Review: Sweet Money Won

The Book: Sweet Money Won by Mycroft Magnusson

Price: 77p (AKA 99c)

Review Category: Requested via email

The Blurb: Rick and Liam are small-time con artists from the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, who spend much of their time healing from the beatings dished out by disgruntled victims of their scams.

As if the pair’s troubles weren’t serious enough, Rick is addicted to internet pornography and falls in love with Amethyst, a mysterious web-cam girl he meets online. For his part, Liam has a gambling problem, which centers on a lifelong devotion to the New England Patriots.

When Rick learns his new love has been forced into prostitution by a gang of Russian sex-traffickers, he sets out to save her. To do this, he must betray his longtime partner and steal their life savings, which Liam has just bet on his beloved Patriots.

Things go horribly wrong, and the two friends find themselves scrambling for cash to stave off their leg-breaking Korean bookies. With only three days to raise all the money, the partners—along with Amethyst—hatch a desperate scheme to blackmail a philandering US congressman.

Can they pull off their audacious plan, or will jealousy and suspicion tear them apart? Finally, what is the web-cam girl’s dark secret, and can these two screw-ups survive long enough to learn the terrible truth?

It’s all-in for Rick and Liam—the debut novel from Mycroft Magnusson, Sweet Money Won is a sexy, funny crime thriller, balancing character-driven suspense with a comic portrait of masculinity in crisis.

Preview Available: The usual Amazon look inside thing.

Would I buy this (again)? : Possibly.

The Product: Your usual Kindle e-book, pricey paperback also available.

The Nitty Gritty: I'm going to resort to the well known doo-doo sandwich method for reviewing Sweet Money Won. It earned its four stars from me and the reasons for this are numerous. A number of clever, funny comic vignettes. Some energetic card play writing. Sexy scenes that allowed the reader space enough not to feel a cringe coming on, a good variety of situations and character interactions.

Sweet Money Won does its work, it's well edited (often a concern when it comes to indie works even now). The book earns its place in my heart as a collision between murky hard-boiled crime fiction and sexy farce that manages to work despite its extremes.

So Sweet Money Won is well-written and a bit different, both of which qualify it as a worthwhile read. Having said this the book sailed close to the wind for me. It scrapes its four stars rather than being an assured winner. I nearly didn't finish it. If there was one thing that stood out as making the book a chore it was the length.

Don't get me wrong it's only possibly a shade longer than much commercial fiction in the thriller genre. Amazon gives the print length as 405 pages. I did a quick comparison against some other thrillers by Donald E. Westlake, James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. Sweet Money Won is around the same sort of length as LA Confidential. Raymond Chandler always kept his stuff around the 200 page mark.

Why is this important? I don't think that Chandler consciously kept his stuff brief any more than I think Ellroy beefed up LA Confidential. Let's not forget that the latter title has three intertwining plot strands that shift around and about one another to build up the whole story. Assumedly in both of these cases the authors just kept writing until they ran out of story.

Sweet Money Won does not feel like this. It feels like it has been bulked up, there are at least three subplots which are not strictly speaking necessary to get the story from A  to B.

When a pair of protagonists, such as Magnusson's Liam and Rick, are going to be such exhausting company it is almost certain that less would be more. The novel is obviously a set up for a recurring series of adventures and, as such, some parts of the novel that clearly weren't going anywhere could have done well to fall to the red pencil.

Having said that I could not single out a scene that was poorly written or not at all amusing (the opening section I made a note that I found it quite depressing for about the first 15% of the book but I did keep going). The problem is not with one particular moment or the writing in any one scene it's in the sheer bulk of it. In the end Sweet Money Won is an enormous, violent, smutty shaggy dog story of a book that gets away with not overstaying its welcome just as its protagonists get away with the bundles of cash suggested by the title.

Short But Difficult

I've had a couple of requests for me to read short stories recently. This has always been something of a thorny topic for me when it comes to commercial endeavour. In fact, even when I did my time in writer's circles back in the day writing shorts was never really my thing. I always tended to submit chapters of longer works, the contexts of my larger story worlds could never comfortably cram into a single short.

