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Scorpio Rising: book review by The Mountain Astrologer

13 Jan

Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand, part of the New Age Noir series, is a gripping murder mystery with a Hitchcockian twist. Private investigator Axel Crowe is an appealing and upstanding protagonist who uses astrology, palmistry and other esoteric techniques to solve crimes. With bits of Vedic wisdom sprinkled through­out, this book is an enjoyable read and an engrossing narrative.

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Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand, part of the New Age Noir series, is a gripping murder mystery with a Hitchcockian twist. The protagonist of this story is a private investigator named Axel Crowe who uses esoteric techniques to solve crimes – intuition, numerology, palmistry, horary astrology, Ayurveda, Vedic astrology, and a well-developed sense of smell. One FBI agent refers to Crowe’s bag of tricks as “whatever it is you do.” Years of observing the subtle signs of the environment have given Crowe the courage to follow his intuition.

He also looks for signs in the form of synchronicity. Here is one unusual method for determining someone’s ascendant: “Out in Central Park, the blue kite wheeled high in the air. Blue was the color of Venus. Libra was an air sign ruled by Venus. On the wall was an Ernst litho­graph, Portrait Bleu, featuring a bird-like figure. More corrobo­ration. [She] would have a Libra ascendant.”

Crowe, of course, has to deal with a lot of skepticism from law enforcement officials regarding his methods. When someone suggests that it is quite a leap from criminology to astrology, Crowe responds: “I suppose, although some would say, they’re both black arts.”

Crowe is an “infomaniac,” according to his Vedic teacher, Guruji, who had tutored him for 14 years and taught him that our greatest enemy is our own desire. (The novel attempts to prove this maxim.) Crowe was quite attached to his guru: “His heart brimmed with love for the man who had shown him the narrow trail through a bramble thicket of ignorance and misperception.”

The bits of Vedic wisdom sprinkled through­out this book were my favorite parts. For example, here’s what Crowe has to say about women: “Women were mothers, sisters, lovers, angels and rarely, but possibly, demons. Every now and then you might have the bad luck to meet a Kali, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, and she would add your head to her collection of skulls.” We meet one such demon in this novel.

This is not a whodunit. By page 60 of the book, a pattern has emerged, and we know who has done what to whom. The reader simply waits for Crowe and the detectives to find the pattern and locate the parties responsible for the murders.

Scorpio Rising is an enjoyable read and an engrossing narrative, but it is not for the super-squeamish. (If you set out to read this book, it is recom­mended that you have at least one Scorpio planet in your chart.) There are several unsa­vory characters here – murderers, adulterers, and thieves – but the police detectives are painted as real working-class people, warts and all, and Crowe is an appealing, upstanding guy who is nonetheless not quite perfect.

– reviewed by Jan de Prosse, The Mountain Astrologer, Feb/Mar 2012

Scorpio Rising by Alan Annand, Sextile, 2011. Softcover, 352 pp, $11.99. ISBN 978-0-9869206-4-6.

For all the latest REVIEWS of Scorpio Rising, see: http://pinterest.com/alanannand/scorpio-rising/

To purchase Scorpio Rising (digital $2.99, paper $11.99)

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Harm’s Way = hard-boiled excitement

31 Oct

“For Canadian writers setting hard-boiled stories in Canada, the closest approximation yet to a US-style private eye is Montreal investigator Lee Harms in Harm’s Way by Alan Annand.” – David Skene-Melvin for Rara-Avis

My fifth novel, Harm’s Way, was published under pseudonym by St.Martin’s Press, one of New York’s venerable houses, in 1992. The book received some good reviews but never enough to make it a bestseller.

In the last few years, publishing has been through a paradigm-shifting upheaval. The mass paperback market is down, bookstores are closing and e-books are on the rise.

Having seen the writing on the wall, I’m now self-publishing. In 2012, I released three novels. Two were new mysteries – Scorpio Rising and Hide in Plain Sight – both available on Amazon.com and Smashwords.com.

The third novel was a re-release of Harm’s Way, whose copyright I had recovered years ago when it went officially out-of-print.

After refreshing my memory about what reviewers had said about the book back then, I gave it some ruthless editing and a total re-write. One criticism was that I hadn’t adequately captured the ambience of Montreal, one of North America’s most vibrant cities. So in my re-write, I worked very hard to bring this great city into focus.

