Stan Makowski, Spears Unleashed: A Kris Spears Mystery

It's tough when you're not the target audience, you know? Tough when I try to make sense of my thoughts and feelings about it, and tough for the author whose efforts have found someone basically unsuited to connect with their work.

Our method for book club is that everybody chooses a book each for the next rotation, a book that you've never read before, and as I've said many times, I love when I'm not the one forcing others to read things (since that's a big part of my day job as an English prof). It often happens that we don't like each others' choices, and that's fine: I was the sole defender, though passionately so, when they recently read my choice of Tim Bowling's Marvels of Youth, and just last week, literally no one found much pleasure in Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how the guys respond to Stan Makowski's debut novel Spears Unleashed: A Kris Spears Mystery. It's tricky to find, though I got a copy from Russell Books. It doesn't seem to be on Amazon (nothing should be!), so its only online source seems to be the Victoria BC martial arts store Dragon Impact, which is selling it as a favour to Makowski as a good customer. (That's what they said on YouTube, at least.)

I appreciated that it's set in Victoria (in the fall of 2010, though published in 2024). Some of its setting feels truer to 2024 than to 2010, but that's fine. Its politics are ... not mine. At all. It's utterly wrong about Antifa, dazzlingly so, and wrong as well about municipal budget practices in Victoria. And then there's the gender stuff, with women writing their phone numbers on receipts etc for men they've just met, and interactions with teenagers, and dialogue issues, and the word "Consequently."

I've enjoyed some of our mystery reads, like Stan Evans' Seaweed on the Street (also set in Victoria), though I've disliked others, like Don Winslow's City of Fire, and I hated C.J. Box's Dark Sky: A Joe Pickett Novel more than I thought possible. It's entirely possible that Makowski's aiming at the readers who've plowed through (good GOD) fully 25 volumes of Joe Pickett novels, and that's fine.

Spears Unleashed certainly isn't for me, but it doesn't have to be, and honestly? Good on people for finishing novels and publishing them, including self-published novels.