Needles for Free

Needles for Free by Ryan K. Smith

When telling a story, one of the most important things to get right is the length. Make it too long, and you lose the rhythm and the audience. Too short, and the audience doesn’t quite get everything. When I picked up Needles for Free, I saw how short it was and said, OK? I wasn’t sure what I would get out of something so short. Then I read it. Needles for Free’s length is perfect. This book is the story of a life. Not a biography telling the events and circumstances and irrelevant anecdotes, but the story of the life. This story is real and raw and frightening and tender. Needles for Free is about one of life’s tougher moments, one that everyone would like to forget, but can’t.

Needles for Free is billed as the story of a young bipolar man’s journey through a manic episode. Superficially, it is that. I’m no expert on mental health, but I have spent significant time with people who are bipolar. None of them had manic episodes quite like this. Free’s episode is too focused and coherent for me to say this episode was just one of mania. There’s something else going on with Free. I think I know what it is, and it’s what really makes this story compelling.

At its core, Needles for Free is the tale of one man’s battle of what is and what is not. Truth comes from many places. That’s part of Free’s problem. He doesn’t know what real is. He can distinguish neither truth nor its source. As the book progresses, Free comes out of his mania and comes back to a physical reality. In a way, it’s very heartbreaking. In his manic state, he’s full of confidence. He sees great things in himself. Out of it, those feelings are all gone. It’s sad. But there is hope here. The optimistic me knows that Free’s journey is really just beginning. Free’s struggle is not just one of the physical world. The man is also in the midst of a spiritual battle. It is here that the story goes to the next level. There are many people who believe themselves to be spiritual. Many of them live their lives as a game of tug-of-war between the physical and spiritual. I can only imagine what that must be like for someone who doubts his/her own sense of reality. Free’s advantage, though, is that he knows his condition. And he knows he has a place in God’s world. The last part is for him to figure out what that place is.

There is a bit of a coming-of-age aspect in here. It’s part of Free’s—and our—development. We never stop growing; we never stop evolving. Free is a grown man, but he still has much to learn. A lot of what is written during Free’s mania shows that he has to learn that he has much to learn. As the book progresses, he spends much of his time in introspection.

If this book was any longer, it wouldn’t feel real. It would, instead, feel orchestrated, which would remove much of the reader’s emotion. That emotion is necessary. The pacing of the book demands it. Reading Needles for Free is an experience, and it’s not a comfortable one.

I don’t know if the author plans on adding a sequel or two to Needles for Free or if he plans to let it lie as a stand-alone story. The next part of Free’s journey, I think, may be the assessment of his tethers. I’m interested to see how his journey goes.

A

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman

I was very excited to read this book. I grew up in the 1980s and I have vivid memories of the Showtime Lakers and their rivalries with the Celtics, Pistons, and my hometown 76ers. This book is about my favorite era of NBA basketball. Additionally, I’d read two of Jeff Pearlman’s previous books, both of them about championship teams from my youth. I fully expected this to become one of my favorite sports books. Boy, was I wrong.

I don’t know how it happened, but this book makes Showtime seem like an era of joylessness. Reading made me wonder why anyone ever wanted to become or remain a Laker. Pearlman portrays Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a surly man lacking any compassion or humanity. Pat Riley is depicted as an egomaniacal monster. And Magic Johnson? He’s a merciless bully. To agree, I know these depictions carry a great deal of truth. Pearlman, however, provides little to no balance; there aren’t many pros to counter the cons that carry the tale.

I wonder if my criticisms are the result of the author relying too heavily on his interviews. Many of us remember the Showtime Lakers. The writing suggests to me that both the author and his interviewees took this into account. Instead of giving us the entire picture, this book reads as a behind the scenes look at the era. I read this book to relive and supplement my memories, not the other way around. In this respect, I feel the book was a failure to anyone who was cognizant during the era.

