Becky's Books –

The plot is great, an old fashioned murder by poison –  in the tea – makes a death look like a heart attack.  And the characters are right up there with the best Lescroart has written – family issues and a lot of money involved plus Dismas’ wife and son and good old Abe Glitzky from the prior books in the series.   San Francisco is still  … of course … San Francisco,  right down to Market Street and China Town.   But …  there’s something different.   The reader is kind of mellow –   it’s not David Collacci.   Oh well,  it’s not Robert Lawrence either so …

*******
Poison
by John Lescroart
2018 / 304 pages
read by Jacques Roy  – 9h 9m 
rating:   B+ /  crime -legal thriller 
*******

By the time Dismas Hardy finds out that Abby Jarvis, an old client,  needs a lawyer on murder charge,  she’s already been arrested and arraigned for the murder of Grant Wagner.   But Dismas,  still feeling the pains of a past gunshot injury, gets down to the jail house anyway.

Wagner was the owner of a manufacturing company and the patriarch of a family of four children,  his wife is deceased.  It looked like he’d had a heart attack but after a second autopsy,  insisted on by one of his daughters,  it was found he’d been poisoned.

The clincher of the evidence against Abby,  to the police anyway,  was that she had spent a year in jail for vehicular manslaughter – while drunk.  But as the whole story unfolds it turns out there was also an affair,  embezzling,  a million-dollar inclusion in a will,  and more.   There certainly seems to be plenty of evidence against her.   But she insists she didn’t do it and for a variety of reasons,  Dismas’  believes she’s innocent.

Also,  Wagner’s children cannot believe that Abby,  a devoted employee of many years, would kill their father.   They don’t like any part of it actually,  because they were getting ready to cash in on a big deal by selling the company.   There’s plenty of motive to go around.

Also,  Wyatt Hunt,  Dismas’ cousin who has his own series,  joins Dismas in this book – nice.

Fuzi – tea aka Aconite   /  https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/21/health/poisoned-herbal-tea-death-san-francisco/index.html

It’s a windy tale about love in many forms – a love of life and music and family and Paris in the springtime, and the fall and the winter and even in the heat of summer.    Maybe it’s a love letter to laughter, too,  because parts are laugh-out-loud funny.

But beware,  there’s a very deep shadow just on the other side of the sunlight.  The book is by Mark Helprin,  after all.   Does the contrast make the lightness brighter?  Perhaps.  Even in the contrasts of love.

It was recommended in one of my reading groups but  I’ve read and loved a couple of other Helprin’s books,   Winter’s Tale (long ago) and In Sunlight and Shadow far more recently.   It’s hard to describe this book –  it’s sad and slow and twisty,  but at the same time it is hilariously funny,  beautifully written and so full of light and love.

*******
Paris in the Present Tense
by Mark Helprin
2017/ 400 pages
read by Bronson Pinchot – 14h 34m
rating:  9.5  / contemp fiction
(read and listened)
*******

Jules Lacour,  a very healthy and robust 74-year old widower,  returns to Paris from New York and sees a psychiatrist because he feels guilty about the deaths of many people he’s loved,  from his parents in Nazi Germany to soldiers in the Algierian war,  to most recently his wife.  The psychiatrist,  Dunaif, asks him if he’s thought of suicide.  Lacour rejects the idea –  well,  that’s good to know for an opening.

Lacour’s present problem is that his young grandson is terminally ill and Lacour although is a very prominent cello teacher he needs a bunch more money than he has to take the boy somewhere for the best treatment.  So Lacour feels guilty for not having the money,  for wasting his time on music,  composing and teaching cello instead of doing the academic and composing which could have made him much better off.

Meanwhile,  a very fat insurance agent named Armand Marteau also needs money – he’s not been able to sell any insurance lately and he’s stooped to pretending.  He has a family too,  and needs money.

And then there’s Francois Ehrenshtamm,  a philosopher, professor and author,  who is Jules’ very good friend,  But he certainly doesn’t have money because he spends it.    He does, however, steer Jules in the direction of Jack Cheatham, an American executive with a huge and very rich insurance company for whom Jules might write a jingle in exchange for a million Euros or so.

This is not to to neglect the characters Élodi,  Duvalier, Arnaud, Rich Panda or a few others who are either fully and individually developed or delightful caricatures.  They all contribute to the whole.

Back to Lacour –  another problem is that he loves women and falls in love on a regular basis.  He never broke his marriage vows, but now that he’s a widower …  at age 74!…   Oh this is a love letter to Paris and life and death and maybe even a love letter to love itself.  –  Vive la difference – the contrast again.

