An octopod of reviews for your pleasure

Oh, woe is me, I am late again with reviews. So lax. So lazy. I humbly beseech thee, prithee, forgive me.

I have been rather busy, actually, what with the job, the second novel coming out, the book trailers I am working on, etc. But tonight, I am all yours, with one caveat; I have an abundance of novels already read this year, and simply cannot give the time I normally would to each title (worthy though many of them may be). So, here now, a whole slew of novels, each reviewed in three to four devastatingly incisive sentences.

The Last Hunt - Cliff Burns

• I'm not a big fan of western novels (my knowledge of such limited to Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet [yay!] and Chuck Norris' The Justice Riders [retching noise]). But I am a fan of Cliff Burns, here straying from his usual sci-fi/cyberpunk/fantasy-noir settings to attempt a serious old-fashioned horse opera. He doesn't reinvent the genre a la Patrick DeWitt (ah, I knew there was another western I've read), but The Last Hunt is a solid oater, with clean, spare prose, conflicted heroes, interesting characters and caricatures, and hefty dollops of gunplay. I'd say it's sure to please fans of Louis L'Amour, but I'm guessing at that.

The Complete Lockpick Pornography - Joey Comeau

• Comeau has become a favourite of late (check out his brilliantly strange One Bloody Thing After Another), and Lockpick Pornography continues along the same lines, delivering a pair of weird, odd, funny, and very original takes on homosexuality, relationships, thefts, public sex, abuse, vigilantism, kidnappings, and more. I wouldn't call the two novellas burdened with plot; these are shaggy, rambling tales that charm the reader even as their wincing at some of the graphic descriptions (the title does contain the word pornography, so I don't know what else I was expecting). As Comeau's protagonists amble through a world they aren't really a part of, we grow to understand the effortless alienation that the LGBT community faces, and the strong sense of humour that can help people survive such bigotry. It's also remarkably sweet-natured and giving.

Bedtime Story - Robert J. Wiersema

• Wiersema has always had a hint of the magical in his stories up until now, but Bedtime Story pushes him into epic new territory. A story about a boy trapped in a fantasy novel and the father seeking clues to free him, it treads a fine line between realism and the fantastic that would trip up lesser novelists. Weirsema keeps his story straight and his style clear, capturing the feel of Tolkien-like epics on one hand while delivering an affecting portrait of grief and loss on the other. Pair this one up with Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

Katja from the Punk Band - Simon Logan

• You want weird? Katja is Elmore Leonard via William Gibson, a fast-paced cyberpunk thriller that commands attention with great dialogue, twisted characters, and a fine sense of place. Set on an unnamed urban island and following a woman delivering an unnamed vial of something, Logan traipses back and forth through time and POVs, keeping the reader off-balance and filling in the blanks later with a precision that would do Christopher Nolan proud. This is a grimy, gritty, terribly unpleasant world, and I'd go back in a second.

Voluptuous Pleasure: The Truth About the Writing Life - Marianne Apostolides

• This unusual set of nonfiction stories is ostensibly drawn from the author's real life, yet Apostolides twists each tale to blur the lines, leaving the reader wondering what, if anything, is real. What is real is her gorgeous writing style, her command of detail, and her daring take on the flexibility of memory. Presenting stories of her father, her relationships, and a fascinating visit to a brothel, Apostolides is fearless in revealing herself and masterful in ability. If you want stories that leave you sated yet wanting more, Voluptuous Pleasure fits the bill.

Pirate Therapy and Other Cures - Mark A. Rayner

• In a collection of short stories, essays, and flash fiction, Rayner fits himself snugly into the eternally off-kilter worlds of Monty Python, The Goon Squad, and Douglas Adams. In Rayner's warped imagination, Jesus contends with dinosaurs, Batman reveals a bout of insecurity, an alien overlord mans an advice column, and Anne of Green Gables eventually destroys the world. If one story doesn't tickle your fancy, the next one will. As with Monty Python's television series, I advise reading only a few stories at a time, as the non-stop punnery can be overwhelming, and taking pauses to savour Rayner's sardonic wit is a pleasure.

In Plain Sight - Mike Knowles

• Sometimes, with crime novels in particular, you can tell when an author is 'faking' it, i.e. the author really doesn't have a clue about the realities of crime. Knowles has no such problem, and his increasingly dark and violent tales of former mob enforcer Wilson reek of someone who knows the game; if Knowles is faking it, he's better than I realized. Almost unremittingly bleak, utterly nasty, yet compulsively readable, Knowles' Wilson series is a dive into the depths of humanity's own hell. In Plain Sight is as harsh as sandpaper (think Andrew Vachss before his Burke series descended into self-parody), and unless you're the sort that enjoys gruesome vengeance against irredeemable people (and I am), stay clear away.