I also have found reading shorts by others to be a tricky business. The best short fiction is ephemeral, leaving you wanting more; at least the worst tends to be fairly inconsequential. Short fiction has always struck me as a tool for a writer to get a quick insight into problems with their style, pacing etc. I have to say, looking back on my own experiences with peer criticism it helped me develop a thick skin, but did it make me a better writer? Only in the sense that I had a thicker skin.

A professional guide can tell you what is 'commercial' according to accepted publisher's wisdom and what is not. If there is some glaring inconsistency in your short that can be picked up.

I have never been upbraided for my overuse of the words 'had been', which is odd because I lean on them far too heavily. Nobody has ever suggested that I change ands into follow on sub clauses either e.g. 'Milo picked up the pen and rose to take it to Niles' should become: 'Milo picked up the pen as he rose, intending to take it over to Niles.' Although the second is slightly longer, it flows better.

I learned these things on my own, without writer's circles.

So the short story has never been a favoured form in my eyes. Less so when you intend to charge people money for it. There was a song out last year, you know the one, about sharing a dollar with someone and them sharing their story in return.

Well, if the story is performed, acted out, forms a short performance piece you might get value for money. If it's delivered to your e-reader, well formatted and packed with dynamic, shapely prose, you almost inevitably won't.

Here's the issue. If I received the best short story I had ever read (An unpublished short work called 'Movies and Kids' written by an author called Nicholas Antosca) was sold to me for a dollar that might seem like a good deal. Except the short story is approx 5k words in length. So I'd have to spend 10 dollars to get the equivalent of a bare minimum Nano entry in word length. Most novels are between 70 and 100k these days (although I predict the return of the 50k special in days to come) the indie author will typically charge me between 1 and 6 dollars for 70-100k, a trad author will retail between 7 to 12 dollars for the same amount.

Now, hold on, I hear you cry. Quantity does not equal quality.

No, not always. But in this case it kinda does. Genre reading has one basic requirement: entertainment. If I could by a genre novel to keep me entertained for 1-3 weeks for 3 dollars why would I buy an equally entertaining (if also aesthetically beautiful) short that I will only be entertained by for about an hour for one third of the cost?

Answer: I wouldn't. No one sane would.

That leaves us with an awkward problem. I cannot, in good conscience, endorse a work of short fiction offered for sale at any cost greater than, possibly 20c. I believe this price bracket is not currently available on the e-publishing platforms. Let me know if I am wrong.

So, until micropayments become a reality, however they manifest, I find my self in the position of having to eschew requests to review short fiction pieces because I cannot recommend that people spend money on them over bulkier works that represent better value for money.

This is because I am a genre-reviewing heathen. A more literary reviewer may be appalled by my mercenary aesthetic sense, and rightly so.

So, this is by way of a blanket apology to short story writers looking for review here. I am afraid that I cannot help you out because I currently can't find your work, as it stands, to be economically viable.

Note: Short story collections are a different matter... particularly pulp shorts etc. Serial segments on a value spiral are also acceptable (e.g. part 1: free, parts 2/3: a dollar apiece, parts 4/5: two dollars apiece, omnibus edition: four dollars).

Get back to me when I can pick up a single short for a few pence. Then we can do a like-for-like comparison with larger works.

Review: Devil's Hand

The Book: Devil's Hand by ME Patterson

Price: £1.97 (Kindle)

Review Category: An author following me on Twitter posted the most intriguing Twitter shout out for his book about Las Vegas being caught in a blizzard.

The Blurb: Trent Hawkins survived a 30,000-foot fall from a jetliner and became an overnight sensation -- the Luckiest Man Alive. For years, his strange and unnatural luck made him the king of the Las Vegas poker scene. After years on the blacklist, despised by every high roller, he finds himself returning, with his wife, Susan, to his former stomping ground, only to be caught between a serial kidnapper, vengeful angels, poker-playing demons, and a magic-wielding thirteen year-old girl who stands unwittingly at the center of a fallen angel's plot to end all of mankind in an unholy blizzard. As Las Vegas grinds to a halt, Trent is forced to make terrible sacrifices and must ultimately choose his role in the coming War, or watch our world fall to ruin beneath a blanket of shadow and ice.

Preview Available: Amazon look inside, also an excerpt to read on screen on the official novel website.

Would I buy this (again)? : Yes.

