On-the-print

This may be a good novel of the thriller genre; I never finished it. Why? Because of the author's cold calculation that his opening of the book - consisting of a masturbatory scene - would intrigue and tittilate the reader. Maybe if one is wrting to make a buck, this kind of thing is understandable. But that will never make it right. There are other Les Standiford novels on the bookshelves. I won't read those either.

Standiford has topped himself.His wonderfully drawn everday hero, John Deal, is out to find who killed his friend, bookstore owner, Arch Dolan. He teams up with estranged wife, Janice, for the ride of their lives. Don't miss out on this one. Standiford writes a wonderfully stylish thriller

DEAL ON ICE Les Standiford HarperCollins, Feb 1997, $23.00, 231 pp.

The Folks That Live on the Hill is one of Amis` last novels and definitely not the best one.It`s pale in comparison with Lucky Jim.
This novel shows some of Amis` characteristics such as describing life through a combination of humour and sadness,though the funny side of the novel is always emphasized.
We can notice that the writer is aware of numerous shortcomings that this society and life in it have.Still,he describes the people from Shepherd`s Hill with a certain warmth,a feeling of a man who is comfortable there.
Through the character of Harry Caldecote Amis expresses his hatred towards both diverse sorts of modern art and people who are self-centered.Harry is a sort of person that Amis respects:an honest and unselfish man.
The writer poses a serious moral question in this book:what should be more important to us,pleasing ourselves or helping the others? but deals with it in his typically comic manner.His answer,naturally,is opposition to all kinds of selfishness and praise for those rare people who don`t think just about themselves.

I have been a great fan of Kingsley Amis from the days of "Lucky Jim." Nothing is more refreshing than his dry wit, his cynicism, and his hilarious descriptions of various people in various stages of intoxication. Probably the best English writer since Trollope, although completely different. This book was, I believe, written in Amis' later years and it shows. It contains an overwhelming number of rather poorly defined characters and a thin and hard-to-follow plot. Harry Caldecote, the main character, is fairly well developed but the many others appear and disappear with uncomfortable regularity. The plot seems to have been formulated (to borrow one of Amis' favorite phrases) by "a group of high-grade mental defectives unacquainted with each other." Nevertheless, it does provide some very enjoyable moments but is not up to par with his normal 5 star work.

I picked up this novel with a preconceived notion about what I would find. After all, I had read the maverick son's works and assumed that their dark, contemporary atmosphere was a reaction to the father's stalwart British character. Consequently, just from the title alone, I gleaned an image of the happy goings-on of a small, gregarious community who might meet for tea and air their church-oriented disagreements at the local garden sale, tra la, tra la. NO WAY.

The writing is immediately engaging, especially the dialog which moves fasts and twists sharply. Nothing is what it seems. No one is content. Everyone is getting on with their daily business while covering a deeply discordant nature. The most dramatic example of this desolate irony is when the three very adult children take a taxi to lunch with their aged mother still living nearby where they grew up. It's an awful afternoon: no wants to be there, they don't enjoy each other's company; everyone participates in the charade of a happy family gathering. The author's voice is terribly, that is, fiercely, strong in his cynical and ironic commentary on these people. It is sometimes droll but never funny. In sum, the major characters are trapped in and dependent upon the machinations of their humdrum, small everyday lives. It's delightful writing in a very tough, nearly hideous story. There are wonderful and often scathing depictions: the widow Clare and the cumbersome dog left behind by her late husband, the desperate alcoholic Fiona, the bit-on-the-side Maureen and, most memorably, the more-English-than-the-English Pakistani shopkeepers. Just when I thought the whole things was going to end disastrously, these people are all gathered in the neighborhood pub (but of course, where else?) and accept or resolve their differences while Amis's authorial voice becomes almost paternal and loving. It worked for me: I heartily enjoyed this story with its fussy weave of banal hazards and haplessness, and its finely tuned emotional climax when Harry decides not to accept a promising job in the USA because he and his sister Clare, quite simply, need each other.

A pretty good western story, set on the border of Arkansas and the Indian Territory in the 1890s. It is a good read, however, it is pure fiction. If you are looking to actually learn about the historic characters portrayed in the book, go to the library and check out a history book. This novel strays from the truth in a pretty wide manner.

All in all, it is a fun story!

How many authors of Westerns use a 15-year-old orphan as the central figure who tells the story and pairs him with a dyslexic girl? That setup alone might be enough to interest some readers of this new Western. There's plenty of action, too. The author does a fairly good job of developing the story though much of the rest of it is more traditional. A wealthy and influential rancher whose sons make trouble for any who get in their way controls the town. A stranger from New York City happens to be in town when trouble is brewing for young Nate, the orphan. Jake, the stranger, ends up sticking around to see what he can do to even the odds. The struggle between these two sides, as in many Westerns, becomes the struggle between good and evil. Perhaps this might be one of the book's weaker points. It may be a little too black and white for some. Also the dialogue occasionally sounds a little unnatural. But with the setup the way it is and the interaction that occurs, this is a book worth reading.

