Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted banning of books across the United States.

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings. Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections. Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores. Banned Books Week is also endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

It’s a tricky thing, deciding to go ahead with a piece of fiction based on fact. There’s always the issue of whether the facts are broadly accepted (not always a given), and then there’s the potential to offend those for whom those facts are sacrosanct. Double these potential snags when you’re talking about events in another country, and events that affect a totally different demographic. You’re walking into a minefield.

I first became aware of the issue of the feminicidios (female homicides) in the mid-’00s. Amnesty International USA started a campaign to draw attention to the problem and it worked with me. I was exposed to a part of Mexico that had previously been closed to me as an American and I was affected. I immediately knew that I had to write about it, but it would be a few years before I figured out how and what.

For those who aren’t aware: since the early 1990s there have been a serious of vicious murders and unexplained disappearances among the female population of Ciudad Juárez, a border city directly across the river from El Paso. The city enjoyed an economic boom with the advent of NAFTA, but in 1994 the homicide rate among women jumped 600%. Something terrible was happening and no one could figure out how or why. The criminal justice system in Mexico is virtually nonexistent, with successful prosecutions of murders in some states going as low as one percent. So it went on and on. And on.

When we last saw soul collector Sam Thornton at the end of Dead Harvest he’d moved Heaven, Hell and everything in between to avert the Apocalypse and save mankind. You’d think after accomplishing something of that magnitude a guy’d get a medal…or at least a day off or something. Not quite.

See, Sam seriously overstepped his bounds as one of the “devil’s mailmen” with his actions, and as a result he’s on a sort of supernatural double secret probation with both Heaven and Hell. One more screw up or act of insubordination and Sam will be shelved – his soul deposited into “a useless body decades from expiring,” alive and aware but unable to escape. Madness usually arrives before death.

So you can understand Sam’s panic when the latest soul he’s been sent to collect goes missing before he can collect it. Sam’s pretty sure he knows who took it, a fellow Collector with whom Sam had a falling out decades ago, and he sets out to reclaim the soul before the powers that be notice he’s screwed up. What Sam doesn’t initially know is that there’s a lot more riding on him getting that soul back than just his personal well-being, and by the time he realizes it Sam’s once again in the unenviable position of being the linchpin in the quasi-truce between Heaven and Hell…and the denizens of the In-Between.

The foundation was started by The Boivin family in memory of their son Julian, who was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor at the age of 4. Marcus Sakey, television host and author living in Chicago, is a personal friend of Brad and Nettie Boivin, and together, they are using the growing popularity of e-books to raise money for a worthy cause.

50% of the proceeds from the sales of Scar Tissue will continue to be contributed to the Team Julian Foundation beyond September.

Scar Tissue is available at Amazon as both an e-book and on audio, and for as little as $2.99 you can both help provide funds for pediatric cancer research and enjoy a great collection of stories. That’s a win all around.

To learn more about Julian and the Team Julian Foundation, visit their website. You can also learn more about author Marcus Sakey at his website.

Not to get all writerly nuts-and-bolts on you, but when I sit down to write a Collector novel, there are two key ingredients I decide upon straightaway: the flavor (by which I mean the specific genre elements on the menu for that book) and the overarching theme or relationship I’m interested in examining. For DEAD HARVEST, the flavor was straight-up old-school pulp with a dash of wrong-man conspiracy and a healthy dose of fantasy; the theme I wanted to explore was the tragic consequences of romantic love. Hence the hard-bitten undead protagonist with a heart-wrenching back story working his damndest (pun, sadly, intended) to prove the mother of all frame-ups while being chased across Manhattan by a cadre of pissed off angels and demons both (not to mention half the freakin’ NYPD.)

Much to my delight, folks seemed to really dig it. So I suppose I could’ve gone the easy route, and used the same blueprint for book two. Plenty of writers – even ones I really like – put out entire series in which each book is a subtle variation on a theme. But I kind of felt like I’d already left it all out on the field, so to speak. That DEAD HARVEST was as lean and mean as I was gonna muster. And that to be successful with book two, I couldn’t just iterate – I had to blow the doors out, and really expand the size and scope of Sam’s world, as well as better contextualize his place in it.

