Tag: Books

Crime Bake 2025

November 10th, 2025
I’m going back to old-school blogging for a moment to talk about Crime Bake 2025, from which I returned yesterday. I’ll say up front that I had a great time and met quite a few people I didn’t know or had only known on the periphery of the New England crime writing community. I’ll also add the disclaimer that I am on the Crime Bake committee, so I’m going to be a little bit biased.

The Guest of Honor this year with Lori Rader-Day, and she was fabulous. Like Gabino Iglesias the year before, she was friendly, affable, approachable, down-to-earth, and honored to be there. I actually got the chance to speak to her one-on-one for a bit at the banquet, and she was lovely.

Being on the committee, I didn’t get the chance to attend maybe all of the panels I would have liked to. Especially since I was moderating one of them.

I was asked to moderate the Civic Duty: Writing About Social Issues panel. It can be a heavy topic, and certainly there were some heavy moments when the panelists were answering. But we had a terrific group of panelists (Richie Narvaez, Jeff Markowitz, and Courtney Denelle), and they were open and honest about their experiences and how they approach the craft of writing when it comes to folding social issues into their fiction. We heard some really great things from those who attended (to which I felt extremely relieved–this was my first time moderating a panel!).

The banquet was later that night, and aside from a few hiccups, it went smoothly. And then attendance remained pretty high for the Sunday morning non-fiction authors/experts, which is saying quite a lot considering there are plains and trains to catch.

A few personal highlights for me:
- I finally got the chance to meet Sara, my editor for The Last Line in person. It was so lovey to meet her and catch up on the last year.
- Back in March I helped run a writing retreat in Orange, MA. It involved providing some prompts and some writing time. Basically, I would show several images of places and characters and give the group fifteen minutes to write. Then I would pause them, show them images of various “things”, and give them another fifteen minutes, the idea being they must now fold the “thing” into whatever they were writing. One of the participants attended Crime Bake for the first time this year and told me that she continued what she had started using my prompts, and that it was the first time she finished writing a full-length novel. That made me warm and fuzzy.
The number of first time attendees this year was significant, which was a great improvement over last year. And the best story of attendance we heard was about an online writing group that is spread over at least two continents. They had wanted to meet in person, and they chose Crime Bake to do it! One came from as far away as Oregon and another from London, England.

We heard a number of times that this was the best Crime Bake in a number of years, and I’m very proud to have been able to be a part of planning it. Kick-off for planning 2026 is in December, and I’m already thinking through ideas for programming and the banquet.
Apr 27 Photo

April 27th, 2016

I’ll get to all the books in my to-be-read pile someday, I swear.
Feb 19 Photo

February 19th, 2016

I’m running behind tonight. So here’s a picture of some of the books piled next to the desk.

G’night.
NaNoWriMo: The Kids’ Edition

November 2nd, 2015

I feel very fortunate because this year, my younger daughter Maggie is doing NaNoWriMo with me. There is an entire young writer’s program for NaNoWriMo that kids can sign up for. Maggie is going to do it, and so are most of the kids in her class. And that’s my fault.

During the annual open house/back to school night that school holds for the parents of students, I got to talking with Maggie’s teacher, Patty, about people who come in and volunteer and get the kids interested in something that pertains to the lesson plan. At some point in the conversation, NaNoWriMo came up. One of the Patty’s former students participated in NaNoWriMo last year. She mentioned how she would love to get some of her kids to do that again.

I didn’t say anything at the time because I felt like I wanted to think that through. Patty had no idea I had written and self publish book (insert shameless marketing plug here) or that I had done NaNoWriMo last year. I sat on it for a bit, wondering if I wanted to mention this and offer to help lead the class in a NaNoWriMo charge. I’m not a teacher and have no training in classroom management skills. I didn’t know if I’d be a good fit to come in.

In a phone conversation I was having with Patty one night about something else, I decided to mention it, and offered to come into the class and talk about what the NaNoWriMo challenge is, and see if there are any kids who were interested. Her response was unbelievably enthusiastic, and so, last week I found myself in Maggie’s classroom talking to her classmates all about NaNoWriMo, writing, and storytelling.

