Never Sniff a Gift Fish

 

By Patrick F. McManus

McManus was a humor writer for outdoor life, hunting and fishing magazines. His stories featured improbable predicaments and childhood tales and strange characters, including himself. Often hilarious and always amusing, reading his stories is trip, in more ways than one. 

The title story, Never Sniff a Gift Fish, features Pat's neighbor, Al Finley. While on a fishing trip with Pat and Pat's long time friend, Retch Sweeney, Finley tries to think up short epithets that feature sporting themes, among which is, of course, "Never sniff a gift fish." A few more are, "What the tourist terms a plague of insects, the fisherman calls a fine hatch."  "I have never met a fish I didn't like." "Even a fish stick once knew the glories of the deep."

List of the stories included:

• Blowing Smoke
• Poof—No Eyebrows!
• I Fish; Therefore, I Am
• Running on Empty
• The Cat and the Cat Burglar
• Salami on Rye and Hold the Wild Gobo
• Two-Man-Tent Fever
• Fish Poles, and Other Useful Terminology
• The Man Who Notices Things
• The Elk Trappers
• The Short Happy Life of Francis Cucumber
• The Arkansas Prank Hound
• Well, Excuuuuse Me!
• The Mountain Car
• The Christmas Hatchet
• The Night Grandma Shot Shorty
• The Kindest Cut of All
• The Bush Pilots
• Share and Share Alike
• Never Sniff a Gift Fish
• Backseats I Have Known
• Edgy Rider
• Strange Scenes and Eerie Events
• The Hunters' Workout Guide
• Temporary Measures
• The Fibricators
• The Family Camper's Dictionary
• The Big Match 

The Grasshopper Trap

 

By Patrick F. McManus

McManus was a humor writer for outdoor life, hunting and fishing magazines. His stories featured improbable predicaments and childhood tales and strange characters, including himself. Often hilarious and always amusing, reading his stories is trip, in more ways than one. 

The title story, The Grasshopper Trap, features one of his most iconic characters, Rancid Crabtree, grizzled old woodsman and idler. Desiring to acquire more bait for fishing, school age Pat and his friend Crazy Eddie Muldoon are on a fruitless hunt to catch grasshoppers. Eddie, who has an inventive mind, dreams up the grasshopper trap and Rancid, who also wants to do some trout fishing, thinks the idea just might work. And it might have, if Rancid had known his left hand from his right. 

List of the stories in The Grasshopper Trap:

• The Skunk Ladder
• How to Go Splat! 
• The Human Fuel Pump
• 'Twas a Dark and Dreary Night
• Trailer Trials
• The Grasshopper Trap
• Get Lost!
• Never Cry Snake!
• Metamorphosis and Other Outdoor Phenomena Wives Don't Understand
• The Swamp
• A Hunker Is Not a Squat
• Why Wives on Christmas Mourn
• The Hunting Lesson
• First Knife
• Nincompoopery and Other Group Terms
• Bad Company
• The Case of the Missed Deer
• Character Flaws
• Mean Tents
• Crick Ritual
• Hunting Camp Etiquette
• Stone Soup
• Gunrunning
• The Wager
• Letters From Camp
• Sweet Sweet Sixteen
• Down and Way Out in Brazil
• Strange Encounters of the Bird Kind
• The Outing
• I, the Hunted

Regency Buck

 

By Georgette Heyer

A Regency novel

After their father passed away, his nearly grown children, Judith and Peregrine, knew he had named the Fifth Earl of Worth as their guardian. Coming London to introduce themselves to high society, the two were expecting to find Lord Worth to be an elderly man, a contemporary of their father. But Lord Worth was not an elderly man at all. Indeed, he turned out to be the man who had accosted and stolen a kiss from Judith when he happened upon her as she was out taking a stroll unaccompanied. 

So things got off to a rough start in their relationship with their new guardian. And it didn't get any better due to Judith's desire to assert her independence and to her dislike of Worth. 

Judith and Peregrine are lucky to be very wealthy. Plus Judith and Peregrine are both good looking. So becoming a big hit in society is easy for them. And amazingly, young Lord Worth takes his role as their guardian seriously and his guidance and connections make their success assured. 

