I have a theory about why I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed another entry in in Akashic Books noir series, Delhi Noir. Seattle Noir solid, but it didn’t grab me quite like the earlier anthology.

Theory: I have a lot of biased assumptions about Delhi that made the setting very foreboding. But being Seattle born and raised, I know this place much better and have a much harder time seeing its seedy underbelly. Oh, we have our problems. In its early days, Seattle could hold it’s own against any up and coming city. But today this is not a place where crime runs rampant, the cops are on the take, or organized crime takes a cut of everything.

In addition, with a few exceptions, the stories don’t mine the reputations and possibilities of the Seattle neighborhoods in which they’re set. Or they do use genteel areas which limit the crime possibilities to a fairly narrow set. Where’s Lake City, or Aurora, White Center, Rainier Valley? Conversely, a couple of the stories set in places I wouldn’t have expected to be so scary turned out to be quite good at imparting a dark mood.

Blood Tide by Thomas P. Hopp (Duwamish)

The anthology starts out in an area just south of downtown. The Duwamish river has been dredged and shaped into a shipping hub, surrounded by the medium heavy industries that like close proximity to easy international freight. The land once belonged to the Duwamish, a branch of the Salish tribe that inhabited the area when Europeans moved in. Unrecognized, the Duwamish dwindled in number without a reservation or a dedicated tribal government to keep them together. The tribe persevered even so. Hopp’s story interacts more with a few Duwamish members rather than the Duwamish area, which doesn’t have the distinctly Native American feel implied by the text. The crime is that of red tide poisoning, where someone has distilled the poisonous substances from the tide and used it to murder someone. The hero is Peyton McKean, a virologist of some sort. He stars in Hopp’s self-published novel The Jihad Virus. He has a journalist sidekick who comes running to write up McKean’s exploits in mutual symbiosis. While sufficiently noirish, it’s utterly predictable and clunkily written. Good for bringing some exposure to the Duwamish cause, however.

Promised Tulips by Bharti Kirchner (Wallingford)

Wallingford is not a neighborhood I would associate with dreaded crime. The essence of noir (I.M.H.O.), is the ominous knowledge that someone is going to get screwed, and that I both don’t want to watch and can’t help watching. A professional gardener who lives in Wallingford (this certainly fits the area) imagines what could have happened to her best friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a less than upset social climbing husband. The location is not dreadful, but it inspires a quietness that allows a person to think a lot, expanding worry into something huge. It’s all around a very good story.

Golden Gardens by Stephan Magcosta (Ballard)

This is another story that manages to be ominous despite the idyllic location. Magcosta uses Golden Gardens Park to set a tale of emotional revenge. The park’s beach isn’t remote, but it’s secluded from residences by the railroad and a steep bluff. Consequently, if you wanted to kill someone without being bothered by passersby, Golden Gardens wouldn’t be the worst place to do it. A Hispanic woman distraught over her soldier son’s death in Iraq wants to avenge him on the first convenient Middle Eastern looking person she can find, a cabbie. An ugly, inevitable end packs a lot of emotion. Recommended.

The Center of the Universe by Robert Lopresti (Fremont)

Fremont is yet another area that isn’t particularly seedy. It features a weird combination of left-wing free-thinking and good old crass American commercialism. Lopresti really nails the vibe of the neighborhood through the eyes of a somewhat mentally ill homeless person. He can’t always tell the difference between the true and the false already, and Fremont’s dichotomy doesn’t make things any easier. In the middle of this, our guy thinks he sees a girl get murdered, and the guys who did it to boot. Another recommended story.

Blue Sunday by Kathleen Alcalá (Central District)

Alcalá’s story doesn’t really work as noir for me. Someone’s gonna get screwed, but it happens right at the beginning so there’s little in the way of menace afterward. A couple of Iraq soldiers on leave party it up and get drunk when they run into a cop all to eager to suspect the worst of minorities. Alternates between scenes of the soldier recovering from his police encounter in the hospital and scenes of him handling Iraqis roughly. Well worth reading as a portrait of how racial bias fucks us up, and it’s an issue that comes up often in the Central District.

The Taskmasters by Simon Wood (Downtown)

The first of four stories where the person who’s going to get screwed is being set up to take a fall for the unscrupulous. A bar brawler gets taken in by an underground group called the Taskmasters, whose ostensible reason for existing is as a band of vigilantes, righting wrongs ignored by the police. They have one method: they decide someone is guilty and execute them. Sounds like a 70s T.V. movie plot. Predictable. Not a lot of downtown flavor. And I didn’t get a feeling of peril.

