Archives for September 2016

Never Go Back, a Jack Reacher Thriller by Lee Child Book Review

September 30, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Everybody likes the Jack Reacher series. He is the no-nonsense hero of 17 of Lee Child’s action-adventure novels, two of which, including this one, Never Go Back, have been made into movies starring Tom Cruise. Cruise is an improbable pick to play Reacher, but the movies are very good, as are the books. I liked this one better than the last few. The story really pulls you in and the action is non-stop. Reacher, the ex-MP major hitches all the way from South Dakota to visit Major Susan Turner, the new CO of his old unit, the 110^th MPs in DC, only to discover that she’s in jail and some very dark

characters have taken over. Rather than go back out the way he came in and disappear again, (as Reacher would never do) he sticks around, breaks himself and her out of the stockade, and sets off with no money and no resources, not even shoe laces, to take on the entire Pentagon establishment and the FBI. With Reacher, that isn’t a fair fight. He and Turner travel back and forth across the country to track down a large drug smuggling operation that has been going on right under the Army’s noses. As usual, the action is nonstop and the writing spartan and no nonsense. Lee Child has never seen an adjective he likes or uses. It is all straight nouns and verbs. The only thing that made a big thud with me was the ending. Hiss Boo! I won’t give away plot spoiler, but a big basher like Reacher deserves enemies that rise to his stature, and who he personally bests in the end, not those two guys.

William F. Brown is the author of 8 suspense thrillers with over 500 Five-Star Reviews: Burke’s War, Burke’s Gamble, The Undertaker, Amongst My Enemies, Thursday at Noon, Winner Take All, and Aim True, My Brothers, and The Cold War Trilogy. They are all available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and now on Audible Audio Books. You read about them and the author’s screenplays and other writing at billbrownwritesnovels.wordpress.com

Foreign Influence, a Scott Harvath suspense thriller by Brad Thor

September 28, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Brad Thor’s Scott Harvath series has become a must-read for action-adventure, suspense thriller fans looking for a good airplane or swimming pool book. His 16^th Scott Harvath book has just come out, and Foreign Influence is book #9 of the series. All of them are thick books, so he is banging them out. I’ve read most of them, and can attest that you don’t need to read them in order. I think one of the reasons this series sells well is that the main character,

Scott Harvath. He is the secret-secret agent, ex-Navy Seal, master of Black Ops who is working for The Carleton Group, a private company to whom the Defense Department has secretly “outsourced” the “go-kill-the-bad-guys” work they can’t legally do anymore budget. He’s the kind of agent we all hope this country would employ – one who goes out and hunts down the terrorists before they hurt us, and shoots first. Sadly, that’s exactly the kind we know it doesn’t employ, and probably shouldn’t. I think that’s Brad Thor’s view too, and, like Daniel Silva and a few others, he pulls no punches in his scathing commentary regarding US foreign and defense policy in the Middle East and how it lets the terrorist states push us around. Whether you subscribe to that view or not, the books are good reads. In addition to the non-stop action, there is a lot of violence, particularly directed at the bad guys, always on full-automatic. And there is torture, but usually of the “bomb is about to go off” type. He has created some unique minor characters, like “The Dwarf” and his big dogs, among others. Great literature? Hardly. But if you are sick or need a good suspense thriller swimming pool book, they are great. Just don’t over-think them.

Kindle Unlimited: The New Paperback

September 26, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Amazon rolled out the Kindle Unlimited program a little over two years ago. While they continue to tweak it and it does have its flaws, I think it will prove to be the most revolutionary step in publishing since the e-book itself, and perhaps since the first paperback was published in 1939 by Pocket Books. They priced them at $0.25 each, at a time when a reader’s choices were $2.50 – $5.00 hardbacks for the wealthy, library books for the literate but less wealthy, the Book of the Month Club, and Reader’s Digest, which surprisingly is still doing fine today. Pocket Books priced the first paperbacks at $0.25 with the expressed intention of bringing affordable books within reach of the masses. Naturally, all of the major publishing houses laughed at them, as they have at nearly every other innovation since the Gutenberg printing press. Their reaction to paperbacks was a precursor to their reaction to e-books. That lack of innovation has always been at the heart of the publishing house’s problems. Within five years, however Pocket Books had sold over 100 million copies, and no one was laughing anymore.

