Becky's Books –

This is the first James Patterson I’ve read where he has someone other than Maxine Praeto co-writing with him.  It took me awhile but at about a third of the book the plot took off.  Someone was murdered and the whole situation had the makings of a real legal thriller = not one of the best I’ve ever read but it kept me up turning pages.  

The Jailhouse Lawyer
by James Patterson/Nancy Allen
2021 / 
Read by Megan Tusing 6h 4m
Rating: B / letal thriller
(This book includes a second novel but I’ll read it later.)  

Martha Foster is hired as at the Public Defender for Douglass County, Alabama, so taking her 5-year old son. so she’s  relocated and it seemed like such a good move. There were welcomes and introductions and it felt like there was definitely a place for her. But the down side was that there was almost nothing for her to do.  People who were arrested for misdemeanors were not allowed the services of the pubic defenders and felonies were transferred to a different court.  The prior public defender had committed suicide. And before long Martha realizes things are not going the way they should be.  

Slowly what is really going on is unearthed and someone is killed. Martha is not one to keep quiet but the judge there is determined to keep things as they are.  It’s an interesting book after the action starts – about 1/3 through.  

I can only give the novel a B for two reasons. It sometimes seems so slow it’s a bit like a cozy legal suspense novel. At other times it’s over the top in the way the characters behave. Also, the protagonist’s child is a bit mouthy for his age – or that’s how it seems to me, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a 5-year old around.  

I think I’ve gotten involved with this sereies.  I’ve read 4 or 5 out of order simply because they sounded good,  but now I’ve started from the beginning and am going through them in order (as far as I get). I rather like Joe Pickett although he’s sometimes a bit domineering for my tastes.  

Trophy Hunt
by C.J. Box 2004 / 
Read by David Chandler 11h
Rating; A / western thriller 
#4 in the Joe Pickett series 

In this episode Pickett comes across a murderer and a mutilator – first a dead moose is found, and then the men.  Maybe it’s the psycho grizzly bear found near the moose?  No, but who would it be and where is he?  The plot winds around with Joe’s whole family, wife and two daughters,  involved plus Nate, the strange neighbor who has become friends with Joe.  

There seem to be some supernatural elements this time but it turns into a pretty standard thriller.  I do enjoy the setting of central Wyoming, just east of Yellowstone and the main characters are easy to get along with.  

Whew!  I finished again.  I came across parts I hadn’t really processed earlier and I came across parts which had angered me on my prior reading.  At this point I think it’s a nice book. – a really sweet book for the dreamers and God knows someone has to do that.  Parts were really good – other parts were worthy of being called “stupid.”  (I upped tue rating a couple points here because I enjoyed parts of it.)

Poverty by America – 
by Matthew Desmond 
3/23/23 / 287 pages 
Read by Dion Graham 5h 40m
Rating: 6 / politics – government 
(Both read and listened) 

I’m an environmentalist NOT so my neighbor can have more toys, more processed foods, more Sunday drives or whatever else television and social media have to sell him. That’s BS.  We don’t need more houses or any kind of buildings made of trees and fossil fuel products which will burn up come wildfire time.

We have almost used up what once was an embarrassment of riches with the kind of thinking that Desmond is using.  “In this rich country we can certainly feed and house our people…” sounds a lot like “If we can send a man to the moon we can …”.  As though those were equivalents. 

Nope – I don’t think we can get rid of poverty. I know some very well-to-do people (2) who are scared to death they’re going to starve to death with no one to love them.  I knew very poor purple who went about their business and putting a dime in the basket (which ever basket came their way). 

Earthly resources are limited while human demands are not. Besides that we’re going to burn up the world and all its resources USING those same resources while we go about trying to have it our way. (May God forgive us.) 