The Product: Decent e-book, nice cover. One small caveat. I read a couple of chapters on my Samsung Galaxy Ace because I couldn't be bothered to go and get my Kindle from downstairs. Something in the typesetting made it very occasionally drop a word or two off the bottom of one screen and not display it on the next. This meant I had to freestyle the gist of the two missing words from context. Like I say, it's a small niggle.

The Nitty Gritty: There was a point at which I stopped going into bookshops to look for books. The reason why was that no publisher was putting out stuff like Devil's Hand. I don't know if things have changed. I guess they haven't, people keep drawing comparisons in the places I've looked between this and the Dresden Files. If you're going to say that if you liked Dresden then you'll probably like this people would be right. If you want to say the two things have much in common, then you'd be far less right.

Devil's Hand starts out doing things right by not being in the first person. I understand that there's a sort of gumshoe vibe in Dresden but that guy does sometimes come off as a whiner because that's what first person perspective tends to do in long form unless you're clever. Trent Hawkins, the hero of Devil's Hand, is described in the third person and all the better for it. I found it a hell of a lot easier to get on with Trent.

The other two great features of Devil's Hand show a pretty solid understanding of what this series is and what it's about also. One is that it starts a series and has that "television show pilot" vibe about it, but the story contained within its pages is ultimately satisfying in its own right. The other is that its metaphysical set up is laid out for the reader in a pretty clear fashion, giving this urban fantasy thriller a weight that propels it forward and keeps it involving.

As for the plot, the blurb tells you most of what you want to know. The one thing a blurb cannot help to make clear is just how well acquainted Mr Patterson has made him with the apocryphal (as in actually from the apocrypha, not in the metaphorical sense) source of his mythos. I have found that when it comes to contemporary fantasy aimed at adults authors do have a tendency to think that they can half-bake something and let it loose. I have often left these works feeling, somehow, poorer than I came in. Devil's Hand displays the author's research and knowledge in a plot appropriate manner, hence, it enriches even as it thrills and excites.

Not that this is a perfect score card. There is a little flab that could have used some revision. There's too much fighting between the main protagonist and the main antagonist in the first half. There's a character who at first appears a bit thin, then appears to be a cheap motivational device and later proves to be a set up for something down the line; the whole matter is clumsily handled.

These minor problems, however, do not detract from the fact that the overall impact, once the story is done, is a resounding success. I think that some people would say it's an unqualified good that you can get to the end, turn back and see how deftly the players have been introduced and the set up going forward will give room for surprises and drama. I would say that this kind of dramatic coyness, meaning that you can only really see where you were going when you've got to your destination, risks losing a small number of less patient readers along the way.

None of the problems are fatal. I really enjoyed the book and, crucially, am really intrigued to read the follow up and further volumes in the series. Next time I have a gap in my leisure reading schedule (holiday or such) M.E. Patterson's oeuvre will be one of the places I'm going to go looking for another encounter with the fascinating cast of angelic hosts and demonic hordes.

Blurry Lines

Just dropped by to update the work in progress sidebar. While I'm here I would like to make an observation. 2013 has started with a massive blurring of the lines when it comes to the difference between traditional and indie authors.

The chief place this is true is in quality. Back in 2006-ish there were very few self-pubbed books I read which could stand toe to toe with the stuff you might pick up in a bookstore. Since December I have read one book published by Momentum, a digital only imprint offering indie-comparable download prices, and one complete Indie offering and I would say that, although Dark City Blue had the edge IMO it was a close run thing.

I'm currently reading Devil's Hand by M.E.Patterson and it's really good (that's the short review of circa 25% of the book). So of the last three self-pubbed books I've read (the other being APE) I would recommend all of them for one reason or another and none of them look weak next to the more traditional offering. In addition the traditional offering looks more indie and I'm imagining the author of that feels like an indie author at the moment as this is his debut electronic-first offering.

The landscape of fiction publishing is definitely starting to flatten into what it will become. It will be a bumpy ride for certain.

Review: Empire

The Book: Empire by Michael R. Hicks

Price: Free

Review Category: An enthusiastic tweeter and successful indie author I was keen to check it out.

