An Innocent Client by Scott Pratt

 Neither the best nor the worst I have read, but a new author to me and one available in hard print so I bought it.  I like the decent size of this paperback book and the print is not tiny.  But I found it not so thrilling nor mysterious.  Plenty of characters and the author does weave the stories together well over 385 pages.  The synopsis on the back cover is below along with the last page of the book.  . I give it a 3 almost out of 5 rating.  Joe Dillard, the lawyer and main character is not one I will follow in future reads.  

Sky of Stone by Homer Hickam

 

Read this in January, the second of his memoirs about life in Coalwood, a West Virginia coal mining town.  This time the Rocket Boy, Sonny is home from college, VPI, on summer break, reluctantly.  Back in Coalwood with his father, Homer, and he is not happy.  Sonny wanted to go to Myrtle Beach, NC to be with his Mom, Elsie,  but she insisted he go home to spend the summer with his dad because someone needed to be there.  There was an accident at the mine where Homer is superintendent and there is an investigation and not looking good for Homer.  Sonny ends up going to work in the mine and joining the union, which is at odds with Homer and management.  Management looks for a scape goat, and  it appears Homer may take the fall. Sonny asserts his independence and becomes a summer working miner under the supervision of Johnny and working alongside Bobby another college boy home for the summer. Pg 133, "I quickly discovered that what Johnny considered work was going as hard and fast as possible and then a little harder and faster on top of that."  Sonny moves into Floretta's boarding house in town and there meets and develops a crush on Rita, a junior engineer,  the "older" woman assigned to the mining company but who being a woman is not to be allowed inside the mine. 

The book, takes place over the summer of 1961 and is suspenseful as Sonny resolves many issues about and between he and his father and learns more about the secrets of the town.  Including the Epilogue there are 409 pages in this paperback, published in 2001 it had been on my shelf for awhile.  I'd  previously read the first book, "October Sky"  about the Rocket Boys of Coalwood. It would not be necessary to read these books in sequence, but since I had I felt it gave me good background. 

Pages  2-3 with the paragraph hilited.  By the Epilogue Sonny has grown  significantly in both physical and mental awareness, changed in body and mind and learned a lot over this summer.   C

Page 398, "Every summer for the remainder of my college career, I returned to Coalwood to work in the mine.  I became sort of an honorary junior engineer.  My father put me through his boot camp and Jake Mosley taught me much about mining.  A young engineer by the name of Tom Musick especially took me under his wing.  I learned more practical engineering under their tutelage than a thousand  classrooms could ever hope to provide.  I graduated from  VPI now known as Virginia Tech with a degree in industrial engineering."
  .    With the war in Vietnam, he joined the USArmy and  following Combat Engineering Officer Candidate School joined the 4th Infantry Division in the Vietnamese Highlands.  He was at the battle of Dak To,  where the Army infantrymen scaled the mountain against the North Vietnamese.  He later went to near the Cambodian border and fought in battle with his boots on the wrong feet and was rescued by an F-100 Super Sabre jet.  It  had flown into Thailand from Myrtle Beach AFB and he felt his Mom had sent it.  He returned home to the US and  learned not to wear his Army uniform in public, being spat on.  He writes he forgave thoem but it was not easy..  I enjoyed this book and rate it 4 ****

  

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.  

The United States of Trump by Bill O'Reilly

Front cover

I subscribed to Bill O'Reilly.com because I miss the O'Reilly commentary and to get an advance copy of this book which was being written earlier this year.  So when it arrived I immediately worked it into my reading time.  It is a good book, typical of O'Reilly, only 295 pages..  I did not  so much learn a lot of new things about Donald Trump as I confirmed my own impressions and gained better insight into the man I voted for President and the man I will vote for again.  Overall, what you see is what you get, Donald Trump is not pretentious and does not have a filter between his thoughts to the words he speaks,  thus so  many controversies with his Twitter storms many which he starts in his early morning times alone.  With Trump it is what it is,  uninhibited presentation.   O'Reilly mentions that Trump uses negativity like a fly swatter, he does not apologize nor admit mistakes readily if at all.  . He readily returns an insult with an invective, unlike President Andrew Jackson who might have shot the person, btw  Trump admires Jackson. 