I was much more interested in the parts about the actual fire which occurred in 2016 in northern Alberta Canada along with the people involved and the destruction it did than I was in the scientific underpinnings.  That said, I got quite an education about a variety of things.   As David Enrich wrote in The NY Times in June 2023, 

Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World
by John Vaillant
2023 / 
Read by Alan Carlson 14h 18m
Rating: 8/ science-environment-climate change

“Is fire alive?” the journalist and author John Vaillant asks early in his new book, “Fire Weather.” I rolled my eyes, even as Vaillant ticks off a dozen lifelike characteristics — it grows, it breathes, it travels in search of nourishment — because the answer seemed so obvious: No. Of course not…Some 300 pages later, the question didn’t feel quite so ludicrous.”  

This is the whole story of the Fort McMurray Fire, Alberta’s largest wildfire evacuation and the costliest disaster in Canadian history. By “whole story” I mean it covers the origins of the forest, the origins of what we know as western civilization up there, the oil industry these people brought, the way bitumen works, and the troubles it’s all causing.  The main idea is that scientists have been warning us for generations now – this is what it’s like – and it’s worse than they thought. 

I was going to put a photo in here of the Fort McMurray Fire but when I went to Google it I was amazed by so many photos, available in so many places. The book has a few photos and the PDF file at Audible has a few more.  The graph of temperature anomalies provided by NOAA is outstanding and the original.  “Global Temperature Anomalies – Graphing Tool. Climate at a Glance: Time Series – Global”

https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/dataset/global-temperature-anomalies-graphing-tool

Fort Mcmurrey, Alberta housed 88,000 workers and their families to dig bitumen out of the ground in northern Alberta.  It was hard work but they earned good money. They almost always chose to leave at the end of their time there.  But while they l lived there many thought they had a pretty good life with nice, if expensive, homes and lots of toys.  It was a lethal madhouse getting out.  

What else Vailliant explores are all the indicators which should have given pause to the owners and overseers of the mines, not just to the scientists.  But an industry which makes as much money as oil does isn’t going to just go away because of one (of five) horrendous fires.  

Most people are aware of climate change now but this book tells the reader that this new kind of fire, in and of itself, is part of it. And it’s not going away.  A lot of our history, museums, art and architecture, whole universities are going up in smoke. This is to say nothing of the resources, food and plant products are being destroyed. These fires are so hot they crack and break huge boulders. 

I know I’ll remember this book when I hear about fires anywhere in the world – from California forests to Siberia and from the Australian outback to Brazil – everywhere.  (There aren’t so many big ones in Africa, but they get a lot of smaller ones and their fire crews go everywhere.) 

I’m enjoying the Joe Pickett series more and more and this is the best so far.  It starts out in a snow storm just before Christmas when Joe is called to the scene of a murder where another forestry employee has been shot to death … with arrows.  

Winterkill 
by C.J. Box 
2003 / 
Read by David Chandler 11h 25m
Rating – A++ / Western suspense 
(#3 in Joe Pickett series) 

I really got to know Joe and his family better this time.  There were several very interesting characters in this one and a couple of them stay for the series. 

There’s a very anti-government bunch of people who set up camp in Joe’s part of Wyoming.  Joe’s mother-in-law is staying with the family while her new husband is going on trial. Joe and his wife have had a foster daughter living with them for 4 years and her mother decides suddenly to take her back.  

The story has some pretty graphic violence and Joe is definitely shown to be one of the “good” guys. I’ll be following this series but not in any big rush.

This book is said to be based on a true story – it could be.Something about it feels that way, but if you’d asked me before I read that piece of info I wouldn’t have guessed. It’s just not real likely, but could easily happen. (So go read it to find out what I mean because it’s a really good book!)

1.   I love legal thrillers or courtroom drama types of books. 
2.  I got so caught up in this that I was unable to do my jigsaw and listen at the same time.  (I’m usually pretty good at that although the puzzles take me along time – lol!) 

The Murder Rule 
by Dervla McTiernan 
Narrated by a small cast
2022 / 9h 19m
Rating: A+   / legal thriller

The story opens with Hannah Rokeby, a single 21-year old, leaving home for law school in Virginia where she wants to do volunteer work for the Innocence Project.  She’s really going there to see if she can prevent the man who ruined her mother’s life from getting out of prison.  The Innocence Project has taken up his case so all she has to do is throw a couple of clinkers into their project to keep the prior conviction stick in the second trial.  

