The following review contains spoilers. It was the only way to explain how awful the latter half of the book is.

Octavia Butler’s Fledgling starts off with a mystery and a bang. A girl wakes up naked, alone, nearly-dead and in a cave. Who is she? What happened to her? Who did it? Will she survive? But the second half of the book is a clunky fantasy version of the Order side of a Law and Order episode. Butler tried to weave multiple touchy subjects together into a courtroom drama under a legal system of her own invention. The result is tedious.

When we first meet the protagonist, she has no name. The twenty something hunk who finds her on the side of the road names her Renee. She bites him, because unknown to either of them she is a vampire. In the Fledgling milieu, vampires do not turn humans into more vampires. Instead they are another species that forms symbiotic relationships with humans. The vampires get to drink blood and order their humans around. The humans get to live healthier and longer, but they cannot live without frequent bitings from their vampire.

Wright (the young hunk) and the soon to be renamed Shori soon discover a burned out community of farmhouses, what turns out to be the wreckage of Shori’s home, though she never remembers those details. She slowly regains some of her mental faculties, but never any actual memories. A second community of vampires rescues them, but that group is quickly attacked and wiped out too. So Shori, Wright, and two other human refugees head to yet another vampire family for protection. There they fight off attackers yet again, this time finding clues as to who is out for Shori blood. Armed with their few clues, a vampire court is held where Shori takes on all her enemies in a battle of wits.

I loved the first part of the book. Action all around. Shori slowly learning about what she is and how she is supposed to live. No memory. Particularly no cultural memory. Butler also puts Shori through a gamut of situations that seem designed to push buttons. Although we learn later that she is over 50 years old, she has the body of a 12 year old girl (with sharp teeth). Her relationship with Wright turns sexual very quickly. Although we readers didn’t know at the time that she was older, I wasn’t too bothered. I just knew there would be something revealed that would make that not so icky. You want another button? How about cannibalism? Or May December lesbianism? Or (though not revealed until later) some polyamory with a very dominant center of the family unit? I don’t know that Butler was trying to say anything in particular with all this, but she was very definitely pushing the boundaries of what is commonly in fiction. Perhaps not with each tweak individually, but by putting them all together there are definitely going to be some uncomfortable people.

Probably not the most apt thing to compare it to, but I kept comparing Shori’s lack of cultural memory to that experienced by young slaves brought to America from Africa, ripped from their families and tribes. In a lot of respects, it’s really not the same. Slaves had families on the plantations to teach them all about that culture. But it’s not the same as the community they were part of prior to coming to America. Like Shori, they were cut off involuntarily and violently from their heritage and have little way to connect with that.

But in Shori’s case, it doesn’t last very long. She eventually does find her vampire people. And they being teaching her how to be Ina. Ina are the vampires.

And this is where Fledgling starts to go wrong. Shori has to start learning things. So other Ina start explaining things to her. Complicated things. In a long drawn out fashion. Info dump after info dump after info dump. By the second half of the book, we’re subjected to an almost unbroken info dump. And it’s partially because of how many buttons Butler inserted into the text. These things have to work together, and they are complicated. That requires complicated explanations.

Since the vampires and their humans are symbiotic, the humans are called symbionts. The vampires call them that; they call themselves that. All the time. Almost to the point of saying Hello, my fellow symbiont every time. What an awkward word! I never want to hear the word again. Too much!

One of the things the reader learns early on is that Shori is dark-skinned. Some Ina are trying to breed vampires that don’t have to sleep during the day and aren’t so affected by sunlight, which fries normal vampires (though it doesn’t kill them). Yep, that sounds like eugenics to me. Already that’s getting into dangerous ground, though Butler handles that part in a way that’s fairly benign. But of course, other vampires do not like this development, this mixing not only of the dark skinned and light skinned, but also that of humans and Ina. So now we have racism thrown in. Butler’s handling of race in her Parable series was awesome. Here, it’s paint by numbers. The racist bad guys differ little from the standard genteel redneck trope. It’s boring. There’s no nuance.