I have to tell you, it was a metric ton of fun. The class is great, excited about the project, and from what Patty tells me, chockablock full of writers.

I talked about what NaNoWriMo is, and what a novel is. I talked about the kinds of ways you could write a novel, from typing right into a computer to writing it all long hand. I had one person ask if the novel could be dictated to someone, or into a into a software program. Hey, if it was good enough for Paradise Lost, it’s good enough for NaNoWriMo. I talked about the process writers use to write: some write in the morning, some in the evening, some in their bedroom, some at the dining room table, some even in the kitchen. We talked about the kinds of books the kids are currently reading, and what their favorite novels are. We talked about the Inner Editor, which I dubbed the “Evil Inner Editor”, who constantly whispers in your ear telling you to stop, or slow down, or do things differently. One of the exercises from the Young Writers Program is to draw the Inner Editor on a worksheet. Once drawn, the kids are encouraged to hide him/her away so they can’t work their evil spells. We did that in the classroom and some of the kids’ Inner Editors turned out really well.

As I said, it was a ton of fun.

Patty had already come up with the word count she is hoping the kids will hit. She’s shooting for them to complete 250 words per day, which is about one page per day. That means that the kids will end up writing a 7,500 “novel” by the time it’s finished.

I’m headed back into the classroom in the middle of November to check in with the kids and see how they’re doing. I’ll be giving them tips, most of which will be plucked from the wisdom of the NaNoWriMo community. We’ll talk about the challenges they’re having and see if we can’t find ways to working around them. Most importantly, I’ll be giving them the encouragement to keep on truckin’, and to keep ignoring the “Evil Inner Editor”!

After that, I’ll head back into the classroom sometime in December to find out how they did. There is a program NaNoWriMo has this year with FastPencil, which will help kids publish their finished work. Hopefully, at the end of the month, and maybe by the end of December, there’ll be enough kids that finish and publish that Patty will have a whole new library.

After the class was over, tweets were tweeted:

https://twitter.com/scottclyerly/status/659004810625220608

Grade four Launched NaNoWriMo today with a great visit from author and parent Scott Lyerly! #InspiringYoungWriters pic.twitter.com/0OK2JwbTYQ
— Patty Inwood (@PattyInwood) October 27, 2015

@scottclyerly told the students Must. Ignore. Inner. Editor. Just write. #NaNoWriMo pic.twitter.com/x2Sym71YD6
— Patty Inwood (@PattyInwood) October 27, 2015
Book Review: “The Girl On The Train” by Paula Hawkins

October 6th, 2015

The last of the books I snarfed down at the end of this summer was “The Girl On The Train” by Paula Hawkins. This was the “it” book of the summer, the one everyone was talking about and that everyone couldn’t put down. It was supposed to be the page-turner with the twists you couldn’t see coming. And so I too engulfed this one to see what everyone was talking about.

Truthfully, if I had to sum the book up in a word, it would be “meh”.

It’s hard to give too much of a plot summary without giving too much away, and while I, unlike the rest of the world, did not think the book was all that and a bag of chips, I still don’t wish to spoil it for those you enjoy these things more than I do. Or as my wife would describe it, “everyone else but you.”

Fair enough.

The essence of the plot, then, is that a woman named Rachel, down on her luck and sipping gin and tonics from a can while taking the train back and forth to London, fantasizes about what the people in the houses behind the tracks do, the kind of lives they lead. Her own life has fallen apart and she takes a kind of solace in the lives these fantasy people lead in her head. She has even given them names, since their real names are unknown to her.

Then, one day, she sees something as she’s staring through the train window, something that turns her fantasy on its head. At that moment, her life changes from fantasies about these people to an all out obsession about what she saw. An obsession so deep, she risks her life and livelihood, and perhaps darkest of all, her integrity to get close enough to discover the truth.