The Blurb: EMPIRE is the coming-of-age story of Reza Gard, a young boy of the Human Confederation who is swept up in the century-long war with the alien Kreelan Empire. Nightmarish female warriors with blue skin, fangs, and razor sharp talons, the Kreelans have technology that is millennia beyond that of the Confederation, yet they seek out close combat with sword and claw, fighting and dying to honor their god-like Empress.

Captured and enslaved, Reza must live like his enemies in a grand experiment to see if humans have souls, and if one may be the key to unlocking an ages old curse upon the Kreelan race. Enduring the brutal conditions of Kreelan life, Reza and a young warrior named Esah-Zhurah find themselves bound together by fate and a prophecy foretold millennia before they were born.

Preview Available: Well, it's kind of free so...

Would I buy this (again)?: Given the price of titles in the series I probably will buy the others at some point so, yes.

The Product: A really well put together e-book and an example to others, well laid out for the reader with marketing folded into the closing pages. Really well done.

The Nitty Gritty: When I finished Empire I found myself having to ask my wife: If someone gave you a book that claimed to be a space opera what would you expect to happen in the story? She replied that she would have expected space ships, laser battles and aliens. By which count Empire scores 1 out of 3, it does contain aliens. In most other respects, however, this is not a space opera, rather it is a swords and sandals fantasy, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian, with space opera-y trappings.

What's even weirder is that the space opera sections are, by far, the weakest parts of the book. So I'm going to pitch it to you straight, this is a really really good blood and thunder melodramatic gladiatorial fantasy with action, adventure, lizard women and a fascinating, bizarre romance at its core. The slices of space opera bread in which this is the meaty, spicy, satisfying filling are dry, cardboardy and a little mouldy, don't let that put you off.

The story of Reza Gard, enslaved by the Kreelan Empire as part of a grand spiritual experiment is earnest, surprising and exciting by turns. After a couple of chapters of the fifteen year old Reza being obnoxiously wonderful in an orphan's colony the sudden switch to an environment where he is weak, frightened and not loved or respected by anyone is a welcome change. When Mr Hicks begins to dish out punishment to the precocious little snot I began to relax. Later on, when he begins to develop fuzzy feelings towards one of the blue-skinned, taloned, sadistic lizard women who surround him it definitely gave me pause for thought.

That's the hard nugget of mental engagement squirrelled away in amongst the torrid tale of survival, combat and forbidden love on an alien world as deadly as it is beautiful. This is heady stuff indeed, the two lovers in the centre of the tale are given depth by the situation in which they find themselves. Reza is more than just a two dimensional Buck McHeropants because he was a normal all-American human kid who got a taste for bondage and domination at the hands of blue lizards. His lizard companion Esah-Zurah because Hicks commits fully to the idea that this woman is like Red Sonja only blue and not as cuddly or loveable.

So often in fantasy tales female warriors are just vehicles for the expression of dodgy submissive fantasy and misogyny on the part of the author. Empire has the cheek to subvert that notion by extrapolating it to its ultimate end. Hicks is careful to communicate that the Kreelan warrior women are anything but desirable to humans. For a start any human that meets a Kreelan is way too busy watching their intestines uncoil to wonder about alien nookie. To take this unforgiving template and spin an interspecies romance is chutzpah beyond that which I possess. To take all the reasons why such a twist is insane, laugh in their face and then add fairly sophisticated alien political and spiritual complications into the already unlikely mix propels the narrative into a whole new sphere of crazy.

Maybe I am just a bit of a fuddy duddy when it comes to this sort of stuff but the most gripping aspect of this story was the feeling of buying into everything even as you wondered whether you were being an idiot for doing so. The story of Reza Gard is what keeps me interested here, and the adventures in the Kreelan Empire are an amazing ride. I must admit to misgivings about reading other books in the series as I am uncertain that I will enjoy them as much, but I will be giving them a chance when I have some room in my reading schedule (so some time in 2017 then?) simply out of respect for this gloriously lunatic alien fantasy love story.

Selecting A Self-Published Book

I am pretty impressed with Guy Kawasaki's new book APE: How To Publish A Book,  I reviewed it at the beginning of December. I'm also impressed with Mr Kawasaki's unending energy in taking the APE message out into the world. Now it's time for me to be similarly impressed with his short presentation published in the Huffington Post advising readers on how to discriminate when picking an indie pleasure for their e-reader of choice.

