Chanticleer Book Reviews

Author: Marlene Harris

The QUISLING FACTOR by J. L. Oakley – Historical European History, Wartime Fiction, Historical Military Thriller

During World War II “quisling” became a byword for a particular type of traitor, one who not only betrays their own country but also actively collaborates with the invaders. The origin of the term was taken from an actual person, a Norwegian named Vidkun Quisling, who didn’t merely cooperate with the Nazis but actually headed a collaborationist regime in his own country.

The Quisling Factor takes place in the immediate post-war period, as the Nuremberg Trials are gearing up in Germany. Norway is conducting its own post-war legal purge of collaborators at all levels of government.

The story is a direct follow-up to the author’s award-winning World War II novel, The Jøssing Affair. This second novel focuses on the physical and emotional toll of war, and its precarious weight of peace on the survivors.

While the events of J. L. Oakley’s latest novel directly relate to those in The Jøssing Affair, each book is quite capable of standing alone. The first one deals directly with the dangers of war, particularly for those who were part of the anti-Nazi resistance. The Quisling Affair is a peacetime story. While the novel definitely deals with the war’s aftermath, it also sits on the chilling crossroad between a spy thriller and Nordic noir, as the dangers faced by former intelligence officer, Tore Haugland, his wife Anna and his Norwegian family face in two directions.

During the war, Tore was captured by the Gestapo, then tortured by Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Norwegian who ran a notorious organization that targeted resistance organizations in the Trondheim region. He is now scheduled to testify against Rinnan and his vicious gang. While those leaders are in prison, someone on the outside clearly does not want Tore to testify. His family is being threatened to perhaps block his testimony. There is also the possibility of betrayal from within. Not all of Tore’s Norwegian family is willing to accept his half-German, half-American wife as they are unable to separate their suffering at the hands of the Nazis from her heritage.

This meticulously researched historical epic delves deeply into the traumas of all the survivors, whether military, resistance, or civilian, as well as peering into the abyss that lies between the horrors behind them and the hopefully brighter future ahead. The reader sees into Tore’s mind and empathizes with the way that his war continues to eat at him – and his heart that has chosen not just to survive but to love again.

We highly recommend The Quisling Factor for readers looking for an exceptional post-WWII story, for a fantastic thriller with both espionage and domestic elements, and for anyone who loves Nordic noir and would like to see it set in another era. This book is a winner.

The Quisling Factor won the Hemingway Book Awards Grand Prize for the 2020 Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards.

July 20, 2020
HENRY CASTLEWAITE and the PORTRAIT of DOOM by Richard Groseclose – Children’s Fantasy Books, Paranormal & Urban Fantasy for Children, Children’s Fantasy & Magic Books

When 11-year-old orphan Henry Castlewaite is delivered to his new foster family in tiny, rural Terwilliger Tennessee, the only sure thing is he is back in the town where he grew up, but that’s about it. After a terrible accident, Henry is suffering from amnesia and doesn’t remember that he’s a wizard, no matter how many times his chaperone from the Castle Family Trust tells him that this is so.

But Henry is a wizard who doesn’t remember anything about his powers or his past, only that he will see his best friend Gwendolyn on the school bus in the morning. It is also clear that while Henry may not remember much about Terwilliger, the residents of the little town remember a lot about him. Especially his new family, where the other boys tease him unmercifully and the local gossip girls haven’t decided whether they have crushes on him or want to vilify him at every turn.

He even has mortal enemies he does not recall. But he also has another friend, Ben, who seems to come from an even stranger background than Henry. And who appears to have amnesia as well.

On the run from those bullies, Henry and Ben discover the old mining tunnels under the school along with the evil wizard who seems to have convinced most of the teachers that Henry needs to be captured and brought to him – clearly not for Henry’s own good.

Once Henry, Ben, and Gwendolyn realize that they have all lost parts of their memories, they stop trusting the adults around them and are determined to find out the truth for themselves. They are all in danger.