This book was the first in the series that I purchased, but I definitely intend to buy the other two. The main characters, Leo and Jacque are well developed, the historical personalities they run into are represented accurately (having read biographies of Judge Parker and the real Dr. Lemat, who is presented as a relative of Leo in this book) and the details (food, tack, firearms, locations) are accurate. This is a pleasurable way for someone to learn about Ft. Smith and Indian Territory history without having to locate several of the hard-to-find books that the author's obviously studied to create this book.

Highly recommended and definitely a cut above many of the Western genre series.

Four stars for the research and the history, one star for the author's attempt to describe their environement. This is an interesting account of the Hall North Pole attempt. For me, the major problem is the flowery descriptions of the weather and landscape he throws in: "The icy breath of the iceberg chilled their lungs.." "The only signs of light consisted of scattered ribbons of violet and purple fluttering briefly behind the sable mountains."

Come on, this is history. The descriptions the author has chosen to add to spice up the book were very hard for me to wade through. I almost gave up because of them, but instead, decided to skip-over and ignore the flowery descriptions and concentrate on what the crew went through and survived!

I did not expect to find "Trial by Ice" so good.
Using very colorful and vivid writing style, author presents events during the ill-fated polar expedition. Action takes place on the deck of steamer Polaris, along the north/west Greenland's shore and on the ice floes of Baffin Bay.
This is a classic tale of survival describing international motley crew of officers, seamen, scientists and Inuits fighting for their lives after Polaris destruction.
Without leadership and teamwork all efforts are difficult and dramatic. Dark human nature and low morality quite often prevails, hardship creates lack of loyalty, national partiality and racism.
This book has an extra flavor - elements of crime and detective story.
Writing and explanations are enhanced by author's scientific and medical knowledge combined with his experience of living in a harsh climate of Alaska. He knows what he is writing about.
The story of Polaris is just another example of how little we usually know about causes and reality of current political, criminal and social events. True facts and motives stay hidden and masked to be fully exposed and published at much later time.
I rank this book in the same category as "Wreck of the Medusa", "In the Heart of the Sea" and "South".
If Dr. Parry was as good surgeon as he is now a writer, then many patients must be missing his medical practice.

It was a great book written by Richard Parry. The decription from the book was very well written and it felt as if you were there on the ship. It was full of surprises and it was amazing to see what the crew went through. Also, how the Captain Hall's murder was very unexpected. I would say this is one of the best books I have read this year. It is so addicting to read so you finish it in a short period.

At the beginging it is slow because of the introduction but, it gets better after that.

Margaret Truman is getting better with each book. Here she's gone beyond the limiting format (that was getting annoying in her previous books) of having a tough-as-nails but cuddly-as-a-kitten heroine solve the crimes. The plotting in "Embassy Row" is much more carefully crafted, as British Ambassador Geoffrey James dies after his own party under mysterious circumstances. This is the first of Truman's books where you won't have guessed the villain by about 50 pages in. The characters are a bit better, but Truman's efforts at cop-talk and cop-walk still fall woefully short. Hero Sal Morizio makes lots of dumb naive mistakes for a veteran big city detective. He's the least credible of all the characters. Truman also plays some of the same riffs as in her previous books: she spends a lot of time describing D.C. cafes and restaurants, but is woefully uninformed about how government offices actually operate. For example, there is no "British Liaison office at the State Department", and CIA isn't called "the Company" by anyone but callow writers. But the very worst and most annoying mistake in the book is Truman's repeated and insistent assertion that Iranians are Arabs. They aren't, they're Muslim but not Arab.

Overall, "Embassy Row" is better than "Supreme Court" or "White House", but there's still lots of room for improvement.

Once again, Margaret Truman has shared her intimate knowledge of Washington, D. C., governmental politics, and international diplomacy create a credible additional to her spectular crime series. The dialog is real and the story moves along swiftly because of it. This is a mystery that mystery lovers should enjoy.

Who killed the person? Truman isthe only one who knows. Her expertise in mystery is first rate!

Mystery short stories are not usually my favourite genre, simply because there's not enough room to get really "mysterious." I generally find the solution either obvious or contrived. Several of the stories in this collection get around that simply by letting the reader know "who dun it" from the get-go, and then having the sleuth set out to prove it.