What Price Retribution? by Patricia Harrington (Capitol Hill)

A half mile from my place is a steep hillside that separates the Capitol Hill neighborhood from my Eastlake home base. Between Interstate 5 and the incline, there’s only a few streets connecting the areas, at the north and south end of this bluff. However, there’s a couple of stair climbs that lead from us to them, which pass under wooded branches so dense that it’s dark in the daytime during the height of summer. Among those trees is a homeless camp according to Harrington’s story. When a homeless guy gets the crap beat out of him, the Mayor of the camp, an erstwhile cop, sobers up enough to seek revenge on the drug dealer. This one is great, not so much because I wanted to see the dealer live, but because the revenge could get really bad. (Though why a big time dealer would try to sell to penniless homeless folks in the first place is a little fuzzy.)

Till Death Do Us … by Curt Colbert (Belltown)

The second story of set ‘em up to take a fall variety. 1940s Jake Rossiter stars as a P.I. who takes a bad domestic case because he needs the money. Coincidentally within minutes of each other, both sides of a divorce case hire Rossiter to prevent the other spouse from murdering them. A fun story, but not in a dreadful way.

The Best View In Town by Paul S. Piper (Leschi)

Piper’s story is the first of two commit a crime against someone close to you for the money entries in the book. Here a drunk loser brings home a girl, only to find out the girl’s grandfather grew up next door, where he supposedly stashed away valuables that the family never recovered. And she’s damned pissed the new owners seem to have maybe found them. Just a little too predictable. Good portrait of a loser though. I liked that.

The Wrong End Of A Gun by R. Barri Flowers (South Lake Union)

The third of the set ‘em up to take a fall stories, and by far the worst story in the collection. Dude wants to get with a girl just because she’s hot, despite hundreds of warning signs that would make even the most besotted 17 year old run. And he’s a veteran of divorce court, who’s world weary tone should give him a clue. Flowers uses some awfully trite physical descriptions too: Her complexion was like maple syrup over buttered waffles. A) Food descriptions of skin tone are tiresome. B) Maple syrup I can see as a skin tone. Smooth and brown. On top of buttered waffles? Have you ever looked at buttered waffles after pouring syrup on them? They are blotchy, greasy and pockmarked. This is not attractive. Tasty and delicious in a waffle, but not so much for a complexion.

Paper Son by Brian Thornton (Chinatown)

Thornton writes historical noir set in 1889, when Seattle wasn’t exactly welcoming to its Chinese immigrants. One of them washes up dead on Mercer Island, and a rookie Treasury Agent investigates. Triads and prostitution and drug running and multiple missing people! And I definitely didn’t see where the ending was … er … going to end.

The Magnolia Bluff by Skye Moody (Magnolia)

The second of the set up people you know for money stories. Circus clown midgets have a rivalry that spills into really good resentment when one of them makes it to Hollywood. Magnolia as a setting, although described accurately, didn’t lend itself to bad shit happening.

Sherlock’s Opera by Lou Kemp (Waterfront)

Moriarity’s adoring little brother Jacob lures Sherlock Holmes to Seattle to take his revenge on the sleuth. Why? Why?

Food for Thought by G. M. Ford (Pioneer Square)

The final story is the last of the set folks up to take a fall ones, though this one works out a little differently. But again, a broke P.I. takes a domestic muscle case that he’d rather not, because he needs the money. A short, enjoyable story that broke the mold of the previous three.

A few standout stories but overall not as good as I’d hoped.

One other blogged review:

• Bookgasm

Title: Seattle Noir
Editor: Curt Colbert
Cover creator: Jon Resh (designer)
Series: Akashic Noir
Imprint / publisher: Akashic Books
Format: Paperback
Length: 268 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-80-4

Well reviewed a few years ago, it turns out Amy Bloom’s Away is the kind of historical fiction that doesn’t have a lot of effect on me. The main character, Lillian Leyb, travels across North America in the mid-1920s so that she can get to Siberia where her daughter might be. I loved her character, but the story itself is a tale of repeated advancing and falling back. There’s some decent moral takeaways as well.

In the early parts of the book, Lillian Leyb is introduced as a Jewish immigrant in New York City. She’s unsentimental, other than a deep love for her dead child Sophia. She meets people, cares for them, and is willing to take on roles for them without much fuss. Beard for the gay Yiddish theater star, no problem. Lover to his father, no problem. She views much of her life almost as a business transaction. She becomes fond of many of the characters she meets, but her interaction is almost an exchange of services for her.

Then she finds out that the pogrom that drove her out of Russia might not have left her child dead. A new immigrant to New York City carries a story with her of a neighbor saving the child and adopting her as her own in Siberia. Lillian must go find her even if the story isn’t true. But both lovers fail to assist her, showing the pitfalls of transaction based loyalty. Her alternative to a steamship trip back across the Atlantic (which she cannot afford), is to travel to Alaska via Seattle, and from there to boat across the Bering Straight to Siberia. But without money, the trek is easier said than done.