Osama - Lavie Tidhar

• Osama qualifies as one of the greatest mindjobs I've come across, a metaphysical detective story that loops in and around itself like a mobius strip. Set in an alternate reality where global terrorism does not exist, Osama follows a private detective hired to find an obscure pulp author who writes of a vigilante named Osama bin Laden. What follows, in one of the best meta-fiction narratives I've read since Paul Auster's City of Glass, is an atmospheric descent into multiple realities that fractures the sanity of the detective as he confronts the realities of war and chaos. I really enjoy Tidhar's Bookman series of steampunk novels, but I was truly unprepared for the genius of this.

And there you have it, eight reviews to sate your appetite. Get though all of them, and win a t-shirt!

Tiny Monkey reviews - Red Means Run by Brad Smith

Red Means Run (Simon and Schuster, 2012)

by Brad Smith

Description (from the publisher)

Mickey Dupree is one of the most successful criminal attorneys in upstate New York. The upside of being Mickey: he has never lost a capital murder case. The downside: Mickey has a lot of enemies, and one of them has just driven the shaft of a golf club through his heart, leaving him dead in a sand trap at his exclusive country club.

The cops, led by a gung ho but dim-witted detective named Joe Brady, focus their attentions on Virgil Cain. Just two weeks earlier, Virgil told a crowded bar that “somebody ought to blow Mickey’s head off,” after the slippery lawyer earned an acquittal for Alan Comstock, the man accused of murdering Virgil’s wife. Comstock, a legendary record producer, gun nut, and certifiable lunatic, has returned to his estate, where he lives with his wife, the long-suffering Jane.

Virgil is convinced that the fix is in when Brady immediately throws him into jail with no investigation. So Virgil escapes from custody, determined to find Mickey’s killer himself. His only ally is the smart and sexy Claire Marchand, a detective who is at least willing to consider that Virgil may be telling the truth. Now it’s up to Virgil to prove his innocence, and to do that he needs to find the killer. Before the killer finds him.

What the Tiny Monkey thinks 

I think it's still too early to proclaim Brad Smith as Canada's answer to Elmore Leonard; after all, Smith has written only six books, and Leonard has umpteen-million novels and stories behind him. But based on Red Means Run, combined with his past output, it's clear that Smith knows his way around the genre, and has a hell of a lot of fun navigating the terrain.

As with Leonard (and the best crime practitioners such as George Pelecanos and Joe R. Lansdale [a genius who straddles genres with ease, and whose Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series is required reading]), Smith understands that a mystery/thriller is really only as good as its characters. From his debut One-Eyed Jacks, Smith has excelled at crafting entertaining low-lifes and underbelly dwellers, and Red Means Run finds him in fine form. Virgil is the crafty sort of protagonist that best propel outlandish plot lines, a fundamentally honest, wryly funny man who is well-nigh incapable of just sitting by and waiting for results. Claire is also nicely nuanced, and while the sexual tension between her and Virgil is never in doubt (on a side note, the cop/criminal sex trope is really played out for me), Smith keeps the banter light even as the plot bobs and weaves its way through murder and mayhem. There's nothing particularly innovative in Smith's approach, but he has the goods to move the story like a motherfu@#er. Red Means Run is pure pleasure to read.

TINY MONKEY REALLY LIKES

Tiny Monkey droppings - The Cut by George Pelecanos

The Cut (Reagan Arthur Books, 2011)

by George Pelecanos

Description (from the publisher)

Meet Spero Lucas—the newest literary hero from George Pelecanos, New York Times bestselling author and writer for The Wire.

Spero Lucas has a new line of work. Since he returned home after serving in Iraq, he has been doing special investigations for a defense attorney. He’s good at it, and he has carved out a niche: recovering stolen property, no questions asked. His cut is forty percent.

A high-profile crime boss who has heard of Lucas’s specialty hires him to find out who has been stealing from his operation. It’s the biggest job Lucas has ever been offered, and he quickly gets a sense of what’s going on. But before he can close in on what’s been taken, he tangles with a world of men whose amorality and violence leave him reeling. Is any cut worth your family, your lover, your life?

Lucas Spero is George Pelecanos’s greatest creation, a young man making his place in the world one battle and one mission at a time. The first in a new series of thrillers featuring Spero Lucas, The Cut is new confirmation of why George Pelecanos is “perhaps America’s greatest living crime writer.” (Stephen King).

