Before this novel, Evanovich was a Romance novelist.
There are parallels with her character Stephanie Plum, laid off from her job as a lingerie buyer for a Newark department store, who goes to work for her cousin Vinnie, a bail bondsman.
One for the Money is a light-weight easy read. Short and silly.
But Arabian Journey was fascinating from start to finish. I listened to the audio version with the author reading.
He started September 2017 in Northern Syria during the final days of ISIS.
He then moved through the Middle East for six months, often without a plan or visa for the next stop. He slept on the rocks of the empty quarter and in 5 star hotels. He had guides. And hitchhiked through war zones.
… Wood will share tales from his most recent journeys across some of the most perilous danger zones on earth.
With behind-the-scenes moments from his travels over the Caucasus mountains and his circumnavigation of the Arabian Peninsula, Levison will challenge the myths and stereotypes that plague these ancient lands.
Levison’s fascinating and humorous anecdotes reveal the real life stories of the ordinary people he met who call these places home: from Palestinian fighters to Iraqi snipers; refugees to Bedouin nomads.
If you want to know what it’s like to be ambushed by ISIS, have tea with Hezbollah and cross pirate-infested waters in a wooden dhow …
Jack Ryan is not an important in Without Remorse. This book introduces a more interesting character, John Clark, portrayed by actors Willem Dafoe and Liev Schreiber over the years.
Published 1993, it’s dated. Every marijuana users is EVIL, for example. And likely to die.
That’s the bad news.
But, surprisingly, I made it through.
I enjoyed learning about John Clark (real name John Terence Kelly), the former Navy SEAL. His particular skills are fascinating.
His main talent is killing people. Vigilante justice.
In any case, I’ll give Red October a try. Second book chronologically in the series.
Season 7 will be the last in this series. I was hoping they’d bring in a new character from the books: Renée Ballard. But rumours are she won’t be in the final season.
She’s a Bosch-like intense female detective working the night shift (“late show”) in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives.
In 2007 he won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. A book about Islamic terrorism.
The End of October is fiction.
Wright’s fictional tale is about a mysterious virus that starts in Asia, sweeps across continents, cripples the health care system, wrecks the economy, and kills people worldwide.
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“I knew from talking to all these medical experts that something like this was going to happen,” Wright says. “They all knew it. They just didn’t know when.”
Wright began writing the novel in 2017 and turned in his final draft in the summer of 2019.
Wright had started thinking about this plot line after Ridley Scott asked him what kind of disaster could cause what happened in the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road.
Netflix is among the studios considering making The End of October a film.
Like Bill Bryson, he can make academic subjects interesting and lively.
Critics call it sensationalistinfotainment.
He is a simplifier. I like his frequent analogies to well known references.
There are endless interesting factoids.
Critics complain he gets some facts wrong by over-simplifying.
In Sapiens he postulates that humans now rule the earth because of our ability to organize and coordinate in large numbers.
Bees, ants and other species cooperates even better, but they are too inflexible to evolve. And have comparatively small numbers.
We are the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in our imagination, such as gods, states, money, human rights, corporations and other fictions, and we have developed a unique ability to use these stories to unify and organize groups and ensure cooperation.
Author Jason Matthews (born 1951) spent 33 years working for the CIA. He knows what he’s talking about.
Genres: Thriller, Suspense, Spy fiction, Political thriller.
These are his only 3 books to date.
This dazzling finale to Jason Matthews’s New York Times bestselling Red Sparrow Trilogy, called “a primer in twenty-first-century spying…terrifically good” (The New York Times Book Review), confirms the critical acclaim he received for the first two novels, praise that compared Matthews to John le Carré and Ian Fleming.
