Metamorphosis: Review

Metamorphosis (ST Fotonovel #5) by Gene L. Coon is the last of the Star Trek fotonovels sitting on my TBR pile. In the 1970s, long before VCRs were a standard thing in most homes, Bantam Books in conjunction with Mandala Productions gave Star Trek fans the chance to relive some of the shows episodes through series of twelve fotonovels. These books were essentially proto-types of the graphic novels so prevalent today that re-tell classic stories and these used actual film stills from the show with word  bubbles and explanatory text to accompany the photos. I found my first few in the early days of book-collecting and was finally able to complete the collection in 2012 when my husband and I came across a treasure trove at my now favorite used book store in Illinois. Last fall, I decided to catch up on reading those that I had never gotten to and managed to leave this one out. I've now rectified that error.

"Metamorphosis," a second season episode, finds Kirk, Spock, and McCoy accompanying Commissioner Nancy Hedford in the shuttlecraft Galileo. Hedford has been in the midst of negotiating peace between warring factions on Epsilon Canaris III, but has contracted a rare, potentially fatal condition, Sakuro's Disease. She requires treatment on the Enterprise before she can continue her mission. [Don't ask me why the starship couldn't just go pick her up. I don't know--other than we'd obviously have no plot. :-) ]

The shuttlecraft is just under five hours from the rendezvous with the Enterprise when Spock loses control of the ship and it is pulled off-course to a small planet (or piece of a planet). Surprisingly, the atmosphere is breathable and the men get out to investigate. They find more surprises in store--a shimmering, cloud-like entity and Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive and a man who disappeared over 150 years ago. The Enterprise crew are going to need the help of Cochrane and the Companion (Cochrane's name for the entity) if they are going to get off the planet. But the Companion has brought them there to prevent Cochrane from being lonely and has no intention of letting them go. It takes an unusual set of events to convince it... ★★★★
 

Murder at the Masque: Review

When he forgets to add the truffles to the Chicken Bayonnaise, master chef and sometime amateur detective Auguste Didier decides he really needs to take a holiday from cooking at Plum's Club for Gentlemen. He heads for home in Cannes--ready for sun, real provencale dishes, and, above all, no murders. For lately, it has seemed that murders follow him wherever he goes, from Stockbury Towers to the Galaxy Theatre restaurant to Plum's itself. Surely the threat of murder belongs in London and not in his delightful home town.

Back in London, Didier's friend, Inspector Egbert Rose, is immersed in a case--not of murder--but of daring jewel robberies. These are no ordinary thefts. The cat burglar has been running off with beautiful Faberge eggs with priceless rubies inside. Six missing eggs which belonged to former mistresses of Russia's Grand Duke Igor. The eggs were his parting gift to each lady when flame of love had gone out. Rose is having little luck tracking down the eggs. None of his contacts among the fences have heard a word about them. But then he does learn one thing...there is a seventh egg which has yet to be stolen and it just happens to belong to a woman in Cannes.

Rose isn't the only one headed to Cannes. The Grand Duke, the Duchess and their entourage are there, as well as all the ladies whose eggs have been stolen and their husbands and current amours. The gentlemen are all set to play a prestigious game of cricket with the Gentlemen (the English, under the captaincy of the Prince of Wales) being challenged by the Players (led by the Grand Duke and others from various European states. Some on the Players side are taking the game much too seriously. And someone will use the game as a cover to steal a jeweled dagger and use it to commit murder. 

I remember liking the other Chef Didier book (Murder at Plum's) quite a lot. That was before blogging--so I don't have a real review to tell me exactly why, but I do recall enjoying the atmosphere of the murder at a gentleman's club...vaguely reminiscent of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Sayers. This outing, Didier's fourth encounter with murder, is far less satisfying. Primarily because it feels like Amy Myers had a bad case of ADD. She can't possibly focus on one character in the vast array of high society, cooks, and policeman for more than a couple pages. We bounce back and forth from Didier to Rose and their encounters with various people, as well as focusing now on the Grand Duke and now on the Prince of Wales and now on the famous ballerina and now.... Well, you get the idea. It's all too exhausting. I don't remember this being such a problem at Plum's. Perhaps it's the difference between Didier in London and Didier in Cannes.

