Adam ConnellRecensioni

Bagging a Yeti in the Himalayas is just one of the things that has made Lansing a legend in the Orion Guild. He’s a true hunter with all the necessary skills: tracking, stalking, and a crack shot. He respects his kills. And he won’t hunt men. He’s the symbol of the Guild.

But not everyone likes the Guild and its fussy, stodgy ways: no post-1953 firearms are used in their hunts nor much other modern technology. And they forbid their members to hunt men.

That’s why the upstart hunting organization RifleHire has targeted the Guild, and Lansing in particular, for destruction.

Lansing takes charge of the Orion Guild’s contract to purge a herd of brindles, animals highly prized for their aphrodisiac meat and that can only be raised on Wildernesse. That happens to be the home planet of Lansing before he was forced into exile after his parents were wrongly accused of trying to undercut the government’s brindle meat monopoly.

But that’s not the only reunion taking place. One-armed Bledsoe is waiting there to hunt brindle too and disgrace Lansing after the latter forced him out of the Guild for illegally hunting men. A sadist, a proud man of many impoverishing vices, and really only skilled at shooting – preferably slow death shots rather than Lansing’s quick kills. In tow is Cass, a weird dog-woman chimera there to do the hunting and stalking and mundane camp duties for Bledsoe.

Overseeing Bledsoe’s RifleHire audition is Rose, a nymphomaniac armorer who just happens to be Lansing’s cousin and who has delusions of reuniting with Lansing after he sexually spurned her.

Lansing’s crew includes Wren, an ex-football player who isn’t taken seriously as a hunter. That’s why he issues an official challenge to Lansing as to who can kill the most brindles. And there’s Nadia a twenty-something trapped in a body that’s thirteen years old. She participated in the first High Hunt as the Orion Guild’s attempted assassination of Bledsoe was dubbed. She longs for the sexual thrill of killing something intelligent: a human.
And that’s not even listing the misfits rom RifleHire, a thuggish outfit that practices gang rape initiations.

There are several aesthetics a science fiction story can use: attempted prediction and realistic extrapolation, satire, or contrived setups to provide the metaphors or adventure plots an author wants. Connell uses the latter. So we get a too familiar future with Spam meat and the IFL (presumably the Interstellar or Interplanetary Football League) Wren played for. Nadia describes her body as being like a “bobby-soxer”. There are few technological extrapolations apart from the Longliner starships that ply the spaceways and the firearms RifleHire uses
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Instead, Connell put his effort into the complex ecosystem of Wildernesse and the brindles as well as the details (there are a lot of flashbacks in this novel) of Lansing’s other hunts of alien creatures.

Sometimes the Quentin Tarrantino-ish dialogue isn’t distinctive enough for each character. Almost every character has some sort of physical problem. And quite a few also have psychological problems, some, frankly, not very believable.

I was a bit bored with it on the first reading until about the three-quarters mark when it really picked up, and Lansing reveals unexpected depths.
The story is complete though Connell says he is working on a sequel. I suspect some of the (surviving) RifleHire characters will show up in it.
Still, I would be curious about such a sequel.

Recommended if you like hunting stories, thugs, and lots of gunplay.

[Review copy supplied by the author.]

In Adam Connell’s Lay Saints two extrasensory crime syndicates vie for influence over an impenetrable Politician's mind and vote.

A mysterious prisoner and powerful remote viewer narrates the story--with occasional interjections-- to a memory wiped cellmate whose identity isn’t revealed until the very end. This unusual method of story-telling was a compelling touch which added an extra layer of mystery.

Calder, a lonely drifter, is conflicted in his want to both flee from and form connections with people who share his unique abilities. He allows himself to be lured into the gang's seedy underbelly and remains unsure of his place in their world of manipulation, murder and double-dealings.

Layered dialogue and action drive the plot in this gritty crime noir/speculative fiction mash-up. Filled with black humor and tough cynical characters, we are treated to a New York that is both stunning and sinister. The story is populated with rough and realistic Pulp fiction like characters, bizarre relationships, humorous banter, and Chinatown like twists.

This captivating and vintage feeling crime novel is a must-read for any fan of these genres.

I received "High Hunt" through librarything.com.

"High Hunt" is an excellent premise but by the time I finished I had decided that Adam Connell is a lazy writer and possibly a horrid person.

I don't know how many LT members are hunters, especially professional hunters, but my family hunts, raises championship hunting dogs, and a close friend is a professional hunting guide. I checked with them and find, as I suspected, that the whole scenario of the Orion Guild and their rivals RifleHire is an incoherent mess.

