bokDescriptions of the novels, repeated from the weekly posts. Tag to mute: #BokBooks
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.
Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●●○ Flood {Flood 1} - Stephen Baxter (nov) 2008
The story begins with four people being rescued from a hostage situation in Barcelona. Lily, a helicopter pilot, was held for five years by the Fathers of the Elect, as was Piers, the military officer who was her passenger. The terrorist group also held secretary Helen and climate-scientist Gary for lesser spans.
The hostage span influenced the plot in two ways. It provided four character who agreed to check in on each other regularly, which repeatedly drew disparate plot strands together again. And it provided some characters who didn't know what was happening in the world, giving the author an excuse to explain things in the early chapters. "Things" being a massive climate shift. By 2016 when the hostages were released, mean sea levels were up over a meter from 2010 levels. By 2017 it was five meters, and by 2020 it was eighty meters, getting faster all the time.
Thandie, Greg's colleague, had a theory. There was more water trapped in Earth's mantle than in the planet's oceans. What if it were being released for some reason? And that's the story. Between 2010 and 2052, sea levels rose 8800 meters, enough to submerge all land on Earth. This book is the disaster movie that primarily follows Lily, and to a lesser extent Gary, as they survive the rising waters. (Piers and Helen have first-person chapters early on, but by the halfway point one is dead, and the other is sidelined.)
Lily mostly sticks close to Nathan, the billionaire who had the hostages rescued as a publicity stunt. While the economy works, he makes things useful to people, and converts the money he makes into food stores, durable goods, and equipment. Nathan plans on surviving. He builds bases, accomplishes stuff, then retreats to higher land to build more stuff. By the time half of Earth's land has been submerged, his company runs a city in the Andes, and is building Ark Three, a replica of the Queen Mary ocean liner to survive when there's no land left.
Greg spends years going around studying the planet to better understand what's happening and predict what will happen next. He ends up in Walker City, a group of thousands of people who get caught between the two groups who have claimed the US Rockies. They walk down the spine of the Americas trying to get to Peru and Nathan's ship.
In the end, all land is lost as even the peak of Everest sinks beneath the waves. Ark Three fails (it was built more for looks than usability), and humankind is left to live on boats and huge rafts for however long it can. But near the end, octogenarian Lily sees a sign that Ark One, a spaceship,¹ successfully made a slingshot at Jupiter, and that's likely the next volume.
●●●●○ Flood {Flood 1} - Stephen Baxter (nov) 2008
The story begins with four people being rescued from a hostage situation in Barcelona. Lily, a helicopter pilot, was held for five years by the Fathers of the Elect, as was Piers, the military officer who was her passenger. The terrorist group also held secretary Helen and climate-scientist Gary for lesser spans.
The hostage span influenced the plot in two ways. It provided four character who agreed to check in on each other regularly, which repeatedly drew disparate plot strands together again. And it provided some characters who didn't know what was happening in the world, giving the author an excuse to explain things in the early chapters. "Things" being a massive climate shift. By 2016 when the hostages were released, mean sea levels were up over a meter from 2010 levels. By 2017 it was five meters, and by 2020 it was eighty meters, getting faster all the time.
Thandie, Greg's colleague, had a theory. There was more water trapped in Earth's mantle than in the planet's oceans. What if it were being released for some reason? And that's the story. Between 2010 and 2052, sea levels rose 8800 meters, enough to submerge all land on Earth. This book is the disaster movie that primarily follows Lily, and to a lesser extent Gary, as they survive the rising waters. (Piers and Helen have first-person chapters early on, but by the halfway point one is dead, and the other is sidelined.)
Lily mostly sticks close to Nathan, the billionaire who had the hostages rescued as a publicity stunt. While the economy works, he makes things useful to people, and converts the money he makes into food stores, durable goods, and equipment. Nathan plans on surviving. He builds bases, accomplishes stuff, then retreats to higher land to build more stuff. By the time half of Earth's land has been submerged, his company runs a city in the Andes, and is building Ark Three, a replica of the Queen Mary ocean liner to survive when there's no land left.
Greg spends years going around studying the planet to better understand what's happening and predict what will happen next. He ends up in Walker City, a group of thousands of people who get caught between the two groups who have claimed the US Rockies. They walk down the spine of the Americas trying to get to Peru and Nathan's ship.
In the end, all land is lost as even the peak of Everest sinks beneath the waves. Ark Three fails (it was built more for looks than usability), and humankind is left to live on boats and huge rafts for however long it can. But near the end, octogenarian Lily sees a sign that Ark One, a spaceship,¹ successfully made a slingshot at Jupiter, and that's likely the next volume.
●●●◐○ The Lengths We Go {Behold: Humanity! 18} - Ralts Bloodthorne (nov) 2025
More about the continuing war of the extra-universal Atrekna against the Terran Confederacy (hardly hampered by the fact that all but about 2600 Terran Descent Humans were currently extinct [people were working on that]) and its allies. The usual dozens of plot threads followed.