The development of this world where our hero can see the magic hidden in plain sight certainly weaves its own spell. In short, Groseclose presents a fun, adventure-filled new series that promises to fill the gap in children’s fantasy literature left by Rowling’s last book in the Harry Potter series. That’s a big gap, but readers who zipped through the Potter world and those who’ve not had the opportunity to dive in will surely feel at home here. After all, it’s not every day readers experience the pandemonium that ensues when a two-headed dragon is brought to life in the middle of an art museum!

As Henry and his friends delve ever deeper into the strangeness of the world that the adults are attempting to hide from them, they uncover deep secrets, hidden depths, and evil witches and wizards who look to Henry to resurrect a long-dead mystery. And they’re not planning to let anyone stand in their way.

In this world of candle spirits, hidden portals, memory enhanced letters, and time-traveling magical creatures, Henry and his friends take on a quest that will save the world – or end it. Each twist and turn in the story opens up a new world of adventure, even as it shakes our heroes’ world to its foundations.

Readers seeking stories that weave magic, adventure, friendship, and danger surrounding a Boy-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, complete with evil wizards and desperate quests, need to look no further than Henry Castlewaite for their next reading adventure.

July 15, 2020
BLOOD on the CHESAPEAKE by Randy Overbeck – Paranormal, Crime Thriller, Ghost Mystery/Suspense

Once upon a time, Darrell Henshaw saw dead people. Or rather, one specific dead person: his uncle. When Darrell was just 13, Dead Uncle Ed sat on the end of his bed and warned him not to go joyriding with his brother the next day – and not to let his brother go, either. Darrell only half-believed in ghosts in general or Ed in particular, so he only half-paid attention to that warning. Darrell didn’t go, his brother did, and his brother lost some toes to hypothermia and his chance to play varsity sports.

Darrell is an adult now and has been for a while. He’s also the new football coach and history teacher, at crumbling Williams High School in the very tiny town of Wilshire, Maryland. He believes it’s his job to bring a high school championship to the school in its final year in its old building. But the ghost that haunts the halls of Williams High School has other plans for the new coach. Ghost-sensitive Darrell is the spirit’s one last chance at revenge before the walls of the place where he was murdered come tumbling down.

Blood on the Chesapeake is, first and foremost, a ghost story. Darrell is haunted by the ghost of a young black man, just as the entire school has been for over 50 years. The ghost moves objects in Darrell’s office, operates the staff copy machine, and generally appears all over the school, but most frequently in Darrell’s office and the widow’s walk outside his window, the place where the young man supposedly hanged himself. But there are also plenty of people who hint that there is more to the story, and it’s that search for more that drives Darrell to uncover the truth, through a search of primary sources and historical records that is both fascinating and meticulous at the same time. In that search, readers will experience both the joy of discovery and the despair of what is revealed. It seems that some things are even worse than imagined.

The truth that Darrell unearths is one that the entire town has shrouded in a cloak of silence – and shame. After all, even in the early 1960s, lynchings were terrible things that happened in rural areas of the Deep South, not in suburban Maryland.

As Darrell dives deeply into history, the real history, he learns that it happened there and that the attitudes and beliefs that caused that young man’s death are alive and well – as are the men responsible for that death. Men who will do anything to protect themselves. After all, they’ve already committed one murder. Why not more?

While the hauntings of the high school and its coach are certainly the chilling stuff of which nightmares are made, it’s the truth that Darrell uncovers that is the real terror. Terrible things could happen there – and did happen there. And they were covered up there because history is written by the victors. In this case, the survivors and the victims have no voice.

Blood on the Chesapeake is a haunting story about the lengths and depths that one man will go to finish his unfinished business. If revenge is a dish best served cold, this time that revenge is served with the chill of the grave.

March 11, 2020
NO WINTER LASTS FOREVER by Jonathan Epps – Vigilante Justice Thrillers, Literature, Thrillers

There is a frequently paraphrased quotation that goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But there is also a well-known aphorism that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” This is a story where those truisms come together like a train wreck, at the very least a commentary on one of the darkest underbellies of American subculture.