The main male characters are fleshed out very nicely,  no caricatures here,  except maybe a couple of French policemen.   The women, except for Amina,  are not done so well  but they’re interesting.   The themes of love and family and aging are emphasized but there’s an undercurrent of music woven throughout  –  like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDJO1jFuKxk
But then there’s also this:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/muslim-and-jews-in-france-communal-conflict-in-a-secular-state/

Nominated for the Booker Prize or I would never have come across it,  Elmet opens with an epigraph from Ted Hughes:

“Elmet was the last independent Celtic kingdom in England and originally stretched out over the vale of York … But even unto the seventeenth century this narrow cleft and its side-ginnels, under the glaciated moors,  were still a “badlands,’ a sanctuary for refugees from the law.”  

Wow!    – Okay –  see the “Elmet”  of history:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmet

*******
Elmet
by Fiona Mozley
2017 / 312 pages
read by Gareth Bennett Ryan  7h 37m
rating:   9.5  
(both read and listened)
*******

This is an intensely  powerful and  beautifully written story with a plot line which makes the reader want to both gulp it down and digest every word,  both at the same.  (A 9.5 is the highest rating I’ll give for my first reading of a relatively new work of fiction.)

Be warned – it gets gritty.  The themes are man as a force of nature, love of family, feminism, personal identity,  shame,  escape and more.

Part I:   A 1st person,  is stumbling across the land looking for someone referred to only as “she.”   At the railroad tracks this narrator chooses to go North because “if she turned South … there is no use.”   This person walks and walks,  resting and remembering.  The font is in italics and section works like a prologue,  but isn’t quite that,  because it’s really the the first chapter of the frame story which has its own numerical order.

Chapter 1   –  The 1st person narrator is telling us about how he, at age 14 and his sister, 15,  along with their father,  a big hulk of a man,  settle a place in the wilderness.  It’s back in the woods, the out-back of  Yorkshire,  somewhere near a 200-year old tree.  They build a house there for the three of them and try to live there peacefully amongst their rural neighbors.      And this inner story is what goes on in a kind of chronological order of it’s own.   This is the main story which the person in the frame is remembering for us.   The tension builds because it will lead up to what would cause Cathy to leave like that and for Daniel to follow her –

Mozley captures and holds the tension with a masterful variation of sentence length and the regular use of other punctuation and repetition.  And although the time-frame is generally contemporary,  the language includes unusual if not archaic words like calor and gamboled while the dialogue is sprinkled with the speech of rural folks:  “She wandt very welcoming … I mean, she was and she wandt.”

This might very well make it to my top 10 books of the year.

Oh my it’s good to be back to a little light-weight,  almost cozy,  mystery.   I’ve read the first two in the “Gaslight Murders” series,  Murder on Astor Place (#1) and Murder on St. Mark’s Place (#2)  so it looks like I’ll continue.  There are 21 in the series (to date).   That ought to keep me busy.  LOL!

*******
Murder on Gramercy Park
by Victoria Thompson
read by Callie Beaulieu
rating   A  / historical mystery
(#3 in the Gaslight Murders series)
*******

We’re still in New York circa 1895-96,  when life may have been gilded for Mrs Astor’s 400, but quite rough for the immigrants. The cops were crooked (everyone knew that), but Teddy Roosevelt was Police Commissioner so things might change.

Sarah Brandt is the young widow of a very good hearted  doctor who was murdered.  She’d come down from the upper classes to marry him and has no intention of going back.  She now works as a midwife and in the course of doing that job comes across murders which Detective Frank Malloy investigates,  with Sarah’s help,  of course.   Frank is a widower with a young,  deaf and club-footed son.  He lives with his very judgmental mother who helps with the child.   These are the overarching plots which the reader follows while reading the series.

I love the characters and their development over time because they’re good honest compassionate and likable people.  And their sense of humor is often on display.  That’s probably the biggest reason for continuing with this series – the crimes and solutions are quite good though.

This time,  after a high-tension Prologue in which it seems as though a woman is struggling with life/death and addiction,  Chapter 1 opens with Frank going to investigate an apparent suicide and discovers there is a woman in labor also in the house.  Furthermore,   the dead man is/was the woman’s husband and doctor.  Frank calls Sarah to help deliver the baby.

There are plenty of twists and bodies with a wee bit of history,  including the timing of the development of  “chiropractic” and only the tiniest dash of romance – flirting.   I’m not sure if a woman in Sarah’s 19th century position would actually speak to a guy like Frank in such a forward manner but … it works.

Heck of a book to pick up right after finishing How To Read the Bible!   But this book just fascinated me from the first mention I heard of it,  and then someone on the All-nonfiction List  mentioned it in a post – so I started doing a bit of research.   I listened to a an Audible sample,  I read a chunk of the Kindle sample and I read some reviews.  Okay – “Uncle!  I give up!”  –  I followed my heart and I got it – both – Kindle and Audible copies.

