Uncle Patrick's Bookmobile

Here are some quick reviews of the books I read on my recent vacation:

Firebreak by Richard Stark - This is one of a series of crime novels concerning a career criminal. Mel Gibson played this protagonist in the movie Payback, which is based upon another novel in the series. If you have seen that movie, then you have a good idea of the tone. It is a quick read and the model of a modern genre novel, with prose as tight as the smile on a presidential candidate's face. This is the kind of stuff that Elmore Leonard reads to pick up pointers. The plot concerns a breakin at a dot-com billionare's Montana hunting lodge. Computer hacking plays an important role in the story but I found many of those elements unconvincing. The rest is good, clean fun.

Background to Danger by Eric Ambler - Another paragon of tight prose, this work is a spy thriller of the first order. Mr. Ambler pioneered this genre and he did pretty well by it. In this novel, a British freelance journalist gets the crap beat out of him by amoral business flunkies who seek to convince the Rumanians not to side with the Soviets in WWII. As you can tell, the sides in the conflict are pretty blurry. I found the plot to be a little farfetched but I liked the characterization. There are no James Bonds here (and by that I mean the Bond in the films, not necessarily the Bond from the novels), just people trying to stay alive while doing the right thing. Even when they have no idea idea what that is.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross - This is a hard SF space opera by a fellow touted as the next big thing in the genre. The plot revolves around two people who seek to prevent an armada of space ships from crushing a rebellion on a distant colony world. There is a lot of space-time anomalies, sentient communications networks, nanotechnology and the like. I am afraid that Mr. Stross makes the mistake of making all of his villains incredibly stupid in order to show his protagonists in the best possible light; however, he takes his characters through their paces and poses some interesting problems. Pretty entertaining for those long hours on plane flights.