Life’s a Beach

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Bev Vincent

It’s been a while. Lots of water under the bridge in the past few months but, more importantly, lots of water in front of the beach house where we spent the last week. For nearly 20 years, my wife and I have been vacationing in a little community on the Gulf Coast called Surfside Beach. It’s down the coast from Galveston and is much quieter than that island city. Not nearly as many amenities, but we bring what we need and enjoy the peace and quiet.

This year we arrived on Memorial Day afternoon, which was a very busy time in Surfside Beach. It’s one of the few places I know where people are allowed to drive and park on the beach and on that Monday it was wall-to-wall cars. The day before had been so busy they had to close access to the beach completely. However, we didn’t need to get on the beach—our rental house faces the water with a dune between us and the gulf to provide some degree of privacy. (The dune was posted with a sign that said “Rattlesnake nesting area.” I think I’ll get one of those for our front lawn.) There’s a restaurant nearby that we patronized a few times, but the meals we cooked for ourselves were our favorites.

The strawberry moon on my birthday

We couldn’t have asked for better weather. It was in the low-80s most of the week, with low humidity and a near-constant breeze coming off the water, so we were able to sit outside most of the time. The house has two decks; the upper deck provides decent shade to the lower one, although we had to keep shifting position during the day to avoid the sun. (I apparently didn’t do a very good job of that, as I sunburned my shins, presumably from sunlight that crept between the board of the upper deck.) Also, there were no mosquitos, which were the bane of our previous trip to Surfside Beach. It only rained a couple of times, briefly, so, yeah, perfect. We celebrated my birthday on Friday and enjoyed the full “strawberry” moon on the weekend before packing it in to return to reality on Monday. I find the constant sound of the surf to be one of the most relaxing things on earth.

A traffic jam on the Gulf—ships waiting their turn to dock in Freeport.

Another of the unlauded joys of vacation rentals is finding books on the shelves that I might not ordinarily read. I read a total of six novels during the week, four of them books I discovered on the shelf. (For some reason, there are quite a number of Dutch translations in this house!) I did absolutely no writing, though. A total break.

However, that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving along on the writing front. My essay “Facing Reality” appeared this week on Something is Going to Happen from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in conjunction with the release of my story “His Father’s Son,” which will be in the July/August issue of EQMM, which goes on sale very soon. A couple of other recent short story publications:

I was also gratified to learn that Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences made the short list of the Locus Awards. The winner will be announced on June 24. I first read Locus magazine in about 1980. Back then, I would never have imagined that things I wrote would be reviewed in that august publication, so this nomination is very cool.

We’ve watched a number of documentaries recently: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could See Me Now, Bowie: Moonage Dream and Never Surrender. The latter celebrates the 20th anniversary of the quasi-Star Trek film, Galaxy Quest. My wife had never seen that film, so we watched it first. It still holds up as one of the funniest science fiction movies ever, and the documentary is definitely worth checking out. In the feature film category, we enjoyed A Man Called Otto, Where the Crawdads Sing, Juniper, 80 for Brady and Tetris, the latter being a surprisingly excellent espionage film.

I enjoyed the second season of Perry Mason and am sad to hear it has been canceled. I binged through all four seasons of Succession. A difficult series in that every character is reprehensible, but it’s still compelling TV. I thought the final season of Barry lost its way a bit in the middle, but the ending was satisfying. Beef was weird, but I’m glad I watched it. We loved The Diplomat and can’t wait for the second season. I also fully enjoyed Rabbit Hole and The Night Agent, as well as Black Butterflies. Manifest wrapped up in a satisfying manner and it was good of Netflix to give it a second life after it was canceled after the second season. It’s a big mythology series with spiritual overtones that sometimes grated on me. The finale had shades of Lost (even a smoke monster!) but the resolution was different from that series. I liked Beyond Paradise, a slightly darker series than Death in Paradise. I’m currently in the middle of season 2 of From.

