The 2024 edition of the Women’s Murder Club series had a promising start. Three separate threads:
Sadly, all 3 interesting stories are resolved unsatisfactorily.
Some big fans of the series called this the worst yet. And there are some DUMB books. 😀
When Wicked (2024) was released, I had zero interest in seeing it.
But when it showed up FREE on Amazon Prime, I gave it a shot.
Fantastic!
I don’t know on whom to heap praise. Director Jon M. Chu? Writers Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox?
It adapts the first act of the 2003 stage musical by Stephen Schwartz and Holzman, which was loosely based on Gregory Maguire‘s 1995 novel, itself a reimagining of the Oz books and the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Jonathan Bailey was impressive as Fiyero. At least as charismatic an egomaniac as Ariana Grande / Galinda Upland — and she’s perfect in that role. Self-obsessed.
Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba Thropp has a more complicated role.
The songs aren’t great. But I did enjoy Defying Gravity.
It should have been much SHORTER. It would have been near perfect at about 100 minutes. At times it felt 1000 minutes long. 😀
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
It was nothing more than a one-night stand. Juliana Brody, a judge in the Superior Court of Massachusetts, is rumored to be in consideration for the federal circuit, maybe someday the highest court in the land.
At a conference in a Chicago hotel, she meets a gentle, vulnerable man and in a moment of weakness has an unforgettable night with him. They part with an explicit understanding that this must never happen again.
But back home in Boston, it becomes clear that this was no random encounter. The man from Chicago proves to have an integral role in a case she’s presiding over–a sex-discrimination case that’s received national attention. Juliana discovers that she’s been entrapped, her night of infidelity captured on video.
Strings are being pulled in high places, a terrifying unfolding conspiracy that will turn her life upside down. But soon it becomes clear that personal humiliation, even the possible destruction of her career, are the least of her concerns, as her own life and the lives of her family are put in mortal jeopardy.
In the end, turning the tables on her adversaries will require her to be as ruthless as they are.
Mortal Prey is 13th in the long Lucas Davenport series. And one of the best.
The bad guy is a woman.
Lucas clashed with her in a previous book ➙ Certain Prey.
Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, a pleasant, soft-spoken, low-key Southerner, and the best hitwoman in the business.
Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local druglord, and while the boy’s father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn’t: The boy wasn’t the target — she was — and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself.
The FBI and DEA draft Davenport to help track her down, and with his fiancée deep in wedding preparations, he’s really just as happy to go — but he has no idea what he’s getting into.
For Rinker is as unpredictable as ever, and between her, her old bosses in the St. Louis mob, the Mexican druglord, and the combined, sometimes warring, forces of U.S. law enforcement, this is one case that will get more dangerous as it goes along. And when the crossfire comes, anyone standing in the middle won’t stand a chance….
Lucas Davenport vs Clara Rinker.
Pretty. 5’3″ or so.
Clara’s had a tough life. Raped by her step father. Ran away to become a teenaged stripper.
Her main job now is to run the bar she owns in Wichita, Kansas – The Rink.
Side job ➙ Hitwoman. And she’s very good at killing people. The best hitwoman in the business.
And in this book, Rinker partners up with another killer. Double trouble.
Her latest hit sounds simple: a defense attorney wants a rival eliminated. No problem—until a witness survives. Clara usually knows how to deal with loose ends: cut them off, one by one, until they’re all gone. This time, there’s one loose end that’s hard to shake.
Lucas Davenport has no idea of the toll this case is about to take on him. Clara knows his weak spots. She knows how to penetrate them, and how to use them. And when a woman like Clara has the advantage, no one is safe.
Rinker returns in another book ➙ Mortal Prey.
This is one of the Prey books adapted for a TV movie (2012). Mark Harmon plays Davenport.
Click PLAY or watch the trailer on YouTube.
Me fishing bass in Mexico … a couple 😀 of years ago.
There are many software options for upscaling.
The better the original, the better the upscaled version.
I used one that was a FREE website in March 2025 — if you upscaled only 1 photo at a time up to a maximum of 400%.
My favourite LIVE music video of all time.
LOVE the style of guitarist Angus Young.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
Fantastic non-fiction.
One of those books that makes science entertaining. It reminded me of The Body by Bill Bryson. That book made 1st year Anatomy interesting.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a 2022 book by Ed Yong that really impressed.
MOST interesting to me was the mystery behind how all kinds of creatures can migrate so accurately. In 2025 we can still barely grasp how that is possible. It might be partially visual. Birds might SEE something in the direction of flight.
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, author and Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.
We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats.
We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.
We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Humans have better vision than any other mammal — but far inferior to birds of prey, some of which can spot a moving rat at 1 mile distance.
Evolution is amazing.
Trial and error over millions of years works.
Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist and author. Born in Malaysia.
In 2021, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ed Yong reads his own audio book. Amazon.
The Lions of Lucerne is a 2002 spy novel by Brad Thor.
Thor’s first novel with the character of Scot Harvath, an ex-Navy SEAL and current U.S. Secret Service agent, The Lions of Lucerne relates how Harvath survives an attack which leaves 30 of his fellow agents dead and the president of the United States kidnapped. Harvath then begins a search for those responsible and attempts to rescue the president.
Spy novel?
I’d call this a thriller. And I don’t like thrillers.
Thrillers are where one hero saves the world. No attempt at anything remotely realistic. Think Tom Clancy
Publishers Weekly wrote “it’s hard to get past the novel’s many graceless shortcomings, clichéd language […], cartoonish scenes and a protagonist whose superhero character desperately needs fleshing out.”
I did enjoy some scenes set in Europe. But that’s about it.
Today Thor is some kind of political junkie. He announced his candidacy for President of the United States in the 2020 election.
I will read no more Thor.
This is the 3rd book I’ve tried by Korelitz.
I got through The Plot. But quit The Sequel at 60%. Quit The Latecomer at 50%.
Good writing. Critics love Korelitz. But — for me — the storytelling is WAY too slow. Nothing happens page after page.
Here’s one of those good reviews.
The sequel to bestselling thriller The Plot takes the wife of the first novel’s protagonist and throws her into a satisfyingly twisty, literary satire
Rick McCharles 