Which, speaking of Didier, he's not quite on the top of his game here. Of course, he is mighty distracted between dallying with the ballerina and discovering that his one true love, a Russian princess who could never marry a mere cook...even if that cook is a Maître. Didier concocts solution after solution but he never does get it quite right. And I must say, I wasn't altogether satisfied with the final answer. It seemed a bit of a cop-out to me. The penultimate solution (which Rose allows Didier to believe is the right one) strikes me as a much more fitting one. The plot itself is a decent one and there are some humorous episodes sprinkled throughout that do give the book its redeeming qualities. However, overall, a less than stellar performance from our master chef at ★★ and 1/2. It hasn't put me off the series altogether, but if I do come across another entry I hope it is more in line with my memory of Plum's.

Deal Me In Week #3: "Death Draws a Triangle"

This is my first year participating in Jay's Deal Me In Challenge . In a nutshell--we line up 52 short stories for the year, we match those stories up to a card in a regular deck of card, and each week we shuffle our deck (of real cards) and draw a card from whatever remains in the deck. My third shuffle and draw gives me the Jack of Hearts which matches up to "Death Draws a Triangle" by Edward Hale Bierstadt.

 

image credit

"Death Draws a Triangle" appears in Murder by Experts edited by Ellery Queen and is, rather than a fictional short story, an account of a true crime from Victorian-era New York. The triangle in question is that between Daniel McFarland, his wife Abby, and her friend Albert D. Richardson. But the case is rather more than a simple love triangle--Tammany Hall politics and its dislike for the Tribune and editor Horace Greeley play a part as well. The facts of the case were never in question. McFarland, an abusive and drunken husband who saw slights where there weren't any and built up the friendship between his wife and Richardson into a sordid affair, walked into the Tribune offices, sat calmly down to wait, and, when Richardson made an appearance in the outer rooms, just as calmly shot his perceived rival. 

When Tammany Hall discovered that Richardson was a Tribune man, they promptly put all their machinery behind the "poor, betrayed husband." The trial which followed presented McFarland as a saint of a man who was driven insane by his wife's behavior and Richardson's perversion of her affections. Of course adultery (or assumed adultery, as in this case) was often considered the more heinous of the crimes because "it is so much more enjoyable. The point of view of the public on adultery is, generally, 'I want to commit adultery, but I don't dare; and, by heaven, if I can't I'm not going to let you!'" The trial was a travesty of justice--the killer was declared "Not Guilty" and Abby's reputation was permanently blackened. Bierstadt's account attempts to right the historical record.

 

Deal Me In Week #2: "How We Lost the Moon"

This is my first year participating in Jay's Deal Me In Challenge . In a nutshell--we line up 52 short stories for the year, we match those stories up to a card in a regular deck of card, and each week we shuffle our deck (of real cards) and draw a card from whatever remains in the deck. I just dealt myself the Ace of Diamonds...which gives me "How We Lost the Moon: A True Story" by Paul J. McAuley. Beware--spoilers below! [It's difficult to talk about the story at all without letting a cat or two out of the bag--besides, the title gives the punch line away....]

image credit

The image above which comes from an original deck of play cards by the artist Adam Valmassoi definitely has a science fiction vibe for me. Which works nicely with this week's short story. "How We Lost the Moon" appears in the 17th Annul Collection of The Year's Best Science Fiction (2000) edited by Gardner Dozois. As Dozois tells us in his introduction to the story, McAuley write many different kinds of science fiction from rigorous hard SF and "New Baroque Space Opera" to Dystopian speculation and Alternate History. This story falls most decidedly in the hard SF camp.

One of the men directly involved in the events on the Moon before it was lost tells us his story--so we'll know the facts behind the "millions of bytes of Web journalism" and the "tens of thousands of hours of TV and a hundred schlocky movies" as well as "thousands of scientific papers and dozens of thick technical reports." Our narrator and his college Mike Doherty were sent to check on some odd readings from a power source on the far side of the moon. As soon as Mike sees the hole in the floor of the crawl space below the power chamber, he knows what's happened--but he won't tell his buddy. After all, he's got the same info as Mike--he ought to know too. But how many people are going to think that a black hole is opening up in the middle of the Moon? 