Along the way, I tightened up every chapter, until the book moves at the pace of a runaway train. Once you get started, you won’t be able to put it down.

Here’s the jacket copy for Harm’s Way:

Lee Harms, free spirit and investigator-for-hire, is on the cusp of an on-again, off-again love affair with longtime confidante and astrologer Celeste when fate serves him a witch’s brew of trouble.

Start with a broth of sexual intrigue, toss in a kidnapped redhead, stir in two kilos of pure cocaine, dissolve a few pages from a psychiatrist’s notebook, and bring to a boil the fury of an underworld gang whose favorite son has died in an all-night bacchanal. Money ignites the fire under this cauldron, but the fuels that keep it bubbling are sex, violence and the darker forces of human nature.

Although Harms has the advantage of Celeste’s astrological insights to guide him, he must rely increasingly on his own wits to out-maneuver crack-crazed thugs, libidinous porn stars, and a deranged young woman with a dark secret. It’s dangerous enough for Harms, but when his own ten-year-old daughter is taken hostage by the underworld, he must pull out all the stops to rescue her from harm’s way.

Here are more reviews of the day:

“Harm’s Way is a solid P.I. thriller, a nastier-than-you’d-expect slab of pornography, cocaine, gangsters, incest, madness, torture and vengeance.” – Thrilling Detective 

“Underneath the New Age trappings, divorced ex-cop Harms is plenty hard-boiled, using fists, guns and sheer wit to escape the many tight spots here.” – Publisher’s Weekly

“Energy, superior punch-‘em out sequences, and humor.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Harm’s Way is a fast-paced action drama featuring an unlikely variant of the private detective. The writing is above average, the plot convoluted, and the characters well-developed with a past, present and future, something often lacking in the detective field.” – The Westmount Examiner

“Annand has a gift for storytelling. There’s more than enough menace to keep a reader intrigued.” – The Montreal Gazette

“A well-written, quickly-paced story with colorful details of Montreal. And Harms is a likable character – the reader wants to know what happens to him.” – The Daily Gleaner

To purchase Harm’s Way (digital $0.99, paper $8.99)

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Scorpio Rising: book review by North American Jyotish Newsletter

20 Sep

Book review of “Scorpio Rising” by Michael Laughrin (michael@jyotish.ws) in his North American Jyotish Newsletter (August/September 2011)

There are dozens of different varieties of mystery novels, and I have read at least 2000 of them. Some of these books feature ex-cops who have become PIs (private eyes). Some mysteries, mostly written by British female authors, are called cozies because of their genteel manners and settings. Then there are mysteries in which the setting is all-important — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago being some of the more popular cities.

Then there is a whole category of mysteries that feature certain professions — lawyers, doctors, chefs, and musicians come to mind. Another genre features certain animals — horses, dogs, cats, and parrots.

Alan Annand has created — or expanded upon — a whole new genre: Vedic Astrology and detective. Our hero in “Scorpio Rising” is also a fine palmist, numerologist, and expert in Vastu (ancient Vedic laws of architecture) and Ayurveda. Being a lover of mysteries (especially the “hard-boiled” type) and of all things Vedic, I believe this book is a 5-star winning combination.

Without giving any of the plot away, here’s the gist of it: Criminal profiler Axel Crowe investigates the killing of a New York City heiress, only to discover that her death is linked to two other murders on the same day: a dot-com millionaire in San Francisco, and the team leader of a CIA counter-terrorist project in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

A finder of wayward people and stolen possessions, the enigmatic Crowe profiles subjects in a distinctly unique manner, using astrology, palmistry and other techniques drawn from Vedic lore. Facts are gross, but the truth is subtle, Crowe’s guru always told him. And although the truth behind this three-way conspiracy lies buried in the past, Crowe is relentless until he uncovers it.

If you think about it, astrologer and detective go together like fish and chips. Astrologers look for that which is hidden, and so do detectives. Both professions value intuition and logic equally. Mr. Annand has done a masterful job in creating a believable character who is personable, intelligent, and multi-faceted in his approach to crime solving.

“Scorpio Rising” is a truly great book. And according to the author, it is just the first in a series of several books featuring this astrologer-detective character. If you love Jyotish, palmistry, etc, READ THIS BOOK! You will learn a lot of predictive techniques because Mr. Annand, besides being a writer, is also a very fine Jyotishi.

Enjoy.