The book’s biggest failing, in my opinion, is Pearlman’s treatment of Game 6 of the 1985 NBA Finals. There is no debate: that game is the single most important game in the history of the Laker franchise. Going into that game, the Celtics and Lakers had played for the world championship eight times. The Celtics had won eight times. Many believed the Lakers would never get over the hump. They did. They defeated the Celtics in the Boston Garden to win the championship. Pearlman handled this game the same way he did every other game of that series, which is to say he gave it no special treatment. That was a disservice to the sport, the Lakers, and everyone who appreciates NBA history. One could write an entire book about Game 6. I’m not suggesting Pearlman should have done that, but that game certainly should have been a focal point of this book. That, like the rest of the book, was a huge disappointment to me.

D

The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell

The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell by Mira Grant

When I read Feed, the first novel of Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy, I amazed by her world-building and her storytelling. As I read the final two novels and the accompanying novellas, I fell deeper in love with the world Grant had created. After reading the latest novella, The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell, I think Feed is only the second-best thing she’s written. This, I believe, is Mira Grant’s masterpiece. What sticks out to me more than anything else is the author’s bravery. This story, short as it was, was beautiful and bold and terrifying and sad. It is what the horror genre should be, what the originators of the craft sought.

The protagonist, Elaine Oldenburg, is a character readers of the series already know as Blackout’s Foxy. In that novel, readers neither liked nor trusted her. In The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell, we learn all we need to know about how her history. In the novella, Elaine is a first grade teacher in the post-Rising Pacific Northwest. Just imagine the possibilities of first graders in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. And remember that I praised Mira Grant’s bravery. And now I tell you this story features the single most heartbreaking scene I’ve ever read in fiction.

Yeah, this was great.



A+

Parasite

Parasite by Mira Grant

As a series, Parasitology is not Newsflesh. As a narrator, Sal Mitchell is not George Mason. These two facts must be accepted before attempting to read Mira Grant's latest novel, which is the opening to a new series. Parasitology takes place in a world where a trio of mad scientists has genetically engineered a parasite that can be implanted into human beings for the purpose of curing and preventing all of humanity's medical ailments. As expected, things go very, very wrong.

Our narrator is the public face of the wonders of Symbogen, our evil mad scientist-backed corporation. Sally Mitchell was in a car accident and never woke up. Just as her family was ready to say goodbye, Sal Mitchell woke up. Same body, different personality. Our story takes place six years later, when Sal has a job, a boyfriend, and a yearning for answers.

There is a lot of promise in this premise. I don't think the writing or the plotting did much to fulfill the potential. Sal is an unfortunate narrator. This person has only been around for six years, so there is much she does not know. It's not quite reading an adult story narrated by a six-year old child, but it is very much like reading from the mind of a mentally advanced tween. It's maddening, and I often lacked the patience to deal with the thoughts inside of Sal's brain.

The primary mystery of the novel turns out to not be a mystery at all. I figured out the "twist" very early on. I feel that anyone who does not figure it out by the 51% mark is either not paying attention or not intelligent. I had hoped that Grant would get the reveal out of the way so we could get on to the real story, but she didn't. She saved it until the last several paragraphs of the novel. She hinted at Sal's figuring it out, but did not pull the trigger. And the wording of the reveal suggests that Sal's boyfriend did not know either. I find nothing about that believable. I think that interfered with the plot and the conspiracy. In short, Parasite reads like a young adult novel. I doubt that was the intention.

To me, the best parts of the book were the scenes with Sal and Dr. Banks, the accredited inventor of the miracle parasite. Their interplay was fun to read. Many of Sal's other interactions were stilted and cliché. The interactions with her mother were often painful to read.

I just didn't like it. I will read the follow-up, though. I'm hoping for better.

C-

Hour Game

Hour Game (King & Maxwell #2) by David Baldacci

My wife and I read Split Second, the first book of the King & Maxwell series, together. It was the first David Baldacci book either of us had read. After trashing the book, I read other reviews of it. The overall sentiment was that Split Second was bad, but Baldacci’s other books were not; those reviews suggested that my wife and I had started with the wrong Baldacci book. I’d heard this in the past regarding other authors; sometimes the author’s other works proved to be much better than the one I read first, other times, his/her work was consistently as bad as that first book had been. I took into account Baldacci’s success and reputation as well as the “wrong book” viewpoint and decided to give the second King & Maxwell book, Hour Game, a try. Just a few pages in, it became apparent to me that Hour Game had the potential to be just as bad as its predecessor. I kept reading because I wanted to see just how bad it would get. Now that I’ve finished it, I can honestly say that, by a margin not unlike that between The Empire Strikes Back and The Phantom Menace, Split Second was the better of the two.