What the Tiny Monkey Thinks

If there is a class to be taught on how to write simply, succinctly, and yet achieve an impact like a punch to the gut, George Pelecanos is the teacher (or at least co-teacher with Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley). The Cut has nary one wasted word, not one superfluous scene, not fat to trim, yet it brims with astonishingly precise characterizations, brings Washington D.C. to life like few others have achieved, and is a mother of a mover to boot. I've only partaken of a few of Pelecanos' many works (and have not yet seen any of his television series The Wire, which everyone in the universe tells me is the best thing ever created in the history of everything by anybody), but there's no denying he's among the best of his breed. The Cut, however, seems a little light when compared to some of his previous efforts such as Hard Revolution; it's compulsively readable, but it doesn't linger in the soul the way his best do. Yet it's a spiffy crime thriller with a great lead in Lucas, an inventive investigator who knows his way around the streets. Lucas is flawed, magnetic, and deeply human, with echoes of Mosley's Easy Rawlins. The Cut may not be Pelecanos' best, but it's a tight, tough, and brutal novel that doubtless will be a series to be savoured.

Tiny Monkey Greatly Enjoys the Ride

Monkey droppings - Michael Van Rooy

The monkey has no jokes today.






An Ordinary Decent Criminal (Turnstone, 2005)
by Michael Van Rooy

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal (Turnstone), 2008)
by Michael Van Rooy

"You do the math. If you're a bad guy, you don't have a job, no bank account, no apartment. You live in hotels, move around a lot, eat in restaurants. But not expensive hotels because you might be noticed in those and you'll need ID . . . You need maybe sixty bucks a day for food and a little more than that for the hotel and maybe another thirty to fifty for incidentals . . . That's about one-eighty each day. Life gets stressful, though, so you start doing a little something to deal with the stress. If you drink or do grass to level you out, that's another twenty or forty per day. But you can't be level all the time, you might have to move fast so that means keeping cocaine or crank or meth handy, and that's another fifty to one hundred a day and that's if you don't have friends. That's a total of about three Cs per day. Every day. That means two grand one per week, or eight grand four per month, and that means one hundred and nine thousand, two hundred dollars per year. Period."

Michael Van Rooy was a Winnipeg author who passed away far too soon in January 2011. Michael was an author much beloved in the Winnipeg community; his first novel won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book, he won the 2009 John Hirsch Award for most promising writer, he worked with emerging writers, he served on several Arts boards and was named one of Winnipeg's arts ambassadors for its 2010 Cultural Capital of Canada campaign.

I never got a chance to get to know Michael; we were Facebook 'friends' brought together through mutual interests, and only last December did I have the opportunity to meet Michael in person. He was signing copies of his books at a Coles bookstore in Winnipeg, and I was fortuitously visiting my family for the holidays. I stopped by to do the old one author to another appreciation bit, and we chatted for twenty minutes or so. I found Michael to be a warm and approachable sort, and I thought to myself that were I to ever return to Winnipeg for a long-term stay, Michael would be a person I would very much enjoy hanging out with.

Even in that brief space of time, I could tell that Michael was a man passionate about his profession. He gave me a few pointers on how to better pitch a few novelists I represent to Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers' Festival. We discussed our mutual work, my still-in-editing second novel and his ongoing series of crime novels, which had just been picked up for release in the States by Minotaur Books. I left with signed copies of his first two novels and a promise to keep in touch.

And the books sat on my shelves for a brief time while I attended to the many other things that takes up the daily routines of life. And then Michael suddenly passed away, at the age of forty-two, while on tour for his latest release A Criminal to Remember.

I didn't know how to feel about it all. I still don't. We were not close in any way, but I keenly felt the loss of an author whom it appeared was on the cusp of bigger things. And so I honoured his memory in the only way I could; I sat down with his first novel An Ordinary Decent Criminal and began to read.

And now, with two books read and only one left to purchase, his loss is even more personal. Michael Van Rooy was a real talent, his novels bursting with wit, bravado, and style. That we get only three Monty Haaviko novels to remember him by is, quite frankly, not nearly enough, and not fair.

Both An Ordinary Decent Criminal and Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal concern the ongoing exploits of Montgomery "Monty" Haaviko, an ex-con with a seriously cruel past that Van Rooy thankfully keeps all but hidden. As Decent Criminal opens, Monty has changed his name and moved his family to Winnipeg, Manitoba, hoping to give them all a fresh start.

Doubtful. From the opening sentence, "I had a gun I didn't want to use," it is clear that Monty may yearn for the quiet life, but the quiet life doesn't want him. In its first four pages, Monty has killed three intruders to his new home, and Van Rooy has provided not only an attention-grabbing start but the groundwork for a defiantly appealing hero/anti-hero. Monty may view himself as a simple ODC ("ordinary decent criminal"), but as Van Rooy's story revs up, it becomes abundantly clear that Monty, no matter his current intentions, was never ordinary.