This latter part of the book is dominated by a vampire trial. After one vampire rips apart the U.S. legal system (for humans), the supposedly better Ina system is described. Instead of a rule-based system that is all about who has the better lawyer or the most money, the Ina’s system is… well, I’m not exactly sure how it’s better. While supposedly designed to get the truth despite technicalities, it seems instead to depend on loyalties between families. And perhaps even more rule-bound than anything us lesser humans came up with. How species with a 10,000 year written history would manage to avoid a court bureaucracy I don’t know. They don’t really though. There are all sorts of rules.

This trial is so extremely boring. We go from action in the first part of the book to psychological mind games played between clueless Shori and knee-jerk reactionary vampires. Shori let’s her temper get the better of her, gets chided by her elders, then plays her part perfectly. Her opponents pull the classic Jack Nicholson move from A Few Good Men; they lose their cool and scream in the courtroom when prodded, thus revealing their guilt.

Butler attempted a lot, and that’s to be commended. But the execution in the latter half of Fledgling makes this just awful reading.

A few other blogged reviews:

• This Book and I Could Be Friends
• fff
• Self-Importance
• A Striped Armchair
• Ampersand
• Rixosous

Title: Fledgling
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Imprint / publisher: Seven Stories Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 316 p.
Publication date: October 2005
ISBN-10: 1-58322-690-7

Book Club of the Damned. That’s what Paul Constant over at the Stranger calls it when he reads an awful book on a dare. Well, that’s New Moon for me. I need bleach now. Spoilers abound here. I just don’t care enough about your enjoyment of this book to worry about spoiling it. Plus, if you haven’t read it yet and you’ve stumbled here, then you probably are reading it on your own Book Club of the Damned quest.

Plot: At her own birthday party with the Cullens, the vegetarian vampires, Bella Swan accidentally cuts herself triggering their blood lust. Luckily everything ends up okay, but the Cullens decide to leave town rather than accidentally eat Bella. Whatever will Bella do without her beloved but vacuous Edward? Why, she’s start hanging out with the hunky Indian boy Jacob down at the rez, all the while pining for Edward. But she’s too selfish to leave him alone when he develops feelings for her, and he’s too creepy to walk away himself. Then bad vampires start hunting Bella and the Indian youth turn into werewolves (good ones, right?) and Edward in South America thinks Bella has killed herself so he heads to Italy to get the King Vampire to kill him because he is heartbroken. Bella runs to Italy to save him by letting him know that she’s alive, but then the royal vampires give the Cullens an ultimatum to kill Bella or make her a vampire. Which is what she wants anyway, and we are done with the book.

Most codependent relationship I’ve ever read. Bella is just dead inside without her Edward. Edward is the same without Bella. Bella has to have a boy around to feel okay, whether it’s Edward or Jacob. I wanted to strangle her. Edward too. Also Jacob for good measure.

Hated all the navel gazing. A fair amount of action happens. But each time it’s followed by pages of badly written thoughts from Bella about what it all means for her and Edward. 300 levels of parsing.

Edward and now Jacob are just as creepy as before. And as manipulative. Jacob gets to be the nice guy who sticks with Bella in the hope that she comes around to having a thing for him. He’ll be the shoulder to cry on until he can use it to get in her pants. Of course, that’s until Edward returns and then Jacob gets overtly manipulative and somewhat scary trying to get Bella to break it off.

Truly awful tripe.

So why did I read this for Book Club of the Damned? I am being bribed. It’s a good bribe. It involves boots. Plus, sometimes this is just cathartic. And it’s a library book so my only cost was the caffeine necessary to read it.

Title: New Moon
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Cover creator: Gail Doobinin (designer) / John Grant (photographer)
Series: Twilight Saga; 2
Imprint / publisher: Megan Tingley Books / Little Brown
Format: Hardcover
Length: 563 p.
Publication date: September 2006
ISBN-10: 0-316-16019-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-16019-3
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: Werewolves — Fiction
Subject: High schools — Fiction
Subject: Schools — Fiction
Subject: Washington (State) — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.M57188New 2006

Most audiobooks are narrated by professional voice actors for good reason. Sherman Alexie read his own work and did an incredible job. I probably would have been pretty emotionally affected by the work alone, but I cried multiple times listening to Sherman Alexie read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. It’s really that good. I’d say the best audiobook I’ve ever listened to, but I haven’t yet reached double figures so I don’t have a lot of these under my belt. But it’s good. I’d even recommend it over the actual book.

