Gil Reavill

Good heavens, Tarnsman of Gor. I haven't thought about John Norman and the Gor books for decades and now here they are in a murder mystery. Who would have guessed?

I remember reading two Gor books and an interview or two with John Norman a long time ago and dismissing the package as pathetic stuff favored by men who hate women. Not until I read the Wikipedia entry today did I realize what darkness the series has spawned since 1966.

The bad guys in "13 Stolen Girls" are followers of the Corean show more way which is a short alphabet shift from the Gorean way. I can picture the General Counsel for Random House wringing his hands and moaning about lawsuits and harassment charges from John Norman and his disciples. He may have a point; the kinship is crystal clear.

I am not going to bother to search out how much of Gus Monaghan is drawn directly from John Norman. The words coming out of Gus's mouth certainly sound pretty much like direct quotes from the Norman interviews I remember. I wonder whether John Norman bathes. (Gus doesn't.)

I don't much like the topic of this book and I find the many coincidences too convenient. Gus Monaghan as a chess player with boatloads of money and god-like power seems a kind of plotting cop-out. Layla is blocked at every pass by a bad guy who is 6 moves ahead of her. Nyaah. I don't buy it, if only for the timeframe of events. Monaghan works technical miracles with a snap of his fingers. The book's finale is implausible if Layla has an IQ higher than a turnip. No police officers would behave this way. And the crime solution comes from too far out in left field.

I received a review copy of "13 Stolen Girls: A Layla Remington Mystery" by Gil Reavill (Random House – Alibi) through NetGalley.com. show less

Ewwww. Ick. Gross. All that and more. This is a book about the people who clean up when grandpa is found decomposing in the hallway three weeks after he died in the house where he lived alone. This is the story of people who scrape the brains off the wall after junior blows his head off with a shotgun. This is the tale of the maggots and bugs and vomit inducing stench of decomposition. You think you've got stain removal challenges? You don't have stain removal challenges. Bioremediation show more technicians have stain removal challenges. And after they solve them they spend a long time in the shower before they go home to their families. This book tells their stories.

My spouse checked this book out for my son, almost 15, who likes CSI shows. I think on balance I'm glad he wasn't interested in it. We sometimes speak of the awfulness of death as an abstract matter, of nothingness and loss. This is the other awfulness of death, the more visceral sense, the horror of the dissolution of the human body in the summer heat and in turbine engines and at the end of a gun. This is about the noise that the maggots make and the chemistry of decomposition, about the HazMat suits and the problem of waste disposal.

The book itself reaches for more philosophical weight than the author seems capable of sustaining. His ruminations about death and life and the reasons for his own fascination with his subject are disorganized and rambling. His attempt to go beyond the clean-up problem and play forensic investigator on some of the crime scenes he encounters falls flat. But there was enough gruesome detail about the experiences of the employees of Aftermath Inc. to keep me turning the pages.

Now I can add "bioremediation technician" to the list of jobs I'm glad I never had, and never will have. show less

A monkey is not an ape.

In "13 Hollywood Apes" Gil Reavill brings his abilities as a non-fiction writer to bear with a clever interlacing of the sad history of human/chimpanzee interaction with the fast pace of a detective novel.

Layla Remington is an investigator for the DA's office in Malibu who gets caught up in the investigation of 13 retired movie chimps murdered for no apparent reason. As the investigation progresses, she, and we, learn about primates, animal rights, the legal position show more of animals in history, and lots of other interesting factoids that Reavill has scattered through the book.

This is the start of a new series so we get a little more scene setting than is strictly needed to develop the plot. In particular we see a bit too much of Layla's father Gene and his delight in old movies. It's OK though, he is a nice guy.

The plot is suitably complex. Several of the characters do not track as well as they should, but not so poorly that they set off alarms. The only major misstep is conflating the Griffith Zoo with the Los Angeles Zoo. The book suggests that the Griffith Park Zoo is open and perhaps is an alternate name for the LA Zoo. It isn't. Griffith Park has been closed for decades and is several miles from the LA Zoo.

The next Layla Remington book is scheduled for August 2015. Let's see if Mr. Reavill can keep up the momentum.

I received an advance review copy of "13 Hollywood Apes" by Gil Reavill (Random House – Alibi) through NetGalley.com. show less

Most authors have unsold novels hanging around, or notes for novels at least. If you read enough books by the same author you sometimes can tell that a particular book, often the third or fourth in line, was pulled out of the bottom drawer and repurposed. That's how I feel about "13 Under the Wire". The story could have been about any female cop and it is tied to Layla Remington with very slender ribbons.

Mr. Reavill seems to have inserted Layla as a third POV into what had been a two POV show more story. It works, but not very well.

I received a review copy of "13 Under the Wire: A Layla Remington Novel" by Gil Reavill (Random House – Alibi) through NetGalley.com. show less