The economics of book prices are interesting. The first Pocket Book paperbacks came out at the end of the Great Depression. A postage stamp cost $0.03, gas cost $0.10 a gallon, and bread was $0.5 a loaf. At $0.25, it was roughly the same as a gallon of milk, or a pound of butter, chicken, or coffee. More importantly, they were priced at about 10% of the cost of a hardback book. That was a lot of money back then, which is why hardback books were mostly found in libraries. According to government statistics, inflation has totaled 1589% since then, which means that 1939 Pocket Book would cost $4.22 in 2016 dollars and that hardback around $42.20.

Think about that for a moment. First, that 10 to 1 spread between hardbacks and paperbacks hasn’t held up over time. The average paperback today is more like twice that and new paperback releases are normally in the $10-14 range. Meanwhile, the average new hardback still manages to stay under $30, so that 10 to 1 spread now is more like 2 or 3 to 1. While a new, big name e-book in the Kindle store comes out at $10 to $14, the price doesn’t stay there for long. After about 6-8 months, they are normally discounted to the $6 to $9 range, still, in a 4 or 5 to 1 spread to the hardbacks, and the average e-book on Kindle costs less than, roughly equivalent to that $0.25 Pocket Book in 1939 dollars. In fact, many readers only buy the Free or $0.99 e-books on the Sale pages, making Kindle the equivalent of the old public library for the frugal among us. One conclusion you can reach from these numbers is that e-books have had a larger effect on hardback book prices than they have had on paperbacks.

The growth of e-book readership has been phenomenal. Technically, they were first “invented” in the 1930s, but they only reached any level of popular use in the past 20 years, following the introduction of the Sony Reader in 2006, and the first Kindle in 2007. Today, over half of all adults own some type of reader or tablet. More significantly for authors, Amazon now sells 65% of all e-books and 85% of all self-published e-books. In 20 years, the e-book and Kindle have grown to become the twin, 800-pound gorillas in the publishing industry, but their biggest impact may be yet to come.

That comment brings us to the Kindle Unlimited subscription service, which Amazon launched in July, 2014, initially to compete with Scribd and Oyster from HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. At that time, the three services had similar sized libraries to choose from; but like everything else, Kindle just seems to do it better. Kindle Unlimited’s offerings have now grown to over 1 million books. Scribd and Oyster have grown as well, but none of the three offer their first rank bestsellers as part of their subscription services. If you are a reader however, and go through three books or more a month, at $9.99 per month the Kindle Unlimited subscription service is a no-brainer.

True, the Kindle Unlimited library only includes books that are part of the Kindle Select program and “exclusive” to Kindle, which unfortunately is less than half of of their total library, primarily the better, self-published books. Unfortunately, it does not offer many new releases, books that were brought out by the major publishers, or books from front line authors, except their old ones. Still, for $10/ month, there are a lot of good books available for an avid reader, and Kindle is now experimenting with ways to expand their book availability options to Kindle Prime.

For authors, the question has been whether to go exclusively with Kindle Select and get your books eligible for the Kindle Unlimited program, or stay out and try to market them through the other independent e-book publishers such as Smashwords and others. My writing friends have gone either way depending on how much they dislike or don’t trust Amazon. I understand those feelings, but my writing income has doubled as a result of the Kindle Unlimited “Nominal Pages Read,” and it now provides 60% of my books sale income, so don’t let your suspicions or emotions pick your own pocket. More about that in my next blog piece.