Actually,  I expected this to be another long and difficult read like How To Read the Bible,  but NO!  Although it is long,  This book is actually page-turning and hour-devouring.  Slezkine writes wonderfully well and Stefan Rudniki reads it beautifully –  having both the print (Kindle) and Audible versions was perfect.

*******
The House of Government:  A Saga of the Russian Revolution 
by Yuri Slezkine  
2017 /  1004 pages
read by  Stefan Rudniki 
rating:   10 / literary nonfiction – history
(read and listened)
*******

I think I read somewhere,  something to the effect that The House of Government is the nonfiction War and Peace of the Bolshevik Revolution with some Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn)  woven in.    And yes –  I think it is that.  And I love War and Peace as well as In the First Circle (also (Solzhenitsyn) and I  enjoy reading about Russian history,   so … yes –  I’m a kind of model lay-reader for it.

It’s an amazing book –  wonderfully well researched  and organized,  in addition to being beautifully,  even powerfully,  written.  There is a lot of excitement in the narrative as the Bolshevik revolutionaries coalesce to take hold of the government,  wait,  grab it,  and then proceed to remake society according to their plans which were inspired by Marx,  initiated by Lenin and driven by Stalin.   And then it all seemed to end in World War II.  –  The problem,  Slezkine,  is that,  unlike Christianity,  the Bolsheviks never developed a way of transmitting their faith to the children – it never reached the 2nd or 3rd generations.  –  This is a very important theme – what happened?

There are three major “Books” with three “Parts” in each book and a number of Chapters in each “Part.”  The organization is clear.

In Book 1, “En Route,”  Slyzkine discusses the Revolution itself,  from the many participants in the take-over and Civil War to the death of Lenin in 1923 and on into Stalin’s early years.  This is after the failure of the New Economic Policy and when the Bolsheviks have gone into some kind of “postclimactic melancholy”  as well as re-education of the general population – the “non-Bolsheviks.”   Slezkine examines and analyzes the literature of the period.

The narrative wanders through many,  many names and their contributions –  it’s like a family saga – as mentioned in the subtitle.  These folks knew each other,  studied together,  lived together,  married, divorced and remarried each other (or lived together). They  had children together, worked together and vacationed together just like any elite group –  which is a part of Slyzkine’s point.

“Book 2,  “At Home”  focuses more on the actual “House of Government”  or the “House on the Embankment.”    including who designed and built it,  what it was like to look at and live in,  and other issues.  There were problems living under the dictatorship of Stalinist Communism during the first 5-Year Plan –  when almost everyone was really working to transform the country but there  there was also a huge amount of enthusiasm, imagination and work on experimental plans among the elites – the residents of the Government House.

 Much of Book 2 deals with the children of the House of Government – as would seem appropriate because one of Slezkine’s major themes is that the Old Bolsheviks had not prepared their children  –  they didn’t know how – so they fell back on their old bourgeois childhoods,  literature,  entertainments and so on.

My favorite subject  (person, character)  in the whole book is Lyova Fedotov, “… the son of the Russian peasant, American worker, Trenton Prison inmate,  Central Asian collectivizer, proletarian writer, and machine-tractor-station political chairman,  Fedor Fedotov.” (p 676)  He is such a geek – intellectual from birth.

At the end of Book 2 a guy named Sergey Kirov is killed and finding the perpetrator(s) of the 1934 assassination was a kind of starting point for the death of the Bolsheviks because it snowballed into a true witch-hunt and purge.  Slezkine makes that  point pretty clearly.  And it gets very sad with much detail regarding several families.

And Book 3, “The Trial,”  deals with the actual purge of the Old Bolsheviks, and others and the death of the “faith” in the millenarianism of Bolshevism.   Slezkine goes into a bit of history re other “witch hunts” and spends a bit too much time on the child abuse cases in Southern California but it’s important so that contemporary readers can get the idea of what went on at the “trials” of the Russian “traitors.”   The book is heartbreaking at times.

It reads,  and Rudniki performs it,  as though every single sentence is vital. I needed the Kindle version to really comprehend and follow listening for awhile,  then finding my place in the Kindle and reading forward,  then going back to the Audio to listen until I caught up and went ahead again.  (I love doing this – it happens only when a book is fairly complex or dense.)   Also,  there are photographs in the Kindle – of people and places – especially The Government House (“House on the Embankment”)  both inside and out,  under construction,  lived in,  and empty.

For me,  though,  I think it’s the scope and the details which make it stand out –  not to neglect the overarching theme of how the Bolshevik Revolution came to be,  grew, took over the state, held on and died as more of a failed religious, millenarian, apocalyptic prophesy or revolution –  a vision and disillusionment- than a lasting movement.  (“As of this writing,  all millenarian prophecies have failed.”  – pg. 272)  Plus,  it’s got all the juicy tidbits.

Slezkine uses a lot of primary source materials including letters, diaries, newspaper articles and whatever else he found.  Sometimes long excerpts from these documents are quoted.

