Becky's Books –

I had this on my Wish List at Audible and then it came up at the library.  Oh my – yes – So I started listening but it was late and I kept drifting off and finally just fell asleep.   I woke up and tried to find where I’d lost it and just kept getting interested. So I finished but somehow I wanted more –  I still hadn’t got it all – I missed quite a lot in those dozing sessions.  

Hell’s Half-Acre:
The Untold Story of the Benders, 
a Serial Killer Family on the American Frontier
By Susan Jonusas
2022 / 345 pages
Read by Lee Osorio 8h 16m
Rating – 8/A:  history-true crime 

So I started over – still just listening.  Hmmmm… this really is pretty good, so I got the Kindle sample – yes … excellent. And yes-  I bought the Kindle version and kept going on through the book on this, my “second” reading – kind of. 

Part of my problem was that I was expecting “True Crime” in the way I’m used to reading True Crime.  I didn’t expect an academic or scholarly history book with a crime at the core or with a lot of related material plus immaculate source notes. I think Hell’s Half-Acre  is what is sometimes called “creative nonfiction” because the conversations Jonusas describes are likely not found in the source documents. There are other factors – the story arc is important and the author skillfully built tension often appropriate to a thriller. The more scholarly history books I’ve read lately don’t do that – lol. The source notes here are good but they’re generalized – nothing indicates specifically where the author got these particular words or ideas.

This is a history book for members of the general public who just want a good read, not folks who are looking for scholarly source notes or carefully worded suggestions of what might be considered. .  

 Hell’s Half-Acre takes place between 1872 and 1889 in the southeast corner of Kansas, not far from the borders of Missouri and Oklahoma. The Civil War had just ended not too long prior, the Homestead Act had been passed and railroads were going through the West. Displaced Southerners as well as new immigrants to the US were coming to Kansas looking for a home. Oklahoma belonged to displaced (evicted) Natives and Texas was full of abandoned cattle just waiting to be rounded up and taken north to the new railheads. This was a time of change. The frontier would be declared “closed” by the Bureau of the Census in 1890 – but not yet.

This book is about the Bender family who lived on that half-acre mentioned in the title, and their serial murdering of 11 or more people who wandered onto their property (saloon/cafe/inn). It’s just as much or more about the efforts of law enforcement and others to hunt them down. A few suspects were found and a trial held, but no one was ever convicted. The Benders were not among them though and they apparently simply left the area when they were about to be found out.  

 Hell’s Half-Acre isn’t an action-packed thriller although there’s quite a lot of tension in places because these are “the ‘Kansas Fiends’ a family of murderers whose crimes sent the newspapers and the nation into a frenzy.”

As a lover of both True Crime and the history of the West, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I think I might have come across the name Bender long ago, but I’m not certain. 

 Photo of setting with William York in the casket:chttps://www.posterazzi.com/bender-murders-1873-nthe-grave-of-dr-william-henry-york-a-victim-of-the-bender-family-of-serial-killers-in-kansas-wood-engraving-after-a-photograph-by-george-r-gamble-1873-poster-print-by-granger-collection-item-vargrc0354739/

https://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bender-family-photos.htm

What a marvelous book! This is the second book I’ve read from Pekka Hamalainen. a Finnish historian of the American West, and I loved the first, Comanche Empire. So when I was this one was available I grabbed it.

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hamalainen
2020 /586 pages hardcover
Read by Kaipo Schwab 18h 44m
Rating; 10 / world history 
(both read and listened)

What the reader gets is the history of the indigenous peoples of the whole continent of North America (mostly US) from the days of the last ice age, about 2.5 million years ago, to the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. It’s quite a tale to be told in 464 pages of narrative. But it’s there and in extremely readable form.

This telling is not from the colonists’ point of view, nor is it entirely from the natives’ view. It certainly isn’t parroting the story of the US nation-builders which is what seems to have become our “official” national myth.  

This book goes beyond revisionist thinking.  Rather, I saw it called a “counter-narrative” in one of the many laudatory reviews I glanced at (and will read now that I’ve finished the book). . I suppose “counter-narrative” means “revision” on a very large scale rather than in the details  A narrative which counters the “official” version.