This is not a story of an inexorably advancing fight against the odds. Lillian falls into situation after situation, usually coming out of them worse for the wear, though sometimes closer to the end of her journey. In some ways, this is nice to see in a story. It’s kind of the opposite of Eric Flint’s 1632 where everything works out for the protagonists. But it also makes for a depressing story.

I also found the moral ambiguity refreshing. Murder, sex, mistressing, prostitution, theft, death, abandonment. The characters perform these things, and don’t really dwell on whether they are damned to hell for doing so. Likewise when similar bad things happen to them, it isn’t an occasion for the gnashing of teeth. Stuff happens in the world and they pick up and move on to the next thing. A few of the characters have deep attachments to some of the other characters: Lillian to her child Sophie, Reuben Burstein to his son, Gumdrop to her cousin Snooky, and a few others. But even then when bad things happen, the character pick up and continue with their lives, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Fiction often portrays the climaxes of stories as the completion of a person, but in real life, this is usually not so. We grieve when someone dies, we feel violated by theft or abandonment, but something else comes along in our lives and we deal. Away reflects this.

But while it may be fairly true to life in that respect, when the climax of a story isn’t a climax, it makes for a less than interesting plot. I enjoyed the characters very much, but since I’m a pretty plot-based reader, I couldn’t whole-heartedly enjoy the novel.

A few other blogged reviews:

• And I Quote… The Sequel
• Life Wordsmith
• Write Meg!
• Jewesses With Attitude

Title: Away
Author: Amy Bloom
Cover creator: Sherrie Wolf (painter)
Imprint / publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Format: Paperback
Length: 235 p.
Publication date: 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-8129-779-0

I succumbed to the early buzz about Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker. Early last month I bought it on impulse when wandering through Barnes and Noble downtown. I read her Four and Twenty Blackbirds a couple of months ago and thought it was pretty good, particularly considering I’m not a huge horror aficionado. Boneshaker is quite a different book though. The setting and subgenres are more to my taste, so I expected to like it. And I did. The book will go on my best of 2009 list.

This is the setup: in 1863, a scientist/inventor named Leviticus Blue built a giant mining machine for the (40 years earlier than actual history) burgeoning Klondike Gold Rush designed to dig through ice and extract gold. But through circumstances unstated, his test run of the machine burrowed under downtown Seattle causing a few of its major banks to collapse (literally, not figuratively), killing hundreds in the process. Worse, the machine hit a vein of underground gas that slowly seeped out, killing many and turning many more into mindless zombies. Unable to stop the release of the blight gas, the government evacuates the downtown core and builds a 200 foot high wall to contain it.

The story: Briar Wilkes is the widow of the presumed dead Leviticus Blue, who disappeared immediately after the catastrophe. She and her son Ezekiel, now in his teens, live in Outskirts, what’s left of the city outside the wall. Zeke wants to know his heritage, which Briar has kept from him. Was Leviticus Blue a killer thief, or just a careless inventor? Briar has said pretty much nothing. Zeke knows the basic history though because of the intense hatred most people have for the Wilkes. They figure she was in on it. If not, who cares? Because someone’s gotta be the scapegoat for Leviticus Blue. Anyhow, Zeke decides to don a gas mask and trek into the walled city to find evidence to prove his father’s innocence. Later, Briar follows him in to save him.

Doesn’t the premise just sound awesome? Sometimes a great beginning doesn’t continue with an equally fantastic middle or ending. Rest assured Cherie Priest pulls it off. It’s paced well. Everything fits logically. There are incredible fight scenes. Excellent characters, and I do mean characters. Explosions! Zippy steampunk weapons. Some psychological manipulation done fairly well. Yup. I’m satisfied.

But not only is Boneshaker filled with cool stuff, it ain’t just pure eye candy either. For instance, the story passes the Bechdel test quite handily. It does so without beating anyone over the head with overt feminist polemic, so the knuckle-draggers can read it without fear. Also, the notion of a walled city, cut off from the rest of the world except for just a few controlled points, has a lot of parallels with real life. Think about Gaza, or West Berlin. These actual places don’t/didn’t have deadly gas floating around. But without agricultural resources inside the wall, life would be pretty hard without the opportunity for trade outside the wall. Berlin had that, Gaza does not. Neither does the fictional Seattle in Boneshaker. Kept thinking about how people would survive living inside the wall, as some do in the story.

Stylistically, Ms. Priest also does a pretty good job of taking some of the more nonsensical elements of steampunk clothing and putting them to use. Why the goggles and gas masks? Deadly gas. Other steampunk aspects aren’t overdone like in Will Smith’s movie Wild Wild West. There’s steam-powered machines galore, but no giant robots with Babbage brains.

