BLACK IRISH BLUES, a follow-up to OUTERBOROUGH BLUES & WARSAW FURY, a WWII story we need Right NOW

BLACK IRISH BLUES: A Caesar Stiles Mystery
ANDREW COTTO
Black Rose Writing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Black Irish Blues is the return-to-origin story of Caesar Stiles, an erstwhile runaway who returns to his hometown with plans to buy the town's only tavern and end his family's Sicilian curse.

Caesar's attempt for redemption is complicated by the spectral presence of his estranged father, reparation seekers related to his corrupt older brother, a charming crime boss and his enigmatic crew, and—most significantly—a stranger named Dinny Tuite whose disappearance under dubious circumstances immerses Caesar in a mystery that leads into the criminal underbelly of industrial New Jersey, the flawed myth of the American Dream, and his hometown's shameful secrets.

Black Irish Blues is a poetic, gritty noir full of dynamic characters, a page-turning plot, and the further development of a unique American character.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT THE AUTHOR'S REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: The first Caesar Stiles mystery, Outerborough Blues, was a big hit with me. I liked the atmospheric evocation of places I knew, at the times I knew them. I really enjoyed the writing Author Cotto clearly enjoyed writing...I hope that makes sense, I can't figure out how to fix it. Let me try this: When a writer can evoke a specific and precise feeling in me, attached to a specific and precise location in space and time, it comes across to me as that writer is sharing their own pleasure in that image, that moment.

It was too much to hope I'd get it again. I steeled myself as I opened the Kindle file. "It's not going to be the same, don't load that onto this book, it won't be as fresh as the first time," I gently self-talked myself off the ledge of inflated expectations.

"You know what my mother used to say about martinis?" I asked him.
...
We locked eyes until a small smile creased his face and he spoke in a bemused tone.

"No, no. Tell me. Wha'd your mother used to say about martinis?"

I put the knife down, wiped my hands and leaned into the bar, toward the man who needed to know the two Martinis rule.

"They're like boobs," I said. "One's not enough, but three are too many."

And just like *that* I'm right back in Caesar Stiles' world.

What happens next is the kind of thing that happens in the world of people like Caesar: running from, finding out they ran to instead; people don't know you, until they show you how well they got you pegged; a world that doesn't care about you until you find out how much they care what you do, and to whom. (And Foghat on the jukebox! Gawd...it was the 90s, all right.) But what makes this feel so familiar is also what makes the plot work. Get the tropes? Got the course.

Is that a good thing? It is in Author Cotto's hands. I like what he does with the way you're expecting something to happen, to come from a specific direction and involve some pretty familiar events...and that's what happens, only not the way you thought it would. The reason a trope (eg, the Irresistible Outsider Hero bagging all the sex) is an evergreen is that it works. It's not like one needs to challenge the evergreens to prove one's Talent. It's more like, "give 'em what they want but make it 60° off the straight lines."

This is what Author Cotto does with Caesar's story.

Helping out fellow-returnee Mike the local cop (home from LA) in solving the vanishing act pulled by Dinny, the unloved rich-guy Martini-story recipient; learning how Sallie, the dead brother from Outerborough Blues, continues to screw with his life; discovering good dirt on the long-vanished father he really didn't miss...all the noirness any committed reader of 'em could want. And delivered in the same compact form! Today's book-bloat has downsides, like heft and prolixity; it has upsides, like room to explore characters' motivations and present the world of the book; but best of all, in my opinion, is finding someone who can make Fat Elvis work in a few sentences without the bloat.

And here we are. Come for the atmosphere, stay for the story. And pray like hell that we get more Caesar in our lives.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

WARSAW FURY: A WW2 Polish Resistance Novel Based on True Events
MICHAEL REIT
Kindle Original
$4.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1939
We mustn't let darkness win.

Natan Borkowski has it all. In line to take over the successful family business, his future is set.

Julia Horowitz lives in poverty. The daughter of a shoemaker, she dreams of a different life—a different world.

Everything changes when Hitler’s armies invade Poland. Natan’s future is ripped away by the flick of a switch of a Luftwaffe pilot. When the smoke clears, Julia and her family find themselves locked within the walls of the newly-formed Jewish ghetto.

On opposite sides of the wall, Natan and Julia’s lives are not so different anymore. As the Nazis unleash a reign of hunger, terror, and death across the city, they must now decide what’s more terrifying:
To die on their knees, or go down fighting?

