A new ebook project

My friends at the Paperback Warrior blog had high praise for this Harry Whittington story - THE SEARCHING RIDER, which made up half of Ace Double D-510. I was able to find a really good scan of the story online and I converted the images to text using an OCR program called Tesseract. After running the text through a Perl script to remove page numbers, titles and linefeeds I then copied the text into MS Word, did a few Replace All changes to fix some oddball characters and ended up with a pretty clean document. I'll still have to go through the painstaking process of comparing the source scan to the Word document and fixing a lot of other stuff. The best part of that is that I get to read the book, plus it will be digitally preserved in a true book format. Anyway, the screenshot above shows the source image on the left, and the target document on the right. I'm a bit constrained on time so it might take a while.

Review: The Law at Randado

The Law at Randado by Elmore Leonard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A young and and inexperienced deputy sheriff named Kirby Frye has his skills tested when a rich and arrogant rancher and some citizens of Randado conspire to entrust themselves with lawmaking and executions while he’s away. The narrative is nicely dialog driven with plenty of colorful and insightful conversations, especially between Kirby and his mentor and his boss Sheriff Danaher. The descriptive prose is taut and compact so get ready to use your imagination when it comes to how the characters and locations look. There were several tense sequences with a fair amount of gunplay, although I found the final conflict a bit strained. In general an exciting and propulsive read that I recommend.

Review: Mac Detective Series 06: You've Got Him Cold

Mac Detective Series 06: You've Got Him Cold by Thomas B. Dewey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Many years of simmering secrets and blackmail explode in a sudden burst of related murders in this complex private eye mystery from the reliable Thomas B. Dewey. The P.I. known only as "Mac" deftly investigates and unravels the puzzling clues that include several seemingly unconnected characters while butting heads with the police as their investigations overlap, and Mac is forced to evade and withhold information to protect a girl in his care. Dewey's exceptional plotting and prose stands tall amongst the bevy of 1950s PI writers and if you can weather the head-swimming number of characters and names then the rewards are substantial. Highly recommended.

Buy the ebook here.

Review: Death Train

Death Train by Gordon Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Top-notch military fiction taking place in France during the Nazi occupation and telling the story of Sergeant Mahoney, his soldiers, and a band of French resistance fighters attempting to blow up a bridge to cut off the Nazi supply lines to the beaches at Normandy on the eve of the Allied invasion. Of course nothing goes as planned and the heroes have to dig themselves out of several unexpected situations. Mahoney is a fascinating character, an outstanding soldier, and also a complete asshole. Major Richter of the Gestapo is a vile and terrifying villain. Several other memorable characters. A nice blend of actual historical events and people are smoothly integrated into the main narrative. A very entertaining page turner from the great Len Levinson writing as Gordon Davis.

Buy the ebook here