Pro Se Presents #16

Pro Se Presents 16 by Nancy Hansen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Pro-Se Presents #16 A Review
I like this series. I just wanted to get that out of the way before I started. The idea of a monthly short story anthology of pulp stories may have been done all the time seventy years ago, but not today. This was the all Nancy Hansen issue this month with two very distinct and different stories by Nancy.
The first story is called ‘The Keener eye: Our Crosses to bear’. This was a tale about a female private eye who gets caught up in something a bit above her head when a husband and wife hire her to track down their missing daughter. The story was well crafted and had its fair share of revelations by the tales end, but something about it did not sit right with me. I really didn’t care for the story that much. In fact one of the characters (Gwen) I found outright annoying.
Still, it was a well scripted modern day yarn with a decent mystery running through it concerning the disappearance of a troubled teen at a camp for troubled teens and how Kate Keener solved this mystery. The entire tale culminated decently. I knew some of the areas where the story took place in personally so it had that going for it as well. Honestly, it was not my type of story. That’s not Nancy’s fault though. I’d have to give this story *** (3) stars.

Now the second tale, “The Song of Heroes: Dark eyes of the night’ was much more like it for me. This story was about mythical creatures doing battle at night in a modern day port town. The heroine of the piece was a Siren named Lori, as in Lorelei. This immortal woman has become a prostitute and was doing more than just trawling for Johns; she was hunting Vampires, who had infested this town as well as several others nearby. It seems that Lori has other weapons besides her voice with which to battle her deadly foes. Early on in the story Lori is saved from being brutalized by a nest of vampires when Enrique, who is actually hunting the blood suckers, breaks up their attack on her and saves her from at least being hurt badly. Sirens are immortals you see, and they heal quickly. While their real weapon is their song. A song that will entrance any man, leaving him helpless.
Lori and her new beau Enrique are together for many months. In that time Lori stops posing as a prostitute to draw vamps out into the street, where they can be dealt with. You see Lori has one other power as well, a mystic bracelet with which she can summon the great heroes out of legend to join her and kill the foul blood sucking vampires.
All in all this was a GREAT tale for me. The only drawback I found on this one was the ending which was exactly what I expected it to be. It would have been nice to be surprised at stories end. Still, there’s no doubt this was a five star story to me. It had everything I wanted in it and I truly enjoyed it. This story was a bases loaded down three runs in the bottom of the ninth grand slam home run. ***** (5) stars!
And THAT’s the way I like it!





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