My review of Split Second contains the following phrases:

--Logistical nightmare

--Demonstrates poor critical thinking skills

--Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid

--The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it

All of these things apply to Hour Game, but, amazingly, more so. This second book was longer and its crimes were more complex. This time, King’s magical deductive powers were from farther out in left field and Maxwell’s reduction to literary eye candy more thorough. And still, Baldacci and the concept of maintaining point of view are mortal enemies. I can’t even really tell you about all that or else this review would be about 30 pages long. Instead, I’ll just give a brief overview of the novel’s stupidity.

It all starts in the opening pages when Baldacci rewrites King & Maxwell’s history that he had established in Split Second. He tells us that the events that had led King to leave the Secret Service left him “a very cautious man, unwilling to trust anyone, at least until Michelle Maxwell hurtled into his life.” He then states that Michelle had “taken an instant dislike to the man.” Neither of these statements are true. Did Baldacci remix their history for literary effect like John le Carré had with George Smiley? Did I read an alternative version of the novel? Did he forget what he wrote? Does he think we did?

I vote option #3. What else am I to conclude from an author who uses dental records to identify a murder victim who was shot in the face with a shotgun from a distance of less than two feet? His writing suggests to me that he believes we’re idiots.




****SPOILER****He puts us in the head of his serial killer as he scopes out a potential victim. He describes her as an “attractive woman in her thirties” who drove a bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible with vanity plates that read “DEH JD” and an American Bar Association bumper sticker (really, who puts a bumper sticker on that car?) and wore a nice ankle bracelet. Chapters later, Baldacci tells us that Diane Hinson left her downtown law firm for the evening and “climbed into her late-model Chrysler Sebring.” By this point, we know who she is. Still, he had to tell us. “He went back to the body and carefully unhooked the woman’s anklet, the one he’d admired in the shopping mall parking lot.”****END SPOILER****




The man’s writing demonstrates no concept of logistics. He has one person come home from picking up take-out from a local restaurant in a town he repeatedly notes is tiny and putting it in the microwave. A murder victim was discovered because the police were called after she failed to answer her door and phone while her car was in the garage even though the killer had closed the garage door as he left the premises. In yet another example, King & Maxwell come across the killer in a dark basement with no light sources. The killer still managed to aim his firearm at Maxwell. “The red dot then appeared on her chest and moved up and down her body, seemingly in a teasing manner, as though the person aiming the laser were(sic) fondling her.” This latest one continues a theme of Baldacci’s: the irrelevancy of light.

I sometimes wonder if Baldacci is afraid of women. The way he describes them is so…clinical and delicate. “Her curves and bosom were solidly in the range of eye-catching.” “The door was opened by a young woman wearing a long robe that didn’t entirely hide her heavy curves and inflated bosom.” Who talks like that?

Baldacci has a way of making the most mundane of things seem noteworthy while hand waving the most important events and details of his plot. “Subtle changes in the body upon death were well known to him, and satisfyingly, they were all taking place here.” A novel’s narrative quality is dramatically lessened when an omniscient narrator appears to not know details like this. It makes his writing come across as lazily researched. He details the things he knows about and glosses over those he does not, even when that glossed over piece is the one that is actually critical to the plot.

As was the case in Split Second, the absolute worst thing about Hour Game was the thought investigative thought process.




****SPOILER****King & Maxwell visit the home of Steve Canney to interview his father. The victim’s mother had died in a car accident a few years earlier, so the father is now alone. There were no family photos displayed in the home. The father referred to the deceased by his given name, never as “my son.” From this scant little evidence, they concluded that Roger Canney was not the boy’s actual father, that the boy’s mother had an affair with the richest man in town, and that Roger was well off because he was blackmailing the rich man. King also later concluded that one of the rich man’s sons, believed to be mentally retarded, had actually been born with syphilis and that the STD was the actual cause of his brain injury and the cancer that eventually killed him.****END SPOILER****




David Baldacci does not write crime solving novels. They are, instead, tales of fantasy, unwittingly written Inspector Gadget fan fiction. He demonstrates no knowledge of actual science and technique. Anyone who’s ever used a cell phone knows that the location from which a call was placed or answered can be tracked. Baldacci’s investigators didn’t.

