Long Week

It's been a long week, and work has been particularly crazy. Why just today (Friday), we were practically beating our patrons off with a stick at 5PM. Of course, it rained pretty much all day, hard, and I nearly got into an accident and had to pull off the road for a bit when an SUV speeded past me on a partially flooded road and threw up so much water against my windshield it was like being hit with a fire hose, directly on the glass. I couldn't see anything. Of course, one of my co-worker's relatives calls them "F-UV's" for that reason, the general carelessness exhibited by their drivers when behind the wheel.

In the end, I did finish "Murder by the Waters", which was a most enjoyable mystery, although I do note that Robert Lee Hall didn't write any more Ben Franklin Mysteries after that one. I also finished "Ride the Green Dragon" a YA mystery/thriller by Andre Norton. It was one of her hardest books to find, even though as it was written fairly late in her career (1985), mainly because it was only *ever* released as a hardcover.

The story follows a young brother and sister and a mystery they encounter at an old mansion where they are forced to stay at when a rainstorm in town happens during their vacation. Their mother is a writer, and their father works for a man who turns old mansions into bed and breakfasts. The mansion in question was built by a man who owned and ran a circus and is filled with old memorabilia from the circus, not to mention former circus performers and their descendents. A mystery surrounds the old man's son, who according to town rumor, was involved with smugglers and rumrunners during the 20's and 30's and mysteriously disappeared after some kind of spat with his father, and, rumor also has it, with a fortune in money stolen from the very same rumrunners and smugglers.

Even though they stay for a few days on their vacation, they return home, but come back to the mansion when something happens to their own house and they are forced to vacate for a while. The brother and sister go to school in the town, and their father negotiates with the housekeeper to buy the property on behalf of the man he works for. The mother, of course, loves the atmosphere of the house, working it into a book she is writing.

One of the people staying at the house, is the granddaughter of one of the former circus folk, specifically, the gypsy fortuneteller. For some reason, she dislikes the sister, and has an antagonistic relationship with her, stealing the brother and sister's precious items and pinning them up into some sort of voodoo-type dolls. The brother has an albino ferret who takes the siblings into the one place they are forbidden to go, an old carriage house on the property. And it turns out to be a carriage house in more than just name, for the man who owned the property was a woodcarver and was hand-carving a set of horses for a merry-go-round. Not just horses, but fantastic animals and even dragons. One of them, the green dragon of the title, proves central to the mystery and its resolution. The book was vintage YA Andre Norton, and I definitely recommend it for anyone who can track down a copy.

Another Andre Norton novel I read was Rebel Spurs. This was a sequel to the "Ride Proud, Rebel" novel I have also recently read. Drew Rennie a former Confederate soldier, learned at the end of the earlier novel that his father was alive, despite having been told for years that his father was dead. It turned out that his father had gone to New Mexico to start a ranch, and with his grandfather now dead, Drew has taken two good animals from his farm in Kentucky out west to start a new life, and hopefully, a ranch of his own.

His father was never told about him, and Drew is uncertain of his reception, so his disguises himself with a fake last name. On coming to the town nearest his father's ranch, Drew finds out that his father already has a son, albeit one only in name, who was actually the son of his father's best friend. Since Drew's father doesn't know he has a son, when his friend died, Drew's father agreed to raise the man's son as his own. Of course, as with many such arrangements in fiction, the adoptive son is touchy and rather dismissive of his station, yet paradoxically fights to defend his place, even as he spends much of his time avoiding work, getting drunk, and hanging around with the proverbial "bad crowd".

Drew, with his name still disguised, gets a job on his father's ranch, and his father admires the blood stock Drew has brought with him from Kentucky. Drew also runs into one of his comrades from the war, a Texan, and since Drew is posing as a Texan, they agree to pretend to be cousins. But when Drew's horses are stolen from the stables. perhaps by bandits, Drew and his father must go after them. And when his father discovers his adopted son is working for the bandits... but Drew's papers showing who he is have also been stolen. Can Drew ever reveal who he is to his father, and more importantly, will his father believe him?

Unlike many Andre Norton books, I found the two unusual. Perhaps it is that I don't usually read Westerns and are not familliar with Western tropes. But this didn't read like an Andre Norton book in any way. I found the story unusually foreshortened, to my eyes, although, again, this could be because I am not used to reading Westerns. The book was slim, and the ending felt strange, because the resolution was more told than shown. Drew is injured, his father reveals that he knows who Drew is, and says he will take care of him as Drew passes out/falls asleep. It didn't seem that the bandits were really taken care of, or the foster son, for that matter. But that was the ending of the book. A very strange ending for a book. It almost screamed for more information, but not a sequel. There wasn't enough story left for a sequel, but I would have liked to seen... more information about what happened next.

Another book I read is called "The Hidden Worlds" by Kristin Landon. The story takes place in a future where humanity has discovered space travel, but also overreached itself in producing a nanotech lifeform that takes over and converts all life into itself, called "The Cold Minds". Humanity fled Earth and the rest of its colonies to a far corner of the galaxy and a series of fifty colonies called collectively, "The Hidden Worlds". The colonies are held together by the Pilot Masters, the only ones who can pilot starships between the worlds, which they do by accessing a form of hyperspace. The only reason why the Pilot Masters keep their monopoly on power is that only they can pass on the ability to function in the hyperspace. They believe it is a spiritual gift passed on when a man lies with a woman and she carries the baby to term, so they can't even clone babies or do it by artificial insemination.

