Palace of Justice - A Review

I absolutely loved Palace of Justice, the latest in the Aristide Ravel historical mystery series by Susanne Alleyn. The action takes place in Paris during The Terror, a few years after the events in Cavalier of the Apocalypse, the novel in which Ravel reluctantly begins his career as a police agent. Though I loved loved loved Cavalier, and very much enjoyed Game of Patience and Treasury of Regrets, Palace of Justice is my hands-down favorite! Clearly, Ms. Alleyn's really hit her stride with this one!

Someone is leaving headless corpses from one end of Paris to the other, macabre reminders of the bloody work being done by Madame La Guillotine, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason for the killer's choice of victims, which range across the entire social spectrum. Ravel is brought into the case when the headless corpse of an unknown woman is found in an alley in Commissaire Brasseur's patch. When Ravel discovers that their victim is actually the fifth such corpse and that the Revolutionary Council is involved, things start to get dicey for the morose detective. Is it a true madman responsible, or could it be a royalist fanatic out to discredit the fledgling Republic by whatever means possible, even if it means murder?

The mystery is clever and twisty and seems to me to be a police procedural / judicial drama, coupled with a study of what fanaticism and madness does to a society as a whole and to individuals in particular, as much as a whodunnit. As usual, though, it is Ravel's story and the fascinating historical period details that sucked me in and kept me up late at night reading "just one more page...or two."  While immersed in the novel, I was there with Ravel in the gritty heart of Paris during The Terror, with all of its paranoia, hysteria, poverty, fear and bloody death. Even as he races about trying to solve the murders, resulting in some nail-biting moments for me, Ravel is personally touched by tragedy when Mathieu, his best friend from childhood, is brought up on charges of treason in front of the Revolutionary Tribunal, resulting in some of the most heartbreaking scenes in any novel I've ever read. I cried, which isn't something that usually happens when I read a mystery.

Palace of Justice is, quite simply, sublime, and I highly recommend it (and the entire series) to those who love good historical mysteries. For a taste of what Palace has to offer, you can read the first two chapters on Ms. Alleyn's website: www.susannealleyn.webs.com/palaceofjustice.htm. She is also having a giveaway of two copies of Palace ~ the link to the contest is in the right-hand column of this blog. So, do yourself a favor: check out the excerpt and then enter the giveaway. You'll be so glad you did!

In bookstores November 23, 2010 (just in time for the long Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S.)!

Shine On, Harvest Moon

This year's autumnal equinox, which took place on September 23, occurred in conjunction with an event that doesn't happen all that often ~ a harvest moon.  So it's rather interesting that Harvest Moon, an anthology of three fun new fantasy novellas, is being released on October 1, not long after that unusual event.  Coincidence?  I wonder.  At any rate, it's pretty clever, as are the stories which all have as a motif a harvest moon.  In other respects, they all are quite different. 

A Tangled Web by Mercedes Lackey is a story of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, this one a retelling of both Hades's abduction of Persephone and the doomed attempt by Orpheus to rescue Eurydice from the Underworld.  As is common with Lackey, her retelling turns the myths pretty much upside down.

Cast in Moonlight by Michelle Sagara is set in the world of Elantra.  It tells how teenager Kaylin Neya joins the Hawks, a peacekeeping force, and helps them break up a ring of child abductors and murderers. My introduction to Elantra and its different species was pretty much my favorite of the bunch, and I'm looking forward to starting this series. *doing the happy dance over finding an excellent new series to start*

In Retribution by Cameron Haley, Domino Riley is a mob lieutenant who executes a guy named Benny after he attempts to murder her.  This wasn't just an ordinary mob hit, though, nor is this mob run-of-the-mill.  Rather, Domino Riley is a master magician, as are many of the other mobsters.  Although Benny doesn't have much "juice" (magical power), before he dies he puts a Jewish death curse on Domino that has her being stalked by Samael, the Old Testament Angel of Death.  It was okay, sometimes amusing and other times rather gruesome, but I never really warmed to the character, though by the end I was curious enough to want to read more novels about Riley.

