Orchid Beach by Stuart Woods

Orchid Beach (Holly Barker Series Book 1)
by Stuart Woods

Holly Barker has decided to leave the Army after twenty years and take a civilian police position. Her father, Ham, has an old Army buddy who is looking for someone with her experience to be his Deputy Chief but when she arrives a month later to take up the position, the Chief has been shot and is in a coma.

Holly already has a contract and her first goals are clear - take down the Chief’s assailant and clear out the corruption the Chief had been investigating in his own force. When she arrives, Holly finds there has been no announcement about her coming to take up the Deputy Chief position and now she is the acting Chief.

This is a very straightforward police procedural that moves quickly on dialogue and clean action with minimal description. It’s not deep but it is intriguing. I would call it a fun summer read and I’ll probably read another.

It’s got a simple cast. There’s Holly, twenty years in the Army as an MP, working her way up to a command, but now moving into civilian life as a cop. There’s her father Ham, about ready to retire from the Army himself. (Holly’s mom died some time ago.) There’s the police chief, Chet, who appears only briefly. Wallace Hurd expected is the acting Chief for a few hours, until Holly arrives, but he seems to take it all in stride. He does not let his emotions show at all, which makes Holly wonder. Bob Hurst is the detective sergeant and main homicide investigator. Jane was the Chief’s secretary and he apparently confided in her regularly.

Hank Doherty, a friend of Holly’s dad and the Chief is also found dead. Holly adopts Hank’s Doberman Pinscher, Daisy. Daisy is very well trained and becomes instrumental in a lot of action.

They make an arrest quickly, a young couple who whose van was seen in the vicinity and are found to have the Chief’s gun. He claims to have had a punctured tire and found the gun. They prosecute but the public defender, Jackson Oxenhandler, is able to show more than reasonable doubt. He and Holly take a shine to each other and quickly become an item. Then her father arrives, and Holly becomes interested in the goings on at a local high end housing development, gated community. Things develop in an unexpected direction from there.

I can genuinely say I did not see who the mole on the police force was until the end, and there were actually two. This book kept me guessing.

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Jamaica Inn

By Daphne du Maurier

It is Cornwall in the 1820s. Mary Yellan’s mother dies after a particularly hard year on their farm in Helford but, before she does, she makes Mary promise to go to her Aunt Patience, whose husband owns the Jamaica Inn. It has been some time since they have seen her, but Mary remembers her Aunt Patience as a bright and cheerful person. She isn’t anymore. Under the brutal hand of her husband, Joss Merlyn, Patience constantly trembles and wrings her hands.

“The lovely giggling Aunt Patience is now a gaunt, shaky wreck, her spirit destroyed by abuse, and her husband, Joss Merlyn, is a monster: physically overwhelming, lumbering, violent and drunk.”

The first night she is there, Mary thinks she must leave but stays on because of her aunt, thinking she can help her or get her away from Joss Merlyn. It isn’t long before Mary suspects she overhears a murder but cannot be sure. There is no evidence of it except a rope left hanging from a beam.

Mary meets the local vicar when she gets lost following Joss one day and he is kind to her so she thinks she can confide in him. “There was always Francis Davey and his promise; there would be peace and shelter for her at the house in Altarnun.”

I can’t help thinking that this is the wrong direction. Where does the minister get his money for the horses and his fine clothes?

It isn’t until a while later that Mary finds out what her stepfather really is, as he confesses when he is drunk.

“… I have dreams, nightmares; I see things that never scare me when I’m sober. Damn it, Mary, I’ve killed men with my own hands, trampled them under water, beaten them with rocks and stones; and I’ve never thought no more about it; I’ve slept in my bed like a child. But when I’m drunk I see them in my dreams…”

Mary is properly horrified and thinks Joss’s brother Jem, who she has become somewhat enamored of, must be in on it too. She had known he was somewhat of a rogue and a horse thief but didn’t know this.

“No, Mary had no illusions about romance. Falling in love was a pretty name for it, that was all. Jem Merlyn was a man, and she was a woman, and whether it was his hands or his skin or his smile she did not know, but something inside her responded to him, and the very thought of him was an irritant and a stimulant at the same time. It nagged at her and would not let her be. She knew she would have to see him again.”

