Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Last time I set out to help someone things didn’t go too well. – Ray Ward

Ray’s luck isn’t faring much better in Borrowed Trouble, authors J.B. Kohl and Eric Beetner’s sequel to One Too Many Blows To The Head. Still mourning his brother’s death and the resulting carnage that followed, Ray is disarmed when he receives a package from California in the mail from his sister containing a reel of 8mm film and a plea for help.

The film depicts a brutal sexual assault, and as disturbing as that is, what makes the package truly disturbing to Ray is that to his knowledge he doesn’t have a sister. The letter contains enough details, however, to convince him that it’s legit. Determined not to lose another sibling, Ray resolves to do everything he can to help her.

Being as he’s a second-tier boxing manager in Kansas City, Ray’s not entirely sure how to go about things and so turns to his former nemesis – and now former police officer – Dean Fokoli, who’s working as a private investigator. Making it clear that he’ll be coming along, Ray hires Fokoli to go to Hollywood and track down his sister. Little could they have imagined that the film Ray was sent was only the tip of the iceberg, and that the bright lights of Hollywood only serve to cast even darker shadows.

A little hub site is set up at www.normancourt.wordpress.com that has a listing of the blogs that have featured or will feature sections—please give it a look, get yourself all caught up if the below piques your interest. It is my simple hope to use this as a casual, unobtrusive way to release this material to parties interested.

As of now the 22 slots have all been requested (cheers to everyone for that) but if you enjoy what you read please do get in touch with me via unburiedcomments@gmail.com. I welcome any and all comments on the piece (positive, negative, or ambivalent) or general correspondence about matters literary.

Cheers,

Pablo D’Stair

It’s the kind of thing editors throw out glibly, as if they’re asking you to remove an unnecessary comma. “Oh, and one other thing… I think you should kill off Porfiry Petrovich.”

My own editor dropped this particular bombshell at the end of an otherwise unobjectionable meeting. He smiled mildly, though not quite apologetically. No big deal, this, evidently – at least as far as he was concerned. But the steadiness with which he looked me in the eye suggested there was no room for discussion on the point. Just as well I couldn’t speak then. Not only did I not know what to say, I couldn’t physically form words. How could I explain to him that there was only one thing more presumptuous than appropriating a character from a classic of world literature, and that was killing the character off? Quite simply, Porfiry Petrovich wasn’t mine to kill. Or so I felt.

But the power dynamics in a meeting between author and editor when the subject up for discussion is whether the next book in a series is going to be commissioned are not necessarily in the author’s favour. In the end, the speech that did come out of my mouth was “OK.” In retrospect, I can see how this might be taken for agreement. But hadn’t there been a questioning tone to the word? Wasn’t it really “Okaaaaaaaay?” dragged out sceptically, signalling in fact the semantic opposite of consent?

I went away and discussed it with my wife. “No. You can’t possibly do that. You mustn’t do that.”
“Well, I have to. He’s my editor. I have to do what my editor says.” The contract was signed. I deferred the decision and got to work on the book. But realised quite soon that I wouldn’t get very far unless I had resolved the issue, at least in my mind. I needed to know whether I was writing towards Porfiry’s death or not.

At its bare-bones, The Last Red Death has a deceptively straightforward premise: a woman who witnessed the murder of her diplomat father when she was a child returns to the county where it happened and hires a local private investigator to help her track down the man responsible for the murder. As with any great thriller worth its salt, however, things aren’t that straightforward.

The woman, American Grace Helmer, didn’t witness a random act of violence or mugging gone wrong. No, her father was murdered by Iraklis, a rogue offshoot of the Communist Party in Greece which was responsible for a string of terrorist activity in the 70s. And the investigator she hires, Alex Mavros, is himself searching for someone, his brother, who was last seen at an underground resistance meeting thirty years prior.

Further, the recent murders of two high-profile businessmen, both marked with Iraklis’ signature calling card, seems to herald the return of the group after over a decade of dormancy. Tracking down the answers Alex and Grace want may get messy, but like those movie gunslingers, there are some things you just have to do.

The second of my Greece-set novels, The Last Red Death, first saw the light of day in 2003 and was republished in 2009. So why the hell am I writing about it now?

Some background. I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied classics there and at Oxford. But the formative period in my life was the six months I spent as a somewhat ham-fisted tour guide in Greece between school and college. Obviously I was already fascinated by ancient Greek literature and history, but the experience of the ‘real’ country and its people turned me on to the modern culture and language – to the extent that I changed my degree and ended up majoring in Modern Greek.

From then on, I was interested only in returning to the country to live, something I finally managed in 1987. I’ve been moving between the UK and Greece ever since, but now spend much more time in our new home in Nafplio, a beautiful seaside town in the Peloponnese, about 100 miles southwest of Athens.