Publication Date: October 1, 2010

As an aside, I started this about a month ago, but, after I finished Mercedes Lackey's novella, I stopped reading, mainly because I wasn't familiar with the other two authors' and their work. I guess I was in one of my "not interested in trying anything new" moods. Thank goodness that didn't last long because, while I enjoyed the Lackey offering, the second turned out to be really good. I wasn't quite as thrilled with the third, but eventually I enjoyed it too once I got into it, especially since urban fantasy is a new subgenre for me and one which I think I really like a lot.  I do hope this teaches me be less resistant to trying new things.

DISCLAIMER: I received this free unproofed eGalley, sent to my Kindle by the publisher with no strings attached, through http://netgalley.com/. The opinions expresssed are my own, and I am being paid nothing for my review.

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death-a Review

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston. If you enjoy pulp crime fiction, you simply must read this one!

When I finished it last night I knew it was really special, almost genius. It might be pulpy noir, filled with characters like the protagonist, a loser who gets a job cleaning up after violent death for a living and gets involved in tawdry affairs with low-lifes, but it is brilliant. I actually enjoyed this one more than the ones about Joe Pitt, Vampire detective (no vamps were in THIS novel, except maybe the human kind who prey on emo).

Anyway, after I got used to the style (no quotation marks for dialogue, instead a hyphen just before the dialogue; broken sentences, like real life conversations), I could hardly bear put it down.

And the characters! Chev, L.L., Theodora, Dingbang (-BANG! IT'S BANG!), Po Sin, Gabe, Jaime, not to mention the almost unbearably antagonistic protagonist Web! Memorable, funny, tragic, all too human and real, like a fist to the gut or a brush of fingertips against the nape of the neck. Huston's writing is sharp, hard, but lyrical, almost poetic.

I wish I could write like him.

Highly recommended.

Edited to add a caveat: There are a LOT of four-letter words in this novel. Also gore and bodily fluids of one kind or another. Also some sex. If you are easily offended, you might want to pass this one up.

The Graveyard Book - a Review

Okay, so I started listening to The Graveyard Book on audio, read by the author, yesterday afternoon. I was planning to listen to it for a couple of hours, then stop while I did a few hours of weekend chores, then read one of the three paper books I have on hand before going to bed at a reasonable hour.

It never happened.

Instead, I was enthralled by The Graveyard Book and found I simply could not turn it off. So I did a couple of chores with iPod in hand and earphones on, then stayed up until way past midnight to finish it. When it ended, my first thought was, "I can see why it won that award!" My second thought, that it was over too soon, brought a moment of regret until I remembered it was on my iPod so I could listen to it again (and again and again).

The story opens as a man called Jack, having broken into a house and murdered the man, woman, and little girl who live there, climbs the stairs to the top floor nursery to finish off the job by killing the baby. The baby, whose given name we never learn, is a very precocious 18-month old boy who, having been awakened by a strange sound in the night, has already climbed out of his crib, bumped his way down the stairs, and gone outside to explore the night through the door Jack left open. The baby crawls up the hill to an ancient graveyard, followed closely by the knife-wielding murderer. There, he is taken in by the ghosts of Mister and Mistress Owen, as well as the ghosts of those buried there, along with a mysterious man named Silas who vows to become the child's guardian and protect him.

I loved the story, the characters, the fascinating worlds of the graveyard and beyond, and the voice of Gaiman as he told about Nobody Owens (called Bod) and his strange "family" of ghosts and goblins and other strange creatures. Providing as footnotes the dates of birth and death and epitaph of the ghosts as they were introduced was, strangely enough, a charming touch. It was funny, poignant, scary, and exciting in turn, delivered up by the clever pen of one of the most deservedly popular authors around today.

Highly recommended!

THE GIRL WHO STOPPED SWIMMING-a Review

This was my first Joshilyn Jackson novel, so I went into it with no preconceived notions of what to expect. Just as well, because, although I enjoyed it, and I liked the writing style, there was something just a tad flat about it. Perhaps it was that the story was too scattered. Perhaps the characters weren't as well-developed as they could have been, and I did not warm to any of them. Perhaps because the ghosts didn't have as large a part as I'd have liked (although the bit about the foot was really something). One thing, the first half dragged for me. Not sure exactly when it changed, but about halfway through it became unputdownable (my own word).