Hämäläinen’s prior book, The Comanche Empire, is brilliant but I think he outdid that with the astonishing amount of deep and thorough research which obviously went into this.. On almost every page I was surprised by the filling in of the bare outline of information I had previously. I think I need to read it again because there’s no way I could assimilate all of this. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/05/indigenous-continent-pekka-hamalainen-review/

Washington Post review

New York Times Review:

Unless something really incredible comes along, this is my pick for best crime/mytery novel of the year. The author, Eleanor Catton, won the Mann Booker Prize back in 2013 for The Luminaries which is historical fiction with a crime (or several)  at the center. Both are complex and intricately plotted with sharply drawn characters. Both take place in New Zealand, where Catton is from. 

Birnam Wood ~ 
by Eleanor Catton
2023 –  424 pages
Read by Saskia Maarleveld 12h 47m
Rating:  9.5 /A++ /mystery-thriller 

But the differences include that The Luminaries is 846 pages in length, whereas Birnam Wood is only 432 pages (both hardcovers).  The Luminaries is filled with puzzles to figure out en route to the denouement.  Birnam Wood has a lot of chase scenes.  If I have to categorize (which, being a librarian type of person, I like to do), you might say that The Luminaries is a puzzler while Birnam Wood is more of a suspense-thriller. 

The title, Birnam Wood, is from of a prophesy made in Macbeth (Shakespeare) but in the novel it’s the name of an activist environmentalist group based somewhere on the South Island (Wellington?). The group apparently has an extremist streak. And it has some difficulties with morality and economics – a couple themes, plus the differences between the member.

The group basically does gardening on scattered bits of vacant land whether public or privately owned. They sell the produce and other organic products to make money for group purposes. Mira Bunting, one of the group leaders and a major character, gets word of a large and rather remote plot of land owned by a pest control entrepreneur and sets about trying to get permissions to plant larger scale. But the land is being purchased by an American manufacturer of drones, a billionaire who tells Mira he’s creating a survivalist camp there but he’d be willing to let the group do their thing while supporting them financially – an ongoing problem for them.  

The fictional mall town of Thorndike was cut off from the rest of the South Island by an earthquake and the prosperous Owen and Jill Davish, the owners of a large piece of property near there, are concerned and have received an offer to buy. The isolation is an attraction for Robert Lemoine, a billionaire American whose main company makes drones. But his plans for the property and Mira’s ideas don’t mesh at all. Lemoine wants to build a bunker there to hide his extensive illegal mining operations.

This is definitely a murder mystery with spy-type techie devices so it’s great fun but as told by a master wordsmith who is also superbly skillful at tension-building.

See The Conversation for a great review which compares Birnam Wood and Eleanor Catton to Lee Childs and Mick Herron’s Slough House series. I may have a new favorite author.

Then

(finished 3/30) I think I’m done with this series. This book, the 5th, is more background on characters with a heavy dose of love interest thrown in.  The mystery is interesting when that’s the subject. A man has been missing for 7 years and can now be claimed as dead.  There’s also a lot of food and wine filling the pages.  

Blowback ~
by Peter May
2019 / 
Read by Peter Forbes 9h 12m
Rating B- / mystery – detective 
(#5 in The Enzo Files) 

The reason I’m “done” is there seems to be more time spent on non-crime threads than on anything else. Enzo has a complex personal life and it gets old.  

(finished 3/31)
The Forward and Introduction to this book of essays/articles are both quite good,  enjoyable, and informative. But it still took me some time to “get into” the whole and I was cautious for a long time even after I did.  The reader was told about the selection process and the organization by theme, but there was nothing to warn me about the organization by mood.  Actually the Editor plainly states that you can read it in any order you want.  I’m just a literal thinker and like things organized – 

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022,
Ed by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
11/2022 / 324 pages
read by a cast
Rating: 8 / nature anthology

I found the first two or three Sections of this year’s anthology so depressing I almost gave up on the whole book. But Section 4, “Humans Are a Part of Nature” showed real promise so I continued. And by then I was half-way through and as I progressed the tone got more and more promising, lighter. and the theme more solution oriented.  

Okay – but I’m also a very literal and organized type of person and I read books from front to back. That makes most sense to me and that’s what I did. I may go back and read a few I particularly appreciated and skip others. We’ll see.

Some thoughts:

Overall there seemed to me to be a few more Native American essays than one usually finds in these anthologies and there were definitely more women authors this time, but I’ve only read 2 or 3 of the Science and Nature anthologies. One Amazon reviewer commented that 28 of the 33 essays were written by women. Ronin

I also have to mention that one of my favorite nonfiction writers has a story here- “How We Drained California” by Mark Arax. It’s new – not from a book he’s published previously although this is his usual topic. I’m really glad he’s still going – maybe he’ll do another book. I’ve read 3 of his 4 books.