I would, however, take issue with a couple of points that he raised. I'm talking from the point of view of a genre author, Mr Kawasaki from that of a non-fiction writer but there's a good deal of crossover. Many of my quibbles are to do with the different ways that fiction and non-fiction are sold.

On a technical note (so more the Huffington Post's fault than Guy's) I'm also not too pleased with the slide show having no option to read it as a short article. To mitigate the technical issue and add my thoughts here's a quick summary of the key points of the presentation:

1. Cover

Guy says: "While it is inaccurate to say that every book with a crappy cover is not worth reading and every book with a nice cover is worth reading, the cover is [your] first data point." 

The Monkey says: I have to say, I'd pretty much agree with this. I'd add that a cover needs to be appropriate more than anything.

Whacking a great piece of richly detailed art on a fantasy or historical may well be the way to go but thrillers and horror books are often more impressionistic. If someone hasn't even looked at covers of books within the genre they're writing then how seriously are they taking themselves as a commercial writer?

In my opinion, in the world of the indies there is a bar, and currently there are points for effort. If it's clear that the cover has been lovingly handcrafted in an attempt to engage, or generically designed enough to fit with all other similar titles, then I'd tend to give it a thumbs up.

2. Blurbs

Guy says: "An excessive amount of blurbs is a sign of poor quality."

The Monkey says: I have never really paid much attention to blurbs in fiction whatsoever. I think this is more of a non-fiction point. Non-fiction requires a definite authority to say; "This guy knows what he's talking about".

Fiction is far more a matter of taste. I have read loads of Neil Gaiman, I don't believe I have ever bought anything endorsed by Neil Gaiman, or, if I have, never because it was endorsed by Neil Gaiman.

3. Name of publisher

Guy says: "If an author cannot come up with a more clever name for his company than his last name, how imaginative and intriguing could his novel be?"

The Monkey says: There's another point here. The fact is that in order to get your book out into the world you have to take yourself seriously as a writer. To learn to be a thing one must first imitate the thing we want to be.

There are good authors who don't "pretend" to have a publishing house and that's not an indicator that they're a bad writer. It is however, an indication that they don't take the business of marketing at all seriously and, by association, they may not view delivering the product to the customer seriously either.

A book that has a lacklustre cover and loads into your e-reader at page one, chapter one, no title, no TOC may be fine, but it does say that the author had more fun writing than they particularly care about whether you will have reading.

4. Front matter

Guy says: "It’s not crucial that [the front matter conforms to the Chicago Manual of Style] but at least you can determine if the author cared enough to find out what the front matter of a book should contain."

The Monkey says: This just refines the point about how seriously you can tell the author takes themselves as an author. In order to have published a "real book" I want my work to resemble a "real book" to the extent that the casual observer cannot tell why my book is "not real".

Also showing an awareness of copyright notices shows you take the business side of what you're doing seriously, dedications are a nice touch, thinking about the structure of your book is about taking care of your reader. I don't go the whole hog but I do put in a copyright notice, disclaimer and ensure that anything I feel I should say before the main action begins is said in good part. In other words, I do believe a self-publisher should make this effort.

5. Copyediting

Guy says: "Read the first few pages of the book and if you see more than three spelling mistakes or instances of poor grammar, take the book out of your online shopping cart and save yourself a few bucks."

The Monkey says: To this day I still question what "good grammar" really is. In journalistic and non-fiction pieces sticking to the absolute letter of the orthodox grammatical law is essential. In fiction the question is, rather, "does it flow?" Do you understand the story? Do you care? The odd fragment sentence is sometimes allowed for style reasons. Your mileage will vary.

Spelling errors come in two flavours, bad spelling e.g. "I am loosing my mind" and typos e.g. "I am losing my mnid". Either should be rare but typos and even the odd complex homophonic (bear/bare, hear/here) substitution do creep into the best of books.

Mr Kawasaki's three alarm limit seems fair to me. The Amazon default preview is 10% of the book, if the book is hard to understand and poorly proofed to the degree that you check yourself three times in 10% of the volume you will potentially encounter 30 head scratchers in the course of the whole book, which is pretty excessive.