At any rate, the descriptions of the Southern way of life was wonderful, especially of the Stepford-like neighborhood where Laurel lived. I have to say, in that, I agree with Thalia that it was a creepy place. I also found the relationships intriguing. All three of the marriages ~ the mother's and her two daughters' ~ seemed to work well for each of them, yet each was trying to change the others' to conform with her own idea of what a "proper" marriage should be. (Timely, that, with the gay-marriage controversy raging hot in the U.S.) I also found the juxtaposition of material wealth with poverty, not so much in terms of economics as of the spirit, quite compelling. Though what the girl did was horrible, I felt for her, understood the terrible needs that drove her to it. I thought the mother and the girl were very much alike ~ in escaping from their origins, they were willing to do unspeakable things, and, in the end, neither really escaped.

All in all, I'm glad I read it and am looking forward to reading her other novels.

Fault Line by Barry Eisler-A Review

If you are looking for a deep psychological literary masterpiece filled with obscure symbolism and weighty subject matter that you must work hard to interpret, Fault Line is not for you. But, if you would like to immerse yourself for a day or two in a fast-paced, action-packed but intelligent and (unfortunately for society) believable thriller, with characters you can care about and a story that makes you want to keep turning the pages long after you should be asleep, then have I got a great novel for you!

Before going any further, I should admit that I don’t read a lot of thrillers, especially those that feature lawyers. Having worked in the legal field for over 30 years, most of the time with self-absorbed, physically out-of-shape, and uninteresting lawyers who are not the best-looking people on the planet and who do boring legal work for boring clients on boring matters, the thrillers I’ve tried have been unrealistic to the point where I simply could not force myself to suspend belief. When I heard about Fault Line, though, I was in the mood for something different to read, so I decided to give it a try. Am I glad I did!

Alex Treven is a senior associate in a Silicon Valley law firm who wants more than anything to be named a partner, and his influential mentor David Osborne has promised to help him win the partnership prize. When Alex is hired by the inventor of Obsidian, an advanced encryption algorithm that he believes will rock the security software world, he thinks his ship has finally come in. Then his client ends up dead, a bullet in his head, and the police find drugs in his car.

Alex is stunned, but he doesn’t connect the murder with Obsidian until his contact at the patent office also inexplicably dies. Then someone breaks into Alex’s house, and he gets seriously freaked. In fact, he is so freaked that, though he has always blamed his black-sheep of an older brother Ben for some things that happened in their youths, he makes a decision he thought he would never make after his mother’s funeral eight years earlier ~ he calls Ben for help.

Ben and Alex are as different from each as it is possible for two brothers to be. Alex stands for law and order and the comforts of civilized society, while Ben is an emotionally repressed, down-and-dirty assassin for JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), an elite, covert branch of the U.S. government. He has just successfully completed another job and is laying low for awhile when he gets the SOS from his estranged brother. Ben falls back in the old, schoolyard habit of protecting Alex from bullies and hurries back to the Silicon Valley to come to his aid. Once together again, they begin sniping at each other for weaknesses they perceive in the other. Add another bone of contention ~ Sarah, the beautiful first-year Alex has been eying for months but who is drawn inexplicably to Ben ~ and things get pretty heated. As for Ben, he might not trust Sarah as far as he can throw her (I admit it, I love cliches), mostly because she’s Iranian-American and had been working closely with Alex on Obsidian, but, in rare agreement with his little brother, he sure does find her hot.

Okay, enough plot. You want to know more, you can read the book. I assure you, Fault Line is worth it!

One thing that impressed me about Fault Line is the realistic depiction of the Silicon Valley law firm and its politics. Very true to the way a law firm operates. The parts about Ben’s military stint and his work in JSOC ~ and the machinations of the government around that nasty little secret organization ~ also seem (too) true to life. And no wonder! It turns out that the author, Barry Eisler, spent 3 years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations before becoming a lawyer in the Silicon Valley. He also earned a black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center in Japan, so the fight scenes don’t strain credulity either.

I also liked the relationships between the brothers, the way Fault Lines shows the difficulties faced by Iranian-Americans since 9/11, and the sharp dichotomy between the American ideal and the lack of ethics in the way the government actually functions. I also got a real kick out of the way the internet and blogs played a big part. I recommend Fault Line highly and am going to be on the lookout now for his Rain series.

Barry Eisler's blog is at http://www.barryeisler.com/blog.html. He also Tweets at http://twitter.com/barryeisler.

