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Playing With Fire by Peter Robinson
Another Inspector Banks mystery. This one starts with Banks and his co-workers standing on the edge of a canal watching two old barges burn. What makes it police business is that there was someone on each barge--a painter on one and a young woman on the other. Both were killed by the fire (though the girl was on drugs), and there is clear evidence that the fire was set by someone.
There's no dearth of suspects, from the guy who called the fire in (and, mysteriously, went home immediately after the cops showed up and washed his clothes), the girl's boyfriend, the girl's father (who may have been sexually abusing her before she ran away), to the possibility that the painter was killed because of some business connection.
Then there's another fire, and again someone is killed. Banks is left to wonder, is this a serial arsonist?
And if not, who will the next target be?
Recommended.
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne; Revised and Updated Translation by Jacqueline Rogers
Never read this one before. Managed to avoid getting a copy with a cover tie-in to the Jackie Chan movie from a little while ago (in fact, I haven't even seen such tie-ins).
Phileas Fogg, an englishman of sedentary habits (so sedentary that he has just fired his one servant for bringing him shaving water two degrees too cool), has just hired a new servant in one Jean Passepartout, a frenchman of many former careers. That same evening, while playing whist at his club, Mr. Fogg bets his three opponents that he can travel around the world in exactly 80 days (or less), allowing for all possible delays. He bets 20 000 pounds that he can do it. Collecting Passpartout, he sets off. Along the way, he is spotted by a detective who is convinced that he is the robber whose work has just set London on its ear. As Fogg keeps travelling, the detective, one Fix, follows him hoping to catch Fogg in English territory at the same time as a warrant for his arrest . . .
In India, Fogg, Passpartout, and an english soldier rescue a widow from suttee, and the poor woman is forced to travel along with them until they can find a safe place for her (circumstances keep leaving her unable to leave them, not that she wants to, really).
Fogg is certainly a resourceful man, but he's not very interesting, so it's up to Passpartout to carry the reader interest (perhaps why Jackie Chan played him in the movie--certainly, Passpartout is supposed to be a former acrobat [among other careers], so that part's acceptable; but I wonder how they got around the fact that Passpartout is supposed to be French?), which he does fairly well. Fix makes a capable antagonist, though of course there's never much doubt about whether Fogg is going to make it back to England (at least, not until nearly the end). As the afterward notes, it's interesting to consider what would happen if someone were to try this today: they'd spend most of the 80 days waiting for entry visas for the countries along the route . . .
Recommended.
The Family Trade: book one of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross
They got me to buy this one by playing the name association game. The back cover declares it bo be "A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber"; mention Zelazny and I'm willing to invest a few bucks (it also, at the bottom, brings in H. Beam Piper (neutral) and Philp Jose Farmer (evil--I mean, bad), and concludes, "Charles Stross has set a new standard for hard fantasy epics." Never mind the hyperbole; what's "hard fantasy"?). I should also add, before I get into the meat of the work, that Orson Scott Card sees fit to give the book several paragraphs of squeeing that go inside the front cover. If, like me, you consider an endorsement by Card to be a bad thing, consider yourself warned.
Miriam Beckstein is an investigative journalist with a tech magazine who stumbles across a big scoop--money laundering, crime, the whole shebang. She decides, though that she should run things in front of her editorial director (and legal department) before she and her investigator (Paulette "Paulie" Milan) go to the editor. He listens impassively, and by the time they get back to their desks security guards are waiting to escort them from the building. Yes, they've been fired on trumped-up reasons--guess whose management is involved in this very scheme they have uncovered?
In the process of recovery, Miriam stops in to see her mother, who is currently house-(and wheelchair-)bound. Now, Miriam is adopted, because her birth mother was murdered when Miriam was about 6 weeks old, and that murder was never solved (nor was her mother ever identified). Her adoptive mother gives Miriam a box of memorabilia, including her adoption papers and a locket that had belonged to her birth mother. Later in the evening, Miriam opens the locket and finds it contains, instead of pictures or something like hair, a painting of a kind of celtic-seeming knotwork. As she stares at it, Miriam suddenly finds herself in a forest. And a patrol of mounted Knights with machine guns fire at her before she can manage to flip back into the real world again.
It turns out that Miriam's real family is a cabal of world-travelling merchants, who have used their ability to transport goods through two different worlds to make themselves very rich. Miriam's mother was one of the last victims of a war, and Miriam herself was given up as lost and mostly forgotten. But now she's back, and her family comes after her, wanting to control her and make her behave . . .
Miriam goes about investigating her new situation logically and intelligently; she takes a digital camera along on her first controlled trip, for instance, and gets Paulie to film her disappearing and appearing. Once captured by her family, she uses the resources of both worlds to help herself out, investigates the local social mores to find a way of moving around the palace invisibly that's more reliable than secret passages, and takes responsibility for her own security, cause it seems that a lot of people want her dead.
The problem is that while Miriam's situation is interesting, Miriam herself is not. I could care less about her, or indeed, anyone else in the book. Except for a rich family who travel between worlds, and a pattern being involved, this in no way resembles Zelazny. I feel betrayed.
Not recommended.
The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the desert of the real edited by William Irwin
The problem with books on the philosophy of popular entertainment (and this one is brought to you by the editor of Seinfeld and Philosophy and The Simpsons and Philosophy) is that they tend to be uneven at best and incoherent at worst. This one falls in between the two, containing good essays and bad essays, essays that make sense and essays that are nonsense. Things are complicated by the fact that it draws entirely on the first movie, thus not realising important things revealed in the sequels.
Not recommended.