I think the best essay of the book was in  Section 4 “Ways of Knowing.”  I actually stopped putting my digital puzzle together and read with listening going back to catch something which maybe wasn’t quite clear.  “It’s Not Your Face” Page 205  Section 4, “Ways of Knowing\
https://www.clearview.ai

The following line, from the last essay in the first section, was just kind of curious because of how often my reading group has come across Humboldt in our readings of the past year or so.  

“The nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt dismissed the birds as parasites.”
“How Far Does Wildlife Roam? Ask the Internet of Animals.”  p 33
by Sonia Shah From The New York Times Magazine

Maybe we are progressing.

This little murder mystery, #6 in Rhys Bowen’s Constable Evan Evans series, was way more involved and more fun than I expected.  After all my serious nonfictions lately I deserved some easy reading.  LOL!  (Not really.) 

Evan and Elle
by  Rhys Bowen 
2000 – 7h 13m
Read by Roger Clark – 7h 13m
Rating A- / cozy 
(#4 in the Constable Evan Evans series) 

Evan Evans left the big city and is a regular and highly regarded constable in the small town of Llanfair on the western edge of Wales.  What he’d like to be is a detective,  but that advancement keeps slipping by even though he is obviously the best candidate.  He has a girlfriend, though and likes the rural ambiance. 

In this story a new French restaurant has opened up at the edge of town and the cooking is supposedly marvelous. But just like a few other places lately, there’s a fire. The difference this time is that a body is found in the ashes.   Evans and Sergeant Watkins start interviewing and following a myriad of clues which lead them to France and some surprises.  

It’s a cute cozy with a good twisty mystery/thriller attached.  The town and it’s people are a huge draw. There’s a girlfriend for Evan and his co-workers are fine.  It’s the plots which will keep me going with thi so I’ll start at #1 which is when Evan moves to town and go from there. 

I got this at a pretty good sale, but I was interested in what Richardson, a moderately well-known academic professor of US history who also writes for a general audience, has to say about this idea that the South won the Civil War.  It’s a catchy title and it’s not quite accurate, but that said, what does Richardson, a very liberal oriented historian at Boston College, have to say on the subject?  The Washington Post calls the book “provocative” and “searing,” so it’s likely not a dry and dusty textbook. Even the words in the subtitle, “Oligarchy” “Democracy” and the “Soul of America” use some pretty emotionally charged and definitionally challenged words.  

How the South Won the Civil War:
Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight
for the Soul of America
by Heather Cox Richardson / 2020
Read by author /  9h 9m
Rating – 8.5 / US history 

Richardson seems to consider the official Civil War (1860-1864) to be an event in the broader conflict for the large idea of Democracy. To do this she immerses her argument in the party politics of Democrats vs Republicans, through Reconstruction, the progressive conflicts of the late 19th century and through the World Wars the Great Depression, on to the Civil Rights movement, Reagan, the Evangelicals, and finally, Trump (who was president when she was getting it published).  She covers US history as long as it’s useful to her argument.    

Although there were a few surprises and lots of unfamiliar details, I was pretty cognizant of the history and topics up to 1988 when more of it seemed new. Still, it was always the same message,  how horrible the conservatives (oligarch class) were toward the generally innocent and well-meaning progressives (working folks). In her mind the plantation culture of the antebellum South formed an oligarchy and that’s quiet likely true but the North had its own similar situations.

Anyway, according to records, the South did NOT win the Civil War so I’d say she doesn’t mean that in any literal way.  If you understand that for the North, the War Between the States was only about keeping the states united and ending slavery, then it’s obvious – the United States has not been carved up and there  is no legal slavery in the US.  Meanwhile for the South the war was for freedom and property rights which the North was trying to take away.

However we do have pretty serious case of polarization around the ideas of democracy (equality) vs freedom and in their own way those were the basic ideas involved in the Civil War. But imo, those ideas will always be at odds.

What Richardson does with the idea is show how from the Civil War on as we spread out over North America that conflict came up over and over again especially in our politics from Andrew Johnson to Donald Trump.

Richardson is quite liberal and mainly talking about oligarchy and democracy as we understand them today.  If you define the liberals/progressives as being for the working man and the conservatives as being for the oligarchs and the main thrust of the Civil War being Democracy then yup – Richardson is right, that was is sill going on in a myriad of ways.