A lot happens in the 9 hours or 300 pages of this novel. 🙂

I saw Wesley Lowery, the author of American Whitewash, on television Friday morning and just then and there found the book at Audible and put it on my Wish List.  A few hours later I was tired of reading Poverty, By America (2nd time) so I got Whitelash: downloaded and started in.  

Whitelash is only 263 pages long which translates to 7 hours of audio.  The author, Wesley Lowery, is a television journalist and as narrator of his own book he’s pretty good.    

American Whitelash:
A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress
by Wesley Lowery June 2
Read by the author, 7h 
Rating: 9  / History -Americas 

Lowery explores the overt racism and hate crimes present in the US since our earliest days but the focus is more on the events of our own century.

“We cannot solve a problem we refuse to recognize.”

 The subject then is White Supremacy, to the point that some people believe Blacks are, by their very nature, an “inferior race.”  That is, both physically and mentally, they are “less than” the other races – the White “race” in particular. Now we are coming to learn that there is no such actual thing as “race,” the idea is a social construct. Still, some people have been preaching that Blacks will take over the US (replace Whites) since way before Obama was elected.  They say we will become a majority minority nation and talk about the suicidal stupidity of integration.  

So law enforcement complains they don’t have enough resources to keep an eye on all the terrorist and White Supremacist groups in the US doing what they can with limited funds. Even a simple wiretap approval will not pass Congress in the face of counterterrorism and it’s all on 9/11 Muslim terrorists.  Not much goes to White Supremacists. 

The first two parts of the book consist of history and ideas. The next three parts describe more specific and relatively recent incidents of hate crimes with media attention.  

“The problem goes deeper than dialogue or interpersonal forgiveness.  If we are serious about dismantling white supremacy we are going to have some incredibly difficult soul searching conversations and we’ll have to acknowledge that white supremacy is an inherent part of the history of our country.  We can’t get to the part of the apology where we are making meaningful amends unless we acknowledge the harm we have done. “

Recommended by a someone in a reading group, I likely wouldn’t have read it otherwise but she was so enthusiastic about it.  Anyway,  I was pleased with the book and hooked into it for the whole day. I wasn’t overwhelmed,  but it had excellent suspense and good character development plus some an interesting theme.  Some of the technical parts were over my head but it didn’t matter that much.  

Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421  
by  T.J. Newman: 2023 
Read by Steven Weber / Laura Benanti
7h 43m
Rating: A+ / suspense  

From Simon & Schuster: 
Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors—but it’s too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.

“More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.

“Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent—Shannon’s mother and Will’s soon-to-be ex-wife—who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.

“There’s not much time.

“There’s even less air.

“With devastating emotional power and heart-stopping suspense, Drowning is an unforgettable thriller about a family’s desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them—against impossible odds.
**********

The story seemed horribly contrived for awhile,  but with some thought it could easily happen. The author is a former bookseller, airline stewardess and author of Falling, a prior novel. 

The tension is expertly developed along a couple lines – it’s humans against time and humans against each other. There’s also the theme of child deaths which winds through.  And there’s science at its basic level similar to what Andy Weir used in The Martian ( 2011), excellent science fiction.   

I read the first two books in this series a couple years ago and enjoyed them both. Timothy Dalton, the narrator of the audiobook, does an excellent job and the story is  intelligent and beautifully written, as always, from John Banville aka Benjamini Black. The era and place are the 1950s, Dublin.  Quirke, the eponymous protagonist, is a pathologist as well as being a widower and a drunk.  Phoebe Griffin is Quirke’s adult daughter raised separately by her mother’s sister Elizabeth and husband, Mal Griffin  In this book Phoebe has just found out that Quirke is her natural father. 

Elegy for April
by Benjamin Black
2010 / 
Read by Timothy Dalton 8h 29m
Rating 8/5; literary crime

April Latimer, a young, junior doctor from a very respectable but somewhat snobbish family, has not been heard from in over a week. Her friend, Phoebe, is worried so she tells Quirke who has just been released from an addiction program – his addiction of choice is booze.