London Review of Books  (excellent review)

Timeline of Russian Revolution:
https://www.thoughtco.com/russian-revolution-timeline-1779473

Now I travel way back in my reading  to the days of Harald Fairhair,  said to be the first king of Norway,  and his early times – late Viking times –  850-932 AD as he fought and made treaties to unite Norway.   Actually,  this little story probably takes place around the year 866,  when Harald made the first of his conquests and it took him about 20 years. (So Hartsuyker has a trilogy planned – next one up is The Sea Queen – due out in August of 2018).  

But this novel is not about Harald himself,  it’s more about  a bunch of  characters living their lives with Harald as a kind of bit player around whom much of the action focuses.   It boils down to will Harold unite Norway into a single kingdom?  Is that what they all want to attain?  Can it be done?

It’s mostly the fictionalized story of Ragnvald Eysteinsson  (who was a very real assistant to King Harald),  and his sister Svanhild who, in The Half-Drowned King,  were left fatherless and under the care of their mother and her new husband,  their step-father,  Olaf.

*******
The Half Drowned King
by Linnea Hartsuyker
2015/ 453 pages
read by Matthew Lloyd Davies – 15h 33m
rating:   7.5 –  historical fiction 
*******
These are not peasant folks but large land owners, seamen and fiercely ambitious fighters.   Olaf was supposed to hold Ragnald’s inherited lands in trust for him until Ragnald  came of age,  but Olaf turned out to be rather treacherous.  As a matter of fact,  he was downright murderously underhanded as he arranged for Ragnvald to be killed  by a guy named Solvi.   That didn’t work out quite as planned.   Instead,  Ragnvald was only “half-drowned” and had a vision of revenge.    So Ragnvald took the matter to the “Things”  (the court system)  and …   well … (that’s the start of the main story line)

Meanwhile,  Svanhild does not want to marry the much older man Olaf has picked out for her.  She has been raised to do the things Viking wives do –  sew and cook  and garden and – ta-da – keep the homefires burning while she runs raiders off the lands.   Svanhild found her own favorite guy,  but as it turns out,  he’s not friendly with her brother (to say the least).  Oh what does she do?  –  (This is NOT primarily a romance although there is a strong romantic twist to it –  especially toward the end.)

There’s a lot of fighting and stewing as the plot moves along and battles are fought.   Harald finally gets involved – he’s still a child really,  and the sides are drawn,  re-drawn and drawn yet again as there are always turncoats.

It took awhile for me to get into this novel, but if you’re interested historical fiction about the Vikings and their times it’s pretty good.   I happen to be descended from Vikings (or close enough)  on one side of my mother’s sides.  
When I went to Norway and visited the area where that side of the family had their farms I was surprised to see it was on a major fjord and there was a monument put up by some queen to honor her Viking sailors sons.    –  My genealogy only goes back to the 16th century – not the 9th.  lol –

If you enjoyed this book you might really like “The Long Ships” by  Frans G. Bengtsson. It takes place around about a hundred years later,  but follows some fictional Vikings on their foreign battles and how they got Christianized.  (I may read it again,)

Although I generally enjoy reading about the history of the New Testament and Christianity – as shown in this blog –   I’m also very curious about  Old Testament history and interpretation.  I just haven’t come across as many books readily available to the public regarding the Old Testament as the New,  but I did come across this one some time ago and it looked quite interesting.   And it is – fascinatingly so.   It’s taken me months to finish because it’s dense and informative but at the same time it’s well-written and enjoyable.

How  to Read the Bible is basically about the history of scholarship and interpretation regarding what we know as the  Old Testament (Jewish and Christian scholarship).   It was published in 2007 so it’s up to date,  and it’s pretty good,  easy to follow, illuminating.    Kugel identifies as an Orthodox Jew,  but his teachings are not orthodox at all –  more of a heretic or at least a skeptic –  what he does is separate his scholarly work from his personal spiritual life and he honors the whole.

*******
How to Read the Bible:  A Guide to Scripture
by James L. Kugel
2007  / 852 pages
read by  Mel Foster
rating:  9.5 /  Bible interpretation and history
(both read and listened) 
*******

There are a lot of seeming inconsistencies and difficulties (impossibility in a few cases)  in trying to take the Bible at face and literal value.  In fact,  Kugel says (quoting others) that’s not even the way the ancients interpreted it.   Jewish scholars from early on had other things to say about the various possible meanings,  some writers added to the originals,  some removed little sections,  some edited the way they saw fit. Christians did the same thing until the Bible was formally canonized.    So starting from a string of Four Assumptions that people have about the Bible and how to read it,  Kugel works his way through it.