While we were in Surfside Beach, we did something we almost never do, which is turn on the TV. After flipping through a lot of dreck, we settled on MeTV and watched episodes of M*A*S*H, Andy Griffith, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and All in the Family. Only the latter didn’t really hold up all that well. Archie is a lot to take and the plot of one episode was so painfully awkward we stopped watching. We also found the 1941 move Man-Made Monster, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., on Svengoolie, which kept us entertained.

My wife thoroughly enjoyed Fairy Tale, so I followed that up with Billy Summers and Bag of Bones. I often cite “BoB” as one of my favorite King novels and this reread really brought that home to me again. It’s an amazingly complex and lovely novel. Then we read Forever Home by Graham Norton and are currently reading The Enigma of Garlic by Alexander McCall Smith. I also read King’s new one, Holly, and will probably read it again before I review it.

My vacation book binge included Where I End by Sophie White, Redemption by David Baldacci, Enemy of the State by Kyle Mills, The Sleeping Beauty Killer by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke, Where Are You Now? by Mary Higgins Clark and Becoming the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar. The middle four were “found” novels. I also finished Look Both Ways by Linwood Barclay and have his new one on deck.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Life’s a Beach

Forever Home by Graham Norton

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Bev Vincent

The house on Stable Row belies its name. Stability isn’t its hallmark. The original owner, Declan Barry, lived there with his wife, Joan, and two children, Killian and Sally, until Joan vanished one day over two decades ago, never to be heard from again. Naturally, people in the small Irish community of Ballytoor view Declan with some suspicion.

However, Carol Crottie, a divorcée with an adult child, thinks she’s found the second chapter in her life when she meets Declan. Sally is one of her students, so their paths cross regularly and Carol volunteers to tutor the girl. Everything is going fine until romantic feelings develop between Carol and Declan. None of the offspring—his or hers—are happy with this development. 

Carol retires from teaching and moves into Stable Row but she and Declan are never married, owing to the complicated status of his original wife. Therefore, when Declan falls permanently ill, she has no legal standing and his kids can’t wait to sell the house from under her, forcing her to move back in with her elderly and financially independent parents. Her mother, Moira, is overbearing and her father, Dave, loves to tinker (with his industrial-sized coffee machine, primarily) and mend things. He decides to purchase the Stable Row house, his way of fixing Carol’s problem. However, upon reflection, Carol decides she doesn’t want to live there, so the Crotties prepare to flip the house.

Carol heard Declan say many times that he would never sell the house. While she and her mother and surveying the property to see what upgrades might be in order before putting it back on the market, they discover exactly why he was so adamant about holding on to it. However, he is no longer capable of explaining what happened or his part in it.

Thus begins a comedy of errors in which complicated choices are made in lieu of straightforward action. Moira Crottie has a plan to make sure Carol isn’t tarnished by past events in the Barry household, although it’s not necessarily a choice everyone would make. (There are a couple of instances in the book where people do inexplicable things to further the story.)

The novel is primarily about the matrix of relationships in this fictional small coastal community near Cork (which is also where Norton grew up). In light of certain developments, Carol is forced to re-evaluate the man with whom she intended to spend the rest of her life. Relegated to her family home, she also has the opportunity to re-explore her complicated relationship with her parents. She tries her best to connect (or re-connect) with Declan’s adult children, but they are having issues of their own, dealing with their father’s unexpected and rapid decline together with their feelings about their absentee mother. Sally lives a mostly solitary life, working in an elder care home, whereas Killian and his partner Colin are about to embark on a new life after they decide to have a child.

The book is full of twists and turns, as well as some witty and clever turns of phrase and high drama as the plan to conceal the secret of Stable Row leads to some real jeopardy, all presented in the inimitable style of a true Irish storyteller.

Posted in books | Leave a comment

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

Posted on April 2, 2023 by Bev Vincent

The Irish-American Southie region of Boston is already a powder keg awaiting a spark in the summer of 1974. The city is in the midst of a heat wave and the public school system is about to undergo court-ordered desegregation. There will be rallies protesting the latter that will no doubt explode into violent riots as tempers flare and racial tensions reach the boiling point.

