Category: books

Michael Koryta keeps getting better.

How It Happened is his 2018 release.

Kimberly Crepeaux is no good, a notorious jailhouse snitch, teen mother, and heroin addict whose petty crimes are well-known to the rural Maine community where she lives.

So when she confesses to her role in the brutal murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly, the daughter of a well-known local family and her sweetheart, the locals have little reason to believe her story. …

Yet Rob Barrett, the FBI investigator and interrogator specializing in telling a true confession from a falsehood believes her story. He just can’t prove it.

As always Koryta is superb in putting together a plot. And excellent writing the bad guys.

I highly recommend this book.

I’ve not previously read Anne Tyler, though she’s published 23 super popular novels.  Three times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Her 2020 book is Redhead by the Side of the Road.

A slow paced, entertaining slice of life.

Micah … runs Tech Hermit and runs around the neighbourhood fixing computer problems for old ladies who – and you’d be right to bet Tyler mines this for full comic potential – don’t know what a modem is or does. …

He lives rent-free, alone, keeps to himself and sticks to a routine “etched in stone”: Friday is vacuuming day, Monday floor-mopping, and so on. Even his relationship with his “restful to look at” teacher girlfriend has, by his own admission, “solidified”. …

Micah’s peaceful life gets blown up.

Guardian Review

Larson’s true-crime historical non-fiction 2006 book is excellent.

I loved learning about technology of the day. This time the early 1900s.

Guglielmo Marconi, the young Italian entrepreneur. Often credited as the inventor of radio. He shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics. He had no training in physics. And was a jerk.

Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered his overbearing wife and fled Britain with his mistress, unaware that Scotland Yard was hot on his heels. Nice guy — aside from the murder

The two men never met, yet their interacting stories make up this tale.

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.

I’d already written off  David Baldacci as not nearly as good as Koryta, Rankin, Silva and Michael Connelly. 

So why bother?

He’s super popular but not all that good a writer.

For some reason I tried Baldacci’s 2019 book One Good Deed and was pleasantly impressed.

It’s surprisingly and refreshingly simple.  Slower.  Cleaner.

It’s 1949. When war veteran Aloysius Archer is released from Carderock Prison, he is sent to Poca City on parole with a short list of do‘s and a much longer list of don’ts: do report regularly to his parole officer, don’t go to bars, certainly don’t drink alcohol, do get a job — and don’t ever associate with loose women.

The small town quickly proves more complicated and dangerous than Archer’s years serving in the war or his time in jail. Within a single night, his search for gainful employment — and a stiff drink — leads him to a local bar, where he is hired for what seems like a simple job: to collect a debt owed to a powerful local businessman, Hank Pittleman.

Soon Archer discovers that recovering the debt won’t be so easy. …

The 4th and last book (2009) in the Lincoln Perry series is somewhat like the rest.

Great plot. Lincoln unlikeable as ever.

Alexandra Cantrell, daughter of a notorious Mafia don, and her husband, Joshua, set up a house for paroled murderers.

Only Koryta dreams up things like this.

Parker Harrison served fifteen years for murder but claims Alexandra’s intervention saved his life. Now he wants to find her–and he’s not the only one.

Lincoln Perry takes the job.

I’ve now read all 5 of St. John Mandel’s books.  All excellent.

As usual, Lola jumps forward and backward in time.  No author does this more skillfully.

• Last Night in Montreal (2009)
• The Singer’s Gun (2010)
• The Lola Quartet (2012)
• Station Eleven (2014)
• The Glass Hotel (2020)

“Emily St. John Mandel nails it with The Lola Quartet.

She had me from page one, when Anna, a 17 year old with a new baby and $120,000 in cash which clearly does not belong to her goes on the run.

I loved this tale about what not to do after high school.

It’s the story of four flawed members of a high school jazz band after they graduate, lose contact and disperse to follow their dreams,dreams which one by one melt away as they each struggle and falter in a world where doing the right thing is never as clear as it sounds.

Each is connected to Anna’s colossally bad decision whether they realize it or not, and it eventually forces them back together ten years later, to the story’s dramatic climax. …”

–Kris Kleindienst, Left Bank Books, MO