No Winter Lasts Forever by Jonathan Epps takes place in the present, with mass shootings in the news every other week, an opioid epidemic that’s out of control, and an entire generation of young people who will, by all current economic measures, not do as well as their parents, let alone better, as previous generations have before them.

This story also takes place inside the head of Jackson Warner, a 52-year-old man in tiny Franklin, Missouri, who learns of a shooting at the school where he taught for many years. If matters can be worse, and they are, Jackson discovers his 21-year-old nephew is on the exact same path as the shooters.

Jackson won’t allow him to sit idly by. He needs to do something to fix what feels like his little corner of the national malaise. Even if all he can really do is attempt to get his nephew on a different course. He wants justice.

The story here is, in many ways, Jackson’s descent into a kind of madness. He begins to haunt the underground internet chat rooms where misguided young men trash talk each other and discuss gunning the world down. He loses track of his real life, his girlfriend, his family, and especially himself.

It’s not an easy read. Jackson’s online flirtation with those who want to end it all and take as many as possible down with them is visceral. As his walk through very dark places consumes his life, he takes on a few too many of the attitudes of the young men he says he’s “investigating.” His anger at everything he sees wrong in society is palatable and soon spins out of control.

Readers may feel that his descent into that underworld goes on a bit too long, or at least reading about it does. The online chat room language is repetitive, incoherent, unrelieved in its violence, and probably requires all the trigger warnings available for a SWAT team to mobilize. It feels authentic, and it’s terrifying. However much like a train wreck, Epps’s writing is so compelling that readers will be unable to turn their eyes away; in fact, they won’t be able to put the book down.

And just when he seems to draw back from the madness all around, it comes for Jackson and those he holds dear. He has ignored Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning. He has gazed into the abyss too long, never realizing that the abyss has gazed back at him.

It may be true that “no winter lasts forever,” but when the metaphorical spring finally comes, will it be enough to bring Jackson Warner into the light? You’ll have to read it to find out!

This story is an affecting read, but not a comfortable one. The reader is inside Jackson’s head every step of the way and wants to urge him to retreat before it is too late. That he does not, causes the reader to close the book with a shiver of dread. And that’s exactly the thing that makes Jonathan Epps one of our favorite new thriller authors.

January 6, 2020
DESTINY’S WAR (Saladin’s Secret #1) by Pyram King – Alternative History, Alternative History Science Fiction, Historical Fantasy

Destiny’s War is the first in a series of novellas that fictionalize the experiences of a war correspondent, occasional amateur archeologist and sometimes caravan guard Francis Marion Jager during the Desert Campaign of the Great War; the war that was supposed to have been the end of all wars, later known as World War I.

Jager, a young American far from home scraping together a living at the edge of an unsung campaign of a brutal war, left behind a diary of his exploits – a journal that the author has turned into compelling prose wrapped around meticulous research.

Jager is a character caught between multiple sides and perspectives while carefully observing them all. As an American, his observations of the British units with whom he serves, including their attitudes towards their Bedouin allies as well as their German and Turkish enemies, is often sly and cutting. At the same time, he exhibits empathy with the common soldier.

It is 1917, and the war has been going on for three years. Everyone seems to have lost track of its purpose, morale is low, and some have lost their moral centers.

Although still a very young man, Jager has already seen too much; he is as war-weary as any of the soldiers he reports on, and is afraid to befriend anyone out of the very reasonable fear that they will not survive. He is a man who has taken too many losses to sign himself up for more. And yet he becomes involved again anyway.

As a speaker of not merely English but also his grandfather’s native German and the Arabic language of the Bedouin tribes, Jager can see into all the sides of this conflict. Having learned his Arabic while traveling with those tribes, he respects their position considerably more than the British who are allied with them by policy but disparaging of them in practice.

He is the quintessential outsider, able to see all sides of the conflict while being part of none.

Destiny’s War is just the tip of the iceberg of Jager’s experiences. As the story opens, the young man is attached to the Camel Corps, spying for the famous Gertrude Bell. Quite suddenly, he has a historical artifact that entirely too many factions will kill to obtain.

This is only the beginning of his story. Readers who love the epic sweep of Lawrence of Arabia will find themselves immersed in that bygone era, as seen through the eyes of a man who met everyone and experienced it all.

In the end, Destiny’s War feels like the opening chapter of an absolutely fantastic story. It’s a small sampling, the merest taste of a tale that feels like it will be epic. Indeed, the only criticism that most readers are likely to have is that the story feels too short. It’s a tease and a treat.

Readers will be left salivating for the next chapter. This one is highly recommended for readers who love the sweep of history and want to feel as if they are there.

December 5, 2019
RIDE the UNIVERSE by Mark Rues – Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Philosophy, Magic Realism

A young boy goes on a journey through the solar system searching for the spirit of his sister, discovers the basics of science and spirituality with the help of a mystic teacher and a super-powered cat.

Teddy DeXue’s ride around the universe begins in the summer of 1963, just as his amazing catch wins the Little League Championship for his team. But it doesn’t really start there. It really began the year before when Teddy’s sister Jean died, and his family fractured into broken, grieving pieces.

Teddy has a secret. He believes that his sister is out there, somewhere, and that the moon, the big, bright full moon that helped him make his game-winning catch, is going to help him find her. With training from a mysterious spiritual master, a bit of scientific knowledge gleaned from his dad and guarded by Henry, his strange and slightly super-powered cat, how can he fail?

While his best friend, Tem, thinks that Teddy’s quest is nothing more than wishful thinking, he goes along for the ride – and what a ride it is!

As Teddy searches through the stars for his sister, his engineer father introduces him to scientific concepts about the nature of the universe; even the many ways that light can be refracted, reflected, and split. In his dreams, Master Fu-Hsi teaches him the spiritual side of what his father’s talking about. It’s up to Teddy to put that knowledge together to make his journey into the stars – and back.

The story and the way it proceeds is reminiscent of the way the best-selling novel, Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder introduced young Sophie to the basic concepts and history of philosophy while pulling readers along for the fascinating journey.

There’s also an element of the classic YA SF novel, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle in Teddy’s search among the stars for his lost sister.

The combination of the two elements draws readers on Teddy’s journey as he finds his way to his sister and back. Along the way, he grows up and learns what it is to love, even as his family finds their way back from heartbreak.

Ride the Universe crosses genres of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Philosophy, as it uses those tropes and more than a bit of magical realism to tell its story.

Ride the Universe is a multi-genre novel with heart. Fasten your seatbelt! For those searching for something a bit more outside the box, look no further, Ride the Universe is a magic Thunderbird of a ride – in an actual, honest-to-goodness, T-bird.

November 11, 2019
INTO the NORTH: A Keltin Moore Adventure by Lindsay Schopfer – Epic Fantasy, Steampunk, Action/Adventure

If Jack London had written about hunting fantastic beasts in a fantasy-tinged “Great White North” during a gold rush, instead of real animals in the Klondike, he’d have created a hunter like Keltin Moore and a beast like the Ghost of Lost Tap.

The adventures of Keltin Moore read a lot like London’s best adventure stories, only written as if they were inspired by Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series. The combination leads to a chilling story (in more ways than one) about a professional beast hunter and his companions on a quest to make some money and save a town from a beast that no one has survived. Still, everyone has seen the aftermath of its depredations.

They call it the Ghost of Lost Tap because it moves like a ghost. Or something supernatural. And no one has been able to catch it, certainly not the little band of shakedown artists calling themselves the Hunter Guild that has sprung up in the ramshackle boomtown of Lost Tap.

The story focuses on the character of Keltin Moore, the last of a long and storied family of professional beast hunters. Keltin learned his trade at his father’s knee, and like his father, is used to hunting alone. But in his second adventure, he is traveling with an apprentice, young Jaylocke, who needs to learn a trade to earn his place as an adult among his own people.

In Lost Tap, Keltin and Jaylocke band together with old friends that they fought with in the first book of Keltin’s adventures, The Beast Hunter. While they hunt the “Ghost,” Keltin finds himself meditating on the nature of leadership, his need to be alone versus his understanding that he needs others to bring down this unstoppable beast, and his feelings of responsibility to those under his care – and in his heart.

Keltin is a fascinating character. This second installment of the series provides a thought-provoking perspective on his profession, his responsibilities as a leader, and his desire to save people, often from their own mistakes.

At the same time, the world that Keltin inhabits, as much as it will remind readers of London’s tales of the Klondike, is a fantasy world and not London’s historical one. Except for the beasts themselves, with atypical and strangely asymmetric biology, there is little magic in this world or not that is seen in this story.

Beasts are killed with guns, not spells. No matter how unnatural they seem, a bullet to the brain, once Keltin manages to determine where a beast’s brain actually is, kills them just fine. But the places Keltin refers to, and the sentient nonhumans that he meets and befriends, remind the reader that this is a different world with its own history.

While these reminders are not enough to make the reader feel they have missed too much by starting with this second book in the series, they do serve to tease the reader that there are stories yet to be told. We love this adventure/fantasy so much, we happily recommend readers to start with the first book in the series and then move on.

Into the North: A Keltin Moore Adventure by Lindsay Schopfer is such a terrific story on its own that readers will feel compelled to pick up the other stories just to catch up on all the action! Highly recommended.

Into the North: A Keltin Moore Adventure won First Place in the CIBA 2018 OZMA Awards for Fantasy Fiction.

November 8, 2019
COOPERATIVE LIVES by Patrick Finegan – Literary Fiction, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction, Romance Literary Fiction

How well do people really know their neighbors? More importantly, or perhaps more sinisterly, how well do those neighbors know each other – and each other’s secrets?

Cooperative apartment buildings may exist everywhere, but in the U.S., they are frequently imagined as a distinct creation of the densely populated New York City landscape – the location of Cooperative Lives.

This is the story of one particular co-op on Central Park South, a desirable address that is home to a number of seemingly affluent, mostly middle-aged and older residents who look as if they lead rather comfortable and downright dull lives.

Of course, there wouldn’t be a story if that were the case.

As the novel shifts from apartment to apartment, from resident to resident, readers glimpse the secret hurts, the poorly hidden grievances, and the deeply held griefs that inhabit each resident – and the ways that these seemingly casual acquaintances are linked by suddenly exposed lies.

We are drawn into the maze of interconnectedness, slowly but inexorably, beginning with one lonely tenant sleeping on a park bench during one of New York City’s infamous blackouts. From this one life derailed by divorce, the story spirals outwards to the couple whose seemingly perfect life slalomed out of control after a skiing accident that links the first resident’s ex-wife to the one who may spend the rest of hers in a wheelchair.

Who is, in turn, saved from a fatal bus collision by yet another tenant who lapses into a coma and, in his delirium, imagines events that he and his caregivers come to believe must really have happened. This winds up embroiling the cooperative in a shocking televised scandal.

Cooperative Lives is a story told in multiple shifting perspectives, as each resident links to another, to another, and to another. The changes in point of view are often abrupt, but the reader who follows from person to person, lie to lie, and secret to secret will find themselves at the heart of a dark web that stretches well beyond the building to a case that almost seems ripped from the headlines of the late 2000s and early 2010s when this story takes place.

While the author describes this work as extremely recent historical fiction, this character-driven story is most definitely a work of exquisite literary fiction that uses the exploration of its characters to drive the narrative. As the story opens, readers are introduced to the status quo of the residents, mundane lives that, on the surface, are not terribly interesting. But this is far from the case.

Finegan does an excellent job of drawing us inside these seemingly tiny lives, and the deeper we go, the more significant these lives seem, and the greater the impact they have on each other as well as those who have been drawn into their well-written and extremely sticky web.

September 3, 2019
BREACHING the PARALLEL by MWAnderson – Military Sci-Fi, Alternate History, Time Travel

A one-way trip from the near future to the distant past forces one army unit to adapt to a life they could never have dreamt. Their flight into history will forever change the future that they know. Once there, they discover they are not the first to make the journey, and history as they knew it, has gone far, far off course.

As the story opens, the U.S. 4th Armored Cavalry Regiment is conducting an incursion into North Korea during the Second Korean War – an event that seems all too plausible based on 21st-century tensions between North Korea and the rest of the world. But their journey is interrupted by an explosion that interacts with time and space, instantly transporting the 500 men and women from the 21st century A.D. to sometime between 1,000 and 500 B.C.E. Their world is gone – and there’s no way back.

Their initial contact with a nearby village is peaceful until they are forced to decide whether to attempt to preserve the future, a future they are familiar with, or whether they should integrate themselves into their current circumstances and let future history take care of itself.

A local warlord has been regularly raiding their village and conscripting young men for soldiers. None have ever returned. This time it’s the warlord’s men who don’t make it back to camp. They are wiped out by 21st-century weaponry in a matter of seconds. It comes as no surprise, then, when a more substantial unit arrives on the scene to investigate.

Just as the soldiers begin to settle in, building homesteads, relationships, and new lives for themselves, they discover that they are not the first people to travel back in time. Those who have come before are enemies – old enemies.

As the story begins, the circumstances in which the 4th Armored Cavalry finds themselves in are reminiscent of two classic works of alternate history/time travel science fiction, Island in the Sea of Time by S.M. Stirling and 1632 by Eric Flint. In both of those series openers, an unexplained event transports a location, leaving the time travelers to adapt to their changed circumstances and figure out a way to thrive in the past.

The setup is a good basis for a Sci-fi. What makes Breaching the Parallel stand out from the rest is the interesting approach MWAnderson takes, by revealing that our protagonists are not the first to arrive and that people who traveled to the past before them, have become the dominant power in their brave new/old world. Breaching the Parallel sets the characters up for renewed conflict in a future book in this prospective series – a pretty interesting set of characters at that.

Breaching the Parallel is a military sci-fi with a clever twist that both thrills and intrigues. MWAnderson shows his knowledge in detailing how an explicitly military mission would conduct itself in a situation where the mission has changed out of all recognition. Those who love a good military sci-fi need look no further – MWAnderson delivers in spades.

Breaching the Parallel by MWAnderson won 1st Place in the CIBA 2017 Cygnus Awards for Science Fiction.

July 15, 2019
The MIDNIGHT CALL by Jode Millman – Female Sleuth, Police Procedural, Suspense/Thriller

In this fast-paced legal thriller, young attorney Jessie Martin faces multiple crises in both her personal and professional lives when her former high school teacher and beloved mentor calls in the middle of the night to confess a crime. He has just committed murder.

Jessie feels compelled to help Terrance Butterfield, after all the many times he has come to her aid, so she rushes to his side over the protests of her fiancé, and in spite of her third-trimester pregnancy.

When she arrives, she finds herself plunged into the depths of a nightmare that has only just begun. The ending will either make or break Jessie and everything she holds dear. As well as the lives and careers of everyone caught up in the bloody mess.

Although this story begins with Jessie receiving the titular midnight call, the pace of the story is driven by the investigation into the crime, the defendant, and eventually into Jessie herself.

The maneuvering of both legal teams sets a frenetic pace, as the District Attorney is driven to prosecute what turns out to be a high-profile case in the press as well as the courtroom. While the defense attorney sees the case as a way to solve his financial problems, feed his adrenaline addiction, and put himself back on top as the maverick defender with a nose for finding the weak spots in any case.

The punch and counterpunch between the rival legal teams push the story forward at a high-speed, as they maneuver both in and out of the courtroom. The revelation of new information, about both the crime and the people involved in it, is nothing short of fascinating.

As the case builds, Jessie’s life falls apart, and all her long-held secrets are laid bare. During these instances, the pacing slows a bit, in juxtaposition to the back-and-forth battles between the legal teams. The legal strategy and the courtroom battles create an intense page-turner of a book.

The ending of the case does an excellent job of making the reader – and the defense team – question every single thing that came before.

The Midnight Call won First Place in the 2014 CIBAs in the CLUE Awards.

May 21, 2019