Blue Moon by Lee Child

 

Appropriate that I post this finally as it has  been moons ago I read this,   in March,2020...but this has been an awful year, besides COVID the plague of US all,  Jerry's cancer diagnosis and being a caretaker since June redirects my efforts.  Diminishing my time from all else...But I do want to send this book on its way to friends so finally posting...Another Reacher thriller.   He is on his way to....on a bus.. when action is about to begin.  “This is a random universe,” Reacher says. “Once in a blue moon things turn out just right.”  This isn’t one of those times.

This excerpt from Good Reads, "Reacher is on a Greyhound bus, minding his own business, with no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there. Then he steps off the bus to help an old man who is obviously just a victim waiting to happen..."  and this from another online review which was not as complimentary of this one as others, "Jack Reacher lends a hand to an elderly couple under threat from loan sharks and winds up in the midst of an underworld war in the 24th entry in this series (Past Tense, 2018, etc.).  

After Reacher saves an old man from a mugging, he finds out the man and his wife went into hock to get money for their daughter's lifesaving medical treatment. Meanwhile, in the unnamed city where the novel is set, the Albanian and Ukrainian crime bosses who have divvied up the territory are vying to see who can take over for good before the appointment of a new police commissioner. The sudden appearance of Reacher makes each suspect he's an agent for outside forces and accelerates the body count between them. That this is the best premise for a Reacher novel in some time, ..."  And so it begins.  Another Reacher read that I could not put down until the end. and another alliance with an unlikely person a random waitress in this town.    

 I found some of the dialogue amusing, such as the banter about  nuances of who is a better soldier, tougher, etc Marines or Army pages 164-165, including the ex Marine who tells Reacher, Army=aren't really Marines yet." and Reacher's reply, "Marines=muscles are requested intelligence no expected."  This continues along through the novel,  pages 302 where the Marines rescue Army guys and 313 where"If I wanted easy I'd have joined the Marines."    

Another 5***** 

Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman

I seldom post my Kindle reads here and do not know why.  This one was free to me with my Amazon Prime membership so I accepted and read it.  An understatement, I could not stop reading, something I seldom do on the Kindle, preferring a hard copy book.   But this was a great thriller by an author new to me.  I was skeptical because, well, the old saying, "get what you pay for or a little less" and this was free.  But really a great read, characters and writing.  I am sharing the review below from Good Reads, saving myself time as I could not say it any better.  Although I did hi-lite some phrases I do not have the Kindle handy here so will not include those.  I give this a 4 1/2 stars.  Never ever expected it to take the turns it did nor was I sure it would end that way.  All to me the proof of an excellent thriller, mystery.,  And I learned about yet another place, farther north here in MN.  ****.

 Courtesy of GoodReads site "Harrowing loss, psychological trauma, and a deadly mystery test the human will to survive in this electrifying novel from award-winning author Brian Freeman.

Lisa Power is a tortured ghost of her former self. The author of a bestselling thriller called Thief River Falls, named after her rural Minnesota hometown, Lisa is secluded in her remote house as she struggles with the loss of her entire family: a series of tragedies she calls the “Dark Star.”

Then a nameless runaway boy shows up at her door with a terrifying story: he’s just escaped death after witnessing a brutal murder—a crime the police want to cover up. Obsessed with the boy’s safety, Lisa resolves to expose this crime, but powerful men in Thief River Falls are desperate to get the boy back, and now they want her too.

Lisa and her young visitor have nowhere to go as the trap closes around them. Still under the strange, unforgiving threat of the Dark Star, Lisa must find a way to save them both, or they’ll become the victims of another shocking tragedy she can’t foresee

Thunderstruck by Erik Larson 2019 read

Front cover paperback

Back Cover

Another from 2019,   November/December.  Finally  posting so that I can  donate the copy to the local library book sale.  Erik Larson is one of my favorite historical fiction writers and although this was published in 2006 I had not read it.  As with everyone of his books, I learned a lot, this one about electromagnetic energy as Marconi develops the wireless system and the battle  begins between the transatlantic cable and wireless.  True to his form there is more than one character to follow as if Marconi would not have been enough, we learn about one of the nearly perfect murderers, Dr Crippen.  A very unexpected "convergence of the stories of a killer and an inventor.    