The Hand of Isis

I wanted to read The Hand of Isis because I love historical fiction, but it was with some trepidation that I actually began reading it. I mean, I've read a lot of historical fiction about this period ~ from a YA novel read in my youth to McCullough's version and many in between. To be honest, I thought it might turn into just another rehash of the tawdry life and love affairs of Cleopatra. Plus, I'm not a fan of first-person novels. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find The Hand of Isis was really good ~ well-written, with fully developed, interesting characters, and a detailed and historically accurate plot that brought the politics, time period, and Alexandria to life. Plus, I really liked the element of mysticism that was introduced.

This story of three sisters facing the world and their fates together, was charming even as it was tragic. Being myself the eldest of four sisters, I especially liked the closeness and the acceptance of each others' strengths and weaknesses displayed by the three sisters: Cleopatra, Iras, and Charmian. Charmian, the narrator, was easy to like, flaws and all. I did find the seminal scene with Agrippa a bit unrealistic considering Charmian's generally kindly nature, but without a huge misunderstanding like that he wouldn't be as likely to turn out as he did. I also found Dion and Emrys wonderfully realized, and the relationship between the two of them and Charmian was beautiful. Cleopatra, at least in the beginning, was well-realized and surprisingly likeable. Later on, I thought what she did with Marcus Antonius went pretty much against her nature as earlier described, although I imagine it's possible that the tragedy she experienced on her way back to Egypt from Rome effected her in such a way that her later actions are more believable. I'm afraid I didn't get much of a feeling for Iras, which is a shame, as she was a strong, memorable character yet I felt she wasn't as fully developed as the others.

I admit that it took me awhile to get to the point where the novel grabbed me; although I enjoyed it from the beginning, it didn't hook me until about page 200. Then, I couldn't put it down and read the last 282 pages in one big gulp.

As one LT reviewer has noted, being written from an Egyptian point of view rather than a Roman one was refreshing and made some of the Egyptians' behavior much more comprehensible. I also found the juxtaposition of Eastern and Western philosophies well done, and thought the supernatural aspects a wonderful touch. I also liked the portrayal of Isis, a goddess with three aspects. Finally, there were some pretty raunchy sex scenes. I didn't have a problem with them, although I didn't find them all that necessary. I tend to skim over most sex scenes anyway.

Only regret is that I didn't read Black Ships first, although I'm told it's not necessary, just that it might have added to my enjoyment. All in all, The Hand of Isis rocks, and I highly recommend it to everyone who enjoys historical fiction, strong female (and male) characters, and legendary times brought to life.

I'm so far behind, I may never catch up!

I've really enjoyed the books I've gotten to review, at least the ones I've had a chance to read so far, and I've also enjoyed reviewing them, at least the ones...well, you get the picture. Unfortunately, my life over the past few weeks has been crazier than usual, what with a major plumbing problem which included a large jagged hold in the living room ceiling and a sopping wet carpet, removal of the unexpectedly asbestos-containing "popcorn coating" on the aforesaid ceiling, and a copper repiping job. Anyway, I'm still dealing with the fallout of that mess (repairing the walls and ceiling, including patching, plastering and painting, as well as getting the final approval of the job by the city's building inspector).

What's that's meant as far as my blog is concerned is that I haven't had much time to read, much less review, the many books that I have been sent by wonderful authors, publishers, and others, or to interview the authors I have lined up to have as guests on my blog.

So, this is my abject apology for slacking off lately and my promise to get started again just as soon as this nightmare is over.

In case you're wondering, the books for which I owe a review are: Brideshead Revisited, The Italian Lover, The Brass Verdict, The Hand of Isis, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, Fault Line, and Nine Lords of the Night. The first three have already been read, the fourth I'm reading now, and the last three are on the TBR pile.

FOOL, a Bawdy Tale indeed!

I was thrilled to be chosen to receive an Advance Reader's Edition of Fool by Christopher Moore, the guy who wrote one of my all-time, top-of-the-list, desert-island favorite novels, Lamb, and I was excitedly looking forward to reading his latest comic offering. When it finally arrived, I tore open the envelope to find the book wrapped in a warning label that stated, in really large text: "This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank [whatever that is]. If that sort of thing bothers you, then gentle reader pass by, for we endeavor only to entertain, not to offend. That said, if that's the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story."