6. Fonts

Guy says: "As in cover design, the use of Times, Arial, and Helvetica is a bad sign."

The Monkey says: This is a reference to fonts used throughout the interior of the book. I would tend to disagree with this when it comes to genre fiction. In fiction books the use of Times New Roman is to encourage readers to find the actual text as invisible as possible.

I did read something once that stated serif fonts, such as Times were easier to read printed, where as sans serif fonts, such as Arial were easier to read on a screen. We've entered a time when what counts as "a screen" is somewhat harder to define, so this is no longer a hard and fast rule. What I would tend to say is that those artifacts that are used as books tend to benefit from serif text, those intended to be read off a vertical, non-portable screen, such as a monitor, from sans serif.

If a fiction book's text looks pretty boring that's probably a good thing, if it looks weird, crazy or if you're noticing the fonts while you're supposed to be wrapped up in the story that's probably a bad sign. In addition the peppering of a random crew of unusual fonts in a non-fiction book shows a cluelessness in typographic skills that should be a red flag.

So not what I would describe as a hard and fast rule.

7: Website

Guy says: "If you’re browsing online, take a quick look at the author’s website because a website is a window into her soul."

The Monkey says: This is a strange one, because it's just as true of a published author or any other person asking you to become digitally involved with them.

If someone's Facebook profile looks like a Facebook profile, their Twitter bio looks like a Twitter bio and their website looks like the kind of place you'd like to hang out then you know that the person is communicating effectively no matter how they're trying to engage with you. If you get the creeps looking at a public artifact someone left behind with the full intention of having random people look at it then that person probably isn't your type of person... so, a no brainer really.

Review: Dark City Blue

The Book: Dark City Blue by Luke Preston

Price: £2.90

Review Category:  Luke Preston was the first author to follow me on Twitter, I instantly bought his book to review.

The Blurb:  A fistful of people are murdered, fifteen million dollars is stolen and detective Tom Bishop is stuck in the middle. When he hits the street, every clue points in the same direction - his colleagues in a police department demoralised by cutbacks and scandals. Hunted, alone and with no place left to turn, Bishop embarks on a hellish journey down into the gutters where right and wrong quickly become twisted and problems are solved with gunfire and bloodshed.

Over the next two days, Tom Bishop will be cornered. He will be beaten. He will bust into prison. He will shoot at police. He will team up with violent criminals. He will become one of them. He will break every rule in the book, chasing a lead nobody else will go near down a rabbit hole of corruption, murder and buried secrets.

Will Bishop become the very monster he set out to destroy?

A modern hard-boiled tale that unfolds at a relentless pace, Dark City Blue is Serpico, if Serpico snorted a fistful of cocaine and hung out with Lee Marvin.

Preview Available: Amazon Look Inside dealio, also his twitter feed links to the first few pages.

Would I buy this (again)? : Oh yes... yes I would.

The Product: A decent well-formatted e-book. Don't think much of either title or cover because they totally don't do a very good job of conveying the quality of the contents.

The Nitty Gritty: I'd never really considered the possibility of there being a sub-genre called "hard boiled oz noir" before cracking open Dark City Blue. The first thing to note about this is that the Australian patois definitely delivers a unique wrinkle to a powerful, bloody, violent thriller.

Let's be clear about this, there is something joyously adolescent about the violence, the swearing, the cranked up adrenaline-soaked machismo of Dark City Blue. I think the jazzy mood title does little to convey the swaggering minimalist confidence of this assured slice of sardonic action.

The story revolves around your classic hard man super cop Tom Bishop hunting, and being hunted by, a network of corrupt cops in Victoria. The novel wastes no time kicking off with a gun battle, proceeding through an armed robbery, into a balls to the wall action chase where Preston takes every opportunity to beat the crap out of Bishop in a most satisfying manner.

The language is terse and revels in its punchy economy. There's exactly enough story to keep the whole thing barrelling forward, not so much you ever find yourself confused. Dark City Blue is an assured exercise in literary economy. It's the closest thing to a great tits and explosions action movie I've ever read in novel form. The whole thing's a gestalt, no individual element is unusually strong but the whole thing pulls together to make a terrific début novel and I wait with eager anticipation to read the next Tom Bishop novel.