Tag Archives: Suspense

Crimson Letters From Kandahar Province by Ian DG Sandusky

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Please note that this analysis contains spoilers.


Crimson Letters
From Kandahar Province

Ian DG Sandusky
Wild Wolf Publishing 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907954-09-2
Trade Paperback
202 pages
Suspense/Horror

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After a roadside bomb tears Private Quincent L Meyer’s life apart in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, he’s left horrifically mutilated. Back home, job opportunities pass him by and children cry at the very sight of him. All alone, the world fades to grey.

Continued searching for work and insanely brutal workouts fill those grey days, and evening drinking at The Stallion takes care of the rest. But every night Quince is plagued by nightmares, forced to relive the fatal patrol again and again. As the shrapnel rips through him, he wakes to a life he barely knows anymore.

Then, just as there’s a ray of light—a budding romance with the beautiful Sarah, a drunken decision leads to a stupid, reflexive moment that leaves a woman dead and his life ruined. Knowing that if he stays the cops will catch him, Quince decides to re-enlist.

This is when Quince truly begins a descent into a hell of his own making. And we, the readers, watch in horror as our hero makes one inhuman decision after another, reveals one bit of insanity after another… The terrible secret he brought back from Kandahar; The gruesome, torturous death he brings to someone who betrays him; The red phone on his living room wall that can’t dial out but that someone who knows the horrors he has perpetrated can use to call him. The place he goes to in the end; a sort of purgatory, where all will be explained.

And as the book comes to an end, Quince is offered one more choice. When he makes it, all is revealed and we see the Crimson Letters From Kandahar Province for what they really are.

How do you make readers care about a narcissistic murderer, an ex-soldier who’s answer to everything seems extreme and often violent? You sneak up on the readers, of course, hoping they have enough invested in Quince Meyer to keep them reading an increasingly bizarre story—a tale that finally pushes through to a place where the author carefully reels his readers back in so they can sort things out in their minds, readying his audience for when they reach the brief double dénouement, where there’s a moment when Quince suddenly understands what has been going on and another moment where they’re expected to go “Ah… I get it, these are the Crimson Letters From Kandahar Province.”

I think Ian Sandusky took a chance with this book. He counts on the readers to be intrigued when our good guy turns out to be a bad guy. Then he keeps them in suspense as to how this is all going to play out, while he takes them through one horror after the next, with some of the readers, I’m sure, wondering how the hell any of this ties into the title. Where and what are the Crimson Letters from Kandahar Province?

Well, Mr. Sandusky, your gamble paid off with me. You caught me by surprise. Maybe I was just having a bad day, but I prefer to think your story concept, while not exactly new, was dressed up in it’s own unique brand of clothes—the sharp suit capturing my attention while you performed sleights of hand I should have caught. Yes, I looked back and found enough evidence there was something so “hinky”about the story, I should have been on high alert. But even then, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to put the whole story together.

And that last bit is where you lose points. Going forward, Mr. Sandusky, you should remember all puzzles need to be solvable. This fundamental law will keep your readers hanging on and ensure that the suspense keeps building. You see, the readers trust you to play fair, Mr. Sandusky, to give them a chance to win your little game. If that chance doesn’t exist, then you have cheated them.

So, what do I do? Crimson Letters from Kandahar Province is a unique and, in a creepy way, interesting story. A few too many typos, missing words and wrong words used, but not enough to affect the tale. If your reader is a passive one, they will have a rewarding experience when everything is laid out for them in the end (if they can make the leap from literal letters to metaphorical ones). But the active reader, the one who works hard to solve the mystery posed by the letters: I question as to whether there are enough clues for them to figure out what’s going on. Myself, I went with the paranormal, which is certainly left open as a possibility. I suppose someone could make the leap to metaphorical letters and a possible dream sequence. But the actual truth? I suspect not. And that means what could easily have been a solid 4 star book drops down to a 3.

Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye

Blockade Billy: something different from Stephen King

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Blockade Billy
by Stephen King
Scribner, May 201o
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0821-2
Hardcover
132 pages
Suspense/Horror

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Fans of Stephen King know he’s passionate about music and baseball. In his little hardcover, Blockade Billy, King has written such an authentic feeling baseball story I went looking to see if such a character (or a composite of such characters) actually existed. I knew the story was fiction, yet there I was foolishly researching old-time baseball. That should tell you a lot about the story.

