When I heard the news of Robert B. Parker’s passing, I was heartbroken. I have been reading his Spenser novels for ages and the thought there would be no more of them — too much to contemplate. Sixkill is the 39th Spenser novel and, according to the book jacket, “the last Spenser novel Parker completed.” Now, that doesn’t sound very…final. It sounds like there might be some unfinished stuff out there. I am not completely opposed to another author carrying the mantle, as long as we don’t lose any of the snappy dialogue and hooligan philosophy of the original.

In Sixkill, Spenser is older and wiser and without his usual back-up, Hawk, who is off in Central Asia. We start off with a visit from our old friend, Martin Quirk, who wants Spenser to look into a murder. A particularly nasty piece of work named Jumbo Nelson is shooting a movie in Boston and has apparently murdered a young woman he hooked up with. At least, she died in his bed, the coroner isn’t quite sure of what, and he claims to have been barely sober enough to notice she was dead when he came back from taking a leak. Like I said, nasty fella. As much as everyone wants to put him away, Quirk isn’t sure, and Spenser trusts Quirk’s instincts.

The novel introduces a new character that I think would have had some staying power. Zebulon Sixkill (and what an awesome name that is!) is a Native American college drop-out, former college football star, now a bodyguard for Jumbo Nelson. He’s got a drinking problem (not the sort of thing that is helped by hanging out with celebrities) and he ends up working with Spenser. Actually, what Spenser does is more like mentoring — he helps the kid get sober, gets him back in shape, gets him a job at the gym. Gets him back to a place where he might be able to make something of his life. He’s an interesting young man and, like a lot of other tough guys from previous Spenser novels, could definitely become a recurring character. Sadly, we won’t get to read what Parker might have had in mind.

Sixkill is one of the better Spenser novels I’ve read recently. There were a couple of books where I thought it might be time for Spenser and Susan to retire to a little cabin in the Catskills or something, but there is plenty of snappy dialogue, cool new characters, and an engaging mystery to solve. It was a real pleasure to read, which makes the fact that it is the one that was completely Parker’s all the more melancholy. This is an author and a series that I will truly miss, but I am glad that he goes out on such a high note.

My copy of Sixkill came from my personal library.

To be honest, when I started Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright, I wasn’t sure that I was going to love it. The book came to me through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program, and when I got the notice I was getting it, I couldn’t remember requesting it. It was a little slow going at first, but the story really draws you in. These aren’t always very likable people, but you find yourself interested in them and wondering how things will turn out for them. Eventually, I found I did not want to put it down.

Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal has been the head of Tubal & Co., a small privately-owned bank in England, for decades. The bank is in trouble. His son, Julian, was suckered in, like so many financiers, and now the bank is sunk deep in worthless mortgages and complex financial instruments that he barely understands. His father always said he wanted to run a bank, not a casino, but his son gambled and lost. Now Julian will need some fancy footwork — and shady dealing — to keep the bank solvent.

A stroke has left Harry weakened, unable to write, unable to speak clearly. His wife, Fleur, is absent — she can’t bear to see him this way. He is cared for by his longtime secretary, Estelle, who is secretly in love with him:

“But when Harry’s first wife, Eleanor, killed herself she had foolishly hoped that he might turn to her, Estelle. It was like something from Jane Austen: the plain governess who hopes her good qualities will win through with the master in the end. But he was arranging for Fleur, the twenty-five-year-old actress, to be cast in a play he was financing.”

The complication in all of this is playwright Artair MacLeod, Fleur’s ex-husband. When they divorced, he was given a grant — a quarterly stipend and a stern admonition to stay away from Fleur. That has worked well for MacLeod, until the money dries up. He’s a character, one of my favorites, cobbling together a living out in the sticks from grants and speaking arrangements and children’s theater productions of Thomas the Tank Engine. When the checks stop coming, MacLeod takes action.

I loved the writing in this book — it pulled me in and kept me reading. I loved his descriptions of people and places:

“He couldn’t wait to come back to Cornwall, where you could take a lungful of air which had travelled undisturbed from Nova Scotia, rather than one which had passed through the lungs of twenty wheezing cockneys on its way to yours.”