Given the title of the story, it's not difficult to figure out that the Moon doesn't make it past the ending, but a black hole is a bit of a surprise. McAuley gives us all the fine physics to explain the matter--but I have to say, I didn't take it all in. What did strike me was the interesting concept and the idea that the black hole could be used for a sling-shot propulsion effect for deeper space flight. Oh...and the method used to make it seem like the Earth still had a glowing orb in the night sky....

Black hole beginning: Photo credit

The 24th Horse: Review

If you don't know anything at all about jumping, we take you through a series of twenty-four lessons....The idea is we put you on the gentlest horse we've got first...You go from that to horse number two and so on. When you've ridden the twenty-fourth horse, sir, you know all the answers. 
~Peter Shea (The 24th Horse (1940) by Hugh Pentecost)

Inspector Bradley of the New York Police Department certainly hopes that he won't have to go through the equivalent of twenty-four horses to find out all the answers to who who killed Gloria Prayne and stuffed her in the rumble seat of her sister's car.

He's not terribly pleased when Johnny Curtin, at the instigation of Bradley's friend Mr. Julius, drives the car and the body to his apartment but can't help being interested. Mr. Julius wants to be sure that Bradley is the one to be assigned the case--he's gotten used to him after working with the Inspector in a previous case (Cancelled in Red, the first Bradley book by Pentecost). Mr. Julius is also friends of the Prayne family and wants the case solved as quickly as possible with as little publicity as possible. He knows Bradley will get to the truth without creating too much scandal.

Gloria had been missing for a few days, but nobody thought much of it. The young beauty had been a bit of a wild one, running off for days at a time but always coming back home. Johnny, who was initially interested in Gloria's sister Pat, had fallen briefly under her spell and just come to his senses on the last night she was seen. In fact, when he told her he wouldn't be going around with her anymore, she got a bit miffed, walked out on him, and was never seen again. At least that's his story...and nobody else who knows her will admit seeing her after that. Not her father or her sister or her aunt. Not the man she was engaged to or their two friends. Gloria simply disappeared into thin air and then made her startling reappearance in the rumble seat.

Bradley investigates and discovers the faint smell of blackmail. But it's difficult to decide who was the blackmailer and who the victim was  (or victims were). Gloria left a sealed envelope (sealed with her particular sealing wax) with her friend Linda Marsh--telling her to take it to the police if anything happened to her. But then when something does happen and Linda turns it over to Bradley, they discover nothing but blank pages. 

Another murder takes place and Bradley finds clues that leads him to the story of another woman's disappearance--Dorothy Pelham, the wife of another friend of the Praynes. The more he investigates, the more certain he becomes that the first disappearance is important to the recent murders. But what really happened to Dorothy? Is the secret that she's started another life somewhere? Or was she murdered. And who most wants that secret kept hidden? Until Bradley rides the horse with that answer (and it may take twenty-four after all), he won't be able to solve the current deaths. 

The horse metaphors are all tied in to the opening--which takes place at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden where Pat Payne is taking part in the show jumping event. Pat and Douglas Pelham (the missing Dorothy's husband) also run a horse riding school. And the final show-down takes place at the school--though don't think I'm giving anything away. There's no reason why it had to take place there...other than a good metaphorical tie-in.

I seem to be on a good run of good books. Either that or I'm just in a generous four-star-giving mood lately. This is a fast-paced mystery that is tightly plotted and works well in the short Popular Library digest length. A hundred and fifty-eight pages may not seem like a lot for a full-length novel, but Pentecost works in a good handful of suspects and plenty of detective spade-work to keep armchair detectives guessing. I quite enjoyed meeting Inspector Bradley and appreciated the mix of excellent investigator with a man with a heart and scruples (when it comes to protecting the innocent). Previous to this, I had read only the mysteries starring Pierre Chambrun, hotel manager (which are also quite good). I will definitely be looking for the other Bradley stories. ★★★★

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 This counts for the "Skeletal Hand or Skull" category on the Golden Vintage Scavenger Hunt card.

