JONATHAN GASH – Firefly Gadroon. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1984. Paperback reprint: Penguin, 1985. UK editions include: Collins, hardcover, 1982; Arrow, paperback, 1986. Reprinted many times.

   Jonathan Gash is back with another Lovejoy adventure. Lovejoy is a rogue who would rob his blind grandmother in order to get an antique he wanted. Lovejoy puts antiques above everything else in life.

   This obsession is both Lovejoy’s most endearing quality and his greatest flaw. All of Lovejoy’s adventures revolve around antiques the way all Dick Francis books revolve around horse racing.

   In Firefly Gadroon Lovejoy gets involved in a case involving international smugglers of antiques and a mystery of where a fortune in antiques is hidden with the only clue being an antique firefly box.

   Along with the usual action in a Lovejoy thriller, Gash manages to add interesting aspects of antiques to the convoluted plot. This is one of the better books in the Lovejoy series and has just been released in paperback by Penguin. Recommended.

NOTE: For George’s current reviews (mysteries, SF, music, movies and more) visit his own blog at http://georgekelley.org/. It’s worth the trip.

CHARLAINE HARRIS – Dead in the Family. Ace Books, hardcover, May 2010. Reprint paperback: March 2011.

Genre:   Paranormal suspense. Leading character:  Sookie Stackhouse; 10th in series. Setting:   Louisiana.

First Sentence: “I feel bad that I’m leaving you like this,” Amelia said.

   The Fae War is over and Sookie is recovering from her injuries. In spite of the door to the Fae World being closed, it seems not all the faeries have left. Her cousin, Claude, has decided to move in with her, she suspects her great-uncle Dermot may still be around and, perhaps, one other.

   Sookie’s vampire lover, Eric, is also still recovering. Although he is pleased when his “maker” appears, Sookie isn’t happy particularly with the vampire child of Russian nobility who is with him.

   As if that’s not enough, Sookie tries to help a human child who shares her telepathic abilities, is asked to act as Shaman for the Weres, and everyone is concerned about a government bill which would require all Weres and Shifters to register as such.

    It is interesting that, while many people didn’t like this book, I felt it was one of the better books in the series. The consistent thread was families, all types of families, and the relationships within them. For that reason, I felt there was more depth to this book than some.

   At the same time, it is not easy to take vampires, wares, faeries and humans and make the paranormal seem normal, realistic and logical. Harris does it with style, aplomb and humour. The book deals more with characters and less with edge-of-the-seat action. Most of the gang is here but there is just enough detail provided about each character for new readers.

   Harris makes you believe in these characters. More than that, she makes you cheer for the “good” characters and when Sookie says she wants one of the “bad” characters to die; so, too, do you.

   Harris’s descriptions provide such a strong sense of place that when she talks about Sookie sitting on the front porch, you can smell the coffee and hear the birds. Unfortunately, that also works for the less-than-pleasant descriptions as well so it is not a book for the easily queasy. To me, it’s that contrast that makes it work. This wasn’t as much of a graphic action or sex plot as some, although certainly enough to satisfy.

   This was a more introspective book for Sookie with the emotions conveyed being tangible. It also felt a transition book for Ms. Harris — the series growing up, if you will, and relationships developing.

   I know Ms. Harris has planned out where the series is going. There is no question but that I shall be going along with her.

Rating:   Very Good.

MADAME X. MGM, 1937. Gladys George, Warren William, John Beal, Reginald Owen, Henry Daniell, Phillip Reed, Jonathan Hale, George Zucco. Based on a play by Alexandre Bisson. Director: Sam Wood.

   I don’t know which Lana Turner movie I was thinking of when I started to watch this one, but it obviously wasn’t Madame X (1966), which equally obviously I have never seen. What I was expecting to see was a murder mystery, but while there was a murder, and Jacqueline Fleuriot, a wayward wife played to perfection by Gladys George, is suspected of the crime, there is little or no effort onscreen to solve the crime.

   POSSIBLE PLOT ALERT: Some of what follows will tell you more than I knew when I started to watch this film, and to tell you the truth, more than I personally wanted to know, so take the next few paragraphs off, if you feel the same way.

   The shooting death of Mme Fleuriot’s lover by another rival is instead the first step in an nightmarish series of events in her life, leading her ever downward into poverty (pawning first her jewelry, then her clothes) and prostitution (all but assuredly, but the film of course never quite says so).