This is the backdrop against which Lehane tells a more personal story. Mary Pat Fennesy is a single mother who has already lost one child—her son died from a drug overdose after he returned from the police action in Vietnam. Now, her 17-year-old daughter has gone missing after a night out with some questionable friends.

No one is willing to give Mary Pat a straight answer about what Jules was doing that night. The people she was supposed to be with provide conflicting stories. Someone says she went to Florida, which is enough for the police to dismiss her as a runaway. They have real crimes to solve and prevent.

On the same night Jules was last seen, a young Black man died under mysterious circumstances at a subway station in a white neighborhood. It’s tempting to write off his death as being drugs-related, but Mary Pat worked with his mother and doubts he was involved with drugs. It begins to look more and more like a broken-down car left him stranded outside of his safe zone and someone (or some group) decided to take action against him. That group may have included her daughter.

Mary Pat knows that nothing happens in the neighborhood that mob boss Marty Butler doesn’t know about, so she pleads for his help in locating Jules. He’s supposed to be the neighborhood protector, after all. Mary Pat has a short fuse, though, which makes Butler nervous that her relentless pursuit for information will draw unwanted attention to his illicit businesses. He tries to placate her, but she’s having none of it, turning into a determined vigilante who will stop at nothing to find the truth. The only police officer willing to help her tries to counsel patience, but Mary Pat is on fire…and soon the whole neighborhood might be, too.

Small Mercies could serve as a bookend to Mystic River. In that earlier book, it is a mobster who loses a daughter to crime and moves heaven and earth to find the culprit, making mistakes and missteps in his blind rage. Mary Pat doesn’t have appearances to keep up and has little to lose, so she is much more audacious than the characters in Mystic River were. 

Mary Pat isn’t perfect—and neither was her daughter, Jules. Long-hidden racial biases emerge as the tension over integration comes to a head, and Mary Pat is as guilty of blind hatred as many of her neighbors. The book’s title is more ironic than literal—there has been very little mercy in Mary Pat’s life and she does not intend to grant mercy to those who have wronged her.

Posted in books | Leave a comment

Three years later

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Bev Vincent

Three years ago this week, I grabbed my laptop and peripherals, important documents and a few personal objects and left my office at the corporate headquarters for the last time, turning my home office into a dual-purpose location. One computer and desk remained for my personal + writing work and a second, set at 90° to the first, became my new day-job workstation.

I haven’t been back since. Well, that’s not entirely true. I did return to pack up everything else in my office, especially my second “kangaroo” sit/stand desk adapter. And I have been back for a few in-person meetings, but no more than half a dozen times and all of those have been within the past year. I don’t miss working in a building in the least.

My wife has also been working from home full time, with the exception of a few meetings on campus, so we have established a nice pattern. We’re just down the hall from each other during the daytime, but have our own dedicated offices for work. We always have breakfast together. Occasionally lunch, too, and we always rendezvous for supper. “Every night is date night” became our running joke.

In the early years, all meals were made at home. During some periods when COVID seemed to be easing, we dined out, although mostly outdoors, which is still our preference. We perfected a number of recipes that became standards in our repertoire. Lots of experiments with homemade pizzas, for example. We did the occasional pickup order from nearby restaurants and experimented with Door Dash. Discovered the joy of ordering groceries online to be delivered to the car. Some of the pandemic rule changes in Texas even let us order drinks to go.

We traveled little. My car battery was the first to give up the ghost from disuse during the first year and, later, my wife’s car battery did the same. We rarely ventured more than a few miles from home, other than some trips to the airport to pick up visitors and a couple of trips to our favorite coastal destination last year. We’ve taken exactly one trip out of state, to visit our daughter and her family about a year ago. That was while the mask mandate was still in place, so we felt reasonably safe, although we wouldn’t say we exactly enjoyed flying, but that ship had sailed (to mix a metaphor) well before COVID.