He goes to the police even though Phoebe doesn’t want him to. Quirke spent his childhood in institutions before becoming a “man of the cloth.” And now his life is in shambles, his wife has been dead for over 20 years, and their child, Phoebe, was raised by his wife’s sister Elizabeth.

April’s family has all but disowned her (they’ll do that, too) for failing to live up to their good family name. It seems April is somewhat unmanageable, doing whatever she wants to do whenever she wants to do it. This includes taking up with unseemly men and going off somewhere for a week every once in awhile.

Based on Quirke’s report the police begin an investigation.  This isn’t much of a procedural book and it’s certainly not a thriller or even much of a who-done-it. It’s more of a “what happened?” book. But the ambiance Black creates around a young woman whose blood was found on the floor when she disappeared, is rich and compelling. It’s a bit slow compared to the thrillers on the market these days but it’s more redolent of the 1950s which is when this takes place and I understand the characters better for that. 

The themes are timely for the 21st century with abortion, social status, racial issues, and perhaps primarily white male dominance front and center, so mostly this is a very compelling book about a depressing situation.

Fortunately, Banville/Black can provide humor relief, too, and here he has Quirke buying a brand new and very expensive 1956 Alvis TC 108 G Graber Super Coupé. This is funny because Quirke doesn’t know how to drive.

So I jumped right into another really good mystery tale by Louise Penny.  Three years ago? Well, I wasn’t exactly a fan of Louise Penny. Now?  I’m still not her biggest fan, but I have a fondness for Armand Gamache and the semi-mystical place of Three Pines. This might be the best of the Three Pines series so far (to book 18). 

A Better Man 
 by Louise Penny 
2018 / 
Read by Robert Bathurst  
Rating – A+ / mystery-crime-thriller 
(#15 Three Pines/Gamache series)

*Fwiw – there is no real literal translation for Sûreté du Québec, Quebec Provincial Police is as close as it gets. 

The thing about a good series is that the characters can be very nicely developed, that is beyond the usual having problems with the ex-wife, or getting involved with someone at work, or meeting the neighbors and having parties, etc. If the series  goes on long enough you end up in divorce court having babies, in-laws dying, or troubles with kids and after a lot of that you feel like you’ve kind of gotten to know the characters.  That’s what happened to me in a couple of series now and the Three Pines series by Louise Penny is in the group.  

There’s Armand Gamache, the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, and his wife Reine-Marie, who live in Three Pines, Quebec  their daughter Annie and her husband Jean-Guy Beauvoir live not too far away now with their baby son. There are about 7 regular characters who live in the village having coffee at the Bistro and buying books at Myrna’s bookstore.  

Armand Gamache is a true hero with a few warts. He really tries to be the best possible but ideals and the real world don’t always make for a comfy match.  He does his best and usually wins but … 

In A Better Man it’s springtime and the river is rising faster than anyone has seen in their lifetime – it’s dangerous out there. But it’s Armand’s problem because he’s back on the job as Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec with Jean-Guy temporarily sharing the duties.

And in the middle of that the pregnant Vivienne Godin goes missing under suspicious circumstances. If she’s dead her partner Terry is certainly a suspect, so Vivienne’s widower father wants to go after him. But there are other suspects and other things going on. Where were you during that fierce storm?  And who is distributing that new drug?  And why is the media full of nasty things about 

Annie is pregnant which puts Jean-Guy, the father, and Armand, Annie’s father, in an awkward position as they try to contain a man whose own daughter has just been murdered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Inspector_Armand_Gamache

but Armand Garmache is Chief Inspector for his 14th book. 

Imo, this is one of the best in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.  Before I started this particular book, I think I’d read 16 of the 18 books to date. I ‘m not sure because for awhile I tried and tried to like them, but as long as Ralph Cosham was narrating I couldn’t understand them (I know I should have gotten the Kindle version to go with the Audible but that never occurred to me at the time. Huh???…  I know.). 