   It seems that while Mme Fleuriot was having her fling — out of boredom rather than real desire — her son unexpectedly fell seriously ill, and her husband (Warren William), a highly respected and influential attorney, throws her out of his house and his life.

   When the husband relents, it is too late, and his wife cannot be found. This was Gladys George’s only starring role, and I do not pretend to understand why.

   She plays the world weary Mme Fleuriot perfectly — and more and more weary at each step of the way, on her downward path of self-inflicted destruction. Frowzy and embittered, and yet innately likable throughout the movie, she is no stranger to either men or the bottle – semi-adept in warding off the first but not the latter.

   The final blow comes when a cheap con-man named Lerocle (Henry Daniell) comes to her rescue – a man to whom she inadvertently reveals her real identity, initialing a series of events that leads to a courtroom scene in which she is on trial for murder, an accusation for which she cannot defend herself, else it will ruin her reason for being accused in the first place.

   The histrionics run high in these final scenes, all but the calm and mostly controlled performance by Gladys George, who was relegated to small and bit parts for the rest of her career, and unfairly so. Warren William also allows his character’s stony facade to crumble in the end, to good effect. If this is pure soap opera, then so be it. It’s also highly effective, and I enjoyed the movie immensely.

COMMENTS: This version of the movie is easily available on DVD. Warner Archives has, for example, released on a double bill with the 1929 version. For a clip on YouTube of the tavern scene shown above, go here.

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INVISIBLE INVADERS. United Artists, 1959. John Agar, Jean Byron, Philip Tonge, Robert Hutton, John Carradine. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

   As bad as second-rate sci-fi movies are today, in 1959 they were even worse. Even so, while this one is as ineptly written as they come, the solid earnestness of the cast makes it bearable to watch. It also doesn’t manage to turn you off with an excess of stomach-wrenching special effects, as opposed to what just about every other space-invasion monster-movie supplies us with, whether we wish so or not.

   Maybe that’s because the invaders from the moon, the self-proclaimed “masters of the universe”, are invisible. What is not really explained very well is why (1) they have been content to stay on the moon until now, and (2) why they need to possess the bodies of corpses while they’re on Earth.

   Add number (3): while they are in possession of the bodies of corpses, why must they walk in such a vacant-eyed, lurching fashion, and speak with the cavernous voice of John Carradine, the first dead man whose body they took over?

   And, well, while I’m at it, how about question (4): why do they bother “warning” Earth in the first place? If they’re so anxious to take over the place, now that mankind is on the verge of space travel and reaching the stars ourselves, why not just come in and wipe us out, without our even knowing?

   Put the answers to these questions down to the fact that there are certain things that Mankind is doomed to never know. (Nor, I am inclined to believe, are we meant to.)

[UPDATE] 09-02-10. I don’t remember this one at all. It’s available on DVD from Midnight Movies double-billed with another SF film called Journey to the Seventh Planet, which maybe I ought to buy, unless you can talk me out of it. (Some reviewers on IMDB call Invisible Invaders a minor classic, but I’d rather hear from people I trust.)

SUSPENSE. Monogram, 1946. Belita, Barry Sullivan, Bonita Granville, Albert Dekker, Eugene Pallette. Story & screenplay: Philip Yordan; director: Frank Tuttle.

   Back in 1946, Monogram Studios, home of Sam Katzman, the Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi, made a bid for respectability with a couple of films noirs starring Barry Sullivan and skating star Belita.

   The Gangster bloats itself on pretension, but Suspense comes in right on the money, with a clever script by Philip Yordan and solid performances by a cast that includes Albert Dekker and Eugene Pallette.

   The story uses the framework of the rise-and-fall of a hustler, played by Sullivan with his usual assurance, who leeches onto a classy ice show run by Belita and her husband Dekker, playing a role he patented: the crook too smart for his own good.

   Things take off when Sullivan and Belita fall for each other, Dekker decides to kill at least one of them, and an old flame turns up from Sullivan’s past with romance and/or blackmail in mind.

   But that’s just the start of a clever, elliptical screenplay that implies more than it shows and keeps the viewer guessing for its entire length. The ice-dance numbers slow things down a bit — in fact they bring the whole story to a wheezing, protesting halt for minutes at a time — but they’re well-mounted and anyway that’s why God gave us the fast-forward button. Even with the interruptions, Suspense is a film to gladden all fans of gritty little B-movies.

   Editorial Comment:   The movie is available on DVD from Warner Archives.