It sounds like an enthralling premise, doesn’t it? Critics have been using the term Hitchcockian to describe it. It does have a certain “Rear Window” quality to it, that strange voyeuristic quality of Jeff Jefferies looking out his back window and seeing something he thinks is a murder. But that’s were the comparison ends. It starts with a voyeur and turns into a study of a life in freefall. In that regard, the book actually became hard to read. As the main character made bad, then worse, then catastrophic decisions, I wondered how much longer I could read until the unraveling of her life became too unpalatable. It never quite got there, but it came really darn close.

The plot relies largely on what the New York Times referred to as “unreliable narration”, meaning you can’t trust what the narrator is telling you. Except that you can. The narration flickers between three narrators, all of the women, all of whom are involved in the plot. Each one has their quirks and problems, each has moments of fooling themselves, but that’s really all they’re fooling. Unreliable narration only goes so far, and when at least one of the characters is a blackout drunk, you can readily expect that their memory will be a bit, shall we say, fuzzy.

Another of the devices used to confuse the reader is a jumbling of the timing of the scenes. The cutting is designed to bring the reader back and forth and possibly add some confusion, but a careful reading will show that each chapter is timestamped. You get a certain anticipatory feeling as you near the time when you know that the precipitating event happened, and that you’ll finally get to see it, feeling like maybe you’ll be surprised by what’s around the corner. But you aren’t.

Or at least I wasn’t.

Also, the book was written in the first person present tense. Don’t get me started.

The climax doesn’t twist nearly as much as everyone had been claiming it did. I found myself unsurprised at the ending, indeed, hoping for something different. I was disappointed when I was right. Of the four books I’ve reviewed in the last few days, having gulped them all down like a thirsty man in a desert, I’d have to say that “The Girl On The Train” was my least favorite.

Sorry everybody.

Queue up the backlash.
Book Review: “Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland” by Ace Atkins

October 5th, 2015

I needed something to cleanse the mental pallet after Lou Berney’s “The Long and Faraway Gone.” It was such an intense read, the way Berney knifes the reader in nearly every single scene, that I needed to visit some familiar friends. Queue up Spenser.

Since Robert Parker’s sudden death in 2010, Ace Atkins has been carrying on the Spenser tradition with the blessing of the estate. Hand picked to keep Spenser going, Atkins has written four Spenser books thus far, and will likely keep going for the foreseeable future. The first one, called “Lullaby”, I reviewed here. It wasn’t a bad book, so I thought I’d give “Wonderland” a try.

Doesn’t hurt that I got it on remainder.

This time, the client is Henry Cimoli, the owner of the Boston gym where Spenser and Hawk used to (and still do) box. He’s being muscled out of the condo he owns so that a Las Vegas casino developer can move in and build. The novel explorers Henry more than I remember Parker ever doing, and Atkins mostly nails him. There is of course the usual cavalcade of characters that Atkins likes to bring to the stage, and to a certain extent, this feels like Atkins is trying to prove to the Parker faithful that he knows the Spenser work so well. Despite the fact that the book is chock full of characters Spenser has had contact with in the past, the characterizations largely work to the novels advantage.

There is one exception. The relatively new player in the on-going adventures of Spenser is one Zebulon Sixkill, the American Indian that Spenser has taken under his wing to train as a private investigator. This relationship feels forced, as if Atkins picked up a leftover character from the Spenser dinner table and decided to do something with him. In the final Spenser book by Parker, “Sixkill“, we’re introduced to “Z”, as Zebulon has come to be called, but there is nothing to indicate that he’ll be a continued or recurring character. I’m not sure if this is Atkins taking liberties, or whether any of Parker’s notes indicate that Z will continue, but in this case, it feels forced.

As a crime novel, it’s a good one. The plot is more complex than the ones Parker used to set up, at least in the later Spenser novels. Spenser’s sarcasm is present, though more muted than it was in “Lullaby”, which isn’t a bad thing. “Lullaby” felt a little over the top with the hard-boiled quips. Spenser is still sarcastic in “Wonderland”, but he never ventures down the path of snarky. The prose is not as lean as Parker’s was, but then again, few hard-boiled novels written these days are as lean as Parker wrote. Parker, self-admittedly, loved dialogue because it “chew[ed] up a lot of pages.” One could look at this as being lazy, but I find that Parker’s style was such that the plot, characters, and danger were all conveyed convincingly through dialogue, and sometimes dialogue alone. A great example of how this works is through the Jesse Stone novels (which I highly, highly recommend).