Vuxten, now a major, gets assigned to command a garrison, and finds out firsthand the many way troops on garrison duty can cause trouble. One of the Defiled, an Atrekna Dalvanak cultist, demonstrates functional pattern recognition and looks to be winning an encounter with the Confederacy military — at which point the normie Atrekna take over to take credit and promptly lose by going back to their old tactics.
Chromium Peter, a Digital Sentience, dies after 1600 years trying to fix Heaven (the Matrioshka shellword where the Sentience Uninterrupted Data Storage system is, and where time flows differently), and the Detainee sends him back to reality as a biological human. Dambree's younger brother Elurta is in highschool, and finds that, while two planetary invasions taught him how to deal with cannibal marauders, girls are another matter.
More of the same. We're eighteen books in (and I just saw that Book 21 is out), so you either like this stuff or you don't.
●●●◐○ Naked Truth - P.Z. Walker (nov) 2021
Gerben Benders is a detective working undercover as an auditor at SpecialTech, which has finally contacted the police after six of their small one-of-a-kind sensors were stolen in the last year. The gadgets are stored in a room which only three people can access — and that requires passwords and retina prints and finger prints — and yet another was stolen while he was at the company.
On another level, Chao, one of the workers there, belongs to a nudist club. All the clubs in the Netherlands and Belgium have an annual open-pass day, and he invites his colleagues to go, as usual. Most do, so Gerben did as well, which causes some friction with his wife.
Gerben later learns that her family summered in a park in a trailer, and their neighbor was a man who described himself as an indoor nudist. He taught Natasha computer stuff for some weeks, until one day her parents were out, and he tried to rape her. There was insufficient evidence, so he wasn't convicted, though Gerben later uses his police access to look him up, and finds the man died some years ago.
The story has Gerben track the thefts to the nudist club, and visit it again. A long conversation with his wife gets her to try it a couple of times, then the couple begins going there repeatedly with their kids, sixteen-year-old John and thirteen-year-old Marloes. The former adapted quickly — his friend was already a nudist — the latter more slowly.
The mystery isn't wonderful. There are only three people with access to the room, and while some attempt is made at red herrings, only one seemed a real suspect. And the way the theft was covered up was lame. But the repeated nudist visits were interesting, so it gets points on that level.
●●◐○○ The Germ Growers - Robert Potter (nov) 1892
Bob Easterly and Jack Wilbraham met in their last months at Oxford (different colleges), and became fast friends. Being young, they decided to have an adventure, and booked passage to Australia. On arrival, they arranged to join an expedition laying a telegraph cable up the middle of the continent, from Adelaide to Darwin.
After a couple of months, a native traveling with the party said it was time for him to rejoin his people, since the great triennial meeting of the tribes would happen soon. Though advised not to, Jack and Bob decided to travel with him. They lost a horse to lameness, but reached the tribe and continued walking with them. But a fire last year had burned down some trees used as landmarks, and the leader became lost.
During an unusual mist, the tribe came upon a trio of hills “where certain doleful creatures dwelt.” The tribe fled in a panic, leaving Bob and Jack behind, their remaining horse having fled in the stampede. The two white men decided to go to the frightening hills, since it looked like there would be water there. They came upon a high valley, inhabited by men of many races, some fixing flying cars and covering them with invisible paint, and others cultivating gardens that the duo later learned were beds of deadly germs.
Their leader is a being of the ether [explains another such being who later appears to Jack and Bob], who introduces himself as Niccolo Davelli, a name he had used eight hundred years ago. At will, or when killed, the being collapses to a pool of silver liquid, which quickly turns into smoke and vanishes. The process can be reversed, as well. Davelli is “as full of malice as an egg is full of meat” and has throughout history recruited evil humans to work for him, with their group aiming to cause suffering and dissent among humans, for no particular reason beyond Davelli being evil, it seems.
We see Jack and Bob escape with the aid of another ethereal being, one who didn't turn his back on the Infinite One. So basically they've dealt with an angel, a devil, and the demonic humans who follow the latter.
●●●●○ The Case of the Teutonic Temptress {Miles Grant 17} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2021
The nudism part of these novels has surpassed parity with the mystery part. In this book Shirley, wife of private investigator Miles Grant, has arranged a South Seas vacation on a cruise ship for their 25th anniversary. A ship that's currently being used for a nude cruise. Miles, Shirley, and Shirley's mother MJ go on the cruise together.
