Shock Wave -- Shockingly Competent!

Title: Shock Wave

Author: John Sanford

Progress: 27%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

John Sanford has written 36 books. John Sanford's Prey series has made him one of the most successful thriller writers working today. John Sanford is not John Sanford. His real name is actually John Camp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

John was born in 1944 and doesn't seem enthusiastic about social media. His official website feels like it was made in 1995. It is almost all text with a few book covers for art.

There is a Facebook fan club for Mr Sanford, with all of 2,700 members in it. The author doesn't seem to have stopped by. I'm guessing someone at his publisher made the page, and John doesn't really care. He's 67 years old and every book he writes makes lots of money. He doesn't need to coddle his fans, or blog, or tweet, or do anything he doesn't feel like.

All he does is write good books. 

Shock Wave, so far, is one of those. It is conventional, sticking to all the guidelines of thriller writing.

Let's review the check list...

1. Male lead character with charm, good looks, a way with the ladies and a strong sense of morality he keeps disguised with his casual demeanor? Check.

2. Horrific crime that kicks the story off in a big way? Check.

3. Mystery bad guy that we are going to guess the identity of until about 2/3rds into the book? Check.

4. Rich people? Check.

5. Colorful cast of suspect? Check.

6. Gore? Check.

7. Sex? Not yet, but it's going to happen. I don't think it will reach Sandra Brown levels of explicitness, but who knows! One can only hope.

So yes, it's a by the numbers kind of book. So why is it entertaining? 

Because Mr. Sanford is funny. At times, Shock Wave sneaks up so close to satire it could give it a kiss on the cheek.

The description of the glorious PyeMart offices (a stand in for discount big box stores like Walmart and Target), and the buzzards that circle them and shit on them. The bomb that destroys the boardroom (and kills a woman), but spares the board because they were busy drinking at 9 in the morning. The descriptions of the large women playing volley ball somewhere in rural Minnesota. The pink T-shirt our hero wears to the crime scene, because he's just that cool and that comfortable with himself.

There is a wink to Mr. Sanford's writing, something knowing about it, something that says, "Just because I'm writing a by-the-numbers thriller doesn't mean I can't show off every once in a while."

What have we learned from the first quarter of Shock Wave? 

The formula works. If you stick to what has worked in thousands of other books, you too can probably write a readable thriller. (I'm not saying its easy. Not at all. I am saying its possible.) 

However, if you want to be a bestseller, you probably need to add a little of your own secret sauce. With Mr. Sanford, it seems to be humor. With Sandra Brown, it's sex. With John Hart, it's a flair for language and some insane violence, not to mention a talent for jamming a record number of plot twists into 300 pages.

What will mine be? I'm going to go with cuss words, lots and lots of cuss words. And I'm going to make fun of Star Wars a lot. Publishers, let the bidding war begin!  

And then we came to the end...

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 100%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

The last few chapters of Lethal read fast but not fast enough. They kept me awake well past my bedtime, but I wasn't going to put the Kindle down until the last few mysteries were resolved.

Here come the SPOILERS, seriously, SPOIL-FREAKING-ERS!

For about two thirds of the book, you wonder, Who is the bookkeeper? Who is this ruthless, murderous, cruel person who has more power than anyone in Louisiana? Who orders death like most people order pizza?

You want to know? You sure? Really?

It's Tom's wife, Janice Van Allen. Yes, the mother of the brain dead boy. The player of word games on her phone. The sexter with perverts around the globe. The bitter, tired woman who has been unhappy ever since she was trapped in a house with an invalid and trapped in a marriage with an unambitious FBI officer.

Goodbye Sandra! Good luck with the three books
you wrote in the time it took me to read this one.
Bring back Coburn!

Mrs. Brown kept that info hidden well, and really, cheated a few times to keep it from us.

She offered a large variety of suspects, from Stan the stern old man full of rage, to the rich eccentric millionaire who seemed to have all the money anyone could ever want.