The Snake on 99: Review

You know, catching a criminal's rather like playing snakes and ladders. You plod ahead, square by square; sometimes you get a bit of luck, and a ladder takes you up a row or tow. Sometimes things go wrong and you slide down a snake. It's the same for the criminal, but he has more snakes and fewer ladders than you do, in the end. And when he things he's nearly  through, there's always the final pitfall, the dirty great snake on 99, waiting to drop him right into our arms. ~Inspector Morgan

It took me about half the book to find out what the title, The Snake on 99, had to do with Stewart Farrar's detective novel. When I first spotted the cover at Half Price books last year, I almost passed it up--it kindof screamed Western at me for some reason. And then I saw the little "Chantecler Mystery Novel" logo on the spine and thought, "Hmm, what's this?" The synopsis on the dust jacket intrigued me enough to make me add it to the pile to take home with me. Then Rich over at Past Offences announced that January would 1959 for his Crimes of the Century feature and I was all set. Because my edition says "first published 1959." But...when doing a little sleuthing on the internet for any tidbits I could find on Stewart Farrar I discovered that 1959 is the first American printing but it was first printed in Britain in 1958 and I don't know if Rich will let me sneak it in...Ah well. It was a good read and let's get on with details.

So...Joe Archer arrives in London to start a new engineering position with his company. He takes up residence at a hotel cum boarding house. He quickly learns the ins and outs of his fellow residents. There's Geraldine Graham, a bit of drama queen who likes to play the '20s vamp; Frank Branson, a good-looking brilliant young City Editor who has his eye on...; Jane White, a lovely young lady of eighteen who always sees the best in everyone. But Frank can make little inroads with Jane because there's also her father Anthony White who is ultra-possessive and jealous of any attentions paid to his only child as well as a rival in the person of Peter Knapp, a photographer with a sardonic sense of humor. Also in the mix is Gerald Hardy, lead reporter at Branson's newspaper. 

It isn't long before Archer joins Branson and Knapp in seeking Miss White's company (whenever "Daddy" isn't looking). Branson has the habit of watching for Jane to come home from her art classes and waving at her from his rooftop garden. Archer decides to steal a march on the handsome journalist and meets her at the corner bus stop. They decide to play a joke on Branson--sneaking round the long way and Jane only calls up to him at the last minute. Branson seems to take the joke well--Jane turns to share her glee with Archer and then the journalist jerks with apparent surprise and topples from the rooftop. 

Jane is devastated; she believes their joke must have caught Branson off-guard and caused an accident, but Archer is certain it was no slip and he makes certain to tell Inspector Morgan so when the police arrive. Morgan has a long history of summing people up quickly and he realizes that Archer is no fool and certainly has no reason to sensationalize. He and Sergeant Pitt soon find more motives for murder than you'd expect at your average boarding house--everything from drugs to blackmail. And yet Farrar makes it all fit together.

This was a delightful surprise. Farrar has a way with characterization that make this a great read. The interactions between Morgan and Pitt are fun and realistic--you can tell that the two have worked together for some time and know how to pull each other's leg without stepping on anybody's toes. They make a good investigative team. And the boarding house inmates are also well-drawn and given a fairly good chance at the spot-light, especially when you consider how short the book is at 191 pages. The plot is interesting, though I will admit that old hands at the mystery game will probably spot most of the solution before the wrap-up--I certainly did. But I was interested enough in the characters and finding out the fine details that I didn't mind. ★★★★

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This counts for the "Any Other Animal" on the Golden Vintage Scavenger Hunt card and maybe (if Rich is lenient) for the Crimes of the Century feature.

The Hidden Planet: Review

Using the last novella I read (Battle on Venus) as a jumping board, I moved on to The Hidden Planet (1959). This is a collection of stories by five authors featuring Earth's sister-planet Venus. Written during a time when we had little information about the planet (the brief introduction details just how little was known), each author gives us a little different vision of what lies beneath the cloud cover of our nearest neighbor. We get stories ranging from the man who made Venus a breeding ground for experiments with people  to the adventurer who went a little too deeply into the depths of Venus's ocean to those who investigated jungles where dangers lurk. As with most short story collections, this is a bit uneven. The best of the bunch are the stories by McIntosh and Weinbaum with Oliver and Brackett a distant second and Del Rey not even even making the race. I just found the story about the bad luck mascot to be annoying. Why not take the thing back where you found it and get yourself back to work so you can have the girl of your dreams? The critter doesn't even sound appealing and would be plenty happy in its swamp....An overall score of ★★★ for the entire collection.

"Field Expedient" by Chad Oliver (1954): Tells the story of a childless billionaire who pours all his wealth into creating a colony on the very Earth-like planet. The men of Earth have become very complacent and no longer wish to reach for the stars. Vandervort believes his colony will give mankind back his exploratory vision.

