Reviews and Comments

A damn fine follow-up to The Legend of Charlie Fish. Rountree says in the afterword that he has a series of monster stories set in the Wild West in mind. I hadn't seen Charlie Fish as The Creature from the Black Lagoon when I read it, but that's the inspiration. This is Frankenstein in a Wild West Revue. Where my takeaways from Charlie Fish were a sense of place and longing for a family, Frank Lightning is the tragedy, trauma, and perhaps inevitability of violence.

Catherine Coldbridge is both a doctor and something like a witch. Two weeks after marrying Frank Humble in Montana in 1879, he is ambushed while on patrol for the U.S. Army. Distraught and heedless of the consequences, Catherine stitches him together from battlefield body parts and uses magick to bring him back to life. In a soulless, monstrous rage, he kills and Catherine flees. 25 years later, she attempts to right the wrong by killing him, for which she has hired the brothers Dawson, men not afraid to kill.

Be ready for a lot of horror-movie-level violence. Unlike many Westerns, the violence takes its toll. On everyone. On Catherine especially. Also on Frank, Catherine's first love Louisa, the Dawsons... everyone. This is bloody and traumatic. Not a wilting flower, Catherine is nevertheless consumed with the psychic effect of violence.

Quite good! Not as good as Charlie Fish, but I'm still giving it four stgars.

Jack Yu is a detective who is assigned to New York's Chinatown beat, where he grew up. There's a crime and an investigation and I really enjoyed that it involved shoe leather and collecting clues and not jumping to conclusions. But the heart of the story is really about Jack Yu navigating being second generation, and being a cop on behalf of a white-led power structure policing his own community. He's no dupe, but he also doesn't think Chinese people should prey on their own. A childhood friend was murdered by a Chinese gang. Jack Yu's is to become law & order. Another friend's response is to become the leader of another crew that exacts revenge. Years later, they come in contact around the crime at the center of this story.

The ethical lens is presented by the author as complex, and the portrayal is a series of fuzzy compromises rather than easy, sure answers. That feels better than a black-and-white view, but being a non-immigrant white dude, I'm missing experience and perspective.

Floyd Betts returns to his hometown Old Cypress to bury his unloved father when his aunt Constance refuses to pay the $10 the preacher charges for digging a grave in the church cemetery. Nellie and Hank Abernathy are the orphaned children of a witch, late of Old Cypress. Betts, not wanting to leave the children to beg in front of the church in Old Cypress, loads them up to take back to Galveston where he boards. Charlie Fish is... well, read the book. But suffice to say he joins Floyd and Nellie and Hank when they return to Galveston. Nellie and Hank and Charlie all have gifts, and they are going to need them as scoundrels pursue them into the face of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston in 1900.

Extremely engaging story. There's danger. Ghosts. Scoundrels. Hell and high water. Rountree has also put effort into defining his characters. Not just their backstories, but also their values.

It's also one of the best I've read recently at establishing a sense of place through description. Old Cypress and Galveston are not just described visually, but also in the sense of what it feels like to be there, the vibe of each place. This is done without feeling like an info-dump.

All packed into a long novella or a short novel. I'm not sure where it qualifies technically, but it's nowhere near doorstop weight. There's no sense of "finally done with this!" and more like "I wish this weren't over yet."

Mickey Barnes has the job of "expendable." He's sent into hazardous jobs with a high risk of dying, which he often does. Then his body is cloned and his brain is restored from a recent backup, and he's sent out to do something else dangerous. In order to put some tension in the story, Ashton has made it so having more than one multiple alive at the same time is illegal. In the backstory, it's because of a rich multiple who murdered an entire planet and used the biomass to create copies of himself. Oh, also the head of the colony thinks multiples are an abomination because clones have no soul.

That's what he's up against. What he's got going for him is one clone is left for dead but doesn't die. He and his next version (Mickey8) get to put their heads together to save the colony on a harsh planet and figure out how to keep the rest of the colony from knowing about them.

There's a bunch of little things that just don't quite mesh together super nicely, but the characters and plot are much fun.

Billy Boyle is a young Boston cop whose family pulls strings with their Congressman and "Uncle Ike" (Eisenhower) to get a cushy officer position rather than an infantry position in WW2. Ike wants to use him as a special investigator, and the first case is to root out a man who is part of the Norwegian government in exile and also a Nazi spy. While on the grounds of Beardsley Hall, where the Norwegian government-in-exile is located, one of two men competing for King Haakon's ear appears to be murdered. Boyle's search for the spy is now also a search for a murderer.

I found the story enjoyable, especially the early parts of the book where Boyle lays out how he's not really a top-notch detective. Rather he's barely made the rank when he was inducted. And the initial investigation stuff is great too, as it involves things like following money, interviewing staff, and searching rooms. Later in the story the investigation turns more to speculative means, and I don't enjoy that as much. However, the story throughout also includes a lot of the developing friendship between Boyle, British Second Officer Daphne Seaton, and Polish officer-in-exile Piotr "Kaz" Kazimierz. That made up for the investigation veering into methods I dislike in my fiction.

Lastly, the ending is pretty unbelievable, and doesn't hold together on its own terms. I didn't really mind that much, but if you like your mysteries to make sense all the way to the end, this is not the book for you.