The Blue Djinn of Babylon, P.B. Kerr

Okay, so these kids are djinn, right? They are powered by fire, and can grant wishes and so on. And their mom is also a djinn, who has given an oath not to use her powers. It's winter in New York City and the kids feel sick because it is so cold, and a kid shows up who shows them how to get around this, and he tricks them into setting a water elemental on his stepmother.

Then the girl is playing a dice game, and someone sets it up to look like she cheated, and then the kids go off on a mission to SAVE THE WORLD, and the girl is kidnapped, and I couldn't stop reading.

This author is much like David Morrell, in that once you describe the plot it sounds ridiculous, but while you're reading it seems imperative not to stop. I suspect satanic influence.

Savage Night, Jim Thompson

"Little" Biggers rolls into town with a job to do: kill a witness in a way that looks like an accident. He's five feet tall and sensitive about that, and he's worried that the guy in charge sent someone to spy on him. Biggers also has a problem with lingering tuberculosis and banging both women in the house for different reasons.

Thompson really makes you feel the desperation and paranoia and sickness rolling off this story.

Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

This is a sequel to Very Bad Deaths, which I read a few months ago. The problem is that Choices is not nearly as good as the first one.

The whole book is leading up to: a speech on politics and how America is being ruined from the inside out. The first problem with this is that it is probably pretty much preaching to the choir.

The second problem is that it takes a way better writer to carry this off, and that writer would not have put the whole thing in monologue form. Feh.

.357 Vigilante #1, Ian Ludlow (Lee Goldberg)

Men's Adventure is a genre I feel needs a bit of background. It started somewhere around the late sixties with the idea (I am completely guessing here) that mainstream thrillers weren't enough--men wanted to read stories that were basically action movies in book form. So there were cheap paperbacks, about 200 pages long, with series titles like The Executioner, The Destroyer, M.I.A. Hunter, The Survivalist, Penetrator, and so on. Required for these books were lots of killing, fight scenes, gunfire, and generally right-wing politics. The Destroyer was about an invincible martial art and a secret government agency, and is the one I know the most about. This genre was popular for a long time. When I was in high school, it was still a bookstore section.

This particular book is about a man whose dad, a cop, is set on fire. When the gang members who did it go free, our hero takes a gun and goes out hunting scumbags.

The writing isn't bad, and the guy is at least ambivalent about what he's doing. Decent read.