I really like the setting of this 2020 book – Spokane in the early 1900s.

The author is from Spokane.

Homeless workers, railway tramps and union organizers.

A mix of real and fictional characters makes it more entertaining.

Rye Dolan and his older brother, Gig. Orphaned and penniless. Trying to make their way.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a teenage, pregnant firebrand western Joan of Arc. She’s based on an actual historical character.  A founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a visible proponent of women’s rights, birth control, and women’s suffrage.

Ursula the Great, a striptease artist who sings in a cage with a cougar.

The bad guys: mine owners, violent police, unsympathetic judges and conservative newspaper editors.

It’s not all that well written. But the story does keep moving.

Book #2 in the Atlee Pine series.

I enjoyed this one more than the first book – Long Road to Mercy.

Badass FBI Agent Atlee Pine finally returns to her Georgia hometown while on forced leave to investigate her twin sister’s abduction when they were just 6-years-old.

Consumed with survivor’s guilt, Atlee believes solving that mystery might help her get her life together.

She stumbles on to a weird serial killer.

I like her unexpected sidekick Carol, who has at least a dozen grandkids.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Audible selected Falling Glass as a Best Mystery or Thriller of 2011.

It is very good.

But the highlight for me is the reader Gerard Doyle. Irish accents are easy on the ears.

And McKinty is one of my favourite authors these days.

Richard Coulter is a man who has everything. …

But then, for some reason, his ex-wife Rachel doesn’t keep her side of the custody agreement and vanishes off the face of the earth with Richard’s two daughters.

Richard hires Killian, a formidable ex-enforcer for the IRA, to track her down before Rachel, a recovering drug addict, harms herself or the girls.

As Killian follows Rachel’s trail, he begins to see that there is a lot more to this case than first meets the eye and that a 30-year-old secret is going to put all of them in terrible danger.

Many — like me — are frustrated that we’ve read all the Jack Reacher books written by Lee Child.

At a cocktail party in New York in 2009, Lee and author Diane Capri discussed a great question: Where is Jack Reacher? 

With Lee’s blessing, Capri began writing a series of “Hunt For Reacher” books. This one is #13.

FBI Special Agent Kim Otto is tasked with finding the ever elusive wandering Jack Reacher.

Though not as good as the Lee Child books, Full Metal Jack kept me going.

I do recommend it for Jack Reacher fans.

The first book (2018) in the Atlee Pine series.

I picked this book from dozens of similarly popular current fictions because the lead character is based close to the Grand Canyon.

The premise is interesting. The tale less engaging than I anticipated.

I could take it or leave it.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I’ve become a huge McKinty fan over the #COVID months.

This is book #3 in the Sean Duffy series.

In Belfast, September 1983, in the middle of The Troubles, Sergeant Sean Duffy, one of the few Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), is drummed out of the RUC on trumped up charges.

At the same time, Dermot McCann, an IRA master bomber and ex-schoolmate of Duffy’s escapes from the Maze prison and becomes a prime target for British Intelligence.

MI5 drags Duffy out of his drunken retirement to track down McCann.

Wikipedia

Here’s a 2015 interview with the author. Quite a character. Roller coaster of a life.

He didn’t really get famous until his 2020 book The Chain.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

The Fallen (2018) is book #4 in the Amos Decker Memory Man series by David Baldacci.

Star FBI detective Amos Decker and his colleague Alex Jamison must solve four increasingly bizarre murders in a dying rust belt town–and the closer they come to the truth, the deadlier it gets …

… It’s a bleak place: a former mill and mining town with a crumbling economy and rampant opioid addiction. Decker has only been there a few hours when he stumbles on a horrific double murder scene. …

davidbaldacci..com

There’s much to like about this book.

Decker is brilliant but socially awkward due to brain injury from an old football hit.

In this one he finally starts showing some empathy to other people, one 6-year-old girl in particular.

BUT … the plot is still 40% too long and complicated. Baldacci needs a more ruthless editor.