We were very early adopters of the vaccine, thanks to my wife’s work. We got our first jab at the end of Feb 2021 and we’ve kept up with every booster ever since. Neither of us have caught the virus, to the best of our knowledge. Not yet, anyway. It’ll probably happen at some point, but we’re still being careful. Masks when grocery shopping. Dining outside when possible (the weather in 2023 has been like a roller coaster—I’ve switched between heat and A/C more times than I can count. After a couple of weeks in the eighties, we’re back down to overnight temps in the thirties and forties.

Time does sail on by, doesn’t it? I can’t believe this is my first blog entry of 2023. What have I seen lately? Our most recent film was Living, starring Bill Nighy, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a civil servant who gets bad news and decides to make some changes in his life. It’s a remake of a Kurosawa movie. I also watched Luther: The Fallen Sun, which has a rather pell-mell plot with some gaps but even so-so Luther is great viewing. I also saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a brutal look at trench warfare from the German perspective. David K. Harbour was a hoot in We Have a Ghost, which was much better than I thought it would be based on the trailer. And I quite liked Don’t Worry Darling, which unfortunately suffered from some bad PR.

We loved, loved, loved the first season of Poker Face, and have been known to utter “bullshit” more frequently than in the past. It just kept getting better and better with each episode. I’ve also been binging Columbo and am now caught up to the episodes from the 1990s, which I remember less clearly than most of the earlier ones, ironically. I just discovered that two of those later shows were adaptations of Ed McBain novels. The one I saw recently, “No Time to Die,” is the most un-Columbo of all. Not a murder in sight and Columbo never meets the perp. We’ve been enjoying Dear Edward, which gives us lots to talk about concerning some unwise choices by many of the characters. I also binged through Enemi Public, a Belgian series about a serial killer who is paroled to a monastery in a small town. We’re enjoying the final season of Picard and the new season of Call the Midwife. I also really enjoyed The Last of Us, although I wasn’t at all familiar with the game. I’m also hanging in with the new Night Court, which is still finding its footing. Mostly funny, but occasionally not.

I was reading John Irving’s The Last Chairlift, but I put it aside (it’s 900-ish pages) to read And Then There Were None for the first time in ages (I wanted to study how she handled the book’s viewpoint for something I’m working on) and then decided to jump into Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane. I’ll go back to the Irving at some point, but it is a bit of a slog. Another big book was The Deluge by Stephen Markley, which had some interesting characters and a lot of scary material about climate disasters. I’m reading Fairy Tale to my wife each evening—we have about 150 pages left to go.

Recent and forthcoming short fiction publications:

Plus I wrote the introduction to the Centipede Press edition of The Long Walk, which was a great honor. It’s a gorgeous book.

Recent interviews:

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Three years later

The Deluge by Stephen Markley

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Bev Vincent

It should come as no surprise that a book about global warming and catastrophic climate change would be called The Deluge. Indeed, over the course of the many years covered by Markley’s novel, there are several instances of weather-related inundation. However, the title actually refers to something else, a flood of a different kind, that won’t be revealed until late in the novel.

And it is a novel, although at times it reads like a future history, as if Markley is reporting on what happens, step by step, year after year, as the world’s climate barrels out of control toward a life-extinguishing event.

This is a big book, full of big ideas, necessitating a large cast of characters. Markley begins the novel in a structure that seems parallel to what Stephen King does in The Stand, a book that has clearly had an influence on him and which appears a number of times in a literary cameo. He introduces readers to the major players with whom they will be spending the next 900 pages and, for quite a while, it’s not clear how any of them will connect. 

First, there’s geologist Tony Pietrus’s treatise on Monte Carlo simulations of clathrate hydrates, special molecules that can encapsulate other molecules (in this case, methane) under certain conditions (at the bottom of the ocean, for example). Previous species-destroying events occurred when the oceans warmed enough for these clathrates to regurgitate their guest molecules into the atmosphere, accelerating the increase in temperature. It’s gripping stuff…if you’re a geologist.