I don't mind the different suspects. That's part of the fun, thinking about each one, seraching hints and clues.

With Janice, at one point we think she might be caught red handed, as Tom discovers her typing away on her phone and then, as Ms. Brown does so often, we dramatically cut away to another scene.

When we get back to Janice and Tom, we find out that it was only sexting, a little diversion for her to stave off boredom. According to Tom, it was filthy stuff, so dirty he could barely read it.

At that point, we think, Well, she's not The Bookkeeper, next suspect!

But then, at the end of the book, it turns out she is. Somehow she was running a massive crime ring at least partially by sending coded messages disguised as filthy sex texts.

And also, none of her minions, who she's constantly giving orders to, ever thought, What kind of woman commits this much crime, orders this much death? 

It's almost like at some point, Mrs. Brown had someone else in mind for The Bookkeeper, and then changed her mind and inserted Janice.

Who knows? All I know is that it felt a little false.

However, I did like the ending. I liked that Coburn was alive and after a few months, still waiting for Honor to show up. 

So what have we learned from Lethal? First, don't stray away from sex. It's fun to read and your readers are paying for fun. Second, have more than one mystery working at the same time. And third, and this is kind of a boring one, outlines are your friend.

I don't know this for a fact, but it seemed like Mrs. Brown organized her story around four key acts, with a big direction-changing moment happening after every quarter. A novel with so many characters and plot lines would be difficult to manage, but chopped into quarters, it would feel quite writeable.

Goodbye to Lethal and Mrs. Brown, who was actually nice enough to send me a tweet. Until next time!

Next book...Shock Wave by John Sandford.

Seriously this time, we get to the sex

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 85%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

Oh my. Chapter 37, and then chapter 39. I think I’m still blushing.

I now know why some refer to Ms. Brown’s genre as the erotic-thriller.

Up until chapter 37, Lethal is a solid, conventional thriller, one that could have been written by a Grisham (but with lawyers) or a Sanford (but with a dark sense of humor).

Then Mrs. Brown brings on her signature move, what makes her dominant in her genre, hardcore sex.

How hardcore? Well, Coburn, the main character, says this…

“I think I’m gonna like the way you fuck.”

And he thinks to himself things like…

Damn, she’d been sweet. Tight and hot and slick for want of him.

Not hardcore enough? Try this…

His cock woke up and stretched.

It’s odd how disrupting these erotic segments are, how they take over and make the story something different.

It’s not like the adult parts of movies and cable TV shows. On screen, sex is an observed act, interesting, but not anything we are taking part in.

In a book, the naughtiness happens from a distinct point of view, from inside someone’s head. Somehow, that makes the sex more intimate, more embarrassing to read. When Coburn asks Honor to rub the head of his penis a certain way, I felt like I was intruding on some private moment and wanted to let them finish up before returning to the page.

Turns out that sex, written about, in detail, that goes a little further than expected, makes for good reading. I’m guessing this is one of the reasons Ms. Brown has sold over 80 million books. She delivers the danger, but also a big dash of explicit sex that other writers are too prudish to deliver. So bravo!

On the other hand, I don’t understand the post coital discussion. Our hero and heroine discuss a horse he owned as a boy and had to shoot. Where the hell did that come from? Talk about a softening agent.

You know when it wouldn't good to talk about the shooting of this horse?
Right after your really hot sex scene.

Mrs. Brown must have been in an interesting mood when she was writing these chapters because she goes from sex, to a few scenes of bloody violence, followed by some even more brutal violence, and then back to more intricately described sex, followed by…the craziest plot twist I think I’ve ever read.

No seriously. It’s clever and silly and contrived but also kind of brilliant all at once. Even though zero people read this blog, I’m not going to reveal this twist. You are just going to read 85% of Lethal to find it out for yourself.