We're at the 44% mark before we even learn the crime that's to be this novel's mystery, in this case a woman's murder by strangulation. It's pages later before the ship's captain hires Miles to solve the case, which was committed in international waters, and will be a mess to deal with unless at their next port of call the captain can turn over both the body and the killer to the authorities. The case ends at the 84% mark. So three-fifths of the book is about Miles, Shirley, and MJ preparing for the nude cruise, then on it, all during non-case times. And Miles and Shirley have sex multiple times while the case is active, but Miles isn't questioning people.
Again, the mystery part of the book is slighted. Miles figures out that the man who killed the captain's half-sister (who's been living under an assumed name on the ship for a year to hide out from people after her for her late husband's debts) did so to retrieve an object she had. We find out what the object was, and where it was hidden that the killer hadn't found it, but not why he wanted it.
On the night before the ship sailed, the Grants were all three in the same hotel room, and Miles decided that, as Shirley and MJ were fine with it, he would have sex with his wife while his mother-in-law watched and masturbated. On the ship, we see widowed MJ hook up with another widow for some sex play. Multiple swinger couples ask Miles and Shirley if they want to play; they decline, but MJ accepts a couple of times. In each case, the novel discusses what's about to happen in general terms, then jumps to discussions of how things went. Nothing explicit is put on page.
●●●○○ Ark {Flood 02} - Stephen Baxter (nov) 2009
Earth started releasing vast stores of internal water in 2012, ever more, ever faster. It was clear that Earth would drown. There were only three ways to deal with it. Live on the surface in ships and on rafts. That was Flood, book one. In this book, we mostly focus on the quest to plant humans on another planet, though near the end we briefly visit the third option, a seabed city.
We follow the Candidates, some hundred children trained from childhood to run the starship. We see their haven in the Rockies get ever worse as the floodwaters rose. We see the hectic launch amidst rioting, when half of the chosen crew didn't make in onboard, replaced by desperate refugees who forced their way on, and security forces who let that happen as a distraction from their own plan.
We see the barley-FTL ship (three times lightspeed) travel to their destination, and the various ways the ship and the society within broke down. And we see that the world they aimed for — which telescopes of a dying civilization could say was of the right size, and had an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere — wasn't quite right, and the crisis that caused.
Thirty percent of the crew decided to colonize Earth II, not being able to face more time in the ship than the seven years they'd already
spent. Thirty percent decided to return to Earth I, taking one of the ships twin hulls, and building another warp ring from spare parts. And forty percent decided to head for Earth III, a backup world that had been considered, that would take thirty years more to reach.
Stress, riots, accidents, sabotage, dissociative identity disorder, murder, more. Rather a darker tale than I expected, with plenty of suffering to go around. The story covers the years of preparation, then the years on the ship. We see nothing of what happened on Earth II, only a bit about what happened when half the Ship returned to Earth I, and only the landing of the last glider on Earth III.
●●●◐○ The Case of the Felonious Feminist {Miles Grant 18} - Jack Dearborn (nov) 2021
A decade ago, Dewey Marcella (Seattle's Mob boss) hired Miles Grant to find his missing 18-year-old daughter, Kari Anne. Now Kari Anne is married, and her four-month-old son has been kidnapped. Marcella offers Grant another small fortune to find the boy.
Grant does his usual slow-and-steady work, finding someone who saw the van the kidnappers used, then checked out the three addresses the DMV said owned vans of that color, and within two days found the kidnappers unwitting assistants. Then it was a matter of how to get the boy back without telling Marcella any details, since he'd rather not have the Boss's thugs maim or kill the young kidnapper. Also, as has happened several times in recent novels, the culprit's motivation was just dumb.
The mystery-to-nudism ratio in this novel isn't as uneven as the last novel. That one was 40% mystery, 60% nudism. This one is 70% percent mystery, 30% nudism. MJ finds another widow to play with and convert to nudism. It was fun while it lasted — Miles saw her sneaking in naked one night — but the woman ended up moving to be closer to her daughter.
Stewart is dating Kim, and Shirley reconnects with her mother Tina, finding out that her love life is flagging — except when someone else is in the house, since apparently Gus likes it when others can at least hear their lovemaking. Shirley learns of Tina's early sexlife, and learns more of Miles's (like how he walked in on his mother getting out of the shower, and later figured out that she'd staged that).
Stewart graduates college¹, which means the whole naked extended family gathers for a party. Miles and Shirley; daughter Sarah (son Jimmie can't make it, continuing his long offscreen existence) and Shirley's mother MJ. Miles's parents fly in from Iowa. Later, MJ visits her son Joe and his wife Cassie and their three kids, who are all nudists. Even Cassie's widowed father is now a nudist, and may be moving in with Cassie's family, from Arizona where he moved for his late wife's health.
Miles wonders if other people talk about nudity and sex as much as his family. It seems unlikely, but since I enjoy it, I'm all for it. It's always suggestive, never explicit.
[0] Footnotes have been removed, so some parts may lack further explanation. For descriptions of the shorter works, see the weekly posts.
