{"id":5332,"date":"2023-10-30T06:43:45","date_gmt":"2023-10-30T13:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=5332"},"modified":"2023-10-30T06:43:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-30T13:43:45","slug":"stephen-mack-jones-deus-x","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/stephen-mack-jones-deus-x\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Mack Jones: Deus X"},"content":{"rendered":"

August Snow #4<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Stephen Mack Jones, creator of August Snow \u2013 Detroit\u2019s Mexican-African American knight in shining armor \u2013 wants to ponder, in his fourth novel, the cost of doing what\u2019s morally right, no matter what.\u00a0 As the book opens, August is visiting his girlfriend\u2019s family in Sweden but while there, he seems to have tracked down and caught a serial killer.\u00a0 That\u2019s just the first chapter.\u00a0 He gets an urgent call from his sometime housemate, Lucy Three Rivers, that her adoptive mothers are in crisis.\u00a0 One of them is in the hospital with a heart problem.<\/p>\n

Lucy is a young woman August basically scraped off the streets, and she\u2019s a techno whiz.\u00a0 She\u2019s using her tech talent at the moment to help her \u201cmom\u201d even though she now has a \u201cstraight\u201d job.\u00a0 She\u2019s also willing to go off reservation for August. Lucy sees no wrong in what she\u2019s doing, for her, it\u2019s the right thing, no matter the consequence. Her right and wrong boundaries are squishy.<\/p>\n

While visiting the hospital, August overhears a heated conversation (or part of one) between his family priest, Father Grabowski, and a remarkably sinister looking man. While he\u2019s not sure exactly what\u2019s up, his concern intensifies when he finds the good father passed out drunk when he stops by one morning.\u00a0 He sobers him up and gets him to talk.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to give away too much of this complicated and twisty plot, but Father Grabowski also has things he\u2019s done in the past \u201cfor the right reason\u201d that he now regrets.\u00a0 The Father\u2019s moral boundaries, as a Catholic cleric, are not so squishy as Lucy\u2019s. August has two tasks in this book: figuring out what the Father did, and protecting him from harm as there seem to be some very lethal folks looking for him.\u00a0 Just protecting him proves difficult enough.<\/p>\n

August, meanwhile, pretty much daily grapples with the amount of violence that he must use to accomplish his ends \u2013 often \u201cdoing what\u2019s right,\u201d but it still feels wrong.\u00a0 All of these conundrums -from Lucy\u2019s to Grabowski\u2019s to August\u2019s daily battle with the dark side of the world \u2013 are a matter of degree, but all are ultimately the same question. For August it\u2019s begun to impact his relationship with his girlfriend, Tatina.\u00a0 They are not married but shared a \u201ccommitment\u201d ceremony in the last novel (Dead of Winter, <\/em>2021).<\/p>\n

This book of course is not a polemic.\u00a0 Jones is a very quotable and funny writer, and he\u2019s great with sidebar characters, of whom there are many.\u00a0 He\u2019s a bit like Robert B. Parker\u2019s Spenser \u2013 on steroids.\u00a0 Even Spenser took a chill pill every now and then.\u00a0 August shares Spenser\u2019s love of the finer things in fashion as well as the finer things in food, chowing down everything from chili tacos to donuts to swigging down a good amount of bourbon.\u00a0 These books are nothing if not a great cultural food tour of Detroit.<\/p>\n

If these books were any different in tone, I\u2019d almost categorize them as cozy, with August\u2019s circle of supportive friends and neighbors and the food tours.\u00a0 However, the level of violence and intrigue puts them into a darker place.\u00a0 I love August, even though he sometimes veers toward the super-human.\u00a0 I\u2019m glad he\u2019s around though, and I enjoyed this trip through the darker recesses of the Catholic church.\u00a0 This was a fast and fun read. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August Snow #4 Stephen Mack Jones, creator of August Snow \u2013 Detroit\u2019s Mexican-African American knight in shining armor \u2013 wants to ponder, in his fourth novel, the cost of doing what\u2019s morally right, no matter what.\u00a0 As the book opens, August is visiting his girlfriend\u2019s family in Sweden but while there, he seems to have … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[164,1428,163,1427,15,1429,566,1276,166,165],"class_list":["post-5332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-august-snow","tag-catholic-church","tag-detroit","tag-deus-x","tag-michigan","tag-moral-conundrum","tag-private-eye","tag-robin-agnew","tag-soho-press","tag-stephen-mack-jones"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5332"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5333,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5332\/revisions\/5333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}