From Putnam, the publishers: :  
“Critic and writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world.”

Come Back In September: A Literary Education 
On West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan
By Darryl Pinckney: 2022
Rating: 9.5 / memoir 

• National Book Critics Circle Award – Nominee 
• New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year 
• Washington Post Best Books of the Year

The New York Times calls it “elegiac,”although for the most part I didn’t quite understand that. There is certainly a tone of it”good-bye” especially in the last chapter, The title is oddly hopeful for an elegy. It’s more like an observation that an era has passed and this book remembers Pinckney himself as well as his mentor and long-term, good friend Elizabeth Hardwick.  The book is like an homage to Elizabeth Hardwick.

With no audio book available for this, I actually read it on my little iPad-Kindle. It took me quite a long time due to my senior eyes. Also, the book itself is dense with memories which seem to flow (or be choppy). I listened to other books along the way. This lack of an Audible book is rare and I think it mostly happens with the older non-classic books as well as to a few which just wouldn’t work very well (graphic novels?)

 To me, the sample Kindle read like a name-dropping memoir of New York literary snobbery and I almost decided not to bother, but I changed my mind because I am group leader at All-Nonfiction and this was our month’s group read. Besides, I’ve read every book since I joined in April of 2000 – I don’t want to break that record.

 I’m glad I read it. (What happened was that I kept procrastinating the decision to quit. – lol!)   

I have a couple of criticisms, but it still gets a very high rating!  If this book were only 250 pages long it might be much better – although maybe not quite so “elegiac” or nostalgic. I was really interested for only about the first 150 pages and then my involvement was in bits and pieces. That said, there is something worthwhile and compelling about this book – Maybe it’s the good-bye to that era with all the books and different kinds of news from the War in Vietnam (1973) to the height of the AIDS struggle (1980s) and on to the fall of the Berlin Wall so there’s also a bit of nostalgia.

That said, I kept going, but Gertrude Stein did this kind of memoir properly with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which I read about 20 years ago. Stein’s book inspired me to compose a kind of annotated list of people mentioned and what they were noted for to go with the book.  I loved Stein’s book, but it’s only 206 hard cover pages and that fits what it was.

 In his defense, Pinckney tries for quite a lot more and ended up with 432 pages (also hard cover for comparison), for his 2-decade memoir and homage to Elizabeth Hardwick and he also includes information about his own family and some Black-American history.  

All that said, I enjoyed so much of it. I think he captured the ambiance of the New York literary circles in the 1970s and ’80s (much of it anyway).  I’ve read quite a number of the authors mentioned, but certainly not all. And yes, I feel like I got to know Hardwick as well as Pinckney.  

It was after trying the sample that I decided to skip it,  but I guess I only procrastinated the decision because I re-thought it and decided I should check out some background and that got me more interested and I decided to get it. And I read it. For the next 3 weeks I read it, taking notes and highlighting but not going very fast.  

Elizabeth (Liz, Lizzy) Hardwick, was age 50-something in 1974 when she became the professor and mentor of 19-year old Pinckney. Along with Barbara Epstein he kind of pleaded/advised/joked Hardwick into admitting him to her class and they became fast friends until her death 34 years later. (I read somewhere that he’s the custodian of her works.) This book doesn’t do much with the last couple decades of her life but I think Pinckney wasn’t around so much then.  

On the surface, this is NOT my era of New York literature. David Pinckney, is a Black New York writer born in about 1955 or so in Indiana.  (He’s rather coy about his age.)   Meanwhile I love the later New York of Don DeLillo and Jonathan Letham and Cynthia Ozick and others, Mark Helprin? Even Thomas Pynchon in his later days.

I can’t really recommend this if you weren’t a part in some way, even as a reader, of the literary life of New York in the 1980s and ’90s. But if you were a reader of the New York Review of Books or the kinds of books they critique you might really enjoy it.

This is a more a genre fiction with some crime involved than it is a typical crime novel.  The main tension driving this novel are the questions  “What did he do?”  And “Will they be found?”  

These Silent Woods
by Kimi Cunningham Grant 
2020 / 
Read by Bronson Pinchot, Stephanie Willis
Rating:  7+ / genre fiction -crime 

Ken Cooper, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and his young daughter Finch (aka Elizabeth), live seriously “off the grid” in a remote part of the Appalachians.  Finch is 8 years old now and this is the only life she’s ever known. There’s no electricity, no contact with the outside world except for an old army buddy whose land they live on and who visits occasionally to bring supplies.  

