Books: All the Books Read in 2023

I took a few risks this year, reading a handful of new authors such as Tom Holt, Elizabeth McKenzie, Alex Jennings, and Scott Hawkins. Only Jennings and Hawkins won me over, but I’m unsure if I would read new outings by them when they come about.

As usual, I fell into reading series tales such as Joseph Hansen (with only two more Brandstetter titles coming) and continue to read Westlake (and his various pseudonyms). I read a few Simon Hawke tales and DOCTOR WHO.

I have a lot of unread books and I’ve made a decision to stop buying books I really have no plan on reading and will try to go through what I have. It may mean less bookstore visits, less Friends of the Library visits, and maybe not going to the Vintage Paperback Collectors convention in March, and maybe not even go to the Festival Of Books in April @ USC.

I’ve become distracted and bored with reading –I’m finding nothing new and exciting coming out anymore. Nothing worth anticipating for, nothing that is written that will blow my mind. It’s like publishers have taken the same off-ramp the studios have done with films –giving us empty blockbuster novels that are essentially tossed in the bin instead proudly put on the shelf.

Perhaps it’s why I find reading 40 to 50 year-old titles (if not older) more fulfilling –even if no one has heard of these writers or titles before.

Still, I never say never to new writers –or old standbys like Stephen King and Jasper Fforde, who both have new books out in 2024. But I need to really get through my TBR pile. It's huge and I'm not getting younger.

 

01. The Lincoln Highway By Amor Towles

02. Troublemaker By Joseph Hansen

03. East of Ealing By Robert Rankin

04. False Value By Ben Aaronovitch

05. Stolen Skies By Tim Powers

06. The Last Dragonslayer By Jasper Fforde

07. The Song of the Quarkbeast By Jasper Fforde

08. The Eye of Zoltar By Jasper Fforde

09. Doctor Who: Dark Horizons by Jenny T. Colgan

10. Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro

11. The Man Everyone Was Afraid Of By Joseph Hansen

12. The Portable Door by Tom Holt

13. Amongst Our Weapons By Ben Aaronovitch

14. Doctor Who: The Doctor Trap By Simon Messingham

15. The Midnight Library By Matt Haig

16. The Big Door Prize By M.O. Walsh

17. Doctor Who: The Blood Cell By James Goss

18. The Dame By Richard Stark

19. The Portable Veblen By Elizabeth McKenzie

20. The Great Troll War by Jasper Fforde

21. In the Lives of Puppets By TJ Klune

22. This Other Eden by Ben Elton

23. Two Much By Donald E. Westlake

24. Sphere By Michael Crichton

25. The Editor by Steven Rowley

26. Razzmatazz By Christopher Moore

27. The Reluctant Sorcerer By Simon Hawke

28. The Inadequate Adept By Simon Hawke

29. The Ambivalent Magician By Simon Hawke

30. Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: The Knight, The Fool And The Dead by Steve Cole

31. Doctor Who: Time Lord Victorious: All Flesh is Grass by Una McCormack

32. The Goblin Tower By L. Sprague de Camp

33. The Library at Mount Char By Scott Hawkins

34. Roadwork By Richard Bachman

35. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon By Stephen King

36. The Ballad of Perilous Graves By Alex Jennings

37. High Adventure By Donald E. Westlake

38. Skinflick By Joseph Hansen

39. Native Tongue By Carl Hiaasen

40. Gangway By Donald E. Westlake and Brian Garfield

41. The Saturday Night Ghost Club By Craig Davidson

42. The Scared Stiff By Judson Jack Carmichael

43. The Chinese Agent By Michael Moorcock

44. A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt

45. Holly By Stephen King

46. Gravedigger By Joseph Hansen

47. Doctor Who: Josephine and the Argonauts by Paul Magrs

48. Nightwork By Joseph Hansen

49. ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King

50. The TimeWars: The Ivanhoe Gambit by Simon Hawk

51. The Devil’s Alphabet By Daryl Gregory

52. Anarchaos by Curt Clark

53. The Mist By Stephen King

54. A Peculiar Peril By Jeff VanderMeer

55. The Vesuvius Club By Mark Gatiss

56. The Little Dog Laughed By Joseph Hansen

57. Early Graves By Joseph Hansen

58. Obedience By Joseph Hansen

 

Books: Obedience By Joseph Hansen (1988)

“Well into middle age, Dave has decided to retire for the sake of Cecil, the young TV reporter who loves and cherishes him, and has too often risked his own life for Dave’s work. But retirement does not come easily. Dave never did it for the money. He always had that. Nor did he tirelessly work cases in hopes of chasing renown. It was always the pursuit of the truth that drove Dave. He enjoyed the truth’s habit of coming into direct conflict with bigotry, allowing him to surprise the small-minded along the way. It doesn’t take much arm twisting, then, to get Dave back in the saddle when an old friend in the public defender’s office asks him to help Andy Flanagan, a shiftless young man accused of murdering a Vietnamese businessman to defend the Old Fleet — a shantytown of houseboats that has been earmarked for development. Beneath the surface of this oil-slicked slum lurks an international conspiracy so appalling that Dave will regret postponing his retirement.”