What have we learned? Nothing we didn’t already know. Well-described sex makes for compelling reading. But it takes a brave writer to pull it off. It’s hard to write anything that you wouldn’t want your mother to read, and had I written chapter 37 and 39 of Lethal, I would have to cut them out of the copy I sent to my mother.

And if I had sent Mother the entire book, she would have asked me, “What was with the talk about the shooting of the horse after all the woo hoo?”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I would have said.

One Big, Many Small and the Cut and Tease

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 75%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #8 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

Back from a short break! I’m sure all of you, all zero of you who read this blog, missed me.

Today’s focus is on mysteries. How many do you really need?

More than one seems to be the answer. Most thrillers seem to have several, the big one that drives the entire book, then a series of small ones connected to subplots and personal character stories.

For instance, in Lethal, we have quite a few, which I’ll try and list below. (And some of these are actually solved in the course of the story, to be replaced by others.)

Who killed all the people at the warehouse?

Why were they killed?

Who is Coburn, really?

Who is the bookkeeper? Is it Stan? Tom? Tom’s wife? Hamilton?

Who is the leak in the FBI?

What was Eddie up to? Why was he killed?

What is Tom’s wife up to? Why is she always texting when Tom isn’t in the room?

How will Diego be used? He’s a dangerous, and compelling, character, but it’s unclear how he’ll be used in the story.

Will Honor eventually sleep with Coburn? Because really, those two need to get a room already.

How does one write 80 books in 30 years? Has Ms. Brown cloned herself? Are there a team of Sandra Browns pounding away at keyboards on some secret island somewhere?

Tease your readers with many mysteries.
Manipulate them, frustrate them, then give them treats before they get bored and scratch up the couch.

The technique Ms. Brown is using in Lethal could be called “One Big, Many Small.” And it is effective. With so many questions to be answered it create a strong need to keep reading just to find out what’s going on.

With the bigger questions, particularly the one about The Bookeeper, Ms. Brown teases with potential answers, and then cuts away from the scene a second before the pivotal moment.

For instance, Tim’s wife is texting to someone and doesn’t know Tim is watching. Tim confronts her, grabs the phone from her hand, looks at the screen and see…CUT TO NEXT SCENE!

We won’t learn what’s on the screen for another 20 pages or so.

Let’s call that technique the Almost and Cut. You almost reveal the answer to a story question, and then CUT. Frustrate the reader, keep them guessing, but a total tease about it.

And when you do reveal the answer to a mystery, make sure to replace that mystery with a bigger one, or something involving sex.

For instance, want to know what Tim’s wife was doing on that screen…SPOILER ALERT!...

She was sexting, taking part in some kind sexting club. Do those even exist? I have no idea. All I know is that I was very curious as to the contents of the sexting, but Ms. Brown doesn’t elaborate. Alas.

What have we learned? We learned two new techniques…

1.    One Big, Many Small…Have one big mystery and many small ones.

2.    Almost and Cut…Right before a big reveal that will resolve one of your mysteries, cut to something else, hopefully something involving sex or violence. Be a tease. In a good way.

  

And finally we get to the sex

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 60%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #6 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

I started reading Lethal knowing nothing but that it was a thriller, sold well and got solid Amazon reviews, which I purposely didn't read. I wanted nothing coloring my thoughts about the book.

As I Googled around a bit, learning more about Ms. Brown and the amazing amount of books she has written, I realized that I wasn't reading just a thriller, but a "romantic thriller." Yikes. That's just one word away from this book being a "romance," which means I was perilously close to reading something that Fabio might grace the cover of. I'm hoping to get through this life without that happening.

After dozens of novels, John Grisham has yet to have one character pinch the nipple of another character.
Sandra Brown broke the nipple-tweak barrier about 55% into Lethal.
John, your move.

Now that I know that, a big, bright realization slapped me in the head. Duh, I told myself. 

Lethal, and books like it, is fantasy fulfillment for women. A brooding, handsome, man with a bad streak and emotional scars shows up in cloud of danger. He turns out to be good at heart, great with kids, a man of few words, simple tastes and a deep hunger for female companionship, if you know what I mean.