Still, I was not impressed with one story in which the sleuth decides she knows the culprit and, unable to prove it, proceeds to plant evidence. I mean, that happens in real life, but in mystery stories the fun is having the sleuth figure it all out and either nab the bad guy or be SURE -- and I wasn't satisfied with her reasoning. I wasn't sure enough I believed she had the right person to cheer her decision.

That also happened in the the story in which someone is garroted. Henrie O immediately starts looking for a suspect old enough to have worked in Intelligence during the Second World War, because only such a person would think of garroting as a method of murder. Speaking as one who's seen "The Godfather" and immediately reached a completely different conclusion, I wasn't impressed with her logic. Hart allows her sleuths to make unjustifiable assumptions and get away with them, which must be very nice for them, but these leaps in logic can be frustrating to the reader! When I read a story, it is a big problem when the sleuth claims to have proved something and I can see several other explanations for the situation.

And oh, all right: by the last Henrie O story, I was kind of sick of her "Roman coin profile" and the assertion that she packed more surprises into a single day "than O Henry ever packed into his short stories." Somebody needs to tell Ms Hart there's a reason they call them "O Henry endings" -- the single surprise comes at the end. And if you read three or four O Henry stories in a row, you can see the twist coming. That, unfortunately, is what started happening with these stories long before I had finished the anthology.

Overall, no worse than most mystery short stories, but nothing to get excited about.

Carolyn Hart has been described as "The New Agatha Christie" by Mystery Scene. Crime on Her Mind is a collection of Hart's short stories. Female sleuths looking for answers is the common theme of most of the tales which offer a variety of settings, relationships and crimes.

Women make terrific sleuths, Hart feels, because they are nosey. Her most notable sleuth is HENRIE O (Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins), a retired reporter with a talent for trouble and a keen nose for facts. Henrie O's yearning for the facts to add up, her thirst for adventure, plus mountain climbing and lock-picking skills definitely seperate her from the stereotype of a sweet little pie-baking granny! Although Henrie O does bake on occasion.

The Gourmet Detective expects a luxurious trip including a gourmet meal as he rides the Danube Express on its twentieth fifth anniversary tour of Eastern Europe. He just sits down at the table ready to feast on the seven-course first evening dinner when security supervisor Karl Kramer asks for his help.

The Budapest Times reports that renowned passenger Hungarian stage star Magda Malescu is dead in her compartment. There is no body yet Magda is missing and the compartment smells of bitter almonds. The Gourmet Detective wonders how the reporter learned about the alleged death almost in a quantum physics way before the event occurred. Not even fully certain that the victim is dead The Gourmet Detective soon uncovers a wealth of suspects until the corpse reappears breathing quite nicely. However, murder occurs as someone kills Magda's understudy and a journalist. Karl and the Gourmet Detective wonder if the vanishing act and homicides are a diversion from an attempt to steal a valuable Mozart manuscript or improved grapevines found in baggage.

This novel needs to carry a warning label for anyone who is on the slightest health regimen as this tale abounds with good food and drink to the delight of the gourmand reader. Though fun, the mystery seems like eating rabbit diet food compared with the menu of dining palette that obviously clogs the blood system of the Gourmet Detective and the reader.

Harriet Klausner

Every Peter King book is a delight. However since I'm somewhat familiar with the geography of Austria, Germany and Hungary, I resented the liberties the author has taken in describing the route of the 'Danube Express'. (Time and time again, locales were transposed and places attributed to the wrong countries)
The description of the meals is, as always in a Peter King book, superb and the plot and atmosphere are interesting.

This mystery falls short because it just doesn't quite have
the ability to engage the reader and make us feel part of the investigation. The characters seem a little shallow, and they
aren't quite fleshed out enough to seem real. The reader will
not quite be able to identify with any of them.

The publisher makes much of the fact that this author is a native of NYC, but that is apparent without being reminded.
The writing uses a lot of "inside" references that most readers
will not fully understand, especially when presenting information relating to streets and businesses.

The story's frequent use of incomplete information, that only a
NYC native would get, will makes most readers feel like an outsider.

The basic story here is that a body is found in the basement of
a local store on Coney Island, and the hero, a police captain,
happens to be nearby, and he is able to insert himself into the
investigation and take it over. The man killed inside the little store turns out to be a rich real estate developer, and
no one can figure why he would be in the basement of a small, uninteresting store in the first place, let alone why anyone would want to kill him.

It turns out the guy is cheating on his wife with a young "starlet," so the motives begin to unfold. His real estate speculations have angered many local residents, and
the suspects multiply. Plus, the captain begins to wonder if there is any connection between the present crime and the FBI
shooting of a terrorist suspect nearby a couple weeks earlier.