Those Four Assumptions are:

1. The Bible is cryptic – there’s a need for some good interpretation.

2.  The Bible is a book of lessons directed at readers of their own day.

3. The Bible has no contradictions or mistakes.

4. The entire Bible is a divinely given text,  a book in which God speaks directly or through his prophets.

In all his studies – he doesn’t see those Four Assumptions working out very well.  He does try to make as much  literal sense of the Bible as he can but sometimes that’s just not thre for a number of reasons.   So he goes by the interpretations of ancient, historical and contemporary scholars – all.  It’s quite interesting.

In Chapter 1  Kugel outlines the history of Bible interpretation itself and then gets down to cases in the following chapters progressing by Biblical order.    In that first part he includes the assumptions of the old interpreters,  the scholars and rabbis and church hierarchy understanding that they were followed or accompanied by the heretics and then the printing press.   Soon everyone seemed to have their own interpretation.

It’s a very, very, very well researched book – the footnotes are wonderful and mostly included in the Audible version.  Kugel appropriately includes large chunks of Biblical verses.

It’s very nicely written although occasionally it gets a bit dry.   The work of a lifetime, I’m sure,  although he has published many other books and even two since this one came out.   I have to tell you-  I’m looking forward to reading them.

Okay –  I’ll just start my blog post over again because my first impressions of this book were a bit off.   What happened was that I felt like it was a rehash of the author’s earlier book,  The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I read prior to this blog) combined with Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth (which I never finished – got about 1/2 way).

*******
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress 
by Steven Pinker
2018 –  576 pages
rating:  9.75  /  science/politics
read by Arthur Morey  – 19h 49m
*******

Make no mistake – as the subtitle states bluntly –  this is a call for a return to the values of the enlightenment –  “The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress.”    Pinker first reviews those ideals,  then he reviews the advancements made since the enlightenment (this is where I got rather bored),   and finally he calls out the nay-sayers from right-wing religious bigots and nationalists to the leftist intellectuals who bemoan any progress as being “so-called”  for various reasons.

Anyway –  it’s a great book –  (although I’m not quite as sold on atheism as Pinker) and I totally believe that even if the situation looks rather dim right now (and yes,  Pinker addresses the Trump phenomenon as well as fundamentalist Islam) we have to continue the battle for the principles of Humanism –  even if we have to take them on faith and with the understanding that the more peace, health, prosperity and happiness the world has for the greatest number of people the better off we all are.

3/25 –   I have to add to this –  Pinker looks at the Enlightenment values of Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress” – the book’s subtitle.   But what happens when progress seems not to be progress for a certain group – the US vs the world?  Are atomic weapons progress?    What happens when the values conflict (scientific IQ/race studies vs humanism)  etc.

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

https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/manifesto3/

Update:   On April 25, 2018 it was announced in the Washington Post that the serial-killer -rapist known as the “Golden State Killer” was identified by DNA evidence and arrested –   a former police officer.

“More than 40 years after the so-called “Golden State Killer” began terrorizing California, raping dozens of women and killing at least 12, authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 72-year-old Joseph James DeAngelo in the case….”

“The trail ultimately led authorities to DeAngelo, a former police officer living in Citrus Heights, Calif., a city outside Sacramento.”

For more info see either the above link or:   http://abc7.com/golden-state-killer-arrested-in-northern-california/3390636/

*******

I remember just a wee bit of this California serial murderer because I moved from California to Oklahoma in January of 1977 and didn’t return until 1980.  Those were the years the “Golden State Stalker” was active but then again for a wee bit in 1986.  I was living in the Bay Area when the Visalia Ransacker was running amok between 1974 and 1975.   That said,  I’m very familiar with all the cities named – Visalia particularly,  but all the others, too.

Also,  as background,  I’m an old True Crime fan back to the days of my divorce  (lol) so this book was right up my alley.   I especially enjoy the books based  on the procedural and psychological make-up elements in the crime.  And not too much focus on the graphic details,  please.  Beware –  I’ll Be Gone in the Dark does get somewhat graphic but it’s basically the procedural outline of a “cold case.”    The thing is it was almost ready for publication when the author died suddenly in 2016.

*******
I’ll Be Gone In the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
by Michelle McNamara 
2018 / 352 pages
read by  Gabra Zackman, Gillian Flynn, Patton Oswalt/ 9h 45m
rating    9 /  true crime-memoir
*******

So the idea behind the actual final editing and publication is excellent.   The author,  Michelle McNamara,  died  leaving a decade of her life’s work behind.  The book she’d written was left mostly alone and published anyway with an introduction by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl – 2015) and a post script by Patton McNamara,  Michelle’s husband.   There are some editorial comments from time to time -for instance about  the Ventura section which was never completed,  or a couple of section taken  from a piece published in a magazine prior.

The book is as McNamara wrote it and she writes very nicely with Gabra Zackman narrating it for max impact.  My only complaint is that it is a bit overly padded – there’s rather too much background on Michelle’s life,  the lives of the cops and the lives of the victims.   It gets pretty graphic when the actual crimes are described.   That said,  it’s a page-turner.