The Orion Guild, a group of professional animal hunters, is the center of the novel, and this is a very good plot device indeed. Orion holds a traditional view of hunting with an emphasis on correct hunting practice. Guild members may not take contracts to hunt humans. The Guild is much older and more famous than their rival RifleHire. Orion and RifleHire compete for interplanetary contracts to hunt animals but RifleHire may also take contracts to hunt humans.

RifleHire rejects the strictures that define Orion Guild and seems to be made up largely of people who either failed to meet the Guild's membership standards or who are fixated on hunting humans. Somehow, and I don't understand why, the broader range of RifleHire skills does not translate into an economic advantage and the rivalry for animal hunts remains strong.

The problems with the book can be divided into two sets: the poor imagining of Orion, and the illogic of character action. The plot itself is quite good and in better hands this book might have been a real gem.

As it is presented, Orion is fixated on weaponry and has elaborate rules about what armament members are allowed and forbidden to use. In particular, no gun is allowed that has been manufactured since 1953. Many problems here. As far as I can tell, and the book gives no help, 1953 was an important year for many things – the first Corvette, the movie Shane, polio vaccine, the end of the Korean War – but nothing particular for personal armament. Winchester made some important changes to its bolt-action guns in 1964 but nothing comes to mind for 1953.

Guns were invented long ago and the guns of today are direct descendents of the blunderbuss and matchlock. What has changed is not so much gun design but the quality of materials and machining techniques. Our steel is stronger and our lathes more precise. Better manufacturing yields more powerful, more accurate weapons. The chemistry of gunpowder has evolved, but the guns have not, except that more strength in one is echoed in more strength in the other. If Orion needs an early cutoff date, a plot device I think is silly, 1900 would work just as well as 1953. The rifles Orion allows were designed in the second half of the 1800s for war and hunting.

And why a restriction on manufacturing date, not design date? Steel ages and get brittle, as anyone who owns an old car knows, and while we aren't given a time cue for the novel, FTL transport is not around the corner. These weapons are ancient. And, if we are going to be picky about manufacturing date, isn't it "manufacturing" for the Guild to modify the firing capacity of the ancient Marlins they issue to members (not to mention that this detail has no relevance to this plot)? And, for one previous hunt mentioned in passing, somehow these 1953 weapons were supposed to work undersea. No idea what that was about.

Then there is body armor. Everyone wears body armor but Lansing's body armor is far better than the others because it was made by Slocum, a contemporary master gunsmith. This armor is allowed by Orion because it uses old technology. Huh? A quick look at transistor history puts the definitive inventions after 1953. The microcircuitry and controllers for this wonderful suit could not be built even now.

Knives. Orion prescribes what kind of knife members carry. WTF? Knives have been around for ages and who are you to tell me what kind of knife best fits my hand? Guild approved wristwatches? Nutso.

Oh yeah, Orion members are denied access to modern health care, even for exotic diseases they pick up on assignment. Modern diagnostics are OK, just not modern treatment, except for some kind of bionic arm that never got explained.

But does Orion dispatch hunters across the galaxy in rowboats? Hell no. Rocket ships, ration cubes, microweight thermal blankets (read about the equipment Hillary and Norgay used on Everest in 1953 and see if you want to carry it), titanium scabbards, and exotic ammo are just fine.

Orion manufactures its own ammo and seems to have allowed changes to ammo specs. Thus we have "rampage rounds" that have a range far longer than the WWII mortar rounds from which they are derived. "Anvil rounds" are a variation on less-than-lethal rounds such as the beanbag and rubber ammo of today but in 1953 the non-lethal was rock salt. "Firestarter rounds" are modified regular rounds and so pass the age test. RifleHire carries some specialized rounds but nothing even close to SF standbys.

So here we have pages and pages of discussion about Guild technical fixations that do not follow internal logic and have little bearing on the plot, but we have no mention of the aspects of true hunting that Orion must surely practice.

Hunting, for serious practitioners, is a spiritual activity, not a mechanical one. The weapon is the mechanism of the kill, not of the hunt. A hunt is a competition between human and animal and is constrained by skill and ritual on the part of the human and skill on the part of the animal. Correct hunters do not manipulate the hunt by using improper weapons or manufactured scenarios. Where I come from young men (usually men) still run down deer on foot, killing them with a knife or perhaps only touching them with their hands. The most worthwhile hunts risk the hunter's life too.

Hunting ritual is the basis for Orion's moral strength, but Connell ignores it entirely in the pursuit of weapons rules, to the point that the Orion team doesn't mention even the most fundamental hunting ideals. There is no discussion of how to honor the diseased animals they must kill so quickly, no attention to turning carcasses to face the rising sun, avoiding looking them in the eye. No quick thanks to the animal for giving its life – even Avatar was better than this.

I could go on but this essay is getting long so I will start wrapping it up.