 Kingdom of the Blind
by Louise Penny 
2018 / 
Read by Robert Bathurst 
Rating – A+ / mystery-crime-thriller 
(#14 Three Pines/Gamache series)

Kingdom of the Blind has its own contained plot line dealing with a will from a rather eccentric old lady who lives near Three Pines. And she names Gamache, Myrna, and a man named Benedict as executors even though they don’t really know her at all. The executors find that the woman has left her estate to her three grown children, Anthony,  Caroline and Hugo Baumgartner.  But then they find out she’s trying to leave them millions of dollars which, unless something really weird is going on, she doesn’t have.  Of course one of them is murdered. 

Meanwhile the saga of Amelia continues. This is an overarching plot line for the series at this point. The street-smart addict Gamache brought into the Quebec police cadets a couple years prior was doing pretty well, but here she gets in a lot of trouble.   The name is Carfentanil and it’s generally  an elephant tranquilizer not approved for human use. It’s 10,000 x  more potent than morphine 100 x more powerful than fentanyl.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carfentanil

And now I have only one more book in the series and I’ll be caught up and ready for her new release this fall. (Because it was available at my library I got it.  I may take a break of about a week or so but I’ll get it done.)  I got way, way out of order for the series because I also started reading them as they were released starting with book #16, “All the Devils Are Here.”  I was going act the series from both ends for awhile. Whatever,  it worked.  

BUT!!!! I do NOT recommend this scattershot approach for anyone else. There”s a solid overarching plot line with characters being added and taken away from the cast regularly. The thing is that friends and family had all raved about these books and I knew if I could just get past the accent of Ralph Cosham I’d be okay. So I read the 1st 5 books thinking “this one will be better” before I started each one.  LOL!   Then Ralph died suddenly and a few months later Penny’s new one, “The Nature of the Beast” came out.  I waited a couple years I think it was, but I finally got #11  And after awhile I started #16, too, because the plot appealed to me.  

Overall, I wasn’t as thrilled with the books as I thought I should be, but they were enjoyable and  better than they’d been, so I kept going at the rate of about one a year while reading the books between #11 and 16 as I could get caught up (as best I could).  Some are definitely better than others and this is one of the best.  

Powerful –   way more than I expected.  For some reason I was more impressed by the first half of the book than the latter.  I have no idea why.  This is supposed to be a collection of short stories but it’s almost more like a novel because the stories build in ways other than plot and character development. They build in terms of “life on the Rez.”  When the 1st story opens the 1st person narrator, David, is 6 years old and lives with his mother and Frick, her boyfriend, along with the boy’s sister, Paige and sometimes his grandmother.  

Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty
2023 
Read by Darrell Dennis 7h 6m
Rating – 8.5 

They all live on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation on the east side of Maine.  The protagonist is grown when he tells these stories of poverty, addictions and traumas.  

There’s an almost overpowering sensualness to the tales. There’s the visual of course,  how brown is your skin and what’s on TV?  But there are also  the smells of smoke, garbage, dead turtles and perfume, etc.  There is texture in the drops of water running down the boy’s cheeks or a caterpillar crawling up his leg. Then there are the tastes of cooked fish, coffee and fry bread. And then there are the sounds, the phone ringing, the baby crying, something sizzling on the stove.

As the book moves along the chronology is within th stories themselves, not between them which adds its own feeling of brokenness. Death and grief are also huge themes. David goes from age about 6 to 28 in the book – an average kid on an average Rez.

In the splendid retirement village of Cooper’s Chase which lies not too far from Kent UK, live four friends, all in their seventies, who solve cold case files. There’s Joyce, a former nurse, Ron, a trades unionist, Ibrahim, a retired college professor, and Elizabeth, a spy in her prior life,   MI5 or 16, It’s Elizabeth who gets in with the local police department to acquire cold cases.  This is the third book and I understand the fourth one is due out in September.   