H. PAUL JEFFERS – Murder on Mike. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1984. Hardcover reprint, Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, no date. Ballantine, paperback, 1988.

   A brief note on the author at the end of the book tells us that in the real world H. Paul Jeffers was the head of the news department at WCBS in New York, which perhaps explains why his mystery writing career seems to have been awfully sporadic.

   It also says that he grew up listening to crime programs on the radio, which definitely explains where the idea for this particular case for private eye Harry MacNeil came from, and more on that in a minute.

   This is the middle of three cases that chronicle MacNeil’s adventures: The Rubout at the Onyx (Ticknor, 1981); Murder on Mike (St. Martin’s, 1984); and The Rag Doll Murder (Ballantine, paperback, 1987). It’s also the last of the three chronologically, as it takes place in 1939, while both of the other two are set in 1935. (Courtesy, as is often the case, to Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.)

   MacNeil knows his way around Manhattan, and he’s known for also sitting in on late hour jazz sessions, but for hard-boiled fiction, you’d have to look elsewhere. When a good-looking girl asks him to look into the murder of radio’s most popular detective — well, the actor who played him, that is, and the creator of the Detective Fitzroy’s Casebook program — MacNeil is too soft-hearted to say that it’s an open-and-shut case, and that the lady’s boy friend, the show’s announcer, is sure to be convicted.

   He takes the case, he says, to be sure that Maggie Skeffington (Miss Molloy on the radio show) doesn’t waste her money with a more unscrupulous private detective.

   The accused, David Reed, already locked up and waiting trial, is the only person who could have done it and who does not have an alibi. By some fortuitous chance, the sound of a shot in the radio studio pinpoints the time of the murder exactly.

   Aha! You say, I’m one step ahead of you. That’s what I thought, too, and I’ll get back to that.

   Let me give you a feeling of Jeffers’ writing style, from pages 84-85 of the DBC edition. It’s a long quote, so jump in and out wherever you care to:

   Not a paragraph you’d find in the works of Hammett or Chandler, say. Maybe Woolrich, but as long as I’m making comparisons, the ending of this novel is pure Agatha Christie (see above) and very neatly done.

   And in closing, let me ask you this. Why in almost every retro-mystery like this, why is it that everyone who smokes, lights up a Lucky?

[UPDATE] 09-01-10.   This book was reviewed earlier on this blog by Bill Pronzini, in conjunction with an announcement of the author’s death in December 2009. There’s a complete crime fiction bibliography for him there also. It’s quite extensive, more than I realized when I wrote that first paragraph of my review above, once you add in the work he did under several pen names.

   During World War II John Creasey wrote dozens of thrillers set in London that were never published outside the UK — until decades later when, as a superstar of the genre, he revised them for US publication, cutting out all the vivid wartime atmosphere that made them special.

   Recently I picked up The Toff Is Back — first published in 1942 and, according to the copyright page, revised in 1971, two years before Creasey’s death — and found to my surprise that all the ambiance of a largely bombed-out London survived the revision intact.

   The Hon. Richard Rollison, a.k.a. The Toff, returns from military service in North Africa to find that a well-organized gang has been looting bombed jewelry shops on a grand scale and framing innocent residents of his beloved East End for their crimes.

   Over the years I’ve read, or rather tried to read, several revised Creaseys alongside the 1940s versions, and every time found the originals infinitely better. I’ve never seen the wartime version of this one but it reads as if it hasn’t been revised at all, for which I shout Hallelujah.

   In fact, even the occasional gaffes which are inevitable when a book is written at the rate of 10,000 words a day seem to have been preserved. The racket boss is named Barte Lee while other characters live in Bartley Square, and on page 54 we read “Very slowly and deliberately Lee leaned forward,” which reminded me of the hilarious “Everywhere a Lee Lee” song from 1776.

   Gaffes and all, I highly recommend this one to any reader who wants to be taken back, like viewers of the early seasons of the Foyle’s War series, to a London being nightly pulverized by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

   Anyone who would like to sample Creasey’s unretouched WWII thrillers without hitting used book shops has a golden opportunity in store. His first five Roger West novels, originally published between 1942 and 1946, will be reprinted a few months from now by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, the Canada-based publishing operation owned by George Vanderburgh, as the omnibus volume Inspector West Goes to War.

   I’ve written an introduction for the book and have just finished proofreading the computer-scanned texts of those novels. It was a tedious task with two capital T’s but there’s no other way I could have learned so much about the stylistic oddities of these chronicles of London during and immediately after the war.

