Hello and welcome to the latest issue of Fervent Curiosity. My name is Victor De Anda and this is my newsletter.
As I mentioned in the last issue of this newsletter, my relationship to reading has been all over the map. I’m a slow reader of long-form fiction, but this year I managed to read a few novels/novellas that I enjoyed. That’s the focus of this issue.
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Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper
I’d read all of Harper’s short story collection Love and Other Wounds and found his writing style to be hard-hitting and poetic, so this wasn’t a tough sell at all. With Everybody Knows, Harper is painting on a larger canvas than he’s done before, and he pulls it off nicely. This story has epic proportions with a cast of characters ripped from contemporary Hollywood. Having worked in a slice of the movie industry myself, I recognized some of the people Harper writes about.
Mae Pruett is a black-bag Hollywood publicist who’s one of the best. She buries the stories that the studios don’t want to surface. Her ex-lover, Chris Tamburro, is former LAPD and muscle for hire. Each of them work for the Beast (the movie industry) and profit well for their labor, but at a seemingly high cost. When Mae is called in to do damage control for an out of control movie star, things start to unravel for everyone. Soon Mae and Chris find their trajectories careening toward each other as they uncover a secret that could bring down the biggest players in Hollywood.
Harper brings a literary bent to crime fiction that makes it glow like the hot end of a poker. A recommended read.
Stealing Paradise (A Grifter’s Song, Book 34) by Curtis Ippolito
Another fixture on today’s crime fiction scene, Ippolito is another talented writer whose short stories I’ve read and enjoyed. This novella of his was another fun read. I had known about the Grifter’s Song series created and edited by Frank Zafiro, but hadn’t read any of the entries in the saga. Zafiro, a crime writer himself, established the story of Sam and Rachel, two con artists in love and always on the prowl for their next target. Zafiro then enlisted a who’s who of crime fiction writers to each take a stab at advancing their story from book to book.
For this chapter of The Grifter’s Song saga, Ippolito sets the events of the book in his adopted home of San Diego and his attention to detail shows. The locale is the Hotel Del Coronado, a swanky place that I’ve been to, and so has Ippolito. The story moves at a brisk pace, and Ippolito is adept at mixing physical action with emotional moments that give the characters depth.
It begins with Sam and Rachel on vacation in San Diego, happy to relax from their conning ways . But Sam is getting the itch to make some money again, and spots the perfect mark who is staying at their hotel. Soon, he’s convinced Rachel to get back into it and they’re working again. Things go smoothly until they don’t, and some even worse bad guys are after them. Since this is a serial piece of fiction, the events of the book don’t all get resolved. If anything, I thought it all ended too soon. I wanted to read more about Sam and Rachel, but I suppose that’s what the other books in this series do.
Ippolito brings these characters and situations to life in a realistic, funny, and touching way. Even though the characters are not his original creation, he portrays them like they’re his own. A recommended read.
Lowdown Road by Scott Von Doviak
Do you like 70s road movies like Smokey and The Bandit or Eat My Dust? Von Doviak kicks off his latest book with a bang and keeps his foot on the gas for the entire story. What a fun read.
Lowdown Road tells the tale of two cousins, Chuck and Dean Melville, who are just looking to improve their lot in life. Dean, who works for Antoine, a local weed dealer in Huntsville, Texas, comes up with a plan to make him and his cousin rich— a weed heist and a road trip that promises them a big payday. Their destination? Snake River Canyon, Idaho. That’s right, the site of infamous daredevil Evel Knievel’s ill-fated jump in 1974.
What happens next is a road chase with Antoine on their tail, as well as the local sheriff. The three storylines all converge at Snake River Canyon and things don’t go as planned, to say the least.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and was transported back to the days of Burt Reynolds flicks and Roger Corman movies from the seventies. Von Doviak’s done his homework here, and it shows. A recommended read.
Well, that will do it for this issue, here’s wishing you and yours the happiest of holidays and an even better 2024.
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Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.