After writing a series of five crime-SF crossover novels set in a futuristic Edinburgh, I finally found the time (and publishing contract) to do what I’d really been wanting to do for years – write crime novels set in Greece. Note: this was in 2000, well before the current financial woes that are ripping the country apart – back then there wasn’t much crime, apart from corruption. But there was no shortage of other problems. One of them was the caustic effect of sudden tourism-based prosperity in previously dirt-poor island communities. I wrote about that in A Deeper Shade of Blue, republished as Crying Blue Murder.

Most people don’t take bribes or go out of their way to abuse their authority. Most people don’t routinely violate their oath of office or take advantage of people who are down. Most people wouldn’t dream of exploiting a natural disaster of historic proportions for their own gain.

Most people aren’t Billy Lafitte.

And thank god for that, because Billy Lafitte is not a nice man. Billy Lafitte is the type of thieving, exploitative, brutal thug people expect the police to protect them from. Good luck with that…Billy Lafitte is a cop.

Lafitte’s antics finally got him kicked off the Gulfport, Mississippi police force when he stooped to exploiting residents in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, commandeering supplies and charging scalper’s prices for things people needed just to survive. Adding insult to the injury of losing his job, his wife also decided to call it quits, taking their kids and leaving him. Most people would have taken this as a serious wake-up call to get their life in order.

Most people aren’t Billy Lafitte.

Breakups are never fun, but rarely do they lead to the disastrous chain of events that John Brighton finds himself caught up in after being dumped by his girlfriend, Ashley. Instead of going the getting drunk route, John decides to turn to his ex-girlfriend, Michelle.

Problem is, Michelle is involved with a new guy, Frank, and John’s convinced Frank is cheating on her. Thinking he can kill two birds with one stone, prove the cheating and get Michelle back, John sets out to follow Frank to what he believes will be a secret rendezvous with another woman. Well, he was right about the secret rendezvous part, anyway.

As John follows Frank down to some waterfront apartments along the Hudson, he notices Frank actually appears to be tailing a group of men in trenchcoats. As John’s trying to puzzle out what’s going on, a gunfight erupts between Frank and the men. Before he knows it, all five of the men in trenchcoats are dead, Frank is dragging him away from the scene, and life as John knows it will never be the same again.

You see, John has inadvertently stumbled upon a covert operation involving rogue arms dealers, terrorists, the Department of Homeland Security, in-fighting between the New York and New Jersey mobs, and one very, very dysfunctional family…of which his ex-girlfriend, Michelle, happens to be a member. Now John isn’t just trying to salvage his relationship, he’s fighting for his very life, and the lives of countless others.

While a lot of authors say they’re not in the book they’ve written—and they’re not lying—I’m going to own up to something here. The teacher character in my novel Witness to Death is me.

Well, at least one version of me.

You see, one of the moments in my life that helped move Witness to Death along was a break-up. One of those out-of-nowhere, soul destroying, maybe-I-should-take-a-Valium-or-at-least-drink-more-beer break-ups. I was down and out, didn’t want to write, didn’t know what to write about. You know the feeling. Everyone does.

At the time, I was probably five or six chapters into the first draft of Witness. And the book just stalled out. The original concept for the novel was the same, but the tone I’d envisioned was different. Witness was supposed to be a lighthearted spy romp like pretty much any movie starring Cary Grant. There was going to be explosions, action, and lots of jokes.

But after said break-up, my head and heart weren’t in that type of mood.

So I wrote in a break-up, and the book took a turn. I wrote in a personal tragedy or two and the book got even darker. And soon enough, I had a completely different beast on my hands. I was tapping parts of my brain that I hadn’t worked with in a long time. Reliving memories that scratched at my soul and flew from my fingers on to the page. Part of myself is in this book.

With 8 years in the Marines as a sniper, including two tours in Gulf War I, and 10 years with the French Foreign Legion under his belt, Nick Hardin is a genuine badass. Unfortunately, even badasses have a sell-by date, and given all the mileage he’s racked up in conflict zones Hardin is fast approaching his.

Working as a “fixer” in Darfur – someone who escorts foreign journalists into conflict areas, making sure they and their gear get in and out safely – Hardin somehow finds himself tasked with ensuring the safety of a Hollywood feel good charity event, Dollars for Darfur. And he almost pulls it off.

Until, that is, hotshot actor Shamus Fenn feels the need to try and out badass Hardin, a move that earns Fenn a broken nose and a video clip of his humiliation endlessly playing on the internet and late night talk shows. Exercising what little clout he has left, Fenn gets Hardin blackballed by the networks, effectively drying up Hardin’s source of income. Time for that exit strategy.