Based on true events, Warsaw Fury is a story of love, courage, and resilience in the face of unimaginable evil.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE AUTHOR, THE BOOK WHISPERER, AND NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: World War II and the Final Solution and German/Polish antisemitism. All the things I claim repel me like kryptonite does Superman, garlic does Dracula, and Old Spice does a metrosexual. What transreversal of my brain was enacted by which Doctor Who aliens, what cabal of soap-opera writers flipped my script, whose malign curse on me altered my tastes? None. All these tropes are in this thriller, and I still read it.

They all still do repel me, though.

So how did that rating appear up there, the one that doesn't have a minus sign in front of it, the one that's above three but below five? Perspective. Not just mine, the story's as well. I'm down for a story whose *background* is WWII, but whose events while factual and tied to WWII, are not using WWII as the reason for the story.

Natan is a rich kid, a guy with social skills and connections; Julia is not possessed of either of those things; what brings the two of them together in this story is how they each hate and fear the Germans who have invaded their country and are murdering their people. Both lost their parents, each has a wise (if young) head and a fierce heart to avenge those who are unjustly dead. The whole story isn't about the brutal regime trying to exterminate all the Poles, every Jew, anyone who isn't Just Like Them.

We are instead told the two interlinked tales of resourceful young people motivated by a catastrophe they never asked for and weren't consulted about doing every single dangerous, difficult, and deeply necessary thing to stop, reverse, and fix their world. The planet needs them, or their great-grandchildren, now. These two characters, people on either side of a literal and metaphorical wall, are united in their purpose to resist, to expel, the invaders wreaking graphically told havoc on their home. They unite despite their "differences" because the goal they serve is more important than the surface dissimilarities that actually make each well-suited to their respective roles. And, because of course they did, these two crazy kids fell in luuuv. Despite their wildly different backgrounds, though, at least this couple could never possibly lack for something to talk about....

The story doesn't belabor the points I'm calling out here. I am doing so. I am explaining how, despite being a story told in a setting I'm ever so sick of, I got involved in and inspired by Warsaw Fury. Author Reit clearly knows his subject inside out, which adds to the pace of action he achieves and sustains. There is never a lack of action, and it's all grounded in real events.

So that's the story. What about the writing? Well, what indeed. It is unexceptional but unexceptionable. It isn't stellar and it isn't execrable. It is the high end of serviceable, the lower edge of inspired. Occasional phrases made me cringe...a Varsovian, a Pole, and you'd fight to the bitter end, oh now really...but it got the job done.

You're looking at that rating right now, aren't you. Thinking about the times I've said much harsher things about much milder stylistic infractions. You know, you're correct, but you're also looking at this from the ordinary perspective. This is an extraordinary case. I gave a book whose writing I reluctantly allowed to happen to me four full stars...doesn't that say something a lot bigger than "read these pretty sentences" would?

We need this story of coming together to resist an overwhelming, unstoppable crisis. We need to read things that stress our only hope being to find the good intentions and best practices in those we'd normally never so much as fire a neuron for. This story, a fact-based one, tells us that when we're pulling in the same direction, we can move the damn Nazis and their weapons on down the road.

Uncurl your lip, Sunshine. Get the memo here: Fight now, fight hard and with all your power...but aim it where it will help not where you think you want to.

Book-A-Day meme #12: OUTERBOROUGH BLUES, a book that gives me a sense of place

OUTERBOROUGH BLUES
ANDREW COTTO
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: A beautiful young French girl walks into a bar, nervously lights a cigarette, and begs the bartender for help in finding her missing artist brother. In a moment of weakness, the bartender—a lone wolf named Caesar Stiles with a chip on his shoulder and a Sicilian family curse hanging over him—agrees. What follows is a stylish literary mystery set in Brooklyn on the dawn of gentrification.

While Caesar is initially trying to earn an honest living at the neighborhood watering hole, his world quickly unravels. In addition to being haunted by his past, including a brother who is intent on settling an old family score, Caesar is being hunted down by a mysterious nemesis known as The Orange Man. Adding to this combustible mix, Caesar is a white man living in a deep-rooted African American community with decidedly mixed feelings about his presence. In the course of his search for the French girl's missing brother, Caesar tumbles headlong into the shadowy depths of his newly adopted neighborhood, where he ultimately uncovers some of its most sinister secrets.