The descriptions of the villa at Antibes, with its turtle doves and umbrella pines, its hushed servants and the view of the Mediterranean — vivid and enticing. (Well, maybe not the servants, but definitely the turtle doves.) It’s a peek inside a family that is shackled in many ways by its ridiculous wealth, by all the unwritten rules of their status and its obligations. They operate on a different plane than the people around them; it both insulates and isolates them.

You see the trainwreck coming, but there is no getting out of the way. I was particularly impressed with the wrap-up; I hate a book with a bad ending. Here, the storylines are wrapped up nicely, but not too tightly. Even in the train’s path, people manage to salvage bits of their lives; some of them are even happy. All in all, a lovely, satisfying read.

My copy of Other People’s Money was provided by the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program free of charge.

Anyone who reads here regularly will know that I love mysteries. One of the keys to a good mystery series is that it should be accessible — if I haven’t read anything of yours before, I should be able to walk into the series, no matter which book I choose. So when I learned that Black Thunder was the 13th Ella Clah novel, I was a little cautious. The great thing about the book is that without ever reading any of the previous books,  I was able to enjoy Ella’s adventures and not feel at all lost.

Black Thunder takes place on the Navajo reservation (“the Rez”) in New Mexico. One of the most interesting things about the book is the setting and the restrictions it places on Clah’s police work. How can you discuss the suspects in a case when the Navajos avoid using a person’s name? How do you interrogate someone when you have to wait in your car to be invited to their door? It’s a very different way of dealing with people and it was fascinating to see the way that Clah and the other detectives adapted their methods.

The reservation police have discovered a serial killer’s dumping grounds — four bodies, buried close together, all with the same, execution-style cause of death. The bodies need to be identified, commonalities determined, friends and enemies interviews, and they need to do it quickly. From what the coroner has determined, the killer strikes once a year, and it’s nearly that time…

Here’s another difficulty for the tribal police: Navajos do not like to deal with the dead. Which, of course, makes things difficult when you are investigating a murder or trying to perform an autopsy.

“The chindi, the evil in a man, was said to remain earthbound waiting for a chance to create problems for the living. Contact with the dead, or their possessions, was a sure way to summon it to you, so avoidance was the usual strategy.”

The mystery builds slowly, which I like. I hate a story where the killer is obvious while the police are oblivious. Who wants to read about police who aren’t smart enough to catch the crooks? There are some good twists and turns and some subplots to keep you reading along. The only issue I had is that everyone seemed to get along really well. I don’t know that much about actual police work, but it seems likely that the FBI, county police and tribal police would butt heads at some point — jurisdictional issues, policy issues, general posturing. Here, everyone seems to be able to put their ego aside and work together and when does that ever happen in real life? Still, it’s a minor squabble. It’s a very pleasant, readable mystery and I wouldn’t mind at all picking up more in the series.

My copy of Black Thunder was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge. For more on the Ella Clah mysteries, check out the Thurlo’s website.

In Action Comics #8, published in January of 1939, Superman decides that housing conditions are responsible for juvenile delinquency. If only kids didn’t live in slums, they wouldn’t be getting in trouble with Superman. But what to do about the existence of slums? Superman sees a newspaper article that gives him an idea (click on any image to enlarge).

Residents are warned to remove their belongings from the homes. Then the world’s strongest man springs into action.

Yes, you’ve read that right. Superman enjoys a good workout as he destroys the entire neighborhood slum. And the residents — whose homes were destroyed without their permission or even their notification — are fortunate to have had their homes destroyed.

So, you see, if people are living in poor conditions, it is good that a cyclone or Superman or any other force (war?) destroys their homes, because they end up with “splendid housing conditions” when the government rebuilds, at least in the world of early Superman. (No mention is made of where these people live while the housing project is being built.)

Superman has not only apparently never heard of the broken window fallacy, but seems to believe that by destroying the decrepit housing, he is helping to rid the town of “filthy, crime festering slums.” As if the very same people who had lived in the slum, once they are living in government “huge apartment projects,” will no longer commit crimes or be plagued by those who do. 

Ah, the good old days of crime-free government housing projects.

Over at Bleeding Cool, someone called Darin Wagner thinks he has hit upon the primary reason that comic book sales have been steadily declining. And as it turns out, he has actually hit upon the primary reason that comic book sales have been steadily declining, and he stumbles into it in the second paragraph of his essay:

You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig disaster. You immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said, either by your childhood favorite or by some other character given credibility within the story. You turn the page, and sure enough, your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil or how inherently dangerous oil drilling is to the environment and how it’s not worth it or simply mutters to him-or-herself briefly about the evils of corporate America. That’s when you put the comic back on the shelf and your local retailer loses a sale. (Sound familiar? Brightest Day #5 contained a similar scenario featuring Aquaman.)