I shrugged off the warning about it being bawdy but found myself feeling a bit anxious that the nontraditional grammar and split infinitives might put me off the story, but then I reminded myself that one thing that Chris Moore can do well is write, so I shrugged that off too.

I peeled off the wrap-around label and checked out the back of the book. There was that warning label again. Also a Cast of Characters, which included King Lear, Cordelia, and all the rest of the characters from the Bard's play, as well as a couple of fools (Pocket and his apprentice Drool) and a Ghost ("there's always a bloody ghost"). Aha! I exclaimed. It's a retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy. Brilliant.

I began reading immediately, but after I was half through the second chapter (they are not long chapters), I put the book down on the bedside table, somewhat in shock, and turned out the light. Apparently, I am not so inured to ~ what did the warning label call it? vulgarity and profanity ~ as I thought, and I wasn't sure I wanted to continue reading it.

A couple of days passed, and I thought of the book a few times a day, and glanced at it when I got into bed, but I picked up something else to read both nights. But something about the story and the characters and, let's face it, the utterly outrageous naughtiness of it, called to me, so on the third night I picked it up again and read a little more. And it wasn't quite so crude, or maybe I just got used to the language and the images conveyed. So I read a few more chapters before it again got to be too much, though there were a few giggles this time amongst the wide-eyed gasps. And I began to appreciate the dialogue a lot more (that's another thing I've always felt that Chris does really well, is dialogue). Like this bit:

"...The castle's awash in intrigue, subterfuge, and villainy - they'll be
wanting comic relief between the flattery and murders."

"Intrigue and villainy?" Drool displayed a gape-toothed grin.

Imagine soldiers dumping hogsheads of spittle through the crenellations atop the
castle wall - thus is Drool's grin, as earnest in expression as it is damp in
execution - a slurry of good cheer. He loves intrigue and villainy, as
they play to his most special ability.

"Will there be hiding?"

"There will most certainly be hiding," said I, as I shouldered an escaped
testicle into his cod. [Note: you have to read it. I am not going to
explain.]

"And listening?"

"Listening of cavernous proportions - we shall hang on every word as God on
Pope's prayers."

"And fuckery? Will there be fuckery, Pocket?"

"Heinous fuckery most foul, lad. Heinous fuckery most foul."

"Aye, that's the dog's bollocks, then!" said Drool, slapping his
thigh. "Did you hear, Mary? Heinous fuckery afoot. Ain't that
the dog's bollocks?"

Obviously, of course, I broke through previously well-hidden vestiges of prudery ~ a leftover of my Catholic-school upbringing, no doubt ~ and dove into the clever hilarity and surreal wickedness with relish. And glad I am that I didn't let prudishness stop me from reading Fool, which turned out to be much more than crude vernacular & slapstick. Oh, it was certainly vernacular enough, and I did enjoy a few good out-loud laughs and a lot of chuckles, but, like Lamb, it was much more than that. It might have started out almost too crazily, with too much crudity, too many odd characters and improbable scenes, but it soon settled into a rhythm, and the insanity abated into just zaniness, the crudity into merely colorful language, and the characters became familiar ~ weird but familiar ~ and then new characters, some of them from other of Shakespeare's plays, joined the party, and the fool began to change and grow and started to really matter to me. And the ending was ~ well, I really liked the ending.

So, I'm planning to read the whole novel again, because I think I may have missed some really good bits in the first few chapters while I was being prudish. And also just because I want to enjoy it all over again.

Mr. White's Confession - A Review and a Giveaway

Mr. White's Confession by Robert Clark
Trade Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Picador (September 2, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031242812X
ISBN-13: 978-0312428129

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, 1999

In the beginning, two police detectives are drinking coffee at a local White Castle when they happen to notice a bald, rotund, funny-looking man eating hamburgers at the counter. One of them muses that the odd-looking man sits on his stool "like an egg in an eggcup." That was only the first of many moments of pure enjoyment I have had from this murder mystery, which is much more than a whodunnit, and I am looking forward to many more, since I am only at about the halfway point in the novel.

It is late in the autumn of 1939, and St. Paul, Minnesota is still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression when the murdered body of a beautiful red-haired dime-a-dance girl is discovered on a hillside. Coincidentally, the investigation by the two detectives initially leads them to suspect Mr. White, the Humpty-Dumpty of a man they had noticed a week or so earlier at the White Castle.