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

https://www.npr.org/2018/02/24/588101430/patton-oswalt-on-his-late-wifes-search-for-the-golden-state-killer

Good book!   I was up late and couldn’t finish another 4 hours so I slept but the minute I picked up again in the morning there it was –  he non-stop,  page-turning suspense Coben is known for.

Coben can be quite original in both his plots and writing. In this stand-alone he has the 1st person protagonist,  Napoleon (Nap) Dumas, a detective in a small New Jersey town,   investigating the deaths of three high school friends as well as the disappearance of his old girlfriend. Two of the deaths took place 15 years prior but the last one happened recently – a fellow cop.

*******
Don’t Let Go
by Harlan Coben
2017 / 368 pages
read by Steven Weber-  8h 42m
rating:  A+    / crime – suspense/procedural
*******

The book opens with the entrapment of someone who really doesn’t want that coming down and there are two murders. The set-up was a set-up.

One victim was the cop who was part of the entrapment,  a friend of Nap and, it turns out,  a part of a little club from high school days.

The other was a woman who worked with the cop on developing these set-ups but the twist is that  the  fingerprints of Nap”s old girlfriend, Maura, were found at the scene.    Leo and his girlfriend died due to a train wreck on the same night Maura disappeared.

What those murders turn up are memories of high school days and the friends who are either dead or missing.   As Nap follows his leads and does his own investigation, along with others who were around at the time a terrible scenario emerges.

An interesting and kind of literary twist is that Ned spends a lot of time talking to his twin brother,  Leo, who has been dead for 15 years.   It works.

I just needed something different in the middle of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now because that book can get really tedious.   So I picked up The Third Victim by Phillip Magolin,  his new one.  I’d never read anything by him before but it sounded interesting.      Yup –  it was just what I needed even if it does have quite a lot of graphic violence against women,

*******
The Third Victim
by Phillip Margolin
2018 – 320 pages
read by Therese Plummer  – 8h 30m
rating:  A+  / crime –  legal 
(stand-alone) 
*******

PLOT:   A young woman stumbles out of the forest near Portland Oregon..  She tells the police officer who finds her that she has been violently abused and says she has escaped from kidnapper who held her captive.  She’s in bad shape.

Two other women,  both prostitutes,  were recently murdered in a similar manner – abuse to the point of torture.

A prominent attorney is arrested for the murders and the torture of the last woman whose testimony is obviously  vital.   And what the attorney’s current wife has to say about him and his activities is telling.  And of course there’s his own version of events – he denies it all and blames his wife.   He hires Regina Barrister – the best defense attorney in the city,  perhaps in the state.

Meanwhile,  a pimp has been murdered by a cop – or is that really the way it went down?  Whatever … Officer Praeter was arrested also hired Regina Barrister as his attorney.

But there’s Robin Lockwood,  the young, vital,  hard-working and idealistic attorney who is assisting Regina.  She gets  concerned about some similarities in the two cases.   The story is told from several points of view including those of Robin and Regina.

This book is a good twisty yarn and it even has an excellent and original aspect to the main story.   Besides, although this is billed as a legal thriller (my favorite if they’re good)  it’s also a pretty decent procedural.   Therese Plummer does an excellent job of narrating.

I was totally unable to decide what to read next so the last of the most recent sale purchases would have to do.  I’d been both drawn and repelled by Marcia Clark as an author – basically because she was the lead prosecuting attorney in O.J. Simpson case.  That’s totally unfair to her because I love reading legal thrillers by lawyer/authors. The problem is that I knew of her as an attorney first – writer second.

*******
Guilt by Association
by Marcia Clark
2011/ 432 pages
read by January LaVoy – 9h 49m
rating – B+  / crime procedural/legal
(Rachel Knight series #1) 
*******

So… the outcome is that I enjoyed it – good plot and decent writing although I was personally not interested in all the cafe lunches and fashion ensembles.  Oh well –  a heterosexual single female has to do something,  right?   And she has romance problems but that’s not too bad.  It got better as the story unfolded and I adjusted.

So on to the plot,  prosecuting attorney Rachel Knight witnesses the police hauling  one of her co-workers out of a shabby apartment.  He’s dead and it was either a murder or a suicide.

Meanwhile,  the bright and lovely 15-year old daughter of one of the Los Angeles’ elite families has been raped in her very own 2nd story bedroom.   Suspicion automatically falls on the young man she tutors as a private school project,  but the victim says absolutely not.   This young man disappears amongst his very rough friends and a bad part of town.

Knight wants to get to the bottom of both cases because 1.  she thought she was a friend of her co-worker,  but he apparently had a secret life,   and 2. she’s been assigned to this very strange rape case.

