DWD's Reviews

  E-book published in 2022 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road The Mysterious Profile series' title pretty much sums up what the series is all about. They are short profiles of famous lead characters in mystery series in the words of the authors themselves. Sometimes they are interviews in which the authors tell about the inspiration for the characters. Other times, they are scenes in which the characters explain themselves. This profile is of the wisecracking detective Spenser created by Robert B. Parker. Parker (1933-2010) wrote 40 novels featuring wisecracking private detective Spenser and literally had a heart attack and died at his desk writing the 41st novel. The Spenser books are the mold of any modern book series featuring a principled and competent investigator with a tough, mostly silent friend of dubious morality to back him up. This model is followed in the current-day book series of Elvis Cole by Robert Crais and Joe Pickett by C.J. Box .  The problem of having Parker p

  Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Stephen King Duration: 3 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King has a long history of publishing collections of short stories. I am usually not a fan of short stories, but I have no problem with a Stephen King short story. I think King is so good at making characters that the reader can identify with in such a short amount of time. This collection is pretty short - just two short stories. Both feature older men. The author In one, we have a man living in Maine with a supernatural problem and also a misunderstanding with his neighbors. This one really feels like two stories, but it was pretty touching. In the second story, a desperately lonely widower living in the Florida Keys is brought a gift by his older sister to get him up and moving again - a puppy. These are both good stories - very enjoyable and always with a twist. They were read by Stephen King. It was neither a good thing nor a bad thing - his accent w

  Published in 2014 by Little A. Kodi Scheer was the writer-in-residence at a cancer center when she wrote this collection of short stories. They all have two things in common: 1) a focus on female characters and 2) a medical tie-in. This picture goes with the first story. Normally, I struggle with short story collections - they don't develop the characters enough or they tell too little for the reader to get any sort of handle on what is going on until the story is practically over.  This collection has a couple of weird stories that fit those characterizations, but it is mostly a set of strong stories that actually gets better as it goes along.  As I mentioned, there is a medical theme throughout the stories, but there is also a strong dose of the supernatural throughout these stories as well.   I rate this short story collection 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: INCENDIARY GIRLS: STORIES by Kodi Scheer .

  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Originally published by Tor Books in 2011. Read by P.J. Ochlan. Duration: 47 minutes. Unabridged. When the President notices that he can't force his head to go underwater during his morning swim and he complains of being lightheaded, his aides take him off for a medical checkup.  The author, John Scalzi During the checkup, the President's doctor determines that the President does indeed have a major medical problem - his brain is missing but he continues to walk and talk like normal. His aides scramble to try to figure out what may have caused this and what they should do. ****** First things first in this hyper-political time: This audiobook is not a commentary on either President Trump or President Biden since the story was originally published during the first term of the Obama's presidency. In a way, this is very much a piece of throwback science fiction, like a Twilight Zone story. It takes a weird premise and runs with it for a

  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called "Timescape". Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. This collection is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they

Published in 2014 by Hachette Audio. Read by Len Cariou. Duration: 50 minutes. Unabridged. This short story was the closest thing to a straight out police procedural that I have read from Michael Connelly. By that, I mean that although Harry Bosch is the main character in this story, it really is just the story of how a police officer reviews a cold case and figures out who the bad guy is based on one new clue. Any police officer could have been the main character because Harry Bosch was just sort of along for the ride. Len Cariou read the book. Cariou used to read a lot of Connelly's books. Now The narrator, Len Cariou, at the dinner table on his TV show. Cariou is best known as the grandfather on the TV show Blue Bloods and I kept imagining that he was reading it to me at the dinner table from the TV show, which kind of ruined the mood of the story (not that it was much of a story). I rate this short story 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Switchblade

Published in 2018 by Delacorte Press. In this 26 page short story, Reacher is near Barstow, California. He always heads south for the winter and he assumed that Barstow would be south enough to avoid the winter cold. But, a once-in-a-lifetime blizzard hits the area, the power is cut off, the phones are down and Reacher is walking through three feet of snow along an impassable highway (to cars, at least). He stumbles upon a bar and inside finds a bartender an older couple and two British soldiers... The Christmas Scorpion is exclusively published as an e-book. Lee Child was a prolific author (he has since retired) and it is not uncommon for him to generate additional short stories featuring Jack Reacher. These short stories are a mixed bag, at best. I don't know Lee Child's writing process. Some authors plan out every detail meticulously before they start writing, others claim to make up the entire story as they go along - they are finding out what happens as they write

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Tim Sample. Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King uses the voice talents of Tim Sample, a humorist that specializes in talking about Maine. Fans of Stephen King know that the prolific author loves to set his stories in his home state of Maine. This one is set on the corner of a lake surrounded by vacation homes. Two families are part of a year-after-year fireworks contest. One is a family from Rhode Island. The other is an older mom and son who grew up in the area and bought their dream home on the lake. They don't know each other well, but their sense of pride get in the way as their desire to "one up" each other gets more and more ridiculous as the years go along. The folksy manner of the narrator makes this predictable story a lot of fun. It is the perfect matching of author and narrator. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Drunken Fireworks by Stephen K

Published by Author's Republic in 2019. Multicast performance. Duration: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Unabridged This audiobook is a mixed bag. So, I will start with the positive side. The multicast performance in this audiobook is really, really good. The voice actors perform it like an old-fashioned radio play and they are excellent. It even has sound effects that are timed right, set to the right sound level and are not obnoxious. The story is another matter. It starts out with one plot (two university professors trying to grow the size of the practically nonexistent faculty labor union at a small private university in Indiana), drifts into a second story line and finally moves into a third, rather bizarre story thread that doesn't even come close to addressing the original conflict in this 71 minute story. This audiobook just slides around like a nervous six year old tells a story to a bunch of adults at a family get-together. I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It gets 2

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Unabridged Lee Child was a prolific writer of Jack Reacher stories. I say was because he recently announced his intention to stop writing those stories. His brother will start writing them instead. Child wrote numerous books and short stories in no particular order, bouncing around the timeline of Jack Reacher's life. This one is set in Maine. I presume it fits in on the timeline with the other Reacher stories that take place in Maine and New England. Jack Reacher is hitchhiking to the end of I-95 at the U.S.-Canada border. Another of his books starts at the other end of I-95 down by Miami, Florida and Reacher makes a point that he wants to have traveled from one end of the road to the other. Once he gets there, he gets out and is soon picked up by three younger Canadians who are headed to a four day long hiking trip. Their trail starts at one town and ends up at another. Reacher decides

Published in 2015 by Random House Audio. Narrated by Dick Hill Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes Unabridged Lee Child. Photo by Mark Coggins Jack Reacher is back in his Military Police days in this short story. He has been moved to a new base in Georgia and immediately has a murder to investigate - a new female intelligence officer who is beautiful, rich and is on the fast track to the top is found dead beside her Porsche on a country road near the base. Jack Reacher starts to dig and quickly puts all of the pieces together in a satisfying, but too-short story. All of the stuff you love about a Reacher novel are here:  smart comments, a little bit of fighting, quick thinking and an ending that makes you think about the difference between what is legal and what is just. Dick Hill's narration is spot-on, like always. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. This audiobook short story can be found on Amazon.com here: Small Wars by Lee Child .

Humor, Like Food, Is Highly Subjective Published by Symphony Space in October of 2010 Multi-cast performance Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes Here is the premise behind Selected Shorts: Even More Laughs - get a collection of funny short stories and have them be read by great performers such as Stephen Colbert and Alec Baldwin. There are eight stories of varying quality. As I noted in the title of this review, humor is very subjective. What I can really tell you is that this set is designed to appeal to a wide variety of tastes - not by being middle of the road but by bringing a true eclectic mix to the production. That is certain to guarantee that the listener will not enjoy everything. Stephen Colbert begins the collection with "The Lie",  the story Jerry Zaks (b. 1946), one of the performers in this collection. of a man who is just overwhelmed with being the father of a new baby. In fact, he is overwhelmed with everything - his dead end job, his wife's new confiden

Published in 2014 Normally, I am not much of a fan of short stories. For me, by the time I figure out what's going on in the story it's over and then I have to go through the whole process again in the next story. The exception to this has always been Stephen King - he creates characters that the reader can buy into very quickly in a story. I will add C.J. Box to that list with Stephen King. Throughout Shots Fired  Box quickly establishes the parameters of the story and then delivers 10 good short stories. Four of them feature his previously established characters joe Pickett or Nate Romanowski. Nine of them take place in modern times. Nine take place in Wyoming. The one that does not take place in Wyoming features members of the Sioux nation who are working at Euro-Disney in France. It is one of my favorites in the collection. A quote from the book: "Giving alcohol to an alcoholic makes him happy, but it doesn't help him. Buying stuff for people who won&#

Published in 2013 as an e-book short story. Approximate length: 46 pages. Alan Parker is a professional killer who works for an employer called The Company. His wife also works for The Company but she is currently in the last stages of an unsuccessful fight with cancer. It is not really clear if The Company is a government entity or not, but any way you slice it The Company has lots and lots of resources, including an impressive list of hired assassins. Parker (nicknamed "Boom") is one of the very best, but a series of mistakes made his last hit a failure and The Company rarely forgives failure. Photo by Niels Noordhoek So, "Boom" Parker knows that he cannot mess up his new assignment. He has been sent to kill a female scientist that is working on a bio-fuel that threatens the big oil companies. But, this case starts out badly (it looks like someone has already killed his target or, at least, botched an attempt on her) and as he looks for her he finds

     Published in 2014 The short story Mildred has a tone and plot that is reminiscent of a Stephen King story. Certainly, O'Reilly could have stretched this 42 page short story (novelette) out a bit more like Stephen King would have, adding much more detail but not have really adding much to the story itself.  Instead, O'Reilly goes for a much quicker, more minimalist approach, letting the reader try to figure out what is going on while a creepy vibe and sense of dread build. The story begins with a family fight between an aunt who is a realtor (Denise) and her niece (Josephine). It turns out that the aunt has convinced her niece to invest in a shady business deal and Josephine has decided to cash out by just taking one of her aunt's homes. This home is crammed full of consumer products. Josephine clears out a space and sets up housekeeping. When she discovers the diary of the former owner of the house she learns that her aunt was much more depraved than sh

Published in 2013 as an e-book. Estimated length - about 14 pages. Finalist for the 2005 Sherwood Anderson Short Story contest. Ernie Lindsey's short story Noose is a coming-of-age story set in the American south in September of 1916. It features a 17 year-old named Roy who works as a farm hand for a northerner who moved down south for a simpler life. Roy has a strong love for animals which makes him an excellent farm hand. Besides working on the farm Roy also dates Emily, the boss of his daughter. Roy and Emily are much more intimate than anyone suspects and Roy is quite sure that he and Emily are completely in love.  The farm community receives word that a circus elephant named Mary is going to be killed for killing one of her handlers during a parade in a nearby town. The elephant will be executed by hanging from a railroad crane. This part of the short story is based on a true story (click here for more information). This hanging does more than kill an elephant - it

Originally published in 1954 by the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction , Kurt Vonnegut's short story  The Big Trip Up Yonder is set in the year 2185 in a time in which old age has been defeated. The main character is Gramps Ford, a man that was 70 when anti-gerasone, the cure to aging was created. He has been 70 years old for 102 years. He is grumpy, vindictive and generally unpleasant - much like you would expect for a man that has has been 70 years old for 102 years. Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007 Galaxy Science Fiction was designed to be thoughtful science fiction rather than laser guns and explosions driven science fiction and Vonnegut's style fits the bill perfectly. He looks at what would happen in a world with no death. It becomes crowded - so crowded that privacy is a rarity and people are forced to live cheek-by-jowl with their families in hallways, living rooms and the like. If you have ever seen a movie or a TV show in which greedy family members are waiting around

Published as a Kindle e-book in 2012 by Pretur Estimated length: 28 pages The story starts with two friends in the modern world trying to move a washing machine from a basement. Suddenly, they are sucked into another world (no explanation) where they discover a typical medieval fantasy village after they rescue a captive princess. Turns out she was to be a sacrifice to a dragon and the dragon is no mood to be denied. One of the travelers from our world is a former U.S. Marine and somehow this enables him to be proficient with a sword and a bow and arrow. Actually, he is not just proficient - he is a master, as described in the title. I was not aware that the Marines trained in those weapons, but I have never been a Marine, what do I know? So, the young men do battle not once, but twice with unfamiliar weapons against the shocking might of a dragon while hampered with almost no character development, a story with the thinnest of plots and an absurd willingness on the part of e

Originally Published in 2010. Post Hypnotic Press audio version published in 2013. Read by Daniel Mate Duration: 1 hour, 34 minutes Canadian author Gail Bowen takes a break from her Joanne Kilbourn series to bring us Charlie D, a talk radio personality who works the late night shift. This is part of the Rapid Reads series by Orca Books. This is designed to be a set of exciting, short mysteries. On paper this book clocks in at 128 pages. Charlie D is working the night show on Valentine's Day. His guest is the boss's wife. The boss is an ancient man who has married the young, very elegant and very expensive prostitute he used to frequent. She is now very pregnant and being interviewed about her thoughts on love and relationships.  Meanwhile, the neighborhood around the station is now awash in threatening newsletters and posters that advocate getting rid of the local prostitutes in any way possible. These vigilantes are inspired by the right wing host on the air just be

Published in December of 2013 as an e-book Simon is the second least popular kid in his summer camp.  Sadly, the least popular kid in camp, Charlie Fergle, is going home and Simon knows he will be be the target of the nightly rounds of "truth or dare."  But, Simon does not want to leave his summer camp because he has met the girl of his dreams, Opal Finley. Well, he hasn't really met her properly. He has admired her from afar, he has tried to speak to her and he has failed in spectacular fashion every time. So far, this makes TRUTH and DARE sound like a horrible short story, but it is actually very funny and very sweet.  This is my first short story by Nathanael Green, but I can guarantee it won't be my last. I rate this short story 5 stars out of 5. This story can be found on Amazon.com here: Truth and Dare by Nathanael Green. Reviewed on January 25, 2014