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Post by Slam_Bradley on Nov 12, 2024 13:40:52 GMT -5
 Target Lancer by Max Allan Collins You knew it had to happen. With Nate Heller's penchant for getting involved in cases with possible conspiracies it was a forgone conclusion that he had to get to the JFK assassination. Rather than going to Dallas, Collins explores a little known incident in Chicago seemed to presage November 22, 1963. The plot, which was alleged by former Secret Security Agent Abraham Bolden (who is fictionalized in Collins' book) was that a four man assassination team was planning to assassinate JFK during a planned visit to Chicago on November 2, 1963. Collins deftly weaves the likes of Jimmy Hoffa, Johnny Roselli, Richard Caine and a whole lot more into a conspiracy to kill the president. That Collins had previously tied Heller in to the creation of Operation Mongoose just made it that much clearer that Heller was going to become involved in the Kennedy assassination. This was really a page-turner, easily one of the better books in the series. Collins absolutely nailed it by going with the earlier Chicago incident rather than having Heller in Dallas. Not the best in the series, but Collins pulls this one off when I really expected not to care for it. |
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Nov 12, 2024 16:06:58 GMT -5
I’m just about finishing End of Days by Robert Gleason, which I bought for a buck at the Rotary book fair a few weeks ago.
What an odd book. It’s a struggle to go through, honestly, but I must give it several points for trying something a little different in the genre of nuclear war fiction. It’s very much on the trippy side, as if the writer wanted to make us think he was on drugs when he wrote it.
The book is very big (nearly 800 pages in this paperback edition) and three quarters of it could have been edited out. But wouldn’t that have damaged the very nature of the work? The plot doesn’t seem to be the crucial point here, and far less so than the unorthodox alternance between action scenes and long stream of consciousness digressions.
The world of 2011 is facing a great threat: Russia has not yet become the Putin autocracy it is today, and its loose nukes are easily obtained on the black market -or just by walking into an abandoned military compound. Russian officers can easily be bought. A trio of rich siblings from a make-believe Middle Eastern country (we wouldn’t want to offend real world people, right?) get their hands on a lot of boom-booms and engineer the end of the world. Russian subs reach most of the great coast cities in the world and start launching missiles. The trio also impersonates the Russian defence minister (whom they’ve previously murdered) thanks to deep fakes and goad the brand new American president (his predecessor and all the previous cabinet now being radioactive ash) to launch a counterattack, which he does.
All through this apocalypse, we are treated to pages and pages depicting the adventures of a rat escaping the sinking of a ship, escaping a laboratory, fleeing to the sewers, and pages and pages of nuclear missiles actually telling us of their personal feelings. The one headed for Graceland is actually a big Elvis fan, wouldn’t you believe it! Some missiles recite poetry, some sing, and there are a LOT of such weapons in need of sharing their thoughts.
Did I mention the visions of a blind singing nun called Cassandra? No? They're in there too. Plus the musings of an orbital A.I. Then it all goes Mad Max for a while, except that somehow phones, TV and planes still mostly work.
Plenty of unnecessary scenes of torture as well, which is entirely weird and kind of disturbing. The author seems to have something for cattle prods and copper wire around the gonads.
I went and took a look at comments on Amazon; the surplus of one-star reviews confirmed my opinion: it's not a crowd pleaser.
Ah, well… It was only a dollar.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Nov 13, 2024 8:27:18 GMT -5
The Anubis GatesTim Powers, 1983  ( Also reviewed in brief upthread by MRP.) In 1802, an old sorcerer casts a spell near London to summon the powers of the god Anubis which – according to his master, yet another sorcerer who has been alive for millennia – will restore the glory of ancient Egypt, reclaiming from history the lands of the once glorious kingdom now languishing under foreign rulers (mostly recently French and British). However, the spell apparently goes awry and instead creates a series of ‘holes’ in the timestream backward and forward from that point. In the present (well, 1983), a dumpy, middle-aged English lit prof from southern California named Brendan Doyle is hired by an eccentric, dying rich guy named Darrow to hold a lecture on Samuel Taylor Coleridge in London. Once he gets there, he is told some wild story by Darrow that he has found portals in the timestream and that he and a bunch of other pretentious rich tossers are going back to 1810 to attend a lecture by the poet himself, and Doyle is needed to provide some expert guidance for the others – Doyle hardly believes any of it, until they are indeed all transported back in time and he meets Coleridge in the flesh, and then gets stranded, alone, in 1810. Over the next roughly 8 months, Doyle goes from one peril to another, all tinged with sorcery – not just due to the nefarious plots of the ancient Egyptian sorcerers, but also the cynical, ruthless designs of Darrow, who had more in mind than simple time-travel tourism. After initially getting his bearings in the world of professional beggars in the streets and sewers of London, Doyle ends up doing a little more time travel, to the preceding century and back, then to Egypt and back, during which time he learns much about the deeper background of many historical events of the time and how all of his (mis)adventures are connected to a rather obscure early 19th century English poet named William Ashbless. Ultimately he will literally never be the same man again… Like everything I’ve read by Powers, this is a very densely-plotted story, making it difficult to summarize. However, I can say that I think it’s the book by Powers that I liked the most – even though it, like the others, had some aspects I found a bit questionable (story details that were not necessarily plot holes, but didn’t make too much sense or strained the suspension of disbelief – can’t say any more without spoiling the hell out of it, though). Powers is one of those guys I always mean to try and have never gotten around to reading. Wanted to get through Anubis Gates before addressing this comment; I’ve now read five of Powers’ books (four of which I’ve now reviewed in this thread), and generally I’ve liked but not loved them, which I think I’ve made clear in my reviews. Even so, they are mostly enjoyable, esp. those that read like really good blends of historical fiction and fantasy, and you can’t help but be impressed with the amount of research Powers must do to put them together.
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