Their only neighbor is another recluse named Scotland who spies on them and becomes friendly with Finch. Much of the book is about how Cooper and Finch manage their daily lives out there lacking contact with anyone except Scotland. Finch has never been to a store, never seen a movie, never been to school. Cooper is doing his best, but he’s a bit paranoid because he fears his past will catch up with him.

The author gives the backstory in pieces using several chapters scattered through the novel. Mom was killed in a car/deer accident and her parents didn’t think Cooper was a good idea for a dad. – they never have. Cooper had problems after Afghanistan and that’s described.

It’s a very compelling tale and the narration is excellent (Pinchot, is a personal favorite). The writing is smooth with good tension, interesting characters and a few sharp twists. That said it’s definitely not a thriller, in the usual sense of the term. There is more tension than in your usual general fiction, but that alone doesn’t make it a thriller.  

I finished this on about the 1st of March and forgot to post my thoughts.  

Sad to say I was disappointed in this latest offering from a man I consider to be one of the greatest authors alive today.  It started out quite well but that didn’t hold up.  But he’s written several books I wasn’t all that crazy about so …. I guess it’s par for the course since I enjoyed his last several. 

Victory City 
by Salman Rushdie
2023 / 326 pages 
Read by Sid Sagar 11h 48m
Rating – 7.5 / historical-magical realism 

Much of what is background in this novel is supposedly true (from what I read. – I just wish I knew more of the history so I could have followed better).

I knew precious few of the multitude of names and places and events in this magical novel so when I came upon the name Ibn Batuta – my head snapped up. I knew this name! Ibn Batuta was a well known, learned and widely traveled scholar who, for about 3 decades, wandered and wrote about his travels, where all he visited and what all he saw. This included India in the area of which Rushdie writes.    
https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta

I’ve loved Salman Rushdie’s works since I first read The Satanic Verses. I’d read other of his books but something about Satanic Verses and the hype after the Fatwa turned m off.  Ha!  I loved that book.   When I finished I said, “Huh? How did that go from Point A to Point C?  What happened?” And I promptly turned the book over and read it all the way through a second time.  

Over the years I’ve run hot and cool on Rushdie’s novels. The Satanic Verses is the best (imo),  Midnight’s Children, which I’ve read at least twice is also way up there along with several others.  But Shame and Fury and some of the others are flat to me. The more recent ones seem to have been better, since The Enchantress of Florence anyway.  So I was excited about a new one.  

Too bad, so sad. I very much appreciated the first third or so of Victory City but then it lost steam with the repetitive stories as the years past and too many characters were doing what seemed to be the same thing over and over again.  I got so confused I just finished to see how it ended.  If it had been more interested I might have started over when I got confused.  Nope – this one didn’t seem worth that.  

Victory City takes place in central India in the kingdom of Kampili  circa 14th century where the King has just been overthrown. The women of Kampili are distraught and walk into a very large bonfire in honor of heir sons and husbands and fathers.  Pampa Kampana’s mother walks into the flames with them leaving Pampa an orphan.  She grows up to be ravishingly beautiful with seemingly magical powers. She marries well and has children who marry well and have children.  Life and wars go on.  And Pampi gets older and older.  

Surprise!  I finished and enjoyed the whole thing except maybe the ending was a bit schmaltzy.  The surprise is that I’ve never been a Louise Penny fan in any way.  I’ve read 10 or more of the individual novels in the 18-book Detective Gamache/Three Pines series although I din’t read themt in order.  

A Great Reckoning 
By Louise Penny 
2016 
Read by Robert Bathurst 13h 12m
Rating: A+ / traditional mystery 
(#12 in the Three Pines series)

I read from book #1 and got to #6 but I really had a hard time with Ralph Cosham narrating because I couldn’t cut through his strong (but probably accurate) French accent and pronunciations when it came to names etc.   (Try “god” vs “guard.”)  

Since Gosham’s death in 2014  Robert Bathurst has been narrating. Still, I waited until 2020 to pick up on the series with #16 and I’ve been reading right along with publication ever since. Bathurst has enabled me to discern what is being said most of time, and that’s quite helpful although “Jean-Guy” still sounds like Jung-kie – a drug-addict.) 

