Honors Due

[Betsy Speicher 0]

Honors Due by Edward Cline

Book suggested for rating by Bill Bucko

[Bill Bucko 0]

For background on the author, see the interview at Capitalism Magazine: http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/culture/...h-ed-cline.html

Ed's six-book Sparrowhawk series, about the origins of the American Revolution, is a great achievement.

But his other novels are all remarkable:

The Merritt Fury series, about a two-fisted entrepreneur:

Whisper the Guns

We Three Kings

(a MUST READ!)

Run from Judgment

The Cyrus Skeen series, set in Roaring Twenties San Francisco:

China Basin

Head of Athena

(and

The Dedalus Conspiracy

, currently in progress)

The Chess Hanrahan series, about a detective who solves paradoxes:

With Distinction

(to appear next year)

First Prize

(won a national award for Best First Mystery Novel)

Presence of Mind

Honors Due

Honors Due is the climax of the Chess Hanrahan series. From Facebook:

IMPOSSIBLE?? That's what Chess Hanrahan thinks. How could a distinguished historian who reveres human greatness have written a screenplay that turns Galileo into a buffoon? ... Great literature from the author of the "Sparrowhawk" series--as his remarkable detective probes whether literature could be a motive for murder.

Want to know what makes Ed Cline unique among current writers?

(1) He writes about larger-than-life heroes:

"Is this the same Chess Hanrahan who--?"

I grimaced. "Yes. The very same. The one who shoots diplomats and sends kids to Sing Sing. And the papers won't print the things I do when I'm in a

bad

mood."

(2) with enormous skill, wit, and versatility:

[Here Hanrahan is attending a party, at which a young woman tries to seduce him]:

She was a beautifully packaged woman, and she knew it. She sat perched on the arm of a black leather couch, displaying her curves and shadows in the tight satin gown. It was strapless, and my eyes went automatically from her tanned bare shoulders and neck to the tear drop earrings and shiny blonde hair bunched in back with a ribbon. There the allure ended ... The bright blue eyes were dead and all too penetrable, and scuttled the rest of her face. She was trying to look seductive, but only managed to look as though she were looking for Zanzibar on a map of Canada.

(3) and with a strong moral outlook:

[describing a movie based on a Rudyard Kipling story]:

I'd first seen it when I was eight years old, and cried at the end when Lew and Jakin, the British army band boys, were cut down by Afghan bullets just as they'd succeeded in rallying their regiment with their fife and drum. It was the first grand-scale picture I'd ever seen, in the loge of a big screen palace in Manhattan. My father had taken me to see it. I smiled in memory of the afternoon. I was still undecided about which I owed a greater debt to: the picture itself, by which I'd unconsciously begun to measure all subsequent pictures; or the fact that my father had put a hand on my shoulder, but hadn't laughed, and hadn't told me it was only a story.

Read this book, and you'll find you owe a debt to Ed Cline.