Mr. Wagner claims that it’s “liberalism” that is — or, per the title of his piece, “may be” — hurting comic book sales. He claims that it’s Aquaman’s grumbling about oil drilling and the dangers of said practice that represents the “liberalism” that’s turning off readers. But it isn’t that.

Re-read Mr. Wagner’s description of the opening scene of that particular comic book. This story takes place in a world in which there is a S.T.A.R. Labs. There exist dozens of geniuses in any number of fields. There are dozens of alien devices and elements and magical items to which they have access. Why, in a universe such as this, are they still using oil?

You’re telling me that Ray Allen Palmer(!)*, who used “white dwarf star matter” to create a means of shrinking himself to microscopic size couldn’t come up with a better, cleaner, more efficient way to power the cars that they drive in the DCU? Doctor Fate can’t just magically create a fleet of cars that run on magic stardust, and then create an unlimited supply of magic stardust?

Comic book creators have been resistant to introducing real-world implications into their stories for as long as comics have existed. They could not care less about what would happen to the average person-on-the-street in a world filled with supergeniuses and magical figures. They have ignored the rich storytelling opportunities opened up by exploring what a world of superheroes would really be like. (What would housing look like in a world where you can create structures that are bigger on the inside than outside? What would security be like in a world where people can level entire cities with a thought? Would we all have jet packs? Would we have had them 50 years ago?) What they care about is re-telling the same stories over and over and over and over again, over and over.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, in this DCU in which there are supergeniuses and magicians, they are still drilling for oil in exactly the same manner we do here in the real world (which features a distinct lack of supergeniuses and magicians). The DCU features Atlantis, a continent that fell into the sea following a skull-shaped meteor strike on the earth. Rather than just pick up and move to a continent that hadn’t sunk into the sea, the Atlantis scientists instead figured out a way to turn themselves into aquatic mammals that could breathe ocean water, and withstand the intense pressure of the ocean. In this world, the surface dwellers would have to deal with the Atlantisians (“Atlanteans”?) in order to get permission to drill in the oceans in which they live. That opens up an entire new set of potential stories. How do the two groups of people get along? What do the Atlantisians get in return for using their seas in this manner? Could the Atlantisians mine the surface for some power source? Would “radical Atlantisians” throw water bombs at surfacers?

And what would the oil rigs themselves look like? How would Ray Allen Palmer(!)* design one? Would it be made of Nth metal, and therefore indestructible, making oil rig disasters all but impossible?

The creators of mainstream corporate comics today do not care about any of this. I’ve said it before, and it’s so depressing it bears repeating: Comic books as they exist today are nothing more than advertising pamphlets for movie and television properties. That’s all. The people creating them don’t care about what’s actually going on in them (or if they do, they do a fantastic job of hiding it). They don’t care about exploring the implications of the worlds they create. They care about licensing and merchandising.

How little imagination to they exhibit? Here’s a page from that same issue referenced by Mr. Wagner in his essay:

Aquaman was dead — and then came back to life! That’s so… typical. But then, on the very next page we get this *cliffhanger* ending:

(Both Brightest Day scans were swiped from the lovely Aquaman Shrine.)

Aquaman has already established — on the previous page! — that he’s been dead and come back to life, and somehow the fact that someone has been sent to “kill” him is supposed to create breathless tension that will compel us to pick up the next issue.

But it was his wife that was “sent” to “kill” him! Who sent her? Will she actually do it? And if she does do it, how long before he comes back to life yet again? I gotta pick up the next issue!

DC’s treatment of Aquaman is so fantastically pathetic, and an object lesson in everything that is wrong with modern comics, that I wrote a long essay about it here. They’ve made him into a PoMo joke, a commentary on the reaction to the character by people who don’t read comics at all, rather than owning him as character with the potential to be the most important and powerful player in the DCU. Over 80% of the world is ocean, and Aquaman rules the ocean, for crying out loud. But what are the creators doing with him?

