Jeffery Deaver is the master of plot twists & turns. False summits. 😀
Fewer than usual in Watchmaker’s Hand (2023), but it’s still an excellent novel.
16th in the Lincoln Rhyme series.
When a New York City construction crane mysteriously collapses, causing mass destruction and killing several people, Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are on the case.
A political group claims to be behind the sabotage and threatens another crane collapse in twenty-four hours, unless their demands are met.
With New York in a panic, the stakes are higher than ever for Rhyme and his team to unravel the plot before the timer runs out and more cranes crash down, reducing the city and its people to rubble.
Then Rhyme realizes that the mastermind behind the terror is his own nemesis—the Watchmaker.
Once again, it’s a battle of wits between Rhyme and the Watchmaker.
Technology plays more a role in this book. Drones. Artificial intelligence.
It feels like Lincoln is falling behind the times in some ways.
The 2nd season of Reacher on Prime launched yesterday – Dec. 14, 2023.
This book is an early story of Jack Reacher, when he was still military police. Second chronologically of the books.
Having read them all, I’d call this one average. That still puts it into one of my top 10 novels of the year.
And this is the 4th and last Reacher book where the original author, Lee Child, will still have his name attached. From here on his younger brother Andrew Child takes over 100%.
A string of mysterious deaths. A long-classified mission. ….
1992. All across the United States respectable, upstanding citizens are showing up dead. These deaths could be accidents, and they don’t appear to be connected—until a fatal fall from a high-floor window attracts some unexpected attention.
That attention comes from the secretary of defense. All of a sudden he wants an interagency task force to investigate. And he wants Jack Reacher as the army’s representative. If Reacher gets a result, great. If not, he’s a convenient fall guy.
But office politics isn’t Reacher’s thing. Three questions quickly emerge: Who’s with him, who’s against him, and will the justice he dispenses be the official kind . . . or his own kind?
I many times laughed out loud. Though Judy is a Buddhist and clearly sympathetic to all things west coast, she pokes fun at hippies, flower arrangement, spiritual dance, and all thingsbohemian. 😀
She loves butlers. I wanted to go to butler school myself by the end of the story.
The book is told from the perspective of a number of interesting characters. My favourite was a stoner, slacker local teen brought in last minute as a general dogsbody.
Having spent time in Buddhist and Hindu ashrams myself, I could relate to the mixed feelings of the … inmates. 😀
Though a light read, there is quite a bit of philosophy, as well. I enjoyed reading about the Death Club. And their views on assisted suicide. The conflicts between Buddhist philosophy and the real world.
The Body in the Library (1942) concerns the murders of two girls of outwardly similar appearance.
One of them was an 18-year-old dancer, and the other was a 16-year-old Girl Guide with aspirations to an acting career.
The identities of the two victims were deliberately left ambiguous by the killers.
Jane Marple eventually discovers that the dancer was the intended adoptive daughter and heiress to a wealthy man. She starts suspecting the other potential heirs to the old man’s fortune. …
Somewhat too complicated for me. I didn’t find myself assuming that everyone was the killer as I typically do in Christie stories.
Many of these old TV shows are available as full episodes on YouTube.
In July 2021 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, private investigator Holly Gibney mourns the death of her mother, with whom she had a complicated and strained relationship.
Despite taking a break from work, Holly is contacted by Penelope Dahl, whose daughter Bonnie disappeared earlier that month. Holly is intrigued by Penelope’s message and agrees to work on the case. …
Holly is a damaged and flawed individual. BUT you can’t help cheering for her.
Stephen King is one of the most popular critics of Trump online.
In this book, Holly’s mom dies of covid. She had been a rapid MAGA ReTrumplican.
You can criticize the amount of anti-MAGA sentiment in this book. You could call it preachy.
I’m OK with it myself, as I agree with King that Trump is the worst thing that’s happened to the USA in a long, long time.
Too long. Too slow. But still worth reading as are all the books in the series aside from Ink Black Heart. Do NOT bother with Ink Black Heart. It’s gawd awful.
Well … perhaps slightly less irritating as he’s quit drinking and has lost weight, due to health concerns.
We still can’t imagine why partner Robin Ellacott likes him as a boss — or for possible romance.
I would have preferred if these two had finally got together. They don’t … quite … in this book.
But their detective agency is finally successful.
In this book they investigate the Universal Humanitarian Church (UHC) — a cult.
At one point Strike realizes it was formed on the site of a 1960s to 1980s commune, one of the places he, and his half-sister Lucy, had lived as a child, as his mother Leda Strike drifted around the country. The commune had closed after its leaders were arrested for child sexual abuse. Lucy was one of those abused.
Robin volunteers to infiltrate the modern UHC …
It made no sense to me that she stays so long. Not much was learned from her undercover weeks.
Rowling tries to defend the harm she’s done by attacking people who happen to be born transgender.
I’ve read some of her written defences, as well.
Rowling believes she’s defending feminists. It started by her defending Maya Forstater, who was fired for arguing against transgender people the right to live the life opposite their birth gender.
Rowling believes that you should be allowed to say that biological sex cannot be changed, even if that turns out to be wrong. Rowling believes in freedom of speech on that issue.
Most agree that after a wonderful life, it’s a disappointment that such a wonderful writer and billionaire picked this issue as the hill to die on.
I’m disappointed in Rowling, too.
This controversy is a big part of her legacy.
That said — I’m not cancelling Rowling. She’s 95% good. 5% bad.
In some ways having such a famous person talking about the issue is bringing daylight. We have a long way to go yet in terms of making life fair for transgender citizens.
I’d say the most convincing character is Toby Jones as David Pilcher.
The plot of Crouch’s first novel in the trilogy, Pines (2012), is covered over the first five episodes of the TV series. The second and third novels, Wayward (2013) and The Last Town (2014), make up the remaining five episodes.
I’d say the writers did quite a good job translating the longer, more convoluted trilogy into 10 hour long episodes that make more sense. Changes were for the good.
This book is a series of short stories. Some better than others.
This pandemic — the Arctic Plague — starts in 2030 when a prehistoric female came to light having melted out of a glacier in Siberia.
A previously unidentified pathogen from the past was reactivated — and quickly spreads around the world.
How High We Go in the Dark is made up of more than a dozen discrete episodes, separate beads along the narrative timeline from the discovery and release of the virus, through the worst years of the pandemic, on into its lingering aftermath.
The book then leaps 6,000 years ahead, revealing how decisions taken now might lead to radically divergent futures. …
The first story is of an amusement park — City of Laughter —where children infected can enjoy one last, fun-filled day before riding a roller coaster designed to kill them.
The second story is excellent. A pig used in plague research learns how to talk.
After that … none of the other short stories jumped out for me. I skipped some.
The suicide of Christian Habersaat, a recently retired police sergeant from Bornholm, Denmark, kicks off Jussi Adler-Olson’s underwhelming sixth Department Q novel …
Det. Insp. Carl Mørcks looks into an unsolved case from 17 years earlier that consumed Habersaat’s life—the hit-and-run death of high school student Alberte Goldschmid. …
The story becomes more complicated when Habersaat’s grown son, Bjarke, kills himself and young women start disappearing from the Nature Absorption Academy, a sun cult.
The female characters are gratingly one-note: nearly all their narratives revolve around stealing men or getting revenge on the women who stole their men. …
Rick McCharles 