Next come a couple of characters who talk in detail about military bomb disposal techniques. Out of this conversation will come one of the more radical approaches to forcing authorities to sit up and take notice of the oncoming catastrophe. Then Markley introduces an actor who has a random encounter with a woman, both of whom will become important players in the events that follow. Then there’s Ashir “Ash” al-Hasan, the neuro­divergent gay statistician who shifts from computing gambling odds to compiling probabilities about NBA games and ends up becoming a consultant and advisor to high-ranking officials; and Keeper, the impoverished, drug-addicted and disenfranchised man who becomes a patsy for a variety of forces. A Greg Stillson-like zealot emerges, attracting an enormous following due to his charisma and persuasiveness, polarizing the populace.

And, finally, there’s Kate Morris, known as Kate Chaos, who meets a young man named Matt who is working in a fishing camp in Wyoming after graduation while trying to find his footing as a writer. Kate is all in on anything that attracts her interest. She becomes a political/social activist through her organization A Fierce Blue Fire, which eventually becomes powerful enough to influence elections and coerce politicians into taking unpopular stands, with Matt and small inner circle at her side. Rounding out the impressive cast are passing references to such climate-related real-world personalities as Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6 insurrection play a part in proceedings as well.

Dealing with such a large cast can be complicated, but Markley has devised some narrative tricks to help orient readers. Chapters featuring Keeper, for example, are told in second person, and those featuring Ash are epistles. Other chapters are in first person (Matt) or feature injected paragraphs that provide third-party insight into what is happening (Shane, the leader of a terrorist cell called 6Degrees, a reference to the anticipated increase in global tempera­ture).

The book starts in the recent past (Obama era) and plows ahead to 2040, charting one climate crisis after another and the near-futile efforts made by both activists and terrorists to bring about real, meaningful change. Just when it seems like American politicians are about to enact painful but necessary legislation, petty bickering takes over from cooler heads and everyone needs to regroup. It is frustrating (but credible) to see how people are willing to cling to short-term power and influence in the face of the worst environmental crisis to face humanity. It doesn’t help that one of the smartest men in any room, Pietrus, is also a loose canon who regularly insults the very people they’re trying to win over, or that Ash’s white papers often include lengthy digressions about his personal life.

Kate is the novel’s pivotal figure, a polarizing woman who will go to any lengths to get legislation enacted to punish fossil fuel companies and other contributors to climate change. No other contemporary issue (political correctness, gender considerations, Black Lives Matters, equality) is important to her if the world is doomed. She’s willing to cross political aisles to negotiate with people whose fundamental philosophies are anathema to her if they’re willing to support climate-saving legislation. She becomes a popular figure until her other predilections (she is highly sexual and is occasionally caught in what might be considered compromising situations, except they aren’t to her) threaten to derail her political influence.

It’s not a cheerful or optimistic book—it is a dystopia set in times readers will recognize. Often, Markley appears to race to keep up with himself and the changing climate as one disaster after another jeopardizes the very existence of humanity. There are raging wildfires that consume entire cities and states (the Hollywood sign goes up in flames, as does most of the rest of California), hurricanes big enough to fill the Atlantic, inundations that destroy many coastal towns and cities and even some states. Crops fail, persistent heat waves kill legions, prices soar, stock exchanges crash, looting becomes commonplace and a terrorist group shifts from attacking infrastructure to people.

When political maneuvering proves ineffective, even the peaceful activists resort to drastic behavior, including an occupation of Washington, D.C. that brings the government and the country to a standstill. The eventual solution is a bitter pill for everyone to swallow and even it isn’t a guarantee that humanity can survive.

For all his prescience (Markley introduces some interesting virtual reality platforms, for example, and anticipates the recent rise in AI-generated content), his world of the 2030s is remarkably similar to our own. Even many of the product brands he mentions are from the 2020s. However, the amount of research and deep thought that went into this book (Markley says he’s been working on it for over a decade) is mightily impressive. It can be dense and overwhelming (certainly the book could have been streamlined in places), but it may serve its purpose, which is to put readers on notice. This is a work of fiction, but the things Markley details in our near future may well come to pass unless people make radical changes.