Heroes will be tweaked and aged down to showcase them not as established titans but as strivers who “have to sweat to fight the bad guys,” [Jim] Lee says. For example, Johns’ new take on Aquaman — here THR offers an exclusive sneak peek at pages 5 to 8 of issue No. 1, with art by Ivan Reis and Joe Prado — retools the underwater-breathing hero so he is no longer the king of Atlantis and now plays off his second-banana status.

“Geoff has dived into the grandeur of the character while addressing that he’s been a running joke,” Lee says. “It’s going to have humor and majesty.”

If Aquaman were a real, actual, living being, he would be regarded as one of the most amazing people on the planet. I bet you that he would be one of the most — if not the most — popular superheroes, if for no other reason than our ever-present worries about climate change. Aquaman would be a fetish figure.

DC — or, rather, the “creators” at DC — don’t care about any of that. They’re trying to “optimize brand appeal.”

In his introduction to his story collection Strange Wine, Harlan Ellison (a sometime comics writer himself) wrote, regarding the dinosaurs,

“They lived 130,000,000 years and vanished. Why? Because they had no imagination. Unlike human beings who have it and use it and build their future rather than merely passing through their lives as if they were spectators. Spectators watching television, one might say.”

That is just about the best explanation of what is happening to the mainstream comic book industry today. A bunch of dinosaurs with no imagination, not trying to build a future at all, but continually re-writing the past, and keeping their eyes on television, movies, and video games, where they hope to license the properties they caretake.

And that is what’s hurting comic book sales.

*Corrected Jan 13 2012 @8:45PM PST — Many thanks to the gracious “Bruce” for pointing out my error in the comments.

Well, I have found my new detective obsession. I love good detective fiction and I love my handsome detectives, but I am an equal opportunity fan and Keye Street is my new best girl. The Stranger You Seek by Amanda Kyle Williams is a debut novel with great promise. The characters are terrific and the mystery is compelling — I put the book down half-way through to check Amazon and see if I could pre-order the next book. Sadly, I can’t, but I will be pestering her publisher for a review copy.

Keye Street is a terrific character. She’s a private detective with a sordid past, living in Atlanta, Georgia. She’s Chinese; she was adopted by the Streets when she was just a toddler. She didn’t come from a great background:

“I wasn’t emotionally devastated by the fact that they’d given me up. They did it because they were incapable of caring for a child. I mean, with the prostitution and stripping and drugs and all, they were really busy. I guess I was a little pissed that I’d grown up on cheese grits and gravy…but generally I have been incredibly blessed by their handing over their child.”

She’s also got a lot of baggage. She’s an alcoholic and her drinking destroyed her career at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She’ll never officially work in law enforcement again, and with that background she does not make a compelling expert witness. Still, she has carved out a niche for herself in Atlanta, doing background checks, serving subpoenas, and chasing down bail jumpers.  She does tend to gravitate to some odd work:

“I’d been a licensed Bail Recover Agent since leaving the Bureau. It bought the groceries while I built my private investigating business, and it still supplemented by income nicely. My shrink, Dr. Shetty, says it’s a power thing, that I have a brutal case of penis envy. What can I say? I like strapping on a big Glock now and then.”

In The Stranger You Seek, Keye gets caught up in the case of a serial killer. The killer is taunting police, writing letters to the media, and perhaps targeting those involved in the investigation. There are some real scares, some interesting twists, and a story you can really get wrapped up in. I was left with a few questions, but all in all this was a great read.

My copy of The Stranger You Seek was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Novels about academia have never held a strong appeal for me; there seems very little at stake in the tweed-clad genre except for tenure, which doesn’t make for the most riveting reading. But in Alex Kudera’s debut satirical novel, Fight for Your Long Day, there is a lot more on the line for the protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, than mere tenure: his very life, it seems, is doomed to extinction as the world around him erupts into a frenzy of violence.

Cyrus is a breed of university Everyman known as “the adjunct.” If you’ve ever stepped foot in an English 101 or an Introduction to History class, you have seen one: rumpled and coffee-stained, adjuncts are usually in a mid-career or mid-life slump, or in Cyrus’s case, a state of perpetual ennui. [Full disclosure: I am an adjunct, but I make an adequate attempt to wear clean, ironed shirts, and I take St. John’s Wort capsules to stave off any impending mid-life crises.]

