabit the wind and snow.

Sometimes the story is a little obvious -- it is fairly easy to figure out why people are behaving strangely -- and I'm not sure whether Golden meant for the secret to be so easily guessed. I found it difficult to buy into the phenomenon that drives the story, in part because it isn't convincingly described and in part because it is too easily battled in the end, but I liked the characters so much that my reservations about the plot were not a serious obstacle to my enjoyment of the novel.

RECOMMENDED

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives by Sarah Weinman (ed.)

Published by Penguin Books on August 27, 2013

As academics often do, Sarah Weinman's introduction to this anthology takes a narrow theoretical approach to literature. Oddly, while she tells us that she values modern authors who expose the victimization of women by men, few of the stories she selected for this anthology follow that theme. In several stories, women feel abused by other women, and the female characters are often quite capable of dishing out their own abuse, usually in the form of murder. Moreover, not all of these "stories from the trailblazers of domestic suspense" are particularly domestic. While Weinman says she likes stories about strong, independent women, Margaret Millar's "The People Across the Canyon" is a sort of Twilight Zone story about a housewife who has trouble tearing herself away from the television, leaving it to her young daughter to reveal the puzzling nature of their new neighbors. One of the best stories, "Lost Generation" by Dorothy Salisbury Davis -- about a male teacher who is murdered by other males for a reason that is not entirely clear -- features no significant female characters at all.

Whether or not the anthologized stories are of the sort Weinman favors, she chose them well. "The Heroine" is one of Patricia Highsmith's earliest stories, yet it demonstrates her masterful ability to make the ordinary suspenseful. Lucille seems well suited to her new job as a governess, yet there's something odd about her, something that gives the reader cause to wonder whether she is well-suited to care for children. "The Purple Shroud," Joyce Harrington's clever story about a woman who weaves while her husband philanders, also features a woman who is not what she appears to be.

Largely through the unkindness of other women, the protagonist in Nedra Tyre's "A Nice Place to Stay" endures a life of hardship and homelessness until fate grants her wish for a place to stay (albeit in ironic fashion). Written in a similar first-person confessional style (informal yet elegant), Shirley Jackson's "Louisa, Please Come Home" is about a young women who runs away from home (if it's possible to do that at nineteen) and makes a jolting discovery about the family she abandoned.

My favorite character is the 87-year-old woman in Celia Fremlin's "A Case of Maximum Need" who told the social worker that she didn't need a telephone, and now look at all the trouble it's causing (particularly for the heavy breathers who call her). The best sentence in the anthology was written by Charlotte Armstrong in "The Splintered Monday," a story in which the reason for a mysterious death is a family secret: "Poor Alice, with no personal resources, but plenty of money, had taken to the one hobby that appealed to her: she had gone in for poor health."

Nearly all of the stories are good but some are less powerful. Vera Caspery's "Sugar and Spice" is an ordinary but well-told story of life-long mutual jealousy (leading to murder) involving a rich woman of plain appearance (repeatedly described as a "vipress") and the poor but beautiful woman who lives in her shadow. Barbara Callahan's "Lavender Lady" imagines a singer who tells of a traumatic childhood incident in a song that she has tired of singing. "The Stranger in the Car" by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding is a strong but rather dated and slightly melodramatic story about a father who tries to protect his daughter, although he's not sure who or what he's protecting her from.

I didn't quite believe the characters' motivations in Helen Nielsen's "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," a well-written story about a woman who plots revenge for the maddening calls she receives whenever her new husband is out of town, only to be challenged in her selection of the correct target. Also well-written, but sort of a nothing story, is "Everybody Needs a Mink" in which Dorothy B. Hughes imagines a mysterious old man giving a mink coat to a woman he has never met. The only story I disliked, "Mortmain" by Miriam Allen Deford, is about a nurse who decides to murder her dying patient (wouldn't it be easier to let him die?).

Weinman introduces each writer with interesting biographical details, but her need to explain why she chose each story for the anthology often drives her to reveal too much about the plots. While I'm not sure that Weinman's analysis adds anything of value to these stories, I commend her for anthologizing writers who deserve to be remembered.

RECOMMENDED

The Ascendant by Drew Chapman

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

Like Christopher Reich's recently released The Prince of Risk, The Ascendant starts as a financial thriller that involves a secretive decision by the Chinese to sell U.S. Treasury bonds. It even features a woman named Alex, as does Reich's novel. In most other respects, the novels follow very different paths. Both are fun escapist fiction, but The Ascendant is the more absorbing of the two.

The Ascendant begins in China with a village in revolt and a mysterious young woman known as "the Tiger," then shifts to New York where 26-year-old Garrett Reilly, a bond analyst with a gift for pattern recognition, discovers that Treasury bonds are being dumped on the market in a way that will create economic panic and devalue the dollar. A small military working group, believing the Chinese have declared war and impressed with Reilly's ability to predict events that military analysts missed, recruits Reilly to lead a project called Ascendant.