And then another DUH moment hit me. I was getting a bit of a glimpse into the female mind. 

For instance, Ms. Brown has a character describe what is probably the ideal man. So men, here it is, be this and begin attracting the ladies...

"Even-tempered. Conscientious. Serious when called for, but he liked to have a good time. Loved telling jokes. Liked to dance." And after some encouragement, the character speaking also offers, "Liked to make love."

This character, Honor, the hot mom, is describing her murdered husband with those words. She is saying them to a dangerous man, a killer, a man with nothing to lose, who only seems to care about his quest for justice. He is deeply wounded and needs healing. And who can do that but Honor, who has needs herself?

The two come ever so close to doing the dead on their stranded shrimp boat, the night pitch black, their cabin lit with the flame of an oil lamp, the rain pounding outside, with secrets having been exchanged, they kiss, thighs are strategically placed, nipples are lightly pinched (well, one is).

And then Honor pushes away! Oh no! What a horrible time to realize that hooking up with a man who wants to kill a few people, and who an entire police force wants to kill, might be a bad idea.

This is teasing of the highest order. I was looking forward to seeing how Ms. Brown would describe the deed, the body parts, the motions, things John Grisham never dares put on paper. Like a movie from the 1940's, the camera always seems to pan away when two of his character get a little affectionate. 

I think Ms. Brown is going to wield that camera with a bit more confidence, as soon as she stops being so coy with it.

What have we learned? It turns out ... news flash ... sexual tension makes for interesting reading. It might be best to just go for it, be honest with it, and have fun with it. If it's a little embarrassing to write, it just might be compelling to read.

The big reversal and the resulting trail of exposition

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 42%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #6 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

SPOILERS! Seriously. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Okay, here is the spoiler that I need to mention before getting to the point of this post...

Ms. Brown, for the first 25% of the novel, made it fairly clear that the bad guy, the home invader who threatened a mother and her young daughter with death and torture, was a guy named Coburn who happened to have taut muscles and looked interesting while naked. 

(We know about his naked form because he felt the need to shower while trapping the mother, named Honor, in the bathroom. And Honor couldn't help but to take a few uncomfortable peeks at her cruel captor.)

Ms. Brown also made it clear that the good guys included a pair of twins, one of whom was a detective and the other of whom was a city manager who also happened to be an expert hunter and tracker.

We know who is playing for what team and the world makes sense.

Then Ms. Brown flips the board, sending the pieces every direction. The bad guy turns into the good guy. The good guys turn into bad guys. And everyone else we just aren't sure about.

It's a neat trick, pulling that kind of shift, turning the world upside in a way that doesn't strain believability to the point of breaking the story. It almost does. The quick inversion leaves us asking..."Why didn't Coburn just explain himself when he first met Honor? Did he have to be so rough with her? Why did he come back to the house after leaving in the night?"

Here is Ms. Brown technique for dealing with these reader questions, which she seems quite aware of.

First, she anticipates all those questions and a few more. She knows she just made you question her fictional world and if she doesn't answer a few questions she might lose you.

Writing for women? It's best to have this guy deliver your exposition.

Second, she has Honor become the stand in for the reader, saying what we want to say to Coburn, "Why should I believe you? Prove it. If you are the good guy, why don't you show me a badge? Why don't you call your boss at the FBI? Why aren't we going to a police station right now? About your taut muscles, do you work out or is it just good genetics?" (She doesn't actually ask that last one.)

As they drive to their hideout, Coburn delivers all the answers, giving us big hunks of exposition, and we eat it up.

This is a special talent of Ms Brown's. While lengthy exposition is often a story killer, she first makes us ask for it, makes us want it, and then delivers it to us in dialogue that happens while our heroes flee from danger.

Nicely done.