Duffleman sees himself “as a foot soldier on the front lines of America’s knowledge-based economy.” And soldier he is, for on this Thursday, when he teaches not only four courses but works as a tutor and as a security guard to supplement his middling pay, he will come across numerous varieties of that higher education anomaly known as the “disturbed” student: one who has a psychic breakdown in Duffleman’s first class; another who sends him inappropriate — and near threatening — emails; yet another who leaps to his death from the roof of the dormitory. And in the midst of all this, a renegade armed with a bow and arrow is killing wildlife in Fairmount Park, an act of barbarism that has the media fear-mongers agitated.

What’s an underpaid adjunct without any medical benefits to do? If you’re Duffleman, a committed teacher — remember those? — you simply do your job. But that’s becoming increasingly impossible in this discordant world, as Duffleman must act both as psychiatric counselor and General Nanny to the uproarious, unfocused, aggressive and all-but tuition-exploited students enrolled in his lower shelf classes.

The educational institutions in Kudera’s novel are education factories, more concerned with dollars and high student enrollment than in providing quality and affordable education. The tenured class, those with the puny administrative power, comes across as revoltingly grotesque and yet ultimately, recognizable. Kudera’s jabs are shockingly effective:

“From the daily papers, he knows one professor murdered his wife and another was convicted of testing the date-rape drug on  a research assistant. A third came back from Southeast Asia with a laptop full of seven- to twelve-year-old smiles, torsos, and bare behinds, and a master of library science was caught in the hidden corridors of power with a male specimen aged eleven or fourteen. There were rumors scrawled on bathroom walls of ssecret Facebook agreements to exchange fellatio for A’s in freshman seminars.”

In one telling scene, when Duffleman, genuinely concerned for the student’s welfare, reports to his superiors about the student who melted down in his class, their only intentions are to make sure that neither professor nor student intends to sue the university. (Penn State, anyone?)

Meanwhile, as Duffleman plods through his day, the bow and arrow hunter has opted for a taste of human flesh; the United States Undersecretary of Homeland Security Defense is arrowed in the brain during a university speech at Liberty Tech, and the entire city of Philadelphia goes bonkers. Every Left Wing and Right Wing and Centrist nutbag erupts. Protests and counter-protests emerge; while the cops insist on palpating every sack and satchel within reach, as though this were another dress rehearsal for 9/11.

The closing scene involves Duffleman and the bow and arrow sniper.  Duffleman becomes achingly alive in this moment, a moment that may or may not be too late for him and us.

I struggle to find contemporary comparisons for Kudera’s satire. Palahniuk perhaps, but less salacious and juvenile; at times, David Lodge, but with much more meat. But the ultimate compliment I can give to this campus romp is that it bears no resemblance to any other novel that I can think of. Kudera, an English instructor, obviously knows his subject intimately. Fight for Your Long Day is hysterical and sobering, and Cyrus Duffleman one of the great anti-heroes in recent fiction.

I just finished reading The Batman Chronicles Volume One, which contains the first Batman stories ever published. It includes the Batman stories from Detective Comics #27-38 and Batman #1. I’m learning all sorts of interesting things about the early Batman. For example, the original Batman didn’t go for that whole “I don’t kill” morality from the later Batman comics and the movies. These stories from 1939-1940 are pre-Comics Code Authority. Batman’s adversaries and their henchmen end up dead in most of the first batch of stories (click on the image to enlarge it).  

But the most interesting panel might be the last one in Batman #1, where the reader gets advice on citizenship from Robin, the Boy Wonder. We would expect Robin, like most American teenage boys in our own time, to care deeply about obedience, industriousness, and nationalism. But who knew that a teenage boy could be so passionate about regularity?

I was very excited to receive this collection of stories. This is the third Ellen Datlow collection I’ve read, the second that I’ve reviewed, and I think she does a great job of choosing really interesting stories that all play to a theme. Blood and Other Cravings isn’t your typical book about vampires. These aren’t necessarily creatures that suck your blood and hate garlic, but they are creatures who steal something essential from you. They draw something — energy, will, love, vitality — from you and leave your diminished. They aren’t terribly happy stories, not surprisingly. Two of them were so cruel that I found them deeply disturbing. But all in all, this is a very good collection.

