Review: Operation: Loch Ness, William Meikle, 2018.

Meikle continues to wring a surprisingly amount of variety from the simple concept of a Scottish Special Forces squad encountering weirdness on their military mission.

This time operations are in the Scottish Highlands around Loch Ness. The S-Squad, because they’re close and are the nearest things to experts on the weird their CO has, is sent to investigate a massive killing and mutilation of animals at a local zoo.

It appears some kind of large animal is loose and has possibly taken a child off. The next thing you know, the squad is on another monster hunt.

The pacing is slower on this adventure; there’s a lot of walking the Highlands. (Which is fine, descriptions of Scotland is one reason I read the book.) The monster reveal takes longer.

Don’t worry, once things get going, the bodies will pile up.

But this installment of the series has its own special charms and ties into other Meikle works. I’ll just mention three names: Alexander Seton, Boleskine House, and Aleister Crowley.

And I liked the way Meikle treats the conflict between preserving Nessie and it becoming a lethal menace. Meikle’s interest in cryptozoology and studies in biology lends a nice of credibility to the whole thing.

 

More reviews of fantastic fiction are indexed by title and author/editor.

Since I read, Operation: Siberia, I decided I might as well catch up on the rest of the S-Squad books.

This is, incidentally, the first posting of this blog’s fifth year.

Thanks for everyone continuing to stop by and the new comers.

The strange name will remain for the fifth year. So will the erratic choices for reviews.

What will probably change is fewer reviews of what I’ve read. For instance, you will probably not be getting a review of the book of Epictetus’ philosophy I’m reading since I have no reason to believe, based on past experience, anyone would care what I have to say on it.

The blog’s focus, such as it is, will probably tighten a bit. I may not even review every science fiction book I read though, especially by modern authors well covered elsewhere.

The review format, with its need to avoid spoilers, is a bit confining, so I’ll probably do more essays on future books, especially when covering certain authors.

With the time freed up, I hope to actually read more of other people’s blogs and pursue some other writing projects besides the blog.

Review: Operation: Amazon, William Meikle, 2018.

No adventures in the cold here. The Squad is sent to the Amazon to find out what’s happened to the son of an English nobleman. Said son, Buller, disappeared from a gold dredging operation on the Amazon.

But then his phone is found, floating in a plastic bag. Is that really some kind of giant snake in a video on the phone? A local guide, Giraldo, thinks so.

So the Squad goes to look for Buller with Giraldo and Buller’s friend Wilkes. The trail ends at a stone temple on the river. There they are captured by the hidden tribe of Boitata, associated with strange stories about people turning into serpents.

This is the first time in the series that outright magic is unapologetically put in the story. Operation Antarctica’s strange menace was rationalized as a sort of science.

It’s also the installment with, beyond a doubt, the most unlikeable civilian ever met by the Squad: Buller. Continue reading →

This one showed up on Meikle’s list of novels he wrote with the Scottish settings. I’ll be looking at a couple of more later on, but first I’ll be doing some postings on a couple of his Sigil and Totems novels and related short stories.

No, I’m not doing a complete Meikle series, but, between his works set in Scotland, the stories with the Seton clan, his Sigil and Totem mythos, and the S-Squad, it will be a fair chunk of his prolific output.

Review: The Road Hole Bunker Mystery, William Meikle, 2015.

There’s nothing fantastic or weird in this story. It’s a straight up private eye mystery narrated by one John Royle, a down and out private eye in St. Andrews, Scotland. He’s bored and behind on the rent when a fat, blue-haired Texan woman hires him to look for her brother. He’s disappeared when visiting the town.

Later he’ll turn up dead in the road hole bunker on the seventeenth hole of the world-famous St. Andrews golf course. He won’t be the only dead guy by story’s end.

When Royle gets set up for his murder, he figures he might have his “Bogart case”.

This isn’t a hard-boiled detective story with lots of violence though there is certainly the threat of it. But we’ll see all sides of St. Andrews from those making their money off tourists to those who work in the town’s other famous establishment, University of St. Andrews. We’ll see the town’s sleazier side. We’ll meet a dangerous Glasgow gangster and a hot dame in a low-cut red kimono. Royle has to figure just how many lies to tell Joe Boyd, an old friend from childhood but also the police detective working the murder of the Texan.

But the story’s main pleasure is its sense of place and the locals that are old friends of Royle. There’s Tom, Royle’s landlord, former greenskeeper at St. Andrews and who now runs his own private museum on the history of golf there. There’s George, a pub owner at the center of a lot of the town’s news and business, legal and otherwise. There’s Willie and Davy, two old timers who are Royle’s surrogate uncles. There’s Davy, an old friend of Royle’s looking to make his break as a reporter. Continue reading →