When I finished with it, I turned to the next thing on my checklist, which was the Esquire short fiction contest. Glanced at the deadline and discovered that I’d missed it by 24 hours. Ah, well. Instead I went to work on my review of Audrey’s Door (Sarah Langan) for Dead Reckonings #6. I’ve got a lot of room to play around, 1500 words, and I’ve made a substantial cut at a first draft.
Watched Red Eye with Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, about a thug who tries to intimidate a hotel manager into moving the assistant director of homeland security to a room where they can assassinate him and his family using a SAM launched from the harbor in Miami. The extortion takes place during a redeye flight from Dallas to Miami, hence the title. Directed by Wes Craven, it’s an effective thriller with some very good moments, like when she finds an interesting use for a pen.
Though I had given up on Ashes to Ashes after watching the first five episodes of season 1, I decided to give it another try after hearing good things about how that series finished and about season 2. I’m still not a big fan of Keeley Hawes, and there are moments when her performance makes me cringe, but it’s all about Gene after all. If Alex Drake’s visions of the future suddenly ceased and it became a straight crime drama, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Gene Hunt is one of the most interesting characters created in recent memory. While you know that he’s a good guy at heart, with a moral compass that leads him to the truth, the way he gets there isn’t always by the book. When Alex suspects he’s on the take at the beginning of the second season, viewers might be disappointed, but they wouldn’t put it past him. He is, after all, the guy who would beat a confession out of an innocent man if he was sufficiently convinced of the man’s guilt. They did a fine job with the surprise ending of the first season. At first I thought it was absolutely obvious what was going on, but it was all a clever bit of misdirection and I bought it, hook, line and godfather. I like the subtext of the second series, which is so far about rooting out corruption in their own organization, and the Masonic influence which sometimes gets bad guys off the hook. (I’m also relieved that Alex has ditched her 1981 big hair. I thought she looked pretty silly for most of those original eight episodes. She’s still doing the Jennifer Beals off-the-shoulder thing, but not quite so loudly.)
If you’re in Upper or Lower Canada, you can partake of one of two events that launch Tesseracts Thirteen. The first takes place this Friday, August 7th from 3 to 5 pm at the Montreal Delta Hotel, 777 University Avenue, Suite 2815. The other is at BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto on September 12 starting at 3pm. The bookstore is at 697 Queen Street West.
I liked the bowling match, jolly green giant, radiation eating pet plot of this week’s Eureka. Last night’s Law & Order: Criminal Intent was good, too. The trick they played at the end was pretty brilliant. The perp had no choice but defend his actions when he thought the woman he had attacked was still alive and, in so doing, he inadvertently confessed to her murder. Then, when the thought he was going to jump through loopholes, his wife dropped the bombshell. “You look scared,” she tells him. “I like that look on you. I hope to see more of it.”