- Of the 7 central humans, only Lansing and Bledsoe (and maybe Herk, but he hardly counts) did their homework on the planet and the animals and came properly prepared.
- The other hunters not only did not do their homework, they came ill-prepared for hunting anywhere. Wrong shoes. Wrong insect repellant. No menstrual suppression. Untried weapons. Other goofy stuff that belies their professional status.
- Orion makes its living off these hunts and needs the contract payment badly. Why partner Lansing with idiots? Why would Orion not ensure that the team learned the information about the flora, fauna and culture of Wildernesse and issue them the equipment they would need for a successful hunt?
- The biologists of Wildernesse have banned persons who have been inside the preserve with the diseased brindles from ever visiting the planet again, but are moving non-diseased brindles onto the preserve even as the hunt concludes.
- What do brindles eat? If they are carnivorous, as is suggested in a few places, what animal do they feed on?
- Bledsoe uses Cass, a "feral human," as his gundog. What kind of reverse evolution would give a human a tracking nose? We are sight hunters.
- What is the point of giving Herk the ability to control canids with his mind? It's a useful skill that could be worked into another book, but Herk dies so why bother?

Now to Mr. Connell. The book does not have characters, only cardboard cutouts, but what we do learn of the cast is damning. Lansing, the protagonist, is patterned on Mike Vronsky in "The Deerhunter." Silent. Precise. Prepared. And like Vronsky, Lansing is not challenged or changed by events. He marches through the book like a mechanical man and is about as interesting. The other cast members are simply dreadful people. The women are cruelly portrayed, especially Rose, and the men, except perhaps Herk, who doesn't matter, are depraved. RifleHire's initiation is violent and degrading. Bledsoe's treatment of Cass is unspeakable. I am not going to bother with Mr. Connell's other books but if you do, beware egregious misogyny and vile behavior.½

I got this through LibraryThing Member Giveaways. It was a good read and a good story, though a little longer than it needed to be. This is a tale of criminal telepaths working in levels of a mob-like organization peddling their skills to the highest or most influential bidder.
Into this world is drawn Calder, a telepath who normally uses his talents to help grieving families in hospitals albeit for a profit. He is recruited into one of two 'families' of these mind readers and used to influence a vote.
It took some time to get into this as it is written in it own New York boroughs flavored language which seems to come and go. The narrator is not always reliable nor can we always tell from the writing it is him narrating. The story moves along well enough with some interesting unsavory characters and a decent moral dilemna but doesn't resolve itself satisfactorily in my opinion.
An unusual take on a telepath story.

Didn't really hold my imagination, writing just ok, if you like reading about PWT. I got bored too & ran off to read a better book...½

I really wanted to like "Total Secession" but I just couldn't get into the story. I read about half way thru when I decided to just stop because there was too much dialogue and not enough action in the story. I basically got bored of the story and did not want to read all 400 or so pages. Cornell has a talent for writing a good story but not so much so in the editing department.

Connell's LAY SAINTS is a sprawling noir-ish thriller. Set in a contemporary New York and populated with thugs, the element that takes the novel out of "mystery" or "thriller" strictly speaking is that the main characters are telepaths. Connell's emphasis on them is light - their skills are critical (to them as characters and to the plot of the book), but he doesn't go into how they do what they do and he buries their abilities into the world as simply another aspect of a criminal underworld. This is a New York that could be our New York, with the obvious exception of this one paranormal element (unlike, say, Holly Black's White Cat, in which the titular curse workers are known, acknowledged, and integrated into society).

The narrator, an opinionated and imprisoned telepath himself, is less unreliable than he is laden with his own agenda, which is less relevant to the overall plot than it is a bookending device, but he provides the tale with a consistent and acerbic voice. Our main character is Calder, a recent arrival to the city who is immediately adopted by the leader of a gang of telepaths. Although our narrator nominally follows him, he's really telling the story of a particular job that rival gangs are trying to accomplish, tilting a city council vote one way or the other. These men (and most of the gang members here are men), for all their abilities, tend toward the brutal and rough in spite of their abilities - maybe even because of them.

The scale of the story grows steadily out of Calder and into the other characters, belying what the narrator tells us at the beginning. While I found some of the style to be off-putting and some of the storytelling overly drawn out, this is a solid read. You may not like the characters you meet, but you'll understand them.

Excellent well written book. This is my second Adam Connell book. While I did not find it a quick easy read, it was laced with endless possibilities in a word where others can read minds and try and influence others. Lots of low characters from an underworld in New York. I can see this happening.
Another well written book.

If you’re wanting Connell’s novel to be a quick bit of hack work to cash in on recent talk in the U.S., post the 2012 presidential election, of states seceding from the Union, one of those stories where our heroes are repeatedly, enthusiastically, and violently tutored in the necessity of secession, you are going to be sadly disappointed.