"I used to be bad. Now I'm not."

Throughout Decent Criminal's narrative, we see that the odds are stacked up against him at every turn. The three men he killed had connections to a local crime figure who has a personal stake in seeing Monty punished for defending himself and his family. Detective Sergeant Enzio Walsh has figured out Monty's past, and has made it his personal vendetta to destroy Monty by any means necessary. And Monty's new neighbourhood is hardly accepting of Monty and his family, particularly after Walsh begins a not so discreet campaign of slander against him. But Monty is not alone: his wife Claire is supportive, nurturing, but realistic about erasing Monty's past; his son Fred is still in diapers; and his dog Renfield is, well, a dog. Yet without them, Monty would be another lost soul

No reader would blame Monty for retaliation, and part of the many delights of An Ordinary Decent Criminal is Monty's ingenious manner of getting even. Monty may come across as a kind and accepting person, but hidden deep within his soul are immense reservoirs of cruelty and slyness that would make Mickey Spillane blush. His American publisher hypes Monty as akin to the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child, of which I am not familiar. For me, Monty is part MacGyver and part Burke, the one-name hero of Andrew Vachss' series of crime thrillers. But where Burke is grim, humourless, and skirting parody at all times (a line Vachss frequently crossed as the series grew more and more ludicrous, albeit entertainingly so), Monty has a way of finding the lighter side of things, even when he's being beaten into unconsciousness. Van Rooy's novel would not work half as well if Monty didn't have real charisma to help make some of the things he does more palatable to the reader. Because when Monty gets serious, he gets mean, and Van Rooy's balancing act of the two sides of Haaviko is a remarkable feat of writing, particularly when Monty gets very, very angry:

He looked hard and drug-fueled rage opened and closed his mouth until I pressed the barrel of the Colt .22 into his eye and he backed up, and then pressed some more until he backed and finally stopped when he hit the institutional grey wall.

"Stay out of my way or you die. Stay away from my family or you die. If you interfere with me, you die. You try to do anything that affects me personally in even the smallest way and you die."

With each word I jabbed a little harder into Robillard's eye and then I stopped and headed up the stairs. At the top I booked it down the alley, stopping for a second to open the hood and tear a handful of wires loose from Sandra's car. A few alleys over, I wiped down the three guns on a piece of canvas sticking out of a garbage can and dropped them one at a time into trash cans and down sewer gratings.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Criminal finds Monty in a slightly better, if offbeat, place. His wife Claire has found employment as a realtor, leaving Monty to run a daycare centre for local children in his home. Monty is more realistic now about finding real work on a legal level, but he figures that some laws can be bent for a greater good. And as must happen in such novels, if the hero won't go to trouble, trouble must come to the hero. In rapid succession, Monty finds a lucrative side career helping refugees cross into Canada, falls afoul of a criminal figure with eyes on using his unique route past border guards for more criminal-oriented enterprises, and comes back into contact with Smiley Wiebe, a former cellmate who wants instruction on going straight.

It is common knowledge that Michael did time in prison himself for armed robbery, a crime he always denied. I cannot attest to the truth of it, but his experiences undoubtedly helped infuse his writings with a tone of authenticity often lacking in similar tomes. Van Rooy has an eye for detail, both in the minute elements that go into Monty's plans and in the viciousness of his fight and actions sequences that, when they come, are clear, visceral, and riveting. Whether they are completely factual or not is not something I can prove; however, they feel real, which for a crime writer is high praise.

Beyond the authenticity of his research, in only two novels Michael Van Rooy proved himself as a great creator of character. Beyond Monty himself, the various people who populate the underbelly of Van Rooy's Winnipeg - and as an aside, a gritty crime novel in Winnipeg? Awesome. - are some vivid and intense personages indeed. His criminals are memorable, sketched somewhat broadly yet always with enough style to give them some personality. Only Claire remains somewhat a cypher, a woman of grit and substance who keeps Monty focused on his family even as he hangs out with decidedly unpleasant denizens of his past. Claire is an idealized character, too perfect by half for the life Monty lives, but there is enough of a character present to hint that there might once have been bigger plans for revealing her past in future novels.

Such rough patches aside, Michael Van Rooy was an author whose work, already accomplished, hinted at a career that was poised to take him to the next level of crime writers. His first two novels alternate between weirdly humourous and punishingly grim, mixing pulp with class, clearly marking his talent as approaching those who populate the higher echelons on the genre such as Vachss, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. The loss of Michael Van Rooy is a huge blow, both to the writing community to which he contributed so much of his time and energy, and to Canadian Literature.

Michael, we miss you.