After the last page is done, Atkins still isn’t Parker. They’re tough shoes to fill. But Atkins does a nice job with most of the characters and the location of Boston itself. Spenser will continue to live on, and in Atkins hands, that’s not a bad thing.
Book Review: “The Long and Faraway Gone” by Lou Berney

October 2nd, 2015

Right after reading “Third Rail”, I jumped into Lou Berney’s gut-wrenching “The Long and Faraway Gone“. And when I say guy-wrenching, I mean knife plunging into the gut, then barbs opening at the tip, and then twisting all around until your digestive tract is the groundest of ground meat.

Ostensibly a mystery, the book opens with a movie theater robbery prologue that leaves your legs wobbling before moving forward with the story proper. Picking up a couple of decades after the opener, we follow one of two main characters, Wyatt, as he comes back to the city of the prologue and face to face with doubts and demons that filled him before he left, being the only survivor of a brutal slaying.

At the same time, the book follows the story of Julianna as she wrestles with the disappearance of her big sister Genevieve, who vanished around roughly the same time period as the movie theater robbery. She’s been trying to find out what happened to her sister. It’s become an obsession for her, costing her money, and even potentially her job.

The book is, essentially, two separate stories that barely overlap and where both could just as easily be a book unto their own. Why Berney felt compelled to collect two crime stories, each with its own arc, into a single book is unclear. It gives the book volume, and allows the narrative point of view to flicker back and forth without staying with one character the entire time. Perhaps it’s out of a desire to avoid point-of-view reader fatigue that the individual arcs are combined.

Does it work? Sure, well enough for the stories. The tension Berney builds is at times intolerable and you beg for the release of a scene change. He invests the reader in the obsessions of these two primary characters so that you root for them to find the answers they’re looking for. Each chapter examines the characters, both as they are now, and how the events of their earlier lives have made them into who they are. But each examination draws on the sorrow and madness of the pivotal moment of their youth, and with each examination, Berney gives the reader another rabbit punch to the kidneys.

As Wyatt and Julianna crisscross the city trying to dig just a little deeper into their wounds, there grows in the reader the hope that perhaps they will cross paths. But if you’re expecting them to find each other, join forces, and help resolve each other’s quest for answers, you’ll be left wanting. Wyatt and Julianna intersect briefly, and then part, each continuing to pursue their own obsession.
Somehow, this theme of partial satisfaction was the major theme that emerged for me while reading. As I neared the end, I realized that neat answers will not be handed out like pretty little presents left under the tree. This feeling of partial satisfaction is overwhelmingly what the reader feels by the end. Wyatt and Julianna both find the answers to the questions they have been asking, but the answers provide no solace, no real closure. Maybe they have been asking the wrong questions. Or maybe life is messy and unsatisfying and sometimes the answers you get don’t get you anything you need or hope for.

Berney offers the reader only a slight small satisfaction that the protagonists never get. It’s contained in the final two chapters, which feel more like a concession to the journey the reader has taken more than a requirement of the story. By the end of the book, I was exhausted and when I closed the last chapter, I felt like I had read a powerful and moving statement on the human condition. And I was happy to leave it in the past and not look at it again.
Book Review: “Third Rail” by Rory Flynn

October 1st, 2015

I was on a reading tear this past summer. I went through something like six books in four weeks, which, if you knew how slowly I read, you would understand what an unbelievable pace that is for me. And so, without further ado, here is the first of a couple of reviews that I’m going to offer for some of those titles.