   Quirks and all, the early West novels are still amazingly readable today. Unlike any other Scotland Yard series I can recall, these books are packed with vivid action scenes. One might almost be reading a series of old-time Westerns except for the fact that guns are sparingly used, both by the bad guys and the bobbies.

Pounding out those ten thousand words a day, Creasey couldn’t avoid perpetrating some Avalloneisms, but far fewer than in the works of the grand master of malapropisms, Mike Avallone himself.

   One I found while proofreading is worth preserving. In Chapter 11 of Holiday for Inspector West (1946) Roger questions a female suspect and then her father, of whom Creasey says: “Like his daughter he had become a changed man.”

   As editor of this five-volume omnibus I’ve decided to substitute “person” for the last word of that sentence.

   Blatant mistakes of this sort, grammar-wise, usage-wise or otherwise, are being corrected, but I am not Americanizing any British terms: those four rubber doughnuts that are found on motor vehicles are called tyres, and when a car has engine trouble, the driver pulls into the kerb and looks under the bonnet.

   What you will read in Inspector West Goes to War is (except for those blatant slips) precisely what Creasey wrote at white heat as that war was raging and immediately afterward.

Between late June and late August 1939, during the first ten weeks that the 60-minute Adventures of Ellery Queen radio series was broadcast on CBS, each episode featured original background music composed and conducted by the soon to be famous Bernard Herrmann.

   None of those episodes survive, and the last time anyone heard what Herrmann wrote for the EQ series was 71 years ago. But today, thanks to the wonderworld of the Web, you can see some of the pages of Herrmann’s score on your computer screen:

   

   First, go to the Bernard Herrmann Society website. Click on “Talking Herrmann.” Enter the box at the bottom of the first page and, among the options given, click on “Topics for the Last Year.” Near the bottom of the fourth page is a thread entitled “Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939.” [This link, if it holds up over time, should take you there directly.]

   There lies the treasure, allowing those who can read a score and have an appropriate instrument to play some of Herrmann’s EQ music in their own homes.

   I wish I were one of that number. When I was a child my mother tried to make a pianist out of me but I resisted and today, sixty years later, I can’t read a note. Damn!

   The second and final Herrmann-Queen interface took place almost a quarter century later. Among the episodes of the second season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on CBS-TV was “Terror in Northfield” (October 11, 1963), based on Queen’s 1956 non-series novelette about a string of violent deaths on the exact same spot. [Hulu link.]

   Harvey Hart directed from an adaptation by Leigh Brackett that dropped most of the detection in the Queen tale and stressed suspense. The puzzled deputy sheriff, the menaced local librarian and the mad farmer were played respectively by Dick York, Jacqueline Scott and R.G. Armstrong.

   Herrmann composed the score for this and several other Hitchcock Hour segments as well. May I still be alive and the owner of a decent pair of ears on the day when his scores for that series and others of the same period, like The Richard Boone Show and The Virginian, become available on CD.

CAROLYN WELLS – Murder in the Casino. J. B. Lippincott, hardcover, 1941.

   After reading The Gold Bag (1911, reviewed here ) and Feathers Left Around (1923, reviewed here ) — early and middle period Wells efforts respectively–I thought I would try a late one, Murder in the Casino. A casino setting might be interesting, I thought.

   That was back in September 2009. Nearly a year later, I have finally forced myself to finish the book. Verily, dear readers, I hope the suffering I went through on your behalf with this one is appreciated.

   What is Murder at the Casino about, you must be eagerly wondering. Well, one thing it is not about is a gambling casino (that might have threatened the merest modicum of excitement).

   There is a murder at a sort of public entertainment hall for dances and this sort of building can be called a casino, but, for all the use Wells makes of the setting, the murder might have taken place at the opera, the bridge party, the flower show, et cetera — you would just have to take her word for it. This is probably the blandest mystery novel I have ever read.

   To the extent this book is about anything, it is about lovely Rennie Loring. Or more exactly, Rennie’s eyes, to which Wells devotes the first chapter ( “Rennie’s Eyes”), as well as the last sentence of the tedious tale.

   The author wants her readers to understand that the merest look from the intoxicating Rennie can conquer all men in her path. In short, Rennie is one of those tiresome Carolyn Wellsian child-women, ingenuously advanced in the art of coquetry but otherwise an absolute nitwit.

