Free Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews by John Grant Page A

as it were, bits of scattershot phrasing left flying adrift. That "triple time", for example. Did Gershwin, working in 1928, record the pianola roll at one-third speed? Perhaps pianola rolls were always recorded at one-third speed, for technological reasons – the punches could work only so fast, or something? If so, this is a bit of knowledge beyond your humble reviewer's ken. Or maybe Constance set her pianola to play at three times normal speed. Come to think of it, it must have been an electric pianola, because otherwise she'd still be sitting there pumping the pedals. When was the electric pianola invented? And so on.
    A reasonable practitioner of noir fiction would have had the mesmerized reader two-thirds of the way through the chapter after next by now, not still stuck on page 20 grappling with this sentence.
    There are some memorable moments, though, most notably the narrator's encounter with Constance's first, forgotten-nonentity husband, now dwelling eremitically in a hilltop shack surrounded by tottering megaliths of piled old and rotting newspapers. There is a skewed richness in such caricatural scenes, reminiscent of Mervyn Peake. But they are oases of vividness amid much that is desert.
    There are annoying technical blemishes. On pages 44-5 there's an extended exchange of dialogue in the midst of which Bradbury loses track of which of the two characters is speaking. On page 72 there's reference to the British beer Old Peculier, but spelt "Old Peculiar". And so on.
    But what's most irritating of all about this book is its lack of ambition. Yes, even the greatest of writers – and Bradbury's career speaks for itself – may obviously want to relax with a romp every now and then rather than attempting a masterpiece with each and every new book, but Bradbury of all people is surely capable of producing an excellent romp rather than just a piece of lazy froth like this.
    To put this another way: Bradbury has the prized capacity to create works that (and this is irrespective of whether the reader necessarily likes all of them) give the impression of having been greatly loved – loved with an enormous passion, with a fullness of the heart – by the writer. It's a magical ability, and every writer in the world wishes s/he had it.
    This book doesn't have that quality.
    —Infinity Plus

Boost
    by Steve Brewer
    Speck Press, 252 pages, hardback, 2004
    Sam Hill is a professional car thief. Boosting cars is his main source of emotional stimulus ... with the possible exception of his romantic yearnings toward his fence, Robin Mitchell, daughter of the fence and car thief who mentored Sam way back in the days before he'd found anything worthwhile to do with his life. In turn Sam is mentoring the youth Billy Suggs, teaching him not just how to be a car thief but the artistry of the profession – for Sam's specialty is not common-or-garden theft but the stealing, under commissions channeled through Robin, of rare and collectible items.
    It's a good life until the day Sam discovers the Thunderbird he's just stolen has a dead body in the trunk. His first task is of course to get rid of the corpse before the cops come sniffing (perhaps literally) around. But the problem's bigger than that. The whole situation smacks of a setup: someone's trying to land him not just in trouble but in serious trouble, including a possible murder rap. That someone has to be stopped before they try something, well, worse.
    Aided by Billy, Robin and Sam's man-mountain friend Way-Way, Sam soon traces the line back to seedy car fence Ernesto Morales and beyond him to drugs kingpin Phil Ortiz, who, it proves, is seeking revenge for the time Sam boosted one of his prized collection of vintage cars. The makeshift team of buddies find themselves taking on Ortiz and Ortiz's equally murderous army of thugs in a tit-for-tat war of thrust and counterthrust, all the while keeping out of the clutches of both local and federal cops. This is not a war Sam