 Trump is the consummate outsider , no political pedigree and for that the beltway insiders detest him.  I knew that.  He tends to exaggerate, not using precise language and goes along to the next item.   

Back cover

Trump has a short attention span for detail yet quickly absorbs what he needs to know, bureaucratic briefings  drive him up the wall and the stage is set for a tumultuous 4 years which it has been so far.  He sleeps very little, rises by 5:30AM,  drinks no alcohol nor coffee, has no hobbies other than golf and  is a consummate workaholic, he is always on and when immersed in something he is a bull dog.  Now that is what we need as a President to  realign this country, .  His father was all work as well so this trait  is in Trump's DNA. 


 He does drink a lot of Diet Cokes though  sometimes 15 or more a day, always from a bottle poured into a glass with ice, just he way I prefer mine too.  Yet surely all those  diet cokes cannot be good for him.  He relishes disruption and mayhem and can work thru the midst of it especially when he creates it.  Hyperbole and bombastic presentation is Trump, he considers  it insignificant.  His traits are more typical "in your face" New Yorker style than beltway. 

 O'Reilly discusses how the death of his brother affected Donald.  And the thriftiness, not wasting that  comes from his Germanic roots on his father's side (pg 43.)s

nside front flap

I did learn that the youngest son, his and Melania's , Baron is named for the Hotel magnate Baron Hilton, never knew that.  . Page 271  sums Trumps 4 pillars of his presidency, ", improving the economy,  stopping illegal immigration,  defeating Islamic terrorism, and preventing foreign nations from exploiting America financially."  .  Who but a liberal lunatic  can argue with those?  If I have any criticism of the book it is that the photos are mediocre, like reprints of newspaper photos, perhaps they are, apparently pictures were not important to O'Reilly for this book.  After all right now we are living in the midst of this Trump  Presidency, we can see pictures all over TV, 24/7; hang on Mr Toady,  the wild ride will continue!.  I give this 5 *****

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

Front cover paperback

In May the local library hosted this MN author who is extremely popular locally  as throughout the state. The author is well known, acclaimed, and lives in the Twin Cities.    I had never read any of his books so I purchased this one at the others in  talk because it is a stand alone novel compared to his Cork O'Conner mystery series.  The bookseller suggested  this would be a good start for me.    It was first published in 2013, 307 pages and a reading guide with discussion questions in the back.  The writing is easy to follow and the story is well developed.  However for me there was not enough action/intrigue.  Possibly because this is the story of a family and primarily that of a 13 year old boy, Frank Dunn, preacher's son.  

The novel begins in summer 1961,  in New Bremen, MN and mentions that it was a summer" in which death in visitation, assumed many forms."  The prologue  2nd paragraph references the Greek ancient playwright Aeschylus, "He who learns must suffer.  And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."  So we are beginning to know this will be about  death, mourning and twists.  

Back cover

Pg 175, "Loss once it s become a certainty is like a rock you hold in your hand.  It has weight and dimension and texture.  It's solid and can be assessed and dealt with.  You can use it to beat yourself or you can throw it away."  

Pg 196, "I think we just keep going on.  We keep doing what we always do and someday it'll feel right again."  

Pg 302, "It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another's, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow.  So much is lost.  What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses.  Our histories like my father's current body are structures built of toothpicks."  

Author Krueger at the La Crescent Library.

The quotes show the depth and breadth of the writing.  Solid, contemplative perhaps and well matched to impart the story. This book about the death, finding the body and how there is a wrong accused.  the father is a Methodist pastor of 3 small rural churches.  The reference to Lutherans in MN being as "ubiquitous as ragweed," page 45.  There would be other deaths that summer including the sister, which will test the family beyond faith.  It is a Midwestern MN tale over all.  

I did enjoy hearing the author talk about his books and his writing journey.  So many there had read nearly everyone of his books, I was likely the only new reader of this author.  He is very personable.  There is nothing negative I can say about the book but it  just did not grab m.  I read it yet,  I am  not enticed to read others nor to begin the O'connor series.  I give it 3 & 1/2 stars, perhaps 4 ****