   Wells had been perpetrating such characters since before World War One, but apparently her audience had an endless appetite for them, even on the eve of Pearl Harbor and the advent of Rosie the Riveter. So I suppose whether you like Murder at the Casino will depend a great deal on how much you like reading about idiot savant coquettes.

   Renny’s brother and sister-in-law help get her married off to Nicholas Talbot, the richest man in the very rich suburban Connecticut community in which they live with Renny. Charming Renny throws over her old boyfriend to marry Mr. Moneybags. Unfortunately, Talbot proves to be a jealous tyrant.

   As Wells interestingly puts it, Talbot had “a latent Othello complex, which it were wise not to monkey with.”

   The couple take their honeymoon in Mexico City (though it could have been in their own backyard, for all the writing conveys of the atmosphere), and an inspired Renny, once back home, decides she wants to put on a Mexican dance at the local casino:

    “Shall we have real Mexican girls and young men, or our own crowd, fixed up?” asks Renny. “Our own people, of course,” her husband declares. “We don’t want those brown folks around!” So the fun goes ahead, sans authentic “brown folks,” and with Renny dancing the lead female part and Talbot’s nephew the lead male part.

   Describing this dance affair, Wells takes time, as was her wont, for a little fashion show commentary:

   If this were Agatha Christie, there would be something sinister about that serape, but, unfortunately this is Wells, and she is much more interested in pure fashion than murder, so what you see is all you get. Though a murder finally does take place, during the dance, when Rennie’s husband –surprise! — is stabbed to death.

   For the rest of the book the wealthy locals emphasize that the foul deed must be the work of the radicalized lower classes (Emma Lazarus, what hath though wrought?!):

   It would be pleasant to believe this is intended as social satire, but as Wells gives every indication that she greatly admires the stupid people of this wealthy suburban Connecticut town ( “a restricted residential district”), I think she is serious. You would honestly think it was 1886 and that the Haymarket Riot had just occurred.

   Much of the dialogue in this tale (and the tale is mostly dialogue) is written as if the author’s first language were not English:

   Wells’ greatest Great Detective, Fleming Stone, shows up and solves the case, though no discernible process of ratiocination that I could detect. Rather, Stone simply announces he knows who the killer is and the killer promptly confesses and kills him/herself with yet another one of those convenient poison pellets one finds so much in Golden Age tales, particularly those penned by Carolyn Wells.

   Talk about dumb! This person must have been even dumber than Renny.

   The entrancing and filthy rich Renny, by the way, does not the know the meaning of “berserk” or “privileged communications” and says “electricated” when she means “electrocuted.” Surely this helps explain why there is no chapter in Murder at the Casino entitled “Rennie’s Brain.” It would have had to have been a very short chapter indeed.

   Murder at the Casino was apparently Wells’ seventy-ninth mystery tale (I cannot bring myself to call them detective novels). Two more Wells mysteries would be published after Casino in 1942 (one I believe posthumously).

   My copy of Casino, published by Lippincott, a major publisher, is a very attractive volume: well-bound, good creamy paper, an excellent dust jacket. Lippincott must have known what it was doing publishing these later Wells books, but I cannot fathom why people enjoyed reading them. My only guess is that they were 1941’s version of “cozies,” but that guess it sort of insulting to many modern day cozy writers.

   Perhaps the best comparison might be with the books Lilian Jackson Braun was writing in her nineties, before her publisher, Putnam, finally dropped the series in 2007. However classically “alternative” (to borrow a term from Bill Pronzini’s Gun in Cheek) Wells’ earlier mysteries may be, they cannot match Murder at the Casino for sheer inept daftness.

BEYOND THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE. Made for TV movie: NBC, 6 November 1975. Fred MacMurray, Sam Groom, Donna Mills, Suzanne Reed, Dana Plato, Dan White. Director: William A. Graham.

   One of my life-long weaknesses has been the indolent habit of napping in the afternoon. However, I have always observed that I don’t have any interesting dreams when I nap, and I have concluded that I might put the time to better use by propping my eyes open and reading a book or watching a film that I might, in my more alert moments, not want to waste my time on.

   I would like to think that this might occasionally lead to one of those “fortuitous” encounters in which the Surrealists believed and where marvelous consequences sometimes follow upon the most banal circumstance.

   For those of you who would like to delve more deeply into Surrealist philosophy on this point, I refer you to Andre Breton’s Nadja, especially those pages describing his addiction to the American chapter play, Trail of the Octopus.