Posted in books | Leave a comment

City of Dreams by Don Winslow

Posted on January 8, 2023 by Bev Vincent

At the end of City on Fire, Danny Ryan was on the run from law enforcement and the Moretti crime family, the Rhode Island branch of the mafia. The former believe he killed one of their own, a corrupt FBI agent, and the latter think he made off with a cache of heroin. He takes with him his aging father and his infant son (as did Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), along with a few loyal followers.

Danny actually did shoot FBI agent Jardine, arguably in self defense. As for the millions of dollars worth of heroin, Danny tossed that in the ocean, although few believe him. He and his ragtag gang go west, keeping their heads as low as possible. Danny has very limited resources and no experience raising a toddler. He needs money and he needs to find a way to keep people from wanting to kill him, including the FBI agent who was Jardine’s lover.

The solution to his problems is handed to him on a platter by another government agent. All he has to do is rob a cartel safe house containing untold millions and his legal and fiscal problems will go away. He can pay off any financial obligations the Morettis feel they’re owed and start a new life without constantly looking over his shoulder. Of course, the Mexican cartel won’t be happy about the robbery, but they won’t have any idea who hit them. At least that’s the plan.

Where’s young Ian, Danny’s son, during all this? Danny has, reluctantly, reconnected with his mother, Madeleine McKay, who abandoned him as a boy, leaving his alcoholic, neglectful father to raise him. Madeleine has leveraged her beauty and wiles into an empire of her own in Las Vegas. Little Ian soon has the run of the estate and she looks after the boy while Danny sorts things out.

The life of the idle rich isn’t for Danny, though. He wants to work. The solution to this dilemma comes via a couple of his goons. A former bartender at the Glocca Morra, a Providence pub where the Ryans planned their illegal activities, sold Hollywood producers a movie treatment about the events chronicled in City on Fire. The film has been fast-tracked and the troubled actress cast as Pam Davies, the Helen of Troy who inadvertently ignited the war between the Irish and Italian mobs, thinks this might be her Oscar-winning role. Two of Danny’s henchmen have weaseled their way into the production, first offering their services as consultants and then using their mob skills to leverage a bigger piece of the action. The producers approach Danny to rein his men in. Instead, he becomes directly involved in the production and with the leading lady. He also begins to clear the set of corrupt behavior he recognizes from his former life in Rhode Island. This section of the novel might remind readers of Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty.

Although the gang in Los Angeles is a shadow of its former self, they resent an outsider muscling into their territory. Once again, Danny finds himself in trouble with the mob. His involvement with the movie’s star puts him in a situation reminiscent of choices his now-deceased brother-in-law Liam made that led to their problems back east. He’s smart enough to recognize this, but his solution to the crisis has an unexpected and unintended outcome. In the aftermath, Danny heads to Las Vegas, where he will, no doubt, experience further difficulties in the trilogy’s conclusion, City of Ashes.

As career criminals go, Danny is a pretty decent fellow. He wants to be a good father—better than his old man was, at least—and he’s ready to find love again after the tragic death of his wife. Despite his best intentions, he can’t manage to stay out of trouble, although he manages to find a way back out again each time.

One could argue that Danny rarely solves his own problems but is, rather, the regular benefactor of outside assistance. His estranged mother helped him when he was injured during the Providence gang war and facilitated the deal with the feds that got him free of legal problems. For their part, the feds helped make Danny financially independent. And, when things look dire during a mushroom-fuelled hallucination episode, he once again benefits from just-in-time help from an unexpected source.

Given that Winslow has been inspired by the Greek epics, these frequent deus ex machina episodes are, perhaps, to be expected.

Posted in books | Leave a comment

City on Fire by Don Winslow

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Bev Vincent

The peaceful—occasionally even amicable—relationship between the members of the Irish and Italian families who control much of the crime and labor in Providence, Rhode Island in 1986 is at a crossroads. Members of the older generation of both families are ready to retire. Pasco Ferri, the Italian patriarch, wants to move to Florida and John Murphy, who is showing his age, wants only to dig clams and fish for crabs. The next-in-line of both families are ready to encourage their retirement plans so they can make a name for themselves. 