But wealth can be a magnet for bad people. And Peregrine becomes the target of someone who wants him dead. If he dies without an heir, his share of their inheritance would pass to his sister, Judith. So his death with really only benefit his sister. No one else would get their hands on it. Unless they were married to Judith! 

This is one of Heyer's novels that I just never liked as well as most of her romance novels. Judith is arrogant and Peregrine comes off as stupid. Lord Worth is even more arrogant than Judith is. Peregrine's only function in the story is to be the target for the killer. 

Heyer features some of the famous personages of Regency high society of the early 1800s including the Prince Regent, Beau Brummel, the Duke of Clarence and Lord William Alvanley, among others. She also describes the Brighton Pavilion in detail. I image she spent much time researching the time period and the people and places. 

Here is a review by Susan Holloway Scott on Austenprose.

More Than Gold

 

By Shirley Hailstock

Morgan had a rough start to life. Abandoned as a child, she lived on the streets, surviving as best she could. Fortunately, she was adopted by a kind social worker. Morgan turned out to have a talent for gymnastics and was good enough to make the Olympic team when she was nineteen. 

She is approached by US government agents who talk her into, while at the Olympics in Korea, breaking into a Korean prison and rescuing a prisoner, a man who will probably die in prison if not rescued. She does as asked but in consequence she lives her later life in hiding, fearful of assassins coming to kill her. Twelve years later, the assassins do track her down. Her only chance for survival is CIA agent Jack Temple.  

But Morgan and Jack Temple have history, going back to her time at the Olympics, where Jack was there to keep an eye on her, posing as the team swim coach. Morgan fell hard for him, but except for one exciting kiss, it never went anywhere. Having Jack suddenly back in her life sets off so many emotions, she isn't sure she wants him there, even though she needs his expertise to survive the killers on her trail. 

Well, this was a romance novel disguised as a thriller. Sure there are lots of dangerous and thrilling encounters but the main point is to get two lovers back together again. Which requires lots of sex. Which I skipped reading because sex scenes do not appeal to me. And besides the surfeit of sex, there are just so many hair-raising encounters, it began to be a bit tedious. And I never figured out why the Koreans wanted Morgan dead. Something to do with a wedding ring that she was given while in the Korean prison. Why didn't she just give it back to them?  Or give it to the CIA and let them deal with it? And Morgan: first she is this kick-ass woman who can deal with anything. And then she is a lost little girl who needs her big strong man to save her. Then she's back to being kick-ass woman tough enough to track down kidnapped Jack Temple and rescue him from the Koreans completely unaided. The story just left me confused.

Here is a review by Publishers Weekly.

Awakening

 

By S.J. Bolton

Clara Benning is the local veterinarian. So when a plague of snakes descends upon the small town where she lives, the locals naturally turn to her for help. And help she can, having studied reptiles and snakes in the past. 

I did not know this, but apparently the British Isles do have a venomous snake species, the adder. So people understandably get upset when adders start showing up in their homes, among other less dangerous snakes. 

In the past, a local man of limited intellect was known for his obsession with snakes. But supposedly this man was in a medical facility and not in the area. People begin to suspect that maybe this man has returned to the village and is the one behind the sudden influx of snakes. Why he would be doing it may be tied to a fire at a church decades ago.

At first it is mostly just an annoying if a bit of a frightening nuisance. Then a deadly snake native from Papua New Guinea is found in the bed of a little baby. The whole village is looking to Clare for help not only to deal with the snakes but to track down whoever is sending dangerous snakes into the village.

*SPOILER* I liked this story a lot until the end when the killer turns out to be someone who was thought to be dead and buried for decades. I mean, how is the reader supposed to solve the mystery on their own when the author resurrects a corpse? But up to that point, I enjoyed it.  Clare has personal problems that make her an interesting detective mainly due to a childhood accident that left her with a nasty scar on her face. Which, for the most part, she is failing to deal with in a healthy manner. But she is smart, stubborn, daring and knowledgeable. And quite likeable. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.