What have we learned today? Withhold exposition until the reader asks for it. Make her beg for it if you can. Then deliver it via with dialogue between characters she likes and wants to see hook up.

And always mention your male lead's taut muscles. 

I feel the need to go lift some weights. Good night, folks.

Don't save the cat, endanger the kids

Title: Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Progress: 25%

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

NYT BS Hardcover List: #6 (former number 1)

Book 2 out of 107

Holy kevlar keyboard! Sandra Brown writes a lot of books! More than 70 since 1981, and they pretty much all spend quality time in the top-10 of The New York Times Bestsellers List.

I chose Lethal as my next book in the this little project because a couple weeks ago, when I was thinking about reading more to help me write better, it was sitting at Number One. Surely any book at the top of the charts has things to teach. And it must be true that anyone who has 70 something books published, sold more than 80 million of them, and has perfected the art of the mysterious crime author photo pose (see inset), has knowledge to impart.

What have I learned in the first 25% of Lethal?

Pick your victims carefully. You want the most sympathetic, vulnerable targets possible, and then you shove them into a nightmare.

When you are a crime fiction author, you should wear a
weathered leather jacket and jeans,
like you might soon head to a crime scene,
and you should lean a little to your right,
like you might be about to pull the gun in your back pocket.

Manipulative? Yes! What else are people paying for but to have their emotional buttons pushed and pushed hard. If I wanted deep insights into modern American life and complex characters who I have mixed feelings about, I'll read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. 

But what could he possibly know about writing fiction that reads as fast as TV watches? The guy has written three book in 30 years, picked up a Pulitzer, and had his first book turned into an okay arty flick by Sophia Coppola. Call me when he's published another 70 novels, which by my count, will be in about 700 years.

I digress. Back to Ms. Brown and Lethal...

It starts with the most adorable, heartwarming victims imaginable, a beautiful mom with her precocious four-year-old daughter making cupcakes. The daughter, Emily, wants to get the task over with as quickly as possible so she can lick the frosting bowl. Adorable! I sure hope nothing bad happens to these people I now love!

Uh-oh, there is an injured man in the front yard. And uh-oh, he's now jamming the barrel of a gun under the hot mom's chin.

Oh no! He's forcing them into the house! The four-year-old doesn't know what's going on, and she is so spunky! She tells the guy to wash his hands before eating and to not eat any more cupcakes because they are for grandpa's birthday party. Cute!

The story questions being asked are big ones, scary ones. Is the bad man going to kill the mom and daughter? Is he going to rape the mom, and maybe even the daughter? Did he really kill seven people in a warehouse a few hours ago? Why do we keep getting descriptions of his taut muscles? Is mom maybe a little bit into this mysterious but oddly handsome criminal?

The first quarter of this book is all about making you extremely worried about two people who you fell in love with within for the first 500 words of chapter one.

That is some serious commercial writing. Ms. Brown is not going to win a Pulitzer. But she is going to make you furiously turn pages (or press the "next page" button on your Kindle like you're playing Halo).

She also slips in a couple sub plots. The first is the police investigation of the warehouse shooting and their chase after the suspect. The cops come off as too casual and a little incompetent, almost goofy in fact. Now we are really worried about hot mom and cute daughter because their rescuers seem quite lost.

The second sub-plot is an odd one. The FBI agent who will take part in the manhunt is introduced with his wife and horribly handicapped 12-year-old son. The boy has been a vegetable since birth and his mere existence has been a weight on their lives and their marriage. It's sad situation and a sad house they live in. 

This sub-plot seems an odd counter-point to crime thriller it plays against, almost like it's from another novel altogether. The story question it brings up seem to go nowhere plotwise ... Will the boy be miraculously healed? (Would be unbelievable.) Will the boy die? (Would be sad.) Will he be put in a home so the parents can get some of their lives back? (A depressing and ignoble choice.)

So I'm not sure where the FBI guy's story is going to go. If Sandra has any kind of creative challenge in this book, it's to make that plotline satisfying in some way.

Otherwise, this book is a master class in writing commercial crime fiction. 

(By the way, the title of this post refers to the book Save The Cat, a well-known how-to-write-a-screenplay book. It highly recommend having your hero do something extremely likeable in the first few minutes of your story, like saving a cat.)

And now we come to the end...

Title: Iron House

Author: John Hart

Progress: 100% Done!

Platform: Kindle

Amazon Rating: four out of five stars

Book 1 out of 107

Here we are, at the the end of Iron House, book one of 107.

Remember how in my last post I wondered if there would be one more epic, soap opera-esque twist?

There was! I'll say this one more time...SPOILER ALERT!

The final big revelation, taken right out of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, is that the crazy old hillbilly woman with the gamey leg and a filthy mouth is actually the mother of Michael (super assassin) and Julian (the weaker, more gentle, artistic, and crazy younger brother) AND, get this, Abigail (the adopted mother of Julian and almost adopted mother of Michael).


Let me try to put it more simply. The mother is actually the sister of the two brothers, one of whom was adopted by her when he was a child, making her his mother and sister. I said "more simply," not "simply," which might be impossible.


Abigail also turns out to be the murderer of all those people being pulled up from the bottom of the family lake. Well, not Abigail, but her evil alter ego, her hidden personality, Serena Slaughter, who was created when poor Abigail, as a ten year old, was forced to drown her first little brother in an icy lake because her mother didn't care for boys and seems to be evil to her very core.


These revelations come out in some big, entertaining scenes. You can almost hear the dramatic music in the background, heavy on the trombones and cellos...BUM-BUM-BUUUUUM... after each revelation.


Then Mr. Hart eases us into a pleasant coda full of the siblings walking on the beach, drinking wine, and getting to know each other.


He transitions nicely from there to five months later where Michael is in Spain, where he spends his days drinking coffee and waiting for his cell phone to ring, waiting for Elena (who hasn't been heard from since she flew away 10 chapters ago) to call ... and finally ... I won't give it it away, but it was nicely handled.


Now that I'm all done with Iron House, it strikes me how over-the-top happy the ending is. Michael gets $80 million or so. Abigail gets several million. Julian gets to go back to being a successful author.


The bad guys are all dead, but are the good guys so good they deserve all that treasure? 


Michael, in his lifetime, has killed dozens of people, and maybe they all deserved it, but does he get to decide that? Is he really so innocent?


Abigail might be crazy, but just because her other personality did all her killing, does that mean she can go free with no price to pay for all those bodies at the bottom of the lake?


In John Grisham books, the good guy never gets to keep the money. They sometimes come close, but in the end, they are glad to escape with their lives, their loved ones, and a few life lessons. The money they had been chasing evaporates because it wasn't earned honestly. That moral balancing in Grisham stories is a big part of his appeal, and a big part of the appeal of this genre.


Crime thrillers put their heroes in horrific situations filled with dangers and pains that most humans will never know. But we watch the news; we know bad things happen, that nightmares do come to life. We live in fear of those things happening to us. 


Stories can relieve that fear; they can take us to the dark place where it lives, give us a brief tour of the terrors that exist there and then show us a brightly lit exit, telling us that things will be okay, the good guys will eventually win, the case will be solved, and the bad will be punished. 


Mr. Grisham seems to also say that the good guys won't escape punishment either, if they don't play by the rules. Mr. Hart, he seems to be saying that if you kill the right kinds of people, or you don't seem to be aware that you have an evil alternative split personalty with a homicidal streak, you just might get that pot of gold. 


The ending of Iron House is indeed satisfying, even a little moving. But did it make me think at all? Did it get under my skin? Did it make me question my moral compass the way some of Mr. Grisham's novels have?


Nope. But that's okay. Maybe next time. I'm hoping to see Michael again in a future novel. 


Thanks to Mr. Hart for a good book. Looking forward to the next one.


And now, on to the next one...