What is it? Arnold Spirit is a Spokane Indian who decides to go to Reardon High School rather than one of the reservation high schools. The reservation schools are decrepit, under-supplied, under-staffed, and full of Indian kids who have no hope. Reardon, while full of redneck racist white kids, is one of the better small rural schools. The kids there, while not exactly being set up to be future presidents, have dreams that don’t involve the reservation. Arnold gets hope but has to deal with a whole different set of problems than he’s used to.

There are lots of reasons to like the story. The portrayal of alcoholism’s effect and the grief it engenders, for instance. Yet the book doesn’t feel like an anti-alcohol diatribe. There’s the love Arnold’s parents have for him and he for them. Family is everpresent. Arnold’s dad attends every one of his basketball games. Though he often doesn’t have the money to buy gas for the car, when he does he doesn’t hoard it. He drives Arnold in to school. Arnold views his sister’s elopement to Montana as her seeking her dreams. Arnold’s status as poor among the richer students at Reardon is handled with sensitivity. And while I question how realistic the race interaction is, it didn’t become a cliché Indian vs. white thing either. The reaction of the Spokane Indians to a white art collector’s guilt is priceless.

But the part I loved best about the story was Arnold Spirit’s relationship with his best friend Rowdy. Sometimes they contend. Sometimes they cooperate. Rowdy resents Arnold’s opportunity. Arnold regrets overshadowing Rowdy. Sometimes people as close together as Rowdy and Arnold have issues. I like how Alexie has them work things out.

On the top of my list for favorite books read this year.

Title: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Author: Sherman Alexie
Imprint / publisher: Recorded Books
Format: Netlibrary download
Length: 4 h. 51 m.
Publication date: January 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-4281-8297-4
Subject: Spokane Indians — Juvenile fiction
Subject: Spokane Indians — Fiction
Subject: Indians of North America — Washington (State) — Fiction
Subject: Indian reservations — Fiction
Subject: Race relations — Fiction
Subject: Diaries — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.A382 Ab 2007

Show me a cover picturing a woman in leather or boots with a gun and you may just have sold me a good impulse buy. Sadly, in the two cases I’ve succumbed I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the book, including Greywalker. It has some strong positives going for it though.

On the negative side, the climactic battle in the book was over something that really would affect only undead creatures, so I didn’t really care about it much. The main character, Harper Blaine, is partially undead and my level of caring toward her is partially attributable to the relative lack of depth of her character. On the positive side, it’s one of the few books I’ve read where normal people run into vampire types and the normal people’s reactions seems reasonable. Also, despite the author being a transplant, I think she portrayed the feel of Seattle better than most books set around here. (Well, except the sooper-sekret vampire club in Pioneer Square.)

Harper Blaine is a private investigator based out of Pioneer Square. When we are introduced to her in the first paragraph, she’s getting her ass handed to her by the subject of one of her investigations. She’s caught him perpetrating some sort of fraud, he doesn’t like it, and he beats the crap out of her. She’s dead. But just for a couple of minutes before the paramedics revive her. Afterward, black and blue, she starts seeing strange things that aren’t attributable to the blurred vision she has from getting beat up. Ghosts.

Yep, ghosts everywhere! Having been dead herself, she can now slide in and out of the land of ghosts, or the Grey (hence, Greywalker). Being new to the ability, she’s not very good at it. But Harper Blaine is now one of the few beings who can go Grey and back, and so all the world of the undead now has it’s own private investigator. Though not all of them know it.

First case, woman hires her to find her son, last seen in the company of a very white serene goth looking guy with big fangy teeth. Second case, a voice on the phone hires her to track down an antique his family lost several decades prior. The antique seems to have a mind of it’s own.

Harper Blaine is really really whiny. Not quite as bad as Meg in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time series, but pretty close. Every time she has to do something, the doing is preceded by several paragraphs to several pages of Harper’s discussion about being afraid to do whatever it is she has to do. In addition, she has these newly found powers to go back and forth to the Grey, and she barely uses them of her own volition. Nearly every time something happens, it’s either an instinctive reaction or it’s someone else doing the work for her.