As one review put it, "The One Where Dave Retires for 22 Hours." There are some interesting aspects to this tenth mystery featuring Dave Brandstetter. I’m not sure if it was the point, though. But there is a lot of bait and switching going on here, as well as some-clumsy-and-obvious-who’s-doing it attacks on Dave. The large cast of character also hinder Dave, as he tries to figure out the connections between a hit at a restaurant –possibly done by the gang Lord Don Pham- the murder of Le Van Minh –who could connected to the said crime lord- and what all of this has to do with the Old Fleet and the man arrested for the murder of Le. But in the end, I think Hansen is not interested in complicated plot, with rings with-in rings. It’s more about what people do when they’re stuck like a rat in the corner.

Hansen, as usual in his books, wonderfully describes the weather, the geography, exteriors and interiors, with just the right few words. The dialogue easily moves the story along. The other nice thing here, as I noted last book, is how Hansen is allowing Dave to age. This was something Westlake sort of avoided with his Dortmunder titles, even as he added more modern technology (at the time the book was written) to be folded into the books.

Books: Early Graves By Joseph Hansen (1987)

“Dave Brandstetter's afternoon does not begin well: his ex-boyfriend picks him up at the airport, and the ride home — in bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic — is one long argument between them. The insurance investigator's day gets worse when he finds a man — bloody, rain-soaked, and ice cold — lying on his porch, killed by a stab wound while Dave was out of town. There is a serial killer loose in Los Angeles, and this man is his sixth victim. Like the others, he had already been marked for death – by the unforgiving plague known as AIDS. Someone is targeting sick men in the city, and Dave's search for the killer leads him into the dark side of gay Los Angeles, where death comes without warning and life is a fearful dream.”

For the ninth book in this excellent series, Hansen folds the AIDS crisis of the 1980s into the narrative. I suppose, it was just a matter of time, considering the setting of these novels and the fact that Dave is an openly gay, yet “straight” appearing investigator. Because Hansen lived through this era, he takes a very brutal look at the epidemic, as he details the thousands of young men who are infected with HIV and growing homophobia and outright hatred gay men suffered during the period. It has a sometime unvarnished truth about it, with the squalid and sad life of those who were impacted the most, but as always, Dave remains honest, emphatic and loving.

The mystery, of course, is a bit low key in some way, as Dave’s investigation is personal. It’s also a bit of bait and switch, with your typical red herrings of the genre. Still, this books moves swiftly and you get a cast of interesting, sometimes horrible, characters, both old and new.

The only silly part –Hansen is seemly a great set-up artist and then the tales sort of go into weird, unbelievable mode towards the end- is his ongoing relationship with Cecil. I don’t think Hansen nailed down Dave’s birthday (though if I was to use Hansen’s birth year, Dave would be 63-64 in 1987), but it’s clear Dave is well into his 50s and Cecil is twenty-five. Anyways, Brandstetter's relationship with the boyfriend has hit a bump because Cecil went a little overboard by marrying a blind girl he thought he could help (those events were chronicled in the last book, The Little Dog Laughed). Here, a few months later, Dave is missing Cecil and our young cub reporter feels stuck, but because he’s honorable, he can’t see a way out. But all of this is resolved in the final pages, in a weird, deus ex machine writers (or publishers?) choice. It’s just too convenient, I guess.

But the book adds a blunt feeling of dread over these young men, adding a bleak and the sometimes horrible inaction of people and government during one of the darkest health crises of the latter half of the 20^th Century.

Books: The Little Dog Laughed By Joseph Hansen (1986)

“Journalist Adam Streeter covered some of the most dangerous stories of the last quarter century, ranging from Cambodia to Siberia and anywhere troubled in between. Fearless, dashing, and more than a little resourceful, Streeter was renowned as much for his virtuosic writing as the shocking reality of what he uncovered along the way. Why would someone who lived so purposefully and with such demonstrable bravery turn a pistol on himself? Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter has seen enough suicides to know this isn’t one. Suspecting treachery, he digs into Adam's last story — an unpublished investigation into the whereabouts of a vanished South American strongman, called El Carnicero, the Butcher — and finds that Adam's death shows every hallmark of his bloody style. Dave quickly realized that some very powerful people would like him to drop the case. Dave’s own lover, Cecil, would like to see him take it easy for once. But Cecil knows Brandstetter is not so unlike the man whose death he’s investigating. The truth, to someone like Brandstetter or Streeter, is worth the ultimate price. As he attempts to finish Adam’s story and get to the bottom of the journalist’s death, Dave will find more than a few people willing to make him pay it.”

For the eighth book in this series, we get a little parallel 1980s tale of fictional South American rebels, ala El Salvador and certain American semi-retired military men (Oliver North, maybe) who want to overthrow governments without Washington DC getting their hands dirty. It’s a bit far-fetched that an insurance investigator would somehow get involved in such plot and you have to suspend some disbelief during the last sixty pages or so. Not sure why Hansen chose this plot, beyond, maybe trying to say something about what the Reagan Administration did during that period. But the political and military issue he tries to cover here is reminder that as a series of books ages, sometimes the writer gets in over his head.

It’s still worth the read, though. Dave remains a compassionate, very empathic character and you sense he truly wants to help the underdogs here. The first half is a great mystery, very Westlake in some aspects. These later books are also, seemly, getting less gay. I mean, Dave’s relationship with Cecil is still there, but Hansen seemly is putting it in the background more and more. They do make a perfect team, and after the Marines show up at the end, with Cecil leading the rescue, I hope the final four books in this series address this more.