“Evokes the great Agatha Christie classics…Pay close attention to seemingly throwaway details about the characters’ pasts. They are all clues.”

— New York Times Book Review

An excellent and entertaining read. 

And a top best seller in 2020.

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one.

The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star.

The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher.

And then someone turns up dead.

Was it the Best Man?

Was it the Wedding Planner?

Was it the Plus One?

Was it the Bridesmaid?

One of the guests?

The Nickel Boys, a 2019 novel by American novelist Colson Whitehead, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Many times I’ve not been all that impressed by Fiction winners — but this is an emotional story very well told.  Despite the horrors, it’s almost uplifting by the end.

It was based on the real story of the Dozier School, a reform school in Florida that operated for 111 years and had its history exposed by a university’s investigation.

It was named one of TIME‘s best books of the decade.

It is the follow-up to Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. …

Set in the 1960s, the novel follows Elwood Curtis, a studious African American from Tallahassee with a sense of justice, who is adjudicated delinquent and sent to Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Eleanor, Florida, after riding in a stolen vehicle …

He befriends Jack Turner …

The Dozier school allowed beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by guards and employees. Some 55 graves were uncovered on school grounds by December 2012.

The New Republic: “The Nickel Boys is fiction, but it burns with outrageous truth.

Book #2 in the Lincoln Perry series.

I enjoyed it.

Once Lincoln Perry and Ed Gradduk were friends.

Then Perry became a cop, Gradduk turned dangerous, and their friendship imploded.

Now, Gradduk is dead. And Perry wants to use his PI license to prove that whatever else his childhood friend might have been, he wasn’t a murderer.

Sorrow’s Anthem

Emily St. John Mandel is one of the best writers working today.

Singer’s Gun was her 2nd book (2010).

Though I enjoyed it while listening, for some reason this one did not stick with me in the way her other books have.

If you’ve not read her, I’d recommend you start with any other St. John Mandel.

Everyone Anton Waker grew up with is corrupt. His parents dealt in stolen goods, and he was a successful purveyor of forged documents until he abandoned it all in his early twenties, determined to live a normal life, complete with career, apartment, and a fiancée who knows nothing of his criminal beginnings. He’s on the verge of finally getting married when Aria—his cousin and former partner in crime—blackmails him into helping her with one last job.

Anton considers the task a small price for future freedom. But as he sets off for an Italian honeymoon, it soon becomes clear that the ghosts of his past can’t be left behind so easily, and that the task Aria requires will cost him more than he could ever imagine.

Amazon

Sequels in the Hellhole trilogy by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

Great plot.  But I find the pace too slow.  The themes too simplistic. Good and evil — nothing in-between.

Seems the target audience is a distracted 13-year-old boy.  Key points are repeated often, just in case the kids skimmed it the first time.

Normally the middle book of a trilogy is weakest.  That’s true in this case.

The audio books are read by Scott Brick, a reader I find unsubtle.  Overly emotional.

After declaring his independence from the corrupt Constellation, rebel General Adolphus knows the crackdown is coming. Now he needs to pull together the struggling Hellhole colony, the ever-expanding shadow-Xayan settlement, and his connections with the other Deep Zone worlds. Even then, he doubts his desperate measures will be enough.

Diadem Michella Duchenet has collected a huge space fleet led by Commodore Escobar Hallholme, son of the hero who originally defeated Adolphus. They expect resistance from the General’s rebels, but who could possibly stand up to such a mighty fleet? …

brianherbertnovels.com

Hellhole is no Dune.

But it’s still worth reading.

Dave feels Brian Herbert, son of Dune author Frank Herbert, became an even better author — but I’m still not convinced.

Cover art doesn’t have much to do with the second book, by the way.

The final book in the trilogy, Hellhole Inferno, is better.

There is an unexpected resolution.  And a happy ending.

Many of the interesting side stories are resolved.

Finishing this book I began book #2 in the The Expanse (novel series). James S. A. Corey is a much better writer.