That makes it really hard to care about Harper Blaine’s character. Since she’s the only viewpoint character, that’s a bad spot to be in. The climactic conflict is over what is essentially a bomb for the undead. Ghosts, vampires, necromancers, and maybe a witch or two. Those are the people who will get blown to smithereens if someone cuts the red wire instead of the blue wire. I don’t care about them. They are bad guys, except for Harper Blaine. And she’s not someone I care to care for either, so the upblowing of the bomb doesn’t pique me.

However, Kat Richardson did capture the feel of the Seattle in which I live. In particular, a brief sojourn into the University District was spot on. I popped for the scene set inside the Grand Illusion theater as well the note about dodging skateboarders while walking the Ave. J. A. Jance set one of her series in the city and does a pretty good job of using the geography to advantage, but the feel of the city is more the feel of Seattle in the 1970s if at all. Greywalker fits better for a younger generation.

If you’re into the urban fantasy genre, I doubt this will be too bad a read. For this sub-genre outsider though, it wasn’t a great introduction.

Other blogged reviews:

• Word Nerd
• The Dreamcatcher Workshop
• Graculus’s Blog

Title: Greywalker
Author: Kat Richardson
Cover creator: Ray Lundgren (designer) / Chris McGrath (artist)
Series: Greywalker; 1
Imprint / publisher: Roc / Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 341 p.
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 0-451-46107-X
Subject: Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Women private investigators — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3618.I3447 G74 2006

Having read Walla Walla Suite a couple of years ago, I thought it would be a good idea to search out the first Quinn novel, Homicide My Own. I knew the premise was that of someone trying to solve their own murder. However, this book ends up on my not highly recommended list after finishing. Both plot and characterization bothered me.

In Walla Walla Suite, Quinn is much more believably burned-out and cynical. Her partner, Odd Gunderson, becomes possessed by the soul of a dead person, and wants to solve the murder. That part I get. What I disliked was that he often just knew he had to do something. Lazy writing. Better told were his occasional visions and recollections of his previous life as the victim.

As for the crime and investigation, little of it survives the smell test. Sent by their lieutenant to Shalish Island to pick up a wanted suspect, Quinn and Gunderson become involved in the cold case on the other side of the state. Sending a couple of beat cops across the state after the end of a long shift is already suspect enough. Sending them without the chance to shower, with instructions to get the suspect and return without sleeping, and then to work another shift on return? Nuh-uh. And then when they get there and get delayed, the same lieutenant (who I would presume would normally have the sense to go home himself), lends Quinn and Gunderson to the tribal police for a cold case they aren’t even investigating. Why?

I did like Ponicsan’s setting for the book though, which seems to be loosely based on Lummi Island. Quinn and Gunderson drop into a small-town atmosphere where everyone knows everyone else’s business. But despite the chumminess of the locals, the place is big and spread out enough that it’s possible to keep things from others with some effort.

I’m hoping that I’ll like Krapp’s Last Cassette better.

Other blogged reviews:

• Evil Editor’s Gallimaufry (not exactly a review, but worth reading!)
• Kaijsa Reads

Title: Homicide My Own
Author: Anne Argula (Darryl Ponicsan)
Series: Quinn; 1
Imprint / publisher: Pleasure Boat Studio
Format: Paperback
Length: 219 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 1-929355-21-1
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Fiction
Subject: Indians of North America — Fiction
Subject: Fugitives from justice — Fiction
Subject: Washington (State) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3601.R49H66 2005

I was not impressed with Without Due Process. The story veers off on the wrong path and just seemed to keep going sideways.

J. P. Beaumont, intrepid Seattle homicide detective, gets drawn into mystery revolving around Benjamin Gentle Ben Weston, an officer in the gang division. After a call to the department threatening the lives of every police officer, Ben Weston and almost his entire family are found slaughtered in their south Seattle home. But evidence surfaces showing that Weston has been co-signing loans for gang-bangers, which is a no-no for squeaky-clean Seattle officers. Is it fraud of some sort? Did gangs co-opt Weston? Are there more cops involved, as evidenced by the lack of usable evidence at the scene? Who?