The first book that I devoured was called “Third Rail“. Written by Rory Flynn, it tells the story of one Eddy Harkness, a cop in a small town who used to be part of Boston PD’s narcotics intelligence division. After being set up as a fall guy for a crazy fan death that came during the crazier celebrations of the first World Series Red Sox win in eighty-six years, the best job he could find is being a meter maid in the fictional small town of Nagog. He’s not a happy camper with this and, when he’s not spending his time drinking in bars and romancing twentysomething artists with underworld ties, he’s tying to find a way back to narco-Intel,

Then somebody steals his gun. Or maybe he lost it. In the morning-after haze of a boozy hangover, he can’t really remember what happened. But it looks like it was stolen, especially when somebody starts sending him pictures of it. This kicks off a desperate search by Eddy to find it, while at the same time, he starts looking into a deadly new drug called third rail that’s making people act cuckoo for cocoa puffs before they inevitably die.

The thing that works the best in “Third Rail” is geography. Flynn, a Massachusetts native, has a vice-grip lock on the voice of the region. From the moment the book opens the reader is plunged into the seedy scene of the Boston underworld. Flynn’s spot on here, from language, location, and the Southie “I don’t caah who the f*ck you think you ahh” attitude.

The book is a study in the economy of words without veering into the iceberg philosophy of writing. Flynn’s tight prose almost dares you to read it. It’s tough and terse, like a character in and of itself growing up in Dorchester.

This is not to say that the book is flawless. The language, used well enough to drive the book forward at an almost propulsive rate, comes with a price. It is written in an increasingly popular style called “third person present tense.” So, instead of reading “he did, he went, he said,” the prose is instead “he does, he goes, he says.” This style movement (I’m not sure what else to call it) makes me bananas. There are few books I’ve read in this style that I’ve enjoyed. Chuck Wendig uses this, and his Miriam Black series works well as a result. Jody Shields used it to her advantage in The Fig Eater.

The book also has an “everything but the kitchen sink” feel. There’s cops, robbers, sex, drugs, rock n roll, mobsters, drugs, corrupt cops, a damsel in distress, a child in distress, and familial twists that leave you thinking “huh”?. If you took all the pieces of some of your favorite hard-boiled detective fiction and put it all into one book, what you’d have is “Third Rail”. There is a moment deep in the book where it teeters on becoming a parody. It skates by, just managing to avoid that, driving past the cliff edge, but just barely.

In the end, though, the books is far more satisfying than annoying, something which many books cannot claim. Another Eddy Harkness book comes out next June. I’ll be checking in with narco-Intel then to see whether Eddie’s first adventure was a one trick pony, or whether Flynn can beat the notorious sophomore slump.
The Problem with “Game of Thrones”

September 30th, 2015
There’s a joke I read online somewhere that starts this post beautifully: “GRR Martin, JJ Abrams, and Joss Whedon walk into a bar, and everyone you’ve ever loved dies.” Yeah, that sounds about right.

The Emmys were on a few weeks ago. “Game of Thrones” won big with a capital B. And I couldn’t help but think “why?” When I finished the past season, I sat back and wondered whether I would watch it anymore. The end of every season always finds the internet all atwitter with the various “shocking” deaths of certain characters. Why anybody is shocked by a character death, or at least maiming, in this show by now is beyond me. George RR Martin makes a regular habit of killing of whatever character strikes his fancy. So I knew what was coming when I finally watched the finale of season five.

Was I shocked by the deaths? Not really. I’ve come to expect it. I’ve come to expect that any character that I might grow fond of is probably going to get the ax (figuratively and literally). And that illustrates the fundamental problem with “Game of Thrones” the show and “A Song of Fire and Ice” the book series.

Before we go on, let’s be up front, shall we? There WILL be spoilers below. Oh yes, there will be spoilers.

You’ve been warned.

