Too many family secrets were unearthed to be believable. By the end, I couldn’t care less about any of the characters.
P.I. Lew Archer is summoned to the Meadow Farms mansion of Californian oil millionaire, Homer Wycherly, just returned from an ocean cruise.
Asked to locate Wycherly’s daughter Phoebe, missing since she saw Homer off two months before …
For one Hollywood adaptation of a Ross Macdonald book, they wanted Frank Sinatra. It ended up being Paul Newman playing the role, changing the detective’s name to Harper rather than Archer for marketing reasons.
In Canada, average life expectancy at birth is about 81.7 years. Women live longer than men, on average.
As you get older, that number increases. For example, as a 67-year-old man in Canada, it’s predicted I’ll live to be 85-87 years.
We all need to plan and budget for a comfortable life through to the inevitable end. So I need a plan for about another 20 years.
My parents lived to ages 94 and 96.
Some use the term healthspan to sum up Healthy life expectancy (HALE), the average number of years that a person can expect to live in “full health“.
At age-67 … I still feel fully healthy. There’s nothing I can’t do today due to health limitations.
Japan has the highest HALE at less than age-75. Lesotho the lowest.
Surprisingly low are the USA, UAE, and Qatar.
Canada is NOT up with the healthiest, either.
So … we all need to plan and budget for a comfortable life once our health is failing. IF your nation has good public healthcare, costs could be lower for this phase of our lives.
Wearables MIGHT help. I’m not using my Apple Watch for any health reasons. Yet.
Invisible Prey (2008) is perhaps the BEST of the Lucas Davenport books I’ve read, so far.
The bad guys are interesting. Original.
Sandford starts every book with the bad guys.
The world of antique dealers fascinating.
What makes this book different than most murder mysteries is that it’s the villains themselves that end up solving the case.
In the richest neighbourhood of Minneapolis, two elderly women lie murdered in their home, killed with a pipe, the rooms ransacked, only small items stolen.
It’s clearly a random break-in by someone looking for money to buy drugs. But as he looks more closely, Davenport begins to wonder if the items are actually so small or the victims so random, if there might not be some invisible agenda at work here.
Gradually, a pattern begins to emerge — and it will lead Davenport to somewhere he never expected. Which is too bad, because the killers — and yes, there is more than one of them — the killers are expecting him.
I enjoyed seeing Kidd and Flowers make appearances.
Broadchurch season two divides viewers. Some find it a compelling continuation of the story, with strong performances and new mysteries, while others feel it lacks the impact of the first season, particularly due to the courtroom drama and the introduction of the Sandbrook case. Many critics and viewers found the courtroom scenes less engaging and the Sandbrook case less compelling than the initial murder.
That’s fair.
Great TV — but not as brilliant as season 1.
On the other hand, the cast is even better in season 2 (2015).
Phoebe Waller-Bridge has a bigger role.
Charlotte Rampling was fantastic as Jocelyn Knight Q.C., the prosecutor. The role was written specifically for her.
I read The Magic Mountain (1924) when I was young — not much appreciating it at the time.
Philosophical prose inspired by his wife’s letters from a Sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where she was being treated for respiratory disease.
His wife was one impressive person, Katia Mann. A secular Jew while Hitler was rising in power, she later converted to her husband’s Lutheranism.
She and Thomas had 6 children, all interesting characters. This was impressive, as well, because Thomas was a closeted Gay man.
Likely I wouldn’t have much interest in Thomas Mann but for my friend Brian taking a University elective course on him.
In 2025, I somehow downloaded an historical fiction account of his life ➙ The Magician by Colm Tóibín.
His life was even more dramatic than his novels.
His two elder children, Erika and Klaus, were flamboyantly unconventional – promiscuously bisexual, precociously talented as actors and writers, but too politically reckless and financially feckless to make careers for themselves. There were drugs. There were scandals. Eventually there was another, more devastating suicide – Klaus’s …
Erika Mann marries WH Auden, not for sex (they are both gay) but for a British passport …
He escapes (Hitler) first to Switzerland, moving on to the south of France, where he frequents the cafes where other German exiles gather – social democrats bickering with communists – and finally to the US. He watches the second world war from transatlantic safety …
The 23rd book in the entertaining Stone Barrington series is a good one.
Unnatural Acts (2012) find the saddest of sad sacks, Herbie Fisher, the hero of the tale.
These comedies require suspension of belief. Somehow Herbie is positioned to be the next Stone Barrington. 😀
Another surprise to me was finding Stone’s latest romance not killedoff. That’s unusual.
When a hedge fund billionaire hires Stone Barrington to talk some sense into his wayward son, it seems like an easy enough job; no one knows the hidden sins and temptations of the ultra-wealthy better than Stone.
But as Stone and his erstwhile protégé, Herbie Fisher, probe deeper into the case—and an old one comes back to haunt him—he realizes that even he may have underestimated just how far some people will go to cover up their crimes, and commit new ones.
Late afternoon, Virginia, and a woman is on the run. Her husband, a former U.S. Senator named Lincoln Bowe, has been missing for days. Kidnapped? Murdered? She doesn’t know, but she thinks she knows who’s involved, and why. And that she may be next.
Hours later, a phone rings in the pocket of Jacob Winter. An Army Intelligence veteran, Winter specializes in what he thinks of as forensic bureaucracy. Congress, the Pentagon, the FBI, CIA, Homeland Security — when something goes wrong, Winter kicks over rocks until he finds out what really happened. The White House is his main client, and the chief of staff is on the phone now.
If Bowe isn’t located soon, he is told, all hell will break loose.
Rick McCharles 