I watched the Alfred Hitchcock adaptation of the book into a movie recently and found some very large departures as well as some troubling inconsistencies.

In the movie, there is a point where the squire is kidnapping Mary, which never happens in the book. As directed by Hitchcock, Mary, played by Maureen O’Hara struggles very weakly, all but tickling the guy’s fingers while he ties her up.

Contrast that with this passage in the book –

“He nodded at her, reassuring her, smiling still, smirking and sly, and she felt his furtive hand fasten itself upon her. She moved swiftly, lashing out at him, and her fist caught him underneath the chin, shutting his mouth like a trap, with his tongue caught between his teeth . . . she jabbed at him swiftly with the full force of her knee, at the same time thrusting her fingers in his eyes. He doubled up at once, rolling onto his side in agony, and in a second she had struggled from under him and pulled herself to her feet, kicking at him once more as he rocked defenseless, his hands clasped to his belly. 

She grabbed in the ditch for a stone to fling at him, finding nothing but loose earth and sand, and she dug handfuls of this, scattering it in his face and in his eyes, so that he was blinded momentarily and could make no return.”

No, Mary is no delicate lady, but a strong farm woman who will take action to deal with the events and situations she finds herself embroiled in.

The book itself is very atmospheric. There are long passages of description interspersed with action. It can be a bit difficult to set down and pick up if time is limited, but an interesting read and worth the time.

Daphne du Maurier (1907 – 1989) published Jamaica Inn in 1936, when she was just 29. I’ll probably read another of her books in the future but they are definitely time intensive and I wouldn’t call them fast reads.

Beyond The Cliffs of Kerry by Amanda Hughes

Beyond the Cliffs of Kerry

By Amanda Hughes

Reviewed by Tarren Young

The writing of this book does not flow smoothly like any of the three main rivers of Ireland mentioned in the story, it is harsh and choppy. Perhaps this is done because of the environment Darcy McBride, the main character, lives in – and has had to live in since she was a young child, facing and surviving a famine in Ireland in the 1740’s. If Ms. Hughes chose to use choppy sentence structure for the time periods purpose, I could potentially understand, but I still feel that it doesn’t work and makes for a more difficult and less enjoyable read.

There are a few plot twists that I didn’t expect, which is cool, and I was getting into the romance part toward the end. (Literally, like page 320 or something.) Despite how uneven, sometimes awkward and clumsy the romance writing is, I do not appreciate how long it took me to get into the romance.

As a reader, I also don’t appreciate wasting my time on reading something that doesn’t draw me in right from the beginning. The story starts in Ireland but, other than a beating by her brother, there is no real action taking place until two years later – about 120 pages into the story. As a writer of mainly historical romance myself, I stuck with it to see what I could learn about the time period and the general character roles/thoughts/actions of the time.

I am also very disappointed with this story because it is written in third person and, although I typically don’t have a problem with third person, the author gives us what every character says and thinks. For example, in one paragraph we have Darcy’s point of view, then Nathan’s, then Jean-Michel, then another character. Sometimes it is within very short paragraphs in succession, so that we never really get to know the characters. We just have surface driven ambitions. This, to me as a reader, is very distracting and there are very little transitions at all in the story.

As both a reader and a writer, I understand that, considering the time frame of Darcy’s story, (it spans roughly five years of her life) and the scenarios she is thrown into, there is a need for a lot of characters. Darcy and her brother, her friends and family in Ireland, her best friend and her husband and all of their children, the Catholic Father they smuggle in, and the British military that is stationed there for a while (we learn all the top men’s names.) We hear of names from towns one or two over, we learn names from the ship she is on while being transported to the colonies and, of course, the people she meets in the colonies. Having to keep track of all the characters was a bit maddening. I honestly felt there were too many characters in this story and, if we heard ninety-percent of it from Darcy’s view only, then we wouldn’t have had the need for so many characters. She could have just called them the British guards or British Generals.

I am rating this story as 1.5 stars because this story could have been told in 150 pages instead of 390, and the writing feels more like a first draft than a final draft.