Linnea lives on one of the colonies, Santandru, a hardscrabble world where life only barely survives anyhow. When her village loses its only smartboat, any hope for the village surviving is lost. No food plants will grow in Santandru's soil and no regular boats can hope to survive on its waters. In addition to the village losing the boat, Linnea's sister loses her husband. Linnea and her sister cannot survive on their own without a man to take care of them, and are reluctantly forced to travel to Middlehaven, the nearest large city, to join the rolls of the poor and indigent. Her sister finds work as a laundrywoman, but Linnea herself is unable to find work in the city.

Her sister, however, has a secret. Long ago, one of their relatives went to another colony of the hidden worlds to act as a pleasure slave for one of the families there. In addition to the money he brought back with him (which no one in the family would touch, as they considered it tainted money), he also brought with him a secret/proof of a scandal that one of the families he worked for considered very important. Perhaps important enough that Linnea could use it to get Santandru's contract with the Pilot Masters renewed (because the rumor is that the Pilot Masters are going to let it lapse, which will spell the end for Santandru). Linnea agrees to travel to the planet of Nexus, to see if she can save her world.

Meanwhile, on Nexus, Iain sen Paolo is denied the chance to mate and pass on his genes in favor of his cousin Rafael. Iain is a Pilot Master, and his uncle is the head of the Pilot's guild. Even though he both hates and fears his cousin, he must be strong as the other man is elevated over him. With his cousin passing on his family's genes, Iain will never get the chance to mate and have children. He hates and fears his cousin because when Iain was young, he was given to his cousin as a sex toy, and his cousin dearly loves to inflict not only pain, but suffering. Iain also knows that his father is disappointed in him, and that nothing he has done in his life appears to be good enough for his father.

When Linnea arrives on Nexus, Iain is told that she is for him, but he thinks this is a prank from his cousin, as she is from a particularly backwards world and doesn't know how to serve in the way that Nexus families want. Her claim of proof of a scandal intrigues him, and he decides to investigate. But events are conspiring against his family. His uncle knows about the scandal, as does his father, and his uncle decides to get rid of both Iain's father, and Iain himself. As Iain teaches Linnea to be his servant in the house, he is told that he is up on charges at the Pilot's guild. When he is stripped of his title for supposedly conspiring with his father, he and Linnea become lovers.

But Iain's father does love him, and Iain's uncle forces his father to commit suicide so that his son will live. Iain tries to save his father, or failing that, to speak to him, but arrives too late. With his father's death and his own title stripped away, Iain loses all of his father's lands and money. Linnea is taken away from him, questioned harshly and turned over to Rafael as a sex toy. Iain is imprisoned.

When Rafael goes to gloat at Iain after several months of imprisonment, he reveals the scandal to Iain. The man who is their grandfather was actually impotent, and used a sex slave from Santandru to father his supposed "children", Iain's father and uncle. While Iain was raised in ignorance of his true origin, Rafael was told, and grew up his entire lifetime knowing that the Pilot Master's belief that they are the only ones who could pass on the ability to pilot to their sons, is wrong. Rafael wants to preserve the secret so that the Pilot Master's guild will retain its power, but he wants to prune what he sees as Iain's "weakness" from his family. He also insinuates to Iain that Linnea was killed, after Iain had bargained with his uncle for her release. Iain is enraged and attacks and nearly kills his cousin, but is stopped by the guards of the prison.

Meanwhile, Linnea is taken away from Rafael by Iain's Uncle. She is catatonic, but screams when anyone gets near her. She spends time in a mental hospital being "cured" and is taken to the spaceport when she is somewhat functional, supposedly to be returned home. But Iain's uncle cannot allow the information she holds to be known, so he instead sends her to a colony which has been infected by the Cold Minds, and is scheduled to be destroyed by bombarding it with asteroids. After 600 years, the Cold Minds have found the hidden worlds, and Iain's uncle wants to keep it a secret and abandon the outlying colonies so that a select few could be saved.

Iain, meanwhile, is freed by a friend of his father, who his father confessed to in a dying message that took ages to reach him because his father sent it in an extremely roundabout way so it could not be intercepted and destroyed. He gives Iain access to his ship, which has not been touched due to a shortage of pilots, and tells him that Linnea is still alive and where she has been sent. Iain knows he needs Linnea's proof to make his case to the other worlds in the Pilot's Guild, as well as loving her, so he goes in search of her... hoping to find her before the planet is destroyed.

I really enjoyed the novel. It was shelved in the Romance section rather than the Science Fiction section (even though that's what it says on the Novel's spine. It is also very obviously the first in a series of novels rather than a stand-alone, judging by the ending, and I will definitely be looking forward to any sequels. Although some of the novel was a little hard to read (mainly the parts with Iain's cousin Rafael, as he is *NOT* a nice person) for reasons relating to character, not the author's writing, the book is a very good read. The only thing I found strange was the way the author named the characters. Iain is a scottish name, but his father's name, Paolo, is Spanish (or Portuguese, depending). His cousin Rafael is also Spanish and yet Rafael's father is named Fridric, a name that is more northern European. And their grandfather, David, well... you can judge for yourself. Now, I am all for diversity in naming, but it just seemed very strange for all the names in one family to be like that, especially such close family. Linguistically, the names are all over the map. But that's only a niggle and not a real complaint.