Three Pines does not appear on any map, real or fictional, but in A Great Reckoning it’s revealed that it can only be found by getting lost.  . That tidbit might have been mentioned or described before, but if so I must have missed it, or missed the description. Nowhere is there a map with Three Pines on it  anywhere until Ganache finds a very old one inside a wall.  

So I’ll just stay that #16, A Great Reckoning is fine reading for those who enjoy a good “who-done-it” with a few of the old quirky characters from prior books, the folks who live in Three Pines.  Ganache has taken the position of director at a school for police cadets. Apparently bad things have been going on there including a little battle continuing between a rogue staff member and anyone in charge because he believes he was up for promotion.  And then there’s Amelia…

Enjoy – 

 Ma is an 80-year old woman with plenty of money, but she’s been depressed and going downhill health-wise since Pa died a few years ago. She causes problems for her children  and one day she walks away and gets lost. So her daughter, Beti who is very single and modern, takes Ma in to live with her. 

Tomb of Sand 
By Geetanjali Shree
Translated by Daisy Rockwell 
2018 / 
Read by  Deepti Gupta 18h 21m
Rating 9 / fiction
(Winner of the Booker International
prize and more)

Then along comes Rosie, a hijra (transexual -India style) to befriend her and be her companion. Then one of her sons gives her a golden cane with colorful butterflies painted on it. And shortly after that Ma finds a small Buddha-statue and realizes her dream is to return to Pakistan. Rosie humors her and when the dust settles on that idea, they’re on their way. This is a huge abbreviation of what all goes on in the first third or so, but I’ve given no spoilers.    

A tale tells itself. It can be complete, but also incomplete, the way all tales are. This particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please. Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself . . .”

The overarching theme is “borders,” and crossing them. It includes what the borders could be, where they are,  how to cross them, and so on. The borders of gender and dying along with nationality (because it’s there) are more involved.   

There is a 1st person narrator, but that’s rarely apparent so there’s really no character development for him/her.

I had so looked forward to reading this but in places can be as boring as the Amazon readers say it is. It stayed compelling for me though   I just think a reader needs to take time to read it properly. Don’t go through it like it’s a thriller or with the expectation of a big climactic “ending.” The story is in the journey – to paraphrase a good saying.  

 And there’s a lot of good story here, slow and meandering though it is, and I have a feeling I would have appreciated it a lot more 20 years ago when the literary aspects of a novel truly excited me. Now I find I get tired.  

Published ini late June 2022 this  isn’t a thriller but a highly suspenseful novel, but it’s well written and  quite entertaining with plenty of attention given to a twisty plot and a few memorable characters, The thing is that the  Covid quarantine messes with everyone’s lives.  

The Locked Room
By Elly Griffiths
2020
Read by Jane McDowell 9h 41m
Rating: A+ / crime and covid
 (#14 in Ruth Galloway series) 

Again, there are lots of characters, but maybe I should just say there are lots of names, because most do not develop into characters. A few are fully fleshed out, another few are semi-“rounded” (as we used to say), and many others only appear in one scene or chapter.  (Is it a thing these days that if a character is created at all they must be given a name?) 

There have been several “suicides” in the general area of Norfolk and now comes Covid.  It’s the late winter and early spring of 2021 and the quarantines and restrictions are just being put in place.   Griffiths captures the feelings and the fears of the people as they figure out how to work with the rules
Dr Ruth finds a mysterious photo and gets a new neighbor, Cathbert feels ill,

Students and school teachers are on Zoom or FaceChat, 1st responders appear everywhere in Hazmat suits, the streets, stores, restaurants, bars and theaters are all empty. Get togethers of almost any kind are at least, postponed. And especially hospital visits are curtailed so people die there alone. 

Close quarters can put a strain on almost any relationship, but for the most part, people are all very kind. All of these things are present much ini evidence in the families and the neighborhoods of the book.  It gives an added dimension to the usual tension in a detective book.  

 In The Locked Room Ruth Galloway is going through the her mother’s old things although her death occurred 3 years prior.  She comes across a photo of the house she is living in now.  Huh?  On the back in distinctive handwriting her mother wrote, “Dawn 1963.” Ruth has no idea what any of this could mean, but it touches her heart so she keeps it to figure it out.

With Covid now presenting a very real threat Ruth teaches her anthropology students via Zoom while Kate, age 11, does her own homework pages, builds with Legos, and writes her own novel. They go for walks with the dog.  Ruth’s romantic partner, Harry Nelson, a detective chief inspector and is conducting a lot of his business via telephone and Zoom but there are times when that’s not possible.  