Let’s get the problem on the table right now. GRR Martin has left us with nearly no character with which to emphasize. Every time we begin to get close to a character, that character meets and untimely and often ugly end. Let’s recap everybody who got killed off in the last episode of season five, shall we?
- Selyse Baratheon, who hangs herself with guilt of what she let her husband Stannis do to their daughter
- Stannis Baratheon, defeated in battle by Lord Bolton, and, after fleeing to the nearby wood, is discovered by Brienne of Tarth, who avenges her former sworn lord, Stannis’s brother Renly, whom Stannis killed
- Myrcella, Lannister or Baratheon, depending on your allegiance, the young daughter of Queen Cersei who was sent to Dorn to be betrothed to a Dornish prince, but who is murdered by poison by the vengeful consort of another Dornish prince, who himself was killed by a man of the Lannisters
- Jon Snow, Commander of the Night Watch (and fan favorite and apparently the biggest shock of the night, though I don’t know why since he meets this fate at the end of the fifth book)
That’s four major characters in a single episode. So major that two of these deaths, Stannis and Selyes, effectively close off an entire subplot, with Stannis’s effort to claim the throne for himself ending in utter bloody defeat.

I don’t mention Arya Stark, youngest surviving daughter of Ned Stark, (Ned, who you might remember was beheaded by Joffery in an act of malicious cruelty that Joffery reveled in). In the finale, she kills a man out of vengeance for that man’s killing of her first sword master. She’s been training to become a Faceless Man, which is akin to a ninja, a stealthy assassin that does his work then disappears. Except she didn’t have permission to kill the man she killed, so her punishment is…blindness.

This doesn’t begin to cover the other deaths that happened this season, the most brutal of which was the death of Shireen, Stannis’s daughter. Stannis, in a moment of blind faith to the new god he worships, sacrifices his only daughter by burning her at the stake, believing the sacrifice of king’s blood will bring him victory. Did I mention that Shireen is (was) eleven, maybe twelve?

Are you catching all of this?

It’s insane. And this is just the show. The books have a far greater number of characters. It’s a cast of well over a thousand characters. It’s a huge amazing epic that I’m not sure has ever been attempted in modern fantasy novel/series history.

And I won’t bother to read it.

And by the way, I might be done with the show as well.

Why? Because as I watched the season five finale, it dawned on my why I’ve felt less and less interested in investing time into this brilliantly complex story. It’s all about empathy.

Let’s baseline a little bit before we go on. What is the primary purpose of a character driven story? To make you empathize with the protagonist so that you care what happens to him/her. Think Harry Potter. There was another large series, lots of characters, several deaths (though rather bloodless compared to “Game of Thrones”). Kids, and adults, gobbled these books up. They would pick them up at midnight on release night and swallow them whole, unhinging their jaws like starving python. Why? Empathy.

The simple fact is that Martin, in his sprawling epic, has repeatedly given us characters for which he elicits from us empathy. He lets us get close to these characters, let’s us see their struggles, gives us a brief amount of hope that they will persevere…then he kills them. Sometimes gruesomely.

(Oh, who are we kidding? Most times its gruesome.)

I understand that Martin is basing a fantasy series of a real-world morals. The War of the Roses was the initial basis for the first war we see in GoT. Yorks versus Lancasters in England became a template for Starks versus Lannisters in GoT. It’s not that hard a stretch. In England, the Lancasters won, and so in Westros the Lannisters won. So I get it. High fantasy without the clear cut definition of black and white, good and evil. This is not the Lord of the Rings.

And yet, without some character around with whom the audience can rally and put their hopes for a win for the good guys, what are we left with? We’re left with twists and turns and plot yanks that no one sees coming, to the often fatal demise of its characters. We’re left with maybe two characters for whom we can empathize, Daenerys and Tyrion. For now. There’s no guarantee that they’ll survive the series. In whom should we out our feelings? Who will be left at the end of this sprawling epic, and will we even care? As all others perish, so too does our patience and interest. Why should we continue to invest in a show that promises us nothing but pain and misery? So we can talk about it over the watercooler the next day?

No, thank you. I think I’m watercoolered out.
NaNoWriMo 2014 – Day 2

November 2nd, 2014

I promise not post progress every single day. I think will tend to make people bonkers. But here we are at the end of day two of NaNoWriMo, and I’m just curious: how’s it going?

For myself, I’m just over 6000 words. It’s a nice start, especially since I know that once the work week hits, life returns to its normal state of crazy.

No matter how far you’ve gotten remember that it’s farther than you were. Keep writing!