So Knight and her friend Bailey Keller of the LAPD do their investigation which includes help from sources ranging from other cops and attorneys to the young street thugs and gang members.  Lots of characters,  some sympathetic, others gritty,  all fairly realistic (to me),   And the setting feels like L.A. due to the variety of characters.

Overall it’s not a bad book – I might try the second in the series.  We’ll see.

Another Audible book on sale –  I’ve read one prior book in Ingridson’s “Reykjavik” series,  Reykjavik Nights, a long time ago and had Jar City on my wish list for some time afterwards – never get to it though, and at some point I deleted it.  So when it came up in the sale list I grabbed it.

*******
Jar City
by Arnaldur Indridason  (Icelandic)
2005/ 304 pages
read by George Guidall – 7h 33m
rating:  B / crime – procedural
*******

And then I remembered Ingridason had got pretty gritty and besides,  my interest in Scandi-crime has been sated for some time.  Nevertheless,  I persevered and it’s pretty good – okay I guess.

Plot – an old man is found murdered in his apartment with a photo of a girl attached to a note left on top of the body.   As Detective Erlendur Sveinsson and his partner delve into the history of the victim they find he had been a vile serial rapist who had probably left several children with their own difficult histories – and genetics.   It’s very good as a procedural crime novel –

Meanwhile,  Erlendur has his own personal problems – both of his children are addicts and the daughter is pregnant –

I doubt I’ll read more of the  Reykjavik series books.   It wasn’t bad – I’ve just moved on.

Lately, when I see an Audible sale, I’ve been stocking up on a few books I think I’d like later,  usually crime books but not always.   This is unusual for me as my MO is to buy as I read,  but …  Audible sales are pretty good and they don’t last forever – so I think I got four at this last sale and I usually get to them before too long – within a month or two.  (I currently have 4 lined up with one underway.)

*******
A Grave Talent
by Laurie R. King
1993 /  385 pages
read by Alyssa Bresnahan – 14h 14m
rating:  B-  / crime – procedural 
(Kate Martinelli series #1) 
*******

This is relative oldie (as is common on Audible sales),  but it’s a goodie and also the start of a series I might enjoy continuing.   Kate (“Casey”) is a smart, independent detective for the San Francisco police department – she also happens to be lesbian.   Her new work partner is Alonzo Hawkins, a rather gruff and no-nonsense sort of guy,  a dedicated veteran on the force. They have to get used to each other.

The story line itself concerns the deaths of 3 kindergarten-age girls whose bodies were found along a road in a little feudal/hippie-type community in the hills behind San Francisco.  The neighbors are all interviewed except one – the incredible artist Vaun Adams who, unbeknownst to the community,  is a felon – imprisoned for killing a young girl 18 years prior.  Vaugn was orphaned as a teen and has had a pretty rough go of it,  partly due to her prodigious artistic talent.

But did she commit these murders?   For that matter,  did she do the first one because there was a seriously bad guy involved with her – mental problems abound in the book. Child abuse is not so much a motif as art (because of Vaun) and abnormal psychology (Vaun and the guy).

King writes very nicely and that’s possibly a problem because the many descriptions and backgrounds,  the art talk and the history feel like padding and could interfere with the suspense.  Fortunately Bresnahan reads well and was able to give those sections a bit of  their own tension.

Still,  there is a bit too much info on women artists through the ages and the art world of today after which it gets a little weird when the psychologist shows up.  But it always remained within my suspension of disbelief – kind of like “Oh yeah,  let’s see how this pans out.”   And it all comes together quite nicely into a thriller as well as a novel of psychological suspense.

This book was mentioned during the AllNonfiction Group discussion of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.  It sounded intriguing and (!) it was on sale,  so …

Generally,  it’s a similar type of book,  a study of a demographic subset of  people in poverty who are essentially homeless,  but Bruder’s people are generally middle class folks who have turned to traveling in RVs (of one sort or another) to work in temporary situations while living in their vehicles – for free if possible.    Most are in their retirement years from their 50s and into their 80s, but there are a few younger souls.   Some had been fairly successful in their working lives and fell on hard times,  others had not been so successful but managed,  and are now reduced to this.

*******
Nomadland:  Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder
2017/ 320 pages
read by Karen White – 9h 57m
rating:  8   / sociology – economics
*******

Bruder calls this group the “downwardly mobile older Americans” and the demographic is growing at an alarming rate.  Bruder includes the thoughts of some professionals who work in social economics as well as statistics as appropriate,  but it’s mostly an ethnographic study with a less scholarly approach than Evicted.

Where Desmond focused on eight families or individuals as well as a couple of landlords living in Milwaukee,  Wisconsin,  Bruder uses a broader canvas and has sought out dozens of people to interview in Oregon,  Nevada,  California and Kentucky as well as other places – North Dakota.   She focuses on a few people and follows them over a period of a few years.

