J. Daniel Sawyer

I came into reading this book without knowing anything about it except that the author is a hell of a nice guy and sings like an angel and likes to wear natty hats. The hats more than anything else were a clue as to what I was getting, but only a small clue.

And Then She Was Gone reads most of the way through like the influences it wears on its sleeve -- great old hard-boiled detective fiction the likes of Hammett and Chandler -- with just hints that there's something much stranger than a kidnapping/murder/20th century-style crime polot going on, until wow, bang, surprise, there's a dash of techno-thriller thrown in, like a dash of tabasco on a nice helping of perfectly scrambled eggs.

In Clarke Lantham, Sawyer has created the perfect 21st century counterpart to Sam Spade et al: an ex-cop, clasically trained in the detective arts but technically savvy to the hilt. From GPS tracking to data mining, Clarke is a stranger to no tool that could be used to solve his cases. Far from perfect, though, he has to roll with a lot of punches taken and live with a lot of mistakes made.

The language, too, fits right in the good old San Fran crime tradition, taut and witty and occasionally extraordinarily funny ("all shorts and no scrotum" "Coincidence is a hemorrhoid on the ass of reality"). Lantham is the kind of guy you want to knock back a few good strong drinks with, but you might end up snorting some scotch up your nose while you listen to him spin his yarns.

I look forward to more of them!… (more)

Well! There is genre-bending, and there is genre-bending, and the bending author J. Daniel Sawyer has done in this political thriller/crime noir/space opera/tale of revolution/double-cross extravaganza would require a whole new, possibly Lovecraftian, geometry to trace out.



Which is to say this is one of the most downright complicated novels I've read since... hmm... Game of Thrones? Yeah. It's like that. Except for no dragons. Or swords. Or horses. Or kings (at least not in name).



But yeah, Game of Thrones in space? A little bit. Except there are a whole bunch of people on the Moon, Mars and various space stations who are sick of being treated like chattel-colonists and aren't going to take it anymore (one of my favorite scenes is near the end, when a Lunar city erupts in exactly the kind of colorful and seemingly purposeless disorder that characterizes the Occupy Wall Street movement, proving that the movement has been incohate in the air for quite a while now), the one element that I think is most sorely missing in GoT.



So much duplicity. And orbital mathematics. And cool space colonization history. And duplicity. And scotch. And poker.



So much J. Daniel Sawyer, all that is missing is someone singing to an acoustic guitar in a heart-melting clear tenor. But it appears there are four more novels in this Antithesis Progression, so I may yet get some of that.



If you like any (or all) of the above genres Sawyer has bent here, you really pretty much owe yourselves to pony up the five bucks for this here ebook. If you want a dead tree edition, I think one's in the works, but why wait.



And if you're really feeling poor, well, Sawyer is one of those generous Podiobooks authors who offers his books as free audiobooks before they even hit the Kindle/Epub world.



Eyeholes or earholes, you can't lose here.
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