“How pleasant to discover an educated man
within the guise of a lumpen security guard." --read on to see who I'm quoting here
I've loved Ken Lizzi,
a very buff yet erudite veteran, lawyer, and author, since his debut novel "Reunion"in 2014.
"Buff" might be an understatement:
No apologies, No regrets
@KenLizzi at Twitter
Ken Lizzi's quest is to re-infuse pulp sensibility into fiction.
Portland, Oregon kenlizzi.net
Six years and four 5-star Ken Lizzi novels later,
I'm still following him on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else I can find him. His one-liners crack me up on social media. His action novels are witty and clever, intelligent and authentic--leagues above the usual thriller fare.
Lizzi's short stories are so awesome,
I can only urge you to go, go, go and devour "Glutton" - sci-fi horror at its best! - free to read online, and it's a quick, easy read, but riveting and unforgettable as well, and as lurid as something from @GuyTMartland.
His latest novel--
--Well, I was about to say "Karl Thorson," but Lizzi is quick: I just read his latest "latest novel" this week.
Did he quit his day job? Is he a cyborg?
"Boss (aka Boss: Falchion's Company Book 1)" is now his most recent published novel, and the first in a trilogy. I'm currently beta-reading Book Two, "Captain," and Book Three, "Warlord." Meanwhile, Lizzi is writing the sequel to this awesome and incredibly smart and funny slasher/horror.... yes. I know. Carol aka Keangaroo never reads those genres. Unless someone in the league of Harvey Click, John L. Monk, E.E. Giorgi, Libby McGugan, or Ken Lizzi wrote it.
Hollywood needs to give us Ken Lizzi movies!
Back to Karl Thorson
Karl Thorson and the Jade Dagger
Archaeologists uncovering a lost Mayan city unearth a magic artifact. An earthquake disturbs the operations of neighboring narcotraffickers. An ancient sorcerer and his mercenary henchmen arrive to claim the artifact.
When these three factions converge, Karl Thorson, ex-Special Forces soldier, now in charge of site security at the Mayan ruins, is thrust into action. Dexicos Megistos, a nigh immortal sorcerer, wants to retrieve a mystical Jade Dagger. Alejandra Matamoros-Lopez wants to smuggle narcotics through the tunnels beneath the ruins, avoiding the notice of rival cartels. Professor May Chen wants to see if any sparks remain from her relationship with the head of the archaeological dig.
Karl Thorson just wants to do his job, and maybe have a cold beer.
Can he safeguard the archaeologists, especially the lovely Professor May Chen? Can he defeat a murderous band of narcotraffickers? And can he deprive the sorcerer Dexicos Megistos of the Jade Dagger?
This is definitely great material for a Hollywood blockbuster - darkly comic and Quentin Tarantino-violent with the drug cartel accidentally ending up next door to the archeologists and then coming face to face with Karl, who may be more fearsome than the sorcerer.
Thanksgiving week, busy with family,
was not a good time to happen across a new Ken Lizzi novel. Four other ebooks were in my queue (reviews overdue or nearly so) and I vowed to save Karl Thorson until I'd read and reviewed the others.
Final Score: Ken Lizzi wins! Four other authors are put on hold!
Karl Thorson is an awesome character. Our first view of him is mesmerizing: "Oncoming tourists parted before him, the breadth of his shoulders making his near six-feet seem somehow even taller. Even some of those moving the same direction slipped aside, as if sensing his presence."
The man is a wonder: a hybrid, half Nordic/Viking and half Mexican. His mother was "proud of Mexico’s Mesoamerican past and, thus, her heritage. She’d ensured he’d grown up with ghoulish tales of Mictlan and Xibalba, just as his dad had embellished Karl’s childhood with tales of the Aesir and Vanir."
The diminutive professor he's hired to protect, May, is not your usual fictional female in need of a hero. She is quick and resourceful and very useful, not helpless, in the face of danger.
Lizzi's villains are also delightful: Alejandra, the bad^ss woman running a drug cartel. Strong women characters are a hallmark of Lizzi's fiction, and this female jefe is so awesome, I hate knowing she's a villain and will have to go down, one way or another. She kills so swiftly and deftly, it's hard not to admire her. When she uses fear as a motivator, I start remembering how much I hate tyrants:
...insolence driven out by fear. That is what Alejandra needed to see. Without that fearful respect, how could a woman expect to maintain her control over an organization like this? If she had to bury another body in the jungle, she would. This stupid puta might serve Alejandra better as an example than as a cook.
Dexicos, the demon (in human form) whose been around for centuries, is a powerful but endearingly ridiculous being. Small human touches bring him to life. E.g., he likes rotary phones and "found pleasure in the precision and ritual of dialing the numbers that keypads could not replicate." And I love how he quotes human writers like Nietzche.
The quintessential Ken Lizzi hero
has certain traits we love and want more of. War-hardened, battle-weary, resourceful, smart, decent and humane, and a fun drinking buddy. We all wanna know a guy like that, right?
Karl has flaws and sketchy friends, e.g.
his network of informants; old Special Ops buddies now running dive shops, military contractors edging into the shadier side of mercenary work, a few outright criminals.
We can count on certain things in this hero:
He has a conscience:
A pity he had to run. But he was outgunned here and his objective was only reconnaissance. Besides, he had no business putting May at risk merely for the personal satisfaction of fighting back.
Stoic and pragmatic:
He seldom bothered hoping for the best. He didn’t hope much at all; so much time wasted that could more profitably be spent on planning and preparation.