You're never finished with danger. It follows a brave man around.
Maybe, but I'm not a brave man. Never was.
~Virginia Stuart, Warren Blackwell in "Venus Mission"

"Venus Mission" by J. T. McIntosh (1951): A ship is damaged on its way to a city on Venus and crash-lands far from their target. Venus has been hard-won after a war with the "Greys." Little info is given about the Greys except that despite the war being over and a treaty being signed, there are still renegade groups that love nothing more than to capture and torture humans. Will the survivors be able to make it to the nearest settlement?

"The Luck of Ignatz" by Lester Del Rey (1939): What happens when the luckiest man in the universe takes on the unluckiest mascot imaginable? Lots of bad luck for everyone else....and then nobody wants to give him a job or allow him to travel on their rocket ships. So, how's he supposed to rescue the girl he loves?

"The Lotus Eaters" by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1935): Patricia Burlingame, biologist, and her newly-wedded husband Hamilton "Ham" Hammond are asked by the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institution to investigate the dark side of Venus. While there, they find a species of warm-blooded plants who can move about and share a communal intelligence. The plants reproduce through spores which, when they burst, have an effect on humans that can send them into a comatose state. Will Patricia and Ham escape?

"Terror Out of Space" by Leigh Brackett (1944): Operatives from the Special Branch of the Tri-World Police, Lundy and Smith, have captured an alien who has been wreaking havoc with the males of Venus. Whenever a guy looks at "Her," he abandons whatever he's supposed to be doing and follows Her wherever She leads.  The alien causes men to see the her as the most beautiful woman ever--a dream girl, in fact. Lundy is the only one to survive the encounter and finds himself needing to defend Venus's plant people from Her as well. It turns into a very close call indeed.

2016 Mount TBR Final Checkpoint Winner

Today was an absolutely crazy day at work (it's graduate student admission season at the university), and I almost forgot that it was time to find a winner for the Final Checkpoint prize.  So....without further ado, I will just plug in the random number generator and enter in the parameters....and the lights flash and webpage whirs and we get  (drum roll, please).....Link #2!  That means that Jean @ Howling Frog is our winner!  Congratulations, Jean!  I'll be contacting you soon with the prize list.

Thanks to everyone for participating in the final check-in.  I enjoy seeing your progress and the way you fit the titles to the proverbs (for those who did). Thanks as well to all climbers for joining me in scaling those Mount TBR heights in 2016.  Hope to see you on more mountains this year!

2016 Vintage Scavenger Hunt Winners!

Well, the entries for the 2016 Vintage Scavenger Hunt Wrap-Up and Prize Drawings have closed. I pulled out the Custom Random Number Generator and have selected our 6+ and 12+ prize winners as well as visited the wrap-up posts to find our Grand Prize Winner. After much clanking and whirring, our prize winners are

In the 6+ drawing: TracyK from Bitter Tea and Mystery
In the 12+ drawing: JJ from The Invisible Event

And our Grand Prize Winner, with a full Golden Age card and 37 items from the Silver Age card for a total of 112 items found: Joel from I Should Be Reading.

Congratulations to our Winners (let's have a rousing round of applause)! And thank you everyone who joined me for a year's worth of scavenging. I hope you all are along for the ride again in 2017!

I will contact the winners sometime tomorrow with details on the prizes.

Clocks, Cogs & Mechanisms Challenge

R. A. Vucci is hosting the 5th annual Clocks,Cogs, and Mechanisms Reading Challenge. When this challenge was first created, the world of steampunk was still fairly unknown, but not new. This is a genre that has been inspired by the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and H.P. Lovecraft to name a few. For those who have never experienced steampunk, a typical steampunk novel takes place in the Victorian era and involves lots of steam-powered technologies ahead of their time. There are variations and other time periods that fall into this category, but the Victorian era ones are the most common.

Here are the levels to this challenge:

Brass Gears: Read 1-3 books
Flight Goggles: Read 4-7 books
Button-up Boots: Read 8-11 books
Clockwork Corset: Read 12+ book

I have picked up a couple of steampunk mysteries over the past couple years, so I'm going to do the entry-level challenge: Brass Gears.

1. The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton (5/23/17)

2. Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard (8/2/17)