The Irish are woefully outnumbered by the Italians, who have greater local numbers but also the support of the Mafia network in the nearby large cities. The two factions operate by a longstanding set of rules of engagement. Any slight, real or perceived, requires complex negotiations to come up with a satisfactory method of redress to prevent things from escalating. The Irish almost always lose out in these negotiations, and the gentlemen’s rules implemented by the older leaders are less important to the younger generation.

Danny Ryan never wanted to get embroiled in the life of crime but he fell in love with Terri Murphy and she refused to marry someone whose only ambition was to be a fisherman. He may have married into the Murphy clan, but he’s never been embraced by the business arm of that family, relegated to the second tier as a muscle man who’s never killed anyone. Slightly smarter than the average mobster, he attributes the onset of a gang war to a woman, an outsider named Pam. 

City on Fire draws inspiration from the Greek epics, including The Iliad. Pam Davies is Winslow’s Helen of Troy, the beautiful woman whose kidnapping set off the Trojan War. Pam wasn’t kidnapped, though. She arrives at an annual interfamily clam bake on the arm of Paulie Moretti and soon causes a crisis when she accuses Liam Murphy of groping her. However, when Liam is hospitalized for a severe beating doled out as payback for his unacceptably disrespectful behavior, she leaves Paulie for Liam. This personal affront is enough to start a war. In truth, the kindling had already been prepared and the logs stacked in preparation for a bonfire. Pam was simply the spark that lit the match that set the whole thing ablaze. 

Liam, Danny’s brother-in-law, is the youngest of the Murphy gang. He talks big but lacks motivation, tact and nerve. The only thing he has going for him is good looks. Pam is the book’s real enigma. She remains at Liam’s side even after he devolves into drug addiction and violence, primarily because she understands her part in everything that happened after that night on the beach. Women are mostly relegated to the sidelines in this environment, except for Danny’s long-absent mother, who has her own sphere of power and influence. Although Danny wants nothing to do with her, she steps in to provide assistance after Danny is injured in an ambush-gone-bad.

The press are delighted by the outbreak of violence—it sells newspapers—and the police are willing to let the two factions kill each other so long as they do it in places that won’t disturb ordinary citizens or tourists. After a car bomb and another brutal and very public murder, the authorities send word to tone things down and, for a while, an uneasy truce abides. However, as the two sides jockey for supreme power and internal rifts appear as ambitious men attempt to grab power by removing those who stand in the way, the peace can’t last for long. 

Danny, a new father whose wife is seriously ill, wants to find a way out. A complicated heist plan (including a modern-day Trojan Horse) looks like it might provide him with the means to escape Dogtown (the Irish part of Providence) once and for all. However, there’s no honor among thieves…or anyone else, as it turns out.

In addition to the Greek epics (Danny is modeled after Aeneas, the narrator of The Aeneid), City on Fire (the first book in a trilogy) will remind readers of The Godfather, with its rash of back-and-forth murders. The novel explores themes as old as the Greeks—family, loyalty and honor, and the greatest of these, as it turns out, is loyalty. 

Posted in books | Leave a comment

2022 – Last-Minute Additions

Posted on December 29, 2022 by Bev Vincent

A couple of last-minute additions to my year-end stuff. My new Benjamin Kane story “A Woman Called Rage” appears in the charity anthology The Place Where Everyone’s Name is Fear. The anthology consists of essays, poetry and short fiction. All proceeds go to Planned Parenthood.

I started and finished Michael Connelly’s most recent novel Desert Rose. I would easily add it to my best-of list for 2022. Review to come shortly at Onyx Reviews. I started City on Fire by Don Winslow but won’t finish it this year. We watched The Fabelmans and Spoiler Alert to close out the year.