Scorpio Rising is available from Amazon — paperback $12.99, digital only $2.99.
http://www.amazon.com/Scorpio-Rising-ebook/dp/B0050IOY6I

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Madame Ovary, by Dr. Gustave Flaubert (humor)

14 Jul

The life and loves, and death of Emma Ovary, a beautiful woman married to a small town gynecologist, Charles. Dissatisfied with her marriage, Emma has a series of reckless love affairs which eventually lead to a nasty fungus, marital ruin and death from sexual exhaustion.

Charles Ovary, the only son of a middle class family, becomes a gynecologist and sets up a practice in a rural village. He consents to a marriage of convenience with an older woman who owns the building where he rents an office. When she dies, he marries the daughter of a patient with a history of yeast infections.

For a little while, young Emma is delighted to be the wife of the only gynecologist in the county, and enjoys listening to her husband’s after-dinner shop talk about genital warts, incontinence, irregular menstruation and uterine fibroids. After awhile, however, Emma becomes envious of those other vaginas being probed by her husband while hers, a model of feminine health, offers little mystery or challenge for Charles. Despondent, Emma becomes anorexic and refuses to eat.

In an effort to revive their marriage, Charles relocates his practice to a larger town where society life promises to perk up Emma’s spirits. Almost immediately after she gives birth to a daughter, she falls in love with Leon, a paralegal she meets when she and Charles revise their wills.

When Leon goes off to law school, lonely Emma completely abandons her duties as wife and mother and embarks on an adulterous affair with Rudolph, a local businessman who owns a chain of dairy farms and blacksmith shops. When he abandons her for a younger lover, Emma discovers she’s acquired genital herpes.

Because she can’t reveal her infidelity to her husband, she goes to another doctor in the city and by chance runs into Leon again. Still hoping to be cured of her herpes, she returns to the city again and again, ostensibly for shopping sprees and culture appreciation, when in fact she simply rents rooms in expensive hotels and indulges her libido with Leon.

With his help she gains a power of attorney over her husband’s bank accounts, and runs up huge debts. When the creditors come knocking, Emma turns to Rudolph for a loan, but he refuses to help her. In despair, Emma returns to the city and Leon, where she takes an overdose of Spanish Fly and goes out in an orgy of passion, dying of sexual exhaustion.

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Great Expectorations, by Dr. Charles Dickens (humor)

30 Mar

A young man of no prospects goes to the big City where, thanks to poor urban planning and non-existent labor rights, he suffers a multitude of bronchial infections brought on by smoke, pollution, fungus and virus.

Pip, an orphan of poor prospects, can’t complete his apprenticeship in a blacksmith shop because of an allergy to horseshit. His patron uncle sends him to London to live with the reclusive Miss Havisham who, jilted many years ago on her wedding day, still wears her bridal gown. Her wedding cake, which she’s saved all these years, has turned to mould and infected the entire house.

Pip falls in love with Estella, a beautiful young girl with a phlegmy cough. Pip has a nasty reaction to the fungus in the house and develops a bronchial infection whose coughing nearly turns his lungs inside out. Miss Havisham takes an interest in Pip’s future and introduces him to better society. In their company, Pip takes up smoking, which further aggravates his cough. Some of his newfound friends take to calling him “Spit”. When his sister dies of coal cough, a common ailment among residents of poorly-ventilated homes, Pip goes home for her funeral.

Returning to London, he’s approached by the convict Magwitch whom he’d helped escape from chains many years ago. Magwitch, who’s made a fortune running an opium den in Australia, is back in England seeking medical attention for viral pneumonia, but wants to bequeath part of his fortune to Pip. Soon after, Pip learns that Miss Havisham has been secretly planning to marry his beloved Estella off to a rival suitor, and they quarrel bitterly. Miss Havisham’s dress catches on fire and Pip is only able to save her by ripping her dress off. Exposed, Miss Havisham is traumatized and falls into a catatonic state. Magwitch is captured by the police and sentenced to die.

While visiting him in his damp prison cell, Pip develops an allergic reaction to moldy rodent droppings, and falls seriously ill. He spends a month in hospital, wracked by violent coughs, filling spittoons with fragments of his ravaged lungs. When he recovers enough to travel, Pip relocates to the dry climate of Cairo for eleven years. When he returns to London a rich man, he finds Estella now a widow with a mild case of whooping cough, and he rekindles their friendship by gifting her with a family-size bottle of expectorant.

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