Book Review: The Hot Country

Copyright © 2016, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

This novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler is the first in his series billed as "A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller."

The story's setting is Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1914 where Chicago reporter Christopher Marlowe "Kit" Cobb is assigned to report on the various rebel factions that are vying for power in an unstable Mexico, made more complex by America's invasion of the southern port city of Vera Cruz.

While there, Cobb meets a pretty Mexican woman, Luisa, who turns out to be a sniper for an unknown rebel group. Also in town is a German ship filled with armaments that also disgorges, in the dead of night, a mysterious German official who Cobb thinks may be trouble for the Americans. Following the German eventually leads to Panco Villa's rebel camp, but not before Cobb has to fight alongside some Villistas to save his own skin - thus earning Pancho Villa's respect. The German is there, too, to urge Villa to invade San Antionio, Texas, and possibly unite all Mexicans under arms for the fight. Cobb learns of this and must escape to tell the story.

The author does a great job immersing the reader in the place and time of 1914 Vera Cruz, peppering the story with the smells and tastes and emotions of the locality. Each chapter bubbles with tension and suspense and action. Cobb lives on the edge at times, taking chances more suited for a secret agent than a reporter, while he tries to determine the mystery German man's mission. And along the way, he hopes to reunite with the lovely Luisa, despite the fact she once held a gun to his head.

My only negative critique of the book is a writing device Butler uses that I find annoying and ineffective: he lapses into ultra-long sentences - some spanning a page or more - for the purpose, I assume, of creating a frantic sense of action or thoughts for the character. I often found myself just skimming over those sections, having gotten the gist in the first few lines. This is done repeatedly, and I think detracts a little from the overall excellence of the story.

All in all, The Hot Country is a great read that is hard to put down. The hardcover is about 325 pages.

Book Review: The Nomination

Copyright © 2016, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

This suspense novel by William G. Tapply employs a story technique I used in my first novel, Linear Descent, that I think of as the "character spiral." If you consider a spiral shape, such as a galaxy in space, it consists of numerous far-flung entities circling a center point, all drawn toward the center. At some point, they swirl inward and converge at that center, crashing together. In a character spiral, the entities are a cast of characters separated by distance, time, or unfamiliarity (i.e. strangers).

In The Nomination, the main characters are out at the edge of the spiral, living separated lives, with only tangential relationship. The center point, or the inciting incident in novelist terms, is the impending retirement of a Supreme Court justice. The president wants to appoint Massachusetts judge Thomas Larrigan, who is considered a Vietnam War hero with a squeaky-clean record. But Larrigan has a secret past: during the war, he abandoned a child bride and a gave away their baby for adoption. He connects with an old Marine pal, Eddie, who knows all about it. Eddie's old girlfriend knows, too, and Larrigan sends him down to Florida to take care of her.

In New York, that former child bride, Simone, is now a dying woman who agrees to let a ghostwriter tell her story. She'd had a brief acting career in the 1980s, becoming a cult celebrity before retiring due to her illness. She has the documents from her past, and a just-arrived package of photos sent to her by Eddie's girlfriend, who has been spooked by his sudden appearance in Florida.

Out in California, former police detective Jesse Church fears for her life after sending a mob boss to jail. After her picture appears in the paper, she goes on the run, but not before receiving a letter from Simone who believes Jesse to be her birth-daughter. So, Jesse heads for New York, thinking the mob hit-men won't find her there.

Writer Mac Cassidy gets the job to ghostwrite Simone's biography. He meets her and leaves behind a tape recorder that she'll use to dictate the story. She has no idea Thomas Larrigan is a judge and that he's been nominated for the high court. But, Eddie has found out about her from his long-ago girlfriend.

And so the characters spiral in toward one another, and the reader anticipates the impending crash that will happen when they meet. Mac has the tapes and photos, Eddie wants to silence Simone and get the photos (unaware of the book project), and Jesse wants to meet her mother and hide out, and the mob is on her trail. The reader has an inkling about what will happen, yet the outcome isn't exactly as expected. All in all, The Nomination is well worth the read. The hardcover is about 300 pages, so not too long.

