Review: "Bitterfrost" by Bryan Gruley

 

Bitterfrost by Bryan Gruley Severn House, 2025   Bitterfrost, the first in a new mystery series by Edgar Award winner Bryan Gruley, is an uneven but memorable legal thriller set in Michigan’s harsh north country—about as far north as one can go before crossing to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Jimmy Baker—Bakes when he’s on the ice playing hockey—is a local legend. As a kid Jimmy played for the local hockey team, the Ice Kings, and later went on to play in the minors. As a professional hockey player Jimmy was a team enforcer, or a “goon,” tasked with intimidating opposing players with his fists. A role he did well, until he walked away from the game after sending an opponent to the hospital. Now Jimmy works at Bitterfrost’s ice rink, where the Ice Kings play, driving the Zamboni, nicknamed Zelda, and trying to piece his life back together after a divorce. Everything changes for Jimmy when two strangers from down state—read that as Detroit—are beaten to death. One was found near Jimmy’s house and the other outside the ice rink where he works. Jimmy is the logical suspect since he had a run-in with the men at a local bar the night they were killed and everyone knows Jimmy is violent. Jimmy’s friend, Devyn Payne—whose mother owns the ice rink and the hockey team—takes Jimmy’s case. What she finds is a labyrinth of crime wreathing just beneath Bitterfrost’s placid looking surface. Bitterfrost’s opening chapter is as close to brilliant as any you’ll read in popular fiction. It is atmospheric and claustrophobic as Jimmy awakens on his kitchen linoleum with no memory of the previous night. His knuckles are scraped, a bruise on his head, and a text on his phone he doesn’t remember sending. The narrative falters as additional characters are introduced, including the heroine, Devyn Payne, but recovers in the novel’s second half as all the pieces begin clicking into place. The small-town politics, especially the rivalry between the Paynes and a duplicitous bunch called the Dulaneys, are well crafted and impact the story just right. The bitter cold Michigan winter adds flavor, too. Bitterfrost is a tale you need to be patient with—there are a few contrived oh my God moments for the characters that are never shared with the reader—but the ultimate payoff is worth wading through the flaws.

Check out Bitterfrost on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Shorts: "Keep Out" by Fredric Brown

 

Keep Out by Fredric Brown   *     *     *     *   DAPTINE IS THE SECRET OF IT. ADAPTINE, they called it first; then it got shortened to daptine. It let us adapt. They explained it all to us when we were ten years old; I guess they thought we were too young to understand before then, although we knew a lot of it already. They told us just after we landed on Mars. “You’re home, children,” the Head Teacher told us after we had gone into the glassite dome they’d built for us there. And he told us there’d be a special lecture for us that evening, an important one that we must all attend. And that evening he told us the whole story and the whys and wherefores. He stood up before us. He had to wear a heated space suit and helmet, of course, because the temperature in the dome was comfortable for us but already freezing cold for him and the air was already too thin for him to breathe. His voice came to us by radio from inside his helmet. “Children,” he said, “you are home. This is Mars, the planet on which you will spend the rest of your lives. You are Martians, the first Martians. You have lived five years on Earth and another five in space. Now you will spend ten years, until you are adults, in this dome, although toward the end of that time you will be allowed to spend increasingly long periods outdoors. “Then you will go forth and make your own homes, live your own lives, as Martians. You will intermarry and your children will breed true. They too will be Martians. “It is time you were told the history of this great experiment of which each of you is a part.” Then he told us. Man, he said, had first reached Mars in 1985. It had been uninhabited by intelligent life (there is plenty of plant life and a few varieties of non-flying insects) and he had found it by terrestrial standards uninhabitable. Man could survive on Mars only by living inside glassite domes and wearing space suits when he went outside of them. Except by day in the warmer seasons it was too cold for him. The air was too thin for him to breathe and long exposure to sunlight—less filtered of rays harmful to him than on Earth because of the lesser atmosphere—could kill him. The plants were chemically alien to him and he could not eat them; he had to bring all his food from Earth or grow it in hydroponic tanks. For fifty years he had tried to colonize Mars and all his efforts had failed. Besides this dome which had been built for us there was only one other outpost, another glassite dome much smaller and less than a mile away. It had looked as though mankind could never spread to the other planets of the solar system besides Earth for of all of them Mars was the least inhospitable; if he couldn’t live here there was no use even trying to colonize the others. And then, in 2034, thirty years ago, a brilliant biochemist named Waymoth had discovered daptine. A miracle drug that worked not on the animal or person to whom it was given, but on the progeny he conceived during a limited period of time after inoculation. It gave his progeny almost limitless adaptability to changing conditions, provided the changes were made gradually. Dr. Waymoth had inoculated and then mated a pair of guinea pigs; they had borne a litter of five and by placing each member of the litter under different and gradually changing conditions, he had obtained amazing results. When they attained maturity one of those guinea pigs was living comfortably at a temperature of forty below zero Fahrenheit, another was quite happy at a hundred and fifty above. A third was thriving on a diet that would have been deadly poison for an ordinary animal and a fourth was contented under a constant X-ray bombardment that would have killed one of its parents within minutes. Subsequent experiments with many litters showed that animals who had been adapted to similar conditions bred true and their progeny was conditioned from birth to live under those conditions. “Ten years later, ten years ago,” the Head Teacher told us, “you children were born. Born of parents carefully selected from those who volunteered for the experiment. And from birth you have been brought up under carefully controlled and gradually changing conditions. “From the time you were born the air you have breathed has been very gradually thinned and its oxygen content reduced. Your lungs have compensated by becoming much greater in capacity, which is why your chests are so much larger than those of your teachers and attendants; when you are fully mature and are breathing air like that of Mars, the difference will be even greater. “Your bodies are growing fur to enable you to stand the increasing cold. You are comfortable now under conditions which would kill ordinary people quickly. Since you were four years old your nurses and teachers have had to wear special protection to survive conditions that seem normal to you. “In another ten years, at maturity, you will be completely acclimated to Mars. Its air will be your air; its food plants your food. Its extremes of temperature will be easy for you to endure and its median temperatures pleasant to you. Already, because of the five years we spent in space under gradually decreased gravitational pull, the gravity of Mars seems normal to you. “It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.” Of course we had known a lot of those things already. The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open. The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right. Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet. Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day. And tomorrow is the final day. Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy. We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins. We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too. If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth. This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!

