#28: The Marshal of Pioche by Nelson Nye

This Western yarn was the other side of an Ace Double from Ray Hogan's Panhandle Pistolero (reviewed earlier) and was the first book I read from prolific writer Nelson Nye. The cover promises a "lead pay-off for a tin star in this silver town," which in and of itself is hard to resist.

But a bit hard to live up to. Nye writes this one in a first-person dialect as young, hotheaded Arnie Page drifts into town looking for adventure and promptly gets off a lucky shot at the town's top gun. Suddenly Arnie is the new town marshal, and he spends most of the rest of the book's brief page count trying to keep from getting killed while helping out a fiery redhead (as if Westerns boast any other kind).

Agreeable enough, but not much to it, and your mileage may vary with Nye's dialect as Arnie uses his shootin' irons 'gainst a bunch of owlhoots and sidewinders. I bought this one for a shiny quarter at a library book sale. I have a couple more that feature Nelson Nye's work, so I will see what I think as I work my way thr0ugh them.

#27: Limitations by Scott Turow

Drowsy legal thriller from Scott Turow, whose Presumed Innocent was an early, and perhaps best-known, work. Turow has been hammering out solid mysteries featuring lawyer protagonists ever since, including this one, which was serialized for a magazine and then expanded into a novel.

A judge is hearing arguments in a brutal gang rape, and soon begins to recall some repressed memories of an incident he was involved with himself in college. Meanwhile, his wife is fighting cancer and a mysterious stalker is sending the judge threatening emails.

Despite the description, the storytelling doesn't retain a lot of dramatic tension, though is certainly interesting (and, for fans, features characters and situations from earlier Turow novels). Probably more for followers of Turow (which I have been one, more or less) and of passing interest to others.

I listened to this on a good audiobook given to me by a friend.

#26: Resolution by Robert B. Parker

Hard-bitten follow-up to Parker's western Appaloosa features our two tarnished but honorable former lawmen, Virgil and Everett, getting caught up in a war between farmers, miners, and townspeople in a fledgling town.

Robert B. Parker's latest has the trappings of a standard oater but is written in an engaging style with interesting characters. The easygoing Everett Hitch is our narrator, watching as his friend Virgil Cole, legendary with a gun but susceptible to the p-whip, struggles with morality after shooting a man in anger.

I was eager to find this sequel and read it at a very fast clip. To say Parker wrote this one in a laconic style is an understatement. The chapters are short and the dialogue terse, to say the least. A very muscular Western, and apparently one more is on the way to make a trilogy. I have always liked Parker's Spenser detective novels and this is a nice change of pace.

I checked this one out from the Farmland Public Library.

#25: Nova by Samuel R. Delany

I didn't plan it this way, but I'm glad my 25th book--halfway there--was by Samuel R. Delany, who I discovered, more or less, this year and has quickly become one of my favorite sci-fi authors.

Nova is another one of his award-winning novels from the 60s; the last one he wrote, after a prolific bout of writing, before falling silent for a number of years. And I would have to rank it, along with his Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, as one of my favorite sci-fi novels.

This one features a rag-tag spacefaring crew under the sway of a half-mad captain who has the seemingly crazy idea of flying straight into the heart of a nova. As usual Delany is brimming with ideas and includes his usual, rather curious motifs (an obsession with chewed fingernails, rope belts, people who only wear one shoe). But this sweeping space epic also includes brushstrokes from the hunt for the Holy Grail and the Tarot.

In doing some research into the history of Nova, it seems that the book was rejected for serialization in a leading sci-fi magazine of the time because it features a black protagonist and several other multi-ethnic characters. A real shame, as I found it to be a great read.

Somehow, in my 40s, I have begun to embrace hot foods, rare meat, and the previously-scorned "hippie-fi" of the 1960s. I find Delany's writing highly engaging and full of unique ideas, with the added benefit, in this case, of Nova being flat-out fun high adventure. Recommended.

I read this from a big lot of Delany I bought off of ebay, and I am sure I will grab another out of the stack.

#24: Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

An uncorruptable Thai cop, following his own rather bent Buddhist code, goes on a quest for vengeance through the ultra-seedy underbelly of Bangkok after the death of his partner.

John Burdett's edgy police thriller Bangkok 8 is an uneasy mix of philosophy and cold-hearted violence, veined with dark whimsy (if there is such a thing) and brought to an absolutely chilling denouement. I found the millieu Burdett created fascinating and his lead character's outlook unique. Although obviously not Thai, Burdett has spent time there and I felt (having traveled some in Asia myself) that he seemed to have a good eye for the details.

I bought this one at a used booksale for a quarter and it was a pretty raggedy-looking copy, but I was compelled to read it and scare myself to death while my own daughter was on an exchange program in Thailand. Basically I picked it up on a whim, and later learned this is the first of a series featuring the same Thai cop. I will keep looking for more of Burdett's work.

#23: Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter in the Dark is the third book in the series about daytime police specialist and nighttime serial killer Dexter, a cheery Miami native and all-around nice guy whose "Dark Passenger" drives him to hunt the city's dark underbelly. Dexter's peppy narration is set in surprising contrast to plenty of gore and dark humor, coming off somewhere between Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.

In this outing, Dexter's "Dark Passenger" surprisingly flees at the outset in the face of the type of horrible crime he would typically enjoy. In an uneasy narrative device, Dexter relies on his girlfriend's young son, a budding serial killer in his own right, to help ferret out what's happened and teach the boy a moral code akin to the one Dexter was infused with (by a foster father who was also a cop).

The first two Dexter novels were tense police thrillers, strangely comedic while embracing a lizardlike cool, as the detached, clinical--yet oddly charming--Dexter dispatches those worse than him. But this time out the storytelling takes a confounding turn that, even as I kept reading, I was thinking "this isn't what I think it is."

But it was, as Lindsay takes a left turn into the supernatural, introducing demonic possession and other fantasy trappings that were absolutely absent from the first novels in trying to explain Dexter's "Dark Passenger," which had previously been attributed to childhood trauma (and, I suspect, that was plenty for any reader). It was as if Mickey Spillane suddenly had Mike Hammer fighting the Great Cthulhu, a sharp twist from Jonathan Kellerman to Dean Koontz without any notice of a fork in the road.

I have digested this one a bit and am still trying to guage the scale of this unfortunate misstep. I guess I will have to wait and see the next one to learn if Lindsay can right the ship. In googling and finding others who felt the same shock and surprise I learned that the popular TV series is veering away from the books in its next season, probably for the best.

I listened to this one on audio book on loan from the Morrison-Reeves Public Library in Richmond, Indiana.