Now, it turns out that Mr. White has a faulty memory ~ he cannot remember middle-distance events. He can recall in detail memories from his youth, and he is pretty good at remembering things that happened within the last day or so, but between that ~ nothing. As a substitute, he has devised various ways to keep track of his life: he is an avid photographer (particularly of dime-a-dance girls), and he keeps scrapbooks of his photos as well as newspaper articles of current events. On the day of his unknown encounter with the detectives at the White Castle, he had also decided to keep a diary. This diary becomes an integral part of the narrative and is, I think, the best part of Mr. White's Confession. In his diary, Mr. White's voice is formal and innocent and, most of all, blind to his own desires. In the first pages of his diary, recalling a visit by Ruby Fahey, one of the dime-a-dance girls he photographs, he writes: "She went back to my bedroom to change, and I must say I felt a huge sort of breathlessness at the idea that she was in my room shedding and then donning her garments, rather as if some mystery of great enormity were taking place right here in my humble quarters!"

The detective's portion of Mr. White's Confession seems to be a conscious parody of the hard-boiled Chandleresque detective novels, and occasionally it gets a little over-the-top, but overall it works to balance the almost dreamy ruminations of the diarist. So far, anyway.

September 26, 2008 ~ Review continued!

It is always exciting to find a good novel by an author whose work I haven't read before, but when that author is brand new, as in this is his first novel ever, well, that's nothing short of magical.

"Mr. White's Confession" is sort of a cross between a Chandleresque whodunnit and a noir fictional memoir. It tells the tale of an odd-looking and -acting young man who, mostly due to his strangeness, is suspected of murdering a young, beautiful dime-a-dance girl in 1939 during the Great Depression in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is not only socially inept and odd-looking, he has a memory disability. Because of his disability he keeps track of his life in journals and scrapbooks, and that makes up one part of the story. The part that focuses on the police investigation is told mostly through the eyes of the detectives, Lt. Wesley Horner, a chain-smoking, dogged, rough, but honest cop, and reads like a dime-detective novel from that era.

When the story begins, the two protagonists ~ Mr. White and Lt. Horner ~ are eons apart in personality and experience, but, as the novel continues, their lives begin to parallel each other.
I found Mr. White a sympathetic character, perhaps because he is also into photography, and I understood his descriptions of the photographic process and identified with his pleasure at watching an image appear from nothing. I also found his ruminations on the metaphorical aspects of photography as it relates to memory, love, life itself, really quite astute. I also sympathized with him for the way he was looked at ~ as a freak and a creep and even a murderer ~ only because he wasn't fashionable or good-looking. In this story, things got way out of hand because of that bias. I eventually started to like Lt. Horner too, rooting for his redemption when he made the decision that would result in a terrible loss, and feeling his pain over that loss when it occurred. I feel that the character of Lt. Horner grew as much as Mr. White's did until, by the end of the story, they both resembled the kind of quiet heroes the world needs more of but never really seems to appreciate fully.

The novel was a little slow in portions, but the writing itself was so good that it was always enough to keep me going until the pace would pick up again. Toward the end, maybe the last 50 pages or so, the story got so intense that I had to force myself to just keep reading and not skip to the end to see what happened. I did sort of figure out more or less who the murderer was, although it was never 100% certain, due to the ambiguities of Mr. White's faulty memory and everyone's intentional and unintentional falsehoods.

One other thing that bothered me (not about the novel but about one of the issues brought up in the story) was the way the criminal justice system in effect at the time could be so brutal and unfair. There were few of the checks that keep the system in line today, like the requirement for Miranda rights, the rights of the accused to representation and a fair trial by jury, the rights of a criminal not to be subjected to brutal, inhumane punishments, etc. While the criminal justice system today has flaws, they are nothing to what it was like back then. Some of the things that happened to some of the characters infuriated me, and I had to keep telling myself "it's only fiction," and "that was then, it's not like that here anymore."

Needless to say, I really enjoyed this novel and am looking forward to more from this author!

On October 1, a copy of "Mr. White's Confession" by Robert Clark will be raffled off to one lucky reader who leaves a comment below. Please be sure to include your email or blog address in your comment if you want to enter. Mention this contest on your own blog and add a link to the above post, and you'll be entered twice to win. (Open to U.S. and Canadian readers only.)