Fredric Brown authored more than 200 short stories in the mystery and science fiction genres between the late-1930s and the 1960s. He was especially adroit at crafting tales of less than 1,500 words with humor and ironic twist endings. Mr. Brown died in 1972 at the age of 65.

© 1954 Ziff-Davis Publishing Co.

Review: "The Tin Man" by Henry Slesar

 

“The Tin Man” by Henry Slesar Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 1984   Henry Slesar is best remembered for his television writing. He wrote episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, and a bunch of other programs from the late-1950s to the 1980s. He was a maestro of the ironic twist ending so popular in 20th century television anthology series, and short stories from every generation. Speaking of short stories, Slesar’s output numbered in the hundreds. He primarily wrote science fiction and mystery for, in the beginning, pulps like Manhunt and Amazing Stories, before moving into digests like Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Galaxy. His 1984 tale, “The Tin Man,” which I read recently, is an unabashed example of Henry Slesar at his best. The henpecked Harry Budnar is a clothing salesman by necessity—his wealthy wife, Jasmine, insists he keep working—and a technology junkie by aspiration. When the unhappy couple arrive at their friends’ home, Tom and Fleur Polanski, Harry is astounded with the robot that answers the door. Rex, which is the robot’s name, can speak—it responds to Harry’s greeting with, “Hello, Dummy!”—it can traverse the Polanski’s cluttered house, and, once Tom has attached the arm, it will be able to grasp and lift objects. Harry is instantly smitten with the idea of building his own robot. A robot he is certain would be far superior to Rex. But, of course, the domineering Jasmine steps in with her demands and threats, which leaves Harry looking for a solution to his problem. It’s possible the well-read mystery reader may see where, “The Tin Man,” is going early in the narrative (or maybe not since there is a bastard of an ironic twist ending), but it is told so well—with humor, suspense, and an almost tongue-in-cheek style—that it doesn’t matter a whit. Harry as the downtrodden spouse is played perfectly and the reader, by increments, finds himself rooting for the less than perfect husband. The old school technology of the 1980s is fun, too. Did I mention the ending? It may or may not surprise you, but I guarantee it will make you smile.

What's New, Pussycat?: March 2025

Since my last What’s New Pussycat? post, all the way back on February 19th, five orphaned books have found sanctuary in my book loving home. Every solitary title fits squarely within my usual suspects—crime and mystery. The books came from a trio of sources in my home state of Vermont: 1) a HOPE Resale store in Middlebury; 2) Monroe Street Books, an excellent used shop with a bunch of mystery hardcovers from the 1980s and 1990s, also in Middlebury; and 3) Rutland City Free Library’s Friends of the Library book sale held March 14 and 15. I’m pleased with the take because these books (all of them) will be read much sooner than later. So, for your approval, here are my latest house-cluttering treasures…
BINO, by A. W. Gray (© 1988). This first edition from E. P. Dutton came from Monroe Street Books. While I’ve never read any of Gray’s work, I do have fond memories of seeing his novels on bookstore shelves in the 1990s. This one is about a hard charging and (perhaps) unethical criminal lawyer chasing justice from shadowy streets to the halls of Congress. My favorite line from the dust jacket reads: “Bino rubs everybody the wrong way, an ever-present thorn in the side of people who don’t like answering questions.” Which works for me. I’ll let you know more after it’s been read.
DEAD POINT, by Peter Temple (© 2000). This is the third (of four) books in Temple’s marvelous Jack Irish series. Irish is a former high-flying lawyer living on his wits since his wife was killed a few years earlier. Now he does low-level legal work, odd jobs, which are usually unscrupulous, for a horse gambler. In Dead Point, Jack is hired to find part-time barman, Robbie Colburne, but his investigation puts him eyeball to eyeball with some very bad dudes. The first three Jack Irish novels, including Dead Point, were translated into excellent Australian television movies starring Guy Pearce. After those movies aired between 2012 and 2014 it transitioned into an even better television series that ran for four seasons. The copy of Dead Point I picked up from HOPE is a tie-in edition published by Australian publisher, Text, in 2014.
DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, by Walter Mosley (© 1990). This is the 30th anniversary edition published by Washington Square Press in…wait for it—2020! It, like the last book, came from HOPE. I’m ashamed and saddened to admit I’ve never read any of Mosley’s sixteen (so far) Easy Rawlins books, which Devil in a Blue Dress is the first. But I’m planning to make amends in the next few months. If you don’t know, the series is set in post-WW2 Los Angeles. Easy is a war veteran just fired from his defense factory job when he is hired to find a missing white woman, Daphne Monet, with a habit of frequenting black jazz clubs. Devil in a Blue Dress was made into a watchable (but not great) film starring Denzel Washington as Easy released in 1995. It’s worth a viewing if you haven’t seen it, but I’m betting the book is far better.
KILLER GORGEOUS, by Jane Holleman (© 1997). Holleman is a new writer for me and I let this 2004 mass market reprint from Pocket Books sit on the Friends of the Library bookshelves for a few months. But I should tell you, I looked at it, read the blurbs, and even read the first few paragraphs during every sale from the first time I saw it to this last time when I stole away with it. It's about an abused socialite wife, Allison Robbins, looking for a way out of her nightmarish marriage. But—as one would surmise, things go sideways and…well, that’s all I know. A quick search for Jane Holleman netted only three books—Killer Gorgeous, Hell’s Belle and Holy Terror—published between 1997 and 1999.
THAT LEFT TURN AT ALBUQUERQUE, by Scott Phillips (© 2020). This is one of those early days of COVID releases that flew below my radar. When I saw the first edition from Soho Crime in the HOPE store it was a no brainer to rescue its beautiful self and take it home. Phillips is an old hand at writing stylish crime—his most famous is, perhaps, Ice Harvest (2000)—and from what I gather, That Left Turn at Albuquerque is pretty damn good. What I know, a bankrupt lawyer named Douglas Rigby hatches an art forgery scheme that depends on precision and a large cast of players with their own agendas. What could go wrong, right? What I don’t know—if any of the narrative actually takes place in Albuquerque. I’ll let you know.

 

Booked (and Printed): February 2025

Booked (and Printed) February 2025     February zipped by with a whisper. Valentine’s Day, cold weather, and all. Did I mention it was cold? The temperature peaked a ten or more degrees below freezing every damn day until February 25th (when it smiled with a toasty 32-degrees), and there were more than a few days with subzero lows. March, at least in the weather department, is bound to be better. My reading quantity came out mediocre with five novels and three short stories, and the quality of what I read was uneven. Uneven because two of those tales—a novel and a short story—were…as Toad likes to say, blah. I started the month on a high note with David Housewright’s first Rushmore McKenzie, A HARD TICKET HOME (2004). For the last year I’ve been raiding my library’s impressive McKenzie collection—it has 18 of the 21 titles (so far)—and all of those missing are from the first half of the series, including the debut. So my lovely and thoughtful wife gave me A Hard Ticket Home for Christmas and I waited as long as I could before reading it—which was about a month. It was fun to see how McKenzie evolved in the two decades since his introduction and how much he had stayed the same. Read my detailed review here. Up next was Ken Bruen’s impressive new Jack Taylor, GALWAY’S EDGE (2025). Taylor is a disgraced former Guardia, read that policeman, turned private eye in Galway, Ireland. He lives by his own ethical standards, which are often at odds with those of society. In Galway’s Edge, Jack is hired by The Vatican to look into a vigilante group roaming Galway’s dark corners. Of course everything turns to s—, but Jack takes it all in stride. Read my detailed review here. BAD MOON, by Todd Ritter (2011)—who is better known under his pseudonym Riley Sager—was the dark horse of the month. I pulled this one from the library shelf for no other reason than it had been published by Minotaur Books; see my reasoning why here.  And wow did it fill a reading need I didn’t know I had. Bad Moon leans into the psychological thriller subgenre with its twisty and surprising plot but it does so without the jolts and the “oh come on” plot twists that often dampen the genre. I liked it a bunch and I’m certain I’ll find my way back to Ritter’s writing again. Read my detailed review here. February’s bum read is an old paperback original I’ve been carrying around for two decades, give or take a year or three. Jack D. Hunter’s THE TERROR ALLIANCE (1980) is a cold war spy thriller that began promising enough with a little humor, some action, and a cool take on the late-1970s CIA. It even has some relevance in today’s post-truth MAGA world—only one example is a US president exiting NATO and abandoning Europe. But this tantalizing opening was defeated by an overly complicated plot and a bunch of talk-talk filler that made reading a chore rather than a relief. Which is a shame because I’ve read a handful of Hunter’s thrillers with good results. The last book of February returned me to the same world as the first. THEM BONES, by David Housewright (2025), is the latest entry in the McKenzie series and well… it doesn’t come out until June 24 and so I won’t go into detail now. But rest assured I’ll have a review on the street before it hits the bookstores. My favorite book of the month? It must be Bruen’s Galway’s Edge.

As for short stories, my intake was limited. I read three and of those, two were damn good and the third was odd and ultimately disappointing. The first, Judy Alter’s “SWEET REVENGE” (1994), is a treacherous, and most excellent, tale about an abused woman in the Old West. It highlights the misery many women suffered on the frontier and its open ending is perfectly perfect. I liked it a bunch. I read “Sweet Revenge” in Ed Gorman’s fine anthology The Best of the American West (1998). “HOW I SPEND MY DAYS AND MY NIGHTS,” by Håkan Nesser (2006), is the first of two tales I read from a cool Swedish Crime boxed set I picked up at a library sale—I wrote about the set here. This brilliant crime story has a Hitchcockian flare with an ironic ending that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read it. Read my detailed review here. The other Swedish Crime tale was Arne Dahl’s “MIGRAINE” (2012). This wacky sorta existentialist tale is just good enough to finish, but its weirdness and lack of any action or even an interesting conclusion made it frustrating. Only part of the frustration is when, in the last few paragraphs, the reader realizes the whole exercise is nothing more than an advertisement for Dahl’s novels. It had the same buzz as Ralph’s Little Orphan Annie’s decoder ring, from A Christmas Story, when it spelled out: “Drink More Ovaltine.” Fin— Now on to next month…

"The March Violets / Ulysses in San Juan" by Mike Baker

The March of Violets / Ulysses in San Juan by Mike Baker   Phillip Kerr’s THE MARCH VIOLETS, a derogatory reference to people who joined the Nazi Party in Germany after Hitler became dictator in 1933, opens in 1938 Germany, a week before the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The authorities are busy scrubbing the city clean of criminals, vagrants, and any sign of the city’s rabid antisemitism. Bernie Gunther is a former Berlin cop now working as a private detective when he’s hired by a rich German industrialist to find a necklace stolen from his daughter’s apartment—but not the person who burned her and her husband’s bodies after their apartment was robbed and they were murdered.       Bernie isn’t alone in his search, because the son-in-law was in the Gestapo. The SS also wants the killers, and because the son-in-law’s job was rooting out corruption and sending the guilty to concentration camps, assorted other sordid types want the papers that are coincidentally also missing from his safe. Post-Weimar Republic, pre-World War II shenanigans ensue. That’s a mouthful.       This is a complicated book to like. Phillip Kerr was a solid writer of muscular prose, but all the characters are loyal Germans, half of whom are Nazis. To quote the existential philosopher Jake Blues, I hate Illinois Nazis. Kerr uses a device called “saving the cat” in cinema. You take an obvious villain and have him do something kind or selfless, and voila! You have a sympathetic villain.       It’s clear that Bernie will die for his country, but fuck the Nazis. They’re morons and thugs—very dangerous morons and thugs. He’s tough as nails, healthy as barbed wire, etc., but it’s their pillow fight, so like a good servant of the Reich, he knows when to bow and scrape. Kerr wrote a bunch of Bernie Gunther books before his untimely death, each moving Bernie through history, German and otherwise. I’ve not read them, but this one is almost as good as Chandler in its hardboiled toughness, as Bernie navigates a post-Weimar Nazi underworld that is one thin thread apart from the Nazi power machine.       One reviewer, a former cop, had two criticisms* of the book, and one was that Kerr was trying to out-hardboil the masters, which made me wonder if he’d read much hardboiled detective fiction, as Kerr never goes to the places with action or dialogue that those guys did—ever. He does work in lots of German slang, and Bernie is a wise-ass, but never to the levels of Ed Noon or Philip Marlowe. As I said, he’s a bit cowed by the current regime’s willingness to kill and torture, or torture and kill, the poor souls who mistakenly step out of line—a line sometimes impossible to predict.       The way Kerr approached writing the Bernie Gunther books over 40 years reminds me of Barry Sadler’s Casca books, without the supernatural twist, throwing Bernie into the world’s historical and espionage timeline. Considering the Allies’ willingness to utilize Nazi “talent” post-atrocities, this is actually closer to believable than we might be comfortable admitting.

I also read ULYSSES IN SAN JUAN by Robert Friedman, which concerns itself with Wolf, a Holocaust survivor who moved from the 1972 Bronx in New York City to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he now runs a jewelry store for tourists in the Old City. He collects strays, giving them jobs in his store—botched and broken Nuyorican refugees returning to Puerto Rico to escape New York City’s cold streets for something else. I’m not sure what. I’m not 100% sure Friedman knows either.      That probably reads like criticism, but really, Friedman understands the unexplainable nature of the human soul, and while he sheds some light on the terrain, he leaves much murky and unexplained. There’s Stevie, a young man desperately trying to avoid the fomenting revolution, Puerto Ricans who want the Yaquis out, as he writes a novel about a Puerto Rican cabin boy on an English sailing ship, constantly weaving his strange life in broken San Juan into a Conradian naval adventure. There’s Doris, who is drinking herself to death, tormented by her broken stateside marriage to a sociopathic lawyer whose abuse she found sexually arousing until it nearly killed her.       But the main action is the Holocaust survivor Wolf, still haunted by his wife being dragged away to a Nazi pleasure camp and his 8-year-old daughter murdered right before his eyes by Nazi train guards. He takes up with a Puerto Rican junkie whore named Carmen, who he helps get off smack. She becomes a surrogate for his lost wife, his lover, and somehow also his murdered child. Carmen’s cousin Manny, who’s also her drug dealer, wants her back in his stable, and mucho hardboiled shenanigans ensue. It’s book three in the Puerto Rico Trilogy, but the other two books tell independent stories, so they can be read out of order.       It reminded me of those 50s paperback originals whose action sat on the cusp of being action novels but never seemed to get there, yet remain hardboiled to the core. This book has action and darkness, and is definitely hardboiled—but don’t come to it expecting Executioner-style vengeance or a Whittington protagonist-crushing twist plot. Friedman is a realist, so the book bends toward noir**, with an ending as subtle as it is inevitable, but still surprising. ____________________ *   The other criticism was that Bernie does some detection, but mostly uses the time-honored private detective method of being a really good guesser. **  A reader of a review I wrote about William Burroughs’ Junkie said I was wrong in calling it a noir, because his definition included a level of toughness that Burroughs’ effeminate protagonist lacked. ____________________ BONUS: Hardboiled vs. Noir   I used to love the “what is hardboiled and what is noir” discussion until I discovered that the term hardboiled refers to the grammar from a speech by Mark Twain: “...a hundred million tons of A-number-one fourth-proof, hard-boiled, hide-bound grammar...” Scholars claim this was a reference to a period joke, something like, “a hardboiled egg is hard to beat.” After much overuse, the term came to mean whatever the writer wanted it to mean, regardless of what any dictionary had to say.       Noir is worse. It comes from the Gallimard imprint Serie Noire, named for the black card stock Gallimard used for cheap efficiency. They had previously used yellow covers until they ran out of that paper. While some of the authors they published, like Jim Thompson and Charles Williams, were truly noir, they also published James Hadley Chase and Peter Cheyney, who weren’t noir or hardboiled at all. Noir has suffered the same fate as hardboiled, becoming whatever the writer wants it to mean.       More interesting to me is that many of the “translators” who wrote the translations of these books for Gallimard had a poor handle on English—or none at all—like Boris Vian, who translated Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep by having his wife read a section, describe it to him, and then old Boris would just riff, like the Norwegian guy who read Dracula, hated the ending, and re-wrote it to his satisfaction, creating the first known fan fiction ever.

Check out The March Violets at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback. Check out Ulysses in San Juan  at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.