Reilly, who can easily clobber four tough guys in a bar fight, isn't your typical Wall Street analyst. He's your typical thriller hero to the extent that he's an arrogant loner who likes to drink and womanize, but he has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes and, unlike most thriller heroes, he has a passionate hatred of the U.S. military. Where the main character in Reich's novel is a typical "master of the universe" hedge fund boss, Drew Chapman's protagonist is a refreshingly quirky antisocial misfit who cares more about computer games than financial power. When he's recruited to do his patriotic duty by joining the Defense Intelligence Agency, he tells the Secretary of Defense to stuff it. His unorthodox approach to heroism makes Garrett an appealing character, at least to readers who like antiheroes.

The other characters are an assemblage of recognizable types (the hawkish Secretary of Defense, the socially awkward computer hackers, the military officer who must decide whether his duty is to follow orders or to do what's right) but they are developed with sufficient care to give each a believable place in the world. The other character who deviates from the norm (while playing only a small role) is Hu Mei, the charismatic leader of a rebel movement in China, who inspires millions by being kind and cheerful.

Although there aren't many of them, the scenes that take place in China capture the nation's essence (something I would not say is true of Reich's novel). Readers who are looking for an emphasis on finance will probably prefer Reich's novel, but I appreciated Chapman's imaginative look at how the manipulation of images might give rise to a social revolution. Apart from some silliness in the middle of the novel (Garrett has to win a simulated military battle to keep his job), The Ascendant seemed like a credible story while I was reading it. After I put it down, I thought "no, that couldn't happen," but the point of escapist fiction is to engage the reader during the process of reading and The Ascendant did that.

RECOMMENDED

The Polaris Protocol by Brad Taylor

Published by Dutton Adult on January 14, 2014

Reading a Taskforce novel is an adrenalin rush. While that could be said of many action novels, Brad Taylor's Taskforce novels have the additional virtue of being intelligent. Taylor has a clear, cliché-free writing style that helps the story move swiftly. Plentiful action scenes contribute to the pace, but Taylor avoids the overdone and over-the-top nonsense that pervades so many action novels. The plots are farfetched but plausible enough for fun escapist fiction. I keep waiting for Taylor to stumble, given the speed at which he is churning out Taskforce novels, but the quality continues to be consistent.

The Polaris Protocol begins with the Taskforce chasing a bad guy in Turkmenistan while different bad guys in Mexico are messing with the GPS system. The reader knows that it's only a matter of time before the Taskforce takes on the new threat to national security. As is always true in a Taskforce novel, everything that can go wrong does ... until the end, of course, when Pike Logan and his team clean up the mess. It's a formula, but it works.

Another part of Taylor's successful formula has been: Pike wants to do something to defeat a menace; Pike is ordered not to do it; Pike does it anyway, saving the world (or at least some part of it) in the process. Taylor varies that formula a bit in The Polaris Protocol. This time Pike is giving the orders and Jennifer is disregarding them. As always, Taylor strikes a workable balance between action and character development, while the addition of friction between Pike and Jennifer adds interest to the story.

The friction arises because Jennifer's brother Jack, a journalist investigating a Mexican drug cartel, accidentally discovers a bigger story that leads to his kidnapping. Jennifer goes to his aid, abandoning the Turkmenistan mission (with Pike's consent), which cheeses off some of her Taskforce teammates. Knuckles is more cheesed at Pike than at Jennifer, particularly when he learns that Pike and Jennifer have been slipping between the sheets during their off-duty hours. That subplot has been developing over the course of the series and it's starting to pay dividends as Jack recognizes the division of his loyalty to Jennifer and to the Taskforce and its mission.

An old nemesis of Pike resurfaces in The Polaris Protocol, but the most interesting character is a different psychopathic killer. Remorseless killers are standard fare in thrillers, but Taylor fashions this one with subtlety. I'm not sure I quite buy the notion of a philosophical psychopath, but he's more entertaining than the usual mindless grunt-and-kill evildoer. Character creation is one of Taylor's skills, particularly his ability to depict both good guys and bad guys in a nuanced way. Pike engages in appalling behavior at the novel's end for a reason that seems justifiable to Pike (covering up all the laws he's broken in this and earlier novels) and perhaps to the reader, although the notion that good guys obey the law is out the window in these novels. Pike muses that Americans want a black-and-white world in which people and governments are either good or evil, but that isn't the world in which we live. Pike understands that and, fortunately for his readers, so does Taylor. None of his good guys are entirely good, just as his bad guys are not entirely evil. That's one reason I enjoy these novels.

RECOMMENDED