The Bullet that Missed
by Richard Osman
2022 / 
Read by Fiona Brennen 11h 16m
Rating – B+ / mystery 
(Thursday Murder Club #3) 

This time it seems as though a decades-old case comes to life “in current time” and Elizabeth, the ex-spy, finds herself running into old “friends,” one from the KGB and the other a Viking – lol!, but it works.

What happened one night 10 years ago, is that Bethany Waites, a TV reporter, was killed in a car wreck when she “accidentally?” went over a cliff. She’d been investigating massive tax fraud and money laundering in high places.  BUT! Her body wasn’t found.  So the septuagenarian sleuths are on the case looking for various kinds of information.  

Yes, this is a thriller in its own way. but it seemed rather slow-moving at first, the narrator’s voice is a bit soft for my tastes and there are a lot of characters. But I kept going in spite of that and after I figured out what was going on my interest swung right up there. Good stuff. 

Although they get a bit silly sometimes, these are fun books, I occasionally laughed out loud. They’re twisty and intriguing at the same time. Different chapters are told by different characters and just when you think it can’t go any further, the floor drops out.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/16/richard-osman-bullet-that-missed-review/

I’m still exploring – I can’t find help for Mac with Safari and when I tried Firefox the same thing happened although I did get through one time. I can’t comment anywhere (Maybe I should explore.) . I thought it was the Safari thing, but if it’s on Firefox, too … . I also can’t get ahold of the Happiness helpers or whatever they’re called. This is from Firefox. I think I’ll go read for awhile.

I read and added to my post from Safari. Big deal. I can talk to myself.

12:17 pm – I can write new entries but I can’t comment even on my own posts. I can add to my prior posts. Like I’m diong here from Firefox.

And I can fix the info in my prior comments like from 12:17 that should be “doing” – not “diong.” – LOL!

Setting 1964 – Southern California  

Elizabeth Zott, age about 21 or 22,  is set up to get a PhD in Chemistry when her advising professor makes a pass and she completely rebuffs him. So, with admission denied, .she gets a job at a research facility. Sad to say it would seem all the bosses and most of the employers are male and sexist.

Lessons in Chemistry 
By Bonnie Grams
2023 / 
Read by Miranda Raison, 11h 55m
Rating – 8.75 rom-com of the 1960s 

Setting 1964 – Southern California  

But there is one male there, a boss no less. who finds Elizabeth’s intelligence fascinating and their relationship pro-gresses until he carries a ring around with him. At this point I was expecting a romance although there was nothing like that in the blurbs,  The couple eventually moves in together sharing a dog named Six-Thirty, the time they found him.

In spite of barriers Elizabeth and Calvin (a very young Nobel prize winner) get together and fall deeply in love. Wonderful, but this is only about 10% of the book! (No spoilers here!)  Sad do say Calvin is suddenly killed in a traffic accident and only a few days later Elizabeth realizes she’s pregnant. Against all better judgement of the 1960s, she keeps her darling daughter, named Madeline, who turns out to is precocious – precocious to the point of being difficult. But Elizabeth gets a job back at the lab where she and Calvin had worked and the neighbor lady, having problems with her own husband, agrees to babysit.  

Even after all that, there are men around for the now single Mom to be associated with so this reader kept thinking so&so is going to be “the romance” for Elizabeth.    I was delighted when each and every one of them is a jerk.                                                                                                                                                

I’ve done a lot of those things already going by the advice I can find on the site. I do pay for WordPress (because I loathe the ads – they’re okay on other pages but not on mine). This means I’ll try the Happiness techs – is that what it is? I’ll try some again tomorrow – I’m very tired now. Thank you again!

I sincerely apologize. This is very frustrating but I can’t respond to any comments even on my own blog. I can’t comment on other blogs either. Somehow my passwords send me into a loop of some kind and never show up. There is a message telling me I’ve posted that already but it still never shows up. I’m trying to get this fixed but I have no idea what to do until I’m able to contact tech support and I’ve tried that for about a week now. I’m going to keep posting my entries – because I can and that’s how I keep track of what I’ve read. Sorry!!!