   I was, earlier today, at a point where waking and sleep are no longer contrary conditions when my somnolent fingers brought into view on the TV screen, the opening scenes of a WTBS Sunday afternoon movie, Beyond the Bermuda Triangle.

   I have always been intrigued by psychic phenomena, ever since those years when I used to look for the door to the Land of Oz in the closets of my grandparents’ farm.

   Even in my bemused state, I quickly gathered in the essentials necessary to follow the storyline, which involved the disappearance of a boat in the area of the Triangle, and a young girl’s belief that her mother was still alive, somewhere “out there,” and was calling to her.

   I had some trouble with character relationships, but deduced that Sam Groom is courting the sister of the missing woman who is taking care of her young niece, while Fred McMurray (with either a hair-piece or his hair dyed a sinister black) is probably the grandfather of the bereaved child, but is somewhat distracted by his pursuit of a much younger woman who is, herself, to disappear into that same hungry triangular area where the compass goes batty but where there is always time to send one last radio message before static claims the airways. Whew!

   There is also a character to whom I felt peculiarly drawn, a retired professor who, years earlier, had lost his wife in the triangle and, at the last moment, close to the opening of the door to the “other side,” hesitated and was forever barred from crossing over.

   That had obviously bothered him no end, and, in a touching and significant scene, he tells MacMurray that there is one thing bigger than this life “down here” and that’s “love.”

   That choked me up a bit and fogged my glasses, and when I could see clearly again Fred was casting off to sea with Groom’s girlfriend.

   That lead to a really tense climax in which Groom, pursued by the Coast Guard, raced to intercept Fred’s boat. I don’t want to give away the ending (which would be foreign to the spirit of this blog), but let me tell you that the Old Professor was right on target, and some old geezers are quick studies.

      This made-for-TV movie had everything: a grieving child in peril, weird music, mysteries beyond our mortal ken, references to Atlantis, and an impressive, late-career performance by Fred MacMurray.

   Now, I know that some people think Fred wasn’t much of an actor and got by on an earnest look and a commanding, sonorous voice. Well, here it was all in the eyes: the body was slack, the demeanour reserved, but the eyes seemed to reflect glimpses of something that sent a shiver down my spine (or rather up, since I started sliding out of my seat at one point and almost jackknifed on the floor between the chair and footstool).

   I wish they had given the movie a less obvious title, something like Empty Boats. Still, since this might be a picture that only a recent retiree can appreciate, if you ever get a chance to watch it and don’t agree with me, don’t call me, I’ll call you.

   But while you’re waiting for my call, don’t go into your closet. You never know who … or what … might be coming into it from … out THERE!

JACK HIGGINS – The Killing Ground. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, January 2008. Berkley, deluxe paperback, November 2008.

   Jack Higgins was born in 1929, which means he was 79 when this book was published in the US – and unfortunately, it reads like it. The basic story telling ability is still there, but this particular episode in the continuing adventures of Sean Dillon, former IRA operative, and Billy Salter, former East Ender gangster, now both working for British Intelligence, reads like a first or second draft, no more than semi-polished.

   There are no typos, but Higgins’ bare bones style, including the dialogue, is even more bare than usual, and except for the primary villain, there is no depth to any of the characters, none at all.

   The dialogue is curiously cliched and flat, and worse, with bad paragraphing and often no clues, there are times when it is impossible to know who is talking. People who are in a room in one scene somehow seem to disappear, only to be found mysteriously somewhere else one or two paragraphs later.

   Kidnapped is the young daughter of a well-to-do Iraqi couple, taken back to that country and her grandfather while the disastrous aftermath of the Iragi War is still going on, her hand promised in marriage to a cousin who not so incidentally is a notorious terrorist generally known as the Hammer of God.

   There are some subplots here and there, but none of any consequence. The action goes back and forth, but the good guys are just plain too good at their job, and the bad guys are totally inept. Too bad the real world doesn’t work that way. (One does get tired very quickly of every bad guy being shot squarely between the eyes, at least ten of then, every single one of them, but perhaps I lost track after a while.)

   Some complications do arise, mostly foolish stuff such as the girl’s mother, a noted surgeon, using a cell phone to contact her hospital while she and her family are supposed to be in hiding. And of course the opposition is listening in, for all of the good it does them.

   One would like to think that the grand finale would be worth wading through this morass of unenergetic plotting, 415 pages worth, but one would be wrong, alas. The bad guys lose again, and I’m glad that they did, but – and I hate to say this – so what?