How can you be a baseball fan and not like the tale of  Blockade Billy? Narrated to Mr. King by an old man who was there, the reader gets to meet Billy Blakely, perhaps the greatest player who ever lived. Yet today’s generation has never heard of him. It’s as if the game tried to erase his very existence. Now I don’t know about you, but that’s enough of a hook to keep me reading to the shocking end of the story. And what an end it is. King does not disappoint.

Blockade Billy contains a second story entitled Morality. The questions asked here are  “What would you do if a person you look up to offers you a lot of money to do something you know is morally wrong?” and “How would the amoral choice effect you?”

I thought this second story was more horrifying than Blockade Billy, simply because it made me uncomfortable, where the first didn’t. The end will disappoint many people; a subtle, maybe even simple ending that will anger those used to being spoon fed, I found it to be realistic and therefore more disturbing than a larger than life finish would have been.

A great read for a slow Sunday afternoon.



Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye


The Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon

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The Queen of Bedlam
by Robert McCammon
Pocket Books, 2007
978-1-4165-7157-5
eBook, 655 pages
Historical Fiction/Mystery

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It’s 1702 and Matthew Corbett has been working as a personal secretary to Magistrate Nathaniel Powers of New York. When his employer suddenly announces he is retiring and sends the young man on an arranged job interview, Matthew realizes he has allowed himself to become complacent about his future. A growing town of approximately 5,000 people, the promise represented by New York is being considered by many: businessmen, financiers, politicians and criminals. Matthew now realizes he will have to do the same. So, when he’s offered a position with the Herrald Agency, perhaps the first private investigators to set up shop in the Colonies, Matthew recognizes it as a serious opportunity for which he is well suited.

(For those of you who don’t know, Matthew Corbett was introduced in 2002 in a two-volume suspense novel called Speaks The Nightbird. Working as a scrivener-apprentice to Isaac Woodward, a magistrate in Carolina, the two men came to the village of Fount Royal to investigate the charges against Rachel Howarth, who apparently was a witch who killed her husband, a man of the cloth. No one but Matthew believed the woman innocent, and he had to single-handedly solve the murder in order to save Rachel from burning at the stake.)

Now, as Matthew Corbett embarks on his new career, he has three more mysteries to solve…

1. Discover the identity of the fiend New York’s printer of the Earwig (A 2 page rag that passes for a newspaper) has dubbed The Masker. Matthew was intent on solving this particular puzzle even before becoming a detective. But he’s given extra incentive by the widow of one of the victims, who offers him 10 shillings to track down the killer. His new employer is also interested in how Matthew will perform with respect to such a dangerous case.

2. Prove that  Eben Ausley, the headmaster of the local orphanage, has been abusing boys for many years. Matthew spent his childhood at this institution and knows the man is a monster.

3. Complete an agency job which requires that he and his new mentor, Hudson Greathouse, discover the identity of a long-time mental patient known only as The Queen Of Bedlam.

Using the tools of his time, Matthew unwittingly chases after a criminal mastermind so foul one can almost sense the detective will fail. And as we follow our hero through a cast of interesting characters (Matthew’s new mentor, Hudson Greathouse, who is what we, today, would call a mercenary; Zed, the hulking, tongueless slave who works for the city’s strange coroner; even the new Governor, who dresses in women’s clothing in deference to his cousin the Queen), McCammon also paints us a vivid picture what it must have been like to be at the birth of a new century and her greatest city.

I’ve read all four books in the Matthew Corbett series, and I have to say The Queen of Bedlam is my favourite. Robert McCammon takes three seemingly unrelated crimes and turns them into a sinister operation of epic proportions (and makes it seem easy to do). Dropped into the middle of this nightmare is the refreshing hero, Matthew Corbett, who is such a perfectly drawn character he has become a good friend to me. Now, add in meticulous and often surprising descriptions of New York city in its infancy and you have an historical novel of suspense like none other.

The reader will have great fun as McCammon masterfully weaves the many threads of his mystery, creates a fictional world with great skill and still manages to keep some of the playfulness you can find in some of his earlier works. Perhaps the reader will also be excited about the recent release of the fourth Corbett novel, Mister Slaughter.


Copyright © Clayton Clifford Bye 2010