The Ricochet Reviewer: Books, Movies, and Comics

by John D. MacDonald Tal Howard, home from a Korean War POW camp, follows a lead from a dead fellow prisoner to a small upstate New York town, where a hidden stash of money is supposed to be waiting if he can locate the woman who can lead him to it.  A dangerous man from the prison camp is also on the trail, and their search leads to dead bodies and buried secrets.  John MacDonald constructs a smooth narrative that keeps tightening its grip. John D. MacDonald  MacDonald uses an ordinary town and its “respectable” people as the container for escalating violence and moral compromise.  This is a mystery, not an action novel, even though there are grisly murders and a genuinely frightening sociopathic antagonist.  The violence serves as the inevitable release of the pressure built up from years of lies and greed.  It’s tense, ugly, and violent, with a compelling conclusion. "A Bullet for Cinderella" (Portuguese) "Cindy, A Name for Death" (Spanish) "A Dead Man's...

Author: Gerry Conway Artist: Ross Andru Embellisher: Mike Esposito Drugged by the Jackal, Spider-Man awakens a prisoner in an abandoned tenement. At this point, I’m wondering how Conway is going to justify Professor Warren’s ability to fight like this. Well, we have to give the Jackal credit for insight, if nothing else. Warren delivers his villain’s monologue, telling how he tricked a student into cloning human cell samples, then accidentally killed him when he protested. He spends the next several months developing his Jackal gear and caring for his clones. Pretty flimsy motivation. Later, Parker arrives at the offices of The Daily Bugle and learns that Ned Leeds is missing. When Spider-Man keeps his appointment with the Jackal at Shea Stadium, he learns both what happened to Ned Leeds and why Professor Warren was speaking about clones in the plural earlier. So this comes out of nowhere, the most unconvincing heel turn in the history of heel turns. And in the aftermath of the bomb ex...

by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir A secret U.S. government program frames Remo Williams, a nobody beat cop, and sentences him to death so he can be erased and repurposed as a deniable assassin.  It also recruits Chiun, a master of the martial art Sinanju, to train Remo as a lethal operative.  This is a serviceable launchpad for the franchise, especially once Chiun arrives and the book starts showing signs of the humorous personality for which the series is known.  The early Remo/Chiun dynamic is characterized by mentor–student friction, bickering, growing affection, and a clash of worldviews.  A problem is that this novel reads like an uneasy combination of two different types of story.  In the first half, Remo is trained into a killing machine with almost mystical powers of destruction, which promises a Bond-level villain who can threaten the world (which I gather will come along soon enough in the series).  The second half drops him into a mobster plot t...