This one is mostly wrong in plotting. First off, why would bad guys jump straight from small time fraud to murder? When the killers are revealed, the motivation is that lacking. In order to keep from getting discovered at a small crime, they risk the death penalty in a major way. Killing the entire family seemed like huge overkill as well.

Then come up a huge WTF moment. All the major gangs in Seattle call a truce and cooperate with the police to solve the crime, because they don’t want to look bad to their neighbors. I rolled my eyes multiple times.

Further evidence is that someone looked at all of Ben Weston’s computer files at work, after he died. So there are likely to be other police officers on the take besides Weston. But here’s the part that doesn’t make sense. Weston’s boss has no idea what he’s been working on for nine months, does not know what’s in the files, and has no way to get into the files. I find that really really hard to believe.

The holes were just too big and too numerous.

Title: Without Due Process
Author: J. A. Jance
Series: J. P. Beaumont; 10
Imprint / publisher: Avon / Hearst
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 302 p.
Publication date: October 1993
ISBN-10: 0-380-75837-7
Subject: Beaumont, J. P. (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction
LC classification: PS3560.A44 W5 1992

Though it’s billed as part memoir, part polemic on the jacket flap, I’d definitely place this book more in the polemic category. Norm Stamper’s Breaking Rank iterates his opinions on policing in five loosely organized categories with several chapters for each: crime and punishment, cop culture, police department structure, oversight of police, and departmental and city politics. Most chapters in these sections are illustrated with his own experience on the subject. A few of the chapters are devoted almost wholly to major experiences in Stamper’s career: when he shot and killed an unarmed man, his year infiltrating protest groups, and running the Seattle Police Department during the riots at the Seattle W.T.O. ministerial conference in 1999. Stamper espouses liberal, reformist ideas and presents them well in this engaging but cursory survey of policing from his perspective.

First off, a couple of caveats about my own perspective. I’m born and raised Seattle. I spent a few years in Idaho, but Seattle is home. I’m liberal. Seattle liberal. And my brother works as a police officer in the Seattle P.D. He started after Norm Stamper resigned following W.T.O. so his stories don’t cover the period about which Stamper writes. But I do hear stories about police work.

The first section is mostly Stamper’s political opinions on law enforcement policies that many folks are discussing: the drug war (decriminalize), prostitution (decriminalize), domestic violence (not treated as important as it should be), capital punishment (against), and gun control (for). His opinions here are only worth note because his views are opposite the general perception of what the police think. Police are the law and order people, so they should be for more law and more order. While I agree with him on every one of those ideas save that of gun control where my opinion is muddled, I thought Stamper’s arguments were not persuasive. He might have better arguments, but the length of these chapters precludes them from being elaborated.

The second section on cop culture I found a lot more interesting. While his views on marijuana legalization get more notice, this part is a real inside look, albeit of two nicer police departments in the U.S., San Diego and Seattle. Topics covered here include sexism, the blue wall of silence, and doughnut eating cops. But what struck me most were his thoughts on police racism. He wrote something that he admits he can’t back up with data, but which intuitively makes sense to me.

Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don’t talk about it, we pretend it doesn’t exist, we claim color blindness, we say white officers treat black men the same way we treat white men. But that’s a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African-American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it’s a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won’t admit it to themselves, or to others.

So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop. In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.

From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don’t mix, that of all the people we’d encounter on the streets, he most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.

Legitimate kill or be killed events do happen — far more often today than when I was a beat cop. A police officer would be a fool not to be ever vigilant. But I’m afraid this reality has licensed panicky white cops to shoot unarmed black men when they should be talking, or fighting, their way out of a sticky situation.

Stamper’s only data on this is his own experience and statistics about the U.S. population’s fear of blacks in general. In other words, not specific to police officers who have guns and can arrest people.

The last three sections the major viewpoint expressed is that the police should not follow the military command and control structure. It was necessary at one point to combat corruption and cronyism, but now other concerns need to be dealt with. Aloof, rigid police departments become separate from the people they police. Without engagement between communities and law enforcement, relationships between the two will deteriorate. And without that engagement, crime can’t be fought effectively.