To do that, I was gonna need some new ingredients.

Spar Battersea has not had an easy life. He pinballed through his teens and early twenties in a drunken, drug-addled, punk rock fueled haze. During that time he managed to alienate just about everyone he knew, from bandmates to friends to family and everyone in between. Yet, not even getting clean and sober helped keep Spar from finding himself repeatedly at the center of one disastrous event after another.

In the two years he’s been sober Spar’s seen his best friend die, wrangled with a nasty biker gang, been the target of both a psychopathic mime and a dominatrix with an affinity for 50′s style, nearly been murdered (twice), fought off a pack of vigilante ninjas, and been put in the position of having to kill or be killed on several occasions. Death, destruction and downright weirdness just seem to follow him like a shadow.

As Dice Roll opens, the third book in the series following Death Match and Con Job, Spar is still barely clinging to both his sobriety and his sanity while working a dead end job flipping burgers at Mama Calisto’s place. On the advice of his therapist Spar is trying to form new, positive memories to help him move beyond the tragedies in his past, and he’s been going about that by hanging out with a group of fantasy role-playing gamers he met through one of his co-workers. Not exactly Spar’s preferred scene, but what’s a guy with limited options to do?

Turns out not even gaming geeks are safe from the bad luck magnet that is Spar Battersea, as on old friend of Spar’s from high school blows back into town after a ten year absence with a serious score to settle…and a posse of Beatles quoting jujitsu trained cult members to back him up. Before he knows it Spar finds himself up to his eyes in the shit again, this time with the added bonus of a very undesired trip down memory lane.

“I’m the vampire and you invited me in. And I warned you. This isn’t going to be fun.” – Miriam Black

Miriam Black has a unique and unwanted talent; with one glancing touch of skin on skin she can tell exactly when and how someone is going to die. And, trust her, being constantly bombarded with visions of heart attacks, auto accidents, and murders tends to make one a little nihilistic, snarky, and foul-mouthed. However, at the end of Blackbirds, the first of author Chuck Wendig’s books to feature Miriam, things had taken a small turn for the positive in her life.

Louis, the gentle giant of a trucker whose fate Miriam altered after initially foreseeing his death, decided to stick with Miriam in spite of her rough edges and has set about trying to make a normal life for the two of them. But Miriam is anything but normal, and living in a double-wide and working as a grocery store cashier in Long Beach Island, NJ isn’t quite “taking” as far as she’s concerned.

The wheels come completely off Miriam’s wagon when, having just been fired for mouthing off one too many times, she deliberately initiates contact with her former boss in order to get a glimpse of her hopefully painful death. To Miriam’s shock, not only will the woman’s death be violent, it’s going to occur in a matter of minutes in the guise of a gunman in the store. After the ensuing fracas results in a bullet grazing her noggin, Miriam decides to get back to what she knows…wandering the country and living off her “talent.”

Remember the 1980s? When thermonuclear war and Webster filled the TV, heavy metal was turning kids into Satanist, and GI Joe waged the first war on terror without one casualty on either side? Yo Joe!

But from that lost era of Valley Girls, New Coke, and Manimal’s mammoth eight-episode run on the idiot box, there was another pop culture phenomenon poised to take over the nation: Role Playing Games, aka the non-lethal variety of “RPGs.” Games of high adventure set in the imagination and at the kitchen table, where funny shaped dice and human agency decided the fate of magical kingdoms, intergalactic empires, and desolate post Armageddon landscapes. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), the God Emperor of RPGs, took off like gangbusters and has influenced the pop culture sphere forever (there’s a new documentary on it, too!)

But RPGs were no mere fun and games. This greasy kid stuff was feared to be more lethal than rock and roll, comic books, and peanut allergies COMBINED!

D&D was soon spoken of in shadowy whispers alongside suicides, witchcraft and Satanism. There was the Dallas Egbert, Jr. “Steam Tunnel” incident of 1980, that led to a police investigation and a book called The Dungeon Master, all of which resulted in the mind blowing film Mazes and Monsters, where a young Tom Hanks plays a kid who suffers a psychotic break while playing a fantasy RPG, never to return.