Meanwhile, Judy, another Detective Inspector, and her husband Cuthbert are personally impacted by Covid.  

This is a very good book – 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tombland-alley
Augustine Steward’s House (photo)

Again.- don’t think the story is told until you turn that last page.  What a ride!   I think I’m going to leave that last book I have unread alone. These got better an better and the best of the lot so far as been #6, Murder at Black Oaks.  This was good though. – 

The Darkest Place
by Phillip Margolin 
Read by Therésè Plummer 6h 6m
Rating:  A / legal thriller 
(Book 5 in Robin Lockwood Series)  

Oh the tangles! The widow of a brutally murdered man is suspected of killing him. Two gangster types come to her wanting money. But she has no money. She leaves town and lands in Robin’s hometown. Then she agrees to surrogate pregnancy because she hears of a couple who desperately want a child and she needs money and hiding.  A lawyer puts the two in contact, gets all papers signed, and a pregnancy ensues. On a dark and stormy night (yes) a nurse isn’t aware that the newly delivered child is not legally the child of the woman who delivered and brings the baby to her.  They bond. Oops – Big oops!

Again.- don’t think the story is told until you turn that last page.  What a ride!   I think I’m going to leave that last book I have unread. These got better and better and the best of the lot so far as been #6, Murder at Black Oaks. This was good though. – 

Robin Lockwood 
Jeff – Robin’s fiance
Loretta Washington – receptionist 
Vanessa Cole –  Dist Atty
Kevin Harkness – 
Roger – police investigator at scene 
Carrie Anders – police –  “
Shirley Lockwood –  Robin’s mother/ roommate in EF
Nicholas Marquet – Kelly’s husband 
Joel Lowman – 1st victim –  many enemies 
Marjorie Lowman   Wife of 1st victim 
Kelley Starrett – Joel’s partner and Mistress
Gangsters –  go to wife to get what’s owed 
Ruth Larson/ Marjorie Loman  – wife of Joel Lowman
Nancy Cleary –  nurse – exhausted 
Emily – adoptive mother 
Caleb – adoptive father 
Roy /Peter – baby – (yikes) 
Darrel Holloway – atty for adoptive parents 
John Kaiser – motel manager
Irving Gilford local cop
Forster police chief out of state
2 deputies 
Arlene Castro – paramedic 
Gary Pinsky – paramedic 
Stan – a lawyer in Elk Grove, wants Robin as council 
Dr Nadine Wolf –  witness for prosecution 
Judge Stonehouse 
Maxwell Lancaster –  Doc for Marjorie/Robin 
Gabrielle Suarez – Psych for Marjorie 
Mulberry – jury lead 
Ken Breeland – new investigator 

And true to my word I looked at what other books in this series that I hadn’t read and came up with what Kirkus Reviews calls “A genuine whodunnit.”  

A Matter of Life and Death
by Phillip Margolin 
2019
Read by Therésè Plummer 5h 38m
Rating – A+ / legal thriller
# 4 in Robin Lockwood series) 

One thing I really like about this series is that the women are very realistic (imo and speaking as a moderately well read woman). They’re not chic-lit in any way, They’re nicely differentiated from each other. They’re not overly emotional or anything else. They’re what they say they are – or aren’t.  

Another thing I appreciate is that the plots are tangled with more than one thread, they’re thrillers. And the courtroom scenes are high tension,  in fact the tension in the whole book is masterfully built.  

In this story Robin starts out defending a man who is transitioning to be a woman. She is a CPA but was arrested for prostitution.  The courtroom drama is very well done.  

And then in Part 2 the first body shows up in what turns out to be a story of illegal street fighting and Joe, the fighter in trouble, knows Robin from wrestling  Not too long later a second body is found and two threads merge.       

Legal crime fiction is often a matter of “who done it” and Margolin adds to this in his Robin Longwood series by focusing on criminals who are wrongly convicted.   