Throughout all his pontificating, Stamper illustrates his arguments with experiences from his own career. A lot of this frustrated me, because Stamper only names names when it’s safe to do so: the people are dead or he’s saying something nice or the person just won’t care what Stamper says (Rudolph Guiliani for instance). He’s tempers his criticism of police officers and officials individually while repeatedly calling for bad apples and people who don’t get with the progressive program to be removed. Perhaps you could have given a few examples, Mr. Stamper.

Who he’s hardest on in his personal stories is himself. After finishing, I can’t recall a single incident or story in the book where he claims he did well or credit for success. But he does include numerous stories of his own failures. Racist acts. Marital failure. In fact, the three big personal stories are all of failure of some sort. Killing an unarmed man. Spying unnecessarily on peaceful leftists. Presiding over the W.T.O. debacle. None of them ended up with happy people.

And in one way I’m fairly annoyed with him. After retiring, he’s taken his ball and gone home so to speak. He’s gone from urban to rural, now living in the relatively inaccessible San Juan Islands. He’s active in some causes, particularly marijuana legalization. The challenges of criminal justice are urban, racism in particular. I don’t think they can be combated from the reaches of northern Puget Sound. If he’s committed to these issues, I think he ought to come back to the city.

One other blogged review:

• Barers of Maple Valley

Title: Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing
Author: Norm Stamper
Imprint / publisher: Nation Books / Avalon
Format: Hardcover
Length: 396 p.
Publication date: May 2005
ISBN-10: 1-56025-693-1
Subject: Police — United States
Subject: Police — Job stress
Subject: Police misconduct
Subject: Police — California — San Diego
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle
LC classification: HV8138 .S673 2005

Heather bribed me to read Twilight. I lived in Boise, Idaho for about a year. One of the few things I miss about the city is pizza from Flying Pie, particularly gourmet night when they try out pizzas not on their main menu. A pizza smorgasbord. Because people remember their pizza so fondly, the pizzeria offers a pre-made pizza option. They’ll put together one of their pizzas, then pack it in dry ice for you to deliver to your favorite people in other cities. Heather offered up one of their pizzas if I would subject myself to the dazzling angst that is Twilight. Twilight seemed like a small price to pay for a Flying Pie pizza, so I agreed.

Isabella Bella Swan moves to tiny Forks, Washington to live with her father. She soon becomes convinced the dazzling, gorgeous, aloof, smart, talented, athletic boy Edward Cullen is both a vampire and in love with pathetic, lonely, whiny, introverted, fickle, clumsy, over-analytic yet advanced placement new girl in town, herself! Turns she’s right, and chaste adventures ensue.

Surprisingly, I didn’t hate this book. It’s not good, particularly the first half of the book where the characters annoyed me so much I twittered every idiotic move, much to the annoyance of my followers. Bella thinks about two things: how much she hates Forks (go home!) and how much she likes Edward Cullen. Boys boys boys! The book only passes the Bechdel test because Bella discusses her class schedule with the school secretary. She has four local boys chasing after her, and yet she goes for the creepy distant guy who at that point had no redeeming features except for his good looks and designer clothes. Which is fairly normal I’m sure. Just annoying. Worse though is that she likes to claim she’s unattractive. She’s just a little too self-involved to care about. I started rooting for the vampires to cut her up and eat her in the grisliest fashion possible.

After Edward reveals himself, the story picks up and became more bearable. Either that or I became inured to Bella’s whining. Sure, there’s still too much self-flagellating discussion between the two young almost-lovers. He repeats a hundred times that he’s too dangerous to be around her, yet is too selfish to walk away. She breathily pleads for him to never leave her. What sees in her I do not know. Meyer’s narrative says Edward is exceptionally attracted to her scent. Although we boys appreciate a girl who smells nice, T&A is what really attracts us at age 17. But I can indulge Meyer her wish fulfillment scenario where boys are interested in more lofty pursuits.