The secessions this story is really with concerned are the personal ones, the disunions of family and friends.

To be sure, the United States really are breaking up. The reasons, though, are covered in maybe 15 pages all together: disgust with foreign wars, disgust with a corrupt federal government and its alphabet agencies and repressive criminal code and appalling budgets, “the foul word … sewer word” appeal as in foreign aid and justice lacking in federal courts, distress from illegal immigrations, “a government that grew too large to be overseen by its previous incarnation”.

Which brings us to S-Day, the Day of Total Secession when the Union will exist no longer. As part of that transition, all prisoners and illegal aliens not guilty of murder, sexual offenses, or child abuse are being released from Federal prisons. Our story proper starts in Florida, S-Day -11, when convicts Grant and Litz have been released. Grant is a giant of a man, a killer (but, not technically, guilty of murder) with tattoos from all the prison’s major gangs. Grant wants to go north to see his wife and children who he has not seen in 10 years. Litz has another errand in mind – completion of a reunion with the sisters he thinks cheated him out of an inheritance. Given a car and money by a grateful ex-guard and another ex-prisoner Grant saved in a riot, the two set out for Albany.

Determined to prevent Grant’s reunion with his wife are her brothers, Wishful and Valiant. They hire the book’s most interesting character, Harney – one part secretive hit-man, one part publicity hungry bounty hunter. “A populace afraid of reunions, retributions” has created a lot of demand for his work, but he’s willing to accommodate his old clients Val and Wish. Setting out with his wife Pavlova and mistress Little Fritter (to accommodate his frequent need for sex and pills), he gives chase to the two convicts. Throw in some other freed convicts, various state officials, the vengeful and obsessive mother of a man Grant killed, and you have the makings of what would seem to be a crime thriller.

Except Connell doesn’t give us anything so simple. For one thing, the resolution of certain character’ stories is not presented, not even really hinted at. So, if you want a story with all the plot threads neatly tied off, you will be disappointed. Sometimes a lack of resolution bothers me, but it didn’t here since a main plot is resolved.

This is kind of a psychological novel full of a lot of talk between Litz and Grant and Wish and Val on their respective road trips. (The lack of characteristic dialogue, speech patterns that set one character off from another, was, for me, the novel’s weakest point – though Harney’s expositions are appropriately idiosyncratic.) During the time of the novel a lot of back story is presented. We learn about the crimes and motives of Litz and Grant and their more vicious and callous and self-deceiving sides. And we get a lot of details about Grant’s tattoos. However, Connell manages not to make any of his characters besides Harney totally unlikeable.

And, yes, this is a near future science fiction novel though mostly in the peripheral trappings: electric cars, guns with “patented “Facial-Locking Scope and Cooperative Tidal Barrel”, and a European Pestilence that has so decreased the population that headhunters looking for emmigrants from the soon to be defunct United States are a major plot element. But the whys and hows and implications of S-Day are never discussed by the main characters, only the minor ones. The major characters are usually too busy conducting – or trying to reverse – their own private S-Days.

This isn’t a novel about the death of a national family. Violent, funny, occasionally appalling, it’s about the death of private families.

Finally, as an aside, this is a self-published novel, and the production values are quite high from an evocative, simple bit of cover art to a book free, as far as I noticed, from any typos.

Great and gritty read. The story unfolds and is never rushed or boring. It is the story of what is going on with a couple of federal prisoners trying to get home before the US Total Secession. The plot is told from several points of view. It is well written and never spun out of control. I got on Kindle and really liked it. Many thanks to the author.

The federal government has ceased to exist as each of the states becomes a sovereign nation in just a few days time. Grant and Litz are two hard-core convicts, just released from prison for the federal crimes that got them sent there in the first place. They’ve done some bad things and there is no attempt at claiming innocence, and frankly, they haven’t turned into pacifists now that they’ve served most of their time. It’s no wonder that Grant’s brother-in-law, Wishful, would rather see him dead than back in his sister’s life again. Grant and Lutz are prone to outburst of extreme violence that was vaguely reminiscent of Travolta and Jackson in “Pulp Fiction.” If you enjoyed Pulp Fiction, or that sort of story, you’ll enjoy this book. All the main characters have a great deal of depth. Despite Grant and Litz’s propensity for violence, they’re funny and quite likeable in their own way.

The author takes his time telling this story, with outstanding dialogues and character development. It isn’t a quick read – rather, I enjoyed taking my time reading it over several days, savoring the richness of this story. It’s irreverent, at times violent and sometimes more than a little amusing. This is not a book about any right – or left – wing ideology. Recommended!

I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for providing a fair and honest review. I have never met the author or communicated directly with him.