Book Review: The Lincoln Letter

Copyright © 2015, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

Everything about Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate historians and inspire novelists. This seems to be the case for the historical suspense novel, The Lincoln Letter, author William Martin's fifth installment in the Peter Fallon series. A few years ago, I wrote a review of the second in this series, Harvard Yard, a book that I thoroughly enjoyed and which I think is his best story of the lot.

In The Lincoln Letter, antique hunter Peter Fallon and his on and off partner Evangeline Carrington are again drawn into an historical treasure hunt, spurred on by the discovery of a letter by Lincoln. Written on the day of his death to a Lieutenant Hutchinson, it states that the lieutenant possesses something that the president wants returned, something that had been missing for three years.

Peter, of course, is determined to find out what the missing something is, and travels to Washington D.C. to dig deeper into the mystery. But, others are also on the trail, people who have more sinister motives. Eventually, they all come to believe that the missing item is Lincoln's "day book", a diary where he has jotted down his thoughts on emancipation of the slaves.

As with his other books in the series, Martin jumps the reader back and forth in time, telling the story of Lieutenant Halsey Hutchinson and the day book; how he got hold of it, lost it, and strove to retrieve it again from 1862 through the end of the war and Lincoln's assassination. Along the way, Hutchinson witnesses historic events and is involved with infamous figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Wilkes Booth, Walt Whitman, and the president himself.

In the present day, Peter and Evangeline face peril at the hands of the competition, who aren't afraid to use murder to get what they want. Of the Fallon novels, this may the the best after Harvard Yard, and is a couple of hundred pages shorter.

Literary Agents and the Police

Copyright © 2015, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

Some writer friends told me about a panel of literary agents they'd heard at a local writer's conference. They moderated an open critique session, where the panel read snippets of attendees' work and offered their quick opinion. Some readings were the opening pages of novels, some were drafts of agent query letters, some were story ideas. The agents were reported to be rude, insulting, and dismissive of the authors' works, offering little in the way of constructive advice or encouragement. In other words, they acted like insensitive snobs bent on crushing the budding authors' dreams.

This all happened about the time of the Baltimore riots, where police were accused of causing the death of an arrested suspect due to negligence or worse. It all got me thinking about group behavior of those in power over others.

Our police have a difficult job, to say the least. Every day, they encounter many of the worst sorts in our society: drug dealers, violent gangs, thieves and burglars, rapists, wife beaters, murderers, liars and cheats. They face disrespect, resisting arrest, fleeing suspects, and numerous false cries of racism and brutality. Every day. On and on. They are human, and the daily dose of inhumanity and crime takes its toll until some, it seems, become jaded and insensitive to the people they encounter on the job. They may become gruff, short-tempered, and too quick to use force. And so the innocent may feel a bit roughed-up, leading to resentment and claims of brutality.

Enter the literary agents. A bit analogous to the police, they, too, are deluged each day with many of the worst sorts in the literary world: inane story ideas, amateurish query letters, sloppy chapter submissions, ignored submission rules, endless cat stories, authors making pitches over the bathroom urinals, and just plain bad writing. Day after day. On and on. So do they, too, become jaded and insensitive, expecting every new submission to be mindless crap? Do they have a knee-jerk reaction at writers' conferences that, of course, everything they hear is worthy of derision, no matter how much it hurts?

Just wondering.

Book Review: Trust Your Eyes

Copyright © 2015, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

Author Lynwood Barclay's 2012 thriller Trust Your Eyes begins where any thriller or mystery should, with what we writers call "the inciting incident."  In this case, mildly schizophrenic Thomas Kilbride believes he sees a murder online.

Thomas is obsessed with maps. The walls of his room and the hallway outside are papered with them. He believes some cataclysm will wipe out all online maps, and he'll be the only one left with paper ones. He discovers a web site named Whirl360 (a thinly veiled reference to Google Street View) that allows him to "walk" streets around the world.  So, he spends all day in his room web-walking Whirl360's streets to memorize everything he sees, which he has the brilliance to do.

