Free Jami Shuey CD ... Casanegra ... Caine Black Knife

Saw Jami Shuey at the Cinema the other night -- she was apparently getting over a cold, but was in as good a voice as ever. I bought 2 of her CDs -- one of them is free to the first person who sends me a street address at danmoran909@yahoo.com asking for it. Listen to (at least) her song "Wrong Girl" over at her MySpace page first -- the CD's free to a good home, but make sure you like the sort of folk/country she sings before I send it off.

http://www.myspace.com/jaimishuey

Finished the Underwood/Due/Barnes novel, Casanegra, and Matt Stover's Caine Black Knife. I'm not going to comment on Matt's book, except to say it lived up to my extraordinarily high expectations -- I'll talk about it at more length when it's available to be purchased, but he knocked this out of the park. It's the first of a trilogy, too.

Casanegra's a 3-person collaboration between Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due (spelled correctly) and Steve Barnes. It is on sale and it's the first book of a noir series about former gigolo, part-time actor and bodyguard Tennyson Hardwyck. It's a surprisingly touching novel for noir (Due's influence, maybe) -- the fight sequences are trademark Barnes, and I'm not even going to speculate about who wrote what in the really explicit and lengthy sex scenes -- this is the first noir novel I've ever come away from knowing the actual size of the viewpoint character's penis. (Who's based on Blair Underwood. Which means -- well, good for him.)

It's a successful collaboration, and I'm not a big fan of multi-author collaborations -- I always liked the stuff Barnes wrote with Larry Niven, but the 3-way collaborations he did with Jerry Pournelle and Niven always felt cobbled together -- I always thought I could spot which passage had been written by which writer, sometimes down to the paragraph. With a couple rare exceptions I can't do that here -- maybe it's the first-person voice that helps unify things, but I was never aware of dueling authors at any point. This is good stuff and I'm looking forward to the sequels -- I'm a sucker for stories that never stop moving, literary sharks, and this qualifies and still manages to glide through the grace notes that make you care about the characters -- early in the book Hardwyck tells his father, a heroic ex-cop who's had a stroke, that Hardwyck is going to take him out of a nursing home and care for him personally, at his house -- things go sideways, Hardwyck-the-screwup-son is in trouble ... and he has to call his father and tell him no, dad, I'm sorry: you're staying in the hospital. It's as wrenching as it sounds.

The last line is a nice grace note, too -- I was waiting for it, but credit to them for getting it right.

Apparently the sequel concerns the murder of OJ Simpson. That sounds interesting.

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Saw Fantastic Four on Father's Day with my kids and two of my nephews. If you have small children, it's not a bad way to spend a couple hours. Otherwise I wouldn't bother, and I like the Silver Surfer.

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According to Variety there's a Cowboys and Aliens movie coming -- this was the plot of my first novel, which I wrote when I was 16. It wasn't supposed to be a novel; it was supposed to be a short story about a man playing poker with an alien in the old west. But I didn't know how it ended, and it kept getting longer and longer and longer ... finally finished it several hundred pages of single-spaced text later. I've got a very-poorly-scanned copy on my hard drive -- it's awesomely bad, but I am eager to see the basic idea done by someone with (presumably) more competence -- anyway, I'll be there on opening weekend.