The plot and story are interesting, and this is readable, but
many readers will find it difficult to really get into these
characters and their story.

It is nine months since the tragic events of September 11th and Captain Bill Donovan, head of Special Investigations, is depressed, because he isn't part of the World Trade Center investigation. To cheer him up, his wife Marcy arranges a family outing at Coney Island that includes their three-year-old son Daniel. While waiting on a line at Nathan's to buy a "world famous", he hears police sirens and decides to go to the nearby crime scene.

Business mogul James Victor is found murdered in the basement of a candy store and the owner has no idea how he got there or why he would even be in the basement. The storeowner was suing the victim who wanted to tear down the block and build an expensive housing resort. Donovan doesn't really suspect him because everything is too pat and there are plenty of other suspects who wanted the man dead. Imagine Donovan's surprise when the killing is tied to the September 11th attack, and the captain is able to contribute to the bigger inquiry while trying to nab the killer.

Every time Michael Jahn writes a police procedural starring Captain Bill Donovan it turns out to be an exciting page-turner and MURDER ON CONEY ISLAND is no exception. The author humanizes the protagonist by escorting the audience into his personal life and showing how the World Trade Center disaster hurt him personally and makes him want to be a part of the war on terrorism. The interesting twists that the plot takes will keep readers interested to the point that they finish this electrifying novel in one sitting.

Harriet Klausner

Instead of offering copywriters solid suggestions or advice based on experience, Lewis instead gambles that he will reach similarly jaded, sarcastic and negative readers who are eager to ride alongside him on his high horse.The author seems more interested in listening to his own embittered critique of others' work than in instructing readers with real information.

I disagree strongly with most every advertisement he holds up as an example of ineffective copy writing and/or visual communication.It is almost as if Lewis belives his zealous slashing of others' work can replace helpful examples. It is unfortunate that a book like this gets published with such a promising title. Lewis doesn't even come close to providing any sort of tangible help for copywriters who want to increase their repertoire or get another professional perspective.

I took this book off my shelf to write a blurb for a bibliography and in flipping through it, realized just how much I learned from Herschell Gordon Lewis about the subtle nuances of writing copy. He understands the power of words like few other marketing experts I know. I highly recommend this and all of his other books on writing copy.

Herschell Gordon Lewis, the author of many writing books, including Cybertalk That Sells, has updated his book, On the Art of Writing Copy. This book offers a fresh approach to learning the in's and out's copy writing. By gleaning from the many actual printed ads and rules provided in the book, every reader will begin producing better copy.

Lewis provides bold and creative solutions to creating copy for any occasion - including traditional and online advertising campaigns, corporate usage, news reporting, fund-raising, and general correspondence. Throughout the book, Lewis presents actual printed magazine advertisements that demonstrate various methods of communicating - his insightful critiques of them will help readers to structure, clarify, and polish up their own work.

Lewis has mastered the art of writing and so will his readers who apply the contents of this book. Specific instruction includes choosing and using words, exercising care in selecting words, manufacturing words for impact, creating effective sentence structure, producing motivational copy, writing guarantees, and targeting specific audiences. His short course on grammar and usage will help readers improve their writing skills. They will see immediate results.

This book will cater to the writing needs of many, including Web developers and online businesses. They will find this book particularly useful for creating professional-grade Website copy, e-marketing newsletters, and e-mail correspondence. This book would make a great writing class instructional guide. This book is essential reading!

The BSD type printing systems were discussed head to toe but the System V printing systems were referenced sparingly. Because of this, many Solaris and SGI users will have to read beyond the BSD parts to interpret the concepts. I was also surprised that there was no information on CUPS, while some Linux operating systems use it as their primary printing system. If you look past these two points, the book is a fine reference for all UNIX administrators. There is a definitely a distinct demand for these types of books.

The BSD type printing systems were discussed head to toe but the System V printing systems were referenced sparingly. Because of this, many Solaris and SGI users will have to read beyond the BSD parts to interpret the concepts. I was also surprised that there was no information on CUPS, while some Linux operating systems use it as their primary printing system. If you look past these two points, the book is a fine reference for all UNIX administrators. There is a definitely a distinct demand for these types of books.

I found "Network Printing" to be a fine example of taking documentation from at least half-a-dozen sources and tying it all together with a coherent theme: providing network print services to customers using (fill-in-the-blank) systems. Six years ago, when I was managing four Unix systems for 100 customers who wanted to print their reports on any of a dozen printers (some Ethernet, some Ethernet-to-serial), this book would have been a godsend. I especially enjoyed the description of the history of printing: it put into context a lot of things I just accepted without further thought. Anyone in the above situation, or even someone who would like to reliably set up print services, from either the client or server perspective, would be wise to get this book.