Page 33, gives us the origin of the word" bedlam" , from the Hospital of St Mary's of Bethlehem, an asylum for the insane whose name shrunk through popular usage to the word bedlam which is a word to describe chaos and confusion.   With all the hoopla today about climate change, global warming, etc  and the denigration of naysayers, I read with interest about the European heatwave of August 1894  pages 39- 43.  Page 377 near the end of the 392 pages mentions that the Dr Crippen story influenced Hitchcock who  adapted elements in Rear Window and  episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Also that Raymond Chandler  was fascinated by the case and inconsistencies and sympathized with Crippen.    Chandler analyzed that Crippen's mistakes were ones that panicked men tend to make but that Crippen did not seem to panic at all, but that he did many things that required a cool head.  Chandler saysa, " You can't help liking this guy somehow.  He was one murderer who died like a gentleman."  .  

From the author's own blog pages, "The saga of how the lives of the inventor of wireless and of Britain’s second most famous murderer (after Jack the Ripper) intersected during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time. The inventor was Guglielmo Marconi, the young Italian genius; the killer was Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered his overbearing wife and fled Britain with his mistress, unaware that Scotland Yard was hot on his heels. The book—an instant New York Times bestseller—brings to life a host of forgotten characters, including spirit mediums, ghost-hunting physicists, Scotland Yard inspectors, and one of the great pioneers of forensic science. The climax occurs during a trans-Atlantic chase which, thanks to the miracle of Marconi’s invention, was followed by millions of people around the world—with Crippen and his mistress completely unaware."  

Another review  by  James L. Swanson " ..Scientists had dreamed for centuries of capturing the power of lightning and sending electrical currents through the ether. Yes, the great cable strung across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean could send messages thousands of miles, but the holy grail was a device that could send wireless messages anywhere in the world. Late in the 19th century, Europe's most brilliant theoretical scientists raced to unlock the secret of wireless communication.
Guglielmo Marconi, impatient, brash, relentless and in his early 20s, achieved the astonishing breakthrough in September 1895. His English detractors were incredulous. He was a foreigner and, even worse, an Italian! Marconi himself admitted that he was not a great scientist or theorist. Instead, he exemplified the Edisonian model of tedious, endless trial and error.
Despite Marconi's achievements, it took a sensational murder to bring unprecedented worldwide attention to his invention. Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a proper, unattractive little man with bulging, bespectacled eyes, possessed an impassioned, love-starved heart. An alchemist and peddler of preposterous patent medicines, he killed his wife, a woman Larson portrays lavishly as a gold-digging, selfish, stage-struck, flirtatious, inattentive, unfaithful clotheshorse. The hapless Crippen endured it all until he found the sympathetic Other Woman and true love. The "North London Cellar Murder" so captured the popular imagination in 1910 that people wrote plays and composed sheet music about it. It wasn't just what Crippen did, but how. How did he obtain the poison crystals, skin her and dispose of all those bones so neatly?
The manhunt climaxed with a fantastic sea chase from Europe to Canada, not just by a pursuing vessel but also by invisible waves racing lightning-fast above the ocean. It seemed that all the world knew—except for the doctor and his lover, the prey of dozens of frenetic Marconi wireless transmissions.
In addition to writing stylish portraits of all of his main characters, Larson populates his narrative with an irresistible supporting cast. He remains a master of the fact-filled vignette and humorous aside that propel the story forward. Thunderstruck triumphantly resurrects the spirit of another age, when one man's public genius linked the world, while another's private turmoil made him a symbol of the end of "the great hush" and the first victim of a new era when instant communication, now inescapable, conquered the world..".

Although perhaps not my favoirte Larsaon book, I enjoyed it.   Certainly 4.5 stars..One complaint is the size of the type in this edition, Broadway Books, it is too small and meant that I had to use my reading glasses, magnifiers the entire time.