One day, while web-walking a street in New York City, he looks up at an apartment building window and sees a person's head. A plastic bag is squeezed tightly over it.  A murder in progress, frozen in time by Whirl360's drive-by camera.  Thomas convinces his skeptical brother, Ray, to travel to New York City to investigate.  Ray discovers nothing unusual. The apartment is empty and he's told the girls who lived there have moved away.  He does nothing to dig deeper, but his arrival asking questions is noticed by the wrong people - those who ordered the murder.

The murder is orchestrated by Howard Talliman, the campaign strategist of an ambitious politician, to cover up previous dirty deeds by the politician, who plans to run for governor. Ray's snooping leads Howard's henchman to the picture in Whirl360.  Stunned by what they see, they decide the image must be scrubbed out. He sends a hit woman to the Whirl360 headquarters, who then forces the engineer in charge to wipe the image of the head from the picture before killing him and his wife.

When the head image suddenly disappears from Whirl360, Ray is convinced Thomas was right. It was a murder, and someone made the change just after his visit to New York.

As the story progresses, Howard's henchman tries to find Ray's identity, while at the same time Ray, Thomas, and a friend attempt to discover all they can about the murder so they can take a convincing story to the police.  The tension grows as Howard's operatives discover Ray's whereabouts and set out to eliminate them as loose ends.

Trust Your Eyes keeps you engaged all along, and includes other subplots that entangle Ray as he and Thomas struggle with the murder mystery.

Book Review: The Rescue Artist

Copyright © 2013, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

The subtitle of this nonfiction book (“A true story of art, thieves, and the hunt for a missing masterpiece”) doesn’t do justice to the rollicking, outrageous story that author Edward Dolnick tells inside its covers.

The story begins on the day of the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Norway. Two men prop a ladder up against a first floor window of Norway’s National Gallery, bash in the window, and make off with an iconic painting: The Scream by Edvard Munch. The painting hangs only yards from the window, which contains ordinary glass that is easily shattered. The guard, snug in his basement bunker, assumes he’s hearing a false alarm. The theft is a national embarrassment for Norway, coinciding as it does with the Olympics. The police are stumped.

After that introduction, the book focuses on a man named Charley Hill, who is a detective with New Scotland Yard’s Art Squad. Charley’s specialty is undercover work, where he usually poses as a brash American looking to buy stolen art. He spends much of his time cultivating seedy underworld figures, aiming to gain their trust so they’ll confide in him any knowledge of where such stolen items may be. The author tells several hilarious and amazing stories about Charley’s exploits recovering various other stolen paintings, and the outrageous characters he assumes along the way.

Interspersed with Charley’s story are chapters about art theft in general. Some explain how thieves incorrectly assume there is an easy, ready market for the booty. They dream of finding a greedy, wealthy art lover who keeps a secret gallery hidden in the basement, filled with stolen items which will never again see the light of day. However, such shady buyers are mostly mythical, and thieves often find themselves stuck with a Rembrandt or Vermeer that merely collects dust, or which they trade to some other lowlife for drugs or to pay an old debt. Such was the case when the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911. An Italian carpenter, who had previously worked at the Louvre, hid in a closet overnight, donned museum work clothes, and walked out with the painting tucked under his work smock.

A couple of years later, he was arrested in Florence when he clumsily tried to sell the painting to an art dealer. Other chapters focus on how little security accompanies priceless paintings where they hang, especially  the vulnerability of old English estates that are miles from any police and are filled with works by the masters.

Little by little, the author reels out how Charley Hill and the Art Squad became interested in the theft of The Scream, how they wriggled into Norway’s investigation, and the scheme they cooked up for Charley’s undercover persona to find and trap the thieves.

The Rescue Artist reads like a comical crime novel when relaying Charley’s exploits or detailing other thefts and their determined or bumbling perpetrators. The factual chapters about the business of art theft are a fascinating glimpse into a world most of us never consider. This book is a quick read that riveted me and provided more than a few laughs along the way.

Book Review: Reckles$ Endangerment

Copyright © 2013, Steven E. Houchin. All rights reserved.

The financial crash of 2008 was a failure of professional integrity, political courage, and government policy. That is the takeaway message I received after reading Reckles$ Endangerment, a non-fiction work by Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for the New York Times, and Joshua Rosner, a financial adviser on housing and mortgage issues. Before reading the book, I had heard it said that anyone who read it “would never vote Democrat again.” Now I know why that is said.


The inciting incident that set into motion the 2008 calamity begain in 1994, when President Bill Clinton launched the National Partners in Homeownership program (referenced here as the Initiative), which sought to increase home ownership in America through a partnership among home builders, banks, realtors, Wall Street firms, and dozens of housing interest groups around the nation. Those targeted by the Initiative were primarily the poor, who would supposedly benefit by lower construction costs by builders and “creative financing” offered by lenders.

Ultimately, the push for creative financing had a corrosive effect on the mortgage industry as a whole. Many lenders viewed Clinton’s Initiative as permission to lower lending standards to reckless levels, and saw an opportunity to become wealthy along the way by significantly increasing the volume of mortgages pumped through their firms.

James Johnson was one of those who saw an opportunity for amassing wealth via the Initiative. He gained experience with the workings of Washington as an advisor to Vice President Walter Mondale and other prominent Democrats. He was appointed to an executive position at Fannie Mae in 1990, and soon became its chairman. Seizing upon the Initiative, he refocued Fannie Mae to lower lending standards while at the same time increasing profits to justify huge executive bonuses.

Fannie Mae is a quasi-government corporation that buys mortgages from lenders and repackages them into an investment instrument called a Mortgage-Backed Security. As the largest firm doing this, Fannie Mae historically set lending standards for the industry. These securities pay interest and are backed by the taxpayer. Banks, brokerages, pension funds, and others made large purchases of these securities as other fixed-income interest rates fell in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the arrival of James Johnson as chairman, the book describes how Fannie’s lending standards were reduced, using Clinton’s Initiative as the excuse. That action rippled through the mortgage industry, creating a culture of recklessness that resulted in completely unqualified home buyers obtaining loans they could never pay.

Seeing the profits flow into Fannie Mae, Wall Street firms jumped into the Mortgage-Backed Securities business with a seemingly insatiable appetite for buying loans to repackage and sell. In their case, however, taxpayer guarantees were not available, so they turned to AIG (American International Group), a giant insurance company, who sold to these Wall Street firms something called a Credit Default Swap for mortgages - an instrument that was neither an insurance policy nor an investment - that would supposedly pay if the loan went into default. In any case, AIG kept few cash reserves on hand to pay out claims. After all, real estate was not considered a risk. In fact, the prominent credit ratings firms considered Mortgage-Backed Securities so safe they received a better than AAA rating - the best of the best.

Of course, the politicians don’t escape blame in this saga. Chief among them - but hardly alone - was Congressman Barney Frank (MA) who served as the ranking Democrat on the house Banking Committee. He, along with most other Democrats and a few Republicans, were staunch defenders of Fannie Mae’s risky lending practices, partly to support Clinton’s Initiative, but also due to Johnson’s skillful lobbying efforts. All attempts by regulators and the Bush Administration to sound the alarm were rebuffed. Interestingly, the Republicans, and especially the much-maligned President Bush, are mentioned very little in the book; the disastrous policies that led to the Initiative - and those who supported it politically - were mostly Democrats.

Reckles$ Endangerment goes on to detail the various shady operators that infested the mortgage industry as the Initiative firmly took root. It also names politicians who repeatedly issued denials that a financial crisis was building as the housing bubble grew. The Federal Reserve’s role is also examined, where they kept interest rates excessively low in the wake of the post-9/11 recession, even after economic recovery had occurred. Morgenson and Rosner’s writing style makes the book a compelling read, and the financial jargon is not too heavy that it can’t be digested. Anyone who wants to know the real facts of how all that Wall Street greed came about should definitely read this book.