Taking place over the course of a single week, Outerborough Blues is a tightly paced and gritty urban noir saturated with the rough and tumble atmosphere of early 1990s Brooklyn.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, number 12 in the series, is to discuss the book that gave you the best sense of place.

I moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, when it was still dirty, stinky, vice-ridden, and a boat-load of fun. Now it's clean and sanitary and there's a damn Disney store where there used to be hookers, drugs, and other useful things. Yuck.

Anyway, the same thing happened to Brooklyn about ten years later. This development is called "gentrification" and it's a double-edged sword. Nicer middle-class neighborhoods, no place for the poor to live...well, can't make an omelette....

Cotto's reluctant sleuth, Caesar, came to be in this country because of his great-grandmother:

My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money in one sock and a knife in the other, coming to the new world with an old world motive--to murder the man that had left her for America.

Such a fine, upstanding family! Things don't get a lot better in succeeding generations, and Caesar is running at top speed to get the blood-feuding nightmare of his family away behind him. So why does he agree to help the waifish French lassie, Colette, find her brother Jean-Baptist (sic)?

Because he wants some. Because the bar where he works is closing in on him. Because. He starts to search for the boy, an artist, and he gets himself tangled with some people who are where they are because it's where they want to be:

The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord’s name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.

It's clear that Cotto knows his folks well, and has their collective number. It's also clear that Caesar is walking streets deeply familiar to Cotto:

In the open sky above the hushed streets, the moon was a porcelain plate on a black table as I walked home. A breeze raised the collar of my jeans jacket as I sliced through the silvery silence, past unlit buildings and quivering trees and cars idle by the curb. The air felt like glass. I crossed empty corners under the mauve light of overhead lamps.

A more perfect, more poignant recreation of a fall night's walk in the seaport of New York I haven't read. Something that people who live here forget is that this is a seaside place, it was a port for centuries, it is spang doodle on the Atlantic Ocean, and that means the seaside is all around:

The full moon rose above the harbor as brightly lit tour boats skimmed along the black water, the brilliant cluster of lower Manhattan piled like stacks of coins from a treasure chest in the distance. Up the river, bridges arched across the wide water all the way up the east side, while the Brooklyn side was marked by soft, round lights, like a string of pearls.

I've stopped for that view any number of times in the past, and it never failed (or fails) to render me immobile with a blazing bolt of homecoming joy.

So, Caesar and his quest kick into high gear, several associates of his prove to be more than what they seem, and the more questions he asks about Jean-Baptist (sic) the more trouble he gets into. Beatings. Threats. Some sex. Memories blast our guy at every turn, all the crap he's wanted to escape from bubbles up as he searches the druggier parts of Brooklyn for Colette's foolish artist wannabe brother:

Gypsy cabs jostled and honked...Dollar vans lined the sidewalk and people piled in and out. As I walked down the slope, the buildings grew smaller and squalid. Trees vanished...and the heat picked up. Beyond the brick wall of the Navy Yard, the silver skyline of Manhattan glimmered in the distance like a mirage. The industrial remains of the flats were low and decrepit and mostly abandoned, though a few beeping forklifts unloaded trucks here and there. The storefronts were shuttered except for a bank busy with Orthodox Jews. The funk of a chicken processing plant contaminated the air.

I walked along the high brick wall that separated the Navy Yard from the street, frequently stepping over pulverized vials that sparkled like jewels on the sidewalk. There was no shade. I blinked away the dust.

Yep, been there. The Navy Yard, by the mid-1990s, was a cheap warehousing area, and the publisher whose office work I did had his books stored there. Not a super-nice place to walk at night. Fascinating history, and very different now, but this passage nails the sensation of blasting heat and stinking blight that permeated the place then.

More stuff about the search for Colette's brother turns up nasty secrets involving everyone Caesar knows, information that he uses to get a ghost from his own past laid to rest, and then *clap clap* the mystery's solved.

This made me mad. I don't like being taken on a ride and then dumped outside town, told I'm there, and left.

But you know what? Homecoming means more than how you traveled to get there. I liked the people I met on the trip. I liked the evocative landscape descriptons. I liked the sense of Caesar's working through so much about his past wasn't going to Make Shit Better, because landing him in more trouble later means more of this:

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide.

And that, laddies and gentlewomen, is good.