There is too much farcical nonsense in this book to catalogue it all. Surgeries performed by a husband on his wife. Previously bound hostages whose hands and feet were unbound before they were thrown into a locked room. An escape from jail using tools extracted from a fake vein in a man’s arm. Drug deals in which the purchaser drove away in an antique car. Even the attempts on King & Maxwell’s lives were ludicrous.

The coup de grâce, the scene that made reading Hour Game worth the time I spent, was the most ridiculous scene I’ve ever read. On a dark and stormy night, Michelle and the killer tracked each other looking for a kill shot.

One lightning flash; that was all she needed. She edged around the bush, backtracked a bit and then slowly made her way down and around with the goal of coming up behind Eddie.

The flash of lightning. She heard the noise to her right. She pivoted and fired in the same instant. There was an explosion in front of her as a spark of red-hot light erupted for an instant and then vanished.

She couldn’t know it, but Eddie had at the same time been circling around her and had fired at the exact same instant as she. Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided, causing the explosive spark she’d seen.

Yeah, he really wrote that. Colliding bullets was the high point of his climactic scene. Really, that’s all you need to know. Hour Game was craptastic. I’ll try reading something good next time.

F

This is Where I Leave You

This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper

This is Where I Leave You is smart and funny. Laugh out loud funny. More importantly, it captures the realities of family life. Most of the trials and tribulations faced by the Foxman family are familiar to all families in the United States, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, wealth, and every other thing that divides us so. In these ways, this was one of the more brilliant novels I’ve read in the past few years.

This is Where I Leave You is told in first person from the perspective of Judd, a thirty-something Jewish man living in a rented basement room because his house is occupied by his wife and his boss. Theirs is an affair he discovered when he came home from work early one day. It’s a familiar cliché, but Jonathan Tropper does it in an original and unforgettable manner. In the novel’s opening sentence, we learn that Judd’s father has died. Judd learns that his father’s dying wish was to have his family sit shiva, so Judd joins his mother, sister, and two brothers—whom he can only stand to varying degrees of not very much—for a week of togetherness. This togetherness does not exactly drive the plot, but it is what This is Where I Leave You is about.

Tropper’s imagery is superb. His character development is even better. From Judd to his sister’s six-year old son to his wife’s new beau, each character is distinct; each has his/her own path we can follow. They are all whole people. And they all fit, even when they don’t. The novel’s greatest strength is that nothing feels pasted on.

I didn’t love it, though. It was too judgmental for my liking. A lot of that is Judd the character speaking, but there are some instances where it came across to me as the author’s feelings on the world. There was too much fat-hate for my taste. And I’m left wondering if the woman issues are just Judd’s or the author’s. As brilliantly written This is Where I Leave You was, it is entirely possible that my projections were wrong. I will definitely read Tropper again, so I will find out.

In a world of suffering we have two extremes: the boot strappers and the woe-is-me-ers. I don’t particularly like either. Judd is a wo-is-me-er, and I found it difficult to empathize with him. He was never good enough, never attractive enough, never physical enough. He was never able to get the beautiful girl—and when he did, she had a physical defect. He feels sorry for himself. He spends much of the novel in a pseudo-midlife crisis, even though he’s about fifteen years too early for it. he can’t just want a woman or love a woman; he has to save a woman. “I could never resist a crying girl,” he says. “I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good.” Later he recognizes, “I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.” Judd is the kind of man who laments that the beautiful women who want nice guys never look at him. He’s the guy who wants what he thinks he can’t have while never realizing that he could have and would have had it had he ever put out any effort. Instead he makes up ways in which he’s better than this person or that; he cannot uplift his own self-worth, so he puts down everyone else’s. Judd feels like the world owes him something, yet he’s never manned up to what he needs to do for his own life. Even his successes in this story turn out to just be moments of resignation or weakness in others. In short, I found it hard to empathize with him. This book doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to if you don’t at least like Judd. I didn’t…at all.

There was too much I didn’t like to rate it very high, but it was too smart, too funny, too beautifully written, and too likely to be reread to rate low.

B

Split Second

Split Second (King & Maxwell #1) by David Baldacci

This book was so bad, so poorly written, so, so, so massively wrong that I wonder if I had a bad copy, that an unedited version somehow made its way to my Kindle. I just can’t believe that a novel that sold so well, that began a very popular series which led to a television show, was so bad. Split Second was barely readable. In fact, I only finished it because my wife and I had decided to read it together.

The first novel of the King & Maxwell series, Split Second follows two disgraced Secret Service agents. One, Sean King, was caught looking away when the presidential candidate he was guarding was assassinated. The other, Michelle Maxwell, allowed the presidential candidate she was guarding to be alone in a room for a few minutes; he was kidnapped. It is obvious that the two cases would wind up connected to each other. That’s fine. The book has good premise, something that could serve as the base for an engrossing tale. Unfortunately, Split Second deteriorated into absurdity.

My overall impression of the novel is that it reads like a young adult or early teen detective story. Everything is fully explained as if the reader is not expected to figure out things for him or herself. This style leads to the dragging out of many storylines that a reader should figure out fairly quickly. One of the major ones is what exactly distracted Agent King while his candidate was killed. About 20% into the novel, I told my wife what I thought that distraction was. She said, “No. That’s what he wants you to think, but it wouldn’t be something that stupid.” Around the 40% mark, it became clear that no other explanation was possible, and it was confirmed later in the novel. And, yes, it really was that stupid.

I’ve said this about other books I’ve reviewed, but Split Second is a logistical nightmare. The author does a poor job of establishing and maintaining point of view, so much of the narration is a mess. For example, federal investigators in Virginia make preparations to storm a bunker in Tennessee. Instead of flying there, they drive five hours. Why?

Baldacci’s text also demonstrates poor critical thinking skills in his characters. King and Maxwell, we are told, are brilliant investigators. Much of the time, though, they come across as stupid. In one scene, Michelle Maxwell is searching through an old hotel that was abandoned 7 years prior. She found a phone book in the abandoned office, but was disappointed to find it was out of date. What, did she expect Ma Bell to continue its delivery to the abandoned building? Within the novel, we read through the investigators’ thoughts, we experience the processes that take them from clue to conclusion. Often, the conclusions are correct—Baldacci thinks they are brilliant, remember—while the leaps that got the investigators there are utterly stupid. In short, he tells us they are good while showing the opposite to be true.

There was no reason for Split Second to be as long as it was. The most common narrative trick the author used was: I’ve discovered something, but I’m not going to tell you now; I’m going to tell you later, but before I can tell you, I’ll be drugged, kidnapped, or knocked unconscious. That got old…quickly.

The dumbest thing about the book was that forensics and actual law enforcement tactics have no place within it. A few seconds after the assassination, Sean King shot the man who killed his candidate. The investigations within Split Second reveal that there was a second person at the scene with a gun. That person made a point to hide the gun, pay blackmail fees to a woman who saw him hide it, and then spend years contriving all of the foolishness that makes up the plot. The question that’s never asked in the book—let’s face it; had it been asked, the author would have had to think up another plot—is why the gun was an issue at all. It was neither pulled nor fired at the scene. Nothing criminal occurred with it, and there is no proof of anything involving it. In real life, that gun is a nothing; in the pseudo-plot of Split Second, it was everything. That doesn’t work for me.

In some cases, Baldacci writes King and Maxwell coming to conclusions that are scientifically impossible. For example: “She rewound the tape again and listened intently. There it was, like a beep or a clang, or a ding. That was it. A ding! It was coming from the direction where King was staring.” So Michelle Maxwell has the ability to tell sound direction from watching a VHS tape? That was almost as bad as the cold fusion bomb in JJ Abrams’ latest Star Trek film.

This book was awful. It was so awful that I almost want to read the second King & Maxwell book to see if this was an anomaly. If you’re looking for a good, exciting, smart thriller, stay away from Split Second.

F