Playing D&D, parents feared, was “dangerous.”

“Once you commit an act contrary to the laws of society, it’s easy for people to think you’ll do it again, or do something even worse.” – Kip Cross

Iris Thorne doesn’t go looking for trouble, but somehow it always seems to find the young financial adviser. Foolproof, the fourth entry in author Dianne Emley’s Iris Thorne series, finds Iris trying to settle into her position as branch manager for LA based McKinney Alitzer and tackle the task of being a first-time homeowner. If only those were her biggest headaches.

Already working to help her friend Bridget Cross and her husband, Kip, navigate the choppy waters of taking their successful online gaming company Pandora public, things take a dramatic turn when Bridget is shot dead in her mansion’s backyard. Turns out Kip wasn’t keen on the idea of the company going public, which quickly rockets him to the top of the suspect list.

Complicating matters even further, Bridget’s murder was witnessed by the couple’s five-year-old daughter, Brianna, whom Bridget named as the heir to her majority stake in Pandora, with Iris named as the administrator of Brianna’s trust. This puts Iris in the crosshairs of everyone from Kip, who wants the company kept private, to corporate raider T. Duke Sawyer, who wants to buy the company out for a lowball offer given Kip’s legal troubles, to Pandora’s top employees, who are split on which direction they want the company to go. And someone is determined to get their way on the issue, even if it’s over Iris’s dead body.

I won’t let my son read the Miriam Black books.

Not until he’s, ohhh, in his early 30s or so.

Okay. Fine. Maybe a bit extreme. Late 20s, then.

He’s a toddler, now. Loves books. A little sponge for the tales of the Little Blue Truck or that damn Bird Who Thinks Maybe A Wrecked Car Is His Mother. Or Elmo. Or Big Bird. Or any of those hippos and their belly buttons.

The Miriam Black books are, to put it kindly, filthy as shit. Grimy, greasy, snarky. Caked with blood. Slick with fluids. Vulgarity running through the walls of each tale like oh-so-many-cock-a-roaches. They’re violent. And not very nice. And utilize a rather twisted sense of humor.

Murder and fingerbanging and car accidents and blumpies.

Don’t know what a blumpy is? No, no, don’t Google it. It’s, uhh, in the first book. Blackbirds. Go get a copy and Miriam Black will tell you.

See, and that’s what I’m worried about. I’m worried one day my son—at age eight, twelve, twenty—will come up to me and explain that he had never before heard the term “blumpy,” and now, thanks to his own father, he stands illuminated.

That’s it, right there. The death of innocence. Crushed beneath my narrative bootheel like a little delicate snowglobe. Pop, crash, yuck.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for hosting my guest posts about my experiences revisiting my first mystery series which featured Iris Thorne–a single, sexy, and ambitious Los Angeles investment adviser. The books were originally published by Simon and Schuster in the nineties and were long out-of-print. They’ve been refreshed and are now available for the first time as e-books and trade paperbacks.

Before reissuing the Iris Thornes, I decided to reread them because I’d lost touch with their nuances over the years. Of course, I couldn’t help but polish them, just a little. In the process, I embarked on a more significant journey of reconnecting with the writer, and the person, I was back then.

Today, I’m discussing my path to Foolproof, the fourth Iris, recently again on-sale. The first three Irises, Cold Call, Slow Squeeze, and Fast Friends, are also out now. The fifth and final Iris Thorne mystery, Pushover, never before published in the U.S., will be out later this year.

In Foolproof, first published in 1998, Iris’s work life and personal life brutally collide when her dear friend Bridget is murdered by the backyard pool of her oceanfront mansion. The horrific crime is witnessed by Bridget’s five-year-old daughter, Brianna. The prime suspect is Bridget’s husband and Brianna’s father Kip, the volatile creative genius behind the couple’s computer games company, Pandora. Bridget shocked everyone when she left her majority stake in Pandora not to her husband but to her daughter and named Iris as administrator of Brianna’s trust. Iris is now responsible for a little girl’s financial future—and perhaps even the five-year-old’s life.