As I noted, the story picks up. Edward saves Bella with his Superman speed and strength, preventing an out of control van from crushing her tender mortal body. Later he arrives just in time to save Bella from the clutches of dastardly would-be rapists in fair Port Angeles, center of the Northwest’s urban crime zone. Bella even gets to watch a super-fast vampire family baseball game before the evil vampire’s show up and all hell breaks loose. While the alpha-vampire-male playground fight is so derivative the Treasury has to bail it out (yes, I just made a stimulus joke), it’s still fun to watch. Well, except for the fact that Bella passes out when the ultimate confrontation takes place so I didn’t get to see what happens in this exclusively first-person narrative! Bella passes out! Next scene, let’s talk to the winners! Which vampire, the good one or the evil one, gets to claim Bella for books two through however many Meyer will write?

What came to mind multiple times while reading this is Ender’s Game. Yup. The Orson Scott Card (another nebbish Mormon writer) written science fiction classic. That one was all about introverted geek boys realizing their alpha-male fantasies of secret skills that could be revealed if given the right opportunity such as a weightless training school in space for child soldiers. This one is all about introverted geek girls realizing their fantasies of designer clothes, popularity, and Jane Austen style chaste love if only given the right situation such as the school male model heart-throb being a secret vampire. I liked Ender’s Game at the time and failed to see it’s flaws, but with a little bit of self-awareness later in life I came to see it for what it is. The girls who got sucked into Twilight should revel in the fantasy while they can.

Now that I’ve taken one bribe, I must offer the option to all. I’ve got a pretty liberal review policy already, but if you have a book you want reviewed on Rat’s Reading, I am now open to creative bribes as well. Not just any bribe will do, however. If I wasn’t willing to read a free book before, you gotta come up with something really unique or awesome to change my mind. It’s gotta be something good enough to get people to exclaim I can’t believe they did that just to get reviewed for the three schmucks that read that blog! For example, convincing your city to install a bronze bust of me in front of the main library.

Two caveats. This does not guarantee a positive review. Hence, I suggest authors and publicists avoid this opportunity. If it takes a bribe at all, much less one of my envisioned magnitude, to get me to read your book, it’s probably going to be a seriously negative review. Second, all bribes and who made them will be disclosed along with the review. Partially so folks won’t question my editorial integrity, but mostly so everyone can laugh at you (or me).

If that sounds tantalizing, offer me your bribes via Twitter or email at reading kingrat.biz.

Title: Twilight
Author: Stephenie Meyer
Cover creator: Gail Doobinin (designer) / Roger Hagadone (photographer)
Series: Twilight Saga; 1
Imprint / publisher: Little, Brown / Hachette
Format: Paperback
Length: 498 p.
Publication date: September 2006
ISBN-10: 0-316-01584-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-01584-4
Subject: Vampires — Fiction
Subject: High schools — Fiction
Subject: Schools — Fiction
Subject: Washington (State) — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.M57188Tw 2005

After a pretty good Minor in Possession, I think Jance took a step back with Payment in Kind. There’s a little bit of character development embedded in this super-complicated plot. I’m don’t like it when the crimes depends on all sorts of weird connections. And I also don’t really buy the Paul Kramer character. There are assholes on the job, but even the bosses know who they are and what they are up to.

Now, the set up for the plot isn’t too complicated. School district employee found murdered in the arms of dead school district security guard. Suspicion falls on the husband, Pete Kelsey. Especially when his life starts coming unraveled. Really unraveled. He was a draft dodger living in Canada during the Viet Nam War, or so he seems.

There’s also a huge plot hole that makes the complicated thing unworkable. Pete Kelsey’s past. Contrasting it with that of J. P. Beaumont. Beaumont has purposefully avoided his grandfather, who had thrown out Beaumont’s mother when she became pregnant as a teen. However, in this book Beaumont decides to stop carrying a grudge and look his grandparents up. When he finds them, grandmother has kept up a box of clippings of Beau’s exploits over the decades despite having never met her grandson.

Pete Kelsey on the other hand, has no idea about any of the people in his past. His parents for instance. No clue if they are dead or alive despite them living in small town South Dakota. Or other people in the plot. It’s not that hard to check up on them occasionally. Pete Kelsey has a need to. And yet he doesn’t.

I’m trying to remember if, in any of the series, Beaumont ever just investigates a plain old drug hit or something similar. Most of his cases are less convoluted than this one.