A realist, a cynic, but not a pessimist:
Any illusions he’d ever had about fair play had long since been beaten from him by roadside bombs, ambushes, and drone launched missiles.
“Hope is irreplaceable. It underpins all religion, all belief systems.”
Cool and calm and always rational,
even under fire.
The trick to surviving a gunfight was to remain calm. Unfortunately, the human body’s programmed response to a threat was the precise opposite. It wanted to ramp up the nerves, dump adrenaline into the system, attack screaming and flailing or run like hell. None of that helped aiming. A couple of methods helped overcome the fight or....
... The second was repetition of the tasks likely to be required in a fight, hammer them into muscle memory so those actions could be performed almost unconsciously, undermining the fight-or-flight instinct’s attempt to hijack the brain.
He suffers:
Karl hadn’t gone through sniper school, so he hadn’t been trained in enduring the torture of remaining motionless for hours in uncomfortable positions.
and
Karl was moving, the powerful muscles built through endless series of squats and deadlifts uncoiled like a spring, pushing him up from his crouching position and off to his right.
Horror!
The memory of that thing closing about him remained fresh. Those ribs, or limbs, or whatever they were folded around him, moving simultaneously with both the precision of one of those elaborate seventeenth century clockwork mechanisms and the organic smoothness of an insect.
and
Nietzsche might not have been so keen on thinking cosmically rather than individually if he’d known the cosmos contained horrors such as that – demon. Karl didn’t really like the term demon, with the hellish connotations of the word. But it seemed to fit. What had he stumbled upon?
Erudite? An action hero? Yes!
Lizzi's heroes are not just pragmatic and rational, but well-read.
“Did he just quote Nietzsche?” Professor Allison asked Professor Chen. “He does that,” May said. “I haven’t decided yet if it’s endearing or annoying.”
Karl's reading list includes "(primarily classics recommended by his mother), a couple of popular histories, a pocket Shakespeare, Don Quixote (in the original Spanish) and a battered copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
More quotable quotes, in no particular order:
"I figure over the course of human history all models of morality have been tried at one point or another. Nothing new under the sun, right? But I like to read Nietzsche to remind myself to remain flexible. Keep an open mind.”
"For me, the point of life, other than to continue to live, is to stave off boredom.”
... “You don’t want to rule the world like any self-respecting second rate megalomaniac?”
Control and manipulation depended as much upon disinformation as overt power.
Besides, a part of him was beginning to enjoy this game of cat and mouse. A Nietzschean conception, one which he’d considered as amusingly overblown as many of the great philosopher’s other exhortations, now felt relatable. He felt the “eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity – that joy which includes even joy in destroying.
He preferred not to contemplate the ruined husks of the dead, especially not when he’d caused that death. That kind of thinking could lead down dark rabbit holes he’d rather avoid. Better to ponder practicalities.
When the mind is extinguished, that is the end. I do not wish to end. I wish to endure. I admit to a certain weariness. That is why I indulge myself in such activities as this, my little game with the Jade Dagger.
Lizzi's excellent vocabulary has me, with my degree in English teaching, sheepishly using Kindle's built-in dictionary. Most of these words I've seen and kinda remember the meanings but the older I get, the harder it is to retain them - like, how many times do I have to look up puissant? I totally believed horripilation was a manufactured word until thinking "This is Ken Lizzi. Look it up." Here goes:
frangible
Frangible - the characteristic of breaking into tiny fragments - is a bullet that doesn't deform or expand like a hollow point, but instead shatters or disintegrates upon impact with the target.pelagic
pe•lag•ic pə-lăj′ĭk►
adj. Of, relating to, or living in open oceans or seas rather than waters adjacent to land or inland waters.puissant
pu•is•sant
Powerful; mighty; strong; vigorous; forcible: as, a puissant prince or empire.nigromancy
Noun (plural nigromancies) 1. (historical or Caribbean) Necromancy; magic involving deathhorripilation
hor•rip•i•la•tion hô-rĭp″ə-lā′shən, hŏ-►
n. The bristling of the body hair, as from fear or cold; goose bumps.
Ken Lizzi is an attorney and the author of an assortment of published short stories. His novels "Reunion" and "Under Strange Suns" are now available from Twilight Times Books. When not traveling - and he'd rather be traveling - he lives in Oregon with his lovely wife Isa and energetic daughter V.V. He enjoys reading, homebrewing, exercise, and visiting new places. He loathes writing about himself in the third person.
Japanese researchers have used machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify 143 new Nazca Lines, also called geoglyphs, in Peru. Among the numerous new glyphs was one that was discovered entirely by AI, the first time to happen in the world. The New York Times reports that the team of researchers used satellite photography, 3D imaging, and AI to find the ancient geoglyphs that were impressed into the ground in a desert plain around 100 B.C. by Nazcas.
AI Discovered Nazca Lines That've Been Lost for 2,000 Years by Daisy Hernandez
Ancient geoglyphs... the kind of thing Professor May and her team would love to uncover?
If you skipped ahead to the end of the review,
and I don't blame you (there is so much more I could write in a review but this one is already long), here's the low-down:
Ken Lizzi heroes are strong and awesome, rational and competent, and I can't get enough of 'em.
Ken was reportedly in a coffee shop yesterday writing the sequel to Karl Thorson.
Hurry Hurry Hurry!
More More More!
#oc #appreciator #curator #neoxian #marlians #action #adventure #literature