Another difference is there is no call to action about anything in particular in Nomadland,  but there is certainly a fair bit of criticism regarding some aspects of our economy – particularly,  perhaps, but not solely,  the giant corporation of Amazon.com.

Most of these “retired” people try to work as temporary employees in some way or another –  for a park system somewhere or for Amazon in warehouses during the Christmas rush – there are other nomadic jobs available like picking sugar beets in North Dakota and most of them head south for the winter to stay in Arizona or California and attend annual gatherings of fellow-RV’ers there – and/or work.

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

http://www.workamper.com/femp/153589/index.html

Life is hard for these people as they have pretty severe budgets,  but they try to retain a “can do” attitude with a bit of joking and making new friends and trying to keep up with old ones via web-sites.

And then I came across where she describes “Tioga George” and realize I’ve actually met this guy. My brother, a retired lawyer,  lives kind of like this by choice.  He told me about George and Miz Tioga (his RV) so I found George online and we communicated for awhile and he came to Porterville en route to somewhere.   We had a nice little chat in a decent park here.   Very interesting.  He got funding via his website but that was many years ago now – maybe ten – and I have no idea what happened to him.

As I was saying,  much of the book is on the upbeat side.  These folks are free,  made their own choices,  and are making the best of hard times.   But don’t let those parts fool you –  Bruder gets real.  She fully participates in the life for awhile and after another while things get very grim for her new friends.  Many of these people have no other viable place to go.   They are homeless in the eyes of most – they are often harassed and unwanted except in remote camps.   And they’re getting even older,  often sick, and they have to keep on doing the best they can.

Yes,  race is addressed – this is almost entirely a whites only option because a non-anglo person (especially male)  doing what these folks are doing would be putting himself in a very dangerous situation – not from the other “van-dwellers”  necessarily,  but from law enforcement.

http://www.cheaprvliving.com

I read Book 1 of this series,  Murder at Murder on Astor Place, about a month ago and although I didn’t exactly get “hooked” into the story it’s okay (a B+) .  So when it was time for Book 2 on the 4-Mystery Addicts discussion schedule I went ahead.

*******
Murder on St. Mark’s Place
Victoria Thompson
2000 / 288 pages
read by Callie Beaulliau  – 8h 11m
rating:
(Book 2 of Gaslight series)
*******

The year is 1895-96 and Teddy Roosevelt is still the New York City police commissioner with his own ideas about cleaning up the very corrupt force.

Sarah,  was originally from an upper class family but she married out of it,  was then widowed,  and is now a midwife by trade.  Much of her business is in the lower classes and in the course of her work she comes across murders in one way or another. In Book 1 Sarah became an amateur sleuth and met  Frank Malloy, a widowed police detective with his own story.

This time the main plot has to do with the murder of a new mother’s newly immigrated 16-year old sister.   This girl is a fun-loving spirit who enjoyed going to the dance parlors and Coney Island with her friends and picking up men who would pay their way into the amusements or buy them presents in exchange for favors.  It turns out 4 young women have been murdered in the past few months.

This started slow and it’s rather predictable,  but I enjoy it for some reason –  both the way the mystery is resolved and the overarching story of Sarah and Frank.  I’ll be reading #3.

I don’t know what I expected – I read Boyd’s Waiting For Sunrise a few months ago and wasn’t impressed and although I’d enjoyed his prior work,  An Ice Cream War  a bit more, they still both garnered only 7s from me.  This was not encouraging.   But the Booker Prize Group selected this one so …  on I went.

*******
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart
by William Boyd
2002 / 479 pages
read by Simon Vance – 15h 58m 
rating:  8 / contemp fiction (Booker List) 
(both read and listened)
*******

The story  consists of the chronologically ordered life-long journal entries of the imaginary Logan Mountstuart who lived from 1906 to 1991 and traveled to various parts of the world,  living the times,  meeting famous literary and other creative people of the times, and having his own ideas.

The “Journals” are introduced by a Preamble in which Mountstuart explains his life from birth to his arrival at Abbeyhurst College at the age of 17.  The next section is called “The School Journal,”   is dated 10 December 1923 and finds Logan as one of five Roman Catholics attending the school.

It starts out quite funny in an ironic sense, but don’t let that fool you,  the overall life of this guy is not  generally a happy one –  there’s a lot of pain and sadness involved in addition to adventures of the highest order.

Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damage in Battersea, South London, 10 September 1940. (Getty Images)

And then it gets almost unbearably sad for awhile.

The narrative includes footnotes which are included in the Audible version.   They are a mix of fact and fiction and even a couple of fictionalized fictions.

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

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/nov/13/william-boyd-any-human-heart-murder

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

Miami and a Murder Mystery: The Duke of Windsor as Governor of the Bahamas 1940-1945

journals.sfu.ca/cob/index.php/files/article/download/126/139