Anyway, I’m not quite as satisfied with Payment in Kind. Even for brain candy it didn’t quite measure up. Unfortunately, telling more than is in this review already would completely spoil the plot, so I can’t really do a proper job of explaining why. But hopefully this is enough.

Title: Payment in Kind
Author: J. A. Jance
Series: J. P. Beaumont; 9
Imprint / publisher: Avon / Hearst
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 330 p.
Publication date: March 1991
ISBN-10: 0-380-75836-9

Yup, still re-reading J. A. Jance crime fiction. The seventh in the J. P. Beaumont series has Beaumont investigating an apparent suicide by seppuku. Owner of a small high tech company dies with a very rare long-lost samurai sword by his side and his entrails hanging out through a stab wound in his gut. The medical examiner determines it was a blow to the head that killed the man though.

Besides the crime plot, Jance works two big things into the story. First is the treatment and life of the Japanese American community in and around Seattle during and after World War II. That was something that was under-covered in my American history classes both in high school and college. I’ve read about it before now, of course, and I even had friends in college whose parents had been interned. For some reason the Supreme Court declared that jailing people based on their Japanese heritage was perfectly legal. Completely shameful, and unlike Dred Scott, I don’t believe that decision has ever been reversed in subsequent Supreme Court decisions.

The second item in the story background is Beaumont’s drinking. Jance started making an issue of it in the previous book, A More Perfect Union. This book really lays it on thick. The book opens with Beaumont waking up from a drunken blackout with a broken hand that he doesn’t remember. He also forgets a planned meeting, which I don’t recall the story ever rescheduling. His doctor and his lawyer both hammer him on his drinking. By the end of the book, he’s agreed to go into treatment. While well-intentioned, I thought Jance’s treatment of the subject to be unrealistic. The book has the first confrontation with Beaumont about him quitting, and within three days he’s agreed to treatment. My experience is that people fight sobering up much harder than that. (To be fair, Jance has Beaumont backsliding in future books, and that’s pretty spot-on normal.)

But to the crime… with two small exceptions Jance again does a good job at avoiding things that annoy me. The criminal plot is pretty simple. It looks somewhat complicated at first, but that’s because Beaumont doesn’t know what happened, and he learns the facts piecemeal. In real life, criminals rarely have elaborate plans. Or at least they don’t have elaborate plans that work. The more pieces in a plan, the more points at which it can fail. A small high tech company that’s failing, but possibly has an unknown valuable product that could turn things around. Several people could want it, and they might be unscrupulous. Simple. No coincidences required.

The two parts that bothered me? One is a witness who, for no satisfactory reason, bails on Beaumont in the middle of an interview. Walks off and disappears. He answers questions. He has nothing to hide. But the reason later offered for him leaving just doesn’t make sense. Along the lines of I needed to help a person, right then kind of thing. Uhm, why?

The other is who the killers turn out to be and why they are involved. The Mafia. No, that isn’t really a spoiler; the Mafia involvement is revealed fairly early on. What’s in question is just why they are involved. Too clichéd of a reason. It feels like a stereotype of the Mafia that might be held by a pair of suburban parents. In other words, gleaned from the movies. Perhaps that’s really how the mob works, but it doesn’t feel right. Especially for Seattle, which is hardly a center for Italian organized crime.

One thing I should also mention is the settings. Unlike some other of the regional crime fiction writers, Jance doesn’t just use a generic Seattle or Pacific Northwest. The hotel in Moscow, Idaho is really called the University Inn and it’s bar is really called Chaser’s (or at least was until 1998 when I moved away). There really is a green windowed high rise at 1201 Third Avenue in Seattle. There really is a nifty little park called Waterfall park. Jance takes some creative license with locations, but not a lot. So it’s quite the pleasure to read for a local.

Other blogged reviews:

• disorganized, as usual

Title: Dismissed with Prejudice
Author: J. A. Jance
Series: J. P. Beaumont; 7
Imprint / publisher: Avon / Hearst
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 314 p.
Publication date: June 1989
ISBN-10: 0-380-75547-5
Subject: Beaumont, J.P. (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction