Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan had previously collaborated in 2004 on a non-fiction book Faithful, chronicling the 2004 Boston Red Sox season. In Faithful, during a discussion about watching baseball on television, King posits an idea for a story entitled “Spectators”, which later evolved into A Face in the Crowd:
… What if a guy watches a lot of baseball games on TV, maybe because he’s a shut-in or an invalid (or maybe because he’s doing a book on the subject, poor schmuck), and one night he sees his best friend from childhood, who was killed in a car crash, sitting in one of the seats behind the backstop? Yow! …
A dysfunctional family drama compared with Yellowstone and Succession.
Mike is a sports writer. Claims he was only involved to keep facts straight on Pro Football.
But James claims Mike is the best co-author he’s worked with.
Jenny Wolf’s murdered father leaves her in charge of a billion-dollar empire—and a family more ruthless than Succession’s Roys and Yellowstone’s Duttons.
The Wolfs, the most powerful family in California, have a new head: thirty-six-year-old former high school teacher Jenny Wolf.
That means Jenny now runs the prestigious San Francisco Tribune.
She also controls the legendary pro football team, the Wolves.
And she has a murdered father to avenge—if she can survive the killers all around her.
One of those American shoot-em-up non-stop thrillers — but it had enough humour and character development to keep me interested.
I liked how it was set in modern times, the beginning of Putin’s war against Ukraine.
I enjoyed all the computer hacking. Well intentioned Americans trying to disrupt the Russian train system.
This was #2 in the series featuring a badass female killer. I will read more.
Letty Davenport, the tough-as-nails adopted daughter of Lucas Davenport, takes on an undercover assignment that brings her across the country and into the crosshairs of a dangerous group of hackers.
Her previous actions at a gunfight in Texas — and her incredible skills with firearms — draw the attention of several branches of the US government, and make her a perfect fit for even more dangerous work.
The Department of Homeland Security and the NSA have tasked her with infiltrating a hacker group, known only as Ordinary People, that is intent on wreaking havoc.
Letty and her reluctant partner from the NSA pose as free-spirited programmers for hire and embark on a cross country road trip to the group’s California headquarters.
While the two work to make inroads with Ordinary People and uncover their plans, they begin to suspect that the hackers are not their only enemy.
Someone within their own circle may have betrayed them, and has ulterior motives that place their mission — and their lives — in grave danger.
When CIA operative Jenny Silkwell is murdered in rural Maine, government officials have immediate concerns over national security. Her laptop and phone were full of state secrets that, in the wrong hands, endanger the lives of countless operatives.
In need of someone who can solve the murder quickly and retrieve the missing information, the U.S. government knows just the chameleon they can call on.
Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine … Devine must ingratiate himself with locals who have trusted each other their whole lives, and who distrust outsiders just as much.
I don’t recall reading any other books by Anne Perry, who died April 2023, aged 84. Heart attack.
Twenty-one Days (2018) is the first book in the Daniel Pitt series.
Not bad. Historical fiction.
Too slow for me. Mostly talk. Little action.
But the mystery of the murder kept me interested.
Almost literally yanked out of the courtroom where he’s defending dicey private inquiry agent Roman Blackwell on a charge of homicide, Daniel Pitt, who’s been a junior barrister for only a year, is tapped to assist his distinguished colleague Toby Kitteridge in the much higher-profile defense of Russell Graves, a tell-all biographer charged with bashing his wife, Ebony, to death in her bedroom and setting her head on fire.
The case is already winding down when Daniel steps into the Old Bailey, and his emotional last-minute questions aren’t enough to save Graves from a guilty verdict.
But Marcus fford Croft, Daniel’s head of chambers, doesn’t intend to let that verdict stand. He demands that Kitteridge and Daniel get it reversed …
In 1994, it became public knowledge that Perry had been convicted for murder as a teenager while living in Christchurch, New Zealand. In 1954, at the age of fifteen, she and her 16-year-old friend Pauline Parker murdered Parker’s mother, Honorah Rieper. After serving a five-year sentence for the murder, she changed her name and returned to the United Kingdom.
Rick McCharles 