Mad Money
Max Allan Collins, 2023

This is the fourth – and last – of the Hard Case omnibus editions that collect the previously published novels featuring Collins’ master thief, Nolan.
First up is Spree, which was originally published in 1987. As the story begins, Nolan seems to have finally settled down and gone completely legit: he owns and runs a restaurant and bar attached to a mall in the Quad Cities (specifically Moline, IL), he’s well-liked and respected by other businessmen in the area and he’s living in big, comfortable house with his lover, Sherry, who is also the hostess and the de facto co-manager of his place. However, the idyll is thrown out of kilter a bit when Jon, Nolan’s sidekick in many of his previous capers, shows up at his door needing a place to stay, as he got evicted from his apartment in Des Moines and has nowhere else to go (despite now earning a decent income publishing an indie comic book). And then things really go south when Sherry gets kidnapped by an old enemy of Nolan’s who wants him to organize the robbery of the entire mall – or else.
The second book is the short novel Mourn the Living, which was first published in 1999 but – according to Collins’ introduction for this new edition – was not only the very first Nolan story, but also the first novel he ever wrote in the late 1960s. It’s set about ten years before the events in the first published Nolan novel, Bait Money. In it, Nolan is asked by an old acquaintance, who used to be the top bookkeeper for their former common employer, the Chicago mob, to go to the small college town in central Illinois to investigate the death of his daughter – who jumped from the top of a tall building while strung out on LSD. He thinks there’s more to it than that, because the Chicago boys are involved in selling drugs to the local college kids. This one is interesting in that it reads more like a detective story than the fast-paced heist thrillers that are the norm for the Nolan books.

The Scourge Between Stars
by Ness Brown


This got my attention at the library for being a short, stand alone but current book. I can appreciate the author writing a book in the 60s style (intentional or not, I'm not sure).

The problem was there really wasn't any message to make you think, or really much of a plot. There was just one high concept after another... If we have the story of a generational ship trying to overcome tech issues to get home, despite being chased by an overwhelming enemy (ala Battlestar Galactica).. then it turns into Aliens... finally we get the literal hand of god at the end.

Add to that the characters are all very... millenial and this definitely doesn't hold a candle to any of the classics. Not a terrible attempt for a first novel though... perhaps the next one will be better.

Nobody's Perfect by Donald E. Westlake

John Dortmunder and his compadres are back in a fourth caper.  This time Dortmunder is hired to steal an old master painting for the insurance money and then return it to the original owner for a significant cut of the take.  As usual, Dortmunder's plan is pretty darn good.  And, as usual, things go awry and the jinx that seems to haunt him rears its ugly head.  Honestly these books are so plot intensive that almost anything more than that starts to get in to spoiler territory. 

A number of Dortmunder's pals are along for the job, including perennials Andy Kelp and Stan Murch.  We're introduced to muscle-man "Tiny" Blucher.  And Herman X makes a short guest appearance.  These books are just fun capers.  They're long on plot and very light on characterization.  None of the characters personalities are deeper than worn-out rug, but that doesn't really matter because the point is the caper and, in Dortmunder's case, how it's going to go wrong and how he's going to fix it. 

The Team-Up Companion by Michael Eury

I'm a fan of Twomorrows' various publications and have been happy with all of them.  But this one was a little special, so I jumped on it when it was a bit less discounted than I usually would.  Growing up my comic buying money was limited.  And it was sporadic.  So I wanted some bang for my cents.  Team-up books gave me that with just a bit more meat than the normal team book.  And since Batman and Spider-Man were my two favorite super-heroes, Brave & Bold and Marvel Team-Up made up a fair portion of my early comic book buying (Marvel Two-in-One made up a decent bit as well...I was a pretty big fan of Bashful Benjy Grimm).  So there's a lot of nostalgia in my reading of Eury's look at the Team-Up Age of superhero comics.  And yes, nostalgia is a trap, but sometimes you just have to put your foot in the noose.  

Eury covers not just the big books (Brave & Bold, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-in-One, DC Comics Presents), but also the less successful and more obscure tomes.  I loved the look at the ill-fated and poorly named Super-Team Family.  The single issue of Western Team-Up.  The Superman Vs. tabloids.  Super-Villain Team-Up, a book that fascinated me as a kid.  They're all there with more than adequate coverage, including such non-superhero fair as the New Scooby-Doo Movies and some Harvey books that may or may not have constituted team-up books.  And there's a very nice eight page section devoted to Bob Haney who made Brave & Bold one of my favorite comics of all time.  

If I had a complaint, it's that most of the info here is gleaned from and re-worked from issues of Eury's Back Issue Magazine.  So if you read that magazine faithfully you have most of this info already.  But it's nice to have it in one place.  If you like Twomorrows' books, you're going to like this one.  And if, like me, you grew up in the 70s and 80s, the Team-Up Age of Comics, you're going to really love it.  

The Book of Koli
M. R. (Mike) Carey

While the setting is pretty typical post apocalypse. There seems to be alot more tech arount than usual in these things, and at least a few people that know enough to try to use it and get the world up and running again. They also address some things that such stories never typically address.. like having a small gene pool and there NOT actually being lovely caches of useful things just lying around everywhere.

There were some inconsistencies though.. at first it was described that you basically had to hide behind walls in prepared ground or the fast growing 'choker trees' would kill you, but by the end Koli and his crew are just hanging out in the forest without much of an explanation, almost like when he left his village earlier he beat that level and it wasn't a thing anymore.

The AI of the Dreamsleeve (an imprint of a fictional Japanese pop star with a tragic story) is by far the most interesting character,and is almost worth reading the 2nd book for, we'll see.