Good enough that I can overlook how much manipulation of Seattle’s history goes on here. The gold rush in the 1860s? The Smith Tower in 1863????!!!? That one really got me every time I looked at the map. About halfway through I glanced at the end of the book and saw there was an Author’s Note concerning this gross injustice of historical inaccuracy. Don’t email her, Cherie Priest says, she knows it’s wrong and she did it for the story. I’m still one of those people, but the note did work well enough to mollify me.

It’ll make an awesome movie too.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Val’s Random Comments
• Book Love Affair
• Robots and Vamps
• The Literary Omnivore
• Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog
• Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News & Reviews

Usually I include a few reviews across the spectrum of like/dislike in these links, so folks can get a feel for opinions other than my own. However, in this case, I haven’t been able to find any reviews where someone just disliked Boneshaker.

Title: Boneshaker
Author: Cherie Priest
Cover creator: Jamie Stafford-Hill (designer) / Jon Foster (artist)
Series: The Clockwork Century; 1
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Macmillan
Format: Paperback
Length: 416 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1841-1
Subject: Mothers and sons — Fiction
Subject: Zombies — Fiction
Subject: Northwest, Pacific — Fiction
LC classification: PS3616.R537 B66 2009

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

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

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

Back to Jance’s J. P. Beaumont series. This one not quite as good as some of the others, in my opinion. However, it is the first time we begin to see some real changes in the character of J. P. Beaumont. In this story his drinking is really beginning to become an issue. What took the story down a peg is Jance’s attempt to have Beaumont go rogue. It’s a common enough staple in crime fiction, the cowboy cop who disobeys orders and solves crimes his way. Beaumont doesn’t do that normally. This time he does, and gets called to the carpet for it midway through the book. Beaumont’s motivation for not following procedure felt false though.

The murders in this book are that of several ironworkers. Each one staged to look like an accident, which is where the investigating officers Manny Davis and Paul Kramer are going with it. Beaumont sticks his nose into the case (because he was present when one of the bodies was found) and raises suspicion that they aren’t actually accidents. Soon it appears the union is crooked, but who is involved and who is killing the whistleblowers?

One thing I really like though is that one of the characters, Linda Decker, doesn’t take a cop’s badge as proof she should be helping him. She’s a little paranoid, and has Beaumont throw his badge through a window before she’ll talk to him. Instead of opening the door immediately, she calls the Seattle Police Department to verify the information. It’s a Schneier thing. If you want to get away with something, one of the easiest ways to forge identity is to wear a uniform. It’s very rare that people question someone in the appropriate uniform bossing them around. And yes there are stories every day of fake police officers, fake firemen, fake doctors, etc. where people just allow them to do whatever they want because they looked the part. In the story, Beaumont ends up stripped and in a basement for his efforts. When Decker calls the department, they tell her that Beaumont isn’t working the case. His attempt at being a cowboy goes horribly awry.

Title: A More Perfect Union
Author: J. A. Jance
Series: J. P. Beaumont; 6
Imprint / publisher: Avon / Hearst
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 217 p.
Publication date: November 1988
ISBN-10: 0-380-75413-4

Another re-read, this time the fifth book in Jance’s J. P. Beaumont series. Again, not a lot to say about it except it is nice light reading.

In a couple of the Beaumont books, our intrepid detective gets a little too personal with people who turn out to be suspects in murders he’s investigating. This time Jance has him at arms length from everyone. A dentist has been murdered. Beat up pretty severely and then stabbed with a dental pick in the neck. No less than five viable suspects in the mystery, though some of them may be working together. Suspects 1 & 2 are the estranged wife of the dentist and her new boyfriend. Suspect 3 is the husband of the dentist’s lover. And suspects 4 & 5 are the little old ladies who are the dentist’s aunts. Well, they might not really be suspects, but they vamoose rather than talk to Beaumont and his partner Lindstrom.

What’s nice in this case is that the investigators get it wrong. They search out dead end clues and suspects. They make mistakes. And not because the real bad guy leads them down a trail. No, it’s just complicated, particularly when multiple people don’t really like the victim.

Jance’s cause in this book (she always seems to have a cause in the background of each of her books) is battered women. The dentist beat his wife, and eventually she left him and went to live in a shelter. This puts Beaumont and Lindstrom in the position of having to work through the protectiveness and secrecy surrounding battered womens’ shelters. No clue if the portrayal is correct or not, though knowing Jance she’s done some research on it.

Title: Improbable Cause
Author: J. A. Jance
Series: J. P. Beaumont; 5
Imprint / publisher: Avon / Hearst
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 214 p.
Publication date: February 1988
ISBN-10: 0-380-75412-6
Subject: Beaumont, J. P. (Fictitious character) — Fiction
Subject: Police — Washington (State) — Seattle — Fiction
Subject: Dentists — Crimes against — Fiction
Subject: Seattle (Wash.) — Fiction