William F. Brown, is the author of 8 action, adventure, suspense novels on Kindle, Kindle Select, and Kindle Unlimited. To read about them or subscribe to the blog, go to my web site, http://box5462.temp.domains/~billbro4

Book Review – The Valhalla Exchange by Jack Higgins – suspense novels

September 24, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

“Jack Higgins” is the pseudonym of British writer Harry Patterson who lives on one of the Channel Islands, is 87 years old, and has and has now published a phenomenal 84 suspense novels. He is an experienced professional and prodigious writer who keeps banging them, but obviously, some are better than others. The all-time best is The Eagle Has Landed. Most of them center on WW II, Ireland,

suspense novels — William F Brown
Suspense Thrillers

or an assassination, and they are all light and readable. Having read a decent number of his books, The Valhalla Exchange lies somewhere in the middle of the deck. Many of his stories use a literary device like of an old man telling a story in flashback, or a tombstone in a graveyard, as a way of transporting the reader back in time. This one takes up the long-time mystery of what ever happened to Martin Bormann. History says he was killed on the Weidendammer Bridge in central Berlin after escaping from the Bunker after Hitler killed himself. That story has many holes in it and there have been many reports of Bormann in South America long afterward. Higgins’ story has a disguised Bormann escaping south into Bavaria where he runs afoul of an American Army squad and a castle full of elderly political prisoners and generals. Well, the plot is a bit strange, but if you ignore that and like suspense novels, it makes a good airplane or read.

“Deadly Stillwater” suspense fiction by Roger Stelljes – Book Review

September 23, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Roger Stelljes has now written six police procedural, suspense novels featuring Mac McRyan and his friends from the St. Paul Police Department. Deadly Stillwater is the third book in that series, series of action-adventure, suspense fiction set in St. Paul, Minnesota. No doubt, there will be more to come. Although series books are very much in vogue these days; I usually dislike them, because they all-too-often cheat the reader. I feel a story should be distinct and complete from cover to cover and not simply a teaser to get the reader to buy yet another book. By and large, Roger Stelljes’ excellent suspense fiction featuring

‘Mac’ McRyan and a cast of quirky St. Paul homicide detectives don’t do that. They are self-contained stories and you really don’t need to read them in sequence. While they are nominally cop stories, like Deadly Stillwater, Roger Stelljes they are much more action-adventure than police procedurals and fun reads. Think Mitch Rapp with a badge, shooting first and asking questions later. Because this series is set in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, they will always draw comparison to John Sandford’s highly successful “Prey” thriller novels. I think Stelljes’ books like “Deadly Stillwater” have considerably more action and running around (the characters are always running or racing somewhere), while Sandford’s have better suspense and character development, but both series are good reads. Roger Stelljes’ books are on Kindle, and you can frequently find them in the Kindle Countdown Sales. Pick one up, like “Deadly Stillwater.” They are great for the beach or a long airplane ride.

William F. Brown is the author of 5 suspense fiction novels with over 300 Five-Star Reviews: The Undertaker, Amongst My Enemies, Thursday at Noon, Winner Take All, and now Aim True, My Brothers. They are all available on Kindle and now on Audible Audio Books. You read about them and my other book reviews at my web site Billbrownwritesnovels.wordpress.com

Book Review – The Valhalla Exchange suspense thriller by Jack Higgins

September 22, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

“Jack Higgins” is the pseudonym of very prolific British suspense novelist named Harry Patterson, who lives on one of the Channel Islands, is 87 years old, and has and has now published a phenomenal 84 spy novels. He is an experienced professional and prodigious writer who keeps banging them out, but obviously, some are better than others. His all-time best signature piece is The Eagle Has Landed, which was subsequently made into and equally good movie. Most of them center on WW II, Ireland, or an assassination, and they

are all light and readable, and not very complicated. Most of it is fairly straightforward good guys versus bad guys spy novels. Having read a decent number of his books, The Valhalla Exchange lies somewhere in the middle of the deck. Many of his stories use a literary device like of an old man telling a story in flashback, as he did here, or a tombstone in a graveyard, as a way of transporting the reader back in time. This one takes up the long-time mystery of what ever happened to Martin Bormann. History says Hitler’s secretive, but very powerful, Nazi Party Secretary was killed on the Weidendammer Bridge in central Berlin after escaping from the Bunker after Hitler killed himself. That story has many holes in it and there have been many reports of Bormann in South America long afterward. Higgins’ story has a disguised Bormann escaping south into Bavaria where he runs afoul of an American Army squad and a castle full of elderly political prisoners and generals. Well, the plot is a bit strange from that point, but if you ignore that, it makes a good spy novel to take on an airplane or to the swimming pool , nonetheless.

William F. Brown is the author of 8 spy novels with over 500 Five-Star Reviews: Burke’s War, Burke’s Gamble, The Undertaker, Amongst My Enemies, Thursday at Noon, Winner Take All, and Aim True, My Brothers, and The Cold War Trilogy. They are all available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and now on Audible Audio Books. You read about them and the author’s screenplays and other writing at billbrownwritesnovels.wordpress.com

Review of The Third Coincidence, suspense thriller by David Bishop

September 22, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

Nobody believes in coincidences when it comes to multiple assassinations, certainly not the FBI or Secret Service in this suspense thriller. So, when Supreme Court Justices and Governors of the Federal

Reserve start dropping, in completely different ways, the President has no choice but bring in Jack McCall, a veteran CIA and Defense Department agent to track the killers down and stop them. But is it a them? Or just a him? McCall gathers together and eclectic mix of local cops, FBI agents, and computer whizzes to find out. Given the fractured nature of the Washington security world, the competing agencies want McCall stopped almost as much as they want the killer stopped. The only one in Washington who believes McCall can pull it off is the man who talked him into taking the job — The President himself. So it is a coast to coast manhunt from Washington DC to the Bay Area of California with very few clues and the clock is ticking. The question is, will McCall and his team stop the killer before we run out of “Supremes,” or before the killer gets McCall? You need to suspend your credibility a bit to believe one killer could pull off that many complicated killings, each unique and against a well-guarded target, but all-in-all, David Bishop’s suspense thriller is a pretty good story. The author has two Jack McCall novels out, plus others in the Lina Darby and Matt Kile books.

William F. Brown is the author of 8 suspense thrillers with over 500 Five-Star Reviews: Burke’s War, Burke’s Gamble, The Undertaker, Amongst My Enemies, Thursday at Noon, Winner Take All, and Aim True, My Brothers, and The Cold War Trilogy. They are all available on Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and now on Audible Audio Books. You read about them and the author’s screenplay and other writing at billbrownwritesnovels.wordpress.com

Book Review – Tallahatchie by Rick DeStefanis – Good Fiction!

September 10, 2016 by William F. Brown Leave a Comment

I have read and reviewed/ rated several of the author’s Vietnam novels and thought they were good fiction and rated right up there with Fields of Fire, A Rumor of War, or my favorite, The 13th Valley. I was there, and he did a very good job of creating for the reader the sights, smells, and feel of that place and time, as well as

drawing some very well-rounded characters. In Tallahatchie, I think he’s the one who did the rounding out as a very good writer. I’ve never spent much time in the Mississippi Delta (and I’m not sure I want to), but this book saves me the trip. It captures that region today, complete with run down factories, small towns, diner food, waitresses, Delta blues, racism, rednecks, pick up trucks, and all the rest, with a cast of marvelously original characters, as the protagonist, Jack Hartman, leaves the modern world and heads to the Delta to ‘save’ a hopelessly run down factory. I spent two college summers working in a place just like that, and the author nails that too. His characters are the key. At its heart, good fiction (southern or any other kind) is about good characters, half fo whom you want to smack or laugh at, and all the action, feel, or setting won’t make up for weak ones. The author can call this ‘southern fiction’ if he wants, although I’m not sure what that means other than he absolutely nails a time and a region and it is a very well written story. I don’t want to give ti the ‘kiss-of-death’ label of ‘serious fiction,’ because it is simply a really good novel. Period!

William F. Brown is the author of eight suspense novels, including Burke’s Gamble, Burke’s War, and The Undertaker, exclusively available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited