Books: Dead Voices by Katherine Arden (2019)

“Having survived sinister scarecrows and the malevolent smiling man in Small Spaces, newly minted best friends Ollie, Coco, and Brian are ready to spend a relaxing winter break skiing together with their parents at Mount Hemlock Resort. But when a snowstorm sets in, causing the power to flicker out and the cold to creep closer and closer, the three are forced to settle for hot chocolate and board games by the fire. Ollie, Coco, and Brian are determined to make the best of being snowed in, but odd things keep happening. Coco is convinced she has seen a ghost, and Ollie is having nightmares about frostbitten girls pleading for help. Then Mr. Voland, a mysterious ghost hunter, arrives in the midst of the storm to investigate the hauntings at Hemlock Lodge. Ollie, Coco, and Brian want to trust him, but Ollie's watch, which once saved them from the smiling man, has a new cautionary message: BEWARE. With Mr. Voland's help, Ollie, Coco, and Brian reach out to the dead voices at Mount Hemlock. Maybe the ghosts need their help--or maybe not all ghosts can or should be trusted.”

In the second book in Katherine Arden’s series, Dead Voices is just a bit creepier than Small Spaces but it’s still a wonderful middle grade horror story. Arden is able to capture the innocence of childhood friendships that have a troubled and shared history and mash that up with the spooky supernatural world that exists in the haunted ski lodge (perhaps a cousin to the Overlook). The book borrows a lot of themes from other haunted house stories, along with the Upsidedown from Stranger Things, but what Arden is able to do here is pretty neat. It’s still an atmospheric tome, filled with cold, dread, and deception, but at its core is the friendship between our three main characters that is the warming heart of the book.

It’s also clear we’ll get at least one more book with our charming cast of youngsters, but I don’t feel this is the “filler”, it works as a continuation, really. Still, the smiling man is not done with our triumvirate kids and I fear that the real battle for Ollie, Coco, and Brian is about to begin.

Books: The Hunter By Richard Stark (1962)

“You probably haven’t ever noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice everything. That’s their job, sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers’ work habits, the positions of the security guards; lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds; surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They’re thieves. Heisters. They’re pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. If you’re planning a job, you want him in. Tough, smart, hardworking, and relentlessly focused on his trade, he is the heister’s heister, the robber’s robber, the heavy’s heavy. You don’t want to cross him, and you don’t want to get in his way, because he’ll stop at nothing to get what he’s after. In The Hunter, the first volume in the series, Parker roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption.”

Ever the prolific writer, Donald E. Westlake used the pen name Richard Stark for 28 novels published over some 46 years. Of the twenty-eight, twenty-four featured Parker, the unapologetic and ruthless antihero. However, when he wrote The Hunter, Westlake was not seeing a series of novels. When he turned it in, his editor told him that if he would rewrite the ending so that Parker escaped, he would be willing to publish up to three books a year about Parker. Even though Westlake was prolific, he knew he could not do that. Still, he produced sixteen Parker novels under the Richard Stark name between 1962 and 1974 before letting Parker take an extensive hiatus, finally returning to the character in 1997. He would write eight more between then and his death in 2008. The structure he used for the novels did not vary during its run, making them somewhat formulaic in nature, however, Westlake’s razor-sharp prose-style always won fans over. In some ways, it has been odd no film studio has successfully brought the character to the big screen. I mean beyond the inherent violence, the stories are not that complex and follow a straightforward plotting. However, there was several adaptations of the Stark books, including two versions of The Hunter, one called Point Blank (1967, starring Lee Marvin) and the 1997 Mel Gibson version, Payback (none of the films versions were able to use the Parker name, though). Still, the character does have a somewhat merciless and lopsided moral code: he had a streak of professionalism and efficiency in him that most people would not expect and he only took his fair share of the capers money –but crossing him meant death.

Even though it was written nearly 60 years ago, The Hunter is taunt, well-paced thriller. It’s a rare novel written at a certain time in history that can still work today –and that is a talent few writers had.

Books: The Word is Murder By Anthony Horowitz (2017)

"One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor - enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service. Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home. Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz. Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own."

Even though I read the premise of the book, I was a bit hesitant at first to actually read it. The whole idea of a real-life author inserting himself into the story was and is a risky thing –I remember the criticism Stephen King got when he incorporated himself in the later books of his Dark Tower series. It leaves the author open to being made fun of, other words, as well as being a distracting element within the tale they’re writing. So the big question was how it was going to be handled. For the most part, The Word is Murder is an excellent whodunit, a well constructed mystery with doses of humor, memoir, how TV shows are created, and how to write essays. 

Anthony Horowitz remains a prolific novelist (some 40 plus novels, multiple collections, graphic novels, and even movie scripts). He’s also the creator of the long-running  BBC series Midsomer Murders (adapted from the Caroline Graham Chief Inspector Barnaby book series) and Foyle’s War. He’s also written for other classic British whodunit series such as Agatha Christie’s Poirot, as well as Robin of Sherwood. He’s also well known for his James Bond inspired young adult series Alex Rider (and was also chosen by the Estate of Ian Fleming to continue writing James Bond inspired novels, including 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and A Day). Finally, he’s also penned two Sherlock Holms novels, The House of Silk (2011) and Morairty (2014).

This newest series, called Hawthorne, resembles Sherlock Holmes –the ex-police officer notices a great deal and has the ability to make leaps of random reasoning. Hawthorne, like Holmes, also comes across as dispassionate, cold, and arrogant. He kind of reminded me a bit of Cormoran Strike series, written by J.K. Rowling and published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. Strike too is a bit offensive at times, even cruel. Another trait Horowitz’s gives Hawthorne that resembles Holmes is his flair for showmanship, often keeping his methods and evidence hidden until the last possible moment so as to impress observers –or in this matter, writer Anthony Horowitz. 

Even if you might consider the book self-indulgent of Horowitz, I admit it was a clever murder mystery. There was no obvious clues dropped that would make the reader guess who the killer was and there are plenty of red herrings to keep you turning the page. 

So it’s a tricky mystery that springs some surprises and one that doesn’t insult the reader with obviousness that befalls a lot of this genre over the last thirty or so years.