It’s always tough to review a book of short stories. Where do you begin? What if you love some stories and hate others? This is pretty easy review, though: most of the stories were quite good. I didn’t love the collection as much as I did Naked City, but I think that is partly because of the subject matter. Talking about something that sucks the life out of you — even if we’re not talking about your blood — is not cheery. But the stories aren’t all doom and gloom, they just aren’t as funny as in some of the other collections.

I particularly enjoyed “X for Demetrious” by Stephen Duffy. It is based on the true story of a man who was found dead in his apartment, surrounded by lines of salt, bottles of…waste, and cloves of garlic. It is a distressing look at a mind that is caving in on itself. I was also thrilled to see a story from Kathe Koja — I reviewed her novel Under the Poppy last year and loved it. “Toujours” is not a vampire story, but it is a story about losing the thing that sustains you, having it taken away from you. It fits right in, in its own way.

I also really enjoyed “Blood Yesterday, Blood Tomorrow” by Richard Bowes. I could easily understand the appeal of the mementos of “Myrna’s Place” and other, similar establishments, the feeling that you knew a little something that the world at large did not know. I have always found there is nothing quite as enticing as being in the inner circle, knowing the secret stuff that others can’t guess at — very, very alluring. And if you can profit from that, why not?

There were two stories that I found very disturbing. These were stories of cruelty that haunted me for a bit, a look at being the vampire that was not at all appealing. The first was “Mrs. Jones” by Carol Emshwiller. A lonely woman makes a discovery that lets her get something she desperately wants and also gives her a mean little triumph over her equally lonely sister. But what she is willing to do to get it! It brought out all my protective instincts. The second story was “Mulberry Boys” by Margo Lanagan. It’s a little difficult in the beginning, purposely so, to sort out exactly what is going on, but once you do…shiver. Again, you can’t help but feel a deep sympathy for the poor fellow, with his gentle protests. I found it much more distressing than the stories of more forthright violence.

Overall, this is an excellent collection. There are stories that look at the theme from a variety of angles. There’s a bit of humor (“The Baskerville Midgets” by Reggie Oliver) and a couple of good scares.

My copy of Blood and Other Cravings was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I was really looking forward to reading this book! From the minute it arrived, it sat on the shelf, in the To Be Read pile, and whispered to me every time I walked by. You could tell by the cover that it was going to be racy. There was also the subtitle, “A Novel of Sex & Violence”, to give you a clue. And the publisher — Hard Case Crime. Doesn’t that just sound like it’s going to be a great book? And Lawrence Block’s Getting Off did not disappoint.

This is a novel about a female serial killer, but a woman so interesting that sometimes you forget just what she is. She picks up men in bars, takes them home and has sex with them, then she drugs them and kills them. She takes their money, their credit cards, whatever she needs to pay her bills. When she gets bored, she moves on — new city, new neighborhood, new name. She’s been doing some version of that since she left home (and believe me, her leaving home was a story in itself).

Katherine (at least that’s how she starts out) is a woman on a mission. She has decided that she needs to kill every man she’s ever had sex with. Now for some of us — most of us, I would guess — that’s not a really long list, at least not compared to Katherine’s. There are probably hundreds of men on her list, but since she kills most of them, it’s not too daunting. If only she could find them all…

Okay, this is not a book to leave around for the kiddies to read. There are parts that are downright raunchy. (I consider that a plus.) Of course, if you didn’t figure that out from the cover, this is probably not warning enough. Katherine is a very disturbed person, but yet, I almost found myself rooting for her. (In one situation, I was definitely on Team Katherine, although I think she was Missie by then.) And then, just as you’re almost enjoying her exploits, she does something horrible. Something that you can’t overlook. And you’re a little disgusted with yourself for forgetting that she’s a vicious, disturbed serial killer. How can you not love a book you get that caught up in?

The ending…I wondered where Block was going with this one. I didn’t exactly think he has written himself into a corner, but I was sorting through possible scenarios and not coming up with much. It managed to surprised me and I love the way things wrapped up. I’ve come across a lot of books that are great right up to the last chapter, then they fizzle. This delivered a very interesting ending.

This book was originally written under the name Jill Emerson. According to Jill’s webpage, she hasn’t had a book out since 1975! It’s a surprising assortment from a male author, and worth checking out. (If you scroll to the bottom of her webpage, there are links and descriptions of the other novels.)

My copy of Getting Off was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.