Robin Lockwood – defense lawyer and ex-wrestler 
Jeff Hodges – her romantic partner – roommate 
Mark Berman Robin’s law partner 
Erica Stassen – transexual on trial 
Ian Hennessy  – DA’s office – prosecuting attorney of Erica
Carrasco – a crooked Judge   
Betsy Carasco – Judge’s angry wife 
Stacy Hayes- the Judge’s mistress 
Loretta Washington – receptionist 
Joe Lattimore -ex-pro fighter/cook and murder suspect – (Black)
Maria Lattimore – Joe’s wife 
Asian woman – fighter
Carlos Ortega – Joe’s opponent in the fight  
Kevin Bash –  very criminal fight manager  – 
Roger – police investigator at scene 
Carrie Anders – police –  “
Vanessa  Cole – DA – 
Wilma Malone – circuit court judge – 
Harold Wright –  presiding judge – Robin likes him – 
Brent Maclan/ Macklin – reporter on illegal fights –  
Helen Reptis….  Betsy’s mother – very angry and very rich
 ______ Helen’s body guard 
Amanda Jaffe –  Robin’s co-council on this case
Carl Tepper – Man in Stacy’s apartment – 
Martin Breech –  gangster,  owns The Jungle Club 
Andre Rostoff –  giant gangster 
Sally Grace – medical examiner 
Wendell Appleton  – fingerprint spec 
Marvin Bradshaw –  police at judge’s house   
Melinda Cortez –  forensics expert – DNA 
Max Weaver –   lawyer for Bash 
Sal Bandetto – thug 

These are not long books – I can finish one in a day with no problem.  Also,  rating them is no problem because there is nothing at all literary about them. They’re straight-forward legal crime novels with great characters and plot with masterful hand in the tension-building.  

So now I’ve got 2 books to go – A Reasonable Doubt (#3) and The Darkest Place (#5)

“An unapologetic valentine to golden age whodunits that sports its clichés as proudly as badges.”https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/phillip-margolin/murder-at-black-oaks/

Oh what a terrific book!  I’ve read several of Margolin’s books but this is hands down the best of what I’ve read.  Now I’m going to have to go back and try to get a couple more of the Robin Lockwood series.  

Murder at Black Oaks
By Phillip Margolin 2022 / 
Read by Thérèse Plummer 5h 55m
Rating:  A+ / mystery 
(#6 of the Robin Lockwood series) 

A young man is unjustly condemned to life in prison for killing his girlfriend and that starts us off.

There is every kind of cliche here – even the board game “Clue” and the Hercule Poirot mysteries of Agatha Christie. There’s a locked room in a remote haunted house when a snow storm traps them all. The house is that of a rich old man who is having a party including his lovely, new and young fiancé, Robin and her detective, along with the man he falsely had imprisoned for 30 years. Just to add spice, there’s an escaped and insane serial killer – and there’s more. It’s such fun.

There are a lot of characters here many of whom are introduced rather suddenly in Part 4. The first dead body shows up in Part 5 or 6.  

Characters – 
Robin – lead
Frank Melville – old rich attorney who put Alvarez in jail 
Jose Alvarez – not guilty but spent 30 years in prison 
Nelly Melville – daughter
Justin Trent – Melville’s attorney 
Sheila Monroe –  Melville’s new fiancé 
Cory Rockwell – actor/director to create film – a suspect in wife’s death – had an alibi Samuels. – local detective. (looks a lot like Zelco – the 
Ken Breland, – investigator for Robin
Victor Zelcoe –  escaped fugitive murderer 
Claire Winters – stabbed to death – lived with Rockwell – 11 pm – 
Khan convicted of the murder of Winters 
Tony Clark – stunt man for Rockwell 
Rose Macintire – witness to the Winters death 
Mrs Raskin – housekeeper 
Luther – house man 
Janet  – caterer
Max – caterer,  combat trained, knives in kitchen 

Starting in about 1990 I’ve read about 10 of Nelson DeMille’s thrillers. I read some in paperback and, after 2000 or so via Audible.  Of the main series with John Corey I’ve read 4 or 5.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_DeMille (scroll down to see all the series). This is the series which starts with Plum Island, possibly the best of his books. 

The Maze 
by Nelson DeMille 
2022 / 
Read by Scott Brick 15h 42m
Rating C- / crime thriller
(8th in John Carey series) 

In The Maze the egotistical and smart-ass John Corey is back being his old arrogant and “politically incorrect” self to the point of real annoyance.  That’s one reason I stopped reading these books  The stories are okay though. The title/idea of the maze is from a large hedge maze on the land next door and used for some capers of the bad guys. 

Overall, I found the story predictable and using a rather coarse and gritty situation.  Scott Brick is his usual over-emoting self which I can only stand once in a great while now. He used to be one of my very favorite narrators. I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to.