I am on the last episode of The Peripheral on Amazon Prime, based on the novel of the same name by William Gibson. It, too, would be an easy addition to my best-of list for 2022. It’s quite imaginative, very well produced, has a terrific cast and some wonderful characters. I also finished the first season of the British crime series Guilt on PBS and will dive into the second season on New Year’s Day.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on 2022 – Last-Minute Additions

2022 – A Year in Review – Part 4 – Movies

Posted on December 27, 2022 by Bev Vincent

Either with my wife or by myself, I watched over 70 movies this year. Only a few of them were films I’d seen before, including a few Star Trek movies. I rectified a longstanding oversight and finally saw Blade Runner and I watched Heat for the first time after reading Heat 2.

A few of them were documentaries and a number were foreign films, including the two Midnight Diner movies that it took quite a while to track down. Several were seasonal movies we watched over the past couple of weeks—A Bad Moms Christmas is not our usual fare, but we like all the actors and it was actually quite funny.

Narrowing down the list to a top 12 was a bit of a challenge. To be honest, some of the titles didn’t remind me of anything at all, so I had to Google them to remember what they were about. That said, I was relieved to discover there were none that I have no recollection of whatsoever. Movie titles aren’t always memorable, as it turns out—even the James Bond films sometimes have titles that don’t jar my memory of the films themselves.

Anyhow, here is my top 12 list, in chronological order. I cheated a bit by adding the documentary that makes a terrific companion to Thirteen Lives.

  • Don’t Look Up
  • Nightmare Alley
  • Licorice Pizza
  • Death on the Nile
  • Peace By Chocolate
  • Everything Everywhere All at Once
  • Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
  • Thirteen Lives / The Rescue
  • Pinocchio
  • The Banshees of Inisherin
  • Emily the Criminal
  • Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on 2022 – A Year in Review – Part 4 – Movies

2022 – A Year in Review – Part 3 – TV Series

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Bev Vincent

It’s fair to say I watched a lot of TV this year. There are always the usual network series (Law & Order, The Amazing Race, Survivor, NCIS, Grey’s Anatomy, The Rookie, Blue Bloods) watched weekly. I finished my rewatch of Fringe at the beginning of the year followed by a second viewing of all seven seasons of The Shield. I also binged through the existing seasons of Manifest in preparation for the final season, which was split into two halves, the final half yet to come.

PBS had a few good things on offer: Around the World in Eighty Days, the second season of All Creatures Great and Small, Call the Midwife and the cute crime series Miss Scarlet and the Duke. Some long-running series came to an end: This Is Us, Ozark, Better Call Saul, Killing Eve, The Good Fight, Dead to Me. I finally got around to watching the final season of Homeland, too. Two returning series I’ve always enjoyed are CSI and Criminal Minds.

Lots of British and international crime series, including Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Borgen, Shetland, Karen Pirie, Grace, Redemption, Sherwood, Deadwater Fell, Deadwind, Borderliner, Miss Sherlock, Good Morning, Verônica and Three Pines.

I started Rings of Power but haven’t gotten beyond the first episode yet. I also need to finish the final season of Westworld before it gets pulled from HBO. We gave up on Season 5 of The Crown after only a couple of episodes and I quit Dahmer after one episode, too. I’ll probably watch The Peripheral over the course of the next week, now that I’m caught up on The White Lotus. I really liked Archive 81, but there won’t be a second season so that’s a shame.

While I enjoyed Andor and the latest season of The Orville and all the Star Treks, none of them were quite as good as the shows that made my top 12 list, which follows—again, in chronological order, not in order of preference.

  1. Yellowjackets (Showtime)
  2. From (Epix)
  3. Severance (Apple TV+)
  4. Barry (HBO Max)
  5. 1883 (Paramount+)
  6. The Old Man (Hulu)
  7. The Bear (Hulu)
  8. Black Bird (Apple TV+)
  9. Kleo (Netflix)
  10. The Patient (Hulu)
